blogs

How to Get Regular Updates of Annarchy

Since I don’t write here daily, it’s easy to miss new stuff on this blog. My friend Chris Brogan, guest-posting at Shannon Paul’s place, calls the content I create here a “craft blog” and distinguishes it from a typical blog that’s updated more frequently, with shorter posts. Understandably, Chris says, my essays here are “something you wouldn’t want to rush.” The downside of that is that I post irregularly. So here are some ways to get my new blog posts sent to you automatically.

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I Suspect Everyone Else Is Smarter, Better-Looking, Taller, Cooler, Cuter, Has Newer and Shinier Objects than I Do (and Is More Modest)

When you are prone to measuring yourself against others, like I am, and when you both work and live out chunks of your life online, as I do, the Internet can be a bitch. It’s easy to get caught up in measuring your impact online, and to suspect that your own self-worth is tied to it. It’s easy, for example, to measure your popularity and self-esteem in terms of the number of “friends” you have on Facebook, the number of followers on Twitter, the extent of your professional contacts on LinkedIn, your cache of Feedburner subscribers, your Web site’s Google PageRank, tags on Flickr, comments, links, visits, clicks, referrals, Karma on Plurk, and—worst of all!—your Technorati degree of “Authority,” which implies a sort of collected clout and power that, for most of us, doesn’t really exist outside of the unblinking screen that is our dashboard to the world. Those of

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New Media as Community Theater—All the World’s a Stage

I am a total sucker for community theater, especially musical theater. What I love isn’t so much the corny show tunes or the predictable story lines, but the players’ infectious energy for taking risks. I was reminded of this a few weekends ago when I went to see a local production of Godspell. Because I have an artsy teenager who does tech crew, I’ve sat through lots of high school musicals over the past few years. I always come away shining with true admiration for the kids on stage. As we all know, adolescence is really tough. There’s probably no time in your life when you are more prone to self-doubt and insecurity, and there’s no time (at least for boys) when your voice performs less than predictably. It’s easier to blend in with the crowd than to call attention to yourself. It’s easier to not set yourself apart. Godspell

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4 x 4 Secrets About Me, And Why I’m Uncomfortable Talking About Myself

Over the weekend, my friends Peter Kim and BL Ochman independently tagged me “It” in two blog games (called memes). The object of each is for the tagged writer to reveal personal bits about themselves that you wouldn’t know otherwise, and then to tag other blog authors to similarly spill their guts. BL (who had been tagged by Toby Bloomberg) asked for “8 secrets,” and Peter (himself tagged by Shiv Singh) asked for four details about four topics of esoteric “things about me”; Peter called it a 4 x 4, which I kind of liked. Truth is, I’ve been tagged lots of times in the past. But I’ve rarely played along, in part because I didn’t have the right forum: I feel a little weird talking about myself on the MarketingProfs group blog. Or so I thought. Now that I have my own blog here, I’m surprisingly just as uncomfortable.

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