Uggh!

I was reading an article in The Nation today and I was mortified by the grammar and style.

Thailand-us ties: 175 years and building

The title of the article “Thailand-us ties: 175 years and building:” what does that title even mean? I only clicked to the article because the title was so cryptic I had to see what they were trying to say.

First off, “Thailand-us” should be “Thailand-US;” proper noun and all that. “Thailand-us” means “Thailand you and I.”

“175 years and building” means what? Most obviously it would mean it’s been 175 years and they are throwing an edifice in for good measure. If they are trying to convey that, after 175 years, the ties are still strong, there are far better words. “175 years and going strong” perhaps.

The punctuation is atrocious. Long, run-on sentences with excessive use of parenthetical elements that are not set off by commas. Or, worse, there is a comma on one side of the phrase and, as if Alzheimer’s has set in, the closing comma is forgotten.

The readability is terrible. It’s laborious to follow. It’s flat and dull. It holds all the flair and style of a 3rd grade “what I did on my summer vacation” essay. OK–the subject matter is not that exciting, but boring becomes painful in the hands of a bad writer with a weak editor.

Maybe circulation is down, maybe they can’t afford qualified writers or editors anymore. Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel and close the doors. (I hope not–the paper is generally pretty good and has noticeably less bias then the competition.)

However, if they are not desperate enough as to close shop, then they should do a little house cleaning and find some more qualified writers and editors.

Well, people have been asking “what about a Barcamp in Chiang Mai?”

Well, why not?

Some of us folks who organized Barcamp Bangkok have started setting up some infrastructure for Barcamp Chiang Mai in hope that people will jump on board and make it happen.

If you are interested in Barcamp Chiang Mai, here are some contact points:

• Website: http://www.barcampchiangmai.org/
• Facebook Group for Barcamp Chiang Mai (the best place to sign up for notifications at the moment)
• Google Group for Barcamp Chiang Mai communications
• Barcamp Chiang Mai Wiki

I am not living in Chiang Mai so I have no intentions of heading-up this effort, but I am glad to support anybody who does and I will do what I can from Bangkok to get a Barcamp going in Chiang Mai.

If anybody is interested in attending, please sign up on Facebook for now.

If you are seriously committed to seeing Barcamp Chiang Mai happen and want to be a key organizer, please email me at john-at-barcampchiangmai.org.

Until then, I look forward to seeing you in Chiang Mai!

Oh–if you are up around Chiang Mai, I will be in the area between March 9 and 12th–look me up online!

I was just reading The Role of the Brand in Social Media Marketing from Search Engine Watch.

He lists seven tactics marketers can use to build their brand in Social Media:

1. Boost the Fun Factor – Find out what social sites your customers and influencers frequent, and help them accomplish something new there. This does not mean inserting your brand as a social media billboard. It may mean offering an application that entertains or informs, or starting and growing a community based around your customers’ areas of interest. Caveat: Start it, facilitate it, but don’t try to control it.

2. See the Forest and the Trees – Pay attention to the smaller, niche social network sites, where people are gathering around their areas of interest and hobbies. Brand opportunities around these newer micro-social sites will increase as they begin competing and winning attention from the large, noisy social sites.

3. Widgets are Welcome – Incorporate a widget into your next online marketing program. Widgets are portable applets that appear on blogs, Web sites, and social networking sites. These self-contained applications allow page owners to personalize their sites quickly and easily. At the same time, widgets allow you to engage your audience with compelling content while also strategically and subtly branding your company or product.

4. Conversation is King – If you develop an application for use in social networks, or if you build a custom network, enable seamless conversations using the tools that users are familiar with. Promoting text conversation among participants is one thing, but also facilitating conversations using video and audio can help boost interactivity and brand resonance. Also give them a way to connect back to you by subscribing to a custom feed and giving them direct access to someone internally.

5. Engage – Find something that appeals to customers at an experiential level. Once upon a time, you built it and they came. Nowadays, they won’t show up unless you effectively engage them. Show your customers that you thought about them at a human level and not as simply “users.” This will impact every approach you take and will force the personalization for target demographics regardless of the tools you use to reach them.

6. Research and Listen – What is appealing to the people you want to reach? The only way to learn about their preferences and what they will or won’t embrace is to monitor their activity, as well as the culture of the community you wish to reach and create. By observing, you’ll uncover not only the ideas to build or deploy relevant tools, services or campaigns, but also the methods and strategies for creating genuine excitement and participation.

7. Don’t Go It Alone – Making the wrong move in the social media space can do more damage than not participating at all. Look to technology, marketing, and strategic business partners to create an effective and appropriate presence on the social web.

And he closes with the advice:

Remember that your brand influencers are online to connect with people who care about the things they care about. They are there to make meaning, not to be broadcast to. They are there to participate and create, not to be advertised to. The more your brand can assist people in connecting with others online to create or share something new, the more favorably you will be received in these new and influential social circles.

I think that there is a critical point he missed here: the way to get people to promote your brand in the social media space is to realize that, in social media, each person s their own brand and a critical part of social media is personal brand building. Each person builds his or her own brand to attract people that are interested in the things and ideas he or she is interested in. in he social media space, the brands you associate yourself with are much like the clothes you wear on the street of the beer you order in a bar: it’s a statement about who you are.

If a brand can make a statement about who a person is, what they care about, then they will want to be associate with the brand. Geeks associate themselves with Apple and promote Apple because it’s a statement about who they are. Photographers associate with Nikon or Canon because it defines who they are.

Does your brand define a person? Does their association with your brand help a person promote their brand? Is your brand make a statement that promotes something people care passionately about?

Just ran across a nifty little module for Drupal called Knurl.

“Knurl is a module that provides a URL shortcut and redirection service similar to TinyURL or TightURL.”

Every time I see a short URL I think: hey, there is something that can can be sent on Twitter. Or by SMS. Seems like this would be a great module for somebody that wanted to interface to send messages via Twitter the Twitter API or SMS news.

This module will be rattling around the back of my mind until I come up with a way to use it.

I just took a peek at Yahoo! Buzz.

Wow. What a steaming pile.

Front page articles as of the moment:

• Britney Spears Gets Some New Jeans
• Pamela Anderson seeks annulment
• American Idol Rundown: The Top 10 Guys
• Angelina and Brad Want to Have Jolie-Pitt No. 7 In France

If I wanted to consume brainless pablum like that I could watch E! or read People magazine. Other articles are run-of-the-mill CNN or MSNBC fare. If that’s what I wanted, I could just as easily be reading those websites.

What’s the value add with Buzz? I don’t see it.

This is the type of crappy site you get when you have a bunch of media executives who use a committee to design a product that “has broad consumer appeal, has reach, has a mass market traction.”

You get a product that has bland, dull and mundane written all over it.

Yahoo Buzz is serving up the same old shallow, mass market crap that hate and the reason I turned to sites like Digg!, Slashdot and Boing! Boing! was to get away from just the crap Yahoo! is dishing out.

I think I am pretty representative of the new breed of web newshounds; I read Digg! because I am looking for off-beat news, humor and opinions with a strong tech flavor. Sure, Digg! can sometimes shoot for the lowest common denominator, but when it comes to humor that’s not always a bad thing. I read blogs on niche topics because thy have in-depth articles on topics I am interested in.

I will not be Buzzing anything… not my cup o’ tea, thank you very much.

Yahoo is looking more like a stuffy old media company that just does get it, struggling get by in a new media world.

Coworking is an extension of the social network into the the real world.

You have a pool of people, ideally somewhat like minded (or at least creative spirits that are inspiring in some way) and you share a casual workspace.

I think coworking would be very energizing.

Working from home, well it’s easy to get into a rut staring at the same four walls all day long, every day, week after week.

I venture out to a coffee house every now and then to work–but not as frequently as I did back in the US. Bangkok just does not have that many casual public spaces where you can sit with a laptop all day long.

Ever since I ran across the concept of coworking spaces I have been thinking “man, it would be great to have a coworking space in Bangkok!” Something like a coffee house–but with more of a regular crowd of people that are working and on the same wavelength.

But alas, I have yet to find a coworking space. I have thought about creating one, but I still have not found the critical mass of people to make it viable.

I just ran across a concept that might be the next best thing–or even a stepping stone to starting a co-working space: A Jelly.

What is a Jelly? It’s “casual coworking” (Which is “awesome,” according the the website tagline.)

It’s a floating co-working space set up in some space (public or private). In my minds eye, I see getting a bunch of other geeks together to meet at different coffee houses on a regular basis. If this gets to be popular enough, we might reach the critical mass we need to open up a coworking space.

Let’s see if I can make this happen. If anybody runs across this post and is interested, drop me a line at jberns-at-johnberns-dot-com.

I would love to see more people using bikes as a way to get around, it’s ecologically friendly and it’s good exercise. We need more attention from politicians who can help make biking a safe transportation alternative.

Glad to see other people are working for this as well.

Check out the Bangkok Critical Mass Bike Ride.

Loved the demo: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=976 .

I am not a gamer–but with a 3D environment based on technology like this, I could get hooked.

As I post this, I am on my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) and connecting the Internet via AIS EDGE wireless internet with my Nokia N70 mobile phone.

One more critical step closer to completely abandoning Windows forever.

The setup was fast and relatively simple once I found Howto connect to the Internet with a Nokia N70 from Ndlovu on UbuntuForums.

For people that have my exact setup (Ubuntu Gutsy, Nokia N70 (connected via the USB cable packaged with the phone), AIS (One-2-Call) in Thailand) I can simplify the process a bit for you.

All I had to do was create the two config files as per the instructions and save them. Then go to the command line and type “pon mobile” and hit enter. Fast and simple–and it worked the first time.

Be warned–there is no feedback; you enter “pon mobile” and you get no “you are connected to the Internet” message–you just are.

If you want to see what happened during the connection process (and to see if you are really connected) try typing “plog” from the command line. Plog is part of the PPPD package (along with “pon” and “poff”) and it shows you the last few lines of /var/log/ppp.log. If that file doesn’t exist, it shows you the last few lines of your /var/log/syslog file, but excluding the lines not generated by pppd. So you can see the status messages that have been written by PPPD about your connection in ppp.log.

A few more notes:

1. PPP is part of the default install for Ubuntu Gutsy–you probably have it installed unless you customized the install to NOT install it.
2. Your user probably belongs to the dialout group already–no need to add. (But it’s not that hard to do, really.)
3. The text he suggests to cut-and-paste all worked exactly as he has it–no need to tweak the settings

It would be nice to have a graphic interface that stepped you through the process, showed you the phone was connected and had a simple little “Connect to Internet Via Mobile” and “Disconnect” buttons–but that’s just me being spoiled by how easy most things are in Ubuntu most of the time.

Polling / voting apps are always good fun.

I ran across this poll of top Drupal modules on Amazon UnSpun.

My favorite Drupal modules CCK and Views? Right at the top!

I noticed UberCart for the first time; I never noticed that module before. It looks interesting!