Last night, I drove up to Denver to catch The B-52s at the Ogden Theatre.  It was a delicious night – driving past snowy fields for an hour in the dark with no traffic is a pretty sweet ride; the drive went by fast, ending with fireworks shooting off of Mile High Stadium when the Broncos won their game as I pulled off onto Colfax.

I last saw the B-52s somewhere in the 90s; they are a high energy band, a party band for sure, and last night was no exception.  If you haven’t seen them live ever, then the next best experience is their With the Wild Crowd album, released this year and recorded in Athens on the 34th anniversary of their first-ever concert on Valentine’s Day 1977.  I got hooked on this band back in the early 80s when Rock Lobster came on my radar.  That was truly nothing like anything else bring recorded (and really, there still isn’t anything like them out there).

It was a party!  And the Ogden is still one of my top favorite venues in Colorado. The crowd was a fabulous mix of women in beehives, lots of queers, and a ton of young kids – the place was packed. Fred, Kate and Cindy are the ultimate in vibrant showmanship and Keith Strickland is cool and suave on the guitar. Their touring bassist, Tracy Wormworth, is absolutely hot (yes, that’s a little crush you hear).

Rather than gush throughout this post, here’s a video of Roam:

Sauna opened the concert. They are a quartet of 17-year old high school students! And they absolutely rocked the house and were the perfect opening act for the B-52s. The drummer’s, Samantha, mom and grandma were standing next to me at the show and called them ‘raucous’ when asked what their sound was like. As soon as their guitarist, CJ, laid into his first riff I registered Surf Punk and enjoyed the set as much as any I’d ever seen back in the LA haze of the 80s and punk music. CJ lost his E string (the low one) on the second to last number, completely non-fazed by it. I was told they were all going off to college next year, but hope to catch them at some dive before they split up.

Here they are doing Beachball:

Here’s the latest example from KRDO, the local ABC affiliate.  They have a .biz site for… well, lots of advertising, krdo.biz, which is distinct but linked from their main site, krdo.com.

Here is the main KRDO site header.  Clean, tasteful, simple, good navigation.  Every menu item goes into the main site; the last takes you off to their advertising spawn site, krdo.biz.

Here is the krdo.biz header (with my ugly markup):

The rest of the page is the same as the Directory menu item (circled in green), since the point of this site is to be a directory (circa 1999) of useful services in town.  The Coupons, Classifieds, Movies, Events & Contact all link to the .biz domain.  The menu items circled in yellow, News | Weather | Radio, take you back to the .com site, as does the button top left.  The big graphic top right that says “the Springs first.com”?  Yea, that takes you to krdo.biz.  Typing thespringsfirst.com into your address bar redirects you back to krdo.biz.  I guess they have so many domains, they can’t keep track of everything they need to update when they make a change.

So, I’m baffled as to why all of this couldn’t be wrapped up within their main domain, either as a subdirectory or subdomain, but it gets… worse.

Those three badges my red arrows point to in the middle of this messy header?  The ones labeled “In the Springs”, “In Pueblo” and “In Teller County”? they each go off to different domains:

• inthesprings.co
• inpueblo.co
• inteller.co

Plus, clicking any of those city directory badges opens a new window in your browser.

Again, these are all directory sites, so you get a list of various types of services on these pages. How does the mother of all directories, the yellow pages, handle this?  They use web directories, not new domains.  So, stuff you want to look up in Colorado Springs is found under http://www.yellowpages.com/colorado-springs-co/ whereas stuff you look up in Pueblo is found under http://www.yellowpages.com/pueblo-co 

That makes sense right?  Whatever KRDO doing does not, to me, as a user, make sense.  If any SEO or marketing specialists care to enlighten me as to why having multiple domains for this info makes any sense, please, drive the clue bus to my door.

Another local site infected by multiple domainitis is our new Mayor’s dual sites.  He’s got one hanging off the official city government website at springsgov.com/Page.aspx?NavID=4077 but he also has his own website at bachsoffice.com. Yesterday, it was announced on twitter that the mayor now has a news site at mayorstevebach.com. Yes, all that second domain does is provide a page for… his RSS and email subscribe links! There are also posts for various news releases, such as this one about Bach announcing new solutions teams. This content is duplicated on his first site.  So, if this content is already available on his main site, why does he need a second site?

As of this writing, neither of these sites are showing up as top search results on Google for Mayor Steve Bach, so clearly there is a failure to grok SEO somewhere in the mayor’s office, but thankfully the first search result is for the local government site.

Again, this just seems like a waste of time to me, a waste of resources, and the work of people who really don’t understand having an internet presence or brand.

The award for local entity with the most domain names goes to the local daily newspaper, the Gazette.

• gazette.com – main news site
• dreamcity2020.org – something about our region in 2020
• coloradosprings.com – they win for securing this domain, general city info, including calendar
• gazettepreps.com – for local varsity sports coverage
• pikespeakparent.com – geared toward local parents
• csfreshink.com – where locals can write their own news stories
• outtherecolorado.com – like coloradosprings.com, but for outdoorsy stuff
• springsmilitarylife.com – geared toward the military folks here
• freedompolitics.com – their parent company’s editorial site.  In case you doubted that news has a bias.

Whew.  I mean, I guess a case can be made for all these sites for the single daily paper we have here, but it sure gets confusing when headlines are linked from one site to the next.  I think it dilutes their brand, too; I didn’t even realize that some of these were owned by the Gazette for several months.  Don’t get me started on the Gazette’s use of digital media. That’s a rant for another day (and yes, I still love you, Paul).

Jocelyn, Santa Barbara, 1985

This photo was either taken on your birthday or shortly thereafter – it was another Santa Barbara day in December and something like 70 degrees.  We took the Pentax K1000 all over town and photographed each other in rose bushes, beside trees, under the wharf on the beach. We had just bought the VW van and were still planning our escape back up to the Bay Area.

It was at the start of it all, and so long ago in 1985, the year we met. We were just babies in our early 20s. All I knew was Los Angeles and punk rock and Catholic school.  You were, to me, this beacon of possibility, expanding my musical horizons, teaching me how to drive a stick shift, showing me that yes, vegetables are tasty and can make a complete meal.

We hadn’t even become anything that we were to be.  You were a baker; not a produce buyer, not a pizza dough thrower, let alone a radio DJ & station manager. I was a drop out, still programming silly things like the TI99/4A as a hobby and interning at a North Hollywood recording studio (“Obsession” by Animotion, anyone?), not yet a truck driver, nor a produce manager, nor a network ops geek, let alone a grad student. Most of the people outside of our families who would be so important to our lives we had not even met yet. Colorado? Not even in any plan, whatsoever.

…

I was walking around Old Colorado City tonight checking out the local art scene and having some Christmas cheer with the artists.  One exceptional photographer asked what brought me out to Colorado.  The story of your death ran through my mind and I dismissed it to give my usual cover story about living the good life.  It wasn’t until I was walking home and looked up at the moon that I realized: it’s your birthday.

That is, if you still get to have birthdays. And 26 years flashed by me, lickety split. Cheers, babycakes, 51 years since you came into this world. Almost 10 now, since you’ve gone. And I’m still fishing for fallen light with patience.

Today was a picture perfect day (and I’ll have photos later today to post).  I went on a train chase.  I went on a fucking exhilarating train chase.  Screw the projects on my desk, there is a steam locomotive in town, the UP844, visiting on its circuitous path around the southwest to show off its historic, sleek black self.  The train was set to pull out of the ‘station’ at 8am (the depot is now an Italian restaurant).

The train pulled forward and backed up and blew a whole lot of steam into the air and kept us waiting for about an hour. I ran into my neighbor – small town.  Meanwhile, a little old lady (and she was little and about 80) came teetering over while her son and great-grandson went frolicking off to find the perfect photo perch.  She was so sweet in her little housecoat and shawl and house slippers and frail freckled skin.  She was all smiles and chatty, so I learned about her life as a child in La Veta, a little old mining town south of here, her pioneer history, her relocation to Orange County, California, during World War II and her recent trip to Alaska.  My God, she was the sweetest thing ever, and made me wistfully wish I had a grandma like her to recall from my youth.

Then she nearly fainted in front of me.  Maybe she was too cold (since none of thought we’d be standing out there for an hour) or maybe she hadn’t eaten or maybe, well, she’s old, hell, I dunno.  But she grabbed onto my arm on the way down and said, “Oh, honey, I feel faint, dear, can you get me to that platform so that I can sit down?”  So, I walked her over to the flatbed rail car that was the closest thing to a place to sit that I could find and enlisted the help of a guy that looked like a roughneck to help her up there (a roughneck is a blue-collar laborer, for you city-bound hipsters).  He gave her his water.  I gave her a lot of calming words.  When the train blew its horn, she said, “Now you go leave me be and take your photos, I’m OK now that I’m sitting here.”

The train blew more steam and pulled away past the coal power plant and away from America’s mountain, headed for Pueblo and then on to Oklahoma. Where the wind blows.  I snapped away at the engine and the steam and Pikes Peak and the tracks and all that good stuff. A trainman onboard waved and shouted a hearty “Thank you Colorado Springs” to us.

By then, her son and grandson walked back, laughing at her sitting up on the old flatbed.  We hoisted her down and spirited her off to their truck; he said, “You coming down to Fountain to shoot more of the train?”  Welll…. OK. I am still half dressed in my flannel PJs, having just thrown on jeans and a down vest to get out of the house, but sure.  Why not.

I jumped in my truck and pulled out onto the Interstate and floored it.  I knew a good train crossing south of Fountain and had no idea where the train was by now.  I saw it, spewing steam and looking so fine, so perfectly Americana fine with her yellow cars, chugging down the tracks.  We have no passenger rail service south of Denver, so the lucky few riding in that one car with the bubble roof were very, very lucky to be on this leg of their trip.  I went careening down the road, got to my exit, pulled into the usually empty dirt lot next to a corn field and found…. most of the people I’d just left behind downtown.  It was a party of old men, most of them who recounted all manner of train stories from their years and travels.  Listening to them beat out any documentary I’ve seen this year.  The old lady and her son and grandson were there, too; she stayed in the cab, though.  He thanked me for my kindness toward his mom.

Then, here she comes!  Woo Woo!  OMG, I was standing about 7 feet from the tracks  - close enough to feel an intense exhilaration, a rush, as she passed.  My camera wasn’t set properly and hunted for a focus, blowing that close-up. As soon as she sailed through, people ran for their cars.  Chase it further south?  Wellll…. ok.  Sure. Go!

I dashed up the onramp and there was traffic like Fort Carson rarely sees.  We were racing that train down the front range; there it is!  Whoa! Traffic jam – we went from 75 MPH to 10 in a blink.  People were wildly careening off to the median and shoulder to jump out and get a photo of that beauty with the plains behind her.  I veered around them all and rocketed on to the next dirt road train crossing, no guards, just lights, crossing that I knew of out her in ranch land.  I spooked a bewildered antelope.  Jumped out of the truck just in time for a fleeting shot, there she goes!  Back on the Interstate.

I sailed up a few more exits and found a great crossing, dirt road, cows, rusted farm equipment and No Trespassing signs… and, of course, the downtown posse and the old lady and her son and grandson.  I kneeled down again 7 feet from the tracks, put the camera in continuous mode and down the line she came.   That roar as she pushed past us, lasting not even a millisecond, was astounding.  I was getting addicted.  An old man told me he chased one of these across 3 states one year. Had I brought the dog with me, I would have done it, I know it.  Another guy commented on how quiet the UP 844 was.  It is quiet.  Everyone concurred, before computers, they really built shit well. We laughed.  I said goodbye to the son and grandson and old lady, who were next off to Pueblo, where the train would stop for a bit. I stood and looked at the Spanish Peaks and thought,

“Wow.  I love this.”

In the simplest of unplanned actions, I smiled more than I have today in a long time.

I then laughed trying to imagine myself chasing anything from SF down to San Jose along 101, 280 or 880.

(and yes, train photos soon).

Accompl.sh – An internet hit list of stuff you’ve always been meaning to get done but never quite get around to doing.  Not just a to-do list (although why not use it that way?) but more of a “what do I want to accomplish this year?” type of thing.  Has a nice social networking component, which is starting to richly grow with the advent of Challenges (a group way to get stuff done). Jenn (the dev) is also responsive and posts informative blog pieces about the work she does on the site.  Highest props for this bootstrapped web app.

750words.com – an online writing tool which challenges you to write 750 words a day, every day, based on a tip in the Artist’s Way.  It’s gamified, you get badges for writing, which surprisingly motivates me to keep going.  I can see that going the other way, too, for some writers, but for me, this is working much better than keeping a journal by my desk. Right now, I’m using it to write a novel.  Who would have thought I would have gotten around to writing a novel finally?

Instapaper – found a long read that you don’t have time for now but want to read later?  Instapaper.  Yes, Safari can do this too in iOS5, but Instapaper still works better.  Marco (the dev) is also a great read on many internet topics.

Pinboard – Like Delicious once was but moar better.  Saves bookmarks online with tagging. For some bucks, archives that content, too, so that when decay happens, you’ve still got the content.

Zite – a personalized news reader for the iPad. It uses an algorithm and my social network to present stories of interest to me.  It’s cut down on my online distraction factor because the algorithm usually gets it right and at the end of the day, I can get caught up with what’s happening.  Flipboard is similar, but Zite gives me more interesting reads with less effort, although Flipboard brings you your Twitter and Facebook feeds, so there’s that if it’s important to ya.

Gowalla – Location services – find places to go, let others know about places you’ve been. Honestly? I enjoyed this much more before their recent revamp which tossed out ‘items’ (virtual things you could pick up at a location you’ve checked into, like a coffee cup, raccoon or pennant) and bagged check-ins for stories. Essentially, you post a story instead of checking into a location and Gowalla pulls content to create city guides.  The city guides are very cool if you’re traveling.  I’m still waiting to see about this, but since it can also post to Foursquare, I’m covered.

Localmind – Uses the check-ins you make on Gowalla, Foursquare, or facebook to provide a QA platform, not unlike Aardvark.  I imagine this app works best in a places San Francisco or New York, full of early adopters and enough people to make asking and answering questions an immediate thing.  When I first loaded up Localmind months ago, there was exactly nothing happening nearby.  I fired it up again recently and was thrilled to find people asking/answering away.  Then my phone buzzed and someone nearby asked where to find coffee in the ‘hood.  I was even happier to recommend my new fave local cafe and they thanked me.  Cool.

This was just a quickie post to get something out there today, then I’ll be migrating this blog once again to elsewhere; self-hosted WP spam and administration sucks and I’m not dealing with it anymore. :/

CSIndy is one of the few remaining locally owned independent weekly newspapers left in the US.  It serves the greater Colorado Springs area.  Its publisher, John Weiss, is a true character.  It provides a nice counter to The Gazette, a daily newspaper owned by the national and right-wing Freedom Communications, by providing investigative articles on local politics and progressive opinion pieces.

To set the stage for this argument,Colorado Springs is the town that brought you Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a book examining the influences of America’s fast food society.  To drive up and down Academy Boulevard here, a street that stretches across the eastern side of our city in an arc, is to encounter just about every national food chain that exists. We are saturated with national chains (with the exception of In & Out, and yes, I do lament that fact).  They are not only well represented here but on the eastern side of town they are just about your only choices for dining out.  In short: we know them well because they are ubiquitous.

What we do not know well in this town, seen in light of the results of the 2011 Best Of survey, are the local dining options.  What needs to be promoted in this town (I use ‘town’ facetiously, we have 600,000 people in the county) are the locally owned businesses.  These are the gems of Colorado Springs, built and supplied with local money and sundries; these are the dining experiences you can *only* get here, under the shadow of America’s mountain.  These local establishments represent our best and should be the only thing rewarded in an annual survey  published by a local paper of where to eat.

To illustrate using the most egregious example, coming in 1st in Burgers is…. Red Robin.  Yes, Red Robin, with 3 happy locations to serve you in town and 100s elsewhere.  The lure of national chains is not arguable: they are consistent, they are everywhere, they are convenient in the sense that they tend to be on large avenues, near strip malls and with ample parking.  If I am all the way out on Powers (we’re getting closer to Kansas on this long boulevard that rings the city), I am probably going to go to Red Robin if I want to sit down and eat a good burger.  And that burger will be the same burger I can get at any other Red Robin coast to coast.  If that burger represents the Best Of Colorado Springs, then we have given up on our town. Forget about you, Cy’s Drive-In, with your local callicrate beef, never frozen and sans hormones. Screw you, The Famous, with your elegant downtown red booths and giant, tasty cheeseburgers.  The Keg?  Take your buffalo burgers elsewhere, we don’t want them – that’s what we’re saying when we vote Red Robin as the Best of the Springs for burgers.

This town is fortunate to have some true geniuses cooking up food in local eateries. Let’s reward them and only them.  To be fair, most of the Best of 2011 categories were actually won by local businesses (whew), but it is truly a slap in the face to our entrepreneurs and chefs to report that any national chain is the best this community can do when it comes to eating out.  It’s simply not true and if I have to go on a dining spree for the next 6 months and reports all my finds to demonstrate this, I will, but do start with Oinkety, a local foodie blog, while you wait for me.

There’s another reason to reward locals and to ignore the chains: locals are great for our economy.  Many studies have shown that locally owned businesses put more money back into the local economy than national chains do.

In Economic Impact Analysis: A Case Study Local Merchants vs Chain Retailers (pdf), a study conducted in Austin, TX, shows that local retailers

1. spent a larger portion of total revenues on local labor than national chains
2. keep their modest profits in the local economy
3. provide strong support for local artists and authors, creating further local economic impact

The Economic Impact of Locally Owned Business vs Chains: A Study in Midcoast Maine (PDF) finds that

When residents… spent $100 at a big box retailer, their purchase generates $14 in local spending by the retailer. That same $100 spent at a locally owned business generates $45 in local spending, or 3 times as much.

In Locally Owned vs. Chain: The Local Premium PDF, a study conducted in Chicago, IL, shows nearly the same results and cites 4 factors as contributing: the same 2 as the Austin study (payroll, profits) and additionally that local business are twice as likely to procure locally as national chains and donated more on average to local charity than national chains.  A study conducted in New Orleans, Thinking Outside the Box (PDF),reports that local businesses generate two to three times more local economic activity than chain businesses.

Fleming and Goetz argue in the academic paper, Does Local Firm Ownership Matter?, using a data set encompassing all US counties, that those counties with a larger density of small, locally owned businesses saw greater per capita income growth whereas the presence of large, non-local businesses had a negative effect on incomes.

So, yes, our local independent paper ought to be encouraging that residents of our little cow town of half a million people on the front range reward local by asking them to only vote local.  It’s more representative of what makes the Pikes Peak region unique for foodies but it’s also good for our stagnant economy.

Here are the chains that won (outside of specified ‘national’ categories):

• American: BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse (3rd)
• BBQ: Rudy’s Country Store and Bar-B-Q
• Biscuits & Gravy: Cracker Barrel
• Bread: PaneraBread
• Buffalo Wings: Buffalo Wild Wings, Wingstop, Wild Wings and Things*
• Buffet: Golden Corral, Old Country Buffet (3rd)
• Burger: Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Five Guys Burgers & Fries, Smashburger
• Chinese: P.F. Changs
• Dessert Destination: The Melting Pot (3rd)
• Diner: Gunter Toody’s*
• Restaurant for Kids that Isn’t fast Food: Red Robin Gourmet Burgers
• Seafood: Red Lobster, Joe’s Crab Shack
• Salads: Souper! Salad, Panera Bread
• Smoothie: Keva Juice, Jamba Juice
• Soup: Panera Bread, Souper! Salad
• Steakhouse: Texas Roadhouse (2nd)
• Take Out: Chipotle Mexican Grill, Chili’s Papa Murphy’s
• Waitstaff: Texas Roadhouse

* indicates regional chains, which arguably ought to be included as they only serve the local area

A local newspaper should not only provide sound journalism for its community, but allow the free expression of an exchange of ides within its community.  A local community is responsible for making informed decisions as to where to spend its money, how to grow its economy and how to govern itself.  This can best happen when the community has a voice and a forum in which to be heard.

But not at the expense of civility.  The cacophony of stupidity that exemplifies the current Gazette commenting system prevents civil discourse.  Those that might weigh in with cogent arguments do not want to subject themselves to the vitriol of the sheer crazies (both left and right) the Gazette has attracted. Ad hominem and straw man attacks abound, as well as racism, sexism and political intolerance.  The current commenting system is an anonymous one – and one which encourages crazy.

Generally speaking, I do think that anonymity on the internet is vital, protecting dissidents from government reprisal, giving a voice to those who may be in danger if their real identity is known and promoting honesty and authenticity in many cases.  Most of the very articulate arguments for anonymity have been presented lately by those seeking to get Google+ to change its real name policies.  Chris Poole, the founder of 4chan, argues most thoughtfully as to why anonymity is to be valued online in this TED talk.

So, how is it that I believe the Gazette’s switch to facebook commenting so that people cannot hide behind anonymity is a good thing, when I do not like facebook and do value anonymity online?

Because context matters. The larger the community (the 200 million using twitter in 2011, for example), the more value provided by anonymity.  In El Paso county, where Colorado Springs and the Gazette’s market is located, there are just over 600,000 residents.  That’s small.  It’s not tiny, but it’s certainly not even 1% of all twitter users.  As county residents, we need to be able to make informed decisions about our community together – be it debates on water rights, development, taxes, roads, schools, parks and all things local.  The local newspaper is one forum – possibly the most visible one in the community – where residents can learn what their neighbors think about local issues.  It is imperative because we are neighbors that the discourse be civil.

We certainly are a polarized community; this polarization is heightened here because of the strong libertarian and right-wing persona of the area.  Liberals tends to be even more left than you might find in other blue areas, simply because to buck the trends here you need to be pretty damn strong in your convictions.  The Tea Party here is strong, the libertarians here are strong, the evangelicals here are strong – having lived here the better part of a decade, I’d argue that our groups are some of the strongest in the nation.

But this polarization devolves into hysterical haterism when people can post anonymous comments to the local newspaper’s website.  It is doubtful that anyone can be persuaded to an opinion when the commenter is simply spewing rhetoric that promotes infantilism.  So, all of the rhetoric found on in anonymous comments on the Gazette serves largely to exist for the sake of antagonism, solidifying the positions you already hold and persuading you that the other side is nuts. Further, the anonymity prevents citizens from knowing who these commenting stakeholders represent.  Someone with a vested interest in an item — it could possibly make or break them financially — is going to argue in their interests; knowing who someone is thus becomes vital when evaluating their comments.  One doesn’t even know if these are actually locals writing comments.

facebook, for all I dislike about it, actually does ‘real names’ well.  I have more confidence in that someone is who they say they are on facebook because of how the site grew (from a very closed system into an open system).  Given that your identity on facebook is tied into your real life social network and that comments made using their commenting system show up in your feed, people are less likely to just spew crazy and more likely to at least attempt an articulate response if they do respond.  You know a person’s interests in an issue based on who they are – a local businessman, a local pastor, a local politician, a local dissident, a college student, a housewife, a hiker, a hunter, your neighbor.

Sure, people spew stupidity regardless of whether their identity is known or not, but knowing that other locals know who you are may just encourage more thoughtfulness when leaving a comment on a news story.  It provides a useful reference for your neighbors when they evaluate your opinion.  It has also been the policy for ages for newspapers to ask for proof of who you are when you write into the Letters to the Editor section.  If facebook commenting can increase the level of civility in the Gazette’s comments, then this community actually might have a better shot of bringing itself together and promoting itself to be the business, recreation and good living area we all – left and right – believe it to be.

As you’ll know from my previous post, I’m already not a fan of the just-introduced news ticker on the right side bar on facebook.  It presents far too much information, constantly streaming past the already crowded wall of text that is the news feed.

I knew what was coming as I’d watched videos of what the service would post to my wall and agreed to the revised popup notification telling me what updates from Spotify would post to my feed.  Essentially, when you listen to music, that information is posted to your feed.  If you listen to a bunch of music of once, that information gets rolled up into a single post promoting Spotify and the artist/s you’re listening to.  The individual songs show up in your friends’ news tickers and a rolled up post gets shown in your friends’ news feed, front and center.

Listen to music, Spotify posts that info to your Facebook wall

Great! Right?  Well… what might be a cool idea in theory has a few problems, the most critical being that I didn’t actually listen to any of this music.  I clicked play and then went outside to toss the ball for the dog on this beautiful morning.  I like Patty Griffin, but I can’t honestly tell you if these particular tracks are worth a listen right now, because I was not listening to any of them.  Most of the time that I have Spotify open, it’s background music.  I’m either working (in which case I’m likely to be playing Coltrane or Mahler, so that lyrics don’t distract me) or I’m cleaning/cooking/gardening or possibly teaching myself a new song to play on the guitar and have a track on constant replay.

Here’s some stuff that got posted to my wall besides the rolled up post:

Individual Facebook wall posts from Spotify

Imagine now that 8 hours have gone by, with me running Spotify in the background. Just because I’ve got the music playing, it may not be worth sharing.  If I’m really grooving to a track, if a track captures my fancy or the moment, then I’ll share it consciously.  I really want you to know about this track, and I’m not going to waste your time with filler.  But this application does waste your time with filler.  And that may backfire on these application as people associate the application with ‘something annoying’.

The savvy will just disable notifications from that application, as happened in my timeline within moments of these posts hitting my wall:

A friend blocks Spotify

What’s surprising here is that this information was conveyed to me via the news ticker and was posted to this friends’ wall.  Now, we get to know everything everyone is doing, all the time.

This is because facebook wants “frictionless sharing”.  ”Frictionless”, for those of you not tuned into every crappy token social media expression in use by marketers and executives and product managers internet-wide, simply means that you don’t need to be bothered with deciding what and when to share something, the application will take care of you for you, so there is no friction.  No effort needed by you.

Instead, the burden of effort is foisted off onto your friends and subscribers, who now get to have a lot of friction.  facebook hopes you will find this serendipitous.  To me, serendipity is when a friend of mine consciously shares something and I happen to be online at the time to see it.  I call what this new paradigm brings us “Noise.”

I do wish I knew exactly what my Facebook-connected friends on Spotify are listening to natively within the Spotify application.  I may derive some value from frictionless notifcation there, within Spotify, not on Facebook.  Perhaps a developer I know has found a set of tunes he listens to while coding that I may appreciate when debugging something.  Perhaps my friend who likes REM has a particular album that she likes best of theirs which I didn’t pay attention to earlier.

But on Facebook, the situation is multiplied by as many friends as I have and as many applications that they may use.  There are apps for Yahoo! News, which posts a notification every time you ‘read’ (click through to) an article there.  There are cooking apps and books apps and jogging apps and movie apps and more: the possibilities are endless.  But all of this really just means they clicked to initiate an action, not that they necessarily liked that action or would recommend that action.

Slate sums it up in their recent article, “Not Sharing is Caring”:

This is a nightmare, but not for the reasons you might suspect. I don’t hate this new model because of its lack of “privacy,” or due to Facebook’s clear financial interest in collecting my personal information. Zuckerberg stressed that these apps require users’ consent to start auto-sharing; for me, that’s enough privacy protection. And I don’t begrudge Facebook making tons of money from what people do on its site—if people enjoy Facebook enough to keep coming back, the site should be free to make as much money as it can get.

My problem with “frictionless sharing” is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste.

Indeed.

But it’s also killing, for me, engagement.  Last night I discovered that every time a friend likes something or comments on something or [soon] takes action on anything connected to facebook, it will show up in my ticker, which feels weird to me.  It feels invasive, especially since I’m confident that many people do not realize that this is happening.  Many of my friends are posting the following plea to their feeds:

Please do me a favour. Hover over my name here, wait for the box to load & then hover over the “Subscribe” link. Then uncheck the “Comments & Likes” choice. I would rather my comments on friends’ posts not be made public. Thanks!! ? Then repost if you don’t want your EVERY MOVE posted on the right for everyone to see! I’ll do the same for you if you want. just click “Like.” Thanks

Yup, they don’t have the ability to control this stream of likes and comments of theirs appearing in your ticker.  If you like knowing everyone’s moves, you take no action.  If you want to respect their wishes, you take action.  If you’re just annoyed by it all, you have to take this action for every single friend.  I tried just doing that on lists, but it only changes that list’s feed, not the main feed or the ticker.

But rather than bothering to do this for my 156 friends, I’d rather just forgo logging into facebook.

I realize that the big joke is people bitching about facebook whenever they change anything, only to stick with the service regardless.  The outrage always subsides into acquiescence.   I honestly do not believe that most of my friends will stop logging into facebook or that this post will dissuade you from logging into facebook.  facebook will roll on, ship more NewThings and people will all carry on liking or sharing or whatever may happen there.

But — for me — the oversharing stops there, now.  Yes, I may log into the site once a month now rather than daily, because it’s about the only way many old friends have to reach me, but daily engagement?  Sorry, babe, don’t think twice, it’s alright.

This is difficult for me because I understand that typically users do not appreciate change, balk at revamps to sites that they visit daily and bitch about the smallest thing, while product teams sit back, confident in their redesigns and unlikely to roll anything back. ‘Haterz gonna hate’ is what they tell themselves when confronted with a mass outcry of vitriol for whatever product they’ve worked on and sweated over for however many months it took to iterate their jizz out the door: ‘Just ship’.  Another common manta is to quote Henry Ford,

If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse”.

So, I sit here, about to embark on my daily romp through the internet before tending to some work, and I’m pissed off that I even encountered the feature changes that facebook rolled out to their newsfeed.  What truly infuriates me are that I do not have the control I actually want and that my opinion about this doesn’t matter one bit (which is actually a lack of control, when you get down to it).  In a few months, the din and roar will die down, as it always does, and the majority will continue to use the site.  I concur with Elgan in ‘Facebook is the new Yahoo!’ when he concludes,

And that’s what Facebook is becoming. Yes, they’ll continue to have users. And yes, they’ll continue to make money. But Facebook is looking increasingly like a one-trick pony that doesn’t have the vision to reinvent itself for the post-Facebook era.

So, on now to what I hate about this new look: absolutely too much noise and too many features competing for my attention on the page.  A redesign is a happy one that facilitates getting done what you want to get done as efficiently as possible but that also compels you to stick around to do more.  This redesign is a mess of text and numbers and scrolling bits that all compete for my attention, but that actually defocuses my attention so much that I turn away - surely not the intended behavior.  The intended behavior is for greater engagement — for me to remain on the site.  That’s the goal: more eyeballs (users) and more stickiness (sticking around on that site rather than venturing off to another site).

The feature I will miss the most is the control to sort my newsfeed by Top Stories or Most Recent.  Now, the two are combined into one stream, gone are the links at the top to switch between them, now they are separated by headers.  Headers which are light enough in color for me to miss and which have the effect of making the stream seem chronologically out of order if you scroll past the Most Recent header and miss it.  I already dislike that Top Stories even exists – an algorithm that tells me what it thinks I will want to read, which actually fails consistently to bring me the stuff that I find interesting.  I enjoy Most Recent because it’s like a river flowing past; it’s best use is the serendipitous discovery of what’s happening right here, right now.  Top Stories is something telling me what I like.  Most Recent is me discovering what I like.  That I enjoy the latter is a no brainer.

Which brings me to the new river of consciousness they’ve introduced on the right hand side bar: this constantly updating stream of what everyone is doing, all of it.  While this stream is what I want in my News Feed, I do not want it stuffed into the small footprint of the side bar right next to the huge block of text that is my News Feed.  It’s competing for my attention but driving me away because it’s just too much information.  You can’t get rid of it natively; I ended up using the nuclear option with AdBlock just to make it go away.  I would have preferred this stream front and center, with ways to filter it that are sticky.

The most useless thing about the News Feed redesign is the blue corner on select posts that flags what their algorithm assumes I will find interesting.  Why this is necessary when there is already a Top Stories filter that I cannot control eludes me.  In a rough glance this morning, not one of the blue flagged posts actually did interest me but all of the posts that I did find interesting did not have a blue flag on it. This in itself isn’t bad enough for me to hate, but it is silly enough for me to ask, ‘Why Bother?’  It does also add just one more bit of business to page – business that fuels the overwhelming inability to focus.  My eyes can’t decide whether to focus on the red notification at the top of the page, the highlight notifications on the left side bar telling me that certain friends filters have new content, the right sidebar with it streaming medley of everything, or the big chunk of text and images center stage with certain posts marked with blue corners.

So, who benefits from my deciding that this site is not worth the hassle of these new features?  Not facebook, because they lose my eyeballs, right?  But they don’t, really, lose me entirely because just about my entire social network — from high school to family to college to work to best friends to neighbors to random musicians — is there and they all have that same dilemma.  Few of them have migrated over to Google+ and most of them do not use Twitter.  I could drop out, but I lose (so long as I value being in touch with people).  I have to admit, while initially excited about Google +, I never use the site, mostly because I decided that checking three social networks a day was one too many.  I may return and explore it again, but it won’t have traction for me until my facebook pals decide to show up there… and I’m betting (as facebook likely is) that inertia will keep them there, regardless of what feature changes they make.

twitter remains my go-to site for social online interaction, news, comedy and distraction.  The site has kept a simple approach, just a stream that flows by and the ability to search it.  So many of my friends tell me that they don’t get twitter, which of course raise the specter of twitter changing everything to accomodate all the eyeballs that don’t get them, but until that happens, it will remain my mainstay.

It was so great to be surrounded by some 1000 people who really grokked this group. Jane asked the crowd if we were aware they they started off as a punk group; much to my surprise, most of the crowd did raise their hands Yes to that question! Seque into Fun with Ropes, a number from the band’s early days in the late 70s, a cut that didn’t make it onto Beauty & the Beat for obvious reasons if you check out the lyrics and recall their image switch from punk to pop around 1980. There are a ton of bands from the 80s that I can write off as overdone, time long past, don’t bother seeing live, but these women are still as vital and lively as they were back in the day. Their songs are timeless and punchy. Their sound is not dated: it’s effervescent, it’s rock, and they still have one hell of a beat 5 decades down the line (yes! 5!).

We staked our positions right in front of Kathy & Jane’s monitors, since the guy I was hanging with had a life-long crush on Jane and since I’ve had a life long crush on Kathy. We both lamented that Charlotte was soo far away, since she is one great guitarist (maybe next time, I’ll have to hang on that side). The pre-show tape played the Runaways, which got us moving (and another fantasy I’d like to see is Joan and Cherie on stage with the Go-Go’s – please?!)… then Foreigner queued up, meaning the ladies were about to rock us. Indeed – they did. They still bebop around all over the stage: Jane with her crazy twirls, Kathy bouncing about, Charlotte with that commanding stance she has and Belinda just flitting all about with her bare feet.

The show couldn’t have been more what I had expectantly hoped for and that much more, since they just go go go from start to finish, Gina’s beat propelling us all through the night. They are fun, funny, sassy, upbeat and just a damn good time. Belinda really, truly has come a long way from her angry stance at the mic belting out songs in the 70s; she is now so graceful yet playful, knowing exactly how to play up her audience in her gestures and smile and laughs. She came to our side of the stage, she camped it up with all the other musicians and she kept that set smoothly humming. I really walked away from this show with a ton of respect for her presence.

Most of their set came off the Beauty & the Beat album (30 years old and recently re-released), with favorites from the others such as Vacation, Head Over Heels (my fave) and The Whole World Lost It’s Head (punk rock isn’t dead!). I was particularly impressed by how much better the Beauty & the Beat tracks sound live and remain true to how the band was playing these songs 30 years ago (as opposed to the thin sound on the album). It’s hard to pin down which number they excelled at the most last night (since the entire set was evenly played well), but We Got the Beat and Automatic were stand-out performances for me. In one number, Kathy slid down on the stage a hand’s length away from me and performed this impressive bass solo – that was the pinnacle of the evening (or year) for me. Gina came out from behind her kit to intro the band and her personality really is a kick.

The ladies played a rare second encore, which really blew me away. The energy from the crowd in the hall was off the hook – I love that the band is so keyed into their crowd and gave us Unforgiven as a closing number.

Thanks for the guitar pick, Jane!

A note about concert photography: never go to a show with a camera you’re unfamiliar with. The lousy quality of the images I got is a direct result of me not knowing what the fuck I was doing with that camera. At any rate, I only got a few seconds of the start of Our Lips Are Sealed, but thankfully someone behind me got the rest of song on their mobile, so enjoy these two clips of the song for what they are (or are not!)

and some fun Cool Jerk moments….

Girl in a Coma opened the night with a 45 minute set that was sheer grrrl punk, and thank Joan Jett for signing them to the Blackheart label. In fact, they’re even featured today on NPR. The trio hails from San Antonio (well, the bassist is from Denver, it seems) and they were all kick out the jams last night. Their fast paced punkish rock beat is offset by the most amazing vocals of lead singer/guitarist, Nina Diaz. Her vocals are ethereal at times and then come crashing down around you just as the bass and drums blast off into the stratosphere. The guy standing next to me said, “Wow, what are we in for here?” as the tattoo covered grrls walked out onstage – they opened and never looked back. They are also approachable, hanging out by their merch table after the show, somewhat laid back in their confidence. Definitely worth another trip to Denver when they play there again (Why, oh why can’t we get bands to show up in the Springs? Maybe I need to put my energy into promoting concerts here).