Let’s just add it to the long list of daunting challenges we are facing these days…

clipped from www.nytimes.com “These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’” said Dr. Josep-Mara Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years. The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

Over time, I hope this blog will become another good resource for learning about the online community organizer role, as I will be posting about my experience, and my learning curve, going forward.

clipped from fastwonderblog.com Seth Godin recently called the Online Community Organizer role a Job of the Future. This brings me to the most common question: “What exactly do you do?” I see the online community manager role as having several key elements: ongoing facilitation, content creation, evangelism, and community evolution. There are certainly many more tasks, but I suspect that 90% of the work falls into one of these four very broad categories.

But is *everything* negative that results from multiple factors really worthy of the label, “a perfect storm”? I think not. Instead, it’s a lazy way to explain complicated causal relationships. We don’t have to actually provide any explanation of cause and effect, let alone get bogged down in tedious details to justify a sweeping conclusion. Just call it “a perfect storm” and people will nod in recognition, visualize that monster wave that doomed the fishing boat in the movie, and blithely accept the statement: “Oh, ‘a perfect storm,’ of course — nothing anyone could have done about that!”

Bull. Calling something “a perfect storm” side-steps close examination of culpability. After all, the weather is no one’s fault and a terrible weather event can’t be attributed to any person or group. Poof! Accountability vanishes, drowned like the ship along with careful examination.

I’m sure my little voice won’t “turn the tide” on this, but I hope that soon we’ll reach “the tipping point” (by my reckoning, the previous catchy-I-don’t-want-to-have-to-actually-explain-my-logic phrase) and the lazy use of “a perfect storm” will fade in popularity. Most likely, however, it will only depart when replaced by another, similarly simplistic way of summing complex things up.

OK, if you got this far, thanks for reading and tolerating my English major rant

Skyrocketing energy prices are inflating the costs of living on the distant edges of metropolitan areas.

One of the key changes that may also be accelerated is the shift to more telecommuting. That’s how I can manage my country lifestyle. If you remove your commute completely, or even several days per week, it has a tremendous impact on both time and costs. I’m surprised this angle was not mentioned in the article.
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Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property easier to copy and harder to sell for more than a nominal price.

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The word “elite,” once an accolade, has turned poisonous in American public life, as both the left and the right have twisted it into a code word meaning “not one of us.”

It’s a perverse thing to ridicule the attainment of education and expertise. I really have had a hard time grasping how this shift has happened. I guess I need to read Jacoby’s book. But for a nation that has an inherent (if arrogant) belief that it is the greatest in the world, why do so many of our people resent and distrust those among them who have acquired the knowledge required to make us succeed?
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Mindfulness meditation has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade.

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Roger Cohen’s NYT column, “The Obama Connection,” starts off with a play on Bill Clinton’s famous line from his first presidential campaign (“It’s the economy, stupid”): “It’s the networks, stupid.” Ironically, it’s Bill’s wife and heir-apparent, Hillary, who is implicitly the “stupid” one this time.

More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.

I’d already been following Obama’s use of the Internet for fund-raising and organizing and energizing volunteers (see, Adios, Sound Bites & Fat Cats – Obama is Changing Politics and Barack Obama Is Rocking the Youth Vote and Obama Supporters Are Hip and Artistic and Home Agents Calling for Barack Obama). Cohen’s column nicely connects the dots and lets the picture emerge more clearly.

As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.

So, I found Green’s article, “The Amazing Money Machine,” and read that, too. It’s longer and more in-depth, so if you just want the highlights, Cohen’s column will do the trick, but if you want the full, fascinating story behind Obama’s fund-raising success, don’t miss Green’s account:

Obama is a gifted politician by anyone’s measure, but what distinguishes him from earlier insurgents is his ability to fully harness the excitement that his candidacy has created, in votes and in dollars. Three forces had to come together for this to happen: the effect of campaign-finance laws in broadening the number and types of people who fund the political process; the emergence of Northern California as one of the biggest sources of Democratic money; and the recognition by a few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that the technology and business practices they had developed in their day jobs could have a transformative effect on national politics.

Obama’s campaign is yet another Silicon Valley start-up. We’ve seen these stories play out before, but never on the political stage.

“They’ve gone from zero to 700 employees in a year and raised $200 million,” Steve Spinner says of the campaign. “That’s a super-high-growth, fast-charging operation.” It’s also one whose growth curve is coming into sharper focus. The Obama campaign has not yet assumed a place in Silicon Valley lore alongside Apple, Google, and Facebook. But a few more months could change that. The hottest start-up in the Valley right now won’t make anybody rich, but it might put the next president in the White House.

If you’re as fascinated by the rapidly changing potential of technology as I am, and as hooked on politics as I admit to being, this is an inspiring story.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars.

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