I told myself that I wouldn’t write a blog post about Google Buzz until I had time to play with it and let the dust settle from the frenzy of reviews during its launch week. It’s been a few weeks now and I have used Buzz almost daily, but so far it’s been a bit disappointing. Some of that blame belongs to Google and some of it is just the will of the Social Media Gods.
There were a couple of reasons that Buzz looked attractive to me and why I thought it might do some good. Its integration with Gmail allowed people to use it without having to go to another destination. As with a lot of great, but failed services, driving traffic and getting adoption early on is an important factor. It’s never about functionality or slickness. There were tons of better options to micro-blogging than Twitter. But Twitter won, simply because that’s where everyone is at. The old MySpace holdouts know what I’m talking about. Even if you prefered MySpace (honestly why would you though), your friends abandoned ship and starting flying the Facebook banner. Your move was just a matter of time. The beauty of Buzz was that it was already in your mailbox. You can’t help put click on an icon that says you have new messages. It’s a calling most of us can’t ignore.
My second reason was based on the first. I felt that more people would use it simply because it was already there. No need to sign up for anything new or go to a different site. My hope was that this would prompt people who I don’t actively use Twitter to get in on the conversation and share information they come across.
Well largely, these two things haven’t developed the way I hoped. Between Google fumbling on the privacy issue and the slow adoption rate by new users, my stream has become yet another source of the same data I’m getting on Twitter. Mind you, I don’t mean the same type of data, I mean the exact same data. (Their feed is linked basically)
The second reason is also a flaw. People who don’t use GMAIL can’t play. The school of thought sometimes is “Well why not just sign up for GMAIL”. If I was perfectly happy with my email provider, Buzz doesn’t offer much that would warrant such a big change for me. Maybe if it also made my coffee and pressed my pants, but unfortunately no dice there, so I can understand people’s reluctance to switch.
Will Buzz get better? Probably from a technology standpoint, but it’s very difficult to reclaim the trust of the web. The Internet is a 24×7 word of mouth factory. It’s a virtual water cooler where rumors, opinions and viewpoints spread quicker than the plague. If you don’t make a positive splash on launch your product may never the negative press. (See Windows Vista) Google has been dragged through the mud on privacy and on a lack of compelling features to leave Twitter. Creating a Buzz destination site could be helpful for those that don’t want to make the switch, but the GMAIL integration is a must and should remain intact.
I’m not turning off Buzz just yet, but the buzz is slowly fading into silence.
We tend to look down on people who make excessive amounts of money. Our reasons vary, but it usually boils down to the jaded belief that runaway success can’t come without selling a piece of your soul or taking some big risks. Wall Street has illustrated this point to us clearly during their fiscal mismanagement which has left some of you available during the weekday to read this post. But none of us should be surprised by the brash behavior of an elite few. Most of us spent years playing Mario Brothers, and that’s really the only life lesson we need.
Super Mario Brothers has always been an incredibly accurate barometer for greed. People of all ages have spent a disheartening amount of time going after that last big coin in the upper right portion of the screen. Don’t act all indignant about it now, because you know exactly what the hell I’m talking about. How many lives did you waste, trying to climb some fucking beanstalk, just so you could recover that last coin. Did you need that coin? Not at all! You already had 98 coins, two more and you get another life. But you’ve already got 47 lives and you’ll NEVER burn through them all.
So why take the risk? Is it for the high? Or just the satisfaction of knowing you could do it. It’s a challenge, dangled in front of your face. That prick Yoshi was just egging you on, telling you how HE could have gotten it if he really wanted to. Your next door neighbor is bragging about how his high score has gotten to the point where it’s flipping back to zeros because 8 sorry ass bits weren’t enough to accurately track his awesome. Challenges, by their nature, are made to be answered.
I don’t know about you, but there was no room for “safety” in my Mario Bros game play. Go big or go home, those were the only rules to live by. I didn’t have time for things like “risk analysis”. I saw some shit and I went after it, that’s how the fat stay fat with coins and mushrooms. Whatever your reasons were, I’m not hear to judge you. I was right there with you, struggling for that last piece of digital gold. I’m just saying that even at a young age, characters like Sonic and Mario are feeding into our desire to want more, no matter the cost.
As I was watching yet another uninformative episode of LOST, I began to think how much this show mirrored real life. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that LOST was really just a metaphor for office life. Take the LOST story and put it in an office setting and see what you get.
A young man loses his job for some reason. At this point it’s not really important, but past is prologue and it will eventually be woven into our story. He leaves his job (Australia) in search for a new job that will offer him a new beginning. (LAX) Along the way however, the economy crashes into the shitter (Oceanic Flight 815) and he ends up at a company that was never on his career road map. (The Island)
This company has some seriously odd shit going on. There are other business unit managers there (survivors of Oceanic 815) who seem to have a mix-bag of history and personal problems. Ultimately most of the management team is trying to get out of the company, but some have reasons for wanting to stay.
There’s the slightly retarded manager of PR, who in any other company would be considered incapable of performing most of the tasks required of him. But because of the “uniqueness” of this company he manages to look like a super star. He knows there’s something about the company that gives him a stronger sense of purpose that he wouldn’t have in the real world. He tries his best to show everyone the light. (Locke)
Then there’s the manager of sales. He’s a mysterious fellow that tries to keep to himself. He’s sort of a lone wolf and looks at the rest of the management team simply as tools to get what he needs done. What the rest of the management team doesn’t know, is that half of his resume is bullshit. Not only is his MBA from a mail order facility in Tuskegee Ohio, but most of his work history references were calls to his high school football teammates. This guy is a bucket of lies and daddy issues. (Sawyer)
The cute little number who manages the call center is another shifty one you have to keep your eyes out for. She bats her eyelashes and makes you think that you can save her from herself. Underneath her cute exterior and her bright smile is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. She’s constantly on edge and sometimes her behavior seems completely erratic. She’s stuck at the company because she’s got 2 felonies that she didn’t disclose on her application. Thankfully the company doesn’t do background checks. Her next company might not be so accommodating. She’s better off here. (Kate)
No team is successful without a leader. As the group begins to gel a leader is selected. The Operations Manager (Jack) assumes the unwanted role. Despite his own ambitions, he knows that the team working together is far better than if the team works alone. As our new hire learns about the dynamics of his teammates he quickly realizes that getting out of the company is a long term goal. The short term goal is generating revenue to keep the company functioning long enough to make the great escape. (a.k.a Surviving on the island) The management team and their subordinates (those other 32 people on the island that tend to change season to season) begin to work together to keep the company solvent. But as they begin to explore their options on what the company has to offer, they run into one of the most dreaded and feared things anyone has ever seen. Office politics. (The smoke monster)
Nobody knows the source of office politics or who controls it. It comes and goes at will, sometimes laying waste to projects or even careers. Whenever the management team sees it showing its ugly head, panic ensues. Everyone runs for cover and if someone falls and is claimed by office politics, it’s generally accepted that there was nothing you could do to save them without throwing away your own career.
As the team tries to find a source for the politics, they stumble upon an unusual group. A group of men and women who seem to have been at the company long before they arrived and knows quite a bit about its inner workings. They’re even aware of the “Office Politics”. This group is referred to as “Information Technology” or “IT”. (The Others)
IT is a strange group. They have a single leader that interacts with the management team. He refers to himself as the “Business Liaison”. (Benjamin Linus) The business liaison treats the management team as if they’re children, fearing that too much information might make their heads explode. Instead he talks to them in cryptic phrases and sentences, giving them just enough information to trust him, but not enough to truly make any type of informed decision. He thrives on having more information than the people he interacts with, pushing them to an end goal that only he can see. While IT says it’s on the side of the business (the survivors), often times their actions seem self-serving and not in the best interest of the management team.
The arrival of the business liaison complicates things for the management team. Now someone else is stepping up to lead them. While some are happy to let the Operations Manager continue to lead, others are pissed off because he fucked up that TPS Report project and Bill from accounting ended up getting fired because of it. (See Jack’s long list of leadership failures) Internal bickering ensues amongst the management team. Some managers decide to rely heavily on the business liaison for guidance, while others continue to follow the Operations Manager. The split causes conflict amongst people who were friends, but have now been driven apart by their decisions. While they’re friendly when they run into each other in the cafeteria (the Jungle), they still return to their respective camps.
The internal structure of IT is complex.There are many parts to the organization that the management team has seen passing references to. Database support (The Swan), Web Support (The Looking Glass) and Change Management (The Hydra) just to name a few. The business liaison knows a lot about the groups, but will only answer your specific questions about them in vague, ass-hat type responses. Obviously your look of confusion is the only way this guy can sustain an erection. Instead of pressing on and grossing yourself out, you let it slide.
In Part 2 we’ll discuss how people manage to leave the company but then feel compelled to return. We’ll also dive into how the Business Liaison is really just a puppet for the CIO. (Jacob)
Most of us are experts at getting our to-dos out of our minds and into whatever task management system we use. Everything from GTD to plain old sticky notes gives you a sense of empowerment once your world is on some sort of manageable system.
But what happens as the to-dos don’t move from to-do to to-done? Your list becomes crowded, unmanageable and before long you’ve abandoned your system and life has descended back into chaos. This is where the power of the due date comes in.
Now lets review what a due-date is. Most people think it’s self-explanatory;
A date when something must be complete by.
But not all tasks have external forces pushing you towards a completion date. If you need to clean the fridge, the world will not explode if it’s not done by Friday. So items like this get pushed farther and farther down the list of priorities. But what if we play a mental game with ourselves and change the word must to should. So now the definition reads.
A date when something should be complete by
Now we can play all types of mental games. A week is more than a reasonable amount of time to get off your duff and clean the fridge. Do you have plans this week? Fine, make it for the week after next, but just make sure you assign a reasonable date to it. Lets put extra emphasis on reasonable, because a date that can’t be hit becomes even more of a distraction.
We’ve got a due date on our tasks, now what? Psychology does the rest. If you’re the type of person that keeps to-dos, then chances are you’re also the type of person that derives satisfaction from checking things off the list and experiences sadness or remorse when they stay on the list. The key is to make sure that your to-do system has someway to alert you when you have a task with a due date approaching or when a task is overdue. This signal is almost like the two-minute warning in football. It signals the brain that you’re behind and you’ve got shit to do! It motivates you in a way that can’t be explained without a PH.D.
We are a weird people psychologically, but we can use this insanity to our advantage. After reading this, go through your to-dos and start assigning realistic due dates to everything you want to move off the list.
There’s a special high that comes with checking off an item off your list. Use this post to stay high all day and all night.
p.s.
Just to drive the point home, this post has been on my to-do list for a week. As soon as Omnifocus told me the task was overdue, I felt like I had to have it complete by the time I head to bed tonight. So I’m sitting in Third Coast Comics, making sure I can check this off my list tonight.
If you haven’t read SIEGE #1 and plan to, I would say you should skip this review right away as it will riddled with spoilers.
With everything that’s been going on in the Marvel universe, specifically with Norman Osborn and his new group H.A.M.M.E.R I was stoked about the release of SIEGE. From the news I read about the series, it would serve as the culmination of Osborn’s stranglehold on power. The series starts with a bang, literally. The destruction of Soldier Field in Chicago kicks off a chain of events which ultimately lead to the invasion of Asgard, home of the Norse Gods. (For those that haven’t followed, Asgard is now on Earth, hovering over a town in Oklahoma to be more precise)
The idea of Norman and his crew invading Asgard is balls to the walls insane. That’s why I love it. It sounds so reckless that you’re waiting to see Norman’s plan unfold into something more grand. During the invasion, a small wrinkle develops in the invasion. Thor shows up. Norman’s a smart guy, so I’m not fully convinced he wasn’t either expecting this or have a contingency plan for it.
The battle against Thor is what really sinks the issue for me. Right up to this point, I’m loving it, but the attack against Thor deserved SO much more panel space. You have Norman’s cronies absolutely HANDLING Thor and it receives nothing more than a few wide angle panels. Where’s the drama? Where’s the tension? Where’s the close ups of a juggernaut like Thor getting a couple of shots in? If this were a regular title, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But this is supposed to be an event book and an EPIC event book at that. So I was a tad disappointed in how the issue ended, especially when compared to how it started.
The Internet is always finding a cause to latch on to. A wrong to right and that justice be served. But sometimes the Internet gets behind a cause that makes it sound like an echo chamber of collective cry babies. I’ve watched as the masses have flocked to the defense of Conan O’Brien. They’ve fought with their tweets and Facebook groups to show the big bad NBC just how they felt about it. But if we’re so supportive of Conan, why aren’t we watching his show?
NBC is a business. It’s not about tryouts and it’s not about “a fair shake” as shitty as that sounds. It’s about the bottom line, the almighty dollar. So why are we surprised by this? Any Joss Whedon fan knows that the vocal minority aren’t enough to make up for the fact that America isn’t watching. This same vocal minority is typically adverse to advertising too, so keeping the status quo is even less palpable to TV stations.
The common argument is that the outcries are coming from people who don’t watch Late Night in general, not specifically because of Conan. That’s a great point, in fact I’m in that same camp. (Which is why the decision won’t effect me) But there are plenty of people who do watch late night and according to the ratings, those people have stopped watching since Conan has taken over. I’m not a causation expert by any means, but I know that studio executives are looking at this as a cause/effect scenario. Their thinking is to put things back the way they were and see if they can at least reclaim their lost viewers. Isn’t this the basis of a free market? The market will react based on the interests of the individual?
If all the people that are up in arms about the cancellation are upset, they should watch Conan’s show. I’m not condoning what NBC has done. It’s the sign of a level of unprofessionalism that has probably existed long before the Internet was capable of dissemnating information in the blink of an eye. Conan has handled the situation admirably in But it’s part of the business and has been for awhile. I love that we have this medium to discuss our concern or our objections about things, but the real motivator is action that results in money. For consumer products, we vote with our dollar. For television we vote with our remotes.
If Twitter were around in 1994, I wonder if the Internet would have came to the aid of Toni Kukoc or Pete Meyers. After only 1 year of action they were benched because a guy named Michael Jordan decided to come out of retirement.
P.S. I understand that our rating system is flawed and not everyone who watches will have a Nielson Ratings box. We do need to improve our system for what it’s worth. The biggest thing is to make sure you accept a box when asked if you care what’s on TV. I know a few people who have refused them due to privacy or other concerns. It’s basically giving you the right to vote on what sucks on TV.
I finally got the opportunity to see Avatar, the James Cameron film that is capable of curing cancer and reshaping the way we look at race relations in America. Based on previous recommendations and reviews of this film, I half expected that the War on Terror would instantly end after I left the theater. While it was a good movie and will ultimately be a great use case for original concept science fiction films, I didn’t feel it deserved all the hype it received.
I had two real concerns with the film, one being the villains overly simplified motivations and the second being the computer generated creatures, including but not limited to the Na’vi. It’s not the quality of the CGI as it was some of the best computer generated imagery I’ve seen yet. It’s more my preference in the style of imagery that’s generated. As I’m watching the film, I’m consistently jarred from my suspension of disbelief when I see the real world mixed with the artificial. It reminds me of drinking a diet coke unsuspectingly. The familiar characteristics of your favorite soft drink are sullied by the taste of aspartame.
This isn’t an issue specific to Avatar. I think the problem first came to light for me when the Star Wars Prequels were released. Lucas went a tad crazy on his use of computer generated imagery and it made the film seem strikingly different. The aliens in the film while more robust, alive and animated (bad pun) they are immediately recognized in my mind as not truly being part of the world. Instead of being immersed in the dialogue between Jar Jar and Obi Wan (ha..immersed with Jar Jar dialogue!) I can’t stop thinking about how far off Ewan McGreggor’s eye line is to the character he’s supposedly interacting with. Strange, I don’t remember feeling that way when Luke talked to Jabba the Hut. Because Jabba the Hut was there, albeit in the form of a puppet.
Yes I know, puppets are old school, puppets can’t swing through trees and puppets can’t have intimate sex scenes. So what? There was a time when we didn’t need our puppets to replace Jean Claude Van Damme. We were perfectly happy with our puppets having 2 men stuffed in the top end of a suit, not moving any further than the bar their stuck behind. But those characters looked real. They looked authentic. And they didn’t jar you out of your suspended reality. They blended so well with the rest of the world.
I know puppets have their limitations, but what they lend to the end product far outweighs anything computer generated parkour could bring. More should follow in the footsteps of Guillermo del Torro. More directors should use puppets.
I know someone out there just had an aneurysm over the title and I apologize for that. But certain thoughts just can’t be helped. While watching the 2nd highest grossing film in the world, I thought back to an article I read about Avatar which asked if this was the new Star Wars. In one word: Maybe.
I can see why this correlation would be made; Lucas was a visual effects pioneer and so is Cameron. The latter waited almost twelve years before the technology was in place for him to make his visual masterpiece. Lucas took an ages-old formula (the Hero’s Journey) and turned it into six box office busters while Cameron took that formula and made it look really, really nice. But what they have in visual aptitude they lack in dialogue, plot, and characterization.
Yes, anyone can say, “Oh I would have done this or that” or “I saw that coming a mile away” but does it hurt to be a little original along the way? If I were to come up with a synopsis in one sentence, it would be, “Dances with Wolves in the far off future in space.” Done. Doing so would be an injustice to Cameron and his team but alas, it is what it is; a grand visual epic that is truly the best-looking movie that has ever existed. CGI or not, this is how sci-fi should be; so damn beautiful that you can’t even tell what is CGI or what isn’t. During one scene when a helicraft is landing, I questioned whether the blades of moving grass were even real. And the facial expressions that were captured exceeded my jaded expectations.
But like Lucas, he is reaching into his past bag of tricks and amending them to be part of his universe. Yes, everyone likes a solid formula (guy gets girl, loses girl, fights heaven and earth to get her and they live happily ever after) but that formula needs to be tweaked so that it resembles nothing like it’s former self. For example, The Abyss; man and woman in midst of divorce are commissioned by the military to help Marines retrieve a nuclear device. There are some drill grunts, the engineers, and the grunts. The drill grunts are weary of the Marines and the husband and wife work together albeit hesitantly. The aliens below want to prevent war from occurring and interact to save us all. Bad Marine dies, the rest atone, happy ending. Aliens; Ripley is woken up over seven decades later by a corporation who needs her assistance with the Aliens. She becomes an adoptive mother of the sole survivor of a colony ravaged by aliens. The greedy corporate hedgehog gets his just desserts, all of the Marines except one good guy and one robot die, and the last Marines to die do so honorably via sacrifice. Ripley beats up momma alien. Everyone is happy. Until Fincher’s debut causes Scanners-like head explosions around the world due to its pure IDGAF (I Don’t Give A Fuck) attitude concerning the surviving characters, except Ripley of course. T2; authority issues, scientist sacrifices self, mother sacrifices life for child and future. Avatar; Dances with Wolves in space. A VERY sexy looking Dances with Wolves in space.
Don’t get me wrong, technically, Cameron can’t be touched. He’s taken what Peter Jackson and George Lucas have accomplished and turned it up a trillion volts. He is the King of Pop Cinema and it would take another technical visionary to come close to what he has accomplished (Neil Blomkampf may be that man) but please Jim, let someone work with you to tighten up those plots and characters. Maybe he should use a recycle system like the plastic bottles with the numbers. You can only recycle them but so many times.
With all the insane rumors flying about surrounding Apple’s new Unicorn product, the tablet, conversations are buzzing again about what this could mean for a host of industries, including the comic book industry. New technology has been a catalyst for change for as long as I can remember. We’ve watched the rise of MP3 players, cell phones and streaming video enter our lives. But we quickly forget about the casualties caused by such innovation. People with CD players are silently mocked, while AT&T fights for approval to take the land line telephone system off life support. Streaming video is poised to deliver a killing blow to the video industry, already reeling from the wounds inflicted by the switch to DVDs and the emergence of Netflix. So as the body count stacks up in this Digital Revolution, I can’t help but ask myself “Who will be the next to fall?”
The comic book industry, more specifically the comic book retailer, seems like a likely candidate to be carted off the battlefield. The attack isn’t malicious in nature, but boils down to consumer motivations. With the ushering of a new digital medium, the biggest advantage to consumers is that devil known as “convenience”. Convenience is a funny thing, because its value typically outweighs the other positives of a traditional medium. I prefer the layout of a standard newspaper. To me it’s a superior product than my digitally delivered Kindle edition of the newspaper. But the convenience afforded to me with the digital version, has ultimately pushed me to the new medium, despite the pain of the price point and the inferior product. That is what comic book shops will have a hard time competing with when the tablet from Apple, or any other manufacturer who does it right, arrives.
That convenience could mark the demise of the culture of Wednesday comic book day. There is something to be said about the feeling you get when you walk into a comic book shop and talk with the owner. When other fans of the medium have made their purchases and are just hanging around discussing the latest story lines or making bold predictions on the future and fates of our spandex idols. It’s more than a retail location. It’s a meeting place for people of a similar passion to meet and enjoy the company of one another. It’s a place for newcomers with questions to come and ask those questions without fear of a belittling response from an anonymous narcissist. It’s a haven for our community and for our culture.
With such a vested interest in its survival the simple question is “Why not just buy them at the comic book shop then?” It’s the same question asked by record store owners and video store proprietors. Convenience is addictive and gratification is delayed. How often have you lamented the idea of lacing up the boots and braving the elements to go to a party? Comic book shop? The gym? Only to be relieved once you got there, happy that you made the journey. It’s how we deal with delayed gratification, the same reason we might spend an extra $20 dollars at Best Buy when we could have ordered the same product from Amazon and waited two days for its arrival. Those same mechanisms will be at work when we can make a few gestures and have Iron Man #31 in our lap in seconds. As we become more accustomed to our new found life style, the details of our shop visits become blurred. The memories of talking with the gang about their pulls for the week, get replaced with memories of the hassles of the weekly trip, double checking your order and making sure your pull list was properly updated. The ease of purchasing that back issue you missed will replace the memory of the joy you had when you found the issue at Wizard World after looking for 3 months. Searching through long boxes will be something left to an even smaller number of collectors. The life of today’s comic book fan will forever be prefaced with “Remember when….”, the hallmark term for nostalgia.
I won’t make any speculations as to what technology may or may not do for the publishing and consumption of comics. Many others have done that. My post is more a plea of hope that technology can breathe life into an industry without it losing a part of itself. The Digital Revolution has improved our way of life. We embrace the victor, but it doesn’t mean we can’t mourn the cost.
As a dork/nerd/geek you find that the people you meet tend to have a lot in common with one another. It’s probably one of the few subcultures where so many of your interests line up with others. Geek culture tends to be a self-feeding cycle where the more nerds you meet, the nerdier activities you’re introduced to and the more you tend to love it. I have found that to be true in just about every area of nerdom, except one. Anime.
I can sit back and watch the beautiful artwork of an anime any day. The genre has a distinctive style that is recognizable instantly, even by the layman. The content carries adult themes, but not always adult execution and I think this is where it falters for me. Not being an anime guru, maybe it’s just what I’m watching, but it’s difficult for me to get past the cheesiness of it. The bug-eyed moments of frustration, the bad voice acting, the strange whimpering noises and lastly, the fascination with school girl heroines. When it all comes together the final package leaves a sulfuric taste in my mouth.
Part of the problem is my highly Americanized sense of theater or pacing. Anime seems to bounce all over the map sometimes in the direction that a story may go in. The pacing is….different, for lack of a better word. I can’t quite get my arms around it.
The female heroines often become uncomfortable for me because their typically boobalicious and bouncy. All those years spent denying I had a crush on Smurfette makes the sexualization of an animated character off-putting. I feel awkward watching an animated love scene, but most of that awkwardness is due to outside forces, not internal forces. I worry about how I might be perceived if someone sees me watching this clip with no context. I remember watching Kitty Grade on the train during a commute to work. I was so incredibly embarrassed that I had to turn the episode off until I got home. It seems silly that at 31 years young I’m still concerned with how strangers perceive me, but you have to admit that this can be taken out of context. If someone was watching two animated characters make out on the bus, what type of frame would it give that person if you met them through a mutual acquaintance later? I’m sure you’d be able to say “That’s the dude!” and everyone would know what you were talking about.
Because I’ve always been so in-step with geek culture, it pains me to have to write-off anime as a loss. I feel like I could be missing out on something spectacular. I’ve tried a few animes in the past and with Hulu offering a decent set of them I’m currently giving them another shot. (Virus is my current viewing attempt) Here’s what I’ve watched so far, along with if I enjoyed it or not.
Apple Seed – 4/5
Akira – 3/5 (the first 60 minutes gets 5/5)
Kitty Grade – 2/5
Blue Submarine No. 6 – 2.5/5
Bleach – 2/5
Ninja Scroll 3/5
Afro Samurai 4/5
Sword of the Stranger 3/5
Ghost in the Shell 2/5 (This movie bores me to sleep every time)
There are plenty of others, but these are the ones that come to mind and these are supposed to be some of the best works out there. My geek-dom doesn’t want to give up, but I’m getting close to waving the white flag.
I told myself that I wouldn’t write a blog post about Google Buzz until I had time to play with it and let the dust settle from the frenzy of reviews during its launch week. It’s been a few weeks now and I have used Buzz almost daily, but so far it’s been a bit disappointing. Some of that blame belongs to Google and some of it is just the will of the Social Media Gods.
If you haven’t read SIEGE #1 and plan to, I would say you should skip this review right away as it will riddled with spoilers.
The Internet is always finding a cause to latch on to. A wrong to right and that justice be served. But sometimes the Internet gets behind a cause that makes it sound like an echo chamber of collective cry babies. I’ve watched as the masses have flocked to the defense of Conan O’Brien. They’ve fought with their tweets and Facebook groups to show the big bad NBC just how they felt about it. But if we’re so supportive of Conan, why aren’t we watching his show?
