I check my feeds and suddenly the stories I have just clicked on are unread. Not only do they come back to life, but suddenly I will have 300+ unread and waiting. All of them are feeds I have gone through and refuse to muddle through again. I click “mark all read” and it only helps for one subscription at a time. I have to do it with all of them, day after day… how long can I stretch out my loyalty? Only this far, it turns out. It’s been more than a month of dealing with this junk and finally I am throwing my hands up and saying “screw it”. I’m moving on to Google Reader. Let’s hope those fields remain green.

Cute and bubbly television chef, Rachel Ray, sports this busy and stringy scarf for an online promotion of Dunkin’ Donuts. My first thought when I saw the picture was “not the most attractive scarf”. It took re-reading the article, moving back to her image and then staring for a moment to understand what the heck they were so upset about. OK-so that isn’t the right wording- I DON’T understand why these conservatives chose to take offense, unless it was simply a way to generate some buzz.

OK, someone informs you it looks like an Arab keffiyeh , a form of Muslim headgear, and then you stare at the picture and ooohh… there it is. But here’s my take – why in the world would you chose to associate a scarf that is worn like a scarf, (not twined around the chef’s head), one that is no more than an adornment on a person who is talking about donuts – with terrorists?? The leap is extreme. Not just extreme, but ridiculous.

Logically I’m following the argument, but then I just sort of stop with this bemused expression plastered on my face as I give up the pursuit, realizing that they’re just not going to convince me of the inherent dangers in a scarf. It’s not “ignorance” folks, it’s perception. We have enough hate mongering, enough fanning the flames of fear…

Are we so steeped in fear and prejudice that we are unable to see the donuts for the scarves?

“Microsoft says Yahoo has three weeks to negotiate a decent deal, after which time Microsoft is going to get medieval on its ass.” -Wired

Image from here.

As a self-accepted bibliophile, I have read something from just about every genre. During my teenage years of angst and self-discovery I read the novels of William Gibson – one promise after another opened up like delightful fortune cookies. It’s been years since I messaged in DOS and went by MonaLisa, but when something sparks a memory of his work, I might as well have just put the book down.

When I read the Wired article about Evernote, I was taken back to those heady visions of instant access to other’s details, to the projection of so many personal information bites that someone can “know” you in mere moments. It sure beats a handshake and a card. Now I know that I am getting ahead of things, but can you imagine?

Think of the ease of communication when all of our shared information is available with an instantaneous download. Refer back to my earlier post regarding the handshake data exchange. Now imagine this commonplace and people offering up who and what they are in the first moment you meet – be it in person or in the virtual world.

I know there are already warning tales in abundance of hacking each other’s information, hacking your own information and just about every cyber nightmare available. In my mind though, we are already suffering from that with identity theft and government spying and the list goes on… if it can be hacked, wouldn’t you rather offer it up willingly?

As you work to live a transparent life and others start to do the same, is it that hard to image people and corporations taking better care to regulate their own actions? When it comes to a choice between the difficult and illegal maneuvering to cover something up and the momentary pause required for making a decision between doing “good” and doing “bad”, I think the latter will predominate.

Honesty. That’s the key word.

Image: GreenGrassDesigns

Supervillain Flowcharts...All I want to know is WHY was Cobra all the way down at #20?? Ah - perhaps it was the use of expletives in just about every sentence? Humorous communication, but the fact is that swearing alienates a fairly large portion  of the population. I do like Cracked’s #1. What thinking individual in this society hasn’t entertained similar thoughts at one point or another?

Humor for the day. (By Eddie Lummox)

Here are a couple that I kept myself from pinning this morning. Perhaps if I include them with my daily blogging I will feel better about taking time to read them through while sharing something of interest. 

Shel Holtz discusses Sprout, an application I have yet to check out, but one that looks very interesting.

The BBC covers Japan’s moon footage. Wow! As someone who is a bit fanatical about space exploration (Do it, Do it, Do it!), images like these along with Japan’s plans to get a similar look at Mars make my morning.

Eric Eggertson talks about being yourself. This one has been pinned for a while as I think it’s a great point and not necessarily the easiest one to follow through on. He says you need to know what makes you tick and basically make sure what you do fits… I for one love social media, love communication and love research, so my profession is a great fit. This doesn’t make “being myself” any easier. I am also a very artistic person who likes to express myself visually and in a more chaotic, creative environment. This isn’t always easy to integrate into my work in the PR field as from what I’ve found; a great deal of the profession tends to be rather conservative. So how do you find a way to integrate self and work in an environment that is “almost” a perfect fit?

From Grinding.be, your business card becomes a handshake. I think this is a great idea! Yes, there are issues of privacy, but don’t we have those in abundance anyways? We have to learn to navigate through it all as we become more and more “instant” dependant.

Well, I think this sort of worked, but now it’s time to get to get busy. The rest will be pinned and saved for later .

You can control it only in the very beginning, but then like a virus, the meme spreads of its own accord, growing without any direct guidance. Can you imagine the picture you paint of yourself on Facebook spreading like that? An idea that takes on a life of its own and if you weren’t honest or you were TOO honest, you are left with nothing but regret.