Bill Cammack

Bill on NYC Rain
Bill Cammack billcammack.com | @BillCammack

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So, this morning, I decided to Google Bill to see how I was doing. I’ve been struggling recently, because of the Stimulus Bill, which had displaced me to about #12 out of 438,000,000 but I knew this was a flash in the pan and would be old news in a second, and I’d be back in stellar form.

Now, what I didn’t expect was to be page 01, number 01:

This is no big deal, because Google’s been customizing its search results for some time now, so I expect them to know that I’m the one (because I’m logged in to Google) asking who’s the top dog amongst the “Bill”s of the planet and to appease me by saying “Thou art the fairest of them all”.

I got this result from Firefox, so I decided to go for a second opinion and try Safari 3.2.1: Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Cammack = #2 blog related to "bill", originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack = #2 blog related to “bill”
December 14, 2008

Bill Cammack = "Bill #4" Today On Google, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack – Google results for “Bill” on November 04, 2008

It seems that Google has changed their “two entries per site” layout, at least for this morning. IMDB only has one and Wikipedia only has one, so that puts me at #4 for now, behind Bill Gates’ Microsoft entry.

Happy Election Day!!!! :D

Bill Can’t Get Closer Than #7 on Google!, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack – #7 Google result out of 560,000,000 pages for “Bill”

ok… This is getting out of hand. If they make like ONE MORE Bill Gates page, I’m finna get squeezed right off the bottom of page 1! grrr :/

Nobody better make any Bill Gates ACTION MOVIES, LUNCHBOXES, MEMOIRS, CAR INTERIORS… NOTHING! :D

Stop hogging the real estate, dude! :D

Today’s "Bill" Google Standings, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack in slot #5 of 388,000,000 English pages for "Bill".

… Actually, slot #3, since #1 and #2 are both IMDB and #3 and #4 are both Wikipedia…

But who’s counting? :D

My apologies for the feed error this morning. :)
 
I usually write all my posts myself, but my Lindz & Bill category is a collab with Lindsey Chen of http://lindseychen.com.
 
I thought it would be a good idea to post our latest article: “Top 10 Mistakes Guys Make When Trying To Get A Girl” password-protected, so that Lindsey could review it and approve it before actual release. I was wrong, haha that was NOT a good idea. :)
 
Since I don’t pay attention to feeds, I wasn’t aware of how quickly my posts were being sent to people’s feed readers. More than one person has informed me that I sent a password-protected post out to the readers. My fault. The only point was making sure that Lindz was cool with it before I released it, but I’ll find a different way to make that happen to avoid confusion in the future. :)
 
Thanks for reading and commenting and I’m sure you won’t be bothered with password-protected articles in the future, because now I know…
 
And knowing’s half the battle! ;)

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

Bill

Alec & Swati, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Alec Pollak & Swati Argade

Bill & Spencer, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack & Spencer Striker of gamezombie.tv

After my cousin… whom I didn’t even know reads my blog… had some fascinating comments for me about my Fame, Popularity & Star Power post, I thought I’d try again to explain what I get and don’t get out of posting to the internet.

Revisiting the definitions I used for the article:

Fame = a lot of people have heard of you (clearly relative… “a lot”)
Popularity = a lot of people LIKE something about you
Star Power = a lot of people know what ADDED VALUE you bring to a production

Fame

Now… By those three distinctions, Fame, to me, is absolutely useless. People have heard of your name?… but have no particular interest in, care about or respect for anything you’ve ever done? hehehe No Thanks. :D

There are lots of people that are famous for nothing. People know their names because their parents are rich or because they run around town making scenes or everybody thinks they’re jerks. Still, these people are famous. To many of them, that’s worth something. I’m sure it gets them in the door at some clubs they otherwise wouldn’t be allowed into or it gets them laid a couple of times with groupies that enjoy self-validation through being selected for sex by someone that people think is someone.

I think my lack of interest in fame comes from elementary / junior high school. Growing up in New York City, personalities develop really early. They have to, because you have to fit into your clique(s). It’s not like the sticks, where you can be just anybody, or NOBODY and have the exact same experience in life. In NYC, you like Rock or you don’t. You like Hip-Hop or you don’t. Your parents are rich, or they’re not. You dress cool, or you don’t. You drink and do drugs (yes, in JHS), or you don’t. You’re cool, or you’re not. You’re smart, or you’re not. You’re artistic, or you’re not. You play a cool instrument, or you don’t. You have to work, or you have an ‘allowance’.

I was fortunate that by going to specialized schools, all these kids were thrown in together, because their parents wanted them to be the best in the world. I got to mingle with future movie stars and future gas station attendants. Kids from Park Avenue and kids from the projects. Kids whose parents were already famous and kids whose parents weren’t even born in the USA (hehehe not that that’s a prerequisite for fame hahaha).

What I took away from that was that even if your family’s name rings bells or you throw the best parties or you have the most money or the best girlfriends, that doesn’t make you cooler or more interesting than somebody people haven’t heard of. Since I like cool and interesting people, fame isn’t something that’s important to me… my own, or someone else’s.

My cousin also snapped on the fact that I said I don’t care about this stuff, yet I posted my “recent visitor list”:

hahahaha :D Well… The thing about that is that people don’t hit my site looking for Bill Cammack. People come here looking for concepts that they were contemplating and searched for. Just because someone visited from Australia, looking for information on the dating scene in NYC doesn’t mean that they looked at the author’s name or even gave a damn who wrote the article. So, Yes… :D It’s congruent to say that I’m not interested in fame, and in the next breath mention how people visit my site from all over the world.

I thought of my cousin the other day when I was hanging out and someone I had never met before was raving about a video of mine (that he had no idea I created) that he had watched and enjoyed. I was happy that he enjoyed himself, haha but I never mentioned that *I* was the one that shot and edited that video. Had “fame” been an interest of mine, I would have made sure that he knew that he was speaking to, as well as hanging out having brews with the incredible content creator, Bill Cammack! HAHAHA… How ridiculous is that? Worthless. I was glad that he enjoyed it. I enjoyed that he enjoyed it, and the conversation changed topics without me requesting props from him and propagating my worthless “Fame”. :D

Popularity

Popularity, OTOH, is extremely useful. I can see how I can be accused of using the internet to attempt to gain popularity. It makes sense, because it’s very tough to distinguish between popular people posting THE FACTS about what they do on a regular basis and unpopular people attempting to *become* popular by strategically crafting an internet persona. I can’t help it that I hang out with cool-ass-people ALL THE TIME! :D

It’s not my fault that this is NYC, and there’s ALWAYS something going on. :D

If I happen to get out my camera and document something that’s happening, that’s because….. it’s HAPPENING. :D It’s not something staged for the benefit of the internet population that stumbles onto my site from Google.

Popularity’s built in the trenches… Person to Person. You can be as internet famous as you like, but if you’re a Herb in person, your props go right down the drain. Popularity’s an aura you carry with you… Your ability to make friends on the fly and enjoy people’s company. It’s about the interpersonal relationship you have with the person you’re spending time with right now.

Having said that, the internet affords us all the opportunity to get to know each other asynchronously, and in most cases, anonymously. What people post to the internet is an expression of their own interests, intelligence, fantasies, desires, skills… Where that becomes useful is when someone’s aware of you because of your internet presence and then gets to meet you IRL and find out how close your real life persona is to how you portray yourself through text, images and video.

So… For people that ARE popular, and especially those that have always BEEN popular, the internet isn’t an extremely efficient way to increase that, because the real relationships are built when people actually spend time together… NOT when they’re reading something someone wrote or watching a video they made on the internet.

Star Power

Increasing one’s Star Power via creating and posting content to the internet is really the most valuable takeaway of the three, IMO… other than one’s own satisfaction in creating and being an artist. Since you can create stuff but never post it, we’ll take that out of the running. :) The ability to demonstrate what you do and how well you do it to people around the world, watching it asynchronously, on their own time schedules and when they seek it out themselves via search engines is both immensely powerful and addictive. I had a conversation with Phil Campbell in England and Liz Burr in California about a post I wrote the other day, and I haven’t discussed that post with anyone, IRL. The ability to express one’s self without the limitation of territorial boundaries is exhilarating… even in a text post like this. I also understand that it’s hard to explain to people that aren’t involved in it because *I* didn’t understand it until *I* got involved.

Since Star Power’s based on the added value that *YOU* bring to a project, it’s built regardless of the projects you work on… assuming you’re branding yourself correctly. If you’re the host of the show, you want people to know what your name is, so that if/when you branch off to do another project, people understand the quality you’re going to bring to it. At this point, both Veronica Belmont and Lindsay Campbell have parlayed this concept perfectly, IMO. People are aware of the value that they bring to the table, regardless of which shows they’re fronting. Is it useful and valuable for people in Japan to be aware of the work one does in the USA? Most definitely! :D

So… Out of the three, Fame does nothing for me personally, because it never really touches your life. Popularity’s fun and useful, but it’s something generated AUTHENTICALLY in close quarters, not across the wires and screens of the internet. When you know, feel and understand what REAL popularity is, internet popularity’s relatively worthless, mentally and emotionally. Star Power is great when you want to work with someone else on a project. They know the quality you’re bringing to the table, and can decide whether they want to collaborate with you based on their honest perception of you as a person and your qualifications as an expert in your chosen field.

I post because I enjoy it. If I meet great people IRL because of it, Great! :D If it makes it easier for me to work on video projects that I think are cool and interesting, Great! :D The only other benefit I can think of right now to Internet Fame is that I never carry business cards… I just tell people to Google “Bill“. :D