Fiat Lux

This was a long and very intense week, and I’m really worn out. On the bright side though, my friend Jason sent me this link, and it made me feel really good, so to ring in the weekend on a good note, I’m sharing it with you. It’s worth the time.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)

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I had to think long and hard before asking Jeremiah Owyang to include me in his “List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008” post.

Although it’s always nice to see your name in print, and I am proud of my role at Adobe, I have a fundamental disagreement with Jeremiah’s suggestion that social media needs to have a senior strategist in the command chain of an enterprise in order to properly embrace this new challenge. This echoes some of the discussion I’ve seen on other marketing and social media blogs and even on Twitter about “who owns social media” and how to bring social media into the enterprise.

From where I sit, that sounds like an attempt to graft typical command and control structure onto something that should be far more organic and integrated into a company’s existing systems. And frankly, an awful lot of what’s being said out there is starting to sound like a load of self-referential justification and/or an attempt to sell one’s own particular products and services. I’d go so far as to say that if your company needs to create an actual person or group who “owns” social media, you’re screwed before you even start.

Social media is not a silo. It’s not even all that new. People have been having conversations on the Internet since the Internet got started. The only problem is that it’s taking time for businesses and people that are used to the old methods of mass communication to truly understand the fact that things work a little differently here.

I’m biased, of course, but I think Adobe is doing a pretty decent job of navigating these waters. Some groups are adapting faster or more thoroughly than others, of course, but we’ve got people throughout the company blogging, Twittering, making videos, interacting on Facebook, and generally getting with the post-Cluetrain approach to communication. And I believe we will continue to move in the right direction.

Getting back to my original point, though, I had to think about what the implications were of putting myself on a list even though I don’t necessarily agree with the underlying premise. Obviously, I opted to be listed, since aside from the issue of “ownership” I fit the role as Jeremiah listed it, but I’m also putting up this post as a counterbalance.

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Winston Zeddemore: Ray. If someone asks if you are a god, you say, “YES!”

ZDNet’s new Social Media blogger Jennifer Leggio posted an interview with Twitter’s Biz Stone this weekend.

What does that have to do with GhostBusters? This:

Q. Finally, the big question seems to be… is Twitter considering a paid model?

A. No. Not for the usage we are talking about now. It is very important that Twitter remains free for people to remain connected. Some people are suggesting a paid model so that we can improve the service but money is not our issue; we have plenty of money. It’s about getting the right architecture in place and boosting reliability. We want to keep it free.

Biz. Please. Right now, Twitter is a God. Do you realize how lucky you are that people are BEGGING you to take their money? Shut up and take it.

You don’t have to roll out a SLA and a full suite of fee-only tools for the paying customers. Start small. Let people pay $25 a year to have a little icon next to their photos (al la Flickr Pro). They will do it gladly and it won’t eat a lot of development cycles.

You’re not going to be in this spot forever. Take advantage of it while you can.

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Some things really do not change.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.

But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.

*sigh*

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We’re off to upstate New York very early tomorrow, and then after the weekend I’m continuing on to the Boston area for 2 days in the Adobe office. It’s faintly possible I’ll blog while I’m running hither and yon, but only faintly.

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I was too tired to write about the end of the Democratic primaries, and Obama’s clinching of the nomination last night. A day later, though, I’ve had time to read the blogs (Steve Benen has a noteworthy post) and get a few thoughts down.

I am deeply proud of my party and of my country. Come what may — and Obama’s election is by no means certain — a black man is a major party candidate for President in this country. I’m not old enough to have any real memories of the civil rights movement. But I’ve seen and heard racism in action, and it’s ugly. That Obama could face it, and still win the nomination against some of the biggest names in politics, is amazing. Truly a milestone to feel good about.

Now, the hard part starts — the general election campaign. This is going to be good.

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Roughly 10 months and 3,000 Tweets ago, I signed up for Twitter. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’ll pick up my 500th follower.

Every time I see that number, I’m a little surprised. I always though I’d be one of those people with a relatively small Twitter following. I’m even more surprised at the gap between the number of people I follow and my followers. I know that the conventional wisdom for many social media folks is that you should follow back everyone who follows you, or nearly so. And for many months, that was my practice. But as the number of people on my follow list crept over 200, I found myself throttling back more and more.

If this were all about just random people and social chat, none of this would be particularly noteworthy. However, in my new job, a not-insignificant number of the user group managers I support are on Twitter, talking to each other (and to me) there. This isn’t just about fun chat anymore, it’s a part of my real work. I need to make that aspect of my Twitter-life a priority.

It’s easier said than done, though. On the one hand, I’ve built connections to a bunch of people on Twitter that I value, and I don’t want to give that up. I also want to have a broad range of voices in my Twitter stream; that’s part of its value. On the other hand, I need to keep the noise level manageable. I just don’t have the bandwidth to follow 500 people; I have to get my work done. I can’t spend all day glued to Twhirl or hitting reload in the browser.

The net result is that right now, I don’t generally follow back new followers unless I already know them or unless they’re part of the Adobe ecosystem, and that I’ve dropped a bunch of people I used to follow - mostly the ones I never had any real interaction with.

Whether I’ll stick to this policy as time goes on, I don’t know. Considering how flaky Twitter has been recently, and how fast the early adopters get bored with their shiny toys, things could be completely different in 6 months. For now, though, that’s the plan.

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Not to make this a “pile on Hillary” kind of weekend, but a quote I saw a week or so ago has been nagging at me.

To feminist writer Linda Hirshman, Clinton’s likely defeat signals a harsh reality that future female candidates will need to consider.

“It shows how fragile the loyalty and commitment of women to a female candidate is. That’s a pretty scary thing,” says Hirshman. “She can count on the female electorate to divide badly and not be reliable.”

That’s a definition of feminism that I don’t understand. In act, it sounds a lot more like essentialism. As a woman who has spent a good portion of her life making her way in male-dominated fields - and as a Jew, to boot - I have an extreme distaste for any ideology that assumes that group characteristics are identical and unalterable.

And yet …. it would make me happy to see a woman elected President, I can’t lie. It would also make me happy to see a Jewish President, although frankly I think that’s even less likely to happen in my lifetime. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m going to put gender or religious characteristics ahead of everything else on the table. Especially when it comes to something as important as a Presidential election.

I’m one of the first generation of American women to be born and raised in a world where women actually had the option to escape the constraints they’d previously been limited to. Is that why I do not feel the pull of identity politics? I consider myself a feminist. Does being a “good” feminist mean that I must vote for a woman candidate solely because of her gender? I don’t think so, but clearly some other women do.

How did things get to this place? And more important, can we fix it?

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Righteous outrage, that is. Keith Olbermann going off on Hillary Clinton today was a thing to behold:

He’s pissed, and with very good reason.

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Sad news from home today.

‘Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.

Sail on, Chris, you’ll be missed by your shipmates here.

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