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Aug 31

Another Hurricane? We Need to Evaluate This Situation

August 31, 2008 • View Comments • Politics and Current Events

I am sitting alone in my duplex wondering if New Orleans will be nothing but history after tomorrow. Hurricane Gustav is predicted to touchdown midday on Monday, September 1st. It is predicted to be a category 3, but as we saw with Katrina, there’s no way of truly predicting its impact. Let’s hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

New Orleans is a ghost town with exception of some reporters and people from the National Guard. For those not understanding how vulnerable New Orleans is, here’s the scoop. New Orleans sits between a lake and the ocean in a “soup bowl”. What separates it from the ocean are the levies, and if the levies fall, the city is ruined. I’ve heard there are many shipping benefits to this situation, but you could pay me enough money to live in New Orleans. It’s too risky.

People much smarter than myself agree that we should be concerned. Although a study by U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claimed that global warming would actually decrease the number of hurricanes, the same study as well another by NASA concluded that global warming will increase the intensity of these storms. This Katrina/Gustav problem will not go away.

If you are a conservative who is under the delusion that carbon emissions have zero to do with this, please read the NASA study in particular. They equate carbon emissions directly with global warming to establish their conclusion.

I’ll be tracking this story for sure all over the web. If Gustav does prove disastrous, please consider donating to the Red Cross.

Know someone who needs help? Know some good resources? Please leave a comment. It could literally save someone’s life.

P.S. Scary Fact of the Day: the North Pole is now an island. Yikes.

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Aug 22

Hunger is Unacceptable (But Please Read This Instead of Heading to the Fridge)

August 22, 2008 • View Comments • Social Media for Social Good, Upcoming Events

Hunger is Unacceptable

When Lisa Goddard from the Capital Area Food Bank first told me that hunger was unacceptable, I kindly agreed with her and grabbed a Clif Bar to munch on. But then I realized that she was talking about the thousands of people who are on food assistance right here in Austin. Here are some statistics from the Capital Area Food Bank website that will blow your mind:

There’s More Need Than You’d Think
* Nearly one in five adults and one in four children in Texas is hungry.
* 41,000 children under the age of 18 in Travis County are confronted with food insecurity every day.
* 82% of Food Bank Partner Agency recipients are food insecure. 49% of recipients experience outright hunger. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America’s Second Harvest)
* 61% of Austin Independent School District (AISD) students are eligible for free or reduced lunch.

Austin is EXPENSIVE
* 76% of households receiving assistance from CAFB Partner Agencies report incomes below the federal poverty level. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America’s Second Harvest)
* 106,930 (12.6%) of Travis County individuals live below the Federal poverty level ($18,850 for a family of four). (Source: Austin Community Survey, 2004)
* The annual income needed for a Travis County family of four without employee sponsored health insurance to “afford” to live in the Austin area is $53,080. That’s 257% above the Federal poverty level. (Source: CPPP.org, The Family Budget Estimator Project)
* Austin continues to have the highest cost of living in the state of Texas, exceeding housing costs in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth.

Kids and the Elderly Are Hungry. How Messed Up is That?
* While the child poverty rate in Texas is 23.2%, for the CAFB service area, 35% of the household members receiving food are children. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America’s Second Harvest)
* While 12.4% of Texans in poverty are elderly, only 7% of households receiving food through CAFB are elderly. (Source: Hunger in America 2006: Central Texas Report, in association with America’s Second Harvest)

September is Hunger Action Month. Personally, I think every month should be Hunger Action Month, because there is enough food in this world for people to not go hungry and being hungry really sucks. But alas, now is the time when we show people how important this cause really is.

Lisa and a bunch of cool people in Austin are planning a Ham Up Tweetup to get food, and in particular protein, to feed the 21 Central Texas counties that CAFB helps. Follow Lisa on Twitter and at her blog for more updates on how you can help, and don’t forget to change your avatar and upload it to the Flickr group to show people that Hunger is Unacceptable.

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Aug 19

How Will the Semantic Web “Think”?

August 19, 2008 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

Bill Erickson sent me Kevin Kelly’s TED talk “Predicting the Next 5,000 Days of the Web”. Kelly discusses the semantic web, which uses relational data to make associations between site to site, profile to profile. The idea of a converging, thinking web is a fascinating concept. Kelly calls this thinking web “more reliable than its parts”. He goes so far as to calls the thinking web “The One”.

I am not afraid of the semantic web. What I am afraid of is a portrayal it as merely unifying. The web converges but it also destroys and stratifies, and NO ONE can truly grasp how all of these points within the web fully relate. It asks us to separate the truth from our own perspective of that truth. If this Truth exists, we wouldn’t be able to get passed ourselves to see it.

So how will the semantic web think outside a bias? We can try algorithms, but inevitably money and time seem to get factored in. A company called Google seems to always put Knol pages ahead of Squidoo pages on search results, even though they do the same thing. Knol is owned by Google whereas Squidoo is not though. The web is also biased because most people in the world are not on it, and therefore could not offer their own even perspective if they tried.

Food for thought: is the web “more reliable than its parts” if 5,000 people report a story incorrectly and the one person who was actually there is totally computer illiterate?

How will the semantic web distinguish what is popular versus what is right? Can it? How can we take steps so that truth goes beyond hype?

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Aug 08

Hint: Transparency in Marketing is Worthless if You Have Zero Passion About What You Do

August 8, 2008 • View Comments • Online Marketing

This whole concept of transparency in marketing is hilarious to me. It seems like the buzz word to use if you want to sell books or get paid to speak.

Let’s think about this: say I work for Hummer. This would be utterly ridiculous, because everyone knows I love BMWs and Porsches and feel that driving a Hummer is the equivalent of wearing a name tag that says “asshole”. The more transparent I am, the more it comes across that I am totally miserable and probably hate your guts for wanting to pollute this lovely green Earth with your tacky Hummer. That’s not good marketing. That helps me in no way.

My ex-boyfriend and I ran an eBay Motors store that made half a million dollars profit in one year with just two people running it. Why? 1.) We (and in particular he) loved cars. We would watch every episode Top Gear and went on a vacation to the Laguna Seca race track. It was a labor of love. 2.) We wanted to make people feel happy by buying a car they loved. It felt great to sell a convertible to the women who just overcame cancer and wanted something fun. I loved giving an executive seamlessly good service so they could pick up their car and go on to something more productive. People are not stupid and they know when you care about them and when you are just trying to make a buck. Take care of them and they will take care of you.

Being transparent is worthless if you have no passion about what you do. You can come across as transparently greedy, or transparently bored, or transparently stupid. Having passion and feeling that the service you are providing will generally enrich someone’s life will make you transparent by default. Why? Because you are offering someone something that you see is good that will help them. Who wouldn’t be transparent about that?

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Aug 04

Yoda Pick Up Lines

August 4, 2008 • View Comments • Politics and Current Events

Brian Smith from Downtown Cartel and I are drinking a few beers at Sara Dornsife’s posh pad right now. An amusing way to pass time? Coming up with pickup lines the way Yoda would say them. Does this make me a geek officially? Oh well. Here they are though:

1.) Tired your legs must be. Running in my mind you have been.

2.) Nice shirt you have. Look better on the floor it will.

3.) Hurt do you? Fall from heaven you did?

4.) A ninja you must be. Kicking your legs are.

5.) Windex in your pants you must have. In your pants I can see myself.

Can you think of any cool Yoda pickup lines? Please share for others so they can enjoy wasting their time at work.

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Aug 03

The Semantic Web Can Fix Social Media’s Data Portability Issue. See How.

August 3, 2008 • View Comments • Other Social Networks, Social Media and Society

I tend to like to be behind a camera instead of in front of it, but I felt that the issue of data portability was important enough to step up and lead a discussion at SocialMedia Camp.

The semantic web can fix the issue of data portability in social media. How? By using associations to group different profiles together. It also allows people to own their data instead of being at the mercy of every social network.

My apologies for the technical difficulties. Many thanks to Paul Walhus for filming, Juan Sequeda for engaging the dialog, Whurley for fixing my internets, and Giovanni Gallucci for buying me some time while i figured things out.

Check out the details here:

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