Big Brother

Privacy is a huge concern for many people on the Inter-webs these days, and understandably so. I recently had an unpleasant exchange on Twitter where I realized that the person I was arguing with could have potentially used just my title and location, both of which were in my public profile, to locate me on LinkedIn (How many Community Managers are there in Utah?) and get my name. Then a simple WhitePages.com search later, he would've known where I live.

(I don't list either my professional title or my location on my personal Twitter account anymore.)

For those of you who blog but don't necessarily want to be "found," consider going into your Blogger (or Wordpress) template and adding the following line of code just before the tag, which you should see in your header or near the top of your template. (You can always search for "head" using your browser's "find" feature.)

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

This prevents search engines from "indexing" (i.e., listing) your blog or any of its contents. Go ahead—search for my name in Google. You won't find this blog.

NOTE: Your blog won't be de-listed immediately, but it will happen within a short period of time.

Along neighborhood lines

A year ago Wednesday was a historic day, although whether it was historically triumphant or historically terrifying depends on your point of view. I really enjoyed voting in the 2008 presidential election, but a number of experiences since then have taught me that the benefit from voting how I actually feel is not always worth the alienation it brings from neighbors and friends. One vote doesn't outweigh the smug, cynical, I-told-you-so comments made at parties and on Facebook. So my new philosophy is this: find out how the neighborhood is voting and do likewise. Anything else doesn't justify the hassle.

On blogstalking

I was surprised (and pleased) a couple of weeks ago to receive a Facebook message from a high school/college friend whom I haven't actually seen since 2001. In addition to giving us an opportunity to catch up, she was (unnecessarily) apologizing for blogstalking Toni (and, by extension, Anna) and me. By "blogstalking," of course, she meant reading the blogs of someone whom she hasn't met (i.e., Toni) and/or someone with whom she long since lost regular contact (me).

UrbanDictionary.com (a crude, vulgar, and exceptionally useful site) defines blogstalking as "secretly [reading] someone's blog with the express purpose of learning more about them without their knowledge." My friend wasn't so much trying to learn about us for any particular reason as she was simply getting to know my family and keeping up with an old acquaintance, and isn't that really what blogging is for? If you're reading our blogs in spite of frequent contact with us, you're probably hopelessly bored or put off by the pretentious nature of the topics I cover (such as this one).

So here's the point: Nobody needs to apologize for "blogstalking" me unless they're actively gathering intelligence on me for malicious purposes. Just curious about what I'm up to? Trying to figure out how much weight I've gained since we last saw each other? Totally fine by me; no apology or introduction necessary. Old friends, high school acquaintances, ex-girlfriends, former ecclesiastical leaders, teachers, mission companions, colleagues, etc.—you're all more than welcome. Make yourselves at home. And feel free to comment openly. This is a friendly place.

After all, if you're only reading your family members' blogs, you're probably missing the point.

I'm NOT fishing for compliments here, people

There is an episode of Married with Children in which Christina Applegate's character (IQ: roughly 85, on a good day) is discouraged because she isn't good at anything. Al reassures her that she'll find her calling in life, and she proceeds to assemble some sort of complicated table saw in a matter of seconds, reassuring us (and a very surprised Al) that she has discovered her true talent.

Growing up, adults warned me against being a jack of all trades and a master of none, but I think that's what I have become. In both my personal and professional life, I understand a lot of things—but none of them well enough to feel really secure, or to feel particularly driven.

Examples?

I call myself a sports fan, but I can't always tell you why my team won or lost, or what a certain player is doing wrong. I can't always tell what type of pitch I just saw, even if I can tell that it was a good pitch. I know enough, but also not enough.

I call myself an athlete, but I'm pretty terrible at almost every sport I've tried. My "basketball IQ" is lower than Kelly Bundy's normal IQ. I play a reasonably decent left field. I'm surprisingly difficult to tackle. But given all of the sports I watch, and the high level of competition that I see and try to emulate, my athletic failings leave me feeling empty. I'm good enough, but also not good enough.

I call myself a computer nerd, but I've never written my own application, or even really built a web site from scratch. I know enough to do a few basic things, but not enough to develop software or configure a firewall. I know enough, but also not enough.

I'm good at social media, right? It's what I do for a living, and it's a field growing in significance and respect. Actually, I'm good in a certain context—my company, my products. But am I an expert? Could I do consulting? Devise my own theories? Hold my own in a conversation with other professionals? Doubtful. I know enough, but also not enough.

I play the piano, but only if it's one of eight or nine songs. And I don't play in public. I can't sight read, but if you give me a few weeks to learn a piece, I can do it. I know enough, but also not enough.

I'm getting my MBA, and I didn't pick a specialty. Jack of all trades; master of none. I know a bit about marketing, a little about finance, and a thing or two about strategy, but could I really do any of those things? Probably not well. I know enough, but also not enough.

I could keep going, but. . .

In any case, I suppose I thought I'd have found my own personal table saw by now. I look around me and I see people who have figured out what they're really good at, and they do it—maybe not professionally, but at least in their private lives. I'm still not sure what I'd like to master in life, or whether I really have the drive to do it.

Not the point of the story

Today in Sharing Time they were covering the Christmas story and reading from Luke. As they were reading a verse about Mary, one of the 10-year-old girls in my primary class leaned over and asked me, in complete sincerity and innocence, "What's a virgin?"

My response: "Ummm. . . wow. You're gonna have to ask your parents."

Definitely not ready to explain things like that to young people. . . especially young people who aren't my own children.

An ode to Facebook

Do you remember where you were when you heard about this crazy new thing called "Facebook?" I do. I was in my "U.S. History Since 1877" class, at the back of the HBLL. My professor was Dr. Andrea Radke. It was the summer of 2004.

In some ways, not much has changed since then; I still spend most lectures drifting back and forth between listening to the professor and chatting with friends and family. On that day, my sister sent me an instant message. It said something like, "Go to http://www.thefacebook.com and sign up. You will love it."

I did sign up, and I did love it. That was a smaller, albeit somewhat less intimate Facebook. You actually had to go out of your way to stalk someone, because there was no News Feed; you basically jumped directly from profile to profile. If you didn't want the latest and greatest news about someone, no problem; you just didn't view their profile.

"Fan pages" didn't exist yet, and groups had "groupies," which (I think) were people who kinda followed a group but weren't allowed to join it. This allowed my roommate, Steve, to declare that "if Hitler had a Facebook profile, he would be a groupie for the 'Men Who Wear Women's Pants' group," still one of the greatest lines I can remember from that period of my life.

These are the stories we'll tell our children about a simpler era, when status updates hadn't taken over the search engines and you had to be in college to join. (Yes, there was a time when you didn't have to worry about mom reading about your social life on the Internet.) You had a profile photo, and that was about it; no massive photo albums broadcasting your life to the world. And, of course, those stupid quizzes hadn't been invented yet.

What really blows my mind, though, is that in the beginning, we all felt a little ambivalent about belonging to Facebook. Today, that would like saying, "I'm not sure how I feel about oxygen. Does spending so much time breathing air make me a creep?" In fact, today I stumbled across one of the first Facebook groups that I joined: "I'm Slightly Ashamed To Be a Member of thefacebook.com." (Oh yeah—it used to be called "The Facebook." I forgot about that.) In those days, we still weren't sure whether loving Facebook made us hip or pathetic, or some combination of the two.

The group is still around; it has 307 members, and hasn't had an update in nearly three years. Nobody is ashamed of Facebook anymore. (In fact, some would probably say that our comfort level with Facebook has exceeded healthy levels, and that we should be a bit more reserved in throwing ourselves out there.) For better or for worse, we can now whittle away our lives staring at those blue-and-white pages without fear that we are social outcasts.

Really, the opposite is true. These days, when someone we know isn't on Facebook, we're surprised and might wonder what is wrong with the person. "Seriously," we think, "it might be time to crawl out from under that rock, buddy." The site has over 300 million subscribers—more than the entire population of the United States. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world, behind only China and India. Not only do we accept or even expect Facebook membership, but part of my job includes using the site to help build brand loyalty and excitement for my company; it is so widely accepted that companies must have a presence there in order to have any control over the discussion about their brand(s).

Somewhere along the way, the site coined not one but two verbs (Take that, Google!)—"to friend" and "to facebook." And what are we doing when we aren't at our computers using Facebook? Of course. We are facebooking (there's the verb in action) on our phones. And what do we see wherever we go? Fan pages, ads, groups, events and status updates. It's a constant stream of information from friends, acquaintances, and businesses. Over the course of five years, the Little Web Site That Could has gone from StalkerNet 2.0 to probably the most powerful social and marketing force ever created.

It's hard to believe we ever doubted its place in our lives, knowing what we know today.

But I still wish they would get rid of those annoying quizzes.

Full disclosure

"Full disclosure: I am an employee of the company on which I am doing my report." That's something I may or may not be saying to my professor shortly.

I started a new, five-week class last week: "Data-Driven Strategies." The first assignment turned out to be a 15-page paper due in three weeks. I need to choose one data warehousing product, one data profiling/ETL product, and one advanced business intelligence product, then research and give a basic report on all three of them.

If there is one thing my company does well, it's give other firms the tools they need to implement data-driven strategy, so on some level, our products fit the criteria for all three of the types mentioned in the assignment. I even asked the professor if I could focus on my company, and she said it would be fine. Of course, I didn't tell her that I work for my company.

Nor did I mention that I write documentation for my company for a living, nor that I could write 15 pages on our products without doing an ounce of additional research.

Really, though, this would help the rest of the class, because they would get an in-depth, authoritative look at top-notch online business optimization software when we present our findings, right? People pay thousands of dollars to understand these products. So I'm serving my classmates here. I'm doing the selfless thing. (No, I don't really believe that, but it's an interesting perspective.)

On the other hand, I am doing myself a disservice. I could use this assignment as an opportunity to learn something new—something I don't do 8-12 hours a day, five days a week. Why not take the chance to learn about Oracle, or SAP, or Teradata? Well, did I mention that I have two other classes, a full-time career, and—oh yeah—a family that I'd like to see occasionally?

More and more, my MBA experience is filled with choices like these. Another example: in preparing for an open-book quiz, should I actually do the reading, or should I just bring the reading since I will be able to look up whatever I need to know, anyway? I'm finding that the answers to questions like these depend largely on how engaging the class is, and "Data-Driven Strategies"—even though it's in my wheelhouse—is not very engaging.

So what do I do? Should I tell the professor what I do for a living? Or should I take the free pass that the universe has given me? (This is your chance to exercise your moral superiority—or moral relativism—should you so choose. Have at it!)