Can Passion and Livelihood Coexist?

My friend Drew sent me a video that started the wheels turning.
The video was Rod Rakic presenting "Building a Social Media Utility and Living to Talk About It" at the Chicago New Media Summit 08. The basic premise is you shouldn't try to achieve a balance between life and work, you should strive for work/life integration. It's twenty minutes well spent and will help you to understand the rest of this post.

I have tried the balance approach and envisioned a group of rectangles within a square representing four aspects of my life and the time devoted to each. The goal would be to allocate my time so that the ratio matched the perfect balance I had set for myself.  The problem is that these are mutually exclusive so adding to one takes away from the others.

So the answer is not to separate the goals but attempt to combine them as circles that intersect instead of rectangles that don't overlap.

Enough about squares, rectangles and circles. It's bringing me back to high school Geometry class and my teacher asking if I was having a vision as I stared off into space.

A lot of imagery in this post but here's one more. Picture this, a man at a busy intersection holding a sign stating, "Will work for my passion" Now keep that image in your mind.

PS Note to brother. Notice no mention of the Tw or Fb word.

Twitter is... a Human Seismograph?

If you were following LA tweeters last week, then you would have heard about the earthquake first hand, before it hit the news wire. Here's a couple of screen grabs from my Twitter stream.

Twitter, blogging and camera phones have transformed us into citizen journalists. Need more examples?

When Captain Sully skillfully landed his Airbus 320 in the Hudson, the image was captured on Twitter. ABC 7 Chicago seeks content from the public.

On the scene, instant images and stories. More eyes on the street, much like the concept of community policing. They can't be everywhere. With this comes some issues. We are not trained and are not held to any professional standards.

Remember, always consider the source, this is the internet after all. Recently, some people I follow started creating phony ReTweets (RT). They made up tweets and added "RT @recognizedname" to make it appear that "@recognizedname" tweeted it. (I was going to use "somebodyfamous" until I searched it and found out there really is somebodyfamous) Is it too easy to fake a tweet? What happens when a respected Twitterer with a five figure following falls for a fraud sourced story or a phony RT? They want to be the first in this crazy world of instant news and jump on the story so they can get the scoop and publish it without fact checking.

The tools we have at our disposal can be used for good and bad, you must decide the direction.

Multiple Social Media Persona Syndrome MSMPS

Do you have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, etc, etc?
You might have MSMPS.

Don't be alarmed, it is a good thing. Your friends on FB are different than your followers on Twitter and your connections in LinkedIn. At least they should be. The information that you deem to share with the world should be filtered by the social network you post it on. For example, my FB network is mainly composed of my family and "friends", LinkenIn has my business contacts and Twitter, well it is everything else. I decide if something goes on FB and Twitter or just one network.

How to deal with MSMPS.
1) Tailor your profile on each service to the audience but remember everything you put on the internet can be available to all.
2) Don't publish every post to every network, be selective. Use Selective Twitter on FB.
3) Use a tool like Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck to aggregate your feeds.

Life is good for now but as new features such as Facebook's Open Stream API are released there will be new challenges to maintain multiple social personas.

Goodbye Pontiac, I Knew You Well

GM's demise of the Pontiac brand saddened me. My first car was a '66 LeMans. I've owned three Bonnevilles and two Grand Prix's. Just the names embody speed. Bonneville, LeMans, Grand Prix, Grand Am, Trans Am and the king, GTO.
Some GTO videos:





The red glow of the instrument panel and the layout of the controls was cockpit-like. You were the pilot and the car could fly. Goodbye old friend, I knew you well.

Life Long Learning

I'm recovering from three days at the CMSExpo, a conference for users, developers and vendors of Open Source Content Management Systems. Basically they are frameworks for creating web sites that use dynamic content driven by a database. The products have names like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Alfresco and Plone. Not exactly household names, well maybe WordPress because of it's popularity as a blogging tool. I use recovering because even though they say the mind is a sponge, mine was well saturated by the end of the day. The point of this is life long learning. You are never too old to learn new skills. In fact, I believe that learning keeps you young.

I have gone through periods of "No More Information" where I shut down, wear blinders and focus on day to day activities but what I've found is that I'm happier and more productive when I expose my mind to new concepts. In the last six months, I've attended seven user group meetings, three Tweetups, three conferences and one Facebook Developers Garage, clicked on hundreds of links from Twitter, blogs and Facebook, and Googled something everyday.

In closing, the mind is a terrible thing to waste, so go out and fill it. And don't worry, it won't explode.