Bill Cammack

One of the ‘consequences’ of the fact that I write in so much depth is that people find it tough to follow my concepts. It’s also because I’m talking about things that people don’t understand. I’m talking about WHY things happen, not *what*happens*. I’m not telling guys to go buy flowers for their girls. I’m talking about THE EFFECT on her when you buy those flowers.

Another ‘problem’ with my style is that I write from “stream of consciousness”. I think about a topic and I type what I’m thinking…. on the fly… When I post something, it’s because that’s what I’ve been thinking about and typing about for the last hour or two. This also makes it tough for the average Joe/Josephine to follow, because it’s not aimed at them. It’s aimed at myself and people who can grasp and process my concepts and the way I present them.

The good thing about this is when someone gets pissed off enough to make a comment. This way, I can see what they took away from reading my post. I get to see the difference between what I THOUGHT I was expressing and what they received… or at least what they were able to articulate from what they received.

Reader “AJ” (no site link… so you know what that means) left me a comment this morning on my post, “Male Birth Control Pills!!!”. I think the points that AJ brought up were too important/interesting to have my response stuck in my comment stream, so I wanted to make a new post based on his/her comments.

Briefly, “Male Birth Control Pills!!!” is about the fact that if they actually create this stuff and it works, guys are going to have a new choice when it comes to attempting to ensure that they don’t get chicks pregnant. Here’s AJ’s response:

AJ: June 30, 2008 at 6:43 am

“All about being the sleezy, gutless guy with no responsibility hey? All play and pleasure no actual contribution to anything. In complete control of his self-centred pleasure obsessed destiny!

If you want to be a loser in life, use the pill, your chick if she is using her’s already, chances are she will get fat for it, if not get cancer! Use her to the point where she is risking her life for your pleasure. You da man aren’t you!”

First of all, sleAzy is spelled with an “A”. ( http://mw4.m-w.com/dictionary/sleazy )

Second, my post was about GUYS *USING* BIRTH CONTROL, which equates to TAKING RESPONSIBILITY. Being *irresponsible* is *NOT* making sure that you use birth control and getting a chick pregnant when you have no intention of having kids with her. So your first sentence doesn’t make any sense. A “sleazy, gutless guy” would do what he wants to do and not care whether the chick gets pregnant or not, so he wouldn’t be READING my post, and he MOST CERTAINLY wouldn’t be WRITING my post.

Third… Not like your troll-ass is still anywhere near my blog, but responsibility for what? If she doesn’t get pregnant, you HAVE no responsibility. Does that make sense? “No actual contribution to anything”? Contribution to WHAT? What are you talking about? :) You mean like a campaign contribution? The “contribution” in messing with a chick is that she has a good time, gets some sort of satisfaction and feels like a desired and attractive woman. What else would you like a guy to contribute to? PLEASE feel free to respond, because I’d love to know. :)

I’m going to skip “play and pleasure” for now, since I think that’s the most important point AJ makes, and move on to:

AJ: “If you want to be a loser in life, use the pill”

um…….. WHAT? :D hahahaha Did you read this before you posted it? According to my stats, you’re from Australia. I don’t know “how they do” over there, but in the USA, we have a bunch of what are known as “deadbeat dads”, which interestingly enough, Wikipedia has down as “deadbeat parents”.

“Deadbeat parent is a pejorative term referring to parents of either gender that have freely chosen not to be a financially supportive parent in their children’s lives. Primarily used in the US, the gender-specific Deadbeat dad and Deadbeat mom are commonly used by the child support agency to refer to men and women who have fathered or mothered a child but fail to pay child support ordered by a family law court or statutory agency such as the Child Support Agency. The real definition is an unrestricted parent treated equally who chooses not to be a regular or supportive parent in their child or children’s lives.”

THAT’S “being a loser in life”, my mellow. So by avoiding the situation of having kids a guy never intended to have, that’s the OPPOSITE of losing, which is WINNING. :D So your statement should have read “If you want to be a WINNER in life, use the pill”.

AJ: “your chick if she is using her’s already, chances are she will get fat for it, if not get cancer! Use her to the point where she is risking her life for your pleasure. You da man aren’t you!”

If you go back and read my post, you’ll notice that I don’t advocate ANYWHERE putting your girl on the pill. *THAT’S* irresponsible, assuming YOU’RE THE ONE that doesn’t want to have kids with her. There’s no reason to mess with her body chemistry for your personal fun and recreation (and her fun and recreation as well, haha :D ). That’s actually the ENTIRE point of the post. Supposedly, the day is coming where there’s a choice that the male has to enact protection besides condoms and vasectomies.

On top of that, besides potential health issues, if she goes on the pill it could change her body-type, potentially taking her outside of your personal range of what you find sexy, and then you won’t want to hit it anyway. Putting her on the pill defeats the purpose of her going on the pill in the first place. This is why Male Birth Control is a grand option, if they ever figure out how to make it happen.

Having said that… I understand what AJ’s overall issue is, and I think it’s an important point to bring up, because it’s an extremely common disconnect that many women have which disallows them from grasping the actual reality of their “relationships”.

AJ: “All play and pleasure no actual contribution to anything. In complete control of his self-centred pleasure obsessed destiny!”

Another of the many things lots of women never realize is that there are A LOT OF GUYS that want to have sex with you with *NO* *INTENTION* *WHATSOEVER* of having kids with you. :) There are lots of guys that want to have sex with you with no intention of entering a “relationship” with you. There are lots of guys that are into sex exactly for the reasons that AJ states… “self-centered, pleasure-obsessed DESTINYYYYY!!! :D “. In the best-case scenario, he’s up front about that with you and you know this guy’s physically attracted to you right now, and doesn’t necessarily want to call or iChat you tomorrow. Even in the case of recurring sexual encounters (often referred to by women as “a relationship”), the fact that he hits it over and over does NOT imply any form of progression towards you becoming his girlfriend or wife. This is why y’all are always asking dudes “where is this going?”… It’s because it’s not *GOING* anywhere. :) It is what it is. He gets to tap that. You get out of it whatever you get out of it. The sun “comes up” and then it “goes back down”. Rinse & Repeat.

This is what AJ’s issue is. The fact of the matter is that there are lots of guys that are having recreational sex with chicks that turn them on, and they have no intention of having kids with said chick or starting a family or even discussing future relationship configurations with her. For those guys, supposedly, the day is coming where they’re going to be able to protect their self-centered, pleasure-obsessed destinies by taking pills that will make it extremely unlikely that the chick will get pregnant, even if he’s using a condom and it breaks.

From where I’m sitting, that’s BEING RESPONSIBLE and WINNING at the same time.

Thanks for the exercise, AJ. ;)

DatingGenius

A lot of shows and sites have been receiving the Fail Whale recently.

There’s nothing wrong with failing. Happens all the time. “Happens to the best of us”. Sometimes, it’s not actually a failure so much as an inability to meet requirements for continuation. You could have a perfectly successful show as far as getting the job done and delivering on time, but you’re just not getting the numbers of views or members or whatever your sponsors asked you for and your authorization to continue the show (or your funding) gets pulled, and that’s that.

More important than failing is what happens AFTER you fail… What happens to your media? What happens to your site? Did you think about this before you started your show?

I’m thinking about this today because I read Liz Burr’s post “Do Social Media Strategies Go To Heaven?”, where she talks about her WIRED SCIENCE Facebook app and the fact that the show itself was canceled and will not be coming back to PBS. She writes:

“The show’s cancellation has me asking myself, where do social media strategies go when they’re no longer needed? So far, the results of our most significant strategies are:

• a blog with over 200 entries and 600 comments
• a twitter account with 1200+ followers
• a facebook fan page with almost 600+ fans
• a facebook application with 12,000 installs

The Facebook application is especially interesting to me because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Since launch, the application has been averaging 100 new installs per day. This is with no paid promotional activity whatsoever. I don’t expect this to stop anytime soon, because I don’t think we will reach a ceiling going at this (slow but) steady rate of installation (considering the number of users on Facebook). I designed the application to be viral enough for it to self promote. I suppose I could turn those activities off if I wanted to.

For the blog, we have decided to stop all posting, write our goodbyes and leave commenting open for a few weeks. We will then shut down all comments, and leave the blog up for the sake of Google and reference.  I am not sure what to do with the Twitter account. It essentially was a machine for the blog and site updates, but with no more site updates, what else is there? I suppose the Facebook fan page can stay in place, however we’ll probably put up a notice about the show and site saying farewell.”

So that project is ending, because the show it was supporting wasn’t picked up for a new season. However… The work that was done will remain and fans of the show will have access to it. Basically, it becomes “what it is”. A project that used to be active and is now inactive. C’est la vie. :D

There’s a Next New Networks show called Bride-O-Rama that went “on hiatus”. :)

I can’t find on the page when the episode I embedded was uploaded, but a) I happen to know this particular show was cancelled a long-ass time ago, and b) the first comment is from October 29 so let’s assume it was canceled in late October, 2007 which was 8 months ago. Similar to the pending status of the Wired Science blog, this show remains in suspended animation. The shows are there to watch. The comments are there to read. As a matter of fact, NNN’s still serving recent ads on those pages, so anybody who happens by to check out some of the Wedisodes is helping out NNN’s bottom line.

OTOH… We have FastCompany.TV’s former offering “Global Neighbourhoods”, which as far as I know was canceled this very month, and immediately disappeared off the face of the earth as if it never happened.

Here’s what the “Global Neighbourhoods” creator, producer and host, Shel Israel had to say about it in his post Several Changes:

“That brings us to GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV (GNTV), my other online video program. Unlike WorkFast, GNTV is my baby, is an extension of not just the Global Survey, but Naked Conversations as well. As many of you know, GNTV was launched in March at FastCompany.TV, and–shall we say–had an inauspicious start.

When GNTV launched, I was not quite ready for prime time. If I was an actor, I would say I was prepared for a summer stock script reading. When the curtain went up, I found myself instead at center stage of an opening night on Broadway with some determined hecklers in the audience who managed for a while to distract me.

Most people seem to agree that I got better. After 14 episodes, I think GNTV has proved its value and professionals hungry for insights into how they can use social media in their businesses have found GNTV to have more than a little value.

A few weeks back, however, FastCompany granted my request to take back GNTV, to remove it from their site and to eventually relaunched it o a smaller scale on this site. Primarily, with FastCompany as a partner, the cost of sponsorship was too high for a new program. Here, I can charge a sponsor significantly less dollars and have great flexibility in the sort of deal I can offer. Here, I am the sole decision maker.

GNTV will go on a brief hiatus, until perhaps mid-August. I need to deal with the complexities of AV, production, storing, hosting, compressing, measuring, etc. Because some of these costs can be quite significant, I also need to have sponsorship before I restart.”

To be fair, Shel has posted a set of links to his 14 GNTV episodes he produced for FastCompany.TV on his blog. This means that assuming you knew he had a blog at all and assuming you saw that one post, you know how you can view his videos. I would guess that he Twittered the information and used whatever other publicity outlets he has at his disposal. However… Someone returning to FastCompany.TV will find that his show’s tab has been replaced with a photography show, and short of putting “Shel Israel” or “Global Neighbourhoods” in the search box, there’s no evidence that his show ever existed.

As far as his plan to relaunch his show on his own site… there goes his google juice. His videos will be available in the future at a completely different address on redcouch.typepad.com instead of fastcompany.tv. What’s the point? The point is that people are still hitting my Cory Lidle plane crash video from October, 2006, because they know where to find it from people’s bookmarks, forum posts and blog links.

If I had been moving that video all over creation, from domain name to domain name, people would hit dead links from the google searches and IME, *NOT* do more creative searches to try to find the same content… They just move on to other content that comes up easily under the google search for the same topic.

Similarly, maybe you have the same site… except your video host fell into the Dead Pool. Recently, VideoEgg discontinued its consumer video service and sent out a notice to people that had videos hosted by them that they were going to cease to host them shortly. Also, DivX’s Stage 6 streaming video site folded. The problem with this is that A LOT OF PEOPLE had videos on their sites which were actually embedded FROM VideoEgg or Stage 6. This means that they had to scramble to a) pull all their videos from those hosts, b) find a new host for all of their now-homeless videos, c) upload all their videos to the new host and d) go to every single post and change the embed code from the Videoegg or Stage 6 location to the new host location. If you happen to have over 300 episodes online, that could be a MAAAAAAAJOR DRAG! :(

So, that’s another thing to consider when you’re ready to make a show on the internet. While you worry about content and worry about being interesting and worry about being entertaining, and worry about getting sponsored and worry about your show being sustainable and worry about growing your audience and worry about creating surrounding social sites… you ALSO have to worry about what happens when your show lands in the Dead Pool. Do you have ownership of your own content after the fact? Do you have ownership of the site that it’s on? Are you going to have to uproot everything and start all over? If you get a new sponsor, can you easily swap the old one out and continue seamlessly creating content?

Believe me, you want to figure out / negotiate all these things UP. FRONT. and NOT when you realize your show that you thought was going to run forever is going down the tubes.

Welcome to the Dead Pool.

Continued from Communication [Part 1]

So now we get to the point where people have this expectation of entitlement to intrusion. This is one of the reasons why I wrote “Digital Internet Snobbery”. I was getting flak from someone because I am not available by text. This was after I SPECIFICALLY TOLD HER how she could get in touch with me, which was via email… which she can do from her phone if she can text from her phone, so I didn’t see what the problem was. Unfortunately, she had been hoping I was going to live into someone else’s style, and it ain’t that type o’ party. :D

I missed the text revolution because I went directly to AIM. The reason I haven’t updated my ancient phone up until now is that I’m available via lots of services which are more efficient for my style of interaction. As a matter of fact, my contact information’s listed in the sidebar to this very post. If you can’t figure out from there how to contact me, I’m still currently the #3 “Bill” on google, behind Gates & Clinton.

I know too many people to be randomly available via phone. I’d never get anything done. Most of what I do requires A LOT of mental processing, as you can tell by these epic posts I keep dropping. I can’t ‘afford’ to get continually taken out of the zone to have random conversations whenever someone feels like contacting me. This is why I herd people towards email or iChat so I can get back to your message when I get back to it. This is why it was so funny to be told that I need to get with the program when it comes to texting, because I’m so far beyond texting. However… Whose problem IS that? :) Is that MY problem, or is that HER problem? Actually, it’s the problem of the person that loses the most if we’re out of contact, which isn’t ME, so that answers that. :)

So we got up to text, and like I said, I missed out on the revolution because I was already on AIM (which became iChat when I ditched PCs hahaha, but that’s another story :D ). At this point, instant messaging services are the final frontier, because you can perfectly craft your socialization experience. You inform people via status update whether you’re online or not, and if so, whether you’re likely to respond to a message they send or not. You can inform them if you’re working or AFK (away from keyboard) or fully welcoming conversation. You can turn sound on or off so if you need to concentrate on writing another epic post, you can still receive messages that don’t break your state. You can have an icon bounce in your tray in case you get a message while you’re AFK and your iChat windows are all hidden. This way, you know to check your new messages. You can start or accept audio conversations or video conversations.

Photo Credit: Rob Boudon

Most importantly, you can carry on several completely different conversations at a time, which you can’t do via audio on a phone. This means that if the person you’re talking to is a slow communicator, it doesn’t matter. They’re not hogging your bandwidth, and you’re talking to six other people while you’re waiting for them to send you something back. It also means that if someone’s a flooder, you can minimize their window and respond to them when you feel like reading the novel they wrote. If people are annoying, you block them so you can go about your day without being disturbed. If you want to find out what’s going on tonight, you can message people in different cliques at the same time and you get back what you get back.

However… If you depend on instant messaging services, you’re at a distinct disadvantage when you go out….

I went over to Ryan’s the other day… specifically NOT pictured here on the right…

And hadn’t bothered to put his cell number in my phone, because I didn’t imagine the party would be in the garden out back and not inside his actual apartment, haha so between that fact and the fact that I hadn’t bothered to charge my phone’s battery, I took a short in that situation, haha :) If I had had a modern phone, I could have emailed him or checked my own email for his number or used any number of services to attempt to bypass the physical barrier of being stuck outside a door, buzzing a buzzer that nobody could hear. :) The same thing happened to me going to Justin’s party…

… but luckily, Amir had to go to the bathroom, so someone was in the apartment to hear me buzzing, haha. :)

The point here is that obviously, communication is returning to the pocket from the computer, except in the form of text and visual information instead of voice. Google Maps, GPS, everything’s going back into people’s pockets, specifically at this point in the form of Blackberry devices and iPhones. This is why the iPhone SDK is such a big deal. You get to create something that people all over the world might buy, because you get to place it in the Apple Store, online.

The next big deal is going to be hand-held video chat, so we’ll see if Apple stops ****ing around and releases an iPhone with the camera in the proper location for people to video chat before someone beats them to the punch and Apple gets the fail whale for once! :D

Do you miss potential job and socialization opportunities by not being randomly accessible or checking voicemail? Yes. Definitely. What you receive in return is increased efficiency and focus. By minimizing my distractions, I probably got this post done in 1/2 the time it would have taken otherwise.

Speaking of the dreaded, yet oft-appearing “Fail Whale”… Twitter has found a new way to not crash so often. That’s to implement Denial of Service when it comes to our @ messages. For people unfamiliar with Twitter, you can send a message to someone’s “replies” folder by using the “@” sign with their username, like “Hey @username, what’s going on tonight?”. If you use the website, like I do, instead of using a standalone client, you find out who sent public messages to your attention or mentioned you in your “replies” folder. Without that folder, all you have is the ten latest pages of Twitter posts from the 800+ people that you follow that you can search through if you feel like it and have time to waste, or you can use search sites like TweetScan and Summize, but you’d better hope THEY were able to pull the entries from Twitter themselves.

So that’s where we stand right now. We live in a world where people expect immediate attention and there are lots of ways for them to get that. Are they entitled to it? No. It’s just that “everybody’s doing it”, so you seem to them to be “odd man out” because your phone has a little alien on it that jumps rope, eats apples, skateboards and takes baths when you open the phone up. :D Meanwhile, the fact of the matter is that I went out for a reason… to hang out with specific people or do specific things. IF having my email on me, and my calendar, and my answering machine, and my instant messaging, and my audio software, and my internet browser, and my quicktime player, and my video compression software was important to me, I would have brought my computer and my EV-DO card with me.

The funny thing is, :) when I finally buy an iPhone, or whatever great all-in-one gadget someone comes out with, that’ll only increase my options for technological offense….

Psychologically, I’m not going to be any more accessible than I am today. :D

Oh Man! hahaha I had to repost this! :D

Rob & Corinne, the Dynamic Duo of Threadbanger.com show you how to make a DiY Bikini Cover-up.

Intro film features Lindsey, Jared & Michelle

Corinne, Rob, Jared, Justin & Marissa

Permalink: How-to Make a Bikini Cover-up for Summer, Thread Heads

I’ve been meaning to write this for a long, long, long, long, long time. Probably over a year. I touched on it a little with “Digital Internet Snobbery” and “Are You A Tech Elitist?”, but I need to go back to the beginning.

Before all this social media stuff jumped off, people had land lines and answering machines. Actually, forget the answering machines. People had land lines. If they weren’t at home… Guess what? You Couldn’t Talk To Them. Period. That’s it. No way around it. The only way around it was if they went to a pay phone and called you from the street. But basically, if you weren’t NEAR YOUR PHONE, you were completely out of contact unless you were in physical proximity to people.

Next, we got answering machines, so now, if we’re not at home, when we DO get home, we know who called us and what for. We also got Caller ID so that we could tell who called us and didn’t leave a message. Still, no contact other than when we’re in our houses where our phones and answering machines are.

Next, we got pagers, so that when we were in the street and people wanted to speak to us, they could send us their number so we could go to a pay phone and call them back. This was probably the beginning of intrusion & entitlement. This was where people started making big deals out of the fact that they paged you and you didn’t call them back. Before this time, there was no guarantee that whatever device people tried to contact you on was attached to your person. You could be at home and ignoring them, and they’d have no clue with phones and answering machines. The reason people got pagers was either because they wanted people to be able to contact them on the run OR they had to have it for business. In either case, it was assumed by people that you had this device with you and didn’t leave it at home, so the “burden” switched from the callER to the callEE as far as whose fault it was that a conversation didn’t occur when the caller wanted it to.

The typical excuses for not returning a page were a) I was in the subway and didn’t get it [since pagers wouldn't hold the message for you and try again when you came above ground], b) my service sucks, and I didn’t get the page [when you got the page and erased it from your memory list in case the caller *COUGHyourgirlfriendCOUGH* checked it], or you got it and didn’t have change on you to call her back or none of the pay phones where you were worked [which was valid because a lot of the phones were broken in NYC for some reason, mostly people doing scams to try to get the change out of the machines]. Still… the ‘problem’ here was that the callEE had to give excuses to the callER, when the fact of the matter is that they didn’t feel like talking to you and ignored your page (or, ACTUALLY didn’t get the page. :) ).

Next up was cell phones. Same problem with intrusion & entitlement. The fact that you had a cell phone with an answering system meant that you were assumed to understand that the caller called soon afterwards, therefore receiving the burden of calling them back. This was especially true if they called you several times in one day. Also, the subway excuse disappeared, because cell phones will repeat sending you the alert that you have messages when you come above ground. To make matters worse, cell phones ring differently if you have them online when you get a call and when you’re not attached to the satellite system. If it rings 4 times and goes to machine instead of going directly there, it’s assumed that you saw the call and ignored it (or perhaps weren’t around your phone). Either way, it’s assumed that the phone is active and has batteries in it, so, again, the burden’s on the callEE to pick up the conversation where the caller left it.

Next was cell phones with the ability to send text messages. This completely flipped the script. Completely.

I didn’t catch on to the importance of this for a long time. I finally got it when I would try to contact my friend Masami to go out…

I would call her and get no response. 45 minutes later, I’d text her and get a text right back. I thought this was odd, because both the call and text go to the same device… except depending on how you SET the device, it notifies you differently about different events. Let’s say the notification for text messages had higher priority on her phone than the notification for voicemail. When I was calling her, it basically dropped into an abyss. When I sent her text messages, they went right to the top of the list and she became immediately aware of them.

A part of the reason for this was that A LOT OF PEOPLE had switched over to using text instead of voice. By the time I was in contact with Masami, she was very used to interacting with people via text from her phone. I was probably the only one leaving voice messages. :) I found out another reason for the changeover by watching television. These guys were sitting at a table with these chicks on some reality show and texting to each other about the chicks. Before seeing this, I hadn’t considered that people use text to communicate in stealth mode, when they can’t actually talk. If someone’s in a business meeting and you call them, it’s going to go to their machine. If you text them, they’re likely to check it and even text you back while the meeting’s still going on. So the fact that you didn’t have to LOOK LIKE you aren’t paying attention to whomever’s speaking was an important factor in people switching to text.

Another good reason to use text is the sound factor. There are a lot of places where people might be in Manhattan where you just can’t hear what’s going on… but you can READ it. This happened to me a while back when I tried to call Dave, and he couldn’t hear a thing I was saying…

The only way I caught up with him was to have a friend of mine do me the solid of texting him for me to ask him where he was hanging out. So once again, text defeats voice. Text is better when you can’t talk. Text is better when you can’t hear. Text is better when you need to look like you’re paying attention to someone you’re standing/sitting in front of.

Text is also better because it’s asynchronous. Technically, so is leaving a voice message, but you can text someone back under just about any conditions, including being in the subway, having already received your messages to your phone. You can reply to a bunch of messages and have them sent out when you get signal. You wouldn’t even be able to RECEIVE your voice messages underground in order to reply to them.

This is where I got to the point of “Digital Internet Snobbery”, which I’ll address in “Communication [Part 2]“.

Bill & Barbara, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack & Barbara Carrellas

Lisa & Suzy Mae, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Lisa Lyons & Suzy Mae Howard

City at night, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack – NYC

Jon, Suzy, Oz & Jessica, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Jon Labes, Suzy Mae Howard, Oz Sultan & Jessica Valenzuela