The First City Crossword is 3pm Saturday!

This New Year, Saturday January 1, at 3:00 p.m. go to www.CityCrossword.com and the first City Crossword game will open.

City Crossword is an online game that you solve as a group. All riddles are local trivia and based on news, history, sports and more. You can win prizes from local businesses and artists by solving the last riddle or by solving the most riddles. Prizes will be announced at the start of the game. See you 3:00 p.m. Saturday at www.CityCrossword.com!

Racetrack

I hear the far off drone of a racetrack: the roar of engines, occasional squeals of tires, and also the wind lifting these sounds to my ears.

Odometers across the city are clicking to the next mile and wheels are spinning, spinning, spinning, but cars aren’t moving.

Wheels are spinning in icy grooves, past bent mailboxes, and at the edges of lonely stretches of white highway.

Before giving in, each driver steps one last step and it’s a squealing, venomous roar.

Wheels ignite patches of dark like a match and tracks are lit into infinite loops.

Rather than fire, a roar of sound is birthed above the loops. The bellowing moves freely through the snow.

The abandoned cars are symbols of failed technology, failed plans, failed normalcy.

But that roar… that roar you hear is the symbol of children pressing their noses against cold glass and smiling their way past the barrier.

See, drivers are walking away from their cars, but the sound of the racetrack drones on, calling forth those ready to race.

Tumblr was down when I launched my Internet venture

Monday I launched City Crossword.

It’s the first city-powered crossword experience where players can win prizes from local businesses and artists.

I began testing the idea over a year ago and it’s ready to move forward with some frequency.

Each month I’ll be responding to feedback and making the game stronger. I hope you’ll join in on the fun.

So, RSVP for Nashville’s first City Crossword January 1!

Belmont Pranksters Form “Be You Crew” (Highlight Reel)

Thank God for creative college kids with video cameras.

A group of Belmont University kids have formed a new prank-heavy performance art group called Be You Crew. The crew has only been putting out videos for a month, and I’m already impressed. Give then video ideas at beyoucrew.com, where they also highlight Belmont music and students.

Here are the funniest things they’ve done so far:

1. Army crawling hinders a student trying to use the sidewalk

2. Ambush-Saluting students at college rival, Lipscomb University

3. Fishing in the fountains, while security looks on

4. Climbing trees in Gorilla suits and throwing bananas 

The Crew’s website says this started “as a funny dorm room idea by a couple dudes that love to live life as fully as possible. Those dudes are us - Josh and Aaron, roommates on the fifth flo’ of Maddox. With an ambitious and active lifestyle, we try to live every day like it is our last. Long story short, a couple weeks into our second year of schooling at Belmont University, we came up with the Be You Crew.”

They are also taking donations. Half goes to props and equipment and they give half to Front Porch Ministry, a East Nashville relationship-driven ministry.

The Crew posts new episodes on Sunday nights so follow them on twitter or subscribe to their YouTube channel to keep up with the fun.

UPDATE: This post is referenced in the Halogen TV article I wrote about Be You Crew.

Stalking is not an information organization issue. It’s a human issue.

Facebook recently released a Friendship Pages feature that allows you to view the activity between you and a friend or two mutual friends.

The information has always been public to you. Now you just have a more powerful filtering tool than manually combing over someone’s Facebook history.

Most people are saying this is a stalky feature. I’m cool with it. You can’t discount proper use because of improper use.

People also freaked out when the News Feed was released. In fact, I reported on the reaction of the News Feed in 2006. There was justified outrage for the lake of basic privacy controls, but this feature essentially changed how information (mostly already available to others) was organized.

Funny how the act of organization makes something creepy. An analog example: A friend flips through your wedding album that you leave on the coffee table for guests. You’ve allowed certain people access by placing it in a traditional place of sharing.

If the friend takes out all the pictures of your spouse and lays them in rows on the coffee table… it just got creepy. The solution isn’t to hot gule the pictures to the album so the feature of sorting no longer exists. Here are some possible solutions:

• Don’t be friends with that person.
• Never make something public unless you are ok with people being able to see and filter the content: manually, mentally, or with stronger tools like the Friendship Page feature.

Better filters for public information is almost always a good thing. It only highlights the importance of knowing what happens when you publish content somewhere. If something is public to some kind of network, it can be found.

Stalking is not an information organization issue. It’s a human issue. We can’t fight stalking by rearranging information.

Takeaways:

1. People with access to information always have the power to organize and filter it for good or ill.
2. Don’t post something on Facebook if you’re not comfortable with all your friends being in a large room and seeing the content projected onto a screen. (Or the world if some of your content is public to everyone.)
3. Understand who is able to see the information you publish.

I’m writing 30 Love Poems in November

November is National Novel Writing Month. I want to participate in some way, but I’m not prepared for a long-form commitment, so I’ll write a poem a day.

Why love poems? Since I started blogging I’ve been surprised how often the topic of love kept popping up.

I might as well own it and see if this structure leads to some self-discovery and growth as a poet.

(And as a indicator I’m attempting to be as anti-cliché as possible, I’ve chosen this post’s photo to show that love can be found everywhere, even in condiments.)

Here’s to the journey!

Follow along if you’d like at my separate…

30 Love Poems blog

 

The “Total Pwnage Of Passive Mediums Society” Is Born

I’m embarking on a social experiment.

I was able to recruit a group of 10 willing folks last night after tweeting:

“Anyone want to experiment encouraging less tv & more reading/writing via facebook group accountability? (e.g. read a book, win a movie pass)”

Here’s the idea:

Inaugural members of the “Total Pwnage Of Passive Mediums Society” are laying the framework for using the influence of community to encourage a healthy diet of passive and active mediums.

We put pressure on unhealthy “medium diets” by crafting incentives and experimenting with a point system: For instance if we establish that a society member consumes too much passive mediums like television, we’d recommend a diet that that may include various goals:

e.g. Write two letters OR finish a book for access to watch a film.

One medium doesn’t have more intrinsic value over another , but media consumption can become unbalanced and therefore unhealthy.

The hope is that we develop a system that any group of diverse people can interact with in order to create a more impactful and well-rounded people.

We operate on a premise argued by Neil Postman: namely that we adopt the characteristics of the technology we use. For instance the availability of search engines contributes to our cultures impatience and value of timeliness.

Call To Action

Inaugural members are asked for a month commitment—once we decide what we’re doing for a month that is. We’re capping it at 15. There are a few spots left if you want to join the closed facebook group where we’ve already begun collaborating.

(And I’m sure a few people will drop out after they realize how philosophical and culty this is getting.)

—Welp, got to go create some subculture with some amazing folks. I’ll report back.

Information Overload BarCamp Nashville session (#bcn10)

Why and how you should filter out noise to unearth relevant and meaningful information

Chip Hayner and I presented at 9:50 am, Oct. 16 in the RockBar room at Cadillac Ranch, 305 Broadway.

We discussed theories on how to deal with information overload. This wasn’t a talk just about how to filter email and google reader.

It had practical applications, but it started by explaining why it’s vitally important that we understand what role information plays in our life. Hint: Information is not supposed to be distracting or give us a feeling we’re drowning. Here, we have a towel.

BarCamp Session Page | Photos by Chris Wage

Slides and Session Links

Information Overload: BarCamp Nashville (#bcn10)

Links

• Nate Baker on Twitter
  
• Chip Hayner on Twitter
• “The End of Education” by Neil Postman
• Getting Real: The Book by 37signals
• “Alone Time” chapter by 37signals
• “Meetings are Toxic” chapter by 37signals
• “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson
• “Getting Things Done” by David Allen
• “Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse” 43 Folders Podcast by Merlin Mann
• TechFasting.com
• Bacn email filtering for email you want by not right now
• SuperNick Email inbox system video (updated for gmail priority inbox)
• Original SuperNick Email system slides
• “Reader” iPhone and iPad app for google reader
• Instapaper
• Slide Notes: http://natenews.com/bcn10 (You are here)

SUPRISE!

Why We Changed Our BarCamp Nashville Topic

It’s less than a week away, and if you’re a member of the Nashville technology scene, you can sense Barcamp Nashville in the air.

• Organizers have wrapped up their last planning meeting.
• Speakers are practicing on empty chairs.
• Our amazing volunteer coordinator Sam Bradley just sent out an email including the words “Report to Nate Baker, the T-shirt General.” (Yes, I’m proud.)
• AND… *cough cough* Chip Hayner and I just changed our session topic.

The Session Topic That Died

We didn’t make this decision because we haven’t put work into our original session. We developed a session on internal communication within a technology company and learned a lot by preparing to teach.

• August 15: Chip and I began discussing our original topic.
• September 14: We collected relevant feedback.
• September 18: During our first face-to-face meeting we developed an outline, pages of notes, and charts.
• September 28: We finished most of the content at Chip’s desk.
• Yesterday: We both sat down to work remotely on the powerpoint and presentation details and decided to step back for a minute.

A Blank Document Made More Sense Than 6 Documents

—Then we realized we weren’t passionate about our topic. One of our goals all along was to create a session that we would want to attend ourselves. We did some quick brainstorming over the phone. As soon as we started hearing book quotes and human inflection, we knew we landed on our topic. We shared a new google document and easily filled it with a weighty outline.

Now, we know it’s a risk to change our topic this late in the game, but we think it’s the right decision. Chip summed it up nicely when I asked him what he thought of our new progress:

I think we’re further in 30 minutes than we were in the last month. ;)

This year’s slogan is “Getting to the good stuff.” For us, this means changing our session topic at the last minute. Come along for the ride if you’d like. If you were looking forward to content on communication, be sure to check out our friends’ session, Natural Tension: Web Development Project Management. Erin and Mark are great. They are sure to have a great talk.

So, our slides may be less polished, but I can promise we won’t need to look at the slides to find the depth of our passion or knowledge. Our new topic is Information Overload.

Ask us questions or leave a comment below: