GregFalken.com

Thoughts on humanizing technology

Heroes of American Storytelling

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This American LifeThey should give these guys an award. Oh yeah, they have: three Peabodys, the George Polk Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, two Emmys (for their TV show) and many others. This American Life, from WBEZ Chicago, is a weekly radio show that has mastered the art of storytelling. The stories they tell are drawn from every facet of life, from the absurd to the enchanting to the terrifying. Having been at it since 1995, they are amazingly good at what they do.

So it should come as no surprise that when TAL produces shows on two of the dominant issues of our day — the economy and health care reform — listeners are able to grasp the concepts behind these difficult subjects, often for the first time. I am providing links to these shows (play them right from this page or download them for later) because I believe that if more people heard these stories, we would be having a much different conversation about these two critical issues. Also as an example of what storytellers, particularly those in new media, can aspire to.

The Economy

The Giant Pool of Money

A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR News. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money. [Aired 5/9/08]

Return to The Giant Pool of Money

In which we mark the anniversary of the economic collapse and the anniversary of Planet Money: recapping some of the original episode, The Giant Pool of Money, and finding out what’s happened to all those guys in the year since. [Aired 9/25/09]

Health Care

More Is Less

An hour explaining the American health care system, specifically, why it is that costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry. [Aired 10/9/09]

Someone Else’s Money

This week, we bring you a deeper look inside the health insurance industry. The dark side of prescription drug coupons. A story about Pet Health Insurance, which is in its infancy, and how it is changing human behaviors—for example, if you have the pet health insurance, you bring your pet to the vet more often, and the vet makes more money and…well, you can see the parallels. And insurance company jargon, frighteningly decoded. [Aired 10/16/09]

Keep the Stories Coming

If, after listening to these programs, you agree with me about the incredible informational and entertainment value of This American Life, please support them by making a donation.

Show descriptions courtesy of This American Life.

TAL_Giant_Pool_Of_Money_355.mp3

Humanizing Twitter

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Flock of twitterers

The following is cross-posted on Annie Hart’s blog, Stories Change The World, with thanks to Annie for requesting a guest post.

Twitter is pretty darned geeky. It’s full of symbols and jargon and half the time you can’t even tell if you’re being tweeted by a human or a robot. People wonder, with good reason, how they can possibly get anything useful, let alone humane, out of the untold number of tweets that pass through the system every day.

The first thing that I tell new Twitter users (after, “you won’t know if it’s a stupid idea or not until you try it”) is that they don’t have to read every tweet that comes through their account. Everything prior to a few minutes ago is water under the bridge. Unless it mentions you or is a direct message to you, in which case you need to keep track of and respond to it. Every Twitter client and the web site makes this easy to do.

Next, you need to follow a group of people who you find interesting or with whom you have common interests; people who you would like to talk to. Think of Twitter like a crowded party. The conversations flow around you and you can choose which ones to focus on and where to join in. If you’ve chosen your party (the people you’re following) well, this can be both entertaining and informative. If you’re at a party with a lot of obnoxious drunks…well, that can be less pleasant. Remember, you get to choose who you follow. If someone follows you and you don’t follow them back, it’s like they don’t exist. If you follow someone who you later decide to un-follow, they’ll get over it.

When you do decide to join a conversation, knowing some of Twitter’s somewhat quirky conventions will help you be better understood.

  • The @ symbol. Including @username anywhere in your tweet will cause it to show up in that person’s list of “mentions”. If @username is the first thing in the tweet (i.e. @ is the first character), the tweet will only be visible to the recipient and anyone who follows both of you. So, when you want your tweet to go into the general Twitter stream and be noticed by an individual, include @username somewhere after the first character of the tweet.
  • Hash tags. Hash tags were not a part of Twitter’s original release. People using the service found that they needed a way of identifying words to search on and settled on prefixing them with a hash (#) symbol. When you include a hash tag in a tweet, you are inviting people to search for that tag. For example, if I tweet about health care reform and include the hash tag #hcr, I can be sure that my tweet will show up in a lot of search results, in addition to my followers seeing it. Use the search box on Twitter.com to find commonly used hash tags. Brand names are also commonly used. If a company is paying attention, they should be monitoring for any usage of their name in a hash tag and respond to you. Sadly, this is not often the case.
  • Retweets. Another instance of the users of Twitter coming up with a convention, in this case the letters “RT” followed by the @username of the original sender (so they will know that they’ve been retweeted). You can either retweet verbatim or edit it a bit and add your own comments. I like to put comments at the end, prefixed with <–.
  • Links. If you use Twitter’s web site, URLs are automatically made clickable but they are not shortened, eating into your 140 character limit. Most of the 3rd party Twitter clients, either desktop or web-based, will shorten URLs using a service (4th party?) like bit.ly or tr.im.

Once you do start talking on Twitter, be a good conversationalist. You want people’s response to your tweets to be either, that was helpful or that was interesting or both. It’s not always easy to write stories in 140 characters or less but it can be done with practice. Here are some good examples:

Rain in DC this morning is mean to all who pass. The bones in my feet will be cold all day.
@jdickerson

Fish communicate through farts http://bit.ly/2ybLKD
@slate

Didn’t realize I flew in on the same flight as @tmonhollon from Oklahoma. Okies represent! #bwe09
@BeckyMcCray

Breaking: Tipped off by Stockholm that he was about to be branded euro-wimp peacenik, Obama ordered NASA to bomb moon.
@Roland_Hedley

Be nice, give credit where credit is due and remember, more than 20 tweets a day and people will think you have way to much time on your hands.

Flock photo by: Eileen Maher

Better Blog Editing with ScribeFire

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ScribeFireWordPress is a great publishing platform but I find its editor to be rather cramped and not very conducive to actually writing. The editing window is only 10 lines high by default and there are lots of other panels, checkboxes and drop-down menus competing for your attention while you write. I wanted an editor that presented more of a blank page.

There are approximately a gazillion external editors available that will post to a WordPress blog but a couple of factors narrowed my search. First, I didn’t really want to install yet another application on my computer. Second, and this really narrowed the field, I wanted to post my writings to WordPress as a draft, so that I can make final changes within WordPress itself. I’m compulsive enough that I always want to tinker with my posts, previewing them many times, before hitting the “publish” button. Also, WordPress changes quickly enough that it’s unrealistic to expect a 3rd party tool to stay in sync with its features. I wanted to decouple the two.

The writing tool that I settled on is ScribeFire, a plugin for the Firefox browser. Since it’s a plugin, it didn’t require installing any new software and it will publish in draft mode. ScribeFire works with several different blogging platforms, however I have only used it with this WordPress blog.

Installation is the same as with all Firefox plugins: click the “install” button, wait for the download to complete and restart Firefox. Once that’s done, you’ll have an additional icon in the Firefox tool tray and another entry for ScribeFire in the Tools menu. Selecting either of these opens the ScribeFire editor on a new Firefox tab.

Here’s a screencast of ScribeFire in action (for best viewing, use full screen mode):

A Cautionary Tale

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Camp Scorpion

Joe Pug told this story onstage at the fall Strawberry Music Festival, about a conversation he had not long ago with Steve Earle. Seems Joe was strolling around backstage with an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear.

Steve (pointing at cigarette): You better quit those things if you want to last 20 or 30 years in this business.

Joe: I know I should, but I just love it so much.

Steve: Yeah, I felt the same way about heroin.

Strike Up the Band

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Jacob and the Baritone Horn

My son, Jacob, attends Sierra Waldorf School, in Jamestown, CA. Music has been a part of his curriculum since first grade. They started on wooden pentatonic flutes (watch Bobby McFarrin demonstrate the power of the pentatonic scale), then moved on to the C scale flute and recorder.

This year, in 5th grade, they started band. At their first class, band teacher Mic Harper (a volunteer – go Mic!) picked out which instruments would make up the 5th grade band and then sat down with the kids to decide who would play what. Jacob, of course, picked one that none of us had ever heard of. He called me that afternoon, very excited. “I’m going to play the baritone”, he told me. “That’s great”, I said. “Baritone what?”

Turns out that the baritone horn (known in the band world simply as the baritone) has been a staple in American brass bands for more than a century. Smaller than a tuba, it is easily confused with the euphonium (I’ll never make that mistake again). There is a 3/4 size version for first time students but Mic felt that Jacob could handle the full size instrument. She even found one that he could borrow for the rest of the school year!

It was only last week that the entire class had their instruments and lessons could begin in earnest. The baritone has a mellow sound, which Jacob has put to good use playing the three notes he has learned so far. As his regular teacher said, the classroom sounds like a flock of happy geese during band lesson.

Jacob has been around music all his life. I’ve always tried to impress on him that music is made by people, not by the stereo or the radio. I hope that though his musical education, he will feel a connection with other musicians as speakers of a common language.

To hear a solo performance, click the player below.