*Photo courtesy of Profound Whatever from Flickr

The one thing I’ve discovered after working in and around social media for nearly six years is that the image presented is not always all that it seems.

If you look through the headlines, there are numerous accounts of folks getting into trouble because maintaining the exterior version of themselves, their real life avatars of who they want to be, does not match up with who they feel like inside their heads, when no one is watching.  And it happens in social media all the time, when we perceive one thing about someone, but it may just be a small snapshot of what’s really happening in their lives outside of Facebook and Twitter.

In real life, the difference between perception and reality catches people up every day. People regularly overspend to try to portray themselves as successful, even if their bank accounts are empty.    They take on jobs they know they can’t handle.  My favorite joke on this is  that “The ego is writing checks the body can’t possibly cash.”

I’m guilty of doing this from time to time.  I want to do 20 things but only have time for four, and so I have to choose.  But choosing is hard, so I take on more than I can handle, causing myself stress and panic.  And I do it more often than I’d like to admit in public, but I bet you do this too.

It’s that old power of magical thinking, where you tell yourself “I’ll get everywhere on time, as long as the traffic gods cooperate”  which, by the way, they almost never do, especially when you are in a hurry.  Yet, despite all of our experiences that tell us to leave a bit early, to compensate for poor GPS directions, or bad weather or whatever, we still end up making mistakes we could have avoided because our egos get in the way of our analytical, common sense.

As stories of people “biting off more than they can chew” fill the headlines, I’m reminded of that old summer enforced reading classic, the Picture of Dorian Gray. The external picture we get of people’s lives is that they are somehow blessed  and privileged in a way we can only imagine. In the meantime, getting to this place of perceived success was not always easy or pretty, and maintaining your place on the top is even more difficult.  As much as the public loves success, it also loves Schadenfreude, the perverse joy we get when we see the mighty and famous are just real people and make silly mistakes, just like the rest of us.  We can’t wait to see that underneath the perfect exterior, lies a grizzled portrait in their attic, like the Picture of Dorian Gray, where the summation of their vice and sin is paid for, convincing us yet again that Karma is a bitch and there is somehow divine justice in the Universe.

I often wonder how the US became the Schadenfreude capital of the world.  I like to think it started back when TV shows like Dallas and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous made it to TV, giving everyone a view of a world very few ever enjoy, and making it seem like this was a commonplace and normal thing we should all aspire to. The world of aspirational thinking got an adrenaline shot in the arm, and its current day successors, ranging from Housewives of (name your ritzy suburb here) to MTV Cribs to the Kardashians, to even the more modest and achievable Martha Stewart continue to set standards beyond the means of the majority of folks out there who live modest lives.

It used to be that you would have to do something to be successful and earn the ridiculously expensive and lavish things in life.  ”Reality TV” seems to portray lavish and silly as something that could happen to you, if you could just think of a plot line with enough drama to get the TV folks and sponsors interested.*  This makes people think they are just one lucky break or lottery ticket away from the good life, but they don’t ever consider that even if they had “the good life” they would still be themselves.

No matter how much we try, we can’t outrun ourselves and our own inherent problems and weaknesses.  We are who we are, and the greater the disconnect between our real selves and the public version of ourselves, the more likely we are to face a crisis point. You don’t need me to point out examples of that- pick up any newspaper and read about the latest public figure who has had a comeuppance or the people who bought too much house and ended up in foreclosure as a result.

Here’s the take home message: The more I wish to obtain something or become something, the more I need to construct the reality of my life to support that move to a different space.  For example, I’m not going to lose weight if I don’t exercise and eat better, and construct my life and habits to help make those changes a sustainable reality.  Otherwise, I’m just going to continue on with the status quo, while my dreams of being a size 8 remain just that, ethereal dreams with no grounding in reality.   (I may secretly hope that I have in inverse Dorian Gray problem, where the outside is getting older, but the inner portrait is twenty-two and sculpted… but I digress.)

When your internal and external reality are pretty well matched, life is simple.  You are in What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) land, and there’s no need to be something more or different that who you are.  It’s a place of acceptance and responsibility, and while it may not be as exciting as jetting off to Cannes, it’s less stressful and more sustainable in exchange.  And that’s nothing to sneeze at.

*However, I doubt the producers will ever show up to “Greenwood PTO 19317″ to see how the moms in this community work to bring people together and help improve our schools, because we’re all simply normal, hard working folks.  Where will they get a full season of TV worthy drama in episodes entitled “Are we going to be able to get a one to one laptop program going or not?” and “Running the Book Fair is like chasing cats” that will keep sponsors and audiences coming back season after season?  Then again, if it solved our school district’s funding problems and improved my kid’s experience at school, I’d sign up in a minute.

Part 2:  The Rise of the Individual

Part 3: Implications for Our Kids and the Future

Picture courtesy of Oak Tree Vintage website

This week, I read an interesting story in Newsweek magazine about “beached white males” talking about the number of middle age, middle management types who’ve found themselves without jobs and have had difficulty finding new ones in this recession.  The most interesting point in the whole article was the following paragraph:

In some ways, it was inevitable. Automation isn’t just a blue-collar problem anymore. (emphasis added) Powerful software programs replaced armies of financial officers, accountants, computer-chip designers, even lawyers, who now feed millions of documents into “e-discovery” programs. Job growth in management, technology, and other white-collar professions slowed to nearly zero. The media business has been perhaps hardest hit by technological change. Last year ABC News pink-slipped nearly 400 people—25 percent of its workforce.

The disruption caused by the rise of the internet and of more powerful computers has hit those who thought they were immune from the various rises and falls in the economy.  Here’s an interesting business cycle to look at:

Companies start to feel that they have to look for ways to cut costs and be more efficient.  They are looking for quarter to quarter results, because this is what the guys on Wall Street and the financial press demand.  In order to do this, you start to look at investments in getting rid of recurring costs- and frankly, salaries and benefits are ongoing expenses.  So they begin to look for ways to automate and make certain tasks more efficient.  Let’s look at a few industries effected by the rise of computerized solutions:

- Travel Agents: Except for booking cruises or complex travel, automated online systems ranging from Orbitz to Priceline to Kayak and everyone in between make this process easier, both for the person trying to figure out where they want to go and when, and even for the companies, who no longer have to pay a cost (fee) to an agent who found them a customer.  This has meant airlines spend more money on direct to consumer advertising and loyalty programs, because Joanne at “She Loves Travel” is no longer sending all her folks to you, but that’s the way it goes, I guess.

-Healthcare: The rise of electronic medical records has reduced (and will continue to reduce) the need for front office staff and file clerks in hospitals.  All of the tasks of managing the paperwork and insurance process is largely managed by computer.  They are still working out kinks with teaching doctors to properly “code” visits for billing, but I suspect this will be a course students will have to start taking in med school before long, or at least as a part of their residency training.

-Retail: A number of years ago, when I worked in a small law firm, we did some consulting for the folks that make the automated check-outs at grocery stores, Walmart, and the like.  The issues we were looking at was making sure the machines could be made accessible for the disabled to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The bottom line is that you could use as many of these machines as possible, as long as you still had the option of having a human to help assist or have a human checkout person to make sure anyone with a disability could still receive service when needed.  So as you see the bulk of the sales and cash register people diminish, you’ll still see one or two around, but mostly that’s about regulatory compliance underneath it all.  The less people involved with checking out, the fewer salaries need to be paid.  RFID tracking helps curb shoplifting, so in the end, all you need is one front end manager and one guard.

-Sales: Websites that are available 24 x 7 and programs like Salesforce can help businesses manage sales and salespeople more efficiently than ever, further cutting down the need for actual humans and eliminating jobs to sweeten that bottom line.

-Inventory Control:  New cash registers help businesses of every size track inventory.  While this may need to be verified a few times a year with an actual physical count to account for loss, theft or “shrinkage”, there’s no longer the same need for every department head to manage all the inventory in a more labor-demanding way- they just look at their print outs, reconcile that with temp help for an actual count quarterly or ven bi-annually, and it’s all done for you.

-Printing: Even back in the early eighties, the small neighborhood printer who did invitations and posters, flyers and business cards, was starting to fade away with the home computer and laser printers, producing great results at a desk top.  While a few big shops remain, engaged in offset multicolor printing on specialty papers, and doing lots of design work, the concept of a local printer is a memory.  So I find it incredibly ironic that Pottery Barn is currently featuring a line of furniture called the “Printer’s Furniture collection” that has the antique look and multiple drawers needed in a print shop.  As another industry further consolidates and automates, its legacy is relegated to a furniture line and faux antique status, along with the

These are just a few examples of how automation, computers and the internet have cut the need for actual humans to do a lot of the work they were trained to do and educated to do over time. The crap has finally hit the fan, so to speak, and this great recession is in part a correction for the disruption caused by the rise of cheap and efficient computing.  The economic crisis provided all sorts of businesses to re-examine what they were doing and ask the hard questions about whether they needed people or programs, and many found programs were much easier to work with, and you didn’t have to work around their moods, vacations, or coffee breaks.  These folks in the middle are much like the telephone pictured above.  They were “classic” models with push button upgrades, but once everyone adopted a cell phone, the need to be anchored to a desk rapidly became obsolete.  Likewise, these folks were trained and inhabited jobs that once were required, but as computers have been able to handle the movement of information much more efficiently and accurately than people, their jobs have become redundant, and finding a new job requiring those same skills at the same salary is extremely difficult.

The next part in this three part series will be based on one of the last paragraphs in the Newsweek article quoted above:

Many of the newly jobless rebrand themselves as consultants. (emphasis added)  The number of so-called independent contractors is up by more than 1 million since 2005, according to Jeffrey Eisenach, an economist at George Mason University. More than one in five of them work in management, business, or finance. Boutique employment agencies are springing up to exploit this labor pool, which is attractive to companies that would rather not shell out for benefits or a 401(k). The New York–based Business Talent Group has a deep bench of BWMs (and some BWFs) for hire, many of them M.B.A.s with two decades of experience as managers, directors, or C-level boardroom players. BTG is on track for record growth this year, says Jody Greenstone Miller, an ex–Time Warner executive who founded the company in 2005. “We want people who treat this type of work as a permanent career,” Miller says. It typically takes executives six to nine months of looking for staff jobs, she adds, before they come around to the idea that no matter what you were before, you’re now basically a full-time temp.

As the economy undergoes a massive shift, the concept of becoming a free agent, independent contractor and/or a “Personal Brand” is something those of us working on the web have been discussing for over 5 years now.  What we’ve learned over that time, and what it means to everyone trying to become more resilient and flexible to the crazy waves of change will be in the next post in this series.

Social Media Barbie?

By the time Podcamp NYC rolled around in April of 2007, I had to worry about getting too many twitter updates by text and having to pay a fortune as a result- in the old days of limited texting and before the iphone and mobile internet were ubiquitous. We had over 1000 people sign up for Podcamp NYC and about 625 show up, including folks who came over from the UK to attend. It was a heady time, indeed.

Flash forward to 2011. Twitaholic reports the most popular twitter users, and the first “geek” that appears on this list of main stream celebrities is Pete Cashmore of Mashable at #56. The rest of the top users looks like a list of People Magazine/TMZ top favorites, by and large. This isn’t surprising given that when I polled a Finance Class at a local university where I was a guest speaker a year or so ago, only a handful of college students were on Twitter, and they were largely following celebrities and using as their National Enquirer.

Twitter has changed over time. It’s not just where the A/V club hangs out anymore. We would follow our real life friends, and people we met at conferences, as a way to keep in touch. It became an international hang out to keep in touch with people we wouldn’t otherwise talk to as frequently. It kept friendships alive and people in touch in a low-cost, high-benefit manner. Reciprocity with friends and followers was much debated, and people would look at the ratios of friends to followers as a measure of how social, antisocial, attention hungry, or desperate you might be.

I think friend and follower ratios have to be re-thought as a metric that tells you anything meaningful these days. When I was going through my friends lists to see whether I needed to pare it down to raise the signal to noise level, I found out that the people who aren’t following me back are largely news organizations, governmental organizations, local businesses and others where I want to know what’s going on in their world or industry, but don’t really need or want them to follow me back in some large gambit to appear either more popular or engaged. I want to know, for example, what the CDC is up to, but they don’t need to hear about my world, so I don’t take any offense to this mismatch.

But if we’re entering a new world with programs like Twitter, and external value measures like Klout and PeerIndex giving anyone who wants them “numbers” about how we conduct our lives on these networks, people who dabble in marketing and PR should probably be aware of what these metrics say about them. Just like having any other Google Alert or listening post set up to monitor what people say about you, do you need to know what these numbers say, what they mean, and what actions you take go into changing them? Probably, at least a little.

Yet if we look at who people follow, just as numbers, rather than looking at whys, or strategy or deeper meaning, we really learn nothing useful about them. I used to basically not follow anyone back I didn’t know, and then I realized I was missing out on lots of possible relationships that might be helpful, if I took a more open approach.

If you look at the people I follow on Twitter, it’s generally a combination of friends, people I’ve met at conferences, people and businesses in Delaware and Philly (my “hood”), places I’ve gone or am intending to go, business contacts, people and businesses I want to learn about, fellow members of the bar, social media types, teachers and folks I can help- there are many distinct groups and social circles I cultivate, all for very different reasons and to stay “in the know” as much as possible.

This means my ratio of friends and followers is no longer “in sync” and I’m starting to follow more people than are following me. But given the number of broadcast-only channels available on twitter, this one to one metric on friends and followers is no longer the same metric is was back in the day. The rules about Twitter and how to use it continue to evolve, as the numbers and types of people on Twitter continues to evolve. And it means I’m going to go ahead and follow people to get news and hope to interact and add value, regardless if the feeling is always mutual. I will follow people because I think there’s value or potential value there, not just a quid pro quo in a quest to increase stats.

As we look at Twitter, what it’s good for, the “right” way to use it, and what all these numbers mean, I think we’re going to have to continually evaluate that the ground rules change as the audience changes and evolves as well.

Metcalf’s law tells us the more nodes, the more value there is in the network, and as Twitter evolves, it’s the power and diversity of your network, and well as the strength of those ties – the mutual exchange value of those ties- that provide the worth. But much of the perceived value of influence (and any attached metric) is just a guess at what the real emotions are that people feel when they connect or their friends recommend things to them. I’m not sure we’ll ever really know how influential and meaningful we are to people, but I know that the numbers don’t tell the whole story of the value we each add or extract from the network as a whole. That’s something only the individual can really know, and I, for one, will not let these numbers or old rules about balance or ratios rule what I do on these networks.

As my dear friend CC Chapman says- Rules are like rubber bands- time to go out and stretch and even break a few. The old rules are not the rules that apply now, and wisdom lies in knowing which ones to throw out and when. Make sure you let your “hard and fast” rules change and evolve, and take all of that advice everyone hands out with a grain of salt. Do what’s best for you, and experiment. Without that, you are looking for cookie cutter results in an improv world.

Currently, I’m in the process of editing my ongoing book project with Jenifer Fox.  We’re taking months of work and cutting out the fat, getting down to the basics, and making a complex topic ultimately more useful and understandable to those who pick up our work.  This process of narrowing down, making things more direct and useful isn’t always easy.  I worry that in the process, we are leaving out useful advice, or things we’ve learned along the way.

But I’m also realizing that much like the “great books”  the book itself is often a starting point for a conversation, not the whole thing.  As my Jewish friends know, the Torah is great, but the commentaries and divining the meanings and applications have gone on for centuries. Sooner or later, you have to decide that the text is meant to be a starting point, but the interesting stuff comes afterwards, in the application of the ideas or suggestions into practice, and what happens when theory and prediction meet the real world.

Chris Penn did a great job today summarizing Accomplishment into Means, Motive and Opportunity. (A post well worth your time, so please go give it a read.)  This is a great example of boiling down what it takes to get something done into an easy to remember framework that’s portable to almost any situation.   We love getting everything down to fundamental mantras and lists- it makes information compact and portable.  But like anything else, simplicity and ease of use are great design features- but the payoff is in the end utility.  This great chair is awesome, but the one in the museum is fundamentally useless to me as anything other than an object d’art- it’s only useful if it’s in my office, or I do something with this idea of chair and carry it forward into another realm.

One of the things I love about the Apple products I use is they are all about simplicity and making it easy to get work done.  The keyboard, the touchscreen, the mouse, the monitor- whatever- are as simple and clutter-free as possible, providing the minimal number of hurdles and distractions between you and your goals.  The more straight-forward, the less complicated, the easier it is to get to the heart of the matter.  And like the book editing, or the Eames chair, or the “top three things to eat for breakfast” list,  simple makes interactions easy.   But the really interesting stuff happens under the hood, when you understand the deeper levels of what went into the design, why it works well, and the active choices that went into the simplification.

Simple and straight forward is awesome.  It takes lots of work.  But for those of you skimming the surface of simple and finding that it seems “too easy” or you aren’t getting the results you want, remember that you also have to deep dive for more nuanced information at your own option.  The simple are merely icons for the more interesting and useful stuff underneath, and it’s up to you to learn and  discover more.

A bunch of the folks I know in social media are writing books these days, and as someone who both consults and speaks on social media to businesses, I wasn’t sure how useful a book on creating content would be for me personally.  Content Rules surprised me by its fantastic “let’s just talk about what’s important” tone- I felt like CC and Ann and I were having a really great lunch, talking about what matters to us all.  Content Rules lays out not only the important methods to help create great and compelling content, but answers all the background questions as to why, and what to expect, as well as how to set goals for measuring your success with a content-based strategy- whether you are in business, in education, or just looking to develop your own corner of the world.

Between the How To’s and “Ideas You Can Steal”, Content Rules brings home the scaffolding people need to understand how to create great content, much like Made To Stick gives a framework for creating memorable messages regardless of your end goals.  Content Rules will be one of the books I can eagerly recommend to audiences, clients and friends who are trying to grasp the ever-changing scope of what’s happening online, by focusing on the threshold issue at hand- Create stuff that people want to read, hear, watch and care about, and do it in a way that fits with who you are and what you want to accomplish.

Don’t miss this book.

The web started out as a way for academics to share information.  They built the web as a “platform” for these conversations.  I don’t think they could have forseen what it has become over time, because it has evolved, as the needs of people using it have changed over time, with each new tool or site or use adding additional knowledge and information in its wake.  Sure, the idea of a platform, like a blank canvas, that changes as the needs and creativity of the users changes, is amazing.  I’d argue that with that logic, we can look at democracy and capitalism as “just a platform”, but clearly they were created with some sort of intent behind them.

Platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, have clearly evolved over time.  Like the code that runs the web itself, its changed enough that its original form seems barely recognizable, like an old farm house that kept having rooms added on to it until barely anything of the first structure exists.  Sometimes the way the initial foundation is constructed reflects what tools were in use and available at that time, leaving us with archaic pieces glommed on to less efficient pieces of code (cough- Windows- cough).  The question then becomes whether or not to abandon the old to make way for a whole new platform, like the Mac did with its OS based on Unix, or to keep modifying the old, and hope the rickety building sticks together.  The legacy of the old foundation and initial purpose still flows through the veins of the platform, however.

The creators of platforms, ranging from web communities or even the iPod and iPad, may be surprised, and even thrilled at what people have been able to do with their creations, enjoying how these “children” have grown up over time, changed, evolved, and even exceeded the parent’s wildest dreams at the moment of conception.  I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg  has probably had a cringe moment or two when his Mom or old girlfriend contacted him on Facebook, but has also been thrilled that people see him as a visionary and having created something 500 Million people engage in- exceeding the population of the US.

Sometimes its difficult to see what to do with blank canvases.  Sometimes its hard to explain to others “What is it good for? Why do I need to use it?”  But if you ever want someone to engage, to have the platform grow and evolve, you had better be able to answer, even in a simple way, why someone would possibly want to be there, and what the attraction is.  If you can’t bait the hook, you can’t catch the fish, or in business, make the sale.

So, my dear geekarati friends, please have patience with the lay folk and come up with a better and more compelling sales pitch than “it’s just a platform.”  That tends to be what we refer to as content-free speech- words are being said, but the meaning is obscure.

This made me think about the longevity of digital media. Some things, like blogs and podcasts, are more durable. This information is stored not only on your website and servers, but by others, including the Internet Wayback Machine. Twitter, and to a certain extent, Facebook, relies more on real-time day to day content, rather than provide any sort of long term search-ability or archiving. Yet with more and more people sharing news items on Twitter, communicating with customers and the like, how much of this information will continue to exist in the future? What becomes “evidence” could be saved for later on, whether its for journalists researching a story, hisotrians, or even laywers?  Would this stuff be admissible in a Court of Law? I’m not sure whether or not we know the answer to any of these questions yet.

For me, I often share information and links on Facebook, sometimes for me, sometimes for friends. I’ve opted to share many things through Delicious, and to Facebook through Friendfeed. This means I have a tagged list of blog posts and articles, creating my own clip file, my own library and encyclopedia that grows over time. But if I only tagged this stuff and shared it out through Twitter, it would likely be gone.

How much of what you are creating online is meant to have a lifespan?  How long to you want to be held responsible for opinions, tweets, snarky comments, etc.?  How much is intended to be in the moment alone?

A case in point is the LD Podcast.  I have had the show on hiatus, and I’m working hard to put it back into production in the near future, spurned on by recent emails from a number of sources who are discovering the content for the first time.  I’m realizing that the content I create has a lifespan far longer than my attention span, and it continues to provide value to others, long after I have taken it for granted.

I hope this provides a little food for thought- Where are you putting your digital media energies?  What’s providing the most real time versus long tail value?  And, what can you do to create both?

Most of all, don’t forget that sometimes, creating content with longevity might actually create the most long term value.

(1) unless they have been stored, archived or otherwise placed in different formats…

Like it or not, we make judgments about people based on the integral of all we know about them.  The baseball player who bets on sports in Vegas is assumed to have a vested interest in tailoring his own play to affect his financial bets, whether or not anyone can prove that that’s true.  We assume Tiger Woods credibility as a spokesperson for various corporations is called into question because of what he has done, or hasn’t done in his personal life.  Bill Clinton apparently had a long reputation of “being a dog that was hard to keep on the porch”, but somehow, he still manages to be a brilliant guy and a pretty great president, overall.

We learn about friends and family these days, not just by our own experience, but by the deluge of information available about them on the web.  Before I meet with a client or speak to a group, I do a Google search to find out a bit about them in advance.  It helps me feel prepared, have a sense of who I think they are, and a chance on meeting in person, to match that preconceived notion, based on web data, with what I see in person.

This is why I try to teach my kids and constantly remind myself that everything I say or do online is the most public of records.  The DM’s I get on twitter, the text messages sent to my phone, my email- all of that- has an illusion of privacy, but it is still discoverable by others, in some way, at some point in the future, legally or illegally.

If you note the recent media discussions about controlled leaks from Apple about the upcoming tablet computer, and rumors of similar controlled leaks in government, you’ll note that these conversations all occur over the phone or preferably in person, aren’t taped or recorded, and provide both parties with plausible deniability because there’s no documented paper trail.

The clear lesson here is that if you want to have a private conversation, clearly don’t leave a voicemail message and don’t put any of it in writing- don’t leave a web or digital or actual paper trail.

This brings me to the point of this post, which is a new service called Blippy, where you can share your recent purchases (and the amount spent) on various sites, including Amazon.com, Netflix, Threadless and iTunes.  You can link a credit card as well, so every time you make a purchase at the convenience store, that, too, is posted to this social network.

Here’s a list of the accounts you can link to Blippy:

iTunes	Amazon	Zappos	Audible
GroupOn	Threadless	StubHub	GoDaddy
Netflix	Blockbuster	SeamlessWeb	Wine Library
Credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX), debit card, or bank account

I am all for living life out loud.  I know people can find almost an infinite set of information out about me- but this crosses the line into kind of stalker-ish territory.  It’s one thing to get pointed to cool apps , books, and music that your friends are buying.  In fact, when looking around Blippy, I found a bunch of great things my friends had purchased, especially books and iphone apps,  that makes it almost certain I will purchase the same, which I am sure is Blippy’s whole marketing attempt.  After all, if you can find out, passively, what your friends are up to and what they’re getting, what better way to keep up with the digital Joneses?  Or even better, find out what your friends are into when it comes to birthday times, or for marketers doing blogger outreach?

However, it’s another thing to be updated every time they buy milk or cigarettes at the convenience store.

And let’s talk about the judgments people make about our private spending habits.

Say I get an account and share with my friends and co-workers.  How long before my boss finds out I rent weird films from Blockbuster?  Or am ordering books on how to develop a side career on Amazon?  How long before a health insurance company figures out you never did quit smoking like you swore you did on those forms?  What if they never see me paying for a gym membership?  What happens if you are buying books on how to make a career transition or how to pad your resume?  What if you ordered books about medical issues?  Or your bill from Wine Library TV seems to indicate you have a serious drinking problem?

Yeah, I don’t much care if all my friends learn I have an old school Tretorn addiction and Zappos is my favorite supplier, but does my husband need to know every single penny I spent there?  What if he gets notifications of things meant as gifts for him?

While it’s great all this information can be aggregated in one spot and I can see it being useful even for companies to track what employees are spending on Company credit cards, this is the first social network in a long time asking us to share information that has long been isolated in your credit card bills, email accounts and the sanctity of your ipod and cell phones.  (I’ve long thought you can learn a ton about someone by seeing the contents of their ipod alone- often leading me to be a bit cautious about giving mine to friends and seeing the plethora of various kid tunes (What? an addiction to Trout Fishing in America?  Really?), my secret like of old school hip-hop, and other music that leads to raised eyebrows in some social circles).

After only a few minutes of poking around, I’m getting more information than I planned about my friends.    Not only did I find out about a great analytics app, but the same person also downloaded the  Playboy app as well.  Clearly  information I probably didn’t need, even if it’s clearly nothing to be prudish about.  Likewise, a recent troll through the people my friends are following led me to Leo Leporte’s account, and the multiple $1,500 purchases he made in a short period of time at the Renaissance in Vegas.   People commented on the site about whether he was paying for his team’s hotel rooms or having a bad night at gaming tables,  but is this information everyone should have? Should Leo have to justify what he was buying to everyone on the internet, or his sponsors?   Likewise, Ev Williams bought a Pregnancy Tracker app for his iPhone.  Does that mean I should offer my husband’s services as an OB-GYN?  Should I start knitting a baby present?  I don’t think so, and that’s why I think Blippy, while a marketer’s dream, is a privacy nightmare.

Feel free to make your own conclusions, but for now, for better or for worse, I think I’ll be keeping my purchases to myself.

Apparently, Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch are in talks where Microsoft would pay the Wall Street Journal to make its contents exclusive and indexed only on Bing and no other search engines.

I found this whole concept kind of shocking.  While I understand that news organizations have to find new revenue streams, I would happily go back to paying for getting the New York Times delivered to my inbox and  iphone rather than this model.  The idea that search will devolve into separate walled gardens, with parts of the ‘net only searchable on certain search engines seems to me to be against the very nature of what the internet was about- to make information open and “findable” in ways it never has been before.  And frankly, if I have to go to yet another website to see if the Wall Street Journal has a piece of news I might need, I might as well go to the WSJ site directly and search their site internally than use yet another search engine.

From Microsoft’s point of view, I can understand how becoming a site that indexes primarily news, for example, might seem like a great competitive advantage.  What it fails to take into account is that money alone isn’t the only thing that matters anymore.  News comes out via non-mainstream media news sites including the Huffington Post, Politico, not to mention the excellent tech blogs like Tech Crunch , Mashable, and Gizmodo.  News is no longer proprietary in the same way it used to be.

It’s going to be virtually impossible for Microsoft to make news a walled off garden, and even if they do, how will they keep people from re-publishing the same material via, say, a tumblr blog and making it easily indexed by Google as well?  Isn’t this just begging for a “Pirate Bay” solution if established?  How long before bit torrents of news are being siphoned out and placed where they can be indexed and re-indexed by any search engine?

There may even be some anti-competitive issues at play here, but as usual, the law drags so far behind actual technology, it will be years and largely irrelevant before that’s all sorted out.

The bottom line here is that information is a precious commodity, but news is only news for a short period of time before even in its old, traditional newsprint form, it starts lining bird cages and train puppies all over the land.  Information now flows faster than we can analyze and process its meaning, which means the value in this play is at most, temporary and ephemeral.

My largest objection is to turning the internet into a series of walled gardens regarding search, and how much more cumbersome it will make finding good and relevant information.  And as the ‘net has already shown us, in the absence of great and thoughtful information, people will simply propagate what is readily available, which may include rumor, innuendo and more.

The Bing/WSJ deal will be an interesting experiment if it happens, but I wonder what it will mean for the future and how long it can last in an economy where information is distilled down to bits and transmitted faster than Marconi ever could have imagined with the radio telegraph.

In an essay talking about how MTV’s “Real World” helped to define reality TV and how everyone becomes a one-dimensional archetype because it’s easier to cast and tell stories than dealing with the real world complexity of ordinary humans, he says near the end, “Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.”  And this struck a real chord with me.

There seems to be a real tension in life between being genuinely interesting, and being identifiable.   You find this in everything from food, to stores to social media.  In food, there’s a group of people who are always looking for the different and inventive (just watch Top Chef) but most Americans seem to eat more frequently at chain restaurants, serving up familiar and predictable fare, even when they are visiting new cities.  This is a clear case of going for Identifiable over Interesting.  Identifiable is predictable and known- you don’t have to think too hard.  Interesting can have upsides, but it’s risky and you don’t know what you’re getting in advance, and that can be pretty scary.

Even in retail, I see a confluence of both stores and merchandise that plays into choosing an archetype over choosing your own style.  Department stores have gone under major consolidation, so you are basically left with the ultra-high end Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom’s, then Bloomingdales and Macy’s, then Sears and JC Penney, who are basically on the same fashion wavelength as Kohl’s and not far behind are Target and Walmart.  The lack of variation leads to a lack of choice, so we see more and more stores popping up with similar pair structures like the Gap/Old Navy and  Ambercrombie/Aeropostale.  When I shop for clothes for my 14 and 11 year old sons, I find wherever I go, my choices come down to Preppy, Sports Kid, Skater Dude, Rockstar/punk, and My Mother Dresses Me.  My choice in clothing for my kids seems loaded with buying into a stereotype, and I feel like I have to guess the right one to avoid too much scrutiny from either teachers or other students.   Getting the line right between “cool” and “I still respect my elders and won’t cause trouble” is not easy at all, but I have to admit, occasional social media conference t-shirts work well to blur this line between cool and geek.

In social media, it can seem like everyone wants to have an “elevator pitch” of who they are and what they do, classifying themselves into archetypes for others.   For those that seem much more complicated than a  simple label, it becomes harder to market your business and ideas because they aren’t easily labeled or defined.  And in an attention-deficit world, anything that’s too complicated gets left at the curb.

Life is easier if we pigeon-hole everyone we know.  They can be classified and re-categorized, but it saves you time and effort and actual thought if you play the archetype game.  It’s easier to identify people, to tag them, to label them, than get to know them.

But in reality, people and friends are more than trading cards.  We may have lots of friends on social networks, but how many of them are friends that would buy you a cup of coffee or let you crash on their couch?  In a quest for new media popularity, are we going for identifiable over interesting because it’s simply easier?   People are more complicated than the simple archetypal mold we try to fit them into.  But it takes time, effort and actually listening to people consistently over time to see past the label and delve into the interesting.

I’m not sure if we can easily walk the line between interesting and identifiable, because interesting simply takes more time and engagement than a simple identification and label system of interfacing with the world does.  But I know I extract more value out of interesting than I ever have from identifiable relationships with others.   So I’ll continue in my quest to be interesting, even though it often seems the vast majority of people value identifiable, because it’s quicker and easier.  What’s your choice?