Forward spring
March 13, 2009 at 10:33 pm | In just_so | No CommentsA forward spring would be nice right about now, because it rather feels like I fell flat on my face this week.
Being a sensitive sort, the twice-annual time change-a-palooza bullshit makes me feel like I have jet lag, albeit without the benefit of actual travel (i.e., change of location), and now that climate change is getting its fangs in, the whole thing has gotten worse because instead of going to Hawai’i, I somehow landed in Ontario last Monday.
You know? Here it is, the first Monday of the Spring Forward Fiasco, and we in Victoria BC – March flower count capital of the Canadian Universe – get …um, snow. Yes, snow.
It went downhill from there.
For one thing, I’m now almost a whole week older than I was 5 days ago, and I’m nearing the point where that sort of thing matters. I’m not getting this week back, no matter how much I resent how it went.
On the plus side: it’s warmer than it was Last Monday When It Snowed. The days are longer (yeah, right). I am very busy with several things, including of course MetroCascade and all its attendant tasks. And I’m pleased with my March Focus article, and very pleased with the April article. I have it on my to-do list to upload the February and March articles to Scribd.com before the week is over.
As the song says, “I will survive.” At least until November, when we Fall Back….
What’s my domain?
March 8, 2009 at 11:02 pm | In housekeeping, writing | 6 CommentsI’m very fortunate. Since March/ April 2003 I’ve been able to blog for free, hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It’s an option open to anyone with a Harvard email address.
While we all started with Radio Userland, Berkman switched everyone over to WordPress couple of years ago. But presumably because it’s a group-hosted gig, we don’t have the same kind of affordances that free-range WordPress users enjoy (I have a hard time getting hold of a human resource person who can explain the options from Berkman’s end of things – you can see that the How-to guides on Berkman’s website all say “coming soon,” which is what they’ve said for years <sigh>).
Individual (and also free) WordPress accounts allow users to upload videos and to add widgets and things, none of which I can do on my Berkman-hosted blog. I won’t even let myself dream of all the neat things paying /hosted WordPress account holders can do.
For a year or more I’ve felt I have a dilemma. I’m not a famous blogger or anything, but I feel like I have some investment in my “blogs.law.harvard.edu” brand. At the same time, I feel like I should be my own brand, and the “blogs.law.harvard.edu/yulelog” handle keeps me from putting what I want into my domain.
If I now, at this late date, abandon my “blogs.law.harvard.edu/yulelog” handle, however, I risk losing whatever equity I built up over six solid years of non-stop blogging. (Ok, there was a month here, or two weeks there, that I temporarily disappeared – but the emphasis is on “temporarily.”)
If I continue with the “/yulelog” handle, my personal brand plays second fiddle.
Meanwhile, new widgets and add-ons come along, which I’d love to implement …but can’t. Case in point? The Disqus commenting system – you can see my profile page here. (Note that Victoria’s own Black Press had added Disqus to its Business Examiner and its Victoria News sites, but not – yet? – to Monday Magazine, which Black Press also owns.)
Another example: a number of years ago I nuked my Flickr account, but even back then I was annoyed that I couldn’t put a Flickr badge on my blog. Things haven’t improved insofar as I can’t put a Twitter updater on my blog, either. And so on.
What should I do? Abandon the “blogs.law.harvard.edu/yulelog” brand (such as it is) and venture out on my own? Forget about it? Or do both (set up my own site, but double post with some sort of redirect work-around – and to what end?)?
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
March 8, 2009 at 2:29 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
Economic Impact: The City as a Social Portfolio « The Captured Perspective
Great ‘Captured Perspective’ blog post by Peter Boumgarden, who comments on Richard Florida’s Atlantic Monthly piece:
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“…cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
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Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture — City Farmer News
Post about the exhibition, Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, February 25th – April 30th 2009 – Free Admission (Opening reception: March 3rd 2009), at Design Exchange, Toronto (website: www.dx.org)
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This exhibition will show how the design of cities and buildings is enabling the production of food in the city.
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SeeClickFix: Report non-emergency issues, receive alerts in your neighborhood
The map includes Canada, but is it used here yet?
Found via CEOs for Cities, who reported:
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It’s a Googlemaps mashup that uses crowdsourcing to report problems to public officials and get them fixed. The start up is located in New Haven where the service is the most developed. There is it used by the Policy Chief, Police Lieutenants, Mayor’s Office, Public Works, Parks Dept, the Town Green Improvement District and, of course, citizens.
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Fine arts are in survival mode as funds dry up – USATODAY.com
“It’s frightening,” says Lockwood Hoehl, BCO’s executive director. “We’re unfortunately at the bottom of the food chain. The general thought about the arts in our society is it’s expendable.”
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Contributing to this catastrophe has been newspapers’ stubborn refusal to consider any news-gathering and -analysis model other than the one that they were used to, one that, most crucially, relegated consumers to the role of passive readers instead of engaged users. It’s a mistake that happens all over the Big Media Debate: misinterpreting the limitations of our print past as prescriptions for our media future.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
March 1, 2009 at 2:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)-
But Who’s Counting? (MIT Technology Review)
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Konrad Feldman, a cofounder of San Francisco–based startup Quantcast, sees big business in audience measurement.
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No one really knows how many people visit websites – the measuring tools aren’t available, but Quantcast and Google aim to change that. -
Toward a New Housing System – Creative Class » Blog Archive »
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The only way toward long-run and sustainable recovery is a dramatic change in where and how we live. What ultimately got us out of the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t just new technology, or creative destruction, or government spending, it was a phase-shift in the way we live – in our economic geography. The recovery after the Long Depression took shape around the rise of the industrial city and its streetcar suburbs. The recovery after the Great Depression was powered by suburbanization. We need a massive shift not just in our infrastructure but in our housing system.
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Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content
Thought-provoking…
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The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida
Richard Florida on how the financial crash will affect specific geographical locales and cities in the US / in North America. On NYC, he notes that its diversified economy – even though it’s home to Wall Street, which may well be moribund if not dead already – will see the city through the worst of it.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Notes on Jennifer Kostuik’s talk at VISA
March 1, 2009 at 12:15 am | In arts, business | Comments Off on Notes on Jennifer Kostuik’s talk at VISAVancouver gallery owner Jennifer Kostuik gave a talk at VISA (Vancouver Island School of Art) on Thursday (2/26) evening. Despite a technical glitch beyond her control (the projector stopped working, mysteriously, about 5 minutes into her presentation), and irrespective of a really laid-back, unstructured presentation style (yours truly sometimes prefers tighter, thesis-oriented talks), Kostuik offered some real insights into both the gallerist’s life (why do it?) and the artist’s relationship with the gallery.
I took a few notes. They are impressionistic, but without additional polishing, here they are…
Kostuik began by affirming the importance of promoting living artists. Sure, you can open a gallery and sell the work of dead people, but it’s really important to stake a claim in living culture – and then promote it. She talked about how she’s a hard worker, but that she ended up owning her own gallery because she’s not terribly well-suited to working for other people. She has her own vision of what art is good, what to promote, and while she initially thought she might be an art consultant, she couldn’t – in the end – promote artists she didn’t believe in.
So: opening her own gallery was the only way forward.
[Editorial aside: This is interesting because of a theme she brings up later, that of entrepreneurialism. Kostuik is an entrepreneur – a cultural entrepreneur and a business entrepreneur. It’s great that she began her talk with a discussion of her own willfulness, her desire to be in charge, and how that relates to her own creativity and artistic/ aesthetic sensibilities.]
She emphasized that you take on people because you believe in them, but also because you believe you can sell them.
[Editorial aside: how refreshing to hear someone in BC or in Victoria talk about selling and business like it was a noble thing to do and not something akin to spreading smallpox infested blankets….]
Kostuik emphasized something that artists should be able to understand readily: business, she said, is all about relationships.
She expects artists who pitch her to have done their homework – to know in advance whether or not their work would be a good fit for her gallery. She was quite clear about what she likes and what she looks for, and her emphasis on building the relationships between her and her artists (and her clients) was something that the audience (I’m guessing over 90% artists) needed to hear. Know who you are, what you have to offer, and pitch to someone who can help you and who will be helped by you.
I couldn’t help but think of some of the comments regarding “the pitch” that I’ve read by various venture capitalists: do your homework, know who you are (what you’re offering, and who you’re offering it to), and understand that in business it’s all about relationships.
Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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