Ominous Weather Conditions over NYC…

This may be the right time to resume my videogaming career…..

~Bill

um… WOW! hahaha

This is all @Brett’s fault. Brett put up a reward for a picture of me when I wasn’t posing, and @Skyle figured she’d cash in!!! :O

Unfortunately, Selina didn’t know how hard it was going to be to get paid, so she had all these extra attempts and decided to make a montage out of them with Animoto! hahaha.. well…

I might have to use this as my show open from now on, hahaha

um.. Thanks, Selina… *waves*

Bill Cammack, Mike Hudack, Annie Tsai & Andres Palmiter

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

The reason I joined Twitter is the same reason I joined any Social Media site. There were people that I ALREADY KNEW that started using a new site, app or tool and I wanted to be involved in this new (and hopefully BETTER and INNOVATIVE) way to contact them or keep up with what they’re doing. What that did was give Twitter a particular flavor for me. It was the place where I went to receive up-to-the-minute information about people that I was keeping in contact with anyway via newsgroups or forums or email or their blogs or whatever.

The first thing I did was stop looking at the public timeline. Some people are fascinated with what random people have to say about random topics. I’m not one of those people. It’s very nice that someone in France saw a bird. I was interested in ‘hearing’ about who was trying to find a cab in Austin Texas to get from one SXSW party to another or that someone had a question or answer about videoblogging or editing or some other topic I was interested in. This is because I joined Twitter following certain people, meaning they were going there, so I wanted to be there too. Granted, it was about 50 people, but I already knew from prior experience with them what I was going to hear from them, and that’s what I was ‘buying’ into.

I remember standing on a line at nighttime, waiting to get into a party (which I normally don’t do, but this was extenuating circumstances), and I happened to be standing behind a few civilians (people not deeply involved in the internet) who started talking about what they had Twittered. One of the gals had announced that she went shopping. Another one had announced that they were going to be coming to this party that we were waiting for. I remember thinking “ah… THESE are public-timeline-people” and considering how all of us standing there use the same service but will never be in contact with each other, because they’re talking about NOTHING! Or, I should say, all the rest of THEM will never be in contact with ME. They’ll have their little pocket of people to communicate with and share stories about ice cream parlors and the mall. I remember being glad that everyone has their own set of people they Twitter with and having absolutely ZERO INTEREST in any of them becoming a follower of mine on Twitter.

Fast-Forward to July 2009 and all the civilians are running around trying to get more Twitter followers. Huh? They don’t care who you are. They don’t care what you do. They don’t care what you said… or IF you said anything at all. Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow. The clear focus is quantity over quality… like as if you get a prize for having a certain amount of Twitter followers.

I understand why this is, to a degree. For a lot of people, Twitter is their first opportunity at feeling what it’s like to be popular. The concept of one-to-many communication is fascinating and enticing. People can send a message from their phone on a bus somewhere and be heard all over the world, or at least by all of their followers at the same time, even if they’re all locals. You can tell a joke and 10 people might “lolol” at it. You can be the first one to break news about a bridge falling down or a plane landing in water. Normally, the only people who would hear you are people who you could physically tell, or people who read your blog after the time it takes you to post it and the time it takes them to check it and read it. All of a sudden, you get to feel like thousands of people care what YOU have to say. I see why people have become addicted to that feeling.

Personally, while I fully APPRECIATE the fact that randoms read my material, I’m most interested in what the people who know what I’m talking about and go through the same things I go through think and have to say about what I post. Right now, I have 2,586 Twitter followers and I’m following 895 people (which is STILL too many people to follow and actually read what everyone has to say). I know people with TENS OF THOUSANDS of followers who are also following that same number of people back! :O … Obviously, they’re using Twitter for a different purpose and experience than I am, but at those numbers, it’s clear that the vast majority of those people being “followed” are actually being IGNORED due to so many posts coming through on each refresh that most of them are flooded off the bottom of the stack before ever having a chance to be seen. Also, if someone COULD read thousands of posts a day, that would mean that they weren’t WORKING and were about to get FIRED from their jobs.

So this is what’s fascinating and annoying to me about the evolution of Twitter, or maybe it’s not evolution, but that the lunatics are now running the asylum. Every show you turn on, some civilian is talking about Twitter and trying to sound intelligent when they’re reading off of the teleprompter and don’t even know the proper inflection to put on words. They SHOULD be embarrassed, but they’re not, because they know that nobody else watching their report knows anything more than they do about the topic.

Twitter addresses are becoming like phone numbers to the civilians. They’re treating this like as if having 2,586 followers means that I have 2,586 people’s phone numbers or 2, 586 people’s ear when I want to talk about politics (which is never) or sell them something or have them all tune in to one of my live broadcasts. Not only is that completely untrue, but with all these people running around trying to get followers by adding everyone in creation, your list of followers is incredibly diluted by people seeking that virtually anonymous fame / acknowledgment. I think the funniest / most pathetic part of this is when people add you and then you delay checking their profiles for a few days, and by the time you do, they’ve already UNFOLLOWED YOU! This is completely ridiculous and shows you who only added you in the hopes you would add them back and inflate their fake popularity ranking of Twitter followers.

Is any of this a problem? No. I still follow the same core of people I’ve been following from 2007 to 2009. I’ve added people along the way whom I’ve found to be interesting online or that I’ve met IRL and shared good times with. I add some people because their bios look interesting or indicate that they might have something to say that I might want to hear or that they might have an answer to a question that *I* have, should they choose to follow me back. It’s just interesting, seeing people coming to the table these days with ZERO sense of community, looking to win a blue ribbon for having the most people follow them in the least amount of time or gaining people that they can peddle their wares to online. *yawn*

There are lots of interesting new people showing up as well, diving into Twitter head-first with valuable, RELEVANT information. Hopefully, they’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and find good groups of people to interact with efficiently & productively. I used to subscribe to the concept of “follow everyone that follows you”, but as I said, that became too many people to honestly follow, so I pared it down to ~700 and now it’s back up to ~900. I’ve been using apps to set up groups, which helps.. but I think I need another subdivision so I can sort people by RELEVANCE and attempt to get back to the essence of what I loved about Twitter when I first started using it.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Episode Clip:

So, off the bat, we don’t seem very similar as far as dating goes, but she’s a pleasant person and nice to look at, so I don’t mind chatting her up for a while…

At some point, the party moves to another location, at which point she was heading home and the rest of us were heading out to party some more. I was already WAAAAAAY over my time limit to determine whether I was gonna kick it with her or not, so I had decided that I wasn’t going to request contact information from her and if she wanted to get in touch with me, she knew to Google me or she knew we had mutual acquaintances and could find me through them.

Now that I’m writing this, I realize that this was actually a VERY important component of the bad decision I ended up making. I had gone over this scenario lots of times between when it happened and today and had neglected to rewind far enough back to the point where I had already written her off as far as tonight. That doesn’t mean my decision was any less poor, haha.. Just that I understand now why I went the route I did.

So… hmm… ok.. In thinking about the rewind some more, and considering my mindset about her by the time we left that party, I now realize how I got in the situation I got in. Before just now, I had been asking myself “How in the HELL did you end up walking with her AND some other guys instead of just HER?”

So when we were leaving place #1, I was going to be heading to place #2 and she was going to be heading to the subway to go home. This is where I made error #1 and told her I’d be right outside while I went to see if these other chicks wanted to come with.

Technically, that wasn’t an error, because I thought she was going home, which would have meant I would have been showing up at place #2 without entertainment in-hand, which is never a good idea. However, in being efficient about keeping my night going as far as entertainment, I wrote her off as past tense even though she was actually physically still right there where I was. I was seeing her as if she had already gotten on the subway, so I started interacting with her as if she were already gone. I was in some kind of “Nice to meet you, see you around the scene” endgame mode, when I should have been in a “This person that you’ve already had fun with is still here with you until she actually leaves” mode.

So the other chicks aren’t ready to leave yet, so I tell them where they’re going and then go upstairs to tell the accountant good-bye. She’s ready to leave on the spot, and if she had, I wouldn’t have thought about ANY of this stuff. She decides to walk to a subway station that’s in the same direction I’m heading to the next party, so we’re walking and talking…

However, due to blunder #1, my not leaving the place WITH her, we’ve now achieved two more people that are walking with us. Two guys. This is where oversight/error #2 comes in. Since I had already considered her as having left, it wasn’t a big deal that these guys were walking with us. One of them, I knew already, and the other, I was just meeting for the first time right there. The problem is that when you add other people into the mix, you can’t really talk about what you SHOULD be talking about with a gal. You talk about watered-down stuff or entirely different topics so as not to have your and her business “in the street”. I wasn’t worried about this, though, because she was already gone as far as I was concerned, and I was just escorting her to the subway.

The turning point in the situation was that she decided NOT to go to the subway and disappear from my life forever, but instead to continue on with the three of us to the party that we were going to. I was glad that she was going to keep hanging out with us, but I hadn’t considered what I was thinking of her in order to reverse it. In other words, I was still treating her like she was immediately leaving.

So my lack of paying attention to the present and instead focusing on an envisioned future (without her in it) led to this rolling mistake. I should have left the place with her. I should have walked with her by myself. If Woody had gone straight to the police, this would never have happened…

So error #3 was not recognizing the changeover and not mentally adjusting to the new situation… Error #4 was letting this guy I’ve never seen before control the conversation.

So now, I’m basically an innocent bystander to my own rap. Granted, it wasn’t much of a rap, because I wasn’t rapping TO her and, in fact had already written her off as soon as she had said she was going home. But what happened was that the new guy was talking to her about something, blah blah blah and then, somehow, he started talking about “picking up women”. I don’t know how this happened, because I didn’t care what he was saying, so I wasn’t listening in on his conversation with her. It just so happened to be loud enough for me to hear “picking up” or “picked up” or something like that.

I doubt their conversation had anything to do with me, because when women ask me what I do, I just say “I’m a video editor”. I can’t afford to say “I write a dating blog”, because that immediately puts women on guard for what I’m attempting to do to them. So, as far as I know, the accountant didn’t think I knew anything about dating at all.

In general, you don’t want to discuss picking up women….. AROUND WOMEN, unless they’re already in your inner circle. If these are your homegirls, and they know you do what you do… Yeah! Talk about picking up women all day. Also, you don’t want to talk about picking up women in front of women with guys who you don’t know what level they’re on as far as kickin’ it with chicks. This is a MAJOR BLUNDER and counts as #5 in this rolling mistake. If a guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s liable to make some sort of egregious error and subsequently drag YOU down with the sinking ship he just blasted a hole in. Also, if he DOES know what he’s doing, he could decide to intentionally sabotage your rap by saying the wrong thing(s) and jacking up her mood.

So, all of these errors led to the one I actually want to talk about… This guy says “blah blah blah picking up women”, and somehow now has incorporated me into their conversation. I replied something to him, to which he replies something to the effect of:

“That’s How You Picked *HER* Up?”

……………

So now, time slows down as all three people are looking at me. As soon as he said what he said, I had looked at her face, and her mind was suddenly kicking into gear, thinking about things she hadn’t thought of before. She looked like she had seen something shocking, snapped out of it in a few seconds and then looked in my direction, to hear what my response was going to be…

I guess time didn’t really slow down, but I was suddenly thinking at hyper-speed, running permutations and potential outcomes. On the one hand, I wanted to say nothing at all, silently pleading The 5th. The problem with a non-commital response is that it allows her to think anything and everything about the situation. You’re giving up control by not attempting to define the situation through words or actions. On top of that, it looks suspicious that you can’t answer a simple question.

Except.. It’s NOT a simple question, because answering a question about HOW I picked her up stipulates to my picking her up in the first place. I don’t “pick women up”. I hang out with them. If they happen to get lucky, good for them. Therefore, at no point in time had I said anything to the accountant as far as dating her, messing with her or even liking the color or her eyes or how pleasant her personality is. This is why she had this “What’s he talking about, picked her up?” look on her face right after he said it. So, I don’t pick women up in the traditional “You come here often?”, “Did it hurt… When you fell out of Heaven?” sense, but at the same time, the fact that I was hanging out with her WAS the pickup.

So I wasn’t inclined to answer the question about HOW I picked her up, because I would have been admitting to her that I DID pick her up, which defeats the purpose of the style.

OTOH… I didn’t want to flat-out deny picking her up either. That would have given her the impression that I wasn’t interested. It also would have been completely disingenuous, because I had been hanging out with at least six other women at party #1 and I left with *her*. Clearly, by the fact of the circumstances we were currently in at the time of the conversation, I was in the process of some format of a pickup on her.

Tactically, denying the pickup was the way to go.. “Pick-up? I didn’t pick her up! We’re just walking down the street together in the middle of the night, even though we never laid eyes on each other before about an hour ago. A heh.. A heh heh *grin*”. I could have recovered from that easily, and it would have been a good excuse to pull her to the side later and explain how I really DID like her and WANTED to pick her up, except I denied it so as to keep our business ‘out the street’, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, while I was running scenarios and permutations in the seconds I had between his question and my inevitable answer, I failed to account for my past-tense view of her and decided that I was bored with the situation and was going to try something off the wall. Ladies, let this be a lesson to you hahaha.. If a guy does something completely odd, it might not be that he’s crazy, but that he just doesn’t care about the outcome and he’s experimenting.

So, without skipping too many beats, I start some BS explanation of “How I picked her up”. Error #6.. Following someone else’s lead when you’re kickin’ it with a chick. It was a HORRIBLE idea. It was completely ill-advised. I totally had no idea what was going to happen as I was explaining to a guy I had never met before the process that I used to pick up a girl that I had never met before who was standing right next to me and that I had never picked up in the first place (so far as she knew at the time). Fellaz… Do NOT try this at home!

Well.. It wasn’t worth it. Not to me. It was worth it as an experiment and to be able to tell y’all about it, but in real-time, I just felt kind of empty after I finished saying whatever I said, and I have no idea what I said, because I was just making it up on the fly and I was more paying attention to her reactions to what I was saying than whatever words I selected. Basically, I had burned whatever rap I had been working on to the ground and was going to have to bail altogether or start something completely new with her after my phony pickup confession.

Really, I felt pretty drained. I immediately started contemplating how this happened to me in the first place. Actually, some of my processing cycles before I spoke up were taken up by thoughts of “um… How the hell did this happen to me?” But I had to suppress that to decide what route I was going with the answer. As soon as I finished, I devoted all energies to assessing the situation, because it was a MAJOR blunder on my part. Now, through writing it out, I see how it happened.

And I supposed that concludes this story with Error #7. Instead of getting back in the game, I was just disgusted with myself and preoccupied with taking mental notes about the surrounding circumstances which led to my grand soliloquy about nothing of import. I basically grounded myself, which might have seemed to her that I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I hope I didn’t come off like that, but I’m pretty sure I did. Actually, I had put myself on punishment and was just disgusted and didn’t feel like working around the issue. I owed her more than that, but didn’t give it to her.

So, gentlemen… The moral of the story is to keep your eyes on the prize, control your situations and environments and make sure you retain the lead role when you’re rapping to a chick. If you’re gonna fumble, make sure you do it on your own terms… Not because you got lazy and let someone else kick the ball out of your hands while you were standing there watching it all go down.

I guess as a bonus, I’ll add in Error #8, which is the fact that since I knew there were plenty of women that I knew at the next party, I was totally unconcerned with fumbling ONE, and that contributed to my experimental nature. So, not only shouldn’t I have considered her past tense until she actually LEFT, but I should have maintained my level of concentration on her and attention to her until the situation played itself all the way out.

I think that’s what disgusted me the most about this situation. I got bored, I got lazy, I started slackin’… and then I GOT CAUGHT SLIPPIN’!!!

Ah well. C’est la vie. Easy come, Easy go!

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
Facebook: Bill Cammack
DatingGenius Category: billcammack.com/category/datinggenius
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Kunal & Bill

Bill & Jackie

This is the end
Beautiful Friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never, look into your eyes, again…

Can you picture what will be?
So limitless and free
Desperately in need
Of some… Stranger’s hand
In a… Desperate land…

Michael Jackson died today.
Thank You for everything.

Bill Cammack enjoying the day.

Hermann Mazard, Bill Cammack, Sarah Cooley, Charles Hope and Grace Piper
blip.tv Summer Party, 2009

Good Times!

I posted videos from that evening @ Who’s The Man? and Bill on NYC Partying: A Daily Operation.
#ChatPack

I haven’t had the time to upload any of my video from #140Char, so I’ll post someone else’s!

Cast:
Lori Harfenist: @TheResident
Jill Hanner: @JillHanner
Laura Fitton: @Pistachio
Jeff Pulver: @JeffPulver
Evan Slusher: @EvanSlusher

~Bill
@BillCammack

Bill & Jody

I never used @BillCammack as identification because Twitter is a tool, not a home. The only reason for someone to go to my Twitter page is to click “Follow”. After that, they’ll be following me in whatever app they choose, so my Twitter handle is now worthless to me as a “home base”.

Personally, I tell people to Google Bill, because I’m me. That probably won’t work for you, so we’ll skip on past that one.

If you’re branding yourself properly, your screen names will be redundant across networks. This is because when something new shows up, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, ustream, livestream, blogtv, whatever.. People that know who you are and what you do are going to look for you as the same name you used in the previous social site. Therefore, your lineup should look like this:

Website: http://BillCammack.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/BillCammack
Facebook: http://facebook.com/BillCammack
Ustream: http://ustream.tv/BillCammack
etc, etc, etc…..

So, even if you couldn’t just Google me, you would be able to find out what I’m doing by using the username you already know me as on the next new popular site.

The question, then… is now that you have the opportunity to easily identify yourself as:

a) Your own website,
b) Your twitter handle, or
c) Your facebook page,

Which one will you gravitate towards to represent you in your social media interactions, and why?

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Facebook: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
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Go get yours @ http://www.facebook.com/username/

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

Grace, Christine, Bill, Kathryn & Annie

A “non Social Media” friend of mine asked me “What’s new with you?” just now. I showed her a multi-person live video/audio/text chat application that I embedded on my blog, and then she goes “So, what’s new with you?”

I would have thought she was kidding, except I could see from her face and her body language that she felt like I had avoided her question instead of answering it. WHAT’S NEW is that we have this capability now to interact with each other whenever we want to. WHAT’S NEW is that I don’t have to travel to DELAWARE to see, talk to and share a laugh with my cousin. WHAT’S NEW is that I don’t have to waste my time traveling from location to location when I can press one button and talk live to someone RIGHT. NOW.

Once I got her to understand what I was showing her, her response was that she wouldn’t want to use that stuff. She likes telephones, texting, etc. She’s clearly a fan of One to One communication. I’m a fan of One to Many communication.

I’m sorry… The days of calling 50 people on the phone and telling them one at a time that the blip.tv Summer Party was OFF. THE. HOOK!!! are OVER! I’m gonna put that information on Facebook or on Twitter or on my blog, and whomever happens to be interested is going to check it out.. Asynchronously.. On their own time.. Even if they check it out three weeks from now, it’ll still be there (on my blog, at least.. Nobody’s going to dig that far on Facebook or Twitter.. If it’s even POSSIBLE to go back that far on those services). All that tell-it-to-one-person stuff is O-VER!

One to Many communication is different, and it’s potentially an acquired taste. You have to be interested in, or see some personal benefit in talking to people in front of other people. One potential benefit is not having to repeat yourself. I know that personally, once I tell a story a couple of times, I get *BORED* of telling it. Even if I tell it to someone later, they don’t get the same experience as when I was actually INTERESTED in telling the story. One to Many allows me to express to everyone who’s interested, the same thing, one time.. Regardless of when each individual actually reads, watches or listens to it.

From the ensuing conversation, I learned that what she doesn’t like about One to Many is the lack of intimacy between people. She would rather have a One to One conversation and expend all of her intimacy in a focused, meaningful manner. It’s like having two cans on a string as opposed to sending out a message in a bottle. You don’t know who’s getting the message in the bottle, but you KNOW who’s holding the other can and talking back to you.

That’s actually a downside of One to Many… It encourages “lurking”. Lurking is probably what you’re doing right now… Reading this post and not commenting on it. Checking it out, getting the information and then going away. I think lurking is actually the norm and de-lurking is atypical on the internet. According to quantcast, there are ~8,000 people that visit my site each month and I probably have 8 regular commenters. So part of One to Many communication, such as this blog post you’re reading, is that you’re writing to the EVENTUAL reader. I’m actually writing to nobody at all when I blog. I’m writing something for myself, and if someone else chooses to read it, fine. If they choose to comment, fine. If they choose to discuss it with me in person, like how David Jr. complimented me on my wedding series at the blip.tv party or how Jeff’s friend Mike told me he reads DatingGenius, that’s appreciated, and that’s great.

The fact of the matter, though, is that there’s no instant gratification to blogging. When you press that “publish” button, there’s no telling whether 10 people are going to read it or 1,000 people (eventually). There’s no telling whether people that you WANT to read the post are going to read it or whether it’ll be all randoms that you don’t know at all. Talking to someone on the phone or texting them and getting a text right back is immediate intimate gratification, so I understand why she likes those formats.

The way I see it, the more advanced the technology becomes, the better, the faster and the more often we’ll be able to communicate with each other. That *HAS* to be a good thing, right?

Then again, there are people that would rather communicate with FEWER people that they’re more intimate with instead of more people that they don’t see or speak to as often. There are also people that would like to speak to people that are specifically speaking to them. What systems like Twitter set up is a culture where people mind other people’s business, because those people are putting their business out in the streets to be minded. You listen in on what other people say and you throw in your two cents or start your own conversations or ask questions or whatever you want to do. It’s a completely different style of communicating. Some people don’t get it. Some people don’t WANT to get it.. They just aren’t interested.

Another reason I like One to Many is that I’m used to talking to groups. When I blog, it’s not just to one person, and when I’m talking about things IRL, it’s normally to a group of 3-7 people. I’m used to the efficiency of saying things one time, having a lot of people get it and then not having to repeat myself. I think it’s something you get used to, and then you save One to One for private communications… Well… Even then, most of these Social Media sites and apps can be sorted into groups, so even if you don’t tell EVERYONE what you’re thinking, you can still tell that group of people in an efficient manner.

I guess the question is how many people you have in your circle and how many of them you like to express things to. Also, what you get out of communicating AT ALL. Some people express ideas directly to other people in order to get that immediate gratification of being heard, understood and potentially replied to. Other people like to express things to the cosmos and see what happens…..

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

They’ve really taken all the fun out of it now that Google knows who you are and caters their search results to where you probably want to go.

Bill Cammack @ #1 of 428,000,000 results for “Bill”. *yawn*