Bill Cammack

A reader writes:

“I’m a guy. Why don’t women approach me?”

That’s always situational. It depends on what she likes and it depends on what you’re like. The first place you want to go is to read life isn’t fair. If you aren’t cute or well-built or have a great personality or sense of humor (or, of course, all of the above! :D) then you’re at a SERIOUS disadvantage to begin with.

The problem is that everybody wants to date the top chicks. A LOT OF WOMEN are being completely overlooked and underdated because they fall outside of a certain range of what guys consider HOT/HAWT. This means that unless you can envision and internalize your station in life, you’re going to delude yourself into thinking that you can get the same girls the next man can get, when, in reality, you’re like a little league player batting against a MLB pitcher.

So, the first thing you might want to recognize is that you’re not “fly”, so chicks aren’t SUPPOSED to be approaching you.

If that’s the case, then you need to make moves to accentuate the positive. One way to do that is to dress better. Chicks like colorful things, also things that sparkle. Distract them from your looks with stylish gear & maybe a nice watch if it fits your persona. Also, be a really, really, REALLY nice guy. This is to your advantage because often, when guys “have it like that” that chicks just like them off the bat, they get souped up. Due to the fact that they can pick up a new chick in, like, 5 MINUTES, women are romantically expendable to them and it shows in their demeanor. By being a nice guy and appreciating women, regardless of how wack you look, you have a chance.

Another good trick is to find out what her hobbies are and feign interest. Of course, this only works if you know something about her ahead of time. So next time you go the bar, bring a copy of the book you heard her talking to her friends about. Flip to a page around 3/4 of the way through the book so it looks like you’re deeply engrossed in it. Watch her make her way over and strike up a conversation ;)

… Oh yeah… Buy the cliff’s notes too, in case you ACTUALLY have to talk to her ABOUT the book. :D

So that covers it if you’re not a good-looking guy to begin with. She’s not approaching you because…. she doesn’t feel like it! So make sure you attract her with gimmicks, smoke & mirrors. However, what if you ARE attractive, and she’s STILL not approaching you?

Well, first of all, you might not be HER type, physically. Just because a lot of chicks give you compliments doesn’t mean that ALL of them want to hook up with you. Assuming that’s not the case, you just might be too much for her to handle, and she knows damned well that she’s not going to have *ANY* control over you, so she doesn’t dare step to you and let you know what she wants. Women like mentally strong guys, but they need to feel like they have some say in what goes on. They need to feel that they have some sort of effect on you, or perhaps leverage. Without that leverage, they feel like their relationship could end any day when you just say “Nah… Not interested. Don’t feel like seeing you this week. Later.” If a gal can’t see in her mind’s eye being with you and having there be SOMETHING about her that’s unique and compelling you to stay with her, she’s not likely to step, because she’s already seeing the end of her relationship with you before it even starts.

Finally, although there are probably another million reasons a chick might not step to a guy she likes, as much as we hate rejection as guys, women hate it MUCH, MUCH, MUCH MORE! :D You have to consider that they’re brought up to get stuff for free just from their looks. Get into parties for free. Have drinks bought for them for free. Get taken shopping for free. Get invited out on yachts for free. Get put up at a Jersey Shore beach house over a three-day weekend for free…… So they’re VERY used to people just giving them things. That includes raps.

The fact that you haven’t already approached her to throw your hat in the ring is a red flag to her. In her experience, a guy that’s interested in her offers her some kind of bribe to “listen to his demo”. If she knows that you’ve seen her, and you haven’t come over and introduced yourself, that means she might very well walk up to you, try to strike up a conversation and get rejected. :( Hate it when THAT happens! hahahaha :D So it’s the safer play to hang out with her girls or whatever group she came out with and keep checking you out, but never actually step to you.

Having said that, don’t expect her to walk all the way over to you unless she’s just that confident about herself, which is a fantastic thing! ;) For the most part, chicks will put themselves within striking distance for *YOU* to rap to them. You still end up doing the work, but what she did to facilitate that was to make herself available. She deserves credit for not sitting on a couch against a wall all night, surrounded by friends she’s never going to hook up with anyway… looking like the king surrounded by the rook and a row of pawns. So acknowledge her gesture with a smile and “hello” and then it’s business as usual from there. ;)

DatingGenius

Reader SlightlyScared writes:

SlightlyScared: “I recently met a woman online through Twitter that I think might be a worthy woman for me to hang my long-time bachelor status for. We’ve been talking via instant messenger and she seems read and incredible. There are pictures of her online, she seems to be open about herself, has a web site, etc. We haven’t talked on the phone or really talked about anything personal and I can’t think of a way to move to the phone without giving away I like her more than a chat buddy. There isn’t a reason for us to talk on the phone and I don’t want to scare her off. I can walk up to a woman anywhere but this woman I am anxious about the things I do. DatingGenius, do you have any advice? Tyme, would you push a man away if he wanted to talk on the phone? It would mean giving up her phone number and some women hesitate on that. Thanks in advance.”

I meant to write about that directly, but there’s a more general issue that needs to be addressed.

For all the talk of “women’s intuition”, women are ABSOLUTELY CLUELESS about when a guy likes them. Completely. :D … This works to you advantage and also to your disadvantage.

It works to your advantage because you get to avoid the path of redundant self-desctruction which is turning a perfectly good female friend into an ex-girlfriend. See… Chicks can’t take it that you just plain think they’re hawt and you like hanging out with them and messing with them. They have to get *GREEDY*! :D They start envisioning dating you, then being engaged to you then being married to you then having kids with you blah blah blah blah blah….. This is why it’s ALWAYS chicks that want to “have the talk”… “Where is this relationship going? :(” … “What are we to each other? :(” … “Are we ’serious’?” HAHAHAHAHAHA :D

You can avoid all this by just not kicking it to them in the first place and remaining their friend. You get MUCH more utility out of a chick as a friend than you would as a girlfriend. She will MIND HER BUSINESS when some other chick wants to kick it to you. It’s no big deal to her if you don’t call her for a week or two. You can go out with her all you want and survive multiple iterations of boyfriends.

It’s the best thing in the world to be friends with hot chicks, because they have no shelf-life. No expiration date. You get to keep them forever, and their boyfriends only have them for a few months or years at a time, and then they disappear like dust in the wind. Never to be mentioned again. Never to be seen again. Like some effing GHOSTS. Gone. Nobody. Nothing. Meanwhile, you’re still meeting up with her for drinks like you did before THIS boyfriend and like you did before the boyfriend before HIM……

Now, the DISADVANTAGE IS that while you’re “being her friend”, if your actual goal was to be her BOYFRIEND, she’s completely oblivious to your intentions. Most chicks in this United States society are pair-bonders. They’re looking to hook up with ONE guy and stick with him until they croak. By playing the friend role, you’re actually getting FURTHER from being her boyfriend instead of closer. She’s spending time with you, but keeping her eye out for guys that are ABOUT SOMETHING. She’s envisioning two-car garages and kids and dogs and cats and grass you have to mow and mortgages you have to pay and getting together at her grandparents’ house on Sundays. The more you play that “friend” game, the LESS she thinks of you as a boyfriend.

Think about it… If you were serious about dating her, you would have said so, right? It’s completely erroneous to believe that friendship -> dating. It *CAN*, but most of the time, chicks are pretty quick. They play it off like they don’t like you, but they can feel it deep down inside. They know if they want to get with you practically immediately. If she decides that you’re boyfriend material, and you’re busy playing the friend role, you know what’s going to happen? She’s going to shut down.

As much as GUYS hate rejection, chicks hate it way more. If she’s into you and you’re not clearly into her, she may suck it up…. suppress it. I mean, if she believes in “the one” (which is an entirely different topic :/), HOW can you be “the one” when you’re right there in her face and you’re only interested in her as a friend? If you were “the one”, wouldn’t YOU feel what SHE’S feeling? Does that make sense? By playing the friend role, when you really mean to date her, you’re actually negating yourself as her “knight in shining armor” that’s going to scoop her up and take her away from the dating scene.

So… Getting to SlightlyScared’s question…

When are you going to pull the trigger? When are you going to turn the corner? You’re asking how to get from IM to phone without “giving away that you like her more than a chat buddy”. What’s the future of that? Think about it? “How do I get her to video chat with me without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I invite her out to dinner without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I take her to the movies without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I get her to come to the crib without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I get her to cook for me without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I make out with her without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” … “How do I have sex with her without giving away that I like her as more than a chat buddy?” ………

See what I mean? It has to end somewhere. Sooner or later, you’re going to do something that makes her go “hey….. I think this guy’s attracted to me like that…” What happens then? What’s your plan after that? It’s a really good idea to assume that she’s completely CLUELESS that you’re romantically interested in her. As a matter of fact, keep it up with this “friends” tactic, and when you finally drop it, she MAY NOT EVEN BELIEVE YOU! :D How about that? How would you like that?

The trick here is that as poor judges of character as women are, they THINK they’re excellent judges of character. By the time you jump out of the cake like “SURPRISE!!! I LIKE YOU!!! :D”, she’s already used her superior intuition to determine that you DON’T like her, or else you would have tried something by now. So now you’re stuck. She thinks you’re kidding, because in order to believe you, she’d have to admit that she ISN’T a good judge of character, and that you wanted her, BADLY, all this time, and she never noticed it. This leads her into a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Click that link and read about it. It’s very useful, if you know what to do with it, but if you don’t, it could be a rap-destroyer… AND a potential friend-destroyer.

So… My answer to the question is to forget about keeping the wool pulled over her eyes. :D Think about how you’re going to get from your current “friendship” to the relationship you *ACTUALLY* want. And think about it SOON, before the next man steps up and scoops your chick.

DatingGenius

Christian Payne aka “Documentally” is a photographer and blogger who was commissioned by the UNHCR to photograph the plight of Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

I edited Christian’s work into a video that we’ve recently completed, and he posted this video, thanking me as well as others for what we’ve done:

Seesmic Member Link | Non-member Link
Initially, this post was going to be called “Thanks for the Thanks”, because I definitely appreciate Christian’s authenticity and heartfelt statements. :D “Cheers for that”, as they say over there in the U.K. :D

However, that’s really a private communication between Christian and myself that happened to be expressed on a public medium (both his video and my text, above). What I think would be more useful to my 40 readers, according to Technorati (minus however-many registered search engines :p) is to talk about the process of creation, in this case, dealing with video, and the difference that it makes when you’re actually emotionally invested in what you’re doing. Also, I wanted to give Christian some more background on how we ended up working together.

I’m a video blogger, which essentially means I film videos and put them on the internet. We have our own little “echo chamber” of friends and colleagues. I first became aware, sort of, of Phil Campbell on Dan McVicar’s social site “Late Nite Mash”.

Bill & Dan in NYCIn November, 2006, Dan collected music pieces from Phil and other members and made a “mash-up” with video footage I sent him of New York City nightlife:

I say “sort of” aware of Phil because at that time, social media wasn’t advanced enough for people to get to know more about each other than what they typed on a page or a picture or video they posted. At this point, we not only have the technology to do our own video shows, like Phil’s “The Gravity”, but there are more and more live services popping up… Ustream, BlogTV, Yahoo! Live, LiveVideo, new services all the time, where we get to see a lot more about people than we used to.

So anyway, I got to know Phil Campbell as a quality guy who STAYS on top of the game when it comes to social media and is simply a treasure trove of good ideas. :D

Next in order, Andrew Lipson gave me an invite to this (at the time, invite-only) video-messaging application called Seesmic while I was an audience member of the Jeff Pulver Show. I checked it out, but it really wasn’t my type of conversation going on between the beta-testers, so I just watched Seesmic like a television show instead of participating in the watercooleresque banter.

There were a couple of people there with strong personalities and methods to their madness. The most animated and volatile of them was this character named “Documentally”. :D Most people, once you’ve seen four videos of them, you know their range… or at least the range they’re willing to bring to the world-stage which is Seesmic or any other site where you post videos that people can watch from NYC to Zimbabwe. With Documentally, you never really know what was going to happen in one of his videos. He might say something intelligent and serious. He might say something batty and off the wall. He might say nothing at all. He might roll his truck and videotape the situation as if he’s the first reporter on the scene! :D It was clear from the “Documentally” character that Christian Payne had A LOT of range to his personality, and there was a lot of entertainment value in his videos.

So being a morning person, I tend to chat with the European folks (who are 5/6 hours ahead of us) before the Americans wake up. I’m chatting with Phil Campbell and he mentions that his friend Christian had a project he was working on. I let Phil know I was aware of Documentally and was willing to chat with him about the project. In skypeing with Christian, I got to meet the “hang out at the pub” version instead of the “Seesmic character” version. He’s a nice guy, and as he put it in the video, he’s “someone I’d like to call a friend”. :)

I really meant to talk about the actual project, but I’ll do that some other time. This ended up being a post about connections. One of the benefits of social media is that people get to learn about each other at their own pace and according to their own level of interest. Another benefit is that we have checks and balances inside our “echo chamber”. For example, Dina Kaplan and I have 102 “Facebook Friends” in common! :O … Even if you spit that into 50 friends and 50 acquaintances, that means there are *50* people that I can contact right this second and ask them a question about Dina. I’d probably get 15 responses back, and they’d all be approximately the same, because that’s how Dina carries herself. She’s consistent.

Liz Gannes, Bill Cammack & Dina Kaplan

Through social media, and also by meeting in person @ Adam Quirk’s event named Vloggercue in Brooklyn, I developed an impression of Phil Campbell as a stand-up guy and a good judge of character. For Phil to bring up Christian’s project to me, I’m automatically *infinitely* more inclined to hear more about it. Yes, it helped A LOT that Christian already had a strong social media presence. Yes, it helped A LOT that the photos he shot for the project are rich and full of emotion, intimacy and meaning. However, the *main* thing is connection… passing it on. Social media offers us the opportunity to get to know each other, asynchronously… and then follow up to find out how the real person matches up to his or her online persona.

Bill & Friends

OK Fellaz, let’s get down to brass tacks here.

The way “dating” is set up in patriarchal society, it’s up to YOU, as the guy, to run the show. YOU kick it to the chick, she decides whether to give you some or not. You make the money. You make the decisions. You’re the “head of household”. No matter how much this society tries to make you into women, you’re *NOT*, so get over it and handle your business when it comes to chicks.

Having said that….. Since it’s YOUR responsibility to pull the chick, it’s YOUR responsiblity to be FLY! That’s a slang term meaning VERY GOOD in general, but in this case, we’re talking about your overall presentation. We’re talking about how you look, how you act, what shape you’re in, how ambitous you are in your career, how you handle your money… Top to Bottom, you have to be better than the next man if you think you’re going to get the rap to some chick.

LIFE. IS. NOT. FAIR.

You are not ENTITLED to a girlfriend.
You are not ENTITLED to have any female friends AT ALL.
You are not ENTITLED to have sex with a chick even if she likes hanging out with you.
You are not ENTITLED to have instant messenger text or video chats with chicks.
You are not ENTITLED to responses to your emails or direct messages.
You *ARE* entitled to….. *NOTHING*. :D

All men are NOT created equal. We may have been born through the same process, but some of us have distinct advantages over others. Go look up Alpha Males, Beta Males and Omega Males. If you’re a natural, chicks just like you and that’s that. You can do whatever you want, such as write blog posts that talk yang about males and females AT THE SAME TIME, and you will still have girls attracted to you just by walking in the door. Life Isn’t Fair. :D

The problem with Omega Males is that they refuse to correctly perceive themselves as the bottom of the barrel. They think to themselves “That good-looking, in-shape, well-educated, friendly, gregarious, charming, well-spoken guy over there can get girls…. so can I!” BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Wrong.

The first thing Omega Males need to do is realize their position in life. It’s like going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Unless you admit you have a problem, you’ll never go for treatment. The first step is admitting that YOU’RE WACK! … Say it with me now… “I am wack”. See? Don’t you feel better now? :D NOW we can get to the part where you attempt to overcome your deficiencies. See, by thinking you’re the same as guys that women actually WANT to talk to them, you’re doing yourself a disservice because you’re not trying as hard as *YOU* need to in order to pull a decent female. Then, when the chick cuts off communications with you, you try to blame it on her. You want to say she’s fickle or a tease or she led you on. Let me let you in on a little secret…..

Chicks in general are non-confrontational. You would think that’s a good thing, but it isn’t… not for YOU. It’s good for guys that girls WANT, because you say “let’s get out of here ;)” and she says “ok” and it’s on and poppin’. The problem for YOU is that she never wanted to talk to you in the first place. She saw you come in the door. She saw you on the dance floor. She saw you post up in her area. She saw you looking out the corner of your eye to try to gauge if you’d be successful in rapping to her or not. She knew what you wanted when you asked her what time it is or if she’d like to dance. She knew you were going to try to get on. She knew you would ask her for her number…..

This is where the non-confrontational part comes in. She will do one of three things. She will inform you that she’s not going to give you her number, she will give you a fake number or she will give you a real number.

If she tells you “no” from the get, she’s going to have to listen to you whining and trying to change her mind.

If she gives you a fake number, she takes the risk that you will call her immediately and realize that you connected to Pizza Hut. More whining from you and trying to change her mind. On top of that, she looks like an IDIOT because she “doesn’t know her own telephone number”. Now, she has to either tell you “no” or give up the real number.

If she gives you the real number, it’s still a trap. :) There are only two ways you can call her. With or without Caller ID. If you call her with your number blocked, she’s going to let it go to the machine, because she DOESN’T know who’s calling her. If you call her with your number showing, she’s going to let it go to the machine because she DOES know who’s calling her… Or, to put it another way, she knows it’s not anybody calling whom she actually picks up the phone for.

All paths here lead to frustration. The only way around this is to realize that YOU’RE WACK and start on the road to self-improvement. Let’s look at what you can do to make yourself less loathsome to chicks. :D

Improve your vocabulary. Go research the difference between “their” and “there”, and “your” and “you’re”. If this chick accidentally has a kid with you, she’s going to want the kid to be SMART, not STUPID.

Stop using primitive tactics to try to pull her. By using the same AMATEUR skillz that get you on with short-bus girls at the club, you’re demeaning the woman you’re kicking it to. She can’t believe that YOU believe you’re going to get on with such garbage. She feels low-rated and is less likely to give it up, so figure out how to step up your game, playah.

Stop trying to hide your kids. This is the United States of America. It’s very easy to find out that you have kids…. and a wife too, for that matter. Stop faking the funk. If you’re trying to get some on the side, “man up” about it. You might get turned down off the bat, but at least she respects you for not trying to get over.

If you’re *BITTER* about everything, KEEP. IT. TO. YOURSELF! :D Nobody’s interested in what you think you’re entitled to or how mad you are that you don’t have what the next man has. Suck it up, put a SMILE on your face, and show the chick a good time.

Go. To. The. Gym. You want to be in GOOD shape so that she’s HOPING you take your clothes off instead of DREADING the concept. :( You don’t want her to start singing the Fat Albert theme song when you emerge from the bathroom in your boxers.

If you’re NOT going to get in shape, at least DRESS WELL! Buy one of those hip-hop graffiti shirts so you look like a wall or an old-school subway car.

Watch black and white movies. Guys don’t know how to treat the ladies anymore. You have to watch old movies to receive the essence of male elegance and character.

And, the *most* important thing is to step to her “on the humble”. Do *NOT* act like you’re entitled to have her talk to you, text with you, email with you, video chat with you, dance with you, go home with you… NONE OF THAT. Just let her know you appreciate how she looks and you’d like to get to know more about her, then cross your fingers! :D

DatingGenius

I spent the day on Seesmic yesterday and had a 90-post conversation involving several of the members. I’ll say first of all that Seesmic has made TONS of improvements since Andrew Lipson gave me an invite 3 months ago. They’re always making improvements to their site, so this post may very well be outdated relatively soon. :)

If you don’t know what Seesmic is, it’s basically like having a conversation with people on a bunch of stickies. In a way, it’s like Twitter, except it’s video and audio instead of text. You get to record a video which goes into the “public” timeline, and other people can watch it just about as soon as you post it. People who see your video can record their own video and make it a reply to your video if they so choose.

They relatively recently implemented threading as a one-dimensional, reverse chronological timeline. This was way better than no threading AT ALL :D but having held a several-hour-long conversation on it that was about actual intellectual concepts, not “what to name a dog” or “who’s going on a date tonight”, I got to experience the downsides of asynchronous video threading in Seesmic’s current format.

The reason I make a point of it being asynchronous is that it’s not a real-time conversation. It’s more like twitter or an email group than it is like Yahoo Live where several people speak to each other simultaneously, or even chat rooms, where everyone’s there at the same time and can jump in with their opinions if they feel like it.

Liz Burr made some excellent points that I hadn’t paid attention to as I was absorbing so many other things during a full day’s use of the app. Someone had made the point that because you record your own video and decide when to stop it, you get to say what you want in its entirety without being interrupted. Liz mentioned that since it’s asynchronous, you can be turned OFF at ANY point, or not listened to at all, as your screen name and icon are attached to your video in the thread. This means you have more of a chance of not.being.heard.at.all. if someone decides that what you have to say isn’t worth listening to based on your behaviors and what you had to say in previous videos. I “knew” this, but I hadn’t processed it until she mentioned it to me. I was already employing that behavior, for example, after listening to a post from someone that I determined was garbage, I would skip anything with their face on it after that.

At this point, I should mention how Seesmic is set up for people to become aware of people’s posts. It’s important to understand this to understand why one-dimensional threading is NOT optimal for an application like this. There’s a “public” timeline that catches everyone’s videos. This is world-wide, but you can set it to only pick up posts in your language. That’s still A LOT of people, and it’s not even open to the public yet. Your next option is a “friends” timeline. You get to choose to “follow” people, and only their videos will show up in this timeline. This is another way you can elect to bypass people whom you’ve determined have nothing valid or intelligent to say… don’t “follow” them. They’ll still show up if you’re looking at a thread that they’ve contributed videos to, but then you resort to visual parsing and skip them as usual.

These abilities to select people to follow and people to “allow to speak” by clicking on their videos and watching them all the way to the end absolutely alters each person’s perception of a thread they arrive to. Seesmic member Otir read a perfect analogy of the situation, telling the story of a bunch of blind people whom were all offered different sections of an elephant to feel and then to give their opinion of what an elephant is like. Each of them had their own perception of “an elephant”, and that perception colored what they had to say about elephants.

First of all, if you’re following certain people, their posts come up in your “friends” timeline. If you click on the member’s icon, you go straight to their opinion. That’s a good thing. However, you’re jumping in in the middle of the thread. You can click “conversation” and see the entire list of posts in that thread. This is where your personal bias comes into play. If you don’t have any respect for the people earlier in the timeline, you might skip their videos entirely, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If there are a whole lot of videos before the person you’re following, you might not be inclined to watch an hour’s worth of posts before you enjoy what you really came here to see… thus, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If you’ve determined that the person you’re following is more credible than others in the thread, you may be inclined to reply along the lines of that personal bias. This is where we get the blind people approaching the elephant from different sides and angles.

Another “problem” with this layout is that what you’re looking at is NOT actually linear other than chronologically. The posts are laid out by the TIME that they were posted to the site, but they are not differentiated by the TANGENT of the thread that that particular post followed. This leads to a circular, “telephone game” situation, because people show up to a thread hours after it started, read something a “friend” of theirs posted, which was dealt with hours ago, and respond to that person’s post without watching all of the surrounding material.

My thread was 90 posts long. Even if each person took only one minute to say what they had to say (and I’ve seen videos that were 5 minutes long, so if there’s a time limit on individual videos, it’s NOT shorter than that), that means that to absorb the entire thread, you’d have to sit there as long as a feature film. People aren’t going to wait that long to reply. As a matter of fact, people started showing up and making NEW threads asking for someone to summarize my thread because they didn’t want to go back and read it all. This is another way that posts get “lost in the sauce”. People show up and want to be involved, but don’t want to put in the work to go back and experience each post.

Another reason it becomes circular is let’s say you have three tangents in a thread. As the original thread participants scramble “left and right” (since it’s all appearing as a one-dimensional timeline) to deal with tangents, 20 posts down the line, someone reads something from a tangent that was already resolved, hits “reply” and now, your 21st post is actually a response to your 5th post. :/ Then, THEIR “friends” see what THEY posted and continue the previously resolved tangent, causing the original thread participants to scramble over there and put out THAT fire… AGAIN. :/ Meanwhile, the thread splinters more and more and is misinterpreted more and more but LOOKS like a single, chronologically-ordered discussion. The snowball rolls further downhill when someone shows up to post #60, which is really only three posts removed from post #5 and doesn’t want to read the rest of the material, so they assume that all 60 posts have been along the same tangent.

Like I said, this only comes into play if you’re trying to have an intelligent conversation. If you’re just socializing via video, you don’t need to worry about tangents and following thoughts and concepts. You just throw up a “me too” post and you’re good… you feel like you’re a part of the conversation, whether people are “following” you or not.

Jan McLaughlin mentioned an addition that I think would work very well in these situations… the ability for the originator to moderate their thread. I suppose the ability to assign mods would be useful as well. A couple of days ago, I left a 32-post thread of mine for a few hours and when I returned, it was around 60. Thinking that there was much interesting material to sift through, I clicked on it, only to realize that two people had started online dating in my thread. :/ Instead of taking their chances in the “public” timeline, the best way to try to get each other’s attention was to click “reply” so that it would show up in their “replies” folder (an alternative timeline to “public” or “friends”. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that as they kept “reply”ing to each other, their posts were being added to my thread.

It would be lovely to have a way to separate irrelevant posts from your thread. It would be lovely to be able to remove videos posted to your thread by people that just showed up to act dumb. Not *delete* them, just remove them from YOUR thread so that new people arriving after the fact wouldn’t bail on your 70-post thread because there are 30 posts worth of online dating inside it that’s completely indistinguishable from on-point conversation in a one-dimensional reverse chronological timeline.

Seesmic’s making tons of improvements, so I’m sure features are coming down the line that will facilitate intelligent conversation, such as GROUPS. The ability to have a discussion only amongst the people that *you* choose would be a major development. There’s no need to block others from reading it. Just stop them from diluting the content and making the originators waste time running around putting out fires. Like I said, they’ve progressed in leaps and bounds in the three months that I’ve been on the service.

Personally, I’m a fan of synchronous interaction, whether we’re talking live video or text chat. Even IRL, I enjoy holding arguments against 5 people at a time. :D The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you only have to make your point ONCE, and everyone hears it and we can all move forward and explore greater depths of the conversation. The downside is that you have to actually BE THERE at the time it’s happening to be a part of it. If you show up hours later, all you can do is watch the archive, if there is one.

The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you can join in on work breaks, when you get out of class, whenever it’s convenient for you, you can add something to an ongoing discussion. The downside is that depending on how much time has elapsed between the beginning of the conversation and your arrival, you might not be willing to put in the work to absorb the entirety of the conversation anyway.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

Yesterday was a fantastic day. :D

I got to meet Kfir Pravda, who was here for a few hours in NYC Friday morning awaiting his connecting flight to Israel. I was familiar with Kfir from blogging as well as our involvement with the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.

We’ve had interesting discussions about the direction of online video and television, but I never figured I’d meet him in person, since I had no plans to travel to Israel.

Fortunately, our schedules and locations coincided, and I was able to enjoy the morning with Kfir, Kathryn Jones, Jeff Pulver and Keren Dagan.

One of the benefits of social media is that you can learn about people and their ideas at your own pace. If you see something interesting, you can bookmark their site or add them on a social network or follow them on a status update service. The effect is that you can gain a respect for someone without ever having met them in person, or if you’re a lurker, without them ever even knowing that you exist. I already appreciated Kfir for his ideas before I walked into “The Library” at the Regency Hotel. The intangibles of meeting him in person amplified that appreciation.

As much as you might be able to tell about someone from reading their blog posts or comments, there’s much more to be gleaned from having real-time, F2F conversation with someone. How do you greet each other? Do you have similar senses of humor? Is this person as sharp in a real-time, constantly-evolving conversation as they are in text, which they may have taken an hour to write, or in a video which they may have scripted or rehearsed many times before recording it? Is this someone with whom you would probably have been friends, had the “accident of birth” placed you in the same geographical location?

Previously, I asked “How Social is ‘Social’ Media?”. Yesterday, there was a ton of “Social” and a ton of “Media”! :D Jeff Pulver was broadcasting live to Qik utilizing his Nokia N95 and his portable hotspot (described/shown in the video below).

I recorded a Seesmic video with my MacBook Pro. So, not only did we share breakfast with each other, we shared ’sharing breakfast’ with our friends on other social media sites as well. :D

This time, social media came through BIG TIME! :D Fortunately Keren was keeping an eye on the clock, because our conversation had become three hours long with no end in sight. There really ought to be laws against having so much fun before 2pm! :D

It was a pleasure meeting Kfir & Keren. It makes such a difference when someone steps off of a blog page or computer screen and you get to experience them IRL. It was great to hang out with Kathryn & Jeff as well. I’m going to strive to sift through the QUANTITY of consistently increasing adds and contacts and have more QUALITY interactions like this one through social media. :D

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

As you know if you’ve been following this column over the last 6 months, DatingGenius doesn’t “date”.

The term “dating” implies progression. It’s like something Richie Cunningham or Potsie Weber might do. You see a chick and you want her, but you’re not willing to let her know what time it is, so you beat around the bush taking her places in hopes that she’ll see you as the kind of guy she wants to give it up to. *yawn*

In fact, there *IS* no progression. A chick knows if she wants to mess with you off the bat. Depending on what you tell her after that, she either thinks more about giving you some or LESS about giving you some, hahaha :D … That’s all there is. You want to hook up with her, or else you wouldn’t be on a so-called “date” with her. Everybody knows it, so stop acting like you’re all sneaky and undercover and then try to surprise the chick with a “good-night kiss” when you drop her home, hoping that it works like in the movies, and all of a sudden, she’ll invite you in for…. a nightcap. :/

So, no. DatingGenius doesn’t “date”. He hangs out with chicks. Period. If they’re into DatingGenius like that, then CHA-CHINGGGG!!! :D If not, we have a good time anyway, then we go about our respective businesses.

Having said that, if you still insist on “dating”, like actually courting one person in a serial fashion with the intent of them eventually handing you a title that’s supposed to mean something, like “significant other”, then make sure you date someone BETTER. THAN. YOU! :D

Now, that might not seem to make sense, coming from the diabolical, empty-life-having (bookstore chick’s friend informed me of this a couple of weeks ago), sinister, evil, manipulating DatingGenius! :D You would think that he would advocate kicking it to the dumbest, low-brow character you can find in order to maximize your control over the situation. Dummies and lowlives are great if you’re just trying to get on ASAP and don’t intend to see them ever again in life. If you’re actually going to REPRESENT with this person, like as in let ANYONE ELSE know that you’re messing with them… That person needs to be a FANTASTIC individual. This is actually MORE IMPORTANT for the ladies than it is for the fellaz, so pay attention. :D

[Part 1: Dummies]

Let’s say the person you’re dating is a dummy. Like they’re just not intelligent. Maybe you’re on iChat with them and it takes them mad, crazy, stupid long to type a response to you, and then after all that waiting, it’s like a line and a half because they were only using their two pointer fingers to peck at the keyboard. Or maybe they can’t spell for JACK, and you’re wondering if they dropped out of school in the 5th grade to pack bags for change at the supermarket, then got hooked on drugs before making it back into the school system.

If you actually date this idiot, regardless of how good he or she looks or how good the sex is, don’t give yourself credit like you’ve pulled off some fantastic feat. In fact, anyone smarter than them will be able to manipulate them if they choose to, and you’ve “built your house on sand”… if not quicksand.

On top of that, you can’t TAKE this person ANYWHERE! :D Unless they happen to LOOK intelligent and you can convince them to not say ANYTHING around your peers, this person is an accident waiting to happen… Actually, an accident TRYING to happen, because it’s been my experience that the dumber someone is, the more they try to impress other people. Did you notice that? :D It’s like the smartest people, most of the time in a conversation, they’re listening and PROCESSING what people are saying. When they finally say something, it’s worth hearing and it’s the product of what they’ve absorbed from what’s been going on. Meanwhile, you see the dummies sitting there staring at the mouth of the person who’s talking… They seem to be trying to synchronize, like double dutch, getting ready to jump into the conversation when they perceive that the current speaker is about to finish his or her point.

The problem with this is that if you’re synchronizing, you’re not LISTENING, which becomes apparent when the dummy jumps in with something relevant to 10 minutes ago when they finally had ONE good idea, and they’ve been waiting until now to get a word in edgewise. That’s when the entire conversation stops and everyone tries to be polite. There’s this silent exchange that goes on between everyone. They’re not so much being polite to the dummy as they’re being polite TO *YOU* because it’s YOUR FAULT that this person’s in here $&%*ing up the program! :D Basically, people are embarrassed *for* you, and everyone’s trying not to mention that the emperor has no clothes on.

This is easily avoided, if you insist on dating dummies and bringing them out in public, by not giving them a title when you introduce them. We all have those friends… Every so often, they come around with a new…. person… and they introduce this person by name, but no title. Like, it’s clear that they’re out on a date, but by not declaring this person, you get to play it off down the line. Oh… That was a business partner from the Kentucky branch, my job asked me to show him around. Oh… That was my CEO’s daughter, visiting from San Diego. Who? When?… OH!… I was interviewing her for that intern position (at 11:30 pm). This only works, however, if you know you’re going to get rid of them eventually. If you end up eventually declaring them, you look like a chump for trying to play it off.

You also can’t leave people like this alone with your friends. Do NOT go to the bathroom. Do NOT go to the bar to order drinks. Do NOT pass “go” and Do NOT collect $200. Stick to this person LIKE GLUE. If you leave, and your friends ask your date “What do you think about Obama” and they reply “I think he’s still hiding in those mountains”, you’re *dead*. Laughing stock. You will NEVER live it down.

DatingGenius

Fellaz: It’s All Over! :O

The Game as we know it is about to be turned on its ear! It’s all over. Get ready for the big Going-Out-Of-Business sale. What’s on sale, you ask?

YOU! You’re going out of business! :D

Systematically, male leverage in the dating game has been eroding, or perhaps has been purposely erodED.

Back in the day, it was easy to pull chicks, because they couldn’t do anything on their own. I mean, they were always intelligent enough to, they just weren’t allowed to.

According to the Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.
Timeline of Key Events in the A…, before August 26, 1920, women didn’t even have the right to vote. There was a bunch of other stuff women were dissuaded from, like having jobs, having their own money, owning land, starting a business…. Add that to the brainwashing girls receive to this very day when they receive baby dolls and toy ovens for Christmas to prepare them for their role as child-bearer, child-raiser, cook, maid, etc and it was a veritable buyer’s market. Oh… don’t forget the Scarlet Letter treatment women still receive to this day if they express themselves sexually and ‘get around’ in the same way that guys do. So… Basically, what you had was a bunch of chicks, sitting around with nothing to do, no money, probably no cars (? horses and buggies? hahaha) hoping that their lives would eventually *BEGIN* when some guy wanted to marry them.

Meanwhile, The Fellaz were living large because they were completely unrestricted in getting money, houses, land, voting, playing the field, etc. All you had to do was be better than the next man who comes a-knocking on a lady’s door as a suitor, and you were guaranteed to bag the chick. Of course, people like Fonzie had multiple chicks, either in parallel or serial, but that’s a different topic. :D

So anyway, in the 1920s, women got the vote. No big deal. However, around the 1940s, World War II kicked off, and all The Fellaz were sent to fight (read: die). In order to maintain American industry, there was no choice except to replace the guys with the chicks that had previously been sitting around at home. *THIS* was a big deal, :D because all of a sudden, “Sistahs were doin’ it for them-SELVES!!!”… Ya HEARD? :D Now, there’s no more sitting at home waiting for you to show up with your money and car, because she has HER money and HER car! :O No waiting for you to take her to Paris or Disney World, because she’s going to go if she wants to, AND hang out with her co-working female friends to boot! hahaha ROAD-TRIIIIP!!! :D

Guys’ leverage down the drain.

Fortunately, not all chicks took advantage of this opportunity to be prosperous. There were still a bunch of lazy chicks left over that wanted to get by on their looks and become “kept women”. There was also the mainstream media who recognized the problem of women doing EXACTLY what they wanted, when they wanted, and did their damnedest to keep images of how women are ’supposed’ to act all over the newspapers, film reels and televisions.

At some point in the 1960s, “Women’s Lib” popped up to combat myriad injustices towards American females. This movement has done a lot of good for women, however, some chicks got completely carried away with it! :D

In 1968, Valerie Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto. I was lucky enough to have been handed a copy of this SCUM Manifesto by a good friend while we were in High School, and found it to be a rather interesting read. Quoting from the wikipedia entry:

“Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks out constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape.”

[Side Note: Now you see how it's come to the point in 2008 when bookstore technique is a perfectly valid gameplan. Act like you've evolved as she has instead of "digging her sexually" and "constantly trying to arouse her", and you're "In like Flynn"! :D]
So, SCUM Manifesto advocated taking guys out of the loop, entirely. This brings us to February, 2008 and this article discussing British scientists trying to figure out how to turn women’s bone marrow into sperm. :O

What this means is that the last stronghold of The Fellaz is going down the tubes, and *YOU* are about to be OUT. OF. BUSINESS! :D

Once they figure this out, women will not need you for AN-NY*THING*! :D

Nothing.

This is partially what the movie “Fight Club” was about. Women do not need you to provide:

companionship = girlfriends
protection = cops
money = her job
shelter = her house
food = the grocery store
sex = Häagen-Dazs

The only thing she needs *YOU* for is your MIT-graduate genes, complete with orangeish-brown complexion and naturally curly hair, and if they figure out how to extract that from the bone marrow of some chick that has those same features…

It’s A Wrap! :(

DatingGenius

Jonny Goldstein interviewed me back in August 2007 on his show Jonny’s Par-Tay [link]. Looking at the countdown timer to the end of the show, around -18:00 he asks me “So… Did you feel a little lonely before you got into all the social media stuff?” to which my response was that I’m actually LESS social NOW than I was before…

Jonny’s response was that it CAN lead to socializing, and he mentioned an instance of an IRL event, Vloggercue, hosted by Wreck and Salvage’s Adam Quirk that he was going to attend BECAUSE of the people that he met and knew because of social media.

While I agree that it CAN… How often *DOES* social media lead to actual social inteaction, for YOU? My point was that I became less social instead of more social because of the fact that my friends are always at my fingertips. For the sake of this post, I’m defining “social” as actually going somewhere to hang out with friends of mine, IRL.

Everyone sitting at that table (Grace, Rachel, Charles, Obreahny, Sandra & Mike), I’m only *seconds* away from interacting with, via social media, wherever I am. Instant messaging, status updates, texting, email, sites, forums, groups. I did a shoot in Central Park with Obreahny and uploaded it to my server sitting out in Central Park, using the park’s wireless access. I get footage from clients overseas via FTP, talk to them on skype or iChat and send them quicktime files for approval/changes. I watched a live stream of PodCamp Philly from NYC and appeared on-screen @ PodCamp Boston while I was sitting in a living room in Maryland.

There’s no reason for me to physically go ANYWHERE unless physically interacting with that person is the reason I’m going. You can’t go snowboarding together unless you actually go snowboarding. Other than that, the current state of communications enables you to be AS in-touch with someone as you want to be. I talk to my friend @CaliNative all day, every day. We’re both MIT Graduates, but we live 3,000 miles apart from each other and never met each other IRL. Meanwhile, there are people that have given me business cards, right here in NYC, that I never spoke to again after that particular day that we met.

Social media allows you to define your enviroment. You can create and maintain relationships that transcend physical and territorial boundaries. You can hold 5 completely separate instant message conversations at a time, which is absolutely impossible on the phone. Does that make you MORE social?… or LESS social? Is “social” being re-defined by technology enabling us to envision new directions?

I also say I’m less social because my tolerance for idiocy has plummeted. :) I didn’t have a lot of that to BEGIN with, but when you get to pick and choose the people you interact with on the basis of their intelligence, common sense and relevance relative to what YOU find interesting or important, it becomes really tough to tolerate people talking about ‘nothing’, or their own agenda which has nothing to do with what you find to be valuable in life.

Anil, Mike, Justin, Debbie, Grace, Bill, Kenyatta, Eric

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

So, yes. Social media DEFINITELY leads to situations where we all get together and have a good time, IRL. I think that more often, social media allows us to FEIGN getting together, which is actually *less* social than more so.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC