There is nobody in this nation who got rich on his own. Nobody.

You built a factory out there-- good for you! But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.

You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come, and sieze everything in your factory and [have to] protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look-- you built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great idea-- God bless! Keep a big hunk of it!

But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Politics aside, I think this is a truth that we should all be more conscious of. In the current divisive political environment, everyone seems to be trying to make his neighbor into the enemy. We could all use a refresher in the way the social contract works-- and a reminder of how to be a little bit more human.

There's a reason that Horatio Alger and Charles Dickens wrote about orphans. There's nothing more terrifying-- nothing more tragic-- than seeing someone adrift, without a social safety net, forced to find their own way. We're simply not equipped for it. The social fabric is the only reason any of us survive. Humans are weak creatures-- we don't have sharp teeth, or claws, or even protective fur. Our only strength comes from our empathy, our language, and our ability to work together.

I'm incredibly lucky. If you're reading this, you are too.

I'm 32, I have a history of health problems, I'm unemployed. And I'm INCREDIBLY lucky. I'm luckier than any one person deserves to be. I'm lucky because I have people. People who care about me. Not all of those people agree with me politically, or even about my taste in food or music. But they're my people. We have a mutual investment in one another.

Because I have people, I still have a roof over my head, I still have health insurance, and-- even though it's easy to lose sight of it-- I still have a faith that SOMETHING will come my way. Not because I deserve it. But because all the people who have helped and supported me do. Life will work out. Because I have people.

America has gone through ten really rough years. We have seen ten years of being terrified, of losing ground, of feeling like we're losing control. Domestically and internationally, things seem to just keep getting more uncertain. We've had to question some really fundamental faiths and assumptions. And that's really hard.

This has led to a shift in the nation. Many, in the face of all this, have come to look at their place in life and to regard it as earned, as an accomplishment. It's reassuring, when faced with uncertainty, to look at the world and proclaim that we got where we are because we deserve it-- and that those who may have fell behind did so because they did not.

But this is a dangerous delusion. Nobody in this world got where they did alone. It is cynical and selfish and hurtful to say otherwise. Our strength lies in our ability to open up to our fellow human beings, to inspire empathy, compassion, and support. Even Ragged Dick and Oliver Twist got ahead in this manner-- they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, yes, but they did it by opening up to others, by caring about those that cared about them, and helping those that needed it.

The internet has an amazing ability to build social ties, to help us all find our people, to have meaningful conversations, to support one another... To make the world better for one another. But so often, it's used as an echo chamber where we just work up our venom for those that don't immediately agree with us. The current cycle in the government, pumped up on a 24-hour news cycle and the instant connectivity of electronic communications does the same.

But these are our lesser instincts, our worst aspects.

The most sacred, amazing, special thing about mankind-- the thing that makes us human-- is our ability to relate, to care, to help. We need to remember this, on a real instinctual level, or we're all doomed to reap what we sow.

You are not self-reliant. You are not a self-made-man. You got where you did by caring about others, and by others caring about you. Without others, we would all be lost in an uncaring wilderness, a victim of the worst manifestations of anarchy.

You have people. People have helped you. This is not something to be ashamed of, it's something to celebrate. But it's also time to pay it forward.

I hope this isn't misconstrued as propaganda. We have some tough choices coming up in next year's election, and frankly, I find myself honestly undecided for the first time in my memory.

My only point is this: let's just move forward, into the next year, actually caring about and considering our fellow men. Let's stop letting kneejerk politics and ideology obscure the fact that we're all in this together, that the ties that bind us are more complex and multivalent than are dreamt of in our politics. Let's treat one another as fellow humans, and admit that one point or another, we could all use a hand up.

And at some point, we've all gotten one.

...we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

...At first blush, the logic of splitting DVD delivery from streaming makes sense to me: licensing for streaming and DVD rentals are two different beasts. I think they may have made this decision looking forward toward their recent parting of ways with Starz.

Even if it's not the right decision, it will take a little while to shake out. But I can tell you, with twitter still reeling about Netflix's announcement, one thing they definitely got wrong: the Qwikster branding.

The name is silly. I personally find the spelling painful. I doubt I'm alone in either of these opinions. But there's also a really powerful historical echo to the name, that dates back to the 1950s. And it's not a good association.

Let's say you're trying to think of a brand name that evokes the speed and efficiency of your service-by-mail. Is this the first thing you want (some) people to think of?

The Mailster -- courtesy National Postal Museum

Qwikster, meet the Mailster.

Netflix, please note, the Mailster was one of the biggest flops of American postal engineering. It had trouble going up hills. Mail carriers complained of them filling with smoke. It couldn't operate in three inches of snow. Some reported it could be knocked over by a large dog. And they had a high rate of injury. But the Post Office Department continued to produce more and more for over a decade, seemingly driven by a sunk cost fallacy.

The Mailster, simply put, was a bad idea, and a giant lemon.

Now, I've spent the last year of my life researching postal engineering. I've met USPS engineers-- they're a talented, intelligent bunch. And I have a lot of affection for the goofy little Mailster. It's a great reminder that engineering successes are built on trial and error, that we learn what works by seeing what does not. And more likely than not, most of the people who will see "Qwikster" and think "Mailster" are big old Postal geeks like me, and not the general population.

But the fact that the names are so similar doesn't bode well. Branding 101 tells you to avoid names that are going to evoke pricey, colossal mistakes of the past. Netflix is already skating on thin ice, PR-wise-- which is why their blog post has the apologetic tone it does.

Beyond the question of whether consumers really will respond positively to having two URLs and potentially two bills for what was once one service, this echo across time of the two names points-- in my opinion-- to a major business decision being made somewhat hastily, and unveiled while still half-baked. And that makes me worry for Netflix's future.

ETA:

The twitter account for "Qwikster" likewise suggests insufficient vetting by PR. SRSLY.

“The UK is the home of so many media inventions,” he said. “It’s interesting that you invented photography, you invented television, you invented computers in both concept and in practice — it’s not widely known, but the world’s first office computer was built in 1951 by Lyon’s chain of tea shops. Interesting. Yet nobody, none of the world’s leading players in these fields are from the UK. That’s a problem.”

Now while I'm sure that the British public was pleased as punch to have Schmidt come over and lecture them on their nation's historical achievements and its subsequent inability to live up to those achievements, I wonder if anyone in the audience immediately noticed what a tin ear for history Schmidt seems to have.

The British definitely do deserve a lot of credit in the early history of computing. And Tim Berners-Lee, a product of British schools somewhat later, has had a little bit of influence himself. The fact is, though, that-- as Schmidt was arguing-- the British influence on the computer market isn't what one might have expected it to be in the 1950s. But for Schmidt to pointedly lay that on the feet of British teachers is historically inaccurate, to put it mildly.

Schmidt is letting an ideologically-driven mythos of the history of computers drive his interpretation of history at the expense of very basic facts.

Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as a meritocracy. Every company starts with scrappy, nerdy college kids in a garage somewhere, college dropouts become multibillionaires, and the internet is a place where information wants to be free-- and make the deserving very, very rich. Internet wonks and tech firms are full of techno-libertarians who believe that computers make the market work better, and that markets fix everything in the end. It's an understandable belief. Computers are a disruptive technology, and disruptive technologies always (initially) upset rigid class boundaries. For this reason, tech is full of people who made it to the top because of skill, intelligence, and perseverance in a way that older industries are not.

However, this fact has led to blind spots about the history of the industry, and why the computer industry looks the way it does. The fact is that the US government spent its way to US dominance in the computer market in the era when the British really had a chance to be players.

This is a widely-established fact, a matter of public record, even if it isn't often brought up in the mythos of American computing and Silicon Valley. For a single, easily readable account, see Roy Rosenzweig's historiographical article "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet," recently collected in his posthumous volume Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age (most of which, ironically, is available for free on Google Books):

That the Cold War. . .fostered the development of digital computers is relatively easy to show. In 1950, for example, the federal government-- overwhelmingly, its military agencies-- provided 75 to 80 percent of computer development funds. Even when companies began funding their own research and development, they did so with the knowledge of a guaranteed military market. Such massive government support enabled American computer research to destroy foreign (mostly British) competition; the American hegemony in computer markets-- routinely attributed to American free markets-- rests on a solid base of government-subsidized military funding. "The computerization of society," writer Frank Rose aptly observes, "has essentially been a side effect of the computerization of war."

So why this collective amnesia in the tech industry about who has been filling its coffers for most of the last half-century? I would argue that it's a problem of what Suzanne Mettler has described as "the submerged state." That is: beneficiaries of government successful government programs have a tendency to forget that they are the beneficiaries of government programs. They tend to think of their success as their own, over-emphasizing the importance of their own accomplishments and underestimating the institutional structures that allowed them to achieve them. Just like how 45% of recipients of unemployment insurance claimed to not be beneficiaries of government programs, the American tech industry sees government grants and contracts as a right, as something earned, not as a hand up.

That someone as intelligent as Schmidt could overlook this difference in subsidy defies reason, especially since he himself is a beneficiary of that same fountain of money. Google would never have existed without the Department of Defense's funding of the proto-Internet ARPANET, or without military and other government grants and contracts with Stanford where Larry and Sergey did the original work on PageRank, just to name the two most obvious.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think that students do need a "license to tinker" And if Schmidt is honestly trying to get the British to follow Barak Obama's lead in funding more education Engineers, I support that. He's right, "the world needs more engineers." My primary reason for writing this is primarily to point out that blaming the British tech market for not keeping up with America's on issues of curricula seems, historically speaking, colossally unfair.

But there's something more, too-- I think that Schmidt's tenuous grasp on his industry's history belies the difficulty with his desire to return to 19th century standards of education:

"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."

This is all true, of course. But the issue that I have is this: in a time when America is in the middle of a blame-the-teacher-first "educational reform" movement, when the British government is in the middle of austerity reforms, a call for this sort of integrated liberal education is likely to fall on deaf ears, and more likely to be interpreted as a call to defund the humanities, rather than simply beef up funding for science education.

And this is dangerous. It's dangerous because Eric Schmidt is a Very Clever Fellow, and he missed a very fundamental point about the history of the industry that has made him a billionaire. In a world where history becomes a generalist hobby for businessmen and engineers, where funding is taken away from the humanities, we are likely to only see far more misunderstandings like this. And failing to understand the history of a subject tends to make it very easy to make very, very bad decisions about the future.

This means that in some alternate reality, there’s a world where Google+ is called “Backrub Me.”

But I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for it. I was never really a big fan of Facebook in the first place. When it was really taking off, I would read about it-- being a grad student in Boston, interested in technology and culture, I was really curious. But I couldn't access it. The Winklevossian commitment to exclusivity that was baked into it from the start saw the school where I was doing my MA as not worthy of inclusion. I think UMass Boston students had Facebook opened up to their .edu addresses a couple weeks before it just opened to everyone and their grandma. I ended up only getting a Facebook account once I started TAing while working on my PhD coursework, as a way to try to put the names of some 150 students with faces. So while I'm a pretty frequent user of Facebook, I've never felt much fondness for it. I'd be glad to go.

So-- you there, over at Google! You want me to switch over to Google+, and drop my Facebook account all together? I'm ripe for it, and I'm not asking much in return.

All I want is this: we need to start a real discussion about what DATA EXPORTABILITY looks like for social networks.

I know Google has a great record in terms of data exportability and open standards compared to any other tech company its size. And I know that, from the get-go, Google+ has come with a way to export your data in a fairly granular way, and that's a good start. I want more, though. I want a discussion.

You see, Facebook has a way to export your data, too-- go to Settings, and scroll down to Export Data. And at least Google gives us a human-readable, stable URL for this process.

And I believe Eric Schmidt when he says that he thinks there's room for multiple Social Networking platforms, and that Google's trying to play nicely with Facebook and Twitter. I believe that because Google's model has long been to improve the overall internet experience, to keep people online more, so they keep coming back to Google and its ads, as opposed to Facebook's walled-garden approach.

But again, all of this is not quite enough. We're at a major turn, here. Integrating social will be a huge boon to Google in terms of personalized search and finding ways to leverage the social graph. And I'll get on board right now. But in return I want a discussion to happen, here.

What do I want this discussion to look like? It's pretty simple. I want Google to invite outsiders to the table to have an honest discussion about what users might be able to expect in return for granting Google access to their social graph. Our social data is going to help drive search-- social is going to influence how much of that fabled "Google Juice" a site or a post might have. When will that weighting data fall under the company's commitment to data exportability?

And when will that commitment lead to them using Google+ as a platform to help create open data standards for social? Because exportability without standards is of very limited utility. Once I can export my data and migrate it to another platform-- maybe even one that could still interact with Google+-- that's when we've really got data exportability that means something.

Google has a good record with standards, and I think that this would undergird Schmidt's point. I think it would be in their interest, as traditionally defined-- keeping people on the net by making the internet better-- and it could potentially force Facebook to rethink its closed approach or risk irrelevence.

So yeah, Google-- let's get this conversation started. I'm ready to switch.

The 2nd Annual Lake Anne Ukulele Festival will take place on Saturday, July 9, 2011 from11:00AM-5:30PM at Lake Anne Plaza, 1609 Washington Plaza, Reston, VA 20190 (at North Shore Dr. & Village Rd.). The free music festival will feature performances by several internationally known and local ukulele musicians, music demonstrations, open to the public jam session, beer/wine garden, festival vendors, and other family friendly activities. The event will kick off during the ever popular Saturday Farmers & Arts/Craft Market. Headlining the festival on Saturday will be acoustic blues queen Del Ray. Del will also offer fingerstyle blues workshops for ukulele and guitar on Sunday (see below).

Del Rey plays concerts worldwide and also conducts concert/lectures on women musicians called Women in American Music. She has contributed to projects in honor of The Mississippi Sheiks, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Johnny Cash. Del Rey has recorded five solo albums, Blue Uke (2008), When The Levee Breaks (2006), X-Rey Guitar (2000), Hot Sauce (1995) and Boogie Mysterioso (1993).  The festival will also include special guests and Grammy award winning artists Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer and other performers such as Hoa Mele Wakinekona (Hawaiian), Bruce Hutton (old-time, folk), Marcy’s Potted Plants, The Aloha Boys (Hawaiian), and local duo The Sweater Set.

Performance Schedule:

11:00AM Hoa Mele Wakinekona

11:30AM The Sweater Set

12:15PM Bruce Hutton

1:00PM Marcy’s Potted Plants

1:30PM Aloha Boys

2:15PM Fink & Marxer

3:30PM Del Rey

4:30PM Open Jam Session (public participation welcomed)

Admission is free.  Festival takes place Rain or Shine.  www.lakeanneplaza.com

Ukulele and Guitar Workshops with Del Rey “Seattle-based queen of fingerstyle blues”

Sunday July 10, 2011 -- Lake Anne Plaza (North Shore Drive and Village Road, Reston Virginia 20190)

Introduction To Fingerpicking the Ukulele, 1:00-2:15 pm
For you strummers, here's a song that will get you started using your right hand in a different way. Papa Charlie Jackson's "Mama Don't You Think I Know," a funny old tune in C with an easy-to-hear fingerpicking pattern, will get you started picking out ragtime and blues tunes on the uke.  Students should be able to play C, C7, F, F7 and G7 without hesitation.

Blue Uke, 2:30-3:45 pm
Intermediate (be comfortable with first position chords and be able to keep time)
Blues, rags and old songs for the  ukulele, with a focus on fingerpicking the melody. Tunes like the Mississippi River Waltz, Tappin’ That Thing (Memphis Jug Band) and Tired Chicken (Gus Cannon)...by ear, no TAB.

Moving Bass lines for Fingerstyle Guitar, 4:00-5:15 pm
Intermediate-Advanced
Want to play like a pianist? Walking and boogie-woogie bass lines for fingerstyle guitar. Learn the positions where you can find both chords and  moving bass. Standard tuning. Recorders ok.

***

Workshops are $25 each.

For information, or to register, contact Ann Granger at 703-470-3038 or AnnThePotter@gmail.com.

Space is limited so sign up early.  You will be given the exact location when you register.

Tomorrow marks the birthday of Fiorello La Guardia, 99th mayor of New York City.

In the opening monologue of his 1958 play Comic Strip, George Panetta turns almost immediately to one of the most powerful cultural memories of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia:

Now, I was a kid in the days of Fiorello LaGuardia-- remember him, LaGuardia? The Little Flower? Maybe he's one of the reasons I grew up. He loved all us kids in New York City, used to read the comic strips to us on Sundays-- worried and looked after us all the time.

On June 30, 1945, New York's newspaper delivery drivers began a strike that would last 17 days, refusing to distribute any paper in the city except for the leftist (and highly pro-labor) PM... a paper that might be best remembered by comics lovers for publishing the wartime political cartoons of Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel.

For those who don't mind reading between the lines, there's an excellent contemporary account of the strike from the newspaper publishers' perspective that can be found in the Prelinger Archives collection at The Internet Archive. Obviously very biased, but an interesting account of how a city dealt with a major media shutdown.

On July 1, La Guardia was scheduled for his regular Sunday broadcast of Talk to the People, a weekly radio show he held on WNYC. At one point in the show, he encouraged his listeners to gather their children around the radio, and commenced to reading that day's "Dick Tracy" comic from the Sunday Daily News. With obvious relish, the mayor described the action in the panels, impersonated the voices of various characters, and reminded listeners of the plot that had led up to that moment. At the end of each strip, he would explicate the moral of that week's adventure to his young listeners.

(In the above clip from the next week, the moral is described in no uncertain terms: "Say children, what does it all mean? It means that dirty money never brings any luck! No, dirty money always brings sorrow and sadness and misery and disgrace.")

He also promised that he would read the Sunday comics on the air every Sunday as long as the strike continued, and that someone from WNYC would read the dailies every day. The next Sunday, when he came in to broadcast, there were camera crews there to record his reading. The story took on a life nationally. And it became one of the things La Guardia was best remembered for.

Such a move by a major politician today would smack of a paternalism and pandering that would make cynical observers tear him apart. But in 1945, La Guardia reading the comics over the radio really seems to have been seen fondly by a great number of people.

Part of this was likely La Guardia's personality-- he possessed a gentleness, kindness, and an air of genuine benevolence that was a huge change from the last multiple-term mayor in New York, the slick and corrupt "Beau James" Walker. He was a genuine uniter, running in opposition to machine party politics, and seemed to many to have the commonwheal of the city in mind.

He didn't lash out against the strikers or against the newspapers-- he just expressed a concern that the children shouldn't have to go without their comics just because of "a squabble among grown-ups."

I genuinely do believe that La Guardia thought that this might just be a nice thing to do-- I don't believe it was necessarily a cynical or calculated move. But I do think that there is one part of this story that needs to be read with a skeptical eye.

I don't think he was doing this simply "for the children." I think that reading the comics was targeted at adults as well.

By all accounts, La Guardia read and enjoyed the comics himself. Born in New York in 1882, he was a member of the first generation to grow up with comics in the newspaper. (Although he was old enough to be working by the time comics started appearing in New York papers, in his early teens.)

While the reputation of comics as a medium for children had fully developed by midcentury, adults actively read and discussed the events in the daily comics page. Based on research conducted around the same time, sociologist and media theorist Leo Bogart argued that newspaper comics were important to working-class urban readers because they provided noncontroversial (but still debatable) subjects of conversation in situations of urban semi-anonymity. You might not want to talk to the guy on the bar stool next to you about religion or politics, but you could debate Dick Tracy with him.

By reading the comics, he was actually not just providing entertainment for the children of his constituents. La Guardia was finding a way to insert himself into the everyday street-corner conversations of millions of New Yorkers. I would argue that this, just as much as appealing to the children, was key to why this was such a defining moment for the memory of La Guardia's career. He had understood the social function of comics to its adult readers, and had joined in that discussion. It's the mark of a true populist-- to actually understand what's important to people, even the stuff they wouldn't normally admit to.

Interestingly, while this event has faded somewhat from the public memory, and more people know La Guardia as an airport than as a politician, the recording of La Guardia reading the comics has taken on a strange and wonderful second life: the "what does it all mean?" that can be found at approximately 1:27 in the video above has become one of the most widely-used and best-known non-musical samples in hip-hop.

Coming in to the Air and Space Museum's very impressive Moving Beyond Earth Gallery, I felt a little like an interloper, but I'm new enough to museums that I feel like an interloper most of the time anyway. During the lunch and discussion section, the other attendees were more than inviting, however. And the roundtable discussion was fascinating.

While the conversation rambled along, covering more topics than I could manage to tweet, the one takeaway I really got from this session was a better appreciation for and understanding of the notion of radical trust. It's a term I've heard batted about a decent amount in recent months, but haven't always had the clearest sense of what it meant.

Radical trust is, simply put, the decision by an organization-- a library, a museum, what have you-- to trust online communities, and to be sincerely open to their input. It's trusting your visitors and your users to actually know what they want to see, to be informed engaged participants, rather than passive consumers. It's making decisions that take into account the feedback people are volunteering.

One irony of the phrase is that "radical trust" isn't particularly radical. It's how many of us engage with others on the web every day. You get your friends' opinions about a coat you want to buy via Facebook, for example, and then actually consider their opinions when making the purchase. You don't simply put up your Facebook page to appear to be engaged. You actually interact. "Radical trust" is really the radical notion that organizations need to treat the people they serve like people.

What makes it so radical is that organizations, while made up of individuals, are not people, and do not act like people. Institutions have different instincts from (healthy) individuals. They're highly compartmentalized. High barriers can exist between one department and the next, even when their actual missions overlap.

If you were to do a survey of the most vocal opponents of blog comments, tagging, wikis, crowdsourcing and the like on museum websites, I'd wager some of the loudest would be in curation. Curators are perhaps the most vested in the museum's air of authority, in the implicit trust people give respected museums. This is natural, as their job is to be the arbiters of information, and to guard that trust. The job of the curator is to make sure that what is presented is accurate, interesting, valuable, and legit.

But when one of the panelists asked for a show of hands to a couple questions about interdepartmental cooperation, something became abundantly clear-- curators are also being locked out of the process. In many museums, it seemed, the curators themselves were not being given access to the back-end of online projects. Is it any wonder that they would be trepidatious about allowing something they can't even access themselves to be opened up to the whole wide world?

Radical trust can't begin with opening up your project to the entire world. It has to start with opening up your project to the guy in the next office. If people in your organization are resisting the kind of openness that you think museums need to embrace, you have to ask yourself: how open are we being within the museum? Do curatorial, collections, education, and the like all have access to the back end of your websites? Are they being given enough administrative rights to actually do something on the back end, to contribute, and to add their own specialized knowledge? Are other departments brought in to meetings to strategize about what new technologies you should adopt?

If only the museum web team is participating in the creation of content for social media and engaging with the public, you already have a problem. Bring the whole family to the table, and make sure everyone has a seat, before you invite company in for a meal.

Radical trust starts at home.

We all nodded in agreement. No matter the strategy, we all want to have more people "Like" (formerly "become a fan of") our institutional Facebook page. The more people who do that, the more people see what's going on, come to the museum, participate in building community, etc. Right? I mean, that's the metric.

Then it hit me-- No. It makes absolutely no difference how many people "Like" your Facebook page.

I'm overstating it slightly, but that's what I thought at the time. My realization was-- and this may be obvious to others-- the number of people who "Like" your FB page is an essentially misleading, and almost meaningless metric.

But whether you're a nonprofit museum, an activist organizer, a brand manager, or a guy with the most amazing Spin Doctors cover band you've ever seen, it's the only metric you get.

The thing is, most of the time, nobody but first-time users visits your FB page. Most of the actual page traffic is going to be people just encountering what you have to offer on Facebook for the first time, exploring. After that, what really matters is not how many people Like your page, it's how many people's News Feeds you show up on.

The News Feed is the primary vehicle with which we explore the FB universe. It's your firehose of information. But it's not a firehose. At least it isn't for many users. You see, Facebook defaults to "Top News," not "Most Recent." So for many users, the News Feed is curated for them by Facebook's algorithms. And from what I can tell from some looking around, nobody seems to know much about those algorithms. Well, the engineer who designed News Feed just explains it by saying it's a robot, but that just makes me feel talked down to.

Facebook has created the new Google Juice. Let's call it FACEJUICE.

The beauty of FaceJuice is that it eliminates Search Engine Optimization, at least for the immediate future. You can game a search engine, at least somewhat, no matter how complex, as long as it behaves the same for every user. And while Google personalizes for those who log in, only a portion of their business is from users with accounts.

Basically everyone who uses Facebook, on the other hand, is tracked. They're a member with an account. If you use it at home or at an internet cafe halfway across the globe, you're going to log in before you get a really useful experience.

And because of that, the FaceJuice flows freely, the "robot" assigns value to every object a little differently, and Search Engine Optimization just can't factor for every person. This is good for the individual user-- it means that your news feed tends to be the most interesting, controversial, amusing, etc. posts from the people you interact with the most. It's The Best Of Your Friends. And that's nice. For the most part, nobody's trying to game the system to sell you something.

And it works well for Facebook, because the only way to beat the system, to overcome the unpredictable rapids of FaceJuice, is to game the system by simply paying Facebook. Become an advertiser. Then, your FaceJuice doesn't matter. You get guaranteed views, if not click throughs. And as an advertiser, you get more detailed metrics, analytic data, etc. So you can track if you're actually connecting with the people you're trying to sell to.

The one place where FaceJuice is not really an added value, but actually a major problem, is in group community building, organizing, and outreach for people who aren't in it for the money, and don't have the ad budget.

If you're trying to organize a rally at city hall or promote your town's local history museum, FaceJuice actively works against you, at least if you're trying to use Facebook to get people interested and involved. You have no way of knowing how many of the people who "Like" your page actually get a given post. Or any of your posts. Probability would indicate that the more Fans you have, the more people's News Feeds you'll creep up onto, but there's no way of knowing which posts are having the desired effect, getting the word out.

Did the last thing you posted on Facebook get zero responses because it wasn't compelling to your followers, or because it was buried in FaceJuice? You have no way of knowing.

Since I've already brought up the Google comparison, let's look at another part of the Googleverse-- Youtube. Youtube has a nonprofit partnership program that adds value for nonprofits who want to use their platform to promote their causes, build their community, etc. Facebook seems to offer no such program. Although I'm sure they're free to advertise.

All of this is all the more reason for nonprofits, organizers, and educators to not play in their garden. Right now Facebook is basically the only game in town-- although that may not be true soon with the unveiling of Google Me and Diaspora. But even so, try to point as much of your content outside, so you can actually have analytics, and at least judge somewhat what the value of your participation on Facebook really is.

And stop counting Facebook fans. That number means nothing.

My results thusfar can be seen in the below Flickr slideshow:

It's been a fun project, and it's gotten me thinking about the weird, science-fiction quality of our lives in the days of mobile computing... I have a phone that includes a better camera than my first digital camera, and has better photo-editing software than the first photo-editing program I used. On a two hundred dollar device with about ten dollars worth of software on it.

And it's been a lesson in perseverance. I know some of my pictures are much better than others, but that's less important than the fact that I'm getting one every day. Some days I cheat a bit, if I can't get a good one or I'm too busy or whatever, but I've been generally pretty good at sticking to the schedule. Regular production yields more results than trying for perfection every time. And that's been something I've learned a lot from, by itself. This is how you acquire craft. This is how you get books written, how you learn an instrument, how you really get anything out of life: you try, every day. Some days will be breakthroughs and some days will be crap. But you try.

And then two weeks ago happened. I was having a busy week, between work, family, and social commitments. And I got a couple days behind. And then a couple more. Eventually, it got to the point where I was a full week behind. This may not seem like much, but it was enough to make me have a minor crisis. What should I do? Abandon the project? Try to catch up?

I decided to just start back up as if nothing happened. And I think it was the right decision. Getting one decent picture a day is hard enough. Two a day, even for a week, would be next to impossible, and would probably discourage me from re-engaging in the project. I'm changing my previous expectation that I post them to the web daily, mostly because of the bugginess of the best Android Flickr upload app.

Quitting or trying to catch up would be overlooking that value I'm discovering in daily work and gradual improvement.

And plus, it just feels so good to get back on the horse. Why ruin it?

After yet another abortative attempt, I've realized that envisioning this as a 365-day, one a day project was just unrealistic, given full-time employment, half-time grad-student-hood, and my two-hour daily commute. All I was having time to take was pictures of people and things on the subway. It was getting repetitive.

I'm not ending the project, just re-envisioning it as a periodic, ongoing project. I'm changing the Flickr set description accordingly and readjusting my expectations. Because while it was a rewarding project, it was less rewarding than working, paying bills, getting my PhD, and trying to have a social life.