Entries from December 2006 ↓

• Santa Clarita Runners: Pace, Race and Training Calculator
  A good calculator for my running
  (tags: running)

• Publish Your Podcast With FeedBurner
  (tags: podcast)
• Ecamm Network: Call Recorder for Skype – Automatically Record Skype Calls On Your Mac
  (tags: podcast skype)
• Vitamin Features » How to Podcast with Skype
  (tags: podcast skkype)
• activeCollab – open source project management and collaboration tool.
  This is a free open source alternative to web based project management. Looks and feels a lot like 37 Signals Basecamp product which I use.
  (tags: basecamp activecollab project management)

In keeping with the use of my personal blog to think out loud before posting a finished product on my business blogs I want to start a post that is brewing in my head. This is actually a response to to my dad’s beaut posts on YankeeWombat and our interactive marketing blog EXCELER8ion on Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. Dad used McLuhan as a way to interpret new media, specifically the Internet and blogging.

Therein lies the point of interest to me. Dad relates to how blogging is a written medium (we can all agree) and compares that to the sight, sound and motion of T.V. that contributes to T.V.’s power. Likely because he was writing about blogs and does so much blog reading and writing himself, Dad didn’t devote a lot of time to how with the web you can experience all of the above, either independently, or all at once. I think his point about McLuhan’s sense ratio is partly to blame.

“McLuhan was amazed when he began to look into the effects of this sort of change of environment on human beings. He searched for evidence of changes caused by living in different media environments. One of the things that got him started was a phenomena noticed by the British when they began to give civil service exams in India. They discovered that examinees passed the tests with high marks because they could remember word for word the entire text book the exam was based on without always fully understanding the content. McLuhan argued that they could perform this prodigious feat of memory because they came from an oral culture. Writing was rare – everything of verbal importance was heard, not read, and then had to be remembered precisely, if it were to be preserved. What McLuhan theorized was that differences in the media environment change the emphasis we place on our various senses. Therefore it impacts the way our brains develop and the way we experience the world. In this case literacy reduces the importance of the process of hearing and remembering and increases the importance of the sense of sight and reduces the necessity to remember the exact wording. McLuhan called that shift in sensory emphasis sense ratio.“

I’d say dad’s life experience heavily colors his sense ratio towards a read/write and in-person form of communicating, interacting, and learning. His Internet experience is therefore largely an extension of that experience even though Dad is an advanced technology user and got into computing before the rocket ship launch of personal computing (he even taught computing at his college).

For myself, as both a heavy personal user of the Internet and also an Internet marketer, what stands out to me about the Internet is that it can reach people on most of the sensory planes (save touch and smell). It can act like a newspaper, a book, a t.v. a radio, a town hall, a living room, a phone booth or a meeting room. Interaction alone is what makes the Internet so different from the media that have come before. The Internet allows you to experience content as you relate to it. To me this puts an interesting twist on McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. As I read his posts it made me aware that my dad probably doesn’t use the Internet the way I do, and therefore doesn’t experience it quite the same either. For that matter, our experience differs from that of my 15 year old son and his peers who spend more time interacting via IM, MySpace, and YouTube watching videos than they do reading news and information on the web like my dad or I would. And I in turn probably watch a lot more YouTube video’s than Dad does (if he’s watching them at all).

So where I want to go with this is still unclear to me but the vehicle I want us to experience this in is writing, a blog, music and finally music with sights and sounds (a music video). Let’s start with listening to the sophomore hit of an up and coming female artist appearing on Blackground records in the R&B/Soul category… Take a listen.

JoJo’s song – click this link to play. Note: this will open an mp3 player in a new window and you’ll need to hit the back button to get back to this story

Please, no cheating and jumping a head to the video. Let’s take this one step at a time.

What did you think? Do me a favor and visualize her in your minds eye. What does she look like to you? Where did she grow up, how old do you think she is, is she from the city or the suburbs?

Now, let’s experience our R&B phenom in the flesh in the accompanying video for Too Little, Too Late and then come back here to wrap up.

Music Video Code By Urbnmix
jojo – a little too late

Now you know that JoJo is a young white girl. You might be surprised to learn just how young. She’s 16 now and she made her first platinum hit album when she was just 13. She was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, a little country town close to where I lived in New Hampshire for a few years and where my dad grew up on his family’s dairy farm in New Hampshire. Needless to say, this isn’t the first time that a white person sounded like a black R&B singer, but the experience we are more familiar with is along the lines of Elvis or Eminem – the break out rapper from the mean streets of Detroit who gained significant street cred long before many people knew he was white. Eminem was among the first legit white rappers (by black standards). A major part of Eminem’s credibility comes from his very poor, very tough childhood, an experience he shares with many of the original and current rap and hip hop stars. Digging a little deeper into JoJo’s short history though we also learn that JoJo actually grew up in Foxborough, Massachusetts and lived in a low income, urban environment. OK, so the urban surroundings probably rubbed off in the typical nurture manner (nature vs. nurture) as well, a little like Eminem’s did. But I digress.

My point about all this is that the record, the radio, the tape cassette, the CD, then MTV all conspired to allow a little white girl to attach her pretty voice to a style of music quite contrary to her own experience. She may have been raised in an urban environment but Foxborough isn’t the 8-Mile area in Detroit that Eminem grew up in either. Much like the British Civil Servants that administered those tests to citizens of colonial India in McLuhan’s example, we are aware that something quite different is afoot, and I think we can fairly attach some of the root cause to the effects of various media. And as we bring this back to the Internet we can ponder what the Internet’s mix of sight, sound, motion and interaction will produce in our 15 year olds that will come of age in the next 10-15 years. The kids like my youngest child Julia, who not quite 3 today, will probably read about MySpace in her High School history books and use the Internet in some way that we may not even be able to comprehend today.

So what’s my point? What does all this mean to you? I’d like to know. How can we use this information and these examples to write a more compelling an interesting story that can be applied to media, advertising, social studies, or something all together different?
[tags]JoJo, Jo Jo, Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, Media[/tags]

• Where to Submit Your Podcasts: Best Podcast Search Engines and Directories – Robin Good’s Latest News
  (tags: podcast podcasting)

I’m getting really bored with chronicling my marathon training runs and rather than give up the ghost all together I’ll try summarizing them a bit.

Oh yeah, and maybe I’ll even put some other content up on this blog.

12/27 8 miles
12/25 11 miles
12/24 3 miles
12/22 4 miles

The 11 miler was my easiest yet at this distance. The 8 miles yesterday was similarly easy. Probably because it was so cool. I’ve also had the good fortune to have run all four of these with Charlie tagging along on his roller blades. Thanks for the company Charlie! Charlies and I were joined on the North Lake Trail along Palm Beach last night by a red fox. He was much faster then either of us.

Peace out

• Port Forwarding for the Belkin F5D8230-4
  Port forwarding help page for your router. Among other things this is supposedly very helpful in getting a clear and clean connection to voip services like SKYPE.
  (tags: skype voip call-quality port-forwarding)
• PortForward.com – Free Help Setting up Your Router or Firewall
  in order to enable port forwarding you need to use a static ip address. This site shows you how to do this for windows or mac pc’s. This page I have bookmarked is for macs.
  (tags: mac static-ip-address port-forwarding skype)

• USATF – America’s Running Routes
  This is a great way to measure and document running routes using google maps. Just click away to pinpoint each leg and turn of your journey. You have to follow the curves of the road / trail you’re running because otherwise it will map your route ‘as the
  (tags: running google-maps)
• http://www.dadlabs.com/ – Home
  Good Dad site
  (tags: FatherHOOD)

Went on a ‘new’ long run today and then had fun today using the USA Track and Field association’s Google Map Mashup to document and measure my run. No more driving my routes in order to figure out the exact distance!
I took it easy to pace myself and enjoyed much of the run. My route was a new one that you can review here if you’re really bored.

Shoes: Asics Gel-Kayano +11 miles (44 total)
Running Time: 1:31:12
Time of run: 10:45AM EST
Average Speed (mph): 8.39
Weather: 78 degree – 66% humidity (feels like 80)
Weekly mileage: 11
Aches/Pains: good but my left foot got sore after a while. I tried to start slow and keep a pretty slow even pace throughout the run so I could have some kick left at the end. I definitely finished running strong and could have kept going.

Ran over the bridge today to Palm Beach for a little bit of bridgework + fast pace + short run. Tomorrow I’ll run 8+.
Shoes: Nike Free +3 miles (? total)
Running Time: 0:18:27
Time of run: 11:30AM EST
Average Speed (mph): 6.09
Weather: 75 degree – 65% humidity
Weekly mileage: 21
Aches/Pains: good – very few aches and pains for a typical back-to-back run

Shoes: Pearl iZumi’s +6 miles (60 total)
Running Time: 0:47:52
Time of run: 07:30PM EST
Average Speed (mph): 7.92
Weather: 70 degree – 55% humidity
Weekly mileage: 18
Aches/Pains: good – small amount of foot soreness that night/this morning