Why delete my profiles, you may ask? Well, there seems to be some sort of subconscious duty to be active in any community I claim to be a part of. I feel completely delinquent just having a link in my bookmarks but never contributing. I don’t want to be a bad citizen, so I will just relinquish my citizenship.

Deleted:

• Digg. My list of “dugg” articles stands at 10. A great site, to be sure, but I’ll leave the digging up to people with more time/desire than me to sort through the loads of crap. Strangely, Digg won’t let me delete my profile… if you know how, please tell me. Googling “delete digg profile” just turns up conspiracy theories of how “Digg” deletes articles from people “they” don’t like.
• Dodgeball. It never really took off with my social circle. I would get notices from one friend, once a week, saying that he was at Zeitgeist. Plus, Twitter seems to accomplish what I was looking for from Dodgeball, without the stalker potential.
• Tribe. Sniff. So sad. It’s a very cool site… I just never had time for it. Like a plant that has died on me for lack of watering. It could even import blog posts via RSS. In the end, I just didn’t need it for anything.
• Zaadz. I was on it for 52 days and literally the only thing that ever happened was that I got invited to a cuddle party. Even the friend that invited me never friended me back. No, I didn’t go.

Not deleted, but probably doomed:

• LinkedIn. I’d be surprised if I end up ever using this site, but since I just got invited by a friend, like, last week, I’m going to give it a chance. Consider it scheduled for termination in the next round. “LinkedIn, you’re on notice.”
• MySpace. My mouse floated over the button, but like Frodo at Mount Doom I just couldn’t destroy my account. I only log-in once a month to delete fake friend invites, so it’s clearly not serving me—and in fact, doing its evil through me. Still…
• Revver. I like Revver. I like it a lot. I like it better than YouTube. But, unfortunately, it’s not YouTube. It gets a bye this round, and I really hope it takes off in between now and the next purging.

Enough death for today.

Maybe this issue hasn’t quite hit mainstream news yet, but almost every blog I read is weighing in and I’ll be damned if I don’t use my position of privilege (by which I mean “a Mac user”) to contribute on the subject as well.

The most recent uproar began when Mike Monteiro called out Carson Workshops for it’s ovewhlemingly white list of presenters. Jason Kottke poured gasoline on the fire, presenting gender percentages of various web conferences.

A backlash began from the event organizers. Eric Meyer heroically blamed the system, saying “Call that decision a manifestation of old-boy clubbiness if you want, but it isn’t.” He cites the research they did about who would attend an event with X, Y, Z speakers… lo and behold, the “A-List” was mostly men.

Trying to cite Micki Krimmel in this whole affair gives me a “circular reference” error, because back to back posts from Mickipedia praise Monteiro and critique the recent rise of the word “poser” in tech circles. Violet Blue recently got called one, Leah Culver has come out in favor of the word, and Leah and Micki both shared spots on Violet’s Sexiest Geeks of 2006 list.

I bring up the poser discussion to illustrate the vastly different understandings of what an “expert” in this industry might be. Eric Meyer knows more about floating divs than I may ever, but his site is not nearly as nice looking as Becca Wei‘s, a top designer of WordPress themes (currently, two of the five “featured” themes are hers). Is he an expert because of the books he’s had published? Because of the panels he’s spoken on? How much of his success under these criteria are tied to his race, sexuality, or gender?

Before I jump in and tear anyone claiming that 0% of presenters at a conference being women is justified a new vagina (my first instinct), I should make sure my own house is in order. Of the blogs in my feedreader with single authors (so not Boing Boing, for instance), 41% are female. Yay, me. I am not a pig.

However, a closer look reveals most of the female blogs I subscribe to are people I know, not “experts” (though exceptionally talented writers, artists, designers, and otherwise crafty people). I really have as far to go as everyone else.

This is really what it comes down to: who do we, as a community, hold up as our experts? Who’s contributions do we say have value? While it’s easy to say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but this is the way the world works”, I can only say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but that puts you squarely in part-of-the-problem and not part-of-the-solution“. How should the world work, and what can you/I/we do with the power we’re afforded as white, heterosexual males to make it that way?

Disclaimer: I bear Eric no ill-will; these are really tough, personal, and often emotionally-charged issues. His follow-up post acknowledges as much.

Just to set the stage, I’m a bit of a social networking site junkie. I belong to far too many of them, mostly for “research purposes” since I’m a web designer myself. Note the quote marks around “research purposes”, stretching them across the gamut of “interesting use of tag-based folksonomies here, I’ll make a note of that” to “dear lord, that’s what 19-year olds are wearing these days?” Luckily I don’t have enough time to spend on any one of them to do too much research.

An elite list of bookmarks.

But anyway, UselessAccount.com vs. Change.org. Here we go.

On the one hand, Useless Account offers the following features:

1. Unlimited account editing
2. Truth in advertising

It’s #2 that really sets it apart from so many other sites out there. I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that Useless Account completely lives up to the hype.

On the other hand, Change weighs in with these promises:

1. Ending Global Warming
2. Empowering Women
3. Advancing Gay Rights
4. Eliminating Borders

Honestly, the list just keeps going on and on…

Some pretty tall orders there. A little ridiculous if you ask me. I mean sure, it hooks you up directly with Non-profits working on these issues and even allows you to find and commit to actions that help these issues, but who are we kidding. It clearly can’t compete with the “Under Promise, Over Deliver” that UselessAccount has going for it.

In this day and age of information overload, there’s something reassuring about UselessAccount’s simple interface. It is 90% an advertisement for itself, with a very, very tiny “Login or Create an Account” near the top. Contrast this with the, although immaculately well-designed, “functionality” of Change.org. For example, when my colleague and paramour Sarah visited the former she immediately burst into laughter, presumably over how laughably simple to use the site was, whereas the latter filled her dread. “It really shows you how screwed up the non-profit/industrial complex is,” she sighed.

Following her lead, I have to give the win to UselessAccount. No doubt some people will find use for a social network that allows them to describe, collaborate, and ultimately bring about a visionary new world, but do we really need another site reminding us how bad everything is? I just go to MySpace for that.

While we’re on the subject of social networking sites and the whole “Web 2.0″ thing, how much of a dork am I that this video actually gets me all choked up? Seriously. Tears.

I’m not lying or even embellishing. Feel free to check out Time Magazine’s official site and see for yourself.

They cite many of my achievements over the last year. As Americans grew weary of the overproduced drivel on television they increasingly turned to sites like YouTube for entertainment and I was there with my videos from Japan. As Americans sought connection they looked for long lost friends and family on sites like MySpace and I was there, smiling back at them. As Americans rejected corporate news they turned to alternative sources, like blogs, and I was there with the Stanifesto. I haven’t even mentioned the events I’ve added to Upcoming or the links I’ve added to Del.icio.us, but I think you get the idea.

I know what you’re thinking. I wasn’t even aware that Stan was a candidate! I know, right? Honestly, I was a little surprised myself… mostly because, if I qualify for these sorts of contests, why haven’t I won any before?

This year, George Clooney was named People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for a second time. That’s right, he was chosen back in 1997 as well. Granted, People does have a blog where you can nominate men you know personally (how very 2.0 of them), but are our celebrity stocks so depleted we have to double-dip in the man candy already? That’s like nominating someone with the last name of “Bush” or “Clinton” for president ever again—kind of a big “F-U” to the other 300 million or so Americans who haven’t been tapped yet. Like me.

It’s the same thing with that other big contest, the Nobel Peace Prize. They really need to take Time’s lead and honor me with a golden dove or stick of dynamite or whatever you get when you win. I’m especially qualified as well. Take a look at the list of past winners. I’ve ordered substantially fewer people killed than either Henry Kissinger or Yasser Arafat.

I’ll be submitting my demo reel for Oscar consideration as soon as I have some time to burn a DVD.

For most, “Web 2.0″ is either a meaningless phrase or one way past its expiration date. Yet there is undeniably a meme-complex that the phrase captures.

Now I must digress to explain meme-complexes. What defines a bird? All birds fly, but not penguins or ostriches. All birds lay eggs, but so do reptiles and the duck-billed platypus. Still, one can look at a bird and see the loose connection of almost-but-not-quite signifiers and get a good idea for what a “bird” is. We call that little cloud of memes a meme-complex or, just to be clever, memeplex.

To return to the issue at hand, with “Web 2.0″ one can see the rounded corners, the subtle gradients, the extra-legible typography and get a good idea for what it looks like (and all of these design elements are present with the friendly-looking Wii). But, of course, there’s more to “Web 2.0″ than just how it looks.

According to O’Reilly, it’s about rich experiences, user-added value, and the Long Tail (and a few more things). Of course, others have other criteria. In general, most would agree that it’s about treasuring the needs and power of the user over superfluous features.

Me and my Mii

James Surowiecki (of Wisdom of Crowds fame), acknowledges that Nintendo is thriving in 3rd place and cites reasons like recognizing limitations and focusing on making fun games instead of the bigger!faster!more! that has seduced Sony and Microsoft (both their consoles and other offerings). My first reaction was, “oh, it looks like Nintendo has read Getting Real“. While Sony loses money on every PS3, in an effort to capture market share (how Web 1.0!), Nintendo’s making money making games people want to play.

Nintendo is far from a cute, little startup. Certainly. I remember the gyroscope-spinning robot from the 80s. Still, the spirit of forsaking bloat and simply delivering the goods is delightfully illustrated in both their own commercials and parody ads. Contrast this with the sterile padded cell and black monolith in the Sony ads and it’s suddenly easy to imagine Nintendo as a ragtag bunch of passionate coders that slapped this thing together in their spare time and next thing you know it’s selling like hotcakes.

There’s a lot more that Nintendo could do if they wanted to truly embrace their 2.0 nature. I’d start with making the Virtual Console handle both downloads and uploads, so amateur gamers could share their own creations (which would require Nintendo releasing at least a junior version of its SDK). Next, take all of the “Abandonware” that is now legal to pirate and Open Source it. Let the community add new levels to Bubble Bobble or new units to Herzog Zwei. Finally, why not embrace the social networking aspects of 2.0 and facilitate players meeting other players: “Stan, we’d like you to Becky. She lives near you, is single, and always plays as Princess Peach in Mario Kart. Just like you!”

1. Numbers are tangible. The primitive brain that you pretend to have evolved beyond still affects a lot of your decision-making. Marketers know this and exploit it. There is an animalistic comfort in the easiness of lists; they suggest objects to be picked up, grasped, and easily compared. Whether it’s horsepower and miles per gallon or gigahertz and megabytes, one number is obviously higher or lower than another. We can rest assured that no one is out to fool us with complex arguments, because the values of the numbers are irrefutable.
2. There is an expectation of legitimate content. With so many posts that are merely ramblings on about one’s day, how work is going, or particular political preferences, there is a suggestion that a list of specific items contains information worth arranging. A headline like “Anarchism is Awesome” could be emotional reactions from a 13-year old reading Emma Goldman for the first time is, but “7 Awesome Moments in Anarchism” presents an expectation that anarchism may actually be talked about in discrete and concrete ways.
3. Scannability. Unlike books that require “reading”, an archaic and inefficient tradition still practiced by some Luddites and most of the Midwest, on the internet we scan pages by moving our eyes very quickly near the words. All kidding aside, it’s true that we really don’t read on the web, our eye-pattern tends to look like a capital “F”. We jump from item to item, treating paragraphs as lists of ideas, not a slowly unfolding argument. In this way, lists align with our natural tendency, a recipe for success.
4. Lists are easy to remember. Moses knew this when he started calling the rules God unloaded unto him the “Ten Commandments”. His contemporary Buddha did the same, whittling life down to Four Noble Truths, an Eightfold Path, etc. Both did so in order for their followers to remember the teachings without having a Treo handy. The number of items in a list present a target of things to remember (how many food groups?) and can remind you of what you’re missing. No one gives up after 7 reindeer, because they’re obviously forgetting Blitzen. Bonus points if your list can be converted to an acronym, like HOMES for the Great Lakes or ABMNNNNNOPQSY for the Canadian Provinces and Territories.
5. What’s number five going to be? Will it be what you longingly hope or what you secretly dread? Lists are dramatic by nature. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end—just like a story. Your brain magically, and mostly subconsciously, transforms the slowly marching items into exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. As you read through the 13 horror movies, your brain is thinking, “Will ‘Jacob’s Ladder‘ be on it?” or, perusing the 10 best Mac apps, you desperately wish to resolve the question, “Has this guy heard of Quicksilver?” By the end of the list, you are rewarded. Countdowns in particular leverage this effect.

Now you see that there’s a perfectly reasonable and largely neurological reason that you like clicking on articles with titles like “the top 10 blankity-blanks” or “7 secrets about blankity-blank”. Don’t beat yourself up about it.

Here they are, ten reasons that MySpace is not all its cracked up to be:

1. MySpace doesn’t actually have over one hundred million members. Given that there are 12 Paris Hiltons, and I get tantalizing friend invites from fake profiles all the time, it’s reasonable to assume that some percentage of the 100,000,000 are not actually “real people” by any sort of rational measurement.
2. MySpace’s traffic is inflated by bad design. This summer, onlookers watched in horror as MySpace pushed past Yahoo in page views. But many contend that MySpace’s poor interface artificially inflates their page views. With good design, it’s suggested that MySpace’s traffic would drop to a third to an eighth of current levels.
3. MySpace is clogging the tubes. A typical user profile can easily be over 200k with all the unnecessary markup, banner ads, and poorly optimized JavaScript—and let’s not forget the pictures, animations, and videos your “friends” leave in the comments section. That bandwidth has to come from somewhere and ISPs charge for it in spectacularly hard-to-understand ways.
4. MySpace is not a team player. They’ve recently made the decision to handicap YouTube videos by disallowing external links from Flash widgets. Their rationale is bursting with hubris:
   

   If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.
   —Peter Chernin, NewsCorp COO

   Sure, Web 2.0 is based on MySpace; If I recall, Al Gore was the project lead.

5. MySpace is being used to spy on you. More than secret crushes and scorned ex-lovers are reading your profile trying to peer into your life. The NSA, perpetually in trouble for illegal wiretaps and the like, also monitors social networking sites in order to “connect the dots” between you and criminal activities. Blog about your friend that runs a pirate radio and you could find yourself subjected to some additional security checks the next time you fly.
6. MySpace is just a fad. Yes, we all have a crush on Danah Boyd, who has so deftly defended MySpace on many an occasion. Still, while the necessity of youth having a space for congregation will never diminish (anyone remember arcades?), even she admits that it need not always be MySpace. There’s no shame in going out looking for that next big thing already, especially if MySpace doesn’t work for you.
7. MySpace contributes to infoglut (aka information overload). We humans are generating a ridiculous amount of electronic information. Do you really need an email telling you that someone has sent you an email?
8. MySpace is a failure of humanity. The science seems pretty sound; it has numbers and everything.
9. MySpace is ruining tomorrow’s web designers. It seems like knowing anything about CSS is actually an obstacle to customizing your page in any way. All the hacks necessary to make simple changes are polluting kids brains with non-semantic, table-based web design. It took ten years to get out off those dark ages, what happens when these kids start getting jobs? Remember when all the kids who used to play with JavaScript to make their backgrounds change colors got jobs and invented AJAX?
10. Finally, my best friends aren’t even on MySpace. Seriously, I have to, like, call them. So annoying.

Feel free to suggest your own.

The desire to be loved and respected is a step on everyone’s Hierarchy of Needs and hardly unique to my own situation, but this particular manifestation began in earnest just this week. I suppose I should lay out the objectives of Project Internet Famous before I get caught up in the details: there is something amazing going down on the internet, I want to be a part of it and recognized as such. However, in the audacious spirit that the project name implies, I’m doing this (at least so far) exactly backwards. It wasn’t until well into the week that I realized maybe I should make some contribution for which to be recognized, instead of cultivating recognition strictly by use of Kato Kaelin voodoo.

Monday, I decided to go to 111 Minna for the WWDC Webloggers Party. If you don’t know much about San Francisco, 111 Minna is a hot little art gallery that is constantly hosting elite parties that combine great art, great music, geeks, and copious amounts of alcohol. Seem like the perfect situation to get in there, rub some elbows, and come out smelling like famous. Except I didn’t know a goddamn person there. I have no probably meeting new people, but without even a single in, I was overwhelmed and left.

The major tragedy of the situation was that was all set to Dodgeball that I was at 111 Minna, scoring extra cool points. Instead, I walked over to the Sony Metreon and watched Little Miss Sunshine by myself, defeated.

Tuesday, I tried again. I found a cool little coffee shop in my neighborhood complete with free wireless, an indie rock soundtrack, a cute barista with a European accent, and really good vegetarian quiche. Clearly the internet luminaries I was so trying to emulate would totally love this place. I set up the laptop, checked-in with Dodgeball, and waited for the magic to happen. My last blog post, in fact, was written at that time. Mission accomplished. I was officially “blogging at a coffeeshop”. I went home and slept the sleep of a winner.

Wednesday, it was time to get a little more ambitious. I had long read about these wonderful Creative Commons Salons. They had, a number of times, made it as far as being added to my calendar but never further. This time I was determined to go. I grabbed my friend Jenny, who had been pre-warned that the night was liable to be extra, extra dorky. Indeed, she didn’t seem to get my joke about the address (1337 Mission St.) being Leet for “Leet”. Many would consider this high praise for young Jennifer. Again, I knew no one, but started to recognize people from the last time I didn’t know anyone. Progress!

It was at this time my cohort suggested we meet up with her friends. She had been a good sport up to this point, so I indulged her. Soon we discovered ourselves watching “40 Days and 40 Nights“, drinking wine with Tantek Çelik. Big points to Jenny and her socialite friends! I won’t share any specific details about Tantek’s awesome apartment, but will mention that, as I was leaving there was much talk about how nice my hat is. Before you cloak yourself in ironic detachment about how little it matters if the creator of the Box Model Hack likes my hat or not, ask yourself this question: Does Tantek like your hat?

It was Thursday before I realized that perhaps I was going about this in the wrong way and that perhaps I should be spending my time trying to “change the game” or see “the big picture” or “move and shake” something. I think I read about how those things are happening a lot. I wrote up a quick schematic for a Web 2.0 website that would help you manage which damn Web 2.0 websites you were on and help you find friends that you had on one site on all of the other sites. It was brilliant! I was certainly cut from the same cloth as Steve Jobs, Jeffrey Zeldman, and whoever came up with Dogster.

I finished the day working on the flag I’ve been making for Consu-Camp. I’m going to Burning Man with a bunch of people from Consumating, all of whom are just the right combination of nerdy and genius to propel me to the next level of internet popularity. It’s only a matter of time.

I’ll keep you all updated on my progress “going forward”. In the meantime, feel free to suggest ways I can reach this goal in the comments section. I have also added it to my profile on 43Things.

Unfortunately, the bit of deception was noticed by a few Wall Street Journalists. The “amateur filmmaker” happened to have an email address that traced back to PR firm DCI, which is on the Exxon payroll. Just to make the conceit complete, he had even set up a MySpace account: http://myspace.com/goreiscrazy.

I’m honestly laughing aloud (LOL in the parlance of our times) at the whole thing, for two major reasons. First, the MySpace account as of this writing has 0 friends. Not even Tom thought this guy was worthy of an invite, and his “extended network” is fast approaching 100,000,000.

Also, the video, sad to say, is completely boring. Not even so bad it’s good (like those awesome ads for Carbon Dioxide produced by CEI). Here’s a sampling of the comments on YouTube:

This is sad. You’d think that a corporate sponsored video would actually be at least funny. Exxon–you need to rehire! This video sucks!

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I wouldn’t mind this oppossing view if it were funny or interesting. It’d be nice if they didn’t reference South Park, though. You know you’re sub-par when you do things like that. For example, you watch a lame movie and one character mentions Jaws. Then you start thinking, “Man, I’d really rather be watching Jaws right now.”

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$3.10 a gallon and they spend the profits on this kaka? Pity that the windfall apparently can’t buy you any “smart” or “interesting”.

In not completely unrelated news, my favorite favorite corporate shill, Steven Milloy is throwing a hissy about the State of California wanting to know if his constant doubting of climate change and his taking money from automakers and oil companies are in any way, y’know… maybe… related? I think he’s my favorite favorite because he gets pissy like this so often.

Are there documents as vital and world-changing out there today? Probably, but I would be surprised if they are immediately recognizable as such. Afterall, it was 13 years between the 95 Theses and the founding of the Lutheran Church (though Marty was condemned after only 4).

My favorite of the original 95 Theses, posted in the crisp October of 1517, would have to be good old #86:

86. Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?

And since we’re on the subject of Theseses, I might as well mention my other two favorite collections (always in flocks of 95).

The Cluetrain Manifesto (have I mentioned that I love manifestos?), was written back in 1999 and did much to foretell both the fall of the Dot Coms (clueless money-making schemes) and the subsequent rise of Web 2.0 (still largely clueless money-making schemes, but who have at least figured out the power of community). My highlight from these Theses?

57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

I’ve heard Craig Newmark describe exactly that strategy as why his list works so well.

Finally, I recently discovered the 95 Theses of Geek Activism, posted just a few days ago. It’s slightly different from these other two in that it’s, pardon the clergy-related pun, preaching to the choir. Still, whereas the others are meant to stir up conflict in hopes that a good resolution will come of it, these Theses actually provide some good advice on how to make change. The most confrontational:

73. We do not lock the door to our bedrooms or bathrooms because we have something to hide. We do not secure our networks, conversations, emails and files because we have something to hide.

This statement made me really think about why I do lock my bedroom door and how the media commonly casts privacy and security as mutually exclusive enemies—which is a lot more provocative and engaging than what I was thinking about before that. Something like, “Wow. Martin Luther looks a lot like Vincent D’Onofrio.”