Do you wish you could follow any blog in your dashboard?

superamit:

I frequently come across blogs (maybe once a week) that I find interesting, look for the follow button in the top-right corner, and am disappointed when it’s missing. (And then don’t follow the blog at all.)

I’m sick of Net News Wire and Google Reader. I want to read more things in the Tumblr dashboard.

Here’s the blog I found today. Not followed. Will probably never see again. :(

This is what happens when we outsource our brains too much.  Which, I can totally relate too.  My brain hasn’t had to remember anything for years!

Let me take off my blogger skirt and put on my biz-advice pantsuit ...

enjoysthings:

An enjoysthin.gs user who just launched his own iPhone app wrote to me and asked “What have you found to be the most rewarding ways to engage with users? … Any tips for a person that’s not very good at self-promotion but who simply wants to be a good creator of interesting things?” I emailed him back a response that quickly became an unrelated rant. I don’t know if it’s interesting, but I’d love to hear people’s opinions on some of this stuff. Here’s a slightly modified version of that response:

It’s actually been tough to measure the success of some of the things I’ve done. A lot of the time, I feel like I’m having a one way conversation. I’ll write blog posts, send email, mail stickers and never hear back about anything.  Sometimes they’ll tweet about it or post pics to flickr, but most of the time… nothing.

Although I’d like to see some more responses, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. I’ve come to realize that people do appreciate the personal email/postal-mail and things like that, they just don’t always have a cause or avenue to respond. Sure, sometimes people have nothing to say, but I think it’s hard for people to understand that I (more or less a business) am ready and willing to have an actual conversation with them. That I’m not looking for a marketing/sales/biz-dev/sleaze opportunity. For enjoysthin.gs, I want to be better about giving people ‘next steps’ with some of that stuff.

That said, the response has been great. People send email, messages, tweets and write blog posts fairly often saying very nice things and expressing surprise that I’m willing to do things other than sit around and collect money. I can’t single out any one thing, I think it’s the sum of all the parts.

One thing that I think has been important when engaging users has been that I don’t pretend to be a big company. I don’t ever say “we,” it’s always I. This is actually something I’ve received a lot of feedback about. Some people are extremely turned off by it, while others like it. For me, I just want to be honest about it. After all, it is just me.

I recently spoke with some VC people who gave me some “advice” which I promptly tossed in the garbage (along with any business cards exchanged). They said that I needed to say ‘we’ so that I could “seem bigger … like a real company.” I don’t get that at all, but I think it comes down to this: Many people confuse looking like a serious company with being a serious business. I’m firmly in the latter, which is exactly where I want to be.

Fun conversation via email with the maker of enjoysthin.gs in relation to the best way to be a human that builds things that are interesting and which the builder wants to promote without being an asshole. (paraphrased)

do you think...

alicetiara:

spangley:

…that women have a higher propensity for anxiety? and do you think it’s generational? i feel like way more of my lady friends have anxiety issues (including myself) than in my parent’s generation. or maybe we’re just more willing to talk about it openly.

i feel like it’s more prevalent in our generation though - maybe because we have more pronounced internal & external pressures to be successful, to have a career, a family. to be awesome. to be awesomenly single. to be badasses. but i hardly ever hear my male friends talk about anxiousness. or maybe they just smoke too much pot. (kidding.) (sort of.)

*this break from musical & comical posts brought to you by my anxiety attack at 4:30 am last night/this morning. and overthinking.

I do have a lot of girlfriends with anxiety issues (including myself) and I can’t think of any guys I know. That’s such an interesting point. I do think women have higher pressure to be perfect— I think men worry about being all sorts of other things, but I don’t think they worry about being perfect.

I found http://www.healthywomen.org/healthreport/march2008/pg2.html here that women are 2-3x more likely than men to have an anxiety disorder, but men are more likely to self-medicate with alcohol.

Finally, I think women are socialized to spend lots of time thinking about other people and taking care of others and situations. Which gives us more to worry about. I have rarely met a man who will worry, at a gathering at his house, whether everyone has a drink, is comfortably seated, etc. but I’ve seen women get super hyper tense over the same thing. I think we wannabe-superwomen could use a big dose of male entitlement and, for want of a better word, laziness.

If you two have anxiety issues then so do I.

Just Got this From My House Mate...

rand0mflora:

Lost humor always gets me.  And this made me laugh to the point of tears:

How to Make a Peanut Butter Sandwich, by the Losties

Jack
1. Gather ingredients
2. Point gun at ingredients and shout “HOW DO I MAKE A SANDWICH OUT OF YOU?!?!?”
3. Breathe heavily through your nose as though you were about to hit ingredients
4. Give up and make the sandwich yourself, and eat it bitterly

Kate
1. Make separate sandwiches, one with peanut butter and one with jelly
2. Take a bite of the peanut butter sandwich, declaring it the best
3. Take a bite of the jelly sandwich, declaring it the best
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 ad infinitum
5. Follow peanut butter or jelly sandwich into grave danger

Sawyer
1. Throw the jar of jelly at wall, sneering “I don’t need no sandwich”
2. Call the mascot on the jar of peanut butter lots of clever nicknames
3. Huff and puff and stomp around and grumble a lot
4. When no one’s looking, make perfect, even, symmetrical peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sit in a corner, enjoying every bite

Locke
1. Sit idly by, believing that the ingredients will find a way to make a sandwich out of themselves
2. Lose faith and make the sandwich anyway
3. Realize that you were the instrument by which the ingredients chose to make a sandwich after all
4. Run around the room and grab everyone’s knives, insisting that their sandwiches will do the same in time

Hurley
1. Make sandwich
2. Eat sandwich
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 ad infinitum

Sayid
1. Procure 23 milligrams of uranium-20
2. Set hadron supercollider to eight megajoules
3. Program a sandwich-making macro using Cobol or Visual Basic
4. Act all tough-like

Desmond
1. Eat sandwich
2. Call the sandwich “brother”
3. Place peanut butter slice over jelly slice
4. Spread jelly on the other slice
5. Spread peanut butter on one slice
6. Take two slices of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly

Ben
1. Steal someone else’s sandwich
2. Claim you coerced them into making the sandwich for you all along
3. Say you’ll tell them everything if they make you another sandwich
4. Stare at them all creepy-like

Libby
1. Lay out plans for one of the most intricate, fascinating, and delicious sandwiches of all time
2. Just as you start making it, get shot

Danielle
1. Apply peanut butter
2. Disappear for eight months
3. Apply jelly
4. Disappear for eight months
5. Eat sandwich

Claire
1. Mmmmmmm, peanut butter

Thank you, Dan, for making me hurt myself with laughter…

why have Tumblr themes?

20 things we can record now that we couldn't then

1. What we’re doing, right now, in 140 characters or less
2. What we’re listening to, right now
3. What’s in front of us, in the form of a picture
4. Audio, but who does that?
5. What we overhear others saying
6. What we’re eating
7. What we’re spending money on
8. A link we just saw
9. Repost something someone else posted
10. A photo we liked
11. Thoughts on any possible topic
12. Our relationship status
13. What we just read, watched, listened to
14. Where we are, exactly, right now
15. Our weight
16. Our goals
17. How far we ran
18. Video, but it’s not very easy
19. Our mood
20. A response to anything in the universe that moves us

So, we can record things.  The temptation to record and save for later turns into a temptation to be completely comprehensive in our records.  Record every meal, record every transaction, record every day of our lives.  And at the end, I presume we’ll have a record for all to see.

And this record for all to see, what will it be good for?  I think it will be voyeuristic and interesting to, perhaps, our children.  The first generation to have a very thorough glimpse into our lives before them.  If we become famous, it will be good fodder for our bibliographies, though the precision of our records might for the biographers to avoid embellishment and mystery that usually makes such accounts shine.

We can use the information to connect to one another… to be closer to people we like but might not have time to know every little detail about.  It’s efficient.  It’s easier to follow a thousand twitters than to have a thousand micro-conversations throughout the day.

But I don’t feel more connected.  It’s like we’re all watching each other on television, but can’t necessarily reach through the screen.