Crossroads Dispatches

Sauntering Towards A Waltzable Web

I stepped off the Aeromexico flight and right away I knew that even the extra days I spent to 'acclimate' in one of the largest cities on the planet - and, yes, to see with my own jaguar eyes the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera home - hardly prepared me for the landing in Las Vegas.

I had re-entered a new territory, and this terrain came without sidewalks. Not even cracked tottering foot-high sidewalks like in the streets of San Cristobal de las Casas.

Later that evening, my mom who lives in Las Vegas, drove us to the off-strip casino with the adjacent shopping center and we entered into the cavernous cacophany of the Cheesecake Factory.

The street vendor's tamales at the Oaxaca market, the steaming chocolate at the neighborhood cafe in Quetzaltenago a few alley zig-zags from the town square, the tortillas and the sweet pineapple Christmas-fruit drink (and, yes, you can spike it) that Erica made were still vivid to my tongue, to my nose, to my eyes, to my skin right then.

It's now three years later. Today, the aromas are a waft of memory. But some caresses leave fingerprints like they've never left your body though the touch is no longer evident by sight of a hand.

My eyes did not quite register the 360 degree dominos of marquee neon signs, and water fountains synchronicized to symphonies as I drove my mom's car into asphalt football field-sized parking lots of the convention center. Armies upon armies of HDTVs spinning scenes and MP3 players assaulted me as I entered "the largest technology industry event." (This year 140,000 attendees are expected according to the San Jose Merc.)

Las Vegas may not yet be my favorite city in the world, but I'd never ever had such a visceral reaction like this before. And I've never been back to CES since.

I'd just spent seven weeks in Mexico, Guatamala, and a brief sojourn at the Copan ruins in Honduras when I went to CES 2004. The family I lived with for more than three weeks in Quetzaltenago took me in as their daughter, and I lived with their grandmother, grandfather, Erica's sister and her boy, and their own son and daughter. I went shopping with the family, strolled the streets in December following the neighborhood processions of revelers, ate three square meals a day all including hordes of tortillas in the kitchen, watched the Simpsons dubbed in Spanish with the boy, changed ringtones on teenager Jessica's new cellphone, ate barbequed pork and joined in on the firecracker frenzy when celebrating Christmas and New Year's with their extended families.

I wasn't disgusted by Las Vegas. That's not it. I simply...

Ached. There was a longing like the longing a baby that's been left in the crib for too long might have to be held by its mother.

I don't know need to try to dig up my journal from the trip right now to tell you the thought that kept ringing through my head over and over:

This city isn't built to human scale.

I was in Manhattan this September. I found myself walking as much as I ever did in Quetzaltenago, Guatemala. Walking to the meteoritic hole where twin towers once stood (on 9-11-06), walking to the Alex Grey gallery, walking to the Whitney Museum to meet Senia, walking to meet Rita for lunch and then walking through the flower district with her to see her artwork hanging at her apartment, walking that weekend to the yoga workshop in that little Cuban enclave near the Lower East Side, walking to the deli with Tom in Little Italy, walking through the smattering of darling boutiques and cafes in NoLita (adore Nolita).

Walking, walking, walking. Waltzing! Have you ever noticed that walking and waltzing are first cousins?

Walking connects me with the touch and movement and breath of humans.

Maybe that's the real reason that when my car left me stranded at the Colma BART Station this past November 2nd, I was not very inclined to fix it.

Sauntering: not a tour, but a never-ending enterprise. Playful and serious. Thoreau discovers his own etymology for the word. The saunterer may begin, he says, in the familiar fields of Concord, and some time later find himself in a place where "...jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested." - Joshua McKinney, Saunter

I say walking. Henry David Thoreau says walking but likes sauntering even better.

Sauntering's roots are tangled with meditating and musing too. And moreover, it means: "Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere," writes Thoreau.

"To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say Ex oriente lux; ex occidente Frux. From the East light; from the West fruit."  - Henry David Thoreau, Walking

So I smile when I read the CES coverage in the San Jose Mercury News this morning. Sub-headline: DOT-COM GLITZ IS DROPPED FOR FRUITFUL CONNECTIONS

"HP did briefly toy with the idea of bringing in big-name celebrities, but decided against that. "You don't get the value from it,'' said Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of HP's PC business. "It's about building relationships, and the only way to build relationships is with that face time.'' - "Parties Take on a Different Life," San Jose Mercury News, January 9, 2007

Yes, I'm supposed to make some 2007 Web predictions tonight.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

So I predict that the time of mass scale will be come down like the Berlin Wall in a velvet revolution yearning for the freedom of human scale.

And this time too, when the Wall comes down, there will be dancing in the streets.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nicked and Dimed shares in her brand-new released-today book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, that "human beings are innately social, naturally taking part in celebrations and festivities that involve feasting, dancing and dressing up. Though these impulses have been suppressed at times,...they can never be kept down; the need for communal joy is a core feature of humanity."

My umbrella prediction (which all other predictions tumble out of) is that 2007 is the year that the Web is likened to a communal table rather than a printing press. Sans piping hot tortillas perhaps or perhaps not, but a gathering that exuberantly explores that human impulse towards collective joy and the delight of sauntering into people on the sidewalk.

Bonus: "We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest brightest morning sun- light fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings guilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright—I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn." - excerpted from essay Walking, Henry David Thoreau

Bonus: Speaking of Dancing in the Streets: "The best-selling author of Nickel and Dimed peeks inside the group behavior that breeds joy" will be speaking in S.F. on January 18th. Say hi, I'll be there myself. 

p.s.  Alright, so I'm more of an essayist like Thoreau than a dialogue-and-scene crime novelist. The whole intent is I want to avoid speaking in off-putting gobbledygook like "the timeless spaceless matrix of beingness dissolved into the One which it had always been." The litmus test is if my own family has half a chance at making heads or tails of the post, then I'm happy. He, he, gobbledygook was coined by a guy named Maverick: 'His inspiration, he said, was the turkey, “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity”.'

Nuff 'splaining Lucy. Like Frida says, ""I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration." Amen, sister.

images La Molendera, by Diego Rivera (yep, she's making tortillas); my friend and local artist Gilbert Marosi's Looney Gamblers; Frida Kahlo's Still Life with Parrot and Fruit; Henry Gasser's The Lord Loves Dancing

Bento Box: A Piece of Uncensored Corporate Art

Rare, if ever, that I've called a corporate blog a work of art. Most honestly bore me. But I'm highly impressed by Bento Box. My impression of BzzAgent from their first corporate blog was it was a highly controversial arena (word-of-mouth buzz marketing) to be launching such an incredibly transparent no-holds-barred blog.

Naked, you could say. (Patrick, Robert Scoble's teenage son said he fielded questions from school buddies about his dad's porn book. The business blogging tome is titled Naked Conversations.) Fresh blood, Ginsberg could say. Refreshing, I say.

Here's three reasons I find it delectable:

1. Tom Parker, a local writer and instructor in Palo Alto, once said that memoir and fiction writing plays with time. One can stretch five minutes into fifty pages or squeeze fifty years into five paragraphs. Well, blogging is a different animal. Time marches fairly linearly on a reverse-chronological time-stamped blog. I've wondered about the linearity of time and how to unhinge from it on a blog. I've wondered how to play with space, rather than time, via a blog. I've wondered how to experiment with an art installation using a blog. And so I had to smile when I got an email announcing the Bento Box. "Think part Blog, part art show, part essay, part media experience," they said.  Aha, great minds think alike ;-)
   
2. How many companies you know hire two artists-in-residences and allow them simply observe untethered the inner workings of a corporation and then freely express their observations online? None come readily to my mind except BzzAgent. I mean one of the early sketches/posts had a dangling penis forgodsakes! And they still didn't squelch the artist on his second penis portrayal either (or is the plural penii, anyhow you'll have to search yourself to find that post).
   
3. "For the next twelve fortnights (24 weeks, or 168 days, or 4,032 hours), The Bento Box will be open for dining." Limited edition. This season only. It's just me probably, but I adore limited edition. I prefer hand-cranked-one-of-a-kind-never-to-be-repeated because there's plenty more creativity where that came from over cookie-cutter-mass-produced lets-churn-this-cash-cow-out until we're all bored to tears. Plus I like how they slying unveil burlesque-style the 168-day installation: "Each business day, another piece of the box will be available for viewing."

   Like CEO Dave Balter said, "All good things come to an end." Amen to that.

Okay, that's just a few reasons. I'll be sharing conversation tidbits from my chat with Dave as I promised over the next week.

Excavating the Creative Contours of Your Customer

I assume you've read the Anthropologie piece. I assume you read that founder and chairman Richard Hayne's training as an anthropologist was put to use when he spent nearly two years on a "cultural odyssey" to make sure his next post-Urban Outfitters venture was on target.

That the headquarters staff keeps their pulse directly on the customer, not focus groups, on cultural events, not trends research reports. That they say fieldwork is never ever done.

"If you really want to understand your customer, you have to spend a portion of your time excavating the creative edge of the culture that defines her. For Anthropologie president Glen Senk, that means lurking around upscale neighborhoods, looking for blue plastic New York Times delivery bags and calculating the ratio of Starbucks to convenience stores. (Fast Company)"

On August 24, and August 25 I'll be leading two separate afternoon expeditions. Highly individualized excavating-the-creative-edge-of-your-customer safaris into the upscale European-boutique-inspired Santana Row shoppes in San Jose, California. One to five curious adventurers per trip. Absolutely no guarantees of safely returning back to civilization with the same eyes, same senses, same palate:

"In my experience, retailers spend most of their time looking at things from the company's perspective or the marketer's perspective," [Glen Senk, CEO of Anthropologie] he says. "They talk about trends and brand but rarely about the customer in a meaningful way. We're customer experts. Our focus is on always doing what's right for a specific customer we know very well."

The catch: I'm doing this research myself anyway. We'll start the afternoon by having lunch at the one restaurant I've been waiting with intense anticipation to open: Tanglewood Restaurant. (If you have to write a press release, that one's a beauty. It's actually a story. And it's no accident we start the dig at Tanglewood.) So that means you guys and gals split my lunch check, that's it. You must be into slow food and exploration into the unknown: what you don't know you don't know. You must be an independent owner (or marketing representative/agent of), designer, artist, artisan, creator or somehow convince me this would be of benefit to your business if none of those vaguely applies. High-tech companies especially Web 2.0 consumer-oriented would gain insights. This isn't about retail. It's about customer. RSVP: c r o s s r o a d s d i s p a t c h e s +at+ gmail +dot+ com and I'll send details.

Anthropologie: We Spend Money on Experience, Not Marketing

I stopped shopping at my ex-favorite chain store Chico's some time ago. Their catalog still arrives in my PO Box, but when I walk by the store I rarely venture in. I haven't bought anything there in maybe two years. I read with passing interest in the Wall Street Journal that "Chico's Falls Out of Fashion With Investors" (7/28/06): "Chico's shares have fallen more than 50% since reaching a high Feb 22 of $49.40."

Yesterday, I'm walking along the European-styled street promenade at Santana Row across from my new retail chain favorite (I'm more of a boutique gal), Anthropologie, and the pair strolling in front of me start a converation as they walk past a potted profusion of lavender agapanthus and the Crepe & Brioche French Artisan Bakery's stall at the organic farmer's market.

The thirty-something woman turns to her friend and gasps, "I am dying to, but I cannot go into Anthropologie!" She's resisting the urge to browse its "latticework chaise lounges, velvet patchwork pillows, ornate birdcages, leather-bound books, sari fabrics, teak benches...vintage-inspired cardigan sweaters...Chinese pajamas and cobwebby camisoles."

Me, I gave up resistance -- and I'm talking far beyond resisting enchanting lace skirts, guava scented candles and Portugeuse china too.

I feel young at heart these days and, yet, when I walk into Anthropologie, I feel younger still. A sense of wonder and enchantment welcomes you as soon as you open the door. Music streams, a couple sits side-by-side on an antique sofa immersed in a coffee-table book of Leonardo da Vinci's complete works, a mother and her teenage daughter with their coiffeured black poodle buy a whimsical sun dress evocative of Provence for Mom.

Chico's tends more towards a baby boomer crowd and I'm right on the cusp of Gen-X and Baby Boomer. Yet I spot many women both younger and older than what the retail critics cite as Anthropologie's so-called demographic of 30-45 years. But then again Anthropologie could care less about demographics.

John Moore of the Brand Autopsy blog shares:

As a marketer, I adore Anthropologie. They do a masterful job of making sure every store is the same, yet different. “The same, yet different” retailing strategy is something we strived to do at Starbucks and because of me, this article found its way on many a chair at Starbucks’ HQ. In fact, I still freely share this article with retailers wanting marketing advice.

As a human (whom happens to be a woman, customer and marketer and much more), I adore Anthropologie. Here's just one reason why:

"One of our core philosophies," explains Anthropologie president Glen Senk, "is that we spend the money that other companies spend on marketing to create a store experience that exceeds people's expectations. We don't spend money on messages -- we invest in execution."

Experience the Message. Intimately Know Your Market. "The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous," said Peter Drucker.

The Fast Company article's author totally understands the wonder and essence of Anthopologie. This article gives insight into far far more than simply retailing. I totally wholeheartedly recommend it.

And you gotta love any story that begins like this:

My mother used to use a phrase, "shop like a Frenchwoman," that I never really understood until the summer we spent a month in Normandy. I was 15, and my parents, along with my aunt (my mother's twin) and her family, had rented an old farmhouse on the top of a hill in the rolling countryside. My schoolgirl French was deemed the most passable of the four cousins', so I was the translator for the women's daily trips to the markets of the little town of Manerbe. There I began to get the picture.

If the twins couldn't exactly talk like Frenchwomen, they could cook with the best of them -- and that started with their approach to ingredients. They would pick over baby potatoes, inspect haricots verts for color and crispness, smell herbs for freshness, and poke and prod everything within reach in the outdoor stalls. They'd move from charcuterie to boulangerie , passing over the pâté for some particularly succulent chickens or pointing out the exact baguette they wanted. As often as not, an unexpected or particularly fresh item would result in a surprise twist in the menu.

It wasn't efficient, but we usually came away with a story: a conversation with one of the shopkeepers, a motorbike run amok in the marketplace, a circle back to replace the tarte Tatin devoured in the car on the way home. And, inevitably, the smells, sounds, and textures of the market seeped into our dinner, adding an intense flavor.

These days, for the most part, shopping like a Frenchwoman is a lost art, having vanished somewhere between the sommelier at Costco and the organic arugula now available in virtually every supermarket in America. The multisensory ritual, with its open-ended sense of discovery and the thrill of the hard-won find, has given way to a uniformity of style -- and a stylish uniformity.

And then there is Anthropologie...

images Yeah, it's a sleeper hit alright. With no advertising, Anthropologie's reliance on its store experience, intimacy with its customer, art, "high touch, not high tech" (says their architect Ron Pompei), evocative soulful catalogs and word-of-mouth makes it seem uber-radically traditionalist. Radical traditionalist, like me. Images from their website.

Grok This! Gesture Algorithms Superfluous Since Humans Naturally Grok Gestures

Robert Scoble was pleasantly touched by an email from a stranger passing on information about a fire in the Paradise Valley area: "[H]e remembered that my mom lived in Emigrant, Montana. How did he know that? Cause I blogged about that a few weeks back." From that email, Robert infers that maybe Steve Gillmor's GestureLab and gesture concepts have legs.

"Can algorithms fill this role? Sure. For instance, read yesterday’s post by Fred Wilson. What gestures do you see there?

I see that he enjoys personal, authentic information about Venture Capital, music, and that he already reads the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal so don’t bother sending him anything that already exists in those two publications." [Hyperlinks added ;-) ] - "Gesture Firestorm Hits," Scobleizer, August 1, 2006

Can algorithms fill this role? The real question: Why should they...

1. When a human being can naturally grok the gestalt of a moment in its totality - without a single algorithm. (We could call it intuition, instinct, impulse, inclination, gut feel, being wholly present to another person.) Singularity, Turing machine or not, mark my words, machines will never ever grok the way humans can instantaneously.
2. When the intention of the person-to-person reaching out is what typically matters in the first place; the gesture's secondary. (Spare me your algorithmically-generated gestures, I already get hordes of spam.)

What do I mean?

Gestures based on reads on my past - anyone's past, and that includes yesterday or five minutes ago - often feel as dissonant and anachronistic as seeing a Rolex on the wristband on a commoner in a Victorian-period comedy of manners film. Something just feels off.

I find myself bemused at best, unseen at worst, when people come up to me who've not talked with me in ages and proceed to act as if I'm stuck in some time machine. They bring up old topics (no, I don't expect even my friends to read my blog, simply ask: What are you into now?) and introduce me to others based on petrified and stagnant historical data.

Recent examples of algorithms gone awry. If you think algorithms are only a machine function, think again. Humans can easily go into full-blown if-then-else algorithmic-mode:

• The wish-fulfilling gesture robot scans my last few posts and concludes I adore vodka, wine, coffee. Very wrong on all three counts. I'm actually a water and tea gal. Better to be curious and ask me why I'm writing about those three. However, a perfect gesture would certainly be to invite me as your guest to Paris this fall.
• I doubt that I'm alone in the fact that the full expanse of my online life represents only a wee fraction of myself. Nothing I've written in over three years would lead you to believe I'm a huge fan of Gershwin and the flapper jazz culture of the 1920's. And more importantedly no algorithm could piece together why I am. Yet a human might grok it's so sheerly through resonance and intuition.
• I get tons of unsolicited PR emails written purportedly by human beings, quite often disguised as friendly 'gestures'. They scan my bio and perhaps the last few posts. Fair enough. The thing is most humans are astute enough to pick up the true intention behind gestures. I have received only one genuine unsolicited email of late from a intriguing woman that found me via a search on the term "renaissance." My email back to her since I was so floored by her perceptiveness and authenticity was basically, Who are you and how did you find me?
• "Would you like some of spinach-and-egg omelette I'm making?" my housemate would often ask in the morning. Typically my answer was "Sure." After about the seventh consecutive 'no' this May he stopped asking. On a July 4th outing to his cabin in the Sierras we visited his neighbor's goat and llama farm - I kid you not, the couple's name was MacDonald! They gave us farm fresh eggs from their chicken coup on our way out the door. The next morning I overhear an algorithm's gears churning as omelettes were frying. My other housemate is explaining to the guest-cook: "Evelyn doesn't eat eggs anymore." 

IF Evelyn doesn't eat eggs in May AND Evelyn doesn't eat eggs in June AND

IF Evelyn says she cannot eat eggs from Safeway anymore but cannot exactly articulate why

THEN Evelyn doesn't eat eggs in July, or maybe ever again

PRINT GESTURE RESULT INTO ARRAY(1): Don't offend thus don't offer eggs to Evelyn

So I corrected the algorithm-writer and I ate eggs that morning because they were fresh and came from a small farm where the folks loved their animals such that I resonated with the whole place. (You might surmise currently today August 3rd that I am not eating industrial meat, fish, eggs; but it's the why that's the crucial question.)

Recent examples of instantaneous (that's nearly superfluous with grok) grokking:

• I met pastry chef Shuna Fish Lydon briefly at BlogHer. She grokked me. (Grokking happens in a split-second.) She intuitively sensed a fellow lover of seasonal, locali food. She offered me her last copy of Edible San Francisco that I was perusely with obvious relish. We've theoretically never met before. I've never read her blog. She's never read mine. Yet Instant Recognition Happened. No algorithm required. Plus nearly no surprise - more akin to 'yeah I knew that' - when I read in the magazine's bio blurb that she is a lover of stone fruits too.
• I recently bought "Between Friends: M.F.K. Fisher and Me" (at Leigh's) about Jeannette's Ferrary's friendship with the legendary epicurean. Now, even though I had dinner with Susan Getgood Friday night she did not know this. She sent me this email Monday: "[T]he peach recipes reminded me of a book I just finished – My Life in France by Julia Child. If you haven’t, you should read it. Julia and her nephew co-writer really bring Paris of the late 40s and early 50s alive. A time remarkably close in many ways to salon culture. I ate it up like a peach." She's totally right of course. I would love this book. It was a valuable, considered recommendation.
• An attuned publicist sent me copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's new book, The Energy of Prayer. Now this was the very first unsolicited book outside the business book category I've ever received. It was like a timely blessing that dropped from Heaven. I felt someone knew. I continue to get tons of business books in the mail because I was really into business book reviews...in 2004. At a bookstore the other day, I flipped through The Long Tail yet I bought Madame Bouvary instead. Anyone that groks me today (and only today matters) could sense that. The gesture algorithms would lump into this conclusion: Nix sending Evelyn a business book to review. Evelyn is not doing biz books. Semicolon. End do-loop. Wrong again! It depends. I absolutely adore and HIGHLY recommend this recent purchase: former VP of Trend, Design and Product Devolopment at Target's book, The Trendmaster's Guide: Get a Juump on What Your Customers Wants Next.

Bonus: Friends don't hold friends hostage to the past.

Last time I met my ex-husband for coffee he gathered all he knew about me about him like trusty library reference materials. To him, I was still the person that had left an ambitious dot-com career, him, and Salt Lake City.

"So you're dating a Republican?" he peered at me quizzically like a play being performed without regard to memorized lines from the script. I felt like a snapshot. Not a live, evolving being. Whereas, said Republican (now ex-lover) is one of my closest friends and every time we meet I'm a fresh discovery he's eager to learn about. And vice-versa.

Recently I wrote this to a close friend: "Be careful (and I will too) with preconceptions and assumptions....it can kill the mystery of the other person. There's unfathomable depths to both of us, all of us. Trust me you have only stratched the surface of the Infinite expressing itself as Evelyn -- we're even a mystery unto ourselves. Let's stay curious explorers, k?"

Wordplay: GROK (Source:) To grok (pronounced GRAHK) something is to understand something so well that it is fully absorbed into oneself. In Robert Heinlein's science-fiction novel of 1961, Stranger in a Strange Land, the word is Martian and literally means "to drink" but metaphorically means "to take it all in," to understand fully, or to "be at one with." Today, grok sometimes is used to include acceptance as well as comprehension - to "dig" or appreciate as well as to know.

As one character from Heinlein's novel says:

'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed - to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science - and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man.

p.s. Grokking isn't Martian. In fact it's reverse: It's alien when Earthbound humans deny their inherent grok capacity. As my teacher said last night, "Truth is innate. There's nothing more natural for a human being than enlightenment; everything else feels quite unnatural." You protest: moi, enlightened? Fine, fine, you may have the dimmer switch turned a bit too far on your awareness of said enlightenment. Yet the light's equally available, and as close as the turning of a knob.

p.p.s. I'm the fourth Evelyn on Google. And it's an utter shame that Evelyn Waugh is not #1.

image Michelangelo of course. (You can Google him ;-)) I bought Il Gigante: Michelangelo, Florence, and the David 1492-1504 during same trip to Leigh's too.

Everyone's Famous to 2.08 Close Friends

"Still - in a way - nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't the time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." - Georgia O'Keefe

The "number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss [important] matters more than doubled, to nearly 25 percent." Americans social circle of intimate friends has been shrinking since 1985, cites a study to be published in the June 2006 issue of American Sociological Review, the General Social Survey (GSS), "one of the nation's longest running surveys of social, cultural and political issues.

"When the survey was conducted in 1985, Americans most commonly said they had three close friends whom they'd known a long time, saw often, and with whom they shared a number of interests. They were almost as likely to name four or five close friends, and the relationships often sprang from their neighborhoods or communities." - "Living to Work Can Be a Lonely Life," PhillyBurbs.com, June 27, 2006 

'Core' confidants, trusted friends, close friends, friends to lean on are just some ways we describe those allies and family members that will bare their souls with us when we're otherwise surrounded by weather banter and last night's reality TV show analysis at the water cooler.

Way easy to fault others' inane chatter and, why, heck, maybe the Internet's partly to blame for your lack of close friends.

"Whenever people come, there is useless talk. Whenever I go, and visit, I have the unpleasant feeling of interfering with other men's business. Now I can do nothing better than follow the examples of Sun Ching and Tu Wu-lang, who confined themselves within locked doors. Friendlessness will become my friend, and poverty my wealth." - Matsuo Basho

As you can see Japanese Zen haiku poet Basho got awfully close to becoming a hermit himself and he didn't even have the depravity of the West to blame. Not the excuse of a grueling 9-to-9 corporate job with the tiresome commute on 101 amid the Valley sprawl. No, not even tech.memeorandum or his Second Life tore him away from close kinship. In fact, he wailed the above complaint in the crisp autumn of 1693.

Friends, we sigh collectively, you can't live with 'em, you can't live without 'em.

Trust, authenticity, and social search came up over and over again at last week's Supernova conference. David Parmet tells me the backchannel folks played a virtual drinking game chugging a make-believe 'shot' each time a speaker mentioned the phrase "user generated content."

"Thank god you're not really at a bar," I replied.

At a Wednesday session the Neilsen Buzzmetrics folks pulled up stats:

• Which factors make you most comfortable purchasing a product (source: Mediaedge) - 76% say because "a friend recommended it"
• What's the best source for advice on a new product (Yankelowich) - (Highest percentage of options, but I missed precise number) - "Another consumer"
• Among best sources for new ideas about products? (NOP) - 92% say friends

My two cents: The trend to listening to friends (word-of-mouth ain't new) and customers like yourself extends beyond "well, marketers are sleazy, journalists lap up everything PR dishes." I really think it's a hunger for connection, for intimacy, for safe and genuine human bonding, for expression, for expansion especially as social circles contract to our nuclear family.

"Things go in cycles. People are [gravitating] to smaller groups," said Mena Trott, co-founder, SixApart on Thursday commenting on a question about mass communities. Several informal hallway conversations raved about Wednesday's more intimate, smaller "give and take" workshop format. It's hard to follow that up with the auditorium lecture format of Thursday, Friday -- and at least one attendee I know decided that she'd already experienced the climax Wednesday, so she skipped the rest of the conference.

At Supernova's Thursday lunch I'm chatting with Mike Sigal and we're chatting about art, bohemianism, and bacchanals, so I figure it's as good a time as any to mention an event idea I've been kicking around. I get a fraction into my 30-sec description and he blurts, "Oh, a salon!" He got it in only two notes. I shared my dilemma finding appropriate space. "And it's got to be a garden, it's a Garden of Eden, forbidden fruit theme," I said.

I think that's when Mike realizes I must be fixated on mass scale, Techcruch Riya sold-out bash size. "Think intimate, 20 people max, three featured artists." Duh. In a super-size me, all-you-can-eat buffet, megahit nation, it's easy to forget that only a handful of poets attended Kenneth Rexroth's Friday salon (think Ginsberg, Kerouac, Synder). And they sent merely one hundred postcard invites for their infamous Howl reading launching a poetry renaissance and one can claim the entire countercultural movement of late 50s, sixties.

Yet who cares if we don't launch any movements, anyhow. We will have moved ourselves to create art, and to unlock our own hearts.

"When you wake up, you wake up out of this [illusion of] "me and you"...there is no such thing as a personal relationship between a you and a me...There is no Other. Look at the implications of awareness that there is no other." - Emptiness Dancing, Adyashanti (some transposing done)

I'll say something radical, and then we can go on like I didn't say that. Having one intimate relationship where you go all the way in depth, where the idea of even relating disappears, the artificial sense of boundary melts, is plenty. It's not a numbers game when it's all One.

The roots of anxiety are embedded

In the delusion that every one of us

Is an island unto ourselves,

Alone and separate, each from the other. - the Siddha Kalapa

It's not a numbers game. "I only read about 10 blogs a day religiously. Each of those blogs is written by a person I know and love," confessed danah boyd weeks ago. "I am glad I am not alone", replies venture capitalist blogger Fred Wilson. I'll refrain from commenting how many blogs I now read lest I offend anyone. Most days it's in the single digits. Way down from the 350+ I used to track two years ago. (p.s. You don't track your friends.)

I only reply to a mere fraction of the comments and emails I receive (I read everything) because I'd need a clone. I don't worry anymore how "unprofessional" that is, how many folks are peeved that I've ignored them - it's either that or I'd unravel the real life connection to people right in front of me. So I've given absolute priority to face-to-face connections.

"Love doesn't sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new." - Ursula K. LeGuin

"I find that my family, friends, colleagues, and readers emailing me links, tagging them for me in delicious, and leaving them in the comments is the single most useful way to stay on top of what's important," adds Fred in another post (an investor in delicious btw) while musing "Is Meta Better?"

Yahoo's VP of Product Strategy, Bradley Horowitz, at Supernova concurs: We're onto the fourth phase of search (1-human editorial, 2- mass automation, 3-topological analysis), social search, which combines all three, editorial + automation (it's not just a couple of Stanford students named Jerry and David doing the grunt work) + your friends.

The morning-glory --

In the daytime, a bolt is fastened

On the frontyard gate. - Basho

We live in an age where we collect 'friends' like trading cards on MySpace, Tribe, LinkedIn (David Sifry's quip), and as in any age it is habitual to keep the bolt of our heart fastened. I know in my own life I've said I want intimacy, but I've often run in the opposite direction. My therapist was my close confidant four years ago. (Less than the whopping average of 2.08 the study cites - thank god for those fractional friends!)

Today I easily count at least eight extremely close friends; friends I can count on to discuss the bread and wine of life, and ones that would share their last dollar with me as I with them if need be.

Paradoxically, at the same time every person that enters my life in person, however briefly, be it in line for a jasmine green tea with tapioca pearls at the mall or sitting across from me at Peet's or riding BART into the city enters my life like a momentary shooting star and is my best friend at least while they are in my presence, even though we may never meet again physically, tangibly, they have my full attention now. I've had conversations on near-death experiences, God, sex, unconditional love, divorce, heartbreak, art, everything under the moon with complete strangers on a weekly, and damn near daily, basis of late.

So-called strangers, momentary shooting stars, kindred spirits, while not counted among our 2.08 confidants, give me the felt sense that if time and space were unbounded, every being in the world could become my dearest cherished friend. For instance, Pieter commented on a recent post covering happiness, luddites, and local farmer's markets:

I don't know Pieter. Then again, I absolutely know Pieter:

"For a while now, I've had this vague desire to buy local produce, preferably organic, but local above all."

Me too. I have this urge to meet my neighbors. To spend time with birders Beatice and Don living down the block and borrow their binoculars as they teach me to look for robins and hummingbirds. I have the urge to eat food grown by goodhearted people I can laugh in person with and touch the very same strawberries and cherries and peaches they've plucked with their own bare hands ripe. I adore paying cash nearly everywhere to feel the real texture of the paper and metal between my palms and thus ground the person-to-person, mano a mano exchange.

I have the urge to buy from booksellers that picked the selections in their window displays themselves. Quirky selections like The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. Ones that will chat with me about literature and not ask me how you spell Wallace Stegner or Jack Kerouac. So it was no surprise, really, that hours later after I've bought The Omnivore's Dilemma at Stacey's (their signs encourage shoppers to buy local) at the close of Supernova Friday, I see Pieter writing about the very same book too.

And Basho's morning glory? That locked gate? His resignation to friendlessness? Poetry is dug from the earth of a poet's life:

"Obviously, Basho wished to admire the beauty of the morning-glory without having to keep a bolt on his gate. How to manage to do this must have been the subject of many hours of meditation within the locked house. He solved the problem, at least to his own satisfaction, and reopened the gate about a month after closing it," says Stephen Kohl, Japanese Literature prof (see also Basho's "Narrow Road to the Deep North).

From nihilism and hermitage, Basho flung open the garden gate unto "lightness." His later haiku collections "reject sentimentalism and take a calm, carefree attitude to the things of daily life, they often exude lighthearted humor." That Zen poet's path, this poet's path to Friendness converge:

He found that while "a sensitivity to things" expanded his awareness of beauty it also expanded his awareness of suffering. This heightened awareness of both beauty and suffering leads some people to despair. This is because our capacity to tolerate suffering in those around us seems to decrease as our awareness increases. When faced with an increase in awareness of suffering, many people instinctively turn away from sensitivity and become hardened, detached or distracted.

The Buddhist culture around Basho taught non-attachment as the correct approach to suffering. Non-attachment was not a turning away from suffering, but a calming of the emotional reactions to suffering through practice of the eightfold path. All other solutions were seen as delusions or deceptions.

Contrary to this prevailing belief, Basho demonstrated that we can avoid developing hard hearts without practicing non-attachment if, instead, we experiece our attachments in a deeper way. - "Wabi Sabi for Writers" article (can't wait for a copy of the July 2006 Wabi Sabi for Writers book)

Basho's path to enlightenment, to lightness, his 'Way of Elegance' is ultimately tantric. Delve into the heart of everything, throw yourself at the mercy of passion - beauty, suffering - rejecting nothing in its poignancy - with a no-holds-barred sensitivity, and in so doing the deepest intimacy and child-like exuberance splays open like a morning glory graced by the first sunbeams at dawn.

images from the backyard fence taken this morning...(except for Georgia O'Keefe's Morning Glory With Black that is)...believe it or not, I did not know how the morning glory got its name until just after 6:30 a.m. today it's not its trumpet-like self yet, oh no, it's a tight pinwheel tucked inward like a child's hugging pose, crouched, and then at some moment it awakens, greets the world wide wide open

Headline reference Scottish artist Momus: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." tags web 2.0 social media user generated content supernova 2006 word-of-mouth social networking social software trust sociology spirituality poetry buy local

Bonus: Mother Teresa on befriending those who live right in our midst, and that there is a deeper hunger than bread alone can fill:

Everyday Ecstasy, Hot Crotchfruit Moms

Advergirl.com writes: "I've noticed that publishers and advertisers have managed to make pregnancy look hot (less the swollen ankles and vomiting, of course); so, the next challenge can only be making the diaper-bag-toting, exhausted, mother-of-a-two-year old hot, too."

Adrants adds: "That might be interesting to see and, of course, would be the next logical step in America's progression toward politically correct nirvana." (The repressed American theme on Adrants is old: "We know the French aren't hung up about sex the way we Americans are...")

Aside: I don't see a PC-bent in America when a recent Wired shares that kids are being labelled crotchfruit ("a derogatory term for children coined by staunch advocates of child-free public spaces" that's also spreading as an online term for kids.)

Anyway this advertisement and many many others, to me, comes across as designed by a man for a particular segment of the male population with a particular view of sexiness (hint: it's not a renaissance man). The best advice I've gotten in ages, came from my friend Ruby, a single mom with two kids, a few months ago when she advised me to spend more time in nature and more time with kids. (I'm currently single, sans kids.) All I can say is thank you thank you Ruby. Serendipitiously I also find myself spending more time with moms and learning how they view the world.

Steve Hall of Adrants feels this trend centers around political correctedness, I counter that the trend centers around recognizing the inherent enchantment in the undercurrent of ordinary workaday lives that most of us are living.

Glamorous, exotic models and lifestyles in advertising and marketing have long been the norm, but methinks women (and men) are starting to suspect and wake up to the erotica in everyday life.

In Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening, Parisien Buddhist teacher Daniel Odier is having a Q&A exchange with a man who says he only feels ecstatic during orgasm yet "dreams of a kind of ecstasy that would influence my whole life." Odier responds:

Then it is necessary to be involved with your whole life...Sexuality cannot be isolated, or made the special or choice vehicle of ecstasy, because the human being demands totality...All searching that isolates one element of human nature in order to make it the only vehicle of the quest anticipates neurotic contact with life.

Sexuality is important if we believe that each and every contact of the senses with the world is a love affair. This is what the yoginis have taught us. This is what I understood from my time with Devi [his Tantric guru]. For her, a leaf falling from a tree, a cloud passing, a fish in the river, the sensation of the sun or ash on her skin, the passing of an emotion or an idea - all that was lived like an unending love affair with the world...To be this absolute lover in ordinary daily life is what causes wonderment to arise unceasingly. When the whole of life is permeated with this tremoring vibration, ecstasy is no longer linked to one particular activity: It flows in all things.

Imagine marketing and advertising that doesn't isolate sexuality to bikini-clad babes or simply the act of intercourse. Imagine advertising and marketing that addresses the tremoring vitality and artfulness in the totality of human experience. Yes, pregnancy is hot and the spate of celebrity babies hasn't hurt (latest is Isabella, and proud parents Matt Damon and Luciana Bozan yesterday.) "How does Angelina Jolie make pregnancy look chic?," I read in a magazine blurb on a plane flight to Seattle. Mostly it's because Jolie doesn't shut down, hide out, and label pregnancy as unsexy, unbeautiful. The article goes on to say she shied away from dowdy maternity clothing and opted to wear drapey dresses and tops from Theory.

Never heard of Theory? Well, women, yeah, moms talk. Theory clothing fits into everyday life without compromising beauty. "She wanted clothes to go with her to the office, with the family, on the weekend, out at night...Theory created a collection that fused great separates with outfits that could be worked into any woman's existing wardrobe."

• "The genius of Theory clothing, I have long believed, lies in its great understanding of the flattering powers and subtleties of stretch. The label’s ability to craft the perfect, just-Lycra-enough working-girl suit (under $600 for tab-front trousers, jacket lightly shrunken, with a sleek little camisole underneath) has earned a following so devoted and so dogged it’s hard to believe Theory didn’t have its own freestanding store until this year." - October 6, 2003, New York Magazine
• A shopper gushes: "Now that I've worn Theory pants, I'll never wear anything else!!!"
• "Theory's focus has never been on advertising, marketing or brand-building. Except, of course, through its clothes. Ask a woman about her favorite black pants or the jacket she throws on over everything. She'll tell you, "It's Theory."" - Nordstrom's site

Finally, I'd like to end with Daniel Odier's admiration for his female Kashmiri Shaivism teacher, Devi, a description that befits anyone observing a three-year-old too:

Devi was not there to give me what I expected; she was there to help me liberate myself within the ordinariness of the everyday, and this was the revolution of my life...

There was no ritual other than to breathe, walk, bathe in the icy water of the waterfall; to look at the earth, the lichens, the trees, the leaves, the common objects; to enter deeply into contact with life, reality. "Adhere deeply to reality with the heart of your being; there is nothing else to look for!" she would say...

The smallest thing would fill her with wonder. Her ecstasy was continually fed by the slightest modification of things. In her was no intentionality at all, simply an immediate and unfailing enjoyment of each moment. In comparison and despite my sensual nature, I had the impression of being totally cut off from the world. Her steadfast joy, her brilliant gaze, her continual tremoring gave the impression that she was making love with the tiniest particle of the universe. - Desire: The Tantric Path of Awakening

images SEAT Alta family car advertisement; and what I think is a much more sensual image of pregnancy that would resonate with women and men from a midwife's site; Angelina Jolie; a Theory 'Koko' shirt at Nordstrom's

In a Saturated Blogosphere, How Does Marketing Reach Out to People?

In a saturated blogosphere (most have few hits) how does marketing by blogs reach out to people? [Question #5 in So How Does It Feel to Be a Global Microbrand?]

My answer: No one reads THE "blogosphere" - that just the umbrella term that encompasses every single blog - we actually read this blog or that blog.

You start by realizing this is a social media. It's not a broadcast bulletin.

You start with connecting to affinity communities with common interests. Maybe parenting sites and blogs, offline clubs, parenting press, etc. for Stonyfield Yogurt's baby blog. Talk and link and communicate consistently with those communities.

Any old large audience most likely won't do - you want the right audience.

Figure out your unique "White Hot Center" (see pages 6-13 in What Clients Love, by Harry Beckwith; summary that doesn't do it justice here).

It's funny that Nike is lauded as a company that was built on identifying their white hot center early in running and basketball. Things change. They launched this basketball blog.

But is their own design team the WHC? I'd rather see a community-authored blog with community-rich features where basketfall fans can talk with each other and with rising athletes. Throw in the design team's riffs if you want, but that's secondary.

Social engagement is the next big thing for the entire marketplace. In this age of consumer resistance, people are avoiding brands while seeking one another. Brands must shift away from the single-minded focus on engaging consumers and instead become adept at enabling people to engage with each other. - "Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market", MediaPost, February 2006

Bonus: Chris Coulter actually does add value here, see comment 41: He disagrees with the blanket statement: Guy said…“If you take two companies with equally good products, and one knows how to suck up to bloggers and the other one doesn’t, I believe that the former will win.”

So do I. Courting the A-List bloggers only makes sense if and only if that is your WHC. Right now, as Coulter points out that is limited to particular set of products and services.

Bonus: In Copyblogger's Viral Copy report (good read, go download), Brian says:

Back when it broke, posting the Numa Numa dance on your law firm blog would have brought in traffic, but I'm not sure it would have translated into a spike in retainer agreements. (p. 5)

Amen. But then on page 7, Brian says: "You want to write things that truly connect with people, and that also result in a direct, specific and quantifiable action - a link, a Delicious tag, a vote on Digg."

But depending on your WHC, a Del.icio.us tag or vote on Digg may be perfect for your law firm or it could signal a shift to your client base that you're now edgier, tech-savvy, and you're more interested in the next Google as a client than the next Harrod's. (No they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but trying to be all things to all people doesn't work either.)

From biz book summary: WHC = "This is the key area where influencers who will endorse your product to followers are located. [Which may include but aren't limited to:] These are the editors whose reviews dictate the trends of the industry. [In other words, who are the folks that sway others and where do they hang out? Can you offer a compelling enough experience so they will hang out on your affinity group blog too?]

Nike found the white-hot center of running and later on, in basketball. [Everyday players look up to rising athletes especially ones that came from similar backgrounds as they. Nike recognized potential when they saw it.] They chose Michael Jordan, who wasn't even first choice in that year's pro draft of college players. Nike's earliest contact with Tiger Woods was when he was playing golf as a freshman in high school."

Selling the Surfing Lifestyle

"I went to get my kite," recounts Chris, the charming surfer who was born in Zanzibar and is half-Sri Lankan. From the horizon, it seemed like a dream wave. Luckily others around him had more sense and had heard that this was no ordinary wave. Or else we wouldn't be having this conversation.

He is drawing a map of Sri Lanka in the sand. It looks like a spiral earring hanging from the tip of India.

"This is where the tsunami came," his stick licks practically the entire coast. It begins near Negombo where we sit where his beach hut once stood (see before photo left and his Negombo Watersports website) and continues south encompassing all the southwest, south, and east.

I spent the better part of a long afternoon and early evening with Chris and some of his staff. Right through tea at sunset, which he explains is a Sri Lanka custom.

He has sold me on the virtues of the surfer lifestyle. Although I think he was actually trying to sell me on kite-surfing lessons. Or, once he sensed I was a kindred spirit, a possible romance.

"Mellow" is their catch word. (More on Chris' philosophy of life and surfer attitudes really must be the subject of a more thoughtful post when I get back.)

I love that word: mellow.

He is keenly observant sponge: "You learn with open eyes", "Learning is good for long life". Fascinated, like me, by global cultures and different people. He travels to the Maldives, Hawaii, Thailand and India each year on the surfing off-season to participate in surfing and kite-surfing competitions.

"Russian," announces Chris.

"What?"

"Russian. That family is Russian." I glance over at the boy and girl prancing around the swimming pool and their attendant parents sipping beers.

I tan easily and after six weeks in the tropics, my complexion is olive which is throwing everyone off. "You are from where?" They are puzzled when I respond, "USA."

Just days before, an Israeli bursts into Hebrew tongue as I walk past the Starbucks with a towering Buddhist spirit house set right next to a Shiva and Ganesha shrine tucked on a sidestreet near Khao San Road in Bangkok. It doesn't occur to him I'm not Israeli.

The staff women at the Negombo guesthouse presume I am from India because that is their perception of a foreigner that isn't completely creamy complexioned.

But Chris runs up to me expectedly as I walk the beach, "Are you from Italy?" He is learning Italian from another customer and has almost got the "Italian look" fingered. I learn he already speaks German much later: "Have you ever seen snow?" "Once - in Germany."

Today I am in Moratuwa, a town 23 km south of the capital of Colombo not even listed in my Lonely Planet guidebook, but the HQ for several NGOs. And I am conspicuous. Are the stares because my skin has different tones than everyone else in town...

(No one - strangely not even the enterprising open-aired three-wheeler taxi drivers - dares to speak to me. Except the bright-eyed fishermen's children living in matchbook plank houses near the train tracks just fifty meters from the sea.)

Or because I am a woman alone wearing trousers rather than a skirt?

"Ten years ago women did not wear trousers in Sri Lanka," I hear Chris echoing to me from Friday.

Yet Western influences are changing Sri Lanka. He explains that people don't realize the trap they are falling right into. While a local skirt may cost 150 rupees, the Western-style trousers are 500 rupees. So they end up worker longer hours to obtain the desired fashions.

"We let our hair grow long and the saltwater naturally makes dreadlocks," continues Chris, whose ebony curly hair in a short ponytail is tucked under his cap. "Like Bob Marley." He explains the rest of their distinctively cheap surfing attire and shows me his dolphin tattoo etched by his kitesurfing buddy.

But I know it's their dark chocolate skin that also sets them apart from the chic surfing masses in the Pacific. Say what you will of surfers, but you couldn't say the Negombo boys are discontented trust fund babies squandering their inheritance or first-world slackers.

He says they draw murmurs of "Those must be the surfers from Negombo." It's their brand of word-of-mouth marketing. All the travelling is part-networking, part-teaching, and part-the-perks-of-their-lifestyle-choice. "We have fun, and everywhere we go we tell people to come to Negombo and visit us."

"So surf fashion is your marketing," I say. He misunderstands me and vehemently agrees, "Yes! Surf passion."

There's no reeling Chris in as he lurches into an intense discussion on surfing passion which I silently decide is actually more accurate.

His simple storefront and surfer cafe have yet to be rebuilt, but that doesn't stop Chris from being confident that tourists will return by April and he can regain his foothold and "grow back up slowly." (I thought Thailand gave a paltry 20,000 baht to business owners affected by the tsunami but Sri Lanka gave their businesses zero - or naught, as they say here.)

"I have easy life. When customers come, I teach. If no customers, I relax." I wonder how he can say this with evident ease. After five hours, I've ascertained that his situation is precarious from any rational, analytical, balance sheet perspective.

But I've also ascertained he surfs life itself. In the first hour of our conversation he was scooping up the sand showing me how it's clean now. It was motor oil black after the tsunami. People were back to fishing within the first three months. And he was back surfing on Negombo. He contrasts to the situation in Galle, just south: "In Galle, the tsunami hit hard." Just as they are starting to get back to normalcy, then Galle had to deal with flooding. It's always something. "Difficult life," says Chris with equamity. "But it's nature."

I've only stratched the surface. Chris taught me a lot about simplicity, focus, choice, nature, acceptance, and the open secrets to a "long life."

"They have money," says Chris of his foreign friends, mostly European, that come to Negombo to surf after they've amassed enough vacation time to head back to Sri Lanka, "but they not free."

p.s. Flickr photo has a few kite surfers riding in the background. I don't have any shots of kite-surfing Friday because conditions were not conducive due to the "gusty land wind," as Chris observed. 

p.p.s. I spent the past week say goodbyes in Khao Lak including teaching Mon how to blog (more on that later), taking a 13-hour bus to Bangkok, wrapping loose ends in Thailand, etc. Left Thailand on the 13-month tsunami anniversary and arrived in Sri Lanka in the wee hours of the 27th.

Blogging for the Rest of the World Outside Silicon Valley

English is not your native language, your computer skills are fresh enough that when you're confronted with a form field named "XML RPC URL" you're pretty stumped, and renting a computer for an hour of Internet access costs the equivalent 1/3 of your daily wage*. You have a secondhand cellphone, but, no, you don't own a computer.

This is the situation for many parts of Thailand I've visited (which is by far certainly not the poorest country from a global perspective).

Heck, does blogging even make sense at all?

"Each one teach one", said Ryanne at a workshop for SAJA this summer (check out the tutorial on creating a free video blog.)

Without Hugh's original guidance and Dave jumping in, Thomas wouldn't be internationally famous. Thomas has a leg up as he speaks the lingua franca of the Web. (Although I have met an inordinate amount of fellow travellers with interest in Chinese, such as MBA students learning Mandarin in Shangai). Besides English, more importantly, Thomas had friends that willingly showed him the blogosphere's tools and tricks of the trade.

But what about Monty the tailor I mentioned the other day?

Perhaps 'Circuit Bloggers' can be of help. A Circuit Rider

...is a concept borrowed from the early development of the United States when judges and ministers traveled a rural "circuit" or region administering their services to small communities and rural populations. From this model, rural citizens had access to the services in their home communities rather than traveling great distances to the nearest judge or minister.

Today's circuit riders travel to the field to teach - anything ranging from teaching technology to non-profits to community-based water system infrastructure maintenance.

The Ecotourism Training Center is the brainchild of Reid Ridgway although he credits the Circuit Riders Productions program that turned his own life around for the inspirational model.

In my "circuit blogger" capacity today I taught the students at the Ecotourism Training Center, a vocational training program for young adults affected by the tsunami located in Khao Lak, Thailand, how to set up a public class blog. The class does have a computer lab full of donated Mac minis - or I won't have even bothered.

The ETC's blog second post is written by Tid, pictured above. Champ, who I interviewed here, is still editing his post on elephant trekking with the Discovery Channel. And Deo, a certified divemaster, is thinking ahead (hear Deo's interview) to his dive instructor duties upon graduation. (The brief interviews total a bit over a minute.)

With or without a blog, the students still need to communicate with their sponsors, friends and family, potential employees and others to let them know how they are doing and how they are progressing.

And they want to share with others their love of diving, wildlife, marine life and their home and its natural beauty.

They're also generally learning how to promote their future diving and the tourism business which depends on international customers. Blogging helps them practice English and computer skills while doing something fun.

Podcasting is even more important as practicing conversational speaking is higher priority than written English, so cheap and easy suggestions appreciated.

Why not stop by and say hello to the students? I found that getting feedback was the best incentive to continue blogging myself.

In addition, two days ago I gave a brief overview to a group of four volunteers currently at the Tsunami Volunteer Center who would like to go volunteer in Pakistan earthquake relief. They are all native English speakers - that is if you count Australian ;-) - but once they are on the road in winter disaster conditions, they'll have some of the same constraints as our students.

Here's the criteria I used to make recommendations outlined below: