I did it!
Hit my 100 mile mark at the top of a nearby hill.
I would walk 100 miles and I would walk a 100 more …
Sunday, March 25th: 96 miles down 4 to go, I’m going to make it!
And I’m going to do it again - 100 miles my July 1st - want to join me?
Bum Rush This
The backstory. First there was the buzz: Bum Rush The Charts. Then I rushed and finally, I sat back and engaged in a little navel gazing…
I wasn’t obsessive about checking the rankings on I-Tunes yesterday, but I did check a couple of times and wondered who was still buying Beyonce, isn’t she a has-been by now? I did notice that things did not look good for Black Lab. Was this experiement going to work out?
Then I read this:
“As of this post, NONE OF THE ITUNES CHARTS WORLDWIDE HAVE UPDATED IN OVER 24 HOURS! The previous chart positions we have are from midday on the 22nd and our guess is that they can’t reflect the total number of downloads made during BUM RUSH. We’re expecting to rise even higher once they update so KEEP AN EYE ON THE ITUNES CHARTS! And let us know if you see anything.”
(from The Bum Rush The Charts blog)
And then I clicked through to an article in Spin magazine, which picked up the story yesterday.
They based their calculations on the only data they had at the time, the same i-tunes rankings as everyone else and concluded their article wondering if the rush worked. It will take some time for the numbers to come in, you can watch the returns at the Financial Aid Podcast.
Let’s say the rush gets Black Lab into the top 20, but never hit number one, just the fact that the rush made it out of the gates and caused a ripple effect on the I-Tunes charts is an amazing thing and it is built on the back of individual prosumers - producers and consumers in the blog/podcast sector. I’m sure Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, Chrisopher Penn, CC Chapman and the rest of the gang behind this will be talking about this for day.
New Media marketing fascinates me because at some level, it is all about how to manage and deliver information to those most likely to need/want/us it. With data feeds we have the ability to finely tune our searches, to focus our scope on the likeliest of targets, but my hunch is that we still crave the human element to put it all together for us, make it matter to us.
We are still at the very begining of the brave new world and the transition is tough. I feel like I spend my day explaining Web 2.0 to people, and that the mere act of catching them up prevents them from enjoying the process. Every once in a while, someone will tell me they’ve read my other blog or they’ve listened to a podcast and I’ll be surprised and relieved, because I’ve stumbled upon someone else who gets it.
I’m tempted to send this out before all my meetings with people, because I think it tells a story but, I worry - does it move too fast? If you aren’t a prosumer (producer/consumer) already, can you keep up?
Bum Rush The Charts
I bought my copy of Mine Again by Black Lab first thing this morning and am listening to it on repeat and loving it. I had no idea who Black Lab was before this mini-movement showed up on my radar. I wanted to join in because I think Christopher Penn - one of the organizers - gets web 2.0 marketing like few others and I wanted to see what he could do with this, and, I wanted to be a part of this. I was going to spend my 99 cents no matter what I thought of the band, and if it sucked, then I’d delete it and no big loss.
But you know what this song is fantastic and I will go back and download the whole album - and so should you.
What do you think?
“It may be the most stunning and creative attack ad yet for a 2008 presidential candidate — one experts say could represent a watershed moment in 21st century media and political advertising.”
Political video smackdown: ‘Hillary 1984′: Unauthorized Internet ad for Obama converts Apple Computer’s ‘84 Super Bowl spot into a generational howl against Clinton’s presidential bid, by Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer, Sunday, March 18, 2007. San Fransisco Gate
If this is the marking point, what comes next?
Did you know?
I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs lately, the last one was on the the Financial Aid Podcast blog. I watched it this morning and went on about my work, but I kept think about it. I joke about being an internet evangelicist in my new job, and while watching this I found myself supressing the urge to walk around my neighborhood, knocking on doors and whipping out my laptop, making all the people who complain about the government’s failure to bring back manufacturing jobs sit through this. I imagine the moment when they have their epiphany and they too demand $100 laptops for their children and grandchildren, with wifi access for all.
Watch this and you too can be saved:
You can read more about the evolution of on the author’s blog.
Berkeley Free Speech Movement, continued
What does this all mean? In the end, the lessons from the BFSM are this – the University and the Government could only see the student’s activities as related to the larger issue of communism, which would determine the path/influence their reaction to student protests for the next few years and because the participants didn’t see their behavior in any way influenced by communism and primarily related to their experiences in the civil rights movement, participant historians failed to the University’s reaction as anything other than anti-progressive. While the Berkeley Free Speech movement, for the media in general, can be seen as the the beginning of white student protest, it is far more closely related to the McCarthyism and a cultural belief that still saw any dissident speech as related to communism.
The Berkeley Free Speech emerged organically from the many student groups affected. Unlike future protests, the strike at Columbia in particular, the event was not pre-planned, there were no major organizations backing and directing it and despite Mario Salvo’s public role, there were no real leaders. And it is this specific snapshot in the movement that best represents the Marshall Bloom’s own political inclinations.
Finally, the BFSM introduced the FBI to hundreds of students they could add to their watch list, (in addition to Clark Kerr), all listed as either communists or communist sympathizers. When J. Edgar Hoover was questioned about the BFSM by the House Appropriations subcommittee on March 14, 1965, “he reported that that there were 43 persons with subversive backgrounds” in the FSM, including five faculty members. He said the Communist Party had exploited the FSM.” He testified despite reports from his own field officers that there were barely a handful of communist sympathizers involved.
In 2004, following an in-depth investigation into the FBI’s investigations of the Free Speech Movement, the San Francisco Gate published an article detailing the FBI’s file on Savio – who wasn’t active in any other movement following the BFSM. Among other things, the FBI:
– Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.
– Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.
– Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.
– Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a “Key Activist” whose political activities should be “disrupted” and “neutralized” under the bureau’s extralegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
“The bureau took these actions against Savio even after San Francisco FBI agents repeatedly told bureau headquarters that he was not connected with, or influenced by, any subversive political group or foreign power.”
Salvo wasn’t alone, Jo Freeman another student active at Berkeley found that both the FBI monitored her and Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (MSC) who planted a spy on the Berkeley campus following Freedom Summer. Freeman details what essentially became a feedback loop between the two organizations in her book At Berkeley in the Sixties: Education of an Activist, 1961-1965. The summer following the FSM protests, Freeman returned to the south, to work on voter registration. Local newspapers ran articles titled “MISS JO FREEMAN, WHITE FEMALE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST AGITATOR,” and the following summer, in August of 1966, the Jackson Daily News ran an editorial “Professional Agitator Hits All Major Trouble Spots.” Complete with 5 photos. The publication of the photos made Freeman Klan bait and effectively ended the fieldwork she could do in Mississippi.
Connecting civil rights with communism was crucial for the white power “Because the culture of anti-Communism permeated the South. Implying that civil rights workers were Communists associated two evils with each other and reinforced Southern beliefs that outside agitators were a foreign as well as a domestic threat.”
These accounts parallel Marshall Bloom’s. In a letter from Bloom to the president of Amherst College, Bloom writes that his southern landlord thought he was a communist, a charge Bloom found unlikely and a bit amusing.
Carnival!
The History Carnival is up at Early Modern Notes and includes a entry from Walking the Berkshires on “”I am wronged. It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.”: Ancestors in the Witch Hysteria”.
I spent an evening this week pouring over a long lost family genology file, marveling several strains of my father’s family can trace their roots back to the 1620s and it appears as if the generational timing was off just enough that no one fought in any major conflict, not the Revolution, the War of 1812, The Civil War, WW1 or WWII or Korea/Vietnam. There was one family that fled Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s because of religious persecution, and another who went to Lawrence, Kansas in 1856 - we have no evidence that they were abolishionists (and even less that they were pro-slavery southernerns), but the timing and the journey itself, from Lowell, Massachusetts, leads me to believe they were some how involved in what has become known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
Must stop procrastinating, back to the 1960s.
Playing with new toys
