Humans First

gotta be startin somethin

2009-10-26T19:10:00.000-07:00

Yep I'm Still Here

2009-10-19T10:03:00.001-07:00

weird email from blogger today - asking me to login here. guess they thought I left. i never leave, i just fade and shine.

pretty good blogspot domain.

might have to come back here and do some stuff.

I forgot, humans were already first.

2002-12-20T23:26:00.000-08:00

BLOG CLOSED DUE TO BAD IDEA.

Over on Gonzo Engaged we have always been human.

This is where we all need to go.

Not here.

Meet there at 23:00 hours.

Bring flea spray and some lube.

love,
jeneane

I'm just saying...

2002-12-07T22:08:00.000-08:00
I have no idea what this place will end up being about, but I have some thoughts. The first bunch of thoughts I had were around business and how maybe this could be a place where they'd be so engaged by how fricking brilliant our ideas are that folks from "out there" would join us all "in here" thereby erasing more of the boundaries between us and them.

Then the whole girlism v feminism thing blew up, and then Elaine and I get an email from a man wanting to join blog sisters and saying he's sure we don't practice reverse discrimination, to which I wrote a rather intelligent and well-thought-out reply, which I won't bore you with here. But one of the results in my urging him to participate with women online was to urge him to participate "HERE" on this blog. (He is a good guy--he wasn't just trying to bait us into an argument, although, he did waste an hour of my billable time I had to make up later.)

While Blog Sisters is a place for women, open to comments, pointers, and even our sharing emails (with their permission) from men on that blog, posting privileges belong to the women building that place as their own, our own. I never meant it to be the only place on the web. It's just one little place. There are lots of other places.

Like here, for instance. Where we're humans first.

Not men or women first. Not black or white or variations thereof first. Not stay-at-home mothers or childless-by-choice first. Not liberals or republicans first.Not lawyers or doctors or homeless guys first. Yes, as this place grows the folks here may be any or all of those things, but FIRST we're just a group of human beings talking to each other and the world in one place. That's all really.

If we come at Humans First this way--regardless of what we're tackling, saying, ranting about, etc.--then I don't think we can go wrong.

Am I making a lick of sense here?

Essence vs Accidents

2002-12-05T07:32:00.000-08:00
In college, as part of a course in comparative religion, I remember a discussion of the Catholic belief that during the Mass, the wafer is transformed into the body of Christ. The professor explained that the belief is really that the "accidents" of the wafer remained the same (the color, texture, taste etc. -- which always made me gag, btw) but its "essence," its essential nature, didn't.

As an aside, that's the difference between feminism and girlism. Feminism says focus on the essence (admirable human qualities) of a person rather than the accidents (looks, weight, religion, race etc.).

It's the essence, not the accidents, of all of us that should be why we are respected, admired, employed, served, loved. Maybe we need to start a new human movement called "essentialists."

This thinking was triggered by a post on Blog Sisters by Brooke Biggs, who works for Anita Roddick who founded The Body Shop and who recently went "undercover" as a "fat person." Her story and comments are revealing, both for her humanity and her approach to serving her customers.

Ignorance is combustible

2002-12-04T11:32:00.000-08:00
I'd like to go on a slightly different tack from Kevin's, though evidence of humanity in corporate spheres is always a rara avis worthy of curious attention. The thng is, I think there is a sort of growing gap between the technoids and, well, me, for example, a technically rather lame and ignorant end-user. Corporations not only fail to really know how to talk to folks like me, they also need to learn how to behave properly - i.e., within what anyone might recognize as a human ''social contract.'' The lack of manners becomes truly oppressive when the product is something like code, software, which can do stuff regardless of whether we understand it or not.

Thus, we get Microsoft, for example, auto-updating its software - adding little goodies that potentially compromise our privacy and autonomous control - and not bothering to tell us before the auto-update takes place. This is arrogant behavior - cluelessness not just in speech, but in action. The fact that networks have put us in close proximity to these giant coding machines makes it all the more necessary that some expectations of how to behave be acknowledeged by all parties. By not telling us stuff, they are keeping us in the dark. So we light a candle to see what's going on, and communicative arson occurs.

My initial rough thought: Draw up a new techno-social contract - an embracing, shared understanding of what is expected of very powerful corporations with regard to relating to very small, often technically unschooled, end-users. The geeks need our help, in part because they really can't imagine how little we know, and what our questions and concerns are. I have put something about this here - very rough. I would appreciate any comments. (Kevin, you have written so much on this subject that what I'm saying there might be redundant - if so, please point me to the relevant places.) All thoughts welcome.

unexpected acts of humanity

2002-12-02T01:41:00.000-08:00
I'm posting stuff about finding human voices wihtin corporations. Not sure if that was what Jeneane had in mind, but they seem to fit together and fit here better than my blog.

The goal should be to form the right kind of group, the kind Gladwell describes here

Remind Me Fellow Humans

2002-12-01T15:30:00.000-08:00
Okay, I'm over here now. Home from the holidays. Now what the heck are we supposed to write about here? If it's about humans -- we have a bunch of those here in Boston tonight -- problem is, they're all frozen solid, it's so damned cold.

Viva voce

2002-11-30T00:19:00.000-08:00
Cory points toLiterary Devices, a short story by Richard Powers.
It's well written, and worth reading. I'll wait while you do....

...OK then The problem with it is the author's barely-masked contempt for any real writing online, in his pursuit of the chimerae of dead literature mediated through AI. Had he connected with other living writers online, he would have realised that their conversations were what he was missing, rather than the simulcra he found. The implication at the end that we cannot tell stories except in person, and that new media cannot help at all is so wrong that it jars the rest of the piece.

Rageboy's attempts at failing the Turing test are funnier too.

Googly speaking

2002-11-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

On a related note: Jonathan Peterson notes the google reflection of interest in voice:

Chernin's speech was heard by hundreds of people in the hall, and was fairly widely reported by both technology and mainstream press. But Google's link weighting algorithms and blogs have pushed my commentary above the mainstream press. Part of the reason people linked to my piece was because it was both contrarian and researched (unlike any of the "journalistic" articles), but I think part of why Google works in such a democratizing fashion is that we are more likely to link to something written with a human voice, instead of just another pre-digested speech summary.

Something here is encouraging - the levelling power of Google, radical in itself, converging with the attractive power of the human voice.

Writing in your own voice

2002-11-24T01:22:00.000-08:00
Orson Scott Card says:
Every writer -- no, every human being -- has a distinctive voice, which emerges when we speak and, with luck, when we write. In certain kinds of writing -- process writing, for instance, and legal writing, and highly formal discourse -- such quirkiness needs to be held under control, or even completely submerged. That is the only value of such guides as Elements of Style, which is often touted as a writer's guide to "good style," but which in fact is utterly useless to writers of fiction; no, worse than useless, because it tears the soul out of phrase, sentence, and paragraph, leaving only a lifeless skeleton behind.

Fiction writing is the opposite of these. The living voice of the individual author needs to be heard; the reader is hungry for it, and delights in the music of it. However, a contradictory force is also at work: The reader wants to be guided through the story so as to be able to follow what happens and why without confusion or uncertainty. The author's rhetoric, therefore, must be employed in such a way as to achieve the latter purpose -- clarity -- without killing the individuality of his style.

Unfortunately, what happens in many, perhaps most, creative writing courses is that the students are encouraged -- or encourage each other -- to exaggerate or artificially simulate the individual voice quite at the expense of clarity, so that the reader is left perplexed, confused, unguided through the mapless landscape of the fictional universe. All that the reader is given is a voice, but one without content, as if someone were singing in your ear in a language you didn't understand. Very pretty, but after a while you start longing for some content.

read the rest of this article for how

Humanity invades commerce

2002-11-23T00:11:00.000-08:00
Nip over to the Speccie and read how serendipitous untidyness can provoke random acts of humanity.

PS Can we turn on RSS for this blog?

Euen and Tom Make Sense

2002-11-18T09:32:00.000-08:00
Yes, this makes good sense. To talk from our humaness. I like that. We do that on our individual blogs, some of us. What will make this different? That we're joined here? I mean, could it be, now that most of us here "know" one another, that we hang out here like we're at our blogger place in the woods and just relate? Hey, I really like that...

and... yes, Marek, Norwegian fjords...

somehow that is a fitting symbol.

When I was growing up, I had horses. I loved my horses, and although I never owned a Fjord pony, the Fjord was a symbol of sturdy steadfast determination. Still is:

Swimming your horse in Lake Ontario, riding bareback through the trails in the park, soaked blue jeans sticking to his back, getting bucked off and having the wind knocked out of you, these are all generally more human experiences than we engage in at work. No doubt.

So I'm for human first discussions here. I'm for whatever we want to do. I've already learned a lot from the posts of the past week. Keep em coming. We'll gel. We always do.

Walking the talk

2002-11-16T15:58:00.000-08:00
Tom wrote "What if talk about corporations, technology and other inhuman things simply evades the human. I was thinking the proposition here is to talk about human things." and I have to agree.

When Jeneane included me in this group blog I felt slightly uneasy and I wondered why. Then I remembered the saying that "what you resist persists" and something about Mother Theresa saying that rather than being fiercely anti-war she'd rather be fiercely pro-peace. If we want to make the web a more human space, place, thingy (sorry David W) then surely we do so by being different in here than we would be in the "real" world.

What about making this group blog a place where we celebrate and articulate the way we want to be rather than focussing on other people or the way we don't want to be?

Humans First At Last

2002-11-16T14:21:00.000-08:00
Thanks for the invitation. I have not written anything in a while. A bit rusty, or a bit less human maybe in my ability to explore the reverberations of the space I find myself in among the humanity of humans. Late last night I have managed to play the keyboard and write crazy stuff at Gonzo Engaged. Like I said, a bit rusty.

Since we are talking about Humans First I would like to thank Norwegians. Fabulous people those Norwegians are. For every $1 an American is willing to invest in Foreign Aid a Norwegian gives $17. I love those Norwegians already. They are the champions for Humans First and as far as I know they don't have any Bomb Factories. I would like to be a Norwegian, they have fjords. I think that is a blessing to have fjords. A place where you could explore the partnership between Earth and Sea. You don't know where one ends and the other begins. It's like there is this No Man's Land. Neither belonging to Neptune nor Jupiter. A place of not knowing. A place of exploring.

Speaking of No Man's Land there is a movie about it made by Danis Tanovic. Danis is 33 years old. It's his first movie. He wrote it. He got an Oscar for it. Most people don't know about his movie. Please promote it. Well, I recommend you watch it too. The movie is about Humans First. I also hightly recommend an interview with Danis. He talks about reasons for making movies and being a journalist - about being a hero he says this: "In war everybody is a hero. Just being there is heroism. That yee-ha kind of heroism just doesn't exist. Just in your imagination and in infantile movies. Nobody jumps and shoots. It does not exist, except in your wildest dreams".

I like Danis a lot. He is not a hero. I don't like heros. I like Norwegians. Danis is like a Norwegian for me. With fjords and all. Maybe in No Man's Land we are all Humans.
I will tell my mom that she is a Norwegian for me. My hero Norwegian. She has given so much. I want her to have fjords in her life.
Peace
Marek J

2002-11-16T12:24:00.000-08:00
Close Call

Andy Bourland, founder of Click Z, has reportedly had a close encounter with the Grim Reaper. Andy suffered a massive heart attack earlier this week, but managed to survive and is recovering from open-heart surgeryat his home in Andover, Mass.

Andy was one of the first to be clued-in about humans-first marketing principles on the Internet. His influential newsletter. ClickZ, was a pioneering force in elevating and guiding the online marketing conversation. It’s lost a bit of its zip since Andy sold it to Internet.com last year, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of his contribution in the developing days of the Net.

Best wishes to Andy for a speedy recovery. For those who would like to send a card or note, Anne Holland, another clued-in internet marketing voice, has provided Andy’s e-mail and snail mail addresses: 39 High Street, Andover, MA 01810 or andy@bourland.com

What is human?

2002-11-16T10:02:00.000-08:00
What if talk about corporations, technology and other inhuman things simply evades the human. I was thinking the proposition here is to talk about human things. Give the inhuman a rest. Here's a human thing: boredom. Ennui. acedia. Spleen. taedium vitae. It is a great teacher and rewards study. If humans saw more deeply into ennui, perhaps they would have less tolerance for that which kills the spirit.

2002-11-16T09:16:00.000-08:00
Haloscan seems popular these days? Moxie's got a slam dunk if you ask me (that's meant as a humorous rejoinder, of course, not an assessment of her undoubtedly iron clad legal footing). I'd be thrilled to represent her; talk about a high profile client!

quick state of the blog

2002-11-16T06:55:00.000-08:00
Outstanding invitees are Marek J., Euen Semple (who's been trying to get on; i just re-invited him), Locke (who asked to be added), and Suitt.

Who knows how to create comments in AFAIK? It's fun in here. I wish we had a few couches and a fireplace.

MoXie and comments

2002-11-15T23:52:00.000-08:00
QuickTopic comments are great, but need to be manually created AFAIK.

Denise, could you send Microsoft a Cease and Desist on behalf of Madison Slade? - After all she's local to you. Could we run a write in campaign for her? I think she has prior claim on being Ms Moxie

And did you invite Marek? He's posting over at Gonzo Engaged tonight.

cooool.

2002-11-15T18:12:00.000-08:00
kevin, cool logo! very cool. okay, now, I need to get comments working. Anyone have ideas? yaccs is a pain to get on because they are so full. where should I go?

Yes, the idea of awarding smart companies humans first seal of approval is a great one! We threw something like that around on gonzoengaged if I'm not mistaken but nothing came of it. I think if I can get comments working and someone posts about a loser company or a smart one, folks could say yes, it's worthy of going on our sidebar. Then we could contact them telling them why we think they're nifty and inviting them to come here and talk with us.... yes? no? crazy? stupid? ah well, maybe some fun if nothing else...

possible Logo suggestion

2002-11-15T00:35:00.000-08:00

The Chinese characters say something like 'Human one' rather than 'humans first' exactly, but I think they make the point.

Hey You guys!!!! How's About...

2002-11-14T12:28:00.000-08:00
The Customer Approved Excellence In Business Award I know it's simple and even possibly overused but, hey, you get the picture... This is a great beginning for laser pointing a purpose to change 'business as usual' mindsets in any given industry. So, lets pick a target. It's so nice to see so many responses from our Blogger community. OK, Jeneane...you can remove the clamps from my [name the body part] now...ouch!

Another great idea from Turner

2002-11-14T12:08:00.000-08:00
Absolutely. Someone needs to design some extraordinary logo for those extraordinary companies. We can start identifying them and then contact them to let them know that they received our award. Of course, they'll want to know who the hell we are. So we'll have to have a mission statement...... Uh oh. This is getting to sound like Blogtank -- except now we have a very specific project with a very specific goal. This just might be the spirit of Blogtank resurrected and ready to roll! (I was only kidding about the mission statement, but we probably would need some sort of one-liner to identify the awarders to the awardees.)

Idea

2002-11-14T11:31:00.000-08:00
An award logo or hallmark that cool companies can put on their sites that says "Humans First".

Send The Companies A Message...

2002-11-13T23:39:00.000-08:00
The message being that all those on this list are not going to deal with: 1) Planned Obsolesence [sp?] 2) Lame salespeople who don't know much about a product 3) Lame salespeople who don't care what happens to a product after it leaves the store 4) Stupid Rebates
5)Bait and Switch 6) Oh wait.....! Honey, are we talking B2B or.. nevermind. You guys define it. I'll be back...

Can I add McAfee to the clueless loser list?

2002-11-13T16:05:00.000-08:00
My sad story is too long to post here. So read it here.

I know. I know. I should have bought a Mac. But at the time I was doing freelance writing and all of my customers used PCs.

I know. I know. What's the point of this site unless leaders from the companies in question join the conversations? Well, we'll see, won't we?

Fish in a Barrel

2002-11-13T15:37:00.000-08:00
I try not to rag on Microsoft all the time, as I'm sure it gets boring, and then they come up with the beauty pageant marketing model for Office software.

one true one blue

2002-11-13T14:22:00.000-08:00
Bix, my (silly) hope is that if we develop this thing into a place where we say YAY about companies who are behaving and LOSER about companies who aren't that maybe some actual (gasp) folks from ain't-misbehaving and behaving businesses will join us here to talk and live among us. Might be surprised what happens when we hang out as people. We'll see if it happens. No Zzzzs the first week. That's not allowed until week 11, if I'm not mistaken on my team blog etiquette, which I make up as i go.

Zzz...

2002-11-13T13:36:00.000-08:00
Wake me when corporations start behaving well and I won't give a rat's ass how they talk.

2002-11-13T12:52:00.000-08:00
Validation

I'm not quite sure that I'm human quite yet--still waitin' to have my ticket validated; but thinks for lettin' me hang around some.

Game Show Hosts

2002-11-13T10:13:00.000-08:00
Remind me of sell-out sales people who put money above human morality. They should be discouraged.

Intitutional Wisdom

2002-11-13T05:52:00.000-08:00
Jevon (of Blogtrack and Blogpeople) offers this dead-on bit of insight, in response to this article in Marketing Magazine:
Blogs are not an overt marketing tool. They are about creating a community that can make the back-door sale and which can influence sway in any group. If companies see blogs as a major "marketing tool", they are wrong. They have to see a community builder, a place where the established is still the grassroots and where they won't just put out marketing material, but where they will accept push-back from the customer, and where they will be expected to listen now.
I take it as an excellent sign that the thought of listing all the institutions I can think of who speak to the world through their representatives' weblogs already is too exhausting even to attempt. There's Macromedia ("Um, what are you doing?") and its bloggers, for starters:
Jeremy Allaire, Matt Brown, Greg Burch, Mike Chambers, Sean Corfield, Waldo Smeets, Bob Tartar.

There are the Utah.gov bloggers:
Phil Windley, Dave Fletcher, Bob Woolley, Dave McNamee, Joe Leary, Dave Willis, Al Sherwood, Q. Wade Billings, Craig Neilson.

Of course, there are Dave, John, Ev, Andre, ... (stop me before I start yacking about what's happening on the law side, ok? Just click down my blogroll).

It's not all about the tech, but it's the tech that propels "getting to know one another" at near light speed. Small example of big phenomenon: I found the quote that kicks off this post as a sidebar to the article it critiques. The author picked up on it from the guy's blog and realized, Damn, he's right, I should have made that more clear.

Oh, the humanity

2002-11-13T05:11:00.000-08:00
The concept of "Humans First" is so radical it just might work. Way to go, Jeneane.

Being t/here

2002-11-13T04:48:00.000-08:00
It is good to be among humans, a very large, rich, funny, erratic, rather unregimented category. Yes, it's good. Hi all.

There Is No U In Team

2002-11-13T01:23:00.000-08:00
"There Is No U In Team". What an imaginative way to fire someone.

I'm Here!

2002-11-12T23:37:00.000-08:00
Okay, I've been invited to the prom. I'm all dressed up and ready to go. Where are we going to today? Mary

Screwed, clued, and tattooed...

2002-11-12T19:27:00.000-08:00
I start a nice little six or seven month contract tomorrow. I was truthful about my technical competence, so the rate we negotiated took that into account. Screwed. But I told the truth and had a straight ahead conversation about how important could it be for that organization to put a lot of resources into Win Nt at this stage of the game anyway, and I think my honesty was what won me the contract (plus the part about how I'll work so cheap because of the aforementioned technical shortcomings).

Okay, I got the screwed part covered and I got the clued part covered... as for the tattooed part, hell... it rhymed. But maybe it has to do with the urge to shave my head and have a bar code imprinted across the top of my skull. I think the downside of that would be too many bad charges on the credit card when the crooks get their scanners set up to read my bar code from across the street.

I like "customer" too. Although what follows will show that "consumer" probably applies... Beth and I ran into a clued dude at Pottery Barn who made our transactions so painless and easy that Beth wrote to his management and told them they probably don't pay him enough, he is so good. The weird wired part of this is that we had input an order online, then applied for the credit card since there was a discount that goes with opening the account, then learned that we'd have to wait a week or so to find out if we were approved, so we went to the store to see if they had any of the things we are interested in and the guy said, hey, let's just do this thing... so he put this complex order together from the online catalog and the retail inventory and so on, and he got our credit approved while we were doing the other stuff and we got our discount and we have a real person shepherding our process so the couch and two bookcases and a media cabinet and a mirror and whatever, all due to arrive on different days, by different carriers, are all being tracked by this guy we have confidence in. Too bad about the credit approval bottleneck in the online transaction. I'm sure the brick and mortar overhead ain't worth it.

Hey, that turned into a "humans first" story didn't it?

Customers, not consumers

2002-11-12T19:02:00.000-08:00
Customer is the term I prefer, because no-one ever said 'the consumer is always right'.

(I now have 13 blogger blogs in that popup, only two of which I post to more thna once a fortnight...)

Happy Birthday RageBoy

2002-11-11T20:46:00.000-08:00
So here I am again. What am I, insane? hmmmm. Well, there's that.

And then there's this. Cluetrain and our fine mentors in Locke, Weinberger, Searls, and Levine--where the hell is Levine anyway?--gave us an amazing legacy. Look over on BlogTree and see how many children they've spawned among them. (I'm not sure how they got three guys' DNA in a bunch of offspring, but that's for another post.) So I got to thinking that we--the kids--clued2--should start doing something with this shall-we-say important and well-imparted knowledge.

So then I do the only thing I know how to do--start a team blog.

Some companies and their "management" yada-yada-yada all day long that Cluetrain can't work in a down economy. That Gonzo Marketing's worst practices won't cut it in tough times. Bullshit backwards is what I say to that, to the nay-sayer corporations and the "management" among them. Now is the *best* time to get a clue, to get in, get your hands dirty, to talk with and understand your markets. This is just the economy to distinguish your company as one who gives a darn, so that when things turn up, and they will, the competition will be kissing your collective behinds as you fly past. Because we'll remember.

We never forget.

And you should know that. For CHRIMINY SAKE, we're out here blogging our hearts and brains out--we're telling you every little thing about our souls and families and lives and deepest darkest secrets. So don't sit there and wonder how you'll use blogging as the latest and greatest marketing tool. Get in here, with us, get engaged, wake up, talk to us. And when we find out you're talking to humans--you know, people just like us--and not consumers, and when we find out you're talking to us in a language we understand, not at us with marketing-speak, we'll feature you right here on this blog. We're going to talk about what you're doing, why you're doing it. We're going to ask you to chime in. We're going to get to know one another really well.

And when we find out who's doing it wrong, when you're treating us like consumers, demographics, spreadsheets and the like, we're going talk about that too. And we're going to because we can.

And because we've already been talking, and because you're already late.

So come on in. Let's talk.

Hey Team, who's in?