Community, Technology and Content

(warning, this is a CC-Chapman-esque rant, if you think I’m writing about you, read on)

Do you know the Carly Simon song “You’re so vain“?  (written about David Geffen, features Mick Jagger on backing vocals, and really annoying 70′s era strings).  The key lyric to this song (hammered home in the 2,569 repetitions of the chorus)  is :

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

In the good old days of the internet, say 5+ years ago. The common thing to worry about was people who’s only mission in life is to point out where they think others make mistakes or are mis-informed. These are annoying people, but pretty easy to deal with with facts and the occasional delete.

There must be something in the air though, because recently I’ve seen a dramatic uptick in cases where people take general information or statements, and publicly play the oppressed victim. I’m not sure what it is about these people, but there are many, and I think they are growing in numbers. I’ve seen it more and more in my recent interactions, and I’ve seen it happen recently in surprisingly violent reactions to published content from friends and the blogs I read.

It may be an old-brain reaction to previous trauma, where the “offended” weren’t recognized in a way they saw fit, it may be pure and simple ego. I’m no psychologist, but perhaps one day I’ll play one on TV.  I think though, that I can try to help these people with a simple sentence :

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

It isn’t. Honest. Almost no one woke up this morning with the specific intention of pissing you off.

Simple research shows the following:

• 99.9999983% of the content on the internet isn’t about you.
• Of the remaining 0.0000017%, only 0.000000001% is written by people who know you exist.
• Of those people, only 0.000000000000001% are ready to call you out publicly on the internet.

Ok, I made those numbers up. I said it was simple research! Anyway, the actual numbers are probably much, much smaller.

There’s a quick self-helpy kind of way out of this though. It simply involves conditioning your reaction.  If you find yourself reading something and taking it personally,  You just need to change your initial question when you react to something.

Instead of saying “Why is this person talking about me?“,  step back and think “Was this person really talking about me?” instead. I hope that helps you, I really do.

As a general help to those reading this blog, I include the disclaimer from my About Bob Page :

The views expressed on this site are my own and in no way reflect the positions, opinions or strategies of my employers or clients. Anything I’ve written here is evaluated on the fact that I will be able to sleep at night. If I’ve offended you, I probably didn’t mean to, or you may have mistaken my judgment of an idea as a personal evaluation. There are rare cases though, where I might actually think you’re a tool. I reserve the right to think and express that.

Photo credit : ME!  caterpillar, It really had nothing to do with this post, but I like the picture. I never said you were a caterpillar.

” … a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.” – Aldo Leopold

I’ve always loved and been drawn to radio. I remember being quite young when my dad showed me how at night you could hear AM stations from far away places.

There was magic in the air – listening to WKBW from Buffalo or WABC from New York, they sounded HUGE in my bedroom here in Quebec.. These were the days before cable TV,  here were these big bold authoritative American stations, beaming tunes and DJ-patter at us with such power and energy, yet by dawn, they were gone.

It was literally a portal to another world opening up each night at sunset. I was hooked. Who knew what the magic would bring that night? Baseball games from Boston or St-Louis, tunes from New York or Chicago,  traffic reports for roads I’d never seen. It seemed like there was no end to it.  To this day I still listen for distant stations at night – though many stations sound alike now, the offerings are no where near as exciting as they once were.

One day, my dad showed me another radio in the house, with the strange “SW” (shortwave) band. Here was the whole world! Strange languages, accents, cold-war propaganda, jamming, stations that broadcast nothing but numbers! More magic!!

As I grew,  my passion for radio started to include wanting to understand the technology behind it. I learned about waves and electronics as I built transmitter kits that let me BE a radio station, even if the range was only about 100 feet.

In my late 20′s, my father passed away, and I took some time to reboot. I discovered an old 1940′s radio at a market, and was hooked into antique radio repair/restoration. I’d discovered a new way to feed my radio addiction.

My journey into podcasting is directly related to my love for radio. Here was a transmitter-less, legal way to be radio. Since I had never worked in radio professionally, this was my opportunity to learn some of the craft behind producing radio-like content.

So here we are in 2011, and I’ve found yet another outlet for my radio passion. I’ve studied for and passed my amateur radio certification, and obtained my own call sign:  VE2PDT. Now radio becomes a two-way communication device, and instead of just listening to the world, I’ll be able to interact as well.

Some of you may be thinking, “Dude, you can interact with the world here. It’s 2011 and called email/social networks/cell phones” .. Yes, that’s true, but none of these feed my passion for radio. Also, I still think it’s cool that I can converse with someone in Europe without there being any 3rd party between us. No telecoms, no Apple, no nothing – Just air. There’s magic in that air.

I’ll be blogging about my amateur radio adventures on this other blog over here, as I build out and use my “radio shack” and hopefully sharing useful information along the way. Let’s see what this brings..

CQ CQ CQ…

Ten years ago today, on a super-hot day in a small town in Vermont, Cat and I were married in front of friends and family. Among so many other things,  Cat is my confidant, my unwavering supporter, my self-confidence when mine fails, and most of all my best friend. Without her love, I’d be lost.

Before all this other stuff, there was us. After all this other stuff, there’ll be us.

Happy 10th anniversary Cat, I love you more today than ever.

In November 2006 I blogged about a then new internet video show based here in Quebec. It was new, fun and somewhat innovative for its time, and I was happy to tell my readers about it.

Fast forward to today, almost 5 years later, and the name of that show is one of the top 2 keywords that brings people to my site. Consistently. Annoyingly.

What to do? Over 1000 blog posts, hundreds of podcast episodes, conference sessions, pictures, whatever, and this pig of a post is how people find me. I want to delete it, or even better find a way to automatically charge $0.05 to anyone even landing on the page.

For kicks, I’ve put Google ads and Amazon referrer links on that (and only that) blog post, thinking that someone MAY click through to the DVD, and then my dismay over seeing this freaking thing in my stats all the time could be comforted with a bit of cash.. Or course, that’s not working. (But it does prove that my comfort can be bought )

You can’t choose how people find you, or can you? What should I do with this post? Has this ever happened to you?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a frighteningly high number of blogs out there have a single purpose.

They tell you what to do.

I don’t mind the occasional “How To” post, that can be helpful. So many blogs though, think they need to tell you how to live/love/work/laugh/drink etc.. It’s very anti-social when you think about it – what did you do with that friend that was trying to run your life? You dropped them, right? Why is this supported in this space?

“Like” this, do that, whatever you’re doing now you’re doing wrong, get more friends, get less friends, get more followers, tweet this way, etc etc etc

ENOUGH!

I’m willing to bet that you’re reading this not because of my wonderful SEO techniques, my sales advice, or my ability to magically hit the wrong note at a crucial moment in a song. Likes tend to attract, so I’m thinking you’re reading this because you like to interact with me or see my views on things, not me telling you what yours should be. To me, that’s the magic of whatever we’re calling “social media” these days. Somewhere along the way, many of us have lost the “exchange” part, and many have taken it to be a broadcast-only medium.

So in the spirit of this post, I’ll tell you what I’ve done, and what a revelation it’s been to me. I looked at the blogs I read regularly, and took a look at the last 10 posts or so. The ones that did nothing but tell me what to do – are gone. Who needs that? I’ve come this far without this “sagely advice”, and I think I’ll be ok.

Reading blogs that do nothing but tell you what to do is bad for you.

I wonder if following all these kinds of blogs doesn’t end up affecting people’s self esteem. I mean, if you ever wanted to think there’s something wrong with you, go read a self-help book. With that you’ll discover faults you didn’t know you had. I think bark-at-you blogs may have the same effect. “Gee, I’m not able to live out of a backpack and Macbook Pro, and still feed my family, there must be something wrong with me”.

I love learning new things, being told what to do, not so much. You?