Farms aren’t the only places that have silos, of course.  There are all kinds of industrial silos and then there are the metaphorical silos that politicians and pundits talk about.

Dairy plants have silos too - very large, tall ones!  Depending on what’s inside them, the vapor at the top can make you dizzier than just being that high off the ground with a case of vertigo. 

So what do the hazards with farm and industrial silos have to do with the metaphorical silos we often talk about?  Not much, maybe, because metaphors are often be stretched until they are broken and no longer apply.  On the other hand, information silos have been blamed for the tragedy of 9/ll, Katrina, and a whole lot of other things.  Perhaps there is something to be said for the application of the silo metaphore to information.

At this point, I am not so sure.  I really don’t believe that information silos are such a bad thing when it comes to internet activity.  There are certain places where I communicate with some of my relatives and some long-standing friends.  On twitter and identi.ca, I comminicate with whoever cares to talk to me as well as anyone on those networks who don’t. 

There is always the risk of misinterpretation with the written word.  That’s true with twitter and the other one-to-many networks, as well as with more traditional, long-form writing.

Right now I have a real problem with misinterpretation in emails with a very dear relative.  Perhaps it just points to the lack of clarity in what I write, but I believe that’s only a small part of it.  The dilemma has even spread to our telephone conversations to the point where, as of recently, we just don’t even bother trying to speak.

Much of what I perceive of misinterpretation, in my estimation, is a reflection of what readers are thinking about or preoccupied with at the time they absorb what’s being said.  Even more than that is whether the information is really “absorbed,” or just glanced at with a positive or negative frame of mind at the time.

Communication is not an easy feat under a lot of circumstances.   Even face-to-face, we all bring SOME preconceived notions to the table.  So silos or no silos, I think just about any kind of information transfer (communication) presents the opportunity to just blow-up or explode.  So what!  The alternative is silence and anyone over a certain age knows the danger of that!

Can infomation silos exist wth cloud computing?  That is something way beyond my well of knowledge today, but it’s certainly something worth thinking about…at least to me!

We’ve heard that international terrorists are threatening local shopping malls near small towns and in big cities.  Terror has certainly been seen at shopping malls in medium-sized cities, but the culprits have most often been people down on their luck, who have apparently felt they had nothing left to lose.

There’s really no need to list every dire warning of doom and gloom that we’ve heard throughout our lives.  One of the worst has indeed been seen here in the United States.  No one who was alive and conscious of their surroundings 7 years ago will ever forget September 11.  There is just no need to list all the dire predictions we’ve heard before that day or since.

Now we are hearing about a mega-meltdown of our financial system, less than 2 weeks after being assured by some that the fundamentals of our economy are strong.  The American people are so shell-shocked since 2001, that many don’t believe the “financial meltdown” is real at all.

Here is one very ordinary anecdote that suggests to me that it is.

My spouse and I keep separate checking accounts.  We always have, for the entire 22 years we’ve been married.  We kept a third “house account” at a Savings & Loan for awhile, but we abandoned that plan some time ago.  That “bank” kept changing hands and changing names.  The rules for free checking kept changing and it was soon no longer called a Savings & Loan.  We thought maybe it was good that the institution was finally called a bank.

There was neither rhyme nor reason to how debits were made to that bill-paying account.  Since many of our bills came due around the same time each month, we started to rack up overdraft fees merely because of the order in which our checks were paid by the bank.  We were told that the debits were made in the order they were received from our creditors.

At first, the fees were waived because of the high-interest CD (Certificate of Deposit) that we had there from when it was a Savings & Loan.  That didn’t last long.  The bank managers were rude and insulting about how we managed our finances, so we closed the checking account and just continued to maintain our separate accounts at the different banks we’d used since before we were married.

We never bothered to calculate how much we ended up paying in overdraft fees before we closed the account.  Without a total, we certainly didn’t compare how much we paid in fees to what we had earned on the CD by the time we finally had the need to cash it.  I suspect it was the bank that came out ahead, not us.

Of course, this was in the 1980′s.  That’s when that large number of Savings & Loans failed.  It was reported that George H. W. Bush’s son, Neil, made out like a bandit and that John McCain was somehow involved.

We didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to those details.  We just started managing our household income as though we were single and we have ever since.

Now here is today’s anecdote:

I keep my so-called checking account (I only use a debit card now) at a large, international bank.  My spouse keeps the other checking account in a bank that’s named after the county in which we live, and monitors the account balance by telephone almost every day (sometimes more than once a day).  Since I do most of the bill-paying by direct debit, money is deposited to my account every payday.

It’s been taking longer and longer for the debit to show up when we check the balance at the local bank.  This time, it took a FULL WEEK!

My spouse blames my bank.  I don’t think my bank has anything to do with it, except that my bank did show the credit to my account within a day or two after we made the deposit from the other bank.  To quote Yogi Berra, “it’s like deja vu all over again!”

So, yes, I do believe that this financial crisis is real.  It’s not another chicken-little story.  I don’t believe it’s reason to panic.  I believe it’s time to be smart.

To panic about it would mean to be scared.  Being scared just lets the “bad guys” win. 

Our job, our Congress’ and Senate’s job, is to figure out who it is that is trying to make us panic and be scared for our financial futures, and steer clear of any plan they present to “save” us. 

If any of the financial snakes are running for office, we need to vote against them.

I was berated by the subject of one of my blog posts recently by a person who makes it a hobby to project her own fears and frailties onto most anyone she encounters.  The amusing thing is that she seemed to have the misguided notion that I know what I’m doing.

I don’t!

I enjoy this medium because it helps to keep me somewhat literate in my accidental “retirement.”  Sometimes it keeps me challenged, which is something I miss to a limited extent.  It is also an excellent source of amusement.

I had no idea I would find the kind of amusement I found from her comments.  When I first encountered this person I found myself enraged at her provocations on the live stream of NewsGang Live.  I wrote a blog post about it because I found myself preoccupied with her antagonism and the sad effect it seemed to have on the other participants.

I find that it helps to dissipate an unwanted preoccupation by writing about it.  A blog post is as good as any place to write and doing that accomplished my purpose.  I didn’t expect any comments because practically no one reads my blogs.  What a surprise it was to read the comments she posted!

I started this post weeks ago when I received her comments.  I am finishing it now because someone asked me today about that particular episode of NewsGang Live and I thought I would see if I am still amused by what she wrote.

The amusing part about it is that I don’t know half of what she is talking about.  If I did, perhaps I would be insulted.  As a neophyte to this technology, it makes me laugh that anyone would be so caught up in it to go to the trouble to find my tiny blog and make such grand assumptions about me.

“Gotcha?”  That sounds like her, not me.  I post pictures to practice posting pictures in WordPress.  Unfortunately, the unflattering picture I posted was the only one I could find of her.

“Hysterical?”  The points she was trying to make on NewsGang Live would have been good launching points for discussion.  It’s a shame that she couldn’t be quiet long enough for anyone to digest what she was saying.

Discussion, however, was not her objective.  Persuasion was not her objective either.  She apparently wanted only to broadcast her point of view and project her assumptions about the participants on NewsGang Live.

Sort of like what I, the blissful neophyte, am doing here.

I had checked out each of these four “communities” to greater or lesser degrees prior to this experiment, but I was never able to grasp the social networking aspects by just “checking them out.”  That’s why I decided to go ahead and sign up for the ones where I didn’t already have a login and try to get better acquainted.  Maybe, by doing that, I would finally be able to figure out what the attraction was.

 The most significant observation after a month of this experiment is that I can rank the level of engagement I have experience with each of these networking serices:

1. Twitter
2. Ustream
3. WebShots
4. Flickr

Twitter has turned out to be enormously engaging.  It’s amazing how many possible uses for it there are, depending on who you “follow.”  (It’s also amazing how quickly one can gain “followers.”)  I decided who to follow by choosing a few people who I already knew were on Twitter and then adding some of the people they followed. 

From doing this I found that there are many professional writers and journalists who use Twitter to promote their other work.  The fun part is that there are a lot of tech writers who use Twitter in conjunction with other new media.  As a result, it’s been almost irrestible to become totally immersed in Twitter and all that flows it.

I started using Ustream more when a live streaming event was announced on Twitter.  There is a chat room with Ustream which usually has many of the same people in the chat room for each event, making it an online community of sorts.

It hasn’t been so easy to experiece the community aspects of WebShots or Flickr.  Perhaps it’s because Twitter and Ustream have kept me so engaged that I haven’t spent much time getting acquainted wth anything else.  It may also be because I haven’t been taking to many photographs lately. 

I would like to be able to spend the next month becoming more acquainted with the online communities and social networks built around WebShots and Flickr.  May is always a good month for taking pictures, so maybe I will be more motivated to spend less free time online and more of it capturing the outdoors with my camera!  Stay tuned!

I’m new at this.  I’m new to blogging, new to social media.  I am new to a lot of things on the internet except podcasts.  That is, in the sense that mp3 media was available before the iPod was invented.  It wasn’t as portable in space before iPods, but mp3 media has always been time-portable.  Probably ten years ago, if I missed a radio broadcast that I wanted to hear, I could usually find it in the mp3 archives and listen to it later.

Since then, the array of podcasts (or mp3 downloads) has broadened well beyond recordings of broadcast radio shows.  The range of podcasts I listen to has broadened slowly since those days when I first started downloading This American Life many years ago.  It hasn’t even been a year since I finally found the former TechTV folks reincarnated in the various netcasts available from Leo Laporte’s tWiT.tv domain.  Shortly after that, I finally discovered where to find podcasts at iTunes.  

I recently discovered Twitter and it has led me to an even broader range of podcasts and blogs to follow.  One of them was NewsGang, which led to TheGillmorGang.  I usually look forward to listening to the NewsGang phone call each day but when I logged into its ustream simulcast last Tuesday, I wasn’t sure what to think.  A semi-professional heckler using the moniker Prokofy was in the process of doing all she could to antagonize the host, the guests, and probably anyone who was listening.  I even found myself responding to her baiting techniques in the Ustream chat room posting poorly thought-out comments back to her.

I’m not sure why I continued to listen, much less respond in an arena where I am a quiet listener.  I find the conversations on NewsGang interesting and sympathetic to many of my own views.  I wondered if perhaps it was a generational thing that held my interest in the way Prokofy presented her views.  Her profile indicated she was 30 years old, but she sounded more like a teenager posing as a someone older. 

It turns out, according to Encyclopedia Dramatica, Prokofy is 50 years old and works as a Russian translator at the UN. 

I found that although I didn’t want to “reward” her by following her on Twitter, I did want to get a better idea of who she was.  Of course she had a blog, so I looked at it a bit to see how she perceives the world she lives in.  It’s an angry world.  She seems to be a well-spoken, melodramatic writer, but her account of her phone call to NewGang was so distorted that I could only wonder what distortions were in the other posts on her blog.  I’ve observed some of her exchanges with other people on Twitter and it’s pretty clear that notoriety is what she’s after.  Now here I am, adding to it.

What was most remarkable was how the unusual, reflective mood I was left with 2 days later was apparently shared by the regular callers and the host on NewsGang.  Prokofy’s attacks in her blog post were so personal and so vicious and it seemed clear that most of the people on the call (as it’s called) had probably read it.  It was insulting to everyone involved, at least I found the things she said in her post a lot of insulting venom. 

I suppose there are plenty of people who occupy their minds with the paranoia evident in her words.  In fact I know that there are plenty of paranoid people in the world.  It’s a sad thing, really, that someone so articulate can be so twisted.

Hopefully, that’s enough and this ugly side of me that wants to observe her self-destructive actions online has been satisfied.   Surely, future NewsGang simulcasts and podcasts will return to the usual topics, espeically when there is so much going on.  Hopefully, I can return to being a quiet newbie who feels an affinity for the people and ideas presented on NewsGang.

Listen to this special Gillmor Gang podcast and enjoy this nostalgic video:

I don’t really know the people I follow on twitter either, but the list of who I follow is growing.  The first people I picked to follow were people who I’ve found interesting to listen to on podcasts.  From there, I’ve added people found on twitter who had interesting things to say in articles linked to twitter.

Leo Laporte brought up some interesting points about the changing nature of delivering news in Episode 138 of This Week in Tech (TWiT).  Twitter was suggested as an early signal source for news, but it was argued that it also narrowed the scope of news that a twitterer would see.

After a week of following tweets on twitter, I have been exposed to a ton of new news.  It’s been fascinating, but no single news source can keep a person informed.  It’s great to have such a variety of new sources to choose from, but I agree with comments made by several of the guests on TWiT Episode 138.  Serendipity is lost with such tight focusing of the news one comsumes, but there’s no law that says one can only consume news one way. 

Following twitter has introduced me to a wider variety of news sources than I had and I’ve learned things that I wouldn’t have otherwise.  I expect that I will continue with twitter for awhile, but it seems that it will be more for the news than for the community experience.

None of us are in this photo but it’s a fair picture of the microbrewery and some of its unnamed patrons.

 Wednesday night at the microbrewery was a whole lot more fun than Thursday afternoon at the hotel.  There were only friendly faces Wednesday, at dinner and back at the hospitality room at the hotel.  Not so much on Thursday, but it’s always good to be able to spend some time with my Springfield buddy.

I was looking for some pictures of pixies and ran across an old web page called Zen Chemistry archived on the hard drive.  There were some interesting links on there.  NOVA Archive was one of them.  It has a bunch of different categories with podcasts, online videos, and more.

I see how twittering is affecting this blog.  I’m not sure that’s so good, but it’s interesting.

Here’s a short list of communities I’ve signed up for today (finally):

• Flickr
• UStream
• WebShots
• Twitter

Hope this doesn’t get too confusing or time-consuming for me.  Ha!