... and not the good kind of PITA either.

In this case the PITA involved here is not the tasty grain based item you would find in your favorite Mediterranean restaurant. It is an acronym for Pain In The Ass. This is where I get to inform folks about stuff that may work for most people but for some reason is not really worth using to me because of the PITA factor.

So, with that being said...

Social Median is a site that is sort of a community based news aggregation portal. You can join in on news streams based on different topics that are posted by other members. You can setup your own feeds to be posted on the site and there is a follow system similar to that of Friend Feed and Twitter.

I used the site for awhile to get news on certain topics and to identify people that tended to post on topics that I like to follow. This feature set works well and I had no issue here. I wanted to use the site to pull in my blog entries and push them out to other sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. My issue was that if I happened to title one of my posts the same as some other site, my post would not get pulled into Social Median it would just link to the other post where ever that may have been. The most recent was a link that was supposed to go to my blog on wordpress.com but instead went to a page at the Nashville Post website. That is a deal breaker for a lot of bloggers that are trying to generate some exposure.

I also like the idea of being able to have one place where I could have all my blog posts pulled into and then be able to push them out to other social networks that I am involved in. The problem here is that whenever one of my posts had apostrophes or periods in them, the social median site would push the link out with a bunch of junk characters in the title. This made the links very hard to read and pretty amateurish which is not what you want if you are trying to attract positive attention.

To their credit when I posted tweets about these issues, Jason Goldberg (the founder) DM'd me asking what was going on. I explained the issues I was having and it escalated into their support side. I then received and acknowledgement about how my issues could be significant to members but no follow up on a timeline to fix the issues. The suggestion I got was to rename my posts so that they weren't the same as any others.

All in all, I'm sure the site is useful to many people but these few issues are more than I am willing to put up with. There are just too many options for news aggregation and social networking/media.

pappi loves the google

Hold on a sec. Let me finish drinkin' my Google branded Kool-Aid. ahhhhhhh. That's good stuff. Okay, now granted, I am a Google nut (plz no fan boy comments) and I suck up their apps like a whale sucking down a metric ton of plankton, but I do have that tiny little voice in the back of my head saying "what if Googles motto is do no evil... right now". That was the case until I heard that they are rolling out Grand Central to the masses as Google Voice. Hang on, one more swig of Kool-Aid. I have been trying to get in on Grand Central for months and was afraid that it might go on the chopping block like a few other apps (notebook, jaiku).

me: Please Google can I have a voice service so that I can replace (fill in the name of the hated, over priced, antiquated phone service provider)

google: Sure thing and we will do it for free aslongasyoudontmindifwekeepallyourtranscribedtextsandvoicemailsandusethatinformationtomakebillionssowecantakeovertheworld.

me: Wait... did you say free? woohoo!

I'm all giddy inside. But seriously this is a really interesting exercise for analyzing the behavioral psychology of this situation. Microsoft would have killed for the kind of data that Google is collecting now. People were paranoid as hell about Microsoft and how and what information they were gathering and what would they do with it. Now, we are freely giving that same information and more to Google without a second thought. Why? Because Google says "Do no Evil"? Because they don't charge for their apps?

I'm not really sure what the mechanism behind this is. If I knew I would try and replicate it myself. What I am sure of is that we have become increasingly paranoid about our personal information. In small town America there was no privacy, everyone knew what everyone else was doing. The more people we are surrounded by, the more insecure we become about our private lives, except when it comes to Google.

I suppose a number of conclusions could be reached from this phenomenon. For me, I like what Google has to offer and I LOVE that it is free of charge and all they want is some data about my usage habits. I hold that idea of small town America as the measuring stick. If all they want to know if who I talk to and where I go, what's the big deal? If they want to delve into my real private life, finances, bedroom activity, etc. then they need to mind their own business.

AIG Bonuses Are Not Stimulating

Everyone seems to be up in arms about AIG paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonus to execs when they are now taking so much bailout money. Are they using bailout money to pay these bonuses? How could they be spending money on bonuses when they should be getting the business straight?

I think the core of the problem is being missed a little bit. How does someone get a job with guaranteed bonus money even if the job they are doing is ruining the company? AIG (and others, I am sure they are not the only one doing this) is REWARDING bad job performance. Performance that would come along with walking papers in any other industry and the finance industry is encouraging it! How the "F" does that happen and everyone pretends it doesn't happen and then the entire industry falls apart and everyone looks around and says "How did that happen?".

The top people in AIG's Financial Products division received not only bonus money but consulting fees up to $1 million a month and now we (the taxpayers) are being forced to subsidize these flawed and failed business practices by pouring trillions of dollars into this industry. I am not forgetting the auto industry, different industry same failed business model, but that is another (albeit related) rant.

BTW, I read something that was eye opening. If Jesus (he is used solely for the purpose of a time frame) spent $1 million a day from the time he was born until today, the amount would be reaching $1 trillion dollars. Then I got curious and broke out my calculator. If we divided up a trillion dollars evenly every person (not family) in the US would get a check for over $3,000! Now for my family of 5 that would mean $15,000. You want stimulus? THAT is stimulating!

first!!!

this is my first post using blogger and this really was intended just to be a test post...

However,

After I titled the post it came to me how many places people use forums or comment areas to just be a dork and stick "first!" in as soon as they can after its creation. 

Don't these people have anything else to do?!?

In real life situations when someone asks a question or makes a statement, does some jerk run up and yell "first!" and then run away?  No!  It is annoying, irritating, aggrivating and a waste of the 3 seconds it takes to create and that 100's of people spend looking at it and getting annoyed.

Can google come up with a web crawler that does a seek and destroy of those posts and wipe them? Maybe, then again google doesn't delete anything...   ever...

hmm, what should I rant about next?