The new TV show Royal Pains is bringing some attention to an area of Long Island the media likes to call “The Hamptons.” I was born there and growing up we referred to the area as “the south fork.” Or perhaps “the east end [of Long Island]” When I was growing up there were summer people – artists, writers, actors, miscellaneous rich people – who had big summer homes but there were also baymen and farmers – lots of farmers – and it did not get the media attention it does today.

Today there are sort of two dimensions (dimensions in the science fiction sense that they occupy the same physical space but hardly interact) to the Hamptons. There are the rich and famous who occupy one dimension and the other people who live in another. For ease of use I refer to the first group as summer people and the second group as year-round people. Strictly speaking many of the “summer people” come out more than just in the summer and may even live here (I am in East Hampton as I write this) most of the time.

The media (TV and movies) mostly presents a fictional view of the summer people. The year round people are kept in the background. I can’t say I am very familiar with that dimension of the Hamptons though. The year round people a bit more. While I haven’t lived in the Hamptons full-time for 50 years I do visit regularly and my father still lives here. I like to think of myself as a “displaced Bonacker'' who knows something of the area.

The TV show Royal Pains is fairly unique in that it does show some local, year-round people types. The hospital administrator who was born and raised in Southampton (not explicitly stated but the only hospital in the Hamptons is in Southampton – I was born there) for example. The most recent episode showed the star helping a sick fisherman. Why they didn’t add some authenticity by finding a way to refer to him as a bayman I don’t know. Baymen is a general term for people who make their living from the bays and ocean around the Hamptons. That is a word I would have liked to see in the show’s “Hamptons Glossary” but I guess as it is a local word not a summer people word it didn’t make the cut.

It’s going to be interesting to watch this show (Royal Pains) to see how it treats the year round people. My suspicion is that the writers and the people working on the show are more generally influenced by summer people. There are many of them in the TV business. I’m not sure how much interaction they have with year round people other than to buy from them, hire them to do work around their houses and see them in the streets. Will they take on the number of immigrants (legal and otherwise) from south and central America? How about the summer workers from Ireland who come to the area in droves? And what more of the hard working baymen will we see?

I actually wonder how they will handle the rest of the year – not the summer. Will the late season events like the Hamptons International Film Festival (October) be an opportunity to have a bunch of high profile cameo appearances?  Will the Hampton Classic show some international beauty (ever notice how many gorgeous young women need treatment on TV shows?) falling off a horse?

Yeah, I guess I like the show. The doctor is a good guy. The young rich kid he befriends is really interesting. The hospital administrator is more attractive than most of the rich people but is still a strong and complex person one can respect. The brother and the physicians assistant add something good to the mix. The USA Network does seem to do characters well. Plus I like to keep my eye open for places I know. :-)

Note: Strictly speaking a Bonacker is from Springs, a village in the town of East Hampton, but more general usage tends to include the most of the town including the village of East Hampton.

Note: If you go to the East Hampton Village page on Wikipedia you will see a picture of the old Hook Mill windmill. That picture is very close to the view from my bedroom window when I was a small child. Our current house is close by but doesn’t have that view.

There is a saying that knowledge is power which in many ways is quite true. Related to that is that the control of knowledge (information) is also a great power. I’ve seen this several ways in my personal experience. Most recently I was on a jury. Over and over we were told to make our decisions based only on the information (evidence) that was presented to us. We were not to do any outside research on our own. No visits to the scene, no reading in newspapers, no Internet searches, nothing outside the court room. The clear goal is to let the lawyers with some help from the judge completely control the information we had.

That is the way the system is supposed to work and I guess it is mostly a good one. But for someone who likes to look up thing and dig deeper it was a little frustrating. I don’t like it when others control my access to information. But I played by the rules even though I felt like I was missing information.

More in the past was my involvement on a school district budget committee. In that role I and the other members were charged with setting the annual budget for a school system. The administration (business manager and superintendent) had almost complete control over the information we had available to do that work. Oh we could ask other people (principals, department heads, and teachers for example) but even with that for much of what we needed the administration was our only option. I remain convinced that there were times when we were “played” to some extent. Not that I suspect the administration of ill intent just that in order to get what they thought was important then controlled what we knew,

The great myth about the Internet is that it removes or bypasses the filters to information. That it empowers people by providing information they did not always have. It’s a nice story and to a great extent there is truth there. But some information is never going to be fully available online. It is in people’s heads and passed by word of mouth. It is hidden in obscure language and/or jargon. Over time some of it will be exposed but there is so much out there. Which brings up information hiding. The old stick the needle in a haystack principle. Search engines can only help so much.

Ultimately you have to be able to trust people. Trusting the powerless is so much easier than trusting the powerful though. Insisting on more transparency and holding people accountable for providing information will help. Setting standards of transparency will help create an environment were it is expected. But I think it will take time. The powerful do not relinquish power easily and the power to control information is a temptress.

I’m the son of a pastor so I could really relate to this. Funny because of the bits of truth in it.

I spent four nights on a cruise ship last week. For a couple of reasons I gave in to buy some Internet time. I wanted to post a daily blog entry on the trip, I had some important things I needed email for, and I sort of wanted to check in on twitter – mostly to promote the blog posts. So I bought 100 minutes to use over the four days. That’s 25 minutes a day total. It forced me to closely conceder what I was doing on the Internet.

The blog posts were easy. I drafted them using Windows Live Writer and then used but a few minutes to post them to the web and quickly check traffic and comments on previous posts. Email was also easy. While I was posting to the blog Outlook was downloading incoming email and uploading previously written replies and other messages. Likewise reading blogs, which I didn’t do a lot of, was also easy as RSS Bandit downloaded posts for later offline reading. But Twitter? Not so easy.

What I did first with Twitter was to post about my blog post – an addin handles that automatically.  I then quickly looked at Direct Messages and @ Replies so that I could quickly and briefly respond to those as appropriate. And maybe I scanned the most recent Tweets from the people I follow. But other than that Twitter was not something I could participate in as usual.

While blogging and email probably seemed as normal to most people I’m sure people could easily tell that I wasn’t Twittering much. Well if they were paying any attention at all – not a sure thing. But for me I felt like I was missing a lot. There was none of the usual conversations or casual banter I am used to on Twitter. I missed it all very much. I think I could easily handle rationing my online email and blogging activity but that is because there are tools for that. There is nothing to really gather a lot of Twitter traffic for reading and responding to while offline. Maybe a coding project for me? Could be but I need to find the time. Anyone know of something like this already out there?

Twitter seems to have started with the geek world but these days I think it has grown beyond that. Today I see a lot of celebrity twittering, business tweeting (in a good way mostly) and conversation in various circles that may or may not be geeky in the way we normally see geeks. A couple of examples.

This post in the Washington Post called Twittering Leaders To Learn From is one example about what is happening with business twittering. Yes there are two tech companies on the list but there is also a congressman and two leaders from the publishing industry – newspapers and books. Yes, people who print things on paper. If you do a search engine search for “comcastcares +twitter” you will find a lot being written about Frank Eliason from Comcast. Yes Comcast is about cable TV, Internet and phone service with is somewhat tech related but Frank’s work is customer service – business work that any business has. More and more companies are using Twitter to put a human face on their company and their business. This is much the same way as blogging has been used but somehow blogging still feels more geek-world while Twitter feels more real world. Perhaps that is just my perception but maybe other people see it the same way.

And then there are small sub-worlds in Twitter. take education for example. There are huge numbers of people talking about education on Twitter. Yes, some of it is edtech related but much of it is broader – school reform, charter schools, classroom management, and general “water cooler” talk. Check out the list of people who have tagged themselves with the education tag at WeFollow for example. Over a million people have used that tag there. The edtech tag at WeFollow has fewer than 200,000 people. Still a large number but small compared to the over all education total. If you look at WeFollow’s tag list you’ll see a lot of huge groups though.

But it seems like celebrities are really taking over in the area of huge followings. Ashton Kutcher (aplusk) has over 700,000 followers.  Demi Moore (mrskutcher) has over 400,000 followers. Ubergeek Robert Scoble (scobleizer) has only 78,000+ followers. What a contrast!

Now of course celebrities use Twitter differently than business twitters and in fact differently than the traditional models of using Twitter. In some ways it is still about building personal brand of course. So the goal may be similar. Businesses want to make friends and influence people, solve customer problems and promote the company. Celebrities want to build a larger and stronger fan base. It’s similar in some ways but in other ways I think it is different. First off companies are usually coming from behind. They have to win people over. They have to fix customer issues, present a more human face and generally work to improve their image. that means they have to follow more people, use direct messages at times and more directly interact with followers.

Celebrities are building on a relationship where people already like them but that want to see a more personal side. They can interact with each other (other celebrities – apparently conversations between Ashton and Mrs. Kutcher are particularly popular) and less with followers. They don’t have to follow a lot of people themselves. Now if they do interact with followers (and apparently Shaq O'Neil (The_Real_Shaq) does that a lot) so much the better. But more people are probably wondering about what is going on between Mark Cuban (mcuban – owner of the Dallas Mavericks) and Shaq that what he is saying to general fans. (BTW I recommend a blog post by Don Dodge (@dondodge) titled Celebs on Twitter Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Britney Spears top the list for more on how celebrities are using Twitter.)

The edge cases on Twitter these days are probably not the geeks like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki who follow as many people as follow them in large numbers but the people like Ashton Kutcher who are followed by completely insane numbers of people.

This doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t there for the rest of us though. Personally I am loving interacting with a lot of educators, friends, co-workers and even family on Twitter (at AlfredTwo). I’ve avoided most of the celebrities, cut back on the pure tech/geek plays I follow but added some news sources. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with news sources (NY Times, PBS, CNN, etc) on Twitter in particular and online in general over the next year.

I expect to see general business grow as well as informal non-business circles of followers and friends. Twitter is a platform and there is room for a lot of interesting uses there.

Thanks to Twitter  (a Tweet by Angela Maiers) I found a post called Five Twitter Analytics Tools You Might Find Addictive. I’ve tried all five of them and yes they can be addictive. I wrote a little about some of these five plus Twitter counter in an earlier post called Twitter Stats – Entertainment Value Only. If you’ve read that post you  know I am somewhat skeptical of any of these statistic sites but that hasn’t kept me from looking at them from time to time.

So if you are at all interested check out Five Twitter Analytics Tools You Might Find Addictive and get a good basic understanding of what these stats sites offer.

BTW an other site you may find interesting is Reteetist. Retweetist provides statistics on the number of times people’s Tweets are “retweeted” or passed along to new sets of followers. So if you want to get some idea of who or how often things you tweet are retweeted this may be a fun site to play with.

The first thing you have to know is that I am somewhat addicted to statistics. Especially if I am involved at all. So of course statistics for things like my blogs, Facebook, online forums and Twitter take up too much of my personal time. Lately I’ve been looking a lot at Twitter statistics. basically I’m finding them not all that useful. The two big reasons for this is that most of them are opt-in and that the Twitter API limits how much information one can get at a time.

By opt-in I mean that people have to tell the grading services that there is an account that they should  be looking at. TwitterCounter has words on its page that suggest it goes looking for people. Could be but I’m sure they are not finding everyone. So if no one involved with a twitter account tells the service about it then it doesn’t get counted. I suspect that really serious twitter users know about these services and check in on them so it may be that under reporting leans to people who don’t use Twitter that much. Also since one can’t get as much information as one might like on a timely basis there is a long lag time and ratings can easily get out of sync with reality.

But Let’s look at a couple of rating sites.

Twitterholic uses raw follower count to rate Twitter users. The more followers the higher your rating (the lower the rank number). Twitterholic also rates users for locations. This is hard because people are not entering their locations in a consistent format. But they try.

TwitterCounter also just uses follower count for there ranking. If you look at the chart below you will find that my account has a much lower ranking at Twitter Counter than it does at Twitterholic. Clearly Twitter Counter tracks more people. Twitter Counter promises Top 100 lists by location and they seem to usually work for the top 100. Beyond that not so much. There don’t break things down by states but by time zone. A couple of US states are their own time zone though which makes that interesting in a way. On the other hand people are entering time zones in their profiles that have little or no relationship with their actual location. We begin to really understand the problems with location data in Twitter accounts now.

Twinfluence and Twitter.Grader both take the statistics a step or two further. Twinfluence takes into account the number of followers ones followers have. This results in a reach number – the theoretical number of people (ignoring duplicate followers) that a twitter message could reach if every follower sent that message on to their followers. So people whose followers have a lot of followers score higher than those who have a lot of followers who don’t themselves have many followers. Did I lose you yet?

Twitter.Grader uses a similar scheme where the value of your followers is a big part of your own score. This just begs for a recursive mess but it seems to work. Sort of. The thing that stands out here is that my position in the list (raw score) is better in Twinfluence but the percentile I fit into is higher in Twitter.Grader. I’m not sure how to parse that except that Twinfluence probably knows a lot fewer Twitter accounts and the way they rate people is different from Twitter.Grader.

Speaking of other effects of different users being followed. You will notice that Twitterholic rates me as that 13th most followed twitter account but Twitter.Grader ranks me at 24th. This is not because of the way Twitter.Grader ranks people so much as that they know a lot more Twitter accounts than Twitterholic.  All of the people Twitter.Grader shows as higher ranking in the state than me have higher follower counts. Several NH Twitter users who have lower Twitter.Grader scores also have higher follower counts. So the value of the Twitterholic count is marginal in my opinion.

I think these rankings may be of some use for comparison within the tools but not across the tools. Also I think as absolute values they are limited for anything beyond amusement purposes. I’m always looking for other Twitter rating/ranking services BTW so if you know of any drop a comment or Twitter me @alfredtwo.

Now twitter could create good rankings if they wanted to.. They have much easier, faster and more complete access to the data. It could be as simple as rating by followers of course or as complicated as they want. It’s probably an open question as it if there is a good reason for them to do it though. There is plenty of gaming of the system as it is and better ratings might make that worse.

Every so often I start to feel like there is no more room to stuff information in my brain. Today is one of those days. Now I know from experience that given a little time my brain will reorganize things and Ill be able to fit more in. I’m not sure if it tosses stuff away or what. I guess if it tossed information away it would probably do so in a way that I didn’t know it was missing. On the other hand from time to time it occurs to me that I used to know something that I can’t quite seem to remember.

Or maybe there is long term storage in my brain some where and it just takes a while for things to get moved there. A philosophical question perhaps?

None of this would be a problem if I felt like I already knew everything I wanted or even needed to know. But no! There is a lot I still want to learn.

Hopefully I’m just tired and I’ll be fine by Monday. Or maybe I need some time off. Frankly I think that this mental reorganization is what vacations and to some extent sleep are for.  So maybe I should get to bed? :-) No time for vacation just yet.

Anyone else ever feel this way? Is it an age thing do you think? Or am I just mentally deficient? (A claim that I have heard in the past but usually from really stupid people. :-) )

Many years ago, long before most people had Internet access, I was involved in a great many online discussion forums on a company internal network. One of my friends and mentors back then was a man named Simon Szeto. Simon had been born in Hunan province in China, grownup up in Hong Kong and received his university training in the US. We both worked for the same US multi-national company at the time. He was based in Hong Kong at one point (prior to the UK handing Hong Kong back to China) and there were some issues that were creating quite a buzz at the time. Simon had opened an online forum to discuss the issue. Despite the fact that is was primarily a Chinese issue (I forget exactly what it was but I believe it had something to do with concerns about HK returning to China) most of the comments were coming from Americans and Europeans. Simon asked me to help moderate the discussion because the time difference meant that many potential troublesome comments were coming way outside his awake hours.  This was an interesting learning experience for me on several levels. But one thing sticks out above all.

I asked Simon why there was such an imbalance in where the comments were coming from. His reply was “The difference between Chinese people and Americans is that when the Chinese people have nothing to say they say nothing.”

Now I am an American and it is quite true that I have a lot of trouble keeping quiet. Like all too many Americans I seem to always want to put in my 2 cents worth. This is no less true online than it is in person. Still since that early conversation years ago I have tried to only say something when I actually have something to say. With mixed success of course. I confess that too often I give in to the urge to add a “me to!” sort of reply to a post or to create such a post myself. I look at my blog and think “I need to say something today.” I look at Twitter and think “No one has heard from me today.” All with the self absorbed conceit that people are out there waiting for me to say something. It’s part of my personality.

But I also find that the people I respect the most, the people whose opinions/writings are the most useful to me are the people who avoid saying things when they have nothing to say.

The best blogs are not the ones who have ten posts a day or even those who post 6-7 times a week. They are the blogs where a post shows up only when the person has something of value to say – something that adds to the conversation in a material way. There are many prolific bloggers out there who are quoted and linked to regularly that I have just given up on following. The noise to value ration is just not there. Often I see the valuable information they post somewhere else long before it shows up there – Slashdot being a great example BTW. It will show up in the post of someone whose posting rate is lower but whose value proposition is higher.

As I find myself overwhelmed with blog posts to read – caused by insatiable curiosity rather than actual need – I find myself looking at dropping the most prolific of blogs and focusing on value. Does the blogger have something new, original,to say or do they have real added value for the conversation? Are they the first to break news in a new area with a good, fresh explanation of why it matters? Or do they say things even when they have nothing to say? That is the new criteria I am using to narrow down my RSS feeds.

At the same time I look at activity on this blog. I’m writing less. Is that good or bad? Hopefully it means I am wasting less time for people. I see that links to my blog are way down. Is that because I am falling into the trap of saying things when I have nothing to say? Could be. Is it because I am saying less? That could be as well. But the goal should not be to write for volume but for value. Perhaps if I focus on that this blog (and my others as well) will develop a value proposition that will get people to follow, comment and link. And that would be a good thing. But even if the traffic isn’t there the value of the blog to me as a person will be better if I use it only to add to the conversation, to clarify my own thinking with original thought and when I have nothing to say I say nothing. That’s my goal as I rethink and reinvest my time with this blog. Please feel free to keep me honest BTW.

Lately it seems like as soon as I close my eyes at night my mind starts working on blog posts. I start thinking about something and my mind organizes my thoughts in the way they would be organized for a blog. The problem is that I’m really trying to get to sleep so the posts never actually get written. In fact it seems like as soon as I open my eyes and get out of bed the mind shuts down and I lose the whole thought line. Sigh!

So the end result is that mentally I have written a lot of posts but the blogs themselves are not seeing any activity. I’m not sure what this all means.

Has my mind become hard-wired to thinking in 500-1000 word bites? Is this good or bad? I need to think about this.

My favorite Margaret Thatcher quote is “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.” I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a huge pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said “Sexy ass woman driving a big ass truck.”  While there is no question that was a “big ass truck” I have a real hard time seeing the driver as a “sexy ass woman.” Well unless “sexy ass” has nothing to do with appearance. This woman was scary. Every time I have seen a bumper sticker or a license plate that indicated the driver/owner was sexy, beautify or otherwise attractive the bumper sticker was saying things that where contradicted by seeing the driver.

So I was thinking, if you have to tell people you are sexy are you really? Or is it just what you want to think of yourself as? I made the same statement with regards to being a new media expert recently. If you have to tell me you are an expert in blogging or Twitter or other social media isn’t that a sign of something missing?

Sure if you have things to tell me so that I can conclude you are an expert myself that’s fine. Or if someone else tells me “oh so and so is an expert” maybe I’ll listen. Although to be honest I’ll probably want some sort of evidence. There are too many cases of the one eyed man leading the blind out there in social media.

I see people put themselves out as experts on social media all the time. All too often they have Technorati rankings lower than mine (on my main blog which even when it was double what it is now was not that impressive) or they are “Twitter experts” and they have a follower count or a Twitter grader rank lower than mine. Not that I am an expert or anything like a social media star. I know people who are blogging, Twittering, Friendfeed, Facebook stars and trust me I am no where near where they are. I’m just saying that if you are a media star there should be statistics to back it up.

And there are other things. Like being smart or knowledgeable. Don’t tell me you are – act like you are and I’ll figure it out.

Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t have positive self-images of themselves. If someone wants to look in the mirror and see a smart, sexy, just incredible person go ahead. I do. But I don’t go around trying to convince people that the thin, athletic, smart sexy guy with a full head of hair I picture in my head when I think of myself is necessarily the same as their reality.

Today marks five years of blogging for me. That day was a Saturday as well. Funny how things work out.

I have to say that time does fly when one is having fun. My first blog post was at a blogging/community site called the Spoke. I wrote about business travel that day. It was the start of an experience that has made me friends and acquaintances all over the world. And broadened my thinking on many topics.

Today the Spoke has been closed but I have moved my blogging in more directions. I blog about social computing and other more random topics at by blog on Live Spaces – my Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher  blog. I blog about computer science and education topics at blogs.msdn – my high school Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson blog. I blog about random stuff at  Mr T's rants and ravings – a blog hosted by a former student. And I micro-blog at http://twitter.com/alfredtwo Perhaps I should consolidate into one blog somewhere. Perhaps one day I will. But for now this is working for me.

So to all who read my blogs, link to my blogs, comment on my blogs and those who have participated in blogging with me for the last five years – Thanks!

Playing around with creating tags that can be read by smart phones. Information on the tool at http://www.microsoft.com/tag/ or go to http://gettag.mobi from your web enabled phone. US only right now. What phones? From the FAQ:

The Microsoft Tag Reader is available for most smartphones and many feature phones. It is available on Windows Mobile, J2ME, iPhone, Blackberry, and Symbian S60 phones. Of course, your phone needs a camera and it must have Internet-access. A detailed list of all supported phones is available and new phones will be added over time.

Links to my vCard online.

Links to my other blog.

If you do a search engine search for something like “decide who to follow on Twitter” you will find that there are lots of opinions out there. And yes, you guessed it, I have my own. :-) Some people will tell you to follow everyone. And yes you can do that. It’s easy enough. For some goals it is a great way to go. I guess. It just still scares me. I’m having trouble with the whole idea of just view it as a river and dip in randomly and you’ll find good things. True but what will I miss?

For me there are a bunch of people who I follow that I really care about (think my brother and his daughter and the people in the group I work in for example). There are other people whose Tweets are just generally so worth it that I don’t want to miss them either. I want to be a part of their conversations. It gets complicated and I have a lot of other things to do besides follow Twitter. I do use Tweetdeck and I have groups to track all replies to me, a group of in real life friends and people not to miss, a group for Education people and a group for everyone. That’s pretty much the order I scan the Tweets. It works and I guess I could auto follow everyone with that but I don’t. Why? Well because I still want to try to read everyone at times. So I have a plan.

1. Do I know them? If I read their blog or know them personally I follow.
2. Read their bio to see if we have things in common. If they are in education or work for a company I’m interested in then I follow. If they are all about search engine optimization I don’t follow. If they are a social networking person/consultant I probably don’t follow unless I know their reputation already. Sorry but I worry about people looking for an easy way to build a reputation based on Twitter followers. No bio is not an automatic nofollow but in that case I need another good reason to follow them.
3. Check out their avatar and website. Not having a web site or a real avatar is not an automatic nofollow but it is something I like to see. A website lets me learn more about them but a lot of people who interest me do not have blogs or web pages.
4. Look at what they Twitter. Are they engaged in conversation? That would be good. Are they saying things that suggest there is more than just casual conversation going on? I do like some casual conversation and engage in it myself. It lets me know that they are real people and not all about the self-promotion. But I like to see some “meat” in the conversation now and again as well.
5. What is the ratio of followers to following? This one can go either way with me. It’s not the pure ratio but the absolute numbers. If they are following 1,999 people and are being followed by 125 I can pretty much count on them to unfollow me soon if I don’t follow them and shortly there after if I do. They are building a following and not really interested in what I have to say. I want Twitter to be a conversation not a broadcast.
6. Who are they following and who is following them. Someone who is following a lot of people I follow, even if they don’t have a lot of followers themselves, is probably someone I want to follow. When they say something I probably want to know about it. Plus it may let me see both sides of more conversations and that is good for learning.
7. What does my gut say? Yeah sometimes I follow or not based on feelings. Occasionally that bits me and I have started following one or two people later based on replies they sent me or someone else I follow. The thing is to be open about rethinking following as time goes on.

In the end I have not hard and fast rules. Somehow with Twitter I don’t think hard and fast rules are the way to go.

BTW if you want to see other lists and strategies check out:

• FOLLOW FAIL: The 10 Reasons I will Not Follow You On Twitter
• How Do You Decide Who to Follow on Twitter?

And of course you can follow me on Twitter (if I fit what you are looking for) at http://twitter.com/alfredtwo

OK it’s a morbid topic and if you don’t want to face it leave now. I on the other hand have no choice but to think about it. I’ve got stuff on my mind and the need to write them down and put them somewhere. Oh and frankly I no patience for euphemisms like “passing away” or what ever. Death is death and dying is dying. So if you have no stomach for plain talk of death you may want to read something else.

I don’t expect to die any time soon and of course I have never done it before. But I’ve lost too many loved ones not to be aware of it. With my own Dad in poor health I worry that I will see it again all too soon. Hopefully not right away but probably not that far away either.

I am not afraid of death. I’m in no hurry to try it out of course but as a Christian I believe as it is written in Philippians 1:21 “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” So I spend more time worrying about those I will leave behind than about myself.

There are two basic ways to die – quickly and slowly. Quickly is probably the best way for the person actually dying. I’ve watched a bunch of people go through slow lingering deaths. Trips in and out of hospitals, gradual failing of body and mind, tests and operations and alls sorts of people poking at parts of the body that would otherwise be none of their business. It’s painful emotionally, physically and in any way one can think of. Falling asleep and never waking up seems so much easier. Well for the person who dies. For the people left behind not much fun.

Both quick and slow deaths are hard on people who stay behind but in different ways. I’ve had several friends die quickly (at least from my point of view) in that I either didn’t know they were sick or they had sudden unexpected deaths. That was hard. There was no closure, no saying goodbye and now time to prepare myself for losing them. On the other hand watching someone be sick a long time and in pain is no great joy either. But in some sense there is closure and a time to reconcile differences, say goodbye and adjust to the future without them.

So perhaps there is no good way to die for all involved. I think I want to go quickly though. It may be harder, initially, for those who are left behind but in the long run I think maybe they will be better off not watching me suffer. I’m pretty sure I’d rather not suffer. And as full of watching suffering as I have been in my live I think that can take a toll on people that they may not be aware of. They may think they want to hold on to every second no matter how much their loved one is going through but at some point I think one wants to see their loved one end their suffering.

The term quality of life means more to me every day. The more I look at it life at any cost and in any condition is not always the best way for everyone.

I don’t mean me – at 55 I do not consider myself near to being old yet. But I’ve been having more experiences with people who are really old the last few years. Being old is not just a matter of age though. Its largely a matter of how the years have been passed. Has there been sickness or injury? Is the mind still working the way it used to work or has their been some degradation? A lot of factors come into play. So when I think of old as in someone is old I think of a big drop in physical and mental ability that is based largely on age and wear and tear on the body.

I’m writing this from a facility that takes care of old people both on a long term residency and a short term rehabilitation capacity. The people who are hear long term are hard for me. They fall asleep at random times even while sitting up. I saw one man with his face in his lunch plate for a short time until someone of the staff noticed. They wander around pretty much aimlessly with little apparent idea of their surroundings. Others are more mentally alert but just as physically unable. It feels like a storage facility in some ways. I could not leave my Dad alone at  this time of his life.

That is not a knock on the staff who all seem both very caring and very competent. It’s not so much a knock on the family of these people as I know from experience how draining it can be to care for a loved one who has diminished capacity (physical, mental or both). People have to make hard choices and sometimes that means different priorities. Different is not always right or wrong but just different.

My wife and I cared for her mother for many years in our home. We’re glad we did it for the quality of her life. But it was not always easy and I can understand not everyone is up to it. In fact watching my Dad (83) struggle to recover from his recent back surgery is really tough for me.

As tough as it is for me its a lot harder on my Dad. He is so used to being so independent for so long that this dependency is painful for him. He’s frustrated by the slow recovery and aware of the struggle his mind and body both are going through. Being away from home makes it all worse because of the unfamiliar surroundings. That’s why I’m here in Texas 1800 miles from home – to be a comfortable familiar face for him. My brother who lives here had surgery of his own and isn’t up to what Dad needs. I’m very happy I could come to help. On Sunday my sister arrives to help and a few days later I go home. We’re all glad their are several of use to share the load. Though honestly at a time like this I wish we all lived closer together to make things easier. But that is life in the modern age I guess.

But I wonder what will my son do? He’s an only child. Poor kid.

Just for fun. A bit US centric in some regards. Also the Girl Scout and giving birth line make me think this was targeted at women originally. I have made adaptations.

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to - leave in plain font

1. Started your own blog. 
2. Slept under the stars. 
3. Played in a band. 
4. Visited Hawaii. 
5. Watched a meteor shower. 
6. Given more than you can afford to charity. 
7. Been to Disneyland/world. Both several times. 
8. Climbed a mountain. Not sure what counts so I’ll say yes. 
9. Held a praying mantis.

10. Sang a solo.
11. Bungee jumped. No. It's not going to happen, either.
12. Visited Paris. 
13. Watched a lightening storm at sea. 
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch. 
15. Adopted a child. 
16. Had food poisoning. 
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty.  Very hot in the summer.
18. Grown your own vegetables. 
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France. 
20. Slept on an overnight train. 
21. Had a pillow fight. 
22. Hitch hiked. 
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill. Hasn't everyone?
24. Built a snow fort. 
25. Held a lamb. 
26. Gone skinny dipping. 
27. Run a marathon. Not happening either. That’s crazy talk. 
28. Ridden a gondola in Venice. 
29. Seen a total eclipse. Of both the sun and the moon.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset. 
31. Hit a home run. Does stickball count?

32. Been on a cruise. 
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person. 
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors. Visited the farm in Norway where my grandfather came from and Fredrickstad where my grandmother was from. 
35. Seen an Amish community. 
36. Taught yourself a new language. 
37.Had enough money to be truly satisfied.

38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person.
39. Gone rock climbing. 
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David in person. 
41. Sung Karaoke. 
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt. I have seen the original geyser in Iceland though.
43. Bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant. 
44. Visited Africa. 
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight. 
46. Been transported in an ambulance. An over rated experience. 
47. Had your portrait painted. 
48. Gone deep sea fishing. 
49. Seen the Sistine chapel in person. Been to the Vatican but somehow missed this stop
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Wonder if the half size version in Vegas counts for anything? 
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling. 
52. Kissed in the rain. 
53. Played in the mud. 
54. Gone to a drive-in theater. This one is getting harder all the time 
55. Been in a movie. I was an extra sitting in the stands for the movie Celtic Pride. Does that count? 
56. Visited the Great Wall of China. 
57. Started a business. With my wife a retail store.
58. Taken a martial arts class 
59. Visited Russia. .
60. Served at a soup kitchen. I
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies. I sold Boy Scout stuff very well. Helped take orders for Girl Scout cookies from time to time.
62. Gone whale watching. 
63. Gotten flowers for no reason. 
64. Donated blood. 
65. Gone sky diving. I don’t like to leave operating airplanes.
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp.
67. Bounced a check. So it happens. 
68. Flown in a helicopter. 
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy. 
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial. 
71. Eaten Caviar. Surprised to find that I liked it.
72. Pieced a quilt. 
73. Stood in Times Square. Used to work near there and walked through all the time.
74. Toured the Everglades. 
75. Been fired from a job. 
76. Seen the Changing of the Guard in London.  Seen it other places though.
77. Broken a bone. 
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle. I owned a motorcycle for years.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person. 
80. Published a book. Several textbooks.
81. Visited the Vatican. .
82. Bought a brand new car. 
83. Walked in Jerusalem. An inspiring trip to say the least. Want to go back. 
84. Had your picture in the newspaper. 
85. Read the entire Bible. 
86. Visited the White House. 
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating. Fish.
88. Had chickenpox. 
89. Saved someone’s life.
90. Sat on a jury. 
91. Met someone famous. Bill Gates count? How about Bobby Kennedy?
92. Joined a book club. 
93. Lost a loved one. Too many..
94. Had a baby. Does becoming a father count? It should so I’m making this bold. 
95. Seen the Alamo in person. .
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake. No but I have swum in the Dead Sea. 
97. Been involved in a law suit. 
98. Owned a cell phone. This one maybe doesn’t belong these days.
99. Been stung by a bee.

No that title is spelled correctly. On the social networking, micro-blogging service Twitter a user’s message is called a Tweet. When someone reads a tweet, and sends it on to their followers it is called a retweet. It’s a fairly common thing and when people retweet other retweets a message can more to a lot of people very quickly. Yesterday on a whim I sent out a Tweet that asked“who would you rather retweet something you twitted @Scobleizer or @guykawasaki in 140 characters or less, why?”

Within minutes Guy Kawasaki sent me a Twitter reply “guykawasaki: @alfredtwo You should run a social survey for a question like this. Check out socialtoo.com to do it.” So I created an account on socialtoo.com and then a survey. (The survey is here.) I added “someone else” as a voting option. (The survey results are here.) When I sent out the link to that survey Guy retweeted it. OK he left out my name but that is ok. There is only 140 characters to get a message out.

Very quickly the number of replies jumped way up and as I write this 160 people have replied. Not surprisingly Guy is winning in the poll with 109 votes, 34 votes for “someone else” and 17 votes for Robert Scoble. Actually given how much of the traffic the survey must have gotten from Guy’s followers I think Robert did pretty well. I have no idea if Robert even saw the survey.

So what did I learn from this? Well, clearly I did not learn that people were more likely to want Guy to retweet their tweets. This was so far removed from a scientific survey that it actually is funny. But what I did learn was that, as far as I can see, Guy is more likely to retweet something I tweet. Now of course there was some self-interest in his retweeting my survey but at the same time I can’t see that being a huge motivator. Scoble didn’t retweet it and he has a huge ego. (But I like him anyway – really I do.) But it doesn’t fit into his twitter style I don’t think. So even if he saw it he’d need more motivation to retweet. I should say under full disclosure  that I have had Twitter conversations with both men. Robert knows me personally. Guy just from Twitter and a couple of emails.

But I also think, that as I thought about the whole retweet idea, that I learned something more important. When deciding who is the best person or persons to retweet what matters most is who are you trying to reach. That may run in parallel with who is most likely to retweet who also hits your target audience.

For example Vicki Davis (http://twitter.com/coolcatteacher) has about 3,150 followers and Guy has over 37,000. But if I want to reach teachers specifically Vicki is the one I want to retweet my Tweet. Vicki has retweeted things for me and I really appreciate it. As I do several other teachers who have retweeted some of my tweets. Now Guy is a great one to have retweet if you want to send out something interesting that may be fun. Robert may be the guy if you want to reach a lot of high tech influential people. Guy probably reaches a lot of them too of course. BTW There are others with readership as large as those of Guy and Robert but these two make good examples because I follow them and I don’t some of those other people.

The followers matter as much or more than the person who does the retweet. My perception is that Guy has more followers who are willing to have fun with things they see on twitter. They retweet Guys’ tweets often. Robert’s followers largely (and again this is my unscientific perception) take Twitter seriously, more business focused. Oh sure they use it to create meet-ups. And they pass around the occasional joke. But it so often seems like a networking cocktail party conversation while Guy’s conversations are more often like purely social chat amongst friends. Casual though that friendship might be. My mental picture is that Guy tweets with a smile on his face and Robert tweets with a serious business pundit look on his face. Well not always. Robert cracks into a smile easily and a laugh almost as easily but he so often starts serious. Guy feels to me like he has to work at being serious and pundit like.

To some extent Twitter is about “making friends and influencing people.” Which is more important though? Along the continuum I see Guy and a lot of people I follow as leaning to the “make friends” side. As you make friends and as you build a relationship the “influence people” part may come. And clearly Guy has seen his influence grow to help alltop.com and Truemors before that. But people seem to really like Guy.

Robert seems more towards the “influence people” side. Oh sure he has lots of friends on Twitter. I like to think I’m one of them. But it feels like people are interested in influencing him and on being influenced by him more than making friends with him. That is not a criticism BTW. It’s an observation.

Lots of people use Twitter for lots of different things and with lots of different motivations. Someday I hope someone does a real study on the Twitter cultures. That would be interesting.

In just about a month from now the US will have a new President. He will bring change both foreign and domestic. Will he bring in common sense as well? We all hope so. Common sense has long been lacking in American policies. The last President with any serious  foreign common sense was  Nixon. Both men had other flaws of course but at least in this area I was impressed with them. Carter and Reagan? Not as bad as the last two Presidents but and they seemed focused on small parts of the world. They didn’t pay that much attention to south America or Africa. Not enough anyway. And forget India because most of our recent Presidents seem to have while in office. And in my mind the only President who really understood China was Nixon.

China and India are two of the main focuses of Fareed Zakaria‘s book The Post-American World. It’s loaded with common sense as well. I think there are two types of people who absolutely must read this book. People who are interested in politics/foreign affairs and people who are interested in business. This book lays out not the decline of America but the rise of other parts of the world. It brings a lot of history into it as well.

I’m a strong believer that to understand the present one has to understand history as well.  This book taught me a lot of history of both China and India that I didn’t know before. Of course US schools are notoriously bad for covering history other than of the west which is probably why we screw up so badly in the middle east, the far east and Africa and South/Central America. We just have too few clues about what is going on and how things got the way they are. Common sense requires knowledge.

So what are my key take aways from this book? Close to home we really need to do two things. Get our energy house in order and get our schools in better shape. Some greater level of energy independence would greatly increase our future development options. China and India are going to require a lot more oil and if we keep our current level of dependence on it prices are going to get higher. Education is the key to innovation and we are going to need that. Really our education system is not as bad as a lot of the media would have us think – at least in the top students – but clearly we need to do better to stay competitive. We do a better job of teaching creative and critical thinking than the rest of the world but that edge is shrinking and we cannot afford that. And by golly we have to turn out more people who have a clue about the world outside our boarders.

Globally the growth of China and India can be a huge opportunity for us if we just grasp it correctly. And as long as we keep our innovation lead. I tell you if every America needed a program like FIRST its now.

But I fear that too much of America, including its politicians and business leaders, are focused on short term fixes, ignoring history and a quick buck over long term growth and stability. How else to explain the current financial melt down? And our failures in the middle east with regards to terror and stability. Of course we are not alone in this. In my opinion both sides in the Arab/Israeli conflict are lacking in common sense. The situation in Saudi Arabia is of dubious stability. And could Africa possibly in a bigger mess? Darfur in the Sudan, Mugabe in Zimbabwe and piracy off the coast of Somalia, just to name a few!  But we can’t count on the rest of the world to screw up worse than we do. Clearly it is time to really get smart about some things.

The book Tribes by Seth Godin seems to be all the rage these days. I keep reading about it in blogs, Twitter, and email from people I know. It’s the latest “answer” though I’m not sure to what problem. So naturally I decided to get a copy and read it. I’m pretty much tired of making up my mind about ideas in books unless and until I’ve read the book myself.

Tribes is an easy read. At about 150 pages I read it in one evening. There are some good things in the  book but I can’t say I learned a whole lot. This is far from the first book on leadership that I’ve read though. At least Godin does point out that knowing the steps of how to lead isn’t enough. There is the art of actually doing those things that is important. He doesn’t get to that until page 121 though and I was thinking it at about page 42 when he started talking about the F word. The F word is fear.

When I was in college I was a pole vaulter. I knew how to do it. In my head. Getting my body to actually do it and do it well was the problem. Could I have overcome my lack of physical prowess? Perhaps but at a cost greater than I was willing to pay. And there is a certain element of natural talent that I’m not so sure I could have ever have overcome. I think it is that way with leadership. Some amount of talent is required and some amount of hard work is required to develop the execution skills. The balance for each individual is different. To say that anyone can be a great leader is like saying everyone can play basketball in the NBA. Of course almost anyone can play basketball and almost anyone can be some sort/level of leader. Some just have to work harder than others to get the same results.

In my opinion fear is the greatest inhibitor to success there is. I’m glad the book addresses it. This is not a book about how to conquer fear though and that is what a lot of people really need. Fear is not a bad thing by the way. Not in and of itself. People who have no fear often fail. They do so because they do not properly evaluate the circumstances and are not properly prepared for what happens. To me, understanding the issues that cause the fear and being able to overcome those problems is the way to beat the fear aside. Oh you do still have to be willing to take risk and jump past things that you can’t completely see a solution for but there is a balance. Sometimes luck is involved and you have to be willing to take that risk.

Two other things in the book stood out for me. One is that no one is going to make you a leader. People who wait for someone to come along and “promote” them to leader are usually going to wait forever. One has to act like a leader; to actually lead. Leaders are recognized (sometimes) but they become leaders on their own and without anyone’s permission. Leaders do not wait for things to happen. They make things happen. Trite? True!

To be a leader you have to be a believer. You have to be passionate about what you are doing. If you need to take a vacation to get away you may not be passionate enough or you may not believe in the value of what you are doing enough. You can’t lead people in a direction you know is wrong. That will fall apart and take you with it.

So I liked Tribes. I’d recommend it to young people and to people who are starting to ask themselves if they have what it takes to be a leader. If you are already a leader you are probably already doing most of the things in this book. Maybe you want to give it to someone you think has unrealized potential as a leader. If you are in marketing or sales you have to read this book because all your peers are reading it, talking about it and trying to figure out how they can create their own tribes to lead. Just don’t forget that you have to actually have great products to hype or your tribe will turn on you and eat you up. :-)