As I mentioned in a previous post, hopefully by the end of next week I’ll be announcing my new employer (once the paperwork is all done). I just want to say that this couldn’t have come at a better time because I’ve been unemployed. While I have been doing some web work in the past here and there, as well as some part-time work, that side work ended a few months ago. More than anything I’ve been vigilant in continuing my research on my weblog (hehe, when it’s been online) in the hopes of attracting a possible employer through my ideas and sure enough it finally has happened (even though I was getting frustrated over the past couple of weeks).
Why this is an even more opportune time is that my wife is a teacher and, as anyone knows in BC, she’s been on strike for the past couple of weeks. Therefore, I’ve finally got the opportunity to start contributing financially again to our relationship. It is definitely a good feeling.
I was watching this anime music video as well as another one and for some reason the music and tone sparked something inside of me. Something’s missing from my online experience. What I’m not exactly sure. For some reason I think it has to do with the different spaces and environments that we have within the real world but that you don’t often see online, especially now with the proliferation of blogs. What am I talking about? Privacy, intimacy, and solitude.
On our blogs we broadcast to the entire world. There is nothing wrong with this but we can’t be “jacked in” 24/7. We need to “unplug” so we can focus on the meaningful people and relationships around us, and even seek solitude from everyone on occasion to reflect on our own thoughts. That’s what I feel like is missing. I don’t have these different spaces online to do this.
Yes I can totally unplug, get away from the computer, be with my wife and pets, or even go for a walk to reflect on my own thoughts. Yet when I’m online, I can’t jump from those different spaces and environments because on a blog it is like having your front door open with anyone able to walk into your house. Well, what if I want a “back room” just for friends only? Even more so, what if I want a “small room” where I can just be alone with my thoughts and reflect on them.
Another reason I want these spaces is so not only can I remove the “mask” from my face but I also can give others that I invite into these private and intimate spaces the opportunity to remove their “mask” as well. What am I talking about when I say a “mask”? Keith said it best in his post When I Make Something. Later in the comments I asked him the question, “Don’t you wish you could just be yourself on your blog without having to think about all of this stuff?” “Yes”, he replied.
I think its time to start working on these spaces, so that I can have intimate and personal spaces of my own where I can just let go, drift, and be myself.
Well I’ve decided to take the job offer that was offered to me because it sounded way too good of a working arrangement to pass up! Hopefully by the end of next week, I’ll be able to announce my cool new employer (after all the paperwork is done and so forth).
I’m a little bit confused as to why Nicholas Carr sounds so fearful and afraid of the future of the Web in his article entitled The Amorality of Web 2.0. I mean a lot of what he speaks about I totally agree with but I’m not sure why he’s making it sound like these changes are bad. Let me explain what I mean.
The Internet is changing the economics of creative work – or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture – and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices.
Hooray, someone finally agrees with me and says the ‘C’ word! Culture is what the Internet and the Web are changing here, right now, at this very moment. The more that people are online and immersed in these environments, the more they will be influenced by its culture and expect the offline world to have this same culture.
Expand our choices? You mean you want more than 50 different types of shampoos to choose from? That not enough for you? Or more than god knows how many different job search sites are out there right now? Uh, no thank you. We don’t need more choices, we need simpler technologies that enable everyone to connect and collaborate directly in new and innovative ways so that these myriad of “choices”, as he calls them, disappear to be replaced by us communicating with each other on our own blogs, so that I can find the job that’s right for me on someone else’s site with just a simple decentralized search instead of having to navigate through a confusing maze of centralized sites. And in doing so, in losing these “choices” of job search engines to go to, I can finally break free and connect with everyone instead of just a select group of people who may be on that centralized site or service. Now given the choice, which route would you rather take?
Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we’ve recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can’t imagine anything more frightening.
Um, boohoo. Who was crying for all of these communities that couldn’t support themselves and eventually died while the corporate sites thrived during the dot com craze period. No one cared for these communities who were trying to survive, most especially the corporate companies themselves who these communities continually supported by drawing attention to their products or services. If these communities had received funding for their support equaling what these companies paid other businesses for a cost per click ad campaign they could have survived no problem. Did the companies decide to help support these communities in any way in gratitude for their ongoing selfless support? No, of course not. Why give money to someone when they are already giving you support for free? Why? It’s easy. It’s called sustainability. If you benefit from others, give back to the community around you so that you can continue to benefit from their support. I mentioned this years ago but most corporate executives just laughed when hearing this. “What? Support them? Whatever for? We don’t really need their support anyways. Its just a pittance anyway!” Ya, laugh it up monkey boy! Stop looking at each little site as a pittance and instead look at the collective communities of sites as a network supporting you. Your time will come for your petty arrogance and sure enough the Reaper is here.
In “We Are the Web,” Kelly writes that “because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture.” I hope he’s wrong, but I fear he’s right – or will come to be right.
When do you normally feel fear? Do you feel it when you are comfy and safe? Or do you feel it when you are doing something radically different than everyone else and taking a risk that no one else wants to take? Yes, we fear the unknown but we also crave it as well. What lies beyond the horizon? There be dragons that way!
As for culture, yes he’s right but it’s “worse” than he thinks. You see culture is the answer. This new culture, or this change of thinking, is what we need to embrace, albeit fearfully as with all new things, to go into the future and bring it into the present. This new culture is the DNA formula or idea virus that we need to start using now, and injecting within all of us, especially if we want to change the world.
Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It’s a set of technologies – a machine, not a Machine – that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn’t care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn’t care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn’t care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn’t care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let’s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.
Why does he make it sound like being amoral is a bad thing? Nature is amoral. It cares not if it is moral or immoral. Instead it just focuses on surviving. Yet what does nature see that so many of us do not. Again, the importance of sustainability, of not only itself but for those around it. You don’t see lions going off on a rampage and slaughtering every bit of prey they can find and consuming it all in a gorgefest all at once. They know, without even having to think about it, that their survival depends upon living as an integral element within an ecosystem. Because if they don’t ensure the survivability of their prey within the ecosystem, they themselves will have a much lower chance of survival. Therefore sustainability for everything in the ecosystem is essential for everything within it to survive. I mean do you honestly think nature is run by some big centralized hidden factory underground or something? No, instead it is run by a collective effort of all things upon the earth that are interdependent upon one another for the survival and ongoing sustainability of the entire ecosystem.
But the most important reason of all why the Web being amoral is not a bad thing is because it allows us to choose our own morality within it. We are the missing ingredient, the catalyst of this DNA formula or virus. Technology is not our salvation, we are our own salvation. We ourselves can “cultivate” this technology and make it work similar to our own new culture which is already in turn influencing us. If you’re an avid reader of news online, you have already probably heard these cultural values being spoken. Just look for words like “open”, “honest”, trusting”, and “transparent”. I don’t know about you but I’m seeing them used more and more every day.
In closing, I just want to repeat what I believe this new cultural DNA formula or virus looks like (from a future company’s standpoint), as I’ve already mentioned it before in my post entitled I Work For The Web. I’m not sure if I’ve got all of the right component elements perfectly but, as for right now, it just seems like a good fit for me.
I work for a daring, imaginative, adventurous, sharing, caring, diverse, open, trusting, honest, flexible, responsible, and connected company.
Whoa, my heads still spinning! I just got a job offer from out of an unexpected, but pleasantly surprising, direction (which means, yes, nothing to do with the jobs I applied for). I’ll hopefully have more details on this later tomorrow, as to where I decide to go with this. As of right now though, it is looking pretty good and it feels pretty good.
I said before that the future is about a change of thinking and I want to elaborate on this a bit. Imagine you were a pygmy warrior in the jungles of Africa and you had never seen an airplane before in your life. Let’s say I was an explorer who was camping nearby and I had been talking to you about an airplane that would be coming soon to drop off supplies for me. How do you think I could describe what an airplane is to you and do you think you could understand what I was talking about? Even more so, do you think you could even understand what you were seeing when the airplane, a float plane, did show up and landed on the river next to you?
Now let’s take this a step further. Let’s say one day you start hearing strange garbled voices in your head. You start getting worried because you think you might be going insane. However, eventually you start figuring out what the voices are saying and you realize it is someone repeatedly letting you know that they will be arriving on a certain date from the future. They are just letting you know ahead of time so that you don’t freak out when they show up. So on the date they mentioned, boom they materialize out of thin air in front of you. Now with everything I just described here, could you even begin to comprehend how these future travellers did this? No, probably not. Even if they sat down and started telling you about their technology, you would probably still be confused.
“A fracklersphere? What’s the hell is a frackersphere?” “It is just a simple device that warps space time on a perpendicular but rotational axis with the inverse of large gravitational bodies. “Huh?”
You see where I’m going with this? We probably wouldn’t have a clue as to what someone from the future is talking about because we haven’t started thinking differently like they have and are aware of the new possibilities that lay before us. Therefore, if you want to start comprehending the future and changing the present you have to start thinking differently. That’s why I keep saying the future and Web 2.0 aren’t so much about a change of technology as a change of thinking. And I’m not just talking about a mild change of thinking, I’m talking about a radical one. Imagine how you live and work today, totally transformed. Think of a massive paradigm shift and you’re headed in the right direction.
Or maybe think like George Costanza and ask yourself what am I going to do the exact opposite today?
“My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”
Ecosystem: a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their physical environment.
It is an environment with which we as organisms live and interact within on a daily basis. While not a physical environment, it definitely influences and affects our physical world, just as our physical world influences and affects it.
Environment: The complex of social and cultural conditions affecting the nature of an individual or community.
It is comprised of the social and cultural conditions that affect us.
Condition: A mode or state of being.
It is our state of being as a people, here and now today (although I’d say primarily from the viewpoint of those within the rich countries of the world).
State: A condition or mode of being, as with regard to circumstances: a state of confusion.
Quality: An inherent or distinguishing characteristic; a property.
And when it comes down to it, like so many other things in our life, we must make a choice between an existence of just being or a distinguishing existence.
Choice: The act of choosing; selection.
Distinguishing: To perceive as being different or distinct.
The Web is what we choose to make it, just as we ourselves, as a people on this planet, are what we choose to be. With every choice though comes consequences and responsibilties. Are we ready and willing to accept them? Or do we feel that our existence is not what we wish it to be and do we desire to choose another different one? The choice is yours. Be what you wish to be, what you wish the Web to be, and what you wish the world to be in every choice you make every day.
Well I just had a great phone conversation with someone at Blast Radius about my resume, as I was recommended to give them a call through a friend of a friend. The conversation brought about some good news and bad news. The good news is that I definitely feel this person has clarified the steps I need to take in improving my resume. The bad news is that I think it is going to very difficult for me to do this. Why? Because as I already guessed, showing your portfolio of accomplishments is critical, especially if you can show how your work directly profited the company and by how much (i.e. I built Site A and it attracted this many visitors and profited the company by this much).
As I mentioned to this person, I didn’t have access to that information at the time. Maybe companies today give out that kind of information to all their staff but it wasn’t something that we thought about back then. I mean if the site launch went smoothly and the client and, more importantly, client’s customers were verbally happy about the site then we felt that we did a great job. Hell we were often to focused on doing a good job and improving our process than slapping each other on the back with site statistics afterwards.
Another thing that this person spoke of was tangibles vs intangibles. Tangibles are your accomplishments that you can obviously show, where as intangibles are things on the side that still may help the company but aren’t tied to a specific job title. For example, he described a type of person called a “connector” who is like a focal point in the company that people come to for advice or information. As soon as he said that, I realized that’s what I was. However, he indicated that intangibles were like the icing on the cake. They make a great person even more desirable, yet they can’t obviously stand on their own, as you need the tangibles as the foundation.
One thing that troubled me though is he said that you have to prove how you helped and improved the company. I got somewhat flustered by this. Why? Well, as anyone who worked during the dot com bomb period knew, most of these companies went down the tubes. So I’m thinking in my head, how the hell do I prove I helped and improved the company, when the management’s direction may have doomed it? I mean I did a great job for the company. They always told me that. Yet how do I prove that if the company consistently went downhill with sales, especially near the end. In the beginning we rose from doing just one job to multiple large projects but this person kept telling me that I needed specifics to prove how I helped the companies overall sales figures or something like that. Um, as I said before, I know very few companies who freely hand out their financial information to their employees.
Interesting indeed! Just found another job posting for a Senior User Experience Designer by a company in town called Peerflix. Why I was so interested in this job posting was because of their adjectives describing the position title. They said they were looking for an “entrepreneurial, multi-talented” Sr. User Experience Designer. Well multi-talented is my middle name! Also after reading the company details and finding out that they had a blog as well, I found this post by Danny Robinson, the company co-founder, entitled Decentralization is now which peaked my interest in them even more. Danny’s thoughts in his post echo similar thoughts of my own, particularly the importance of a decentralized approach vs a centralized one and also the importance of RSS in connecting everything together in this new Web future. Once again, let’s hope my thoughts, experience, and skills peak their interest as well! I’m crossing my fingers, toes, and eyes again, so hopefully I’ll get a call soon because I’m finding it hard to type, walk, and see. 🙂
Ok, it’s away! I just sent my cover letter and resume off to Social Signal and I’m now crossing my fingers, toes, and eyes! Below is my cover letter (and I’ll put my resume online again soon as well). Hopefully it peaks their interest and does the trick in landing me the job (or least an interview to talk to them).
BTW I ended up not using my revised accomplishments that I was working on because I really wanted to get this out the door to them. I will still be working on this accomplishments list in the future though because I think it will give my resume much more of an impact in terms of my experience and abilities.
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Rob & Alexandra,
When I noticed your job posting on Craigslist for a progressive geek / office administrator and then proceeded to your company website to read about your company, I nearly fell out of my chair. Your description of “collaborative communities” sounded exactly like my research on what I call “connected communities”. As your job posting indicates, I felt this could be my dream job, as I’ve been looking for a job like this that will not only utilize my diverse set of skills and experience but more importantly match my personal culture and ethics of working for a company that is trying to change the world and make it a better place. I believe that Social Signals is exactly the type of company I’ve been looking for and both of you are exactly the type of caring conscious people for whom I’d love to work.
As for my knowledge and experience, I actually have done a lot of government work in the past (more even than my résumé shows) but over the past ten years I’ve actually done more work related to online community building within the computer gaming scene, both professionally for large companies as well as voluntarily for the gaming fan communities that surround these company’s products. It is within these communities, however, that I discovered the importance of culture which pushed my interests outside of just the computer gaming scene to look at cultures elsewhere, with the World Wide Web being one cultural environment of particular interest to me. More recently, events like the Hurricane Katrina disaster have been a catalyst for my emotions and feelings in wanting to do something that actually helps the world in collaborating and communicating more effectively together on a larger scale. Immediately after the hurricane, the Recovery 2.0 project ( http://www.recovery2.com/ ), initiated by Jeff Jarvis, interested me the most. However, the more I researched ways for people to collaborate together on a larger scale using blogs, tags, and RSS, the more I realized this idea could be used for any type of large scale project, not just for disaster relief.
Also, the more I researched this, the more I wanted to collaborate and work with others within a company toward this goal. I know this is going make this cover letter lengthy but I just want to make you fully aware of what an amazing coincidence your company announcement has been to me as at the beginning of September I posted the following message on Craigslist’s job area for Vancouver. And as you’ll see below, I think your company’s goals match quite closely with what I was looking for in a company.
> Are You A Caring And Creative Tech Company? > >Do you know of a caring and creative tech company or organization >located in Vancouver, BC who is working on a Web 2.0 social software >application to allow millions of people around the world to collaborate >and share information more effectively? If so please let me know. I’m >feeling fed up and frustrated by the Katrina Disaster and would like >to work with a group of people who are working on ideas and technology >of this nature to help make the world a better place.
And finally with regards to my actual skills and abilities, in relation to your job description, my background has allowed me to perform, in one way or another, most of what you are looking for in a person to fulfill this role. Most of my knowledge over the years has primarily been self-taught due to my ongoing ethusiasm for research and exploration of new ideas and technologies. I am also what you would call an extremely proactive individual in that I believe in solving problems before they happen. Working within a team environment, I strongly believe in being well organized and detailed so that any work performed by one person within the team environment can easily be passed onto another person to continue the work process. As for a wide range of responsibilities, I assisted with pretty much every aspect of operations within the last company I worked for (i.e. web development, computer support, proposal writing / reviews, process & standards definition / documentation, technology / software research, branding / identity, business advice, and more), primarily because it was a startup and the environment permitted me to help out wherever I could.
If you would like to find out more about me, definitely check out my blog at http://nollind.whachell.com with particular interest on my Notable Entries listing within my right sidebar column. I hope both of you will be just as amazed as I was at how close our goals and visions are for a better world.
And finally, while I can only put so much within this cover letter and résumé, I would love the opportunity to meet and talk to both of you in person, so that I can relay more about myself and my stories that directly relate to this job and your company’s goals.
PS. Web 2.0 Definition: Web 2.0 is more about a change of thinking than about a change of technology. It is about taking existing technological tools and rethinking their usage to allow us to do things in amazing new ways.