Archive for the ‘Social networking’ Category

East of eatin’

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 12, 2008

Bloggers for Bounty

It would be best if New Jersey, where I live, had taxation, social and economic policies that encouraged economic growth instead of discouraging it, but it doesn’t. And it is ironic that those most vulnerable to bad economic policy routinely vote into office the people most responsible for the policies that contribute to their misery time and time again. That doesn’t mean, however, that if people, our neighbors, are going hungry in what is still an environment of historically, and absolutely, phenomenal bounty, we should as humans and citizens stand by and watch.

New Jersey is called the Garden State because it once had a lot farms, of course. Recent estimates are that it still has 4.7 times more agriculture than you think. And please do not confuse me with the facts on this point! Not surprisingly, however, there are a lot of people in my home state who don’t have enough to eat.

A quarter of a million people in New Jersey depend on the generosity of their fellow citizens to meet their dietary needs. The Community Food Bank of New Jersey reports that requests for food have gone up 30 percent, but donations are down by 25 percent. Its warehouse shelves, typically stocked with food, are bare, and for the first time in its 25-year history, the Food Bank is developing a rationing mechanism.

For that reason I’m participating in this campaign among bloggers in my state to encourage support of New Jersey food banks, sponsored by the Community Food Bank of New Jersey. It’s a non-partisan effort. This Monday, December 15, we’re trying to get 100 New Jersey-based bloggers to post in support of the Food Bank. This has been coordinated by Deb Smith of Jersey Bites, and she, incidentally, is still looking for participant bloggers.

With the number of families across the country counting on churches and food banks to feed their families increasing at astronomical rates this year, the Food Bank needs our help now more than ever. So, help.

Posted in Gelt, Heart and spirit, Social networking, Suburbia | 1 Comment »

Don’t blame the Netroots for democracy

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 10, 2008

Pajamas Media columnist M.P. MacConnell writes, regarding the “How the Netroots Brought Down Obama’s Spymaster.” (Via Glenn.) Get this:

Regardless of political affiliation, the “Netroots” (a term used to describe those whose political activism is primarily manifested online) are a mob, and as is normally the case in mob attacks, there are ringleaders. In this particular instance it was Glenn Greenwald, an attorney and contributing writer for Salon.com, who took it upon himself to lead those self-appointed champions of liberty in their quest to speed John Brennan’s downfall. Greenwald, who has no background in intelligence, law-enforcement, diplomacy, or international relations, felt himself to be in a position of supreme moral authority in questioning the fitness of Brennan – a 25 year veteran of government, intelligence, and counter-terrorism service – to assume the role President-elect Obama seemed to have him earmarked for.

I wasn’t too impressed, and wrote the following in the comments:

What an odd article. It starts out — well, I don’t know how it starts out; is there a missing topic sentence? — but at the beginning the complaint is, “Bad new media!” Then a quote from William Safire about money and megaphones. Does this mean that non-expert writers have had an effect on political and government decision-making prior to the advent of the Internet? Why, I think it does! In fact, while [Glenn] Greenwald is merely a lawyer, and not an expert on intelligence or the like, he is no worse credentialed than Horace Greeley, Carl Bernstein or Rush Limbaugh: Lay people with opinions, agendas and sometimes information that can affect public policy. The Internet has nothing to do with this.

Having said that, the remaining four-fifths of the article is a defense, on the merits, of Brennan. It may very well be a great defense of Brennan — I’m only a lawyer, not an intelligence expert! But it’s a non-sequitur as regards the first paragraphs, the title and the concluding paragraph.

Guess what, M.P.: Political decisions, or decisions by politicians regardless of merit, need to be supported, defended and sustained in political environments such as the media, online or off. If you haven’t gotten used to that, or if you don’t like it, why on earth do you write for Pajamas Media?

Posted in Blogophilia, Politics and Poker, Social networking | Leave a Comment »

Trails of tears

Posted by Ron Coleman on November 17, 2008

Kaus sums it all up:

Vodkapundit makes the basic point about Obama’s Blackberry. … You want the President to rely solely on information passed up the official chain through the White House gatekeepers? That way lies the Bay of Pigs! The chain of command is a lousy way to find out bad news. Emailing around seems like a pretty good way. Is it that much harder to secure than a phone call? Aren’t Presidents trusted with the telephone? … Paranoid P.S.: You have to wonder whether on some level this isn’t an an attempt by the White House bureaucracy to control Obama. … [via Insta]

I guess I just can’t stop being a lawyer. It is obvious to any of the wingtip-shod that the President can’t use a BlackBerry the way he uses a phone because, duh, (1) a BlackBerry leaves a textual trail, and (2) the BlackBerry isn’t only a way to receive information, it is a way to distribute it; and the process of receiving it requires a series of textual prompts — at the very least — by the putative BB-ing President BO.

Just last week, at the Media Law Resource Center dinner, the presidential historian Michael Beschloss made it very clear that he has no idea how his job will be done in the future. Presidents today, and those around them, do not dare write contemporaneous notes, diaries, letters… these are mere fodder for politically-motivated congressional witch hunts and special prosecutors looking for something, anything, as a hook on which to hang the other side out to dry. The only defense to this process has been executive privilege, and even that is considered bad form now. The Democrats in Congress have made it clear there will be purges later this coming winter and are warning the White House not to rev up the shredders — and in this environment, we think the next President should generate dozens of email trails containing hundreds of messages in the process of governing?

The virtual eye?

It’s much more than this. We have lost some perspective, it seems. The BlackBerry is a virtual replacement for being at the center of the process. It is a form of portable access, both incoming and outgoing, as a replacement for being face to face with the people and data with whom interaction is required.

The BlackBerry — the “CrackBerry” — in fact, is a tyranny that we impose on ourselves in an attempt to manage our piece of a world that will move along without us if we log off for long. You might argue that this is all the more true for a Chief Executive, but it is not merely wishful thinking to suggest that this is not the manner in which the President of the United States should operate on a personal level. It is a managerial and executive imperative that this be so. If there is any single person on earth who absolutely should not be executing his responsibilities via the essentially reactive, and highly improvisational, mode of feverish electronic messaging, it is the President of the United States.

Posted in Nuvo-Techno, Social networking, Stragety, Style | 14 Comments »

Drop Dead; drop 12

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 11, 2008

This Tech CrunchIT article by Steve Gillmor about why I can’t get Twitter to work with instant messaging — a marriage that you’d think would be as obvious as chocolate and peanut butter — was worthwhile, because it clarified what was becoming increasingly obvious: It’s not about me. Twitter doesn’t have any idea on earth how to make it work.

Fine and dandy, as far as it goes.

But here’s the icing: The article is called, “Twitter to IM: Drop Dead,” and, to make it re-e-e-e-e-eally obvious what the joke was to the many Twitter and IM users who are, in fact, under 40…. and then some… it included a JPEG of the famous New York Daily News front page of October 29, 1975, featuring the late President Gerald Ford’s picture and the headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” in reference to his promise to veto any bailout of New York City in the shadow of its threatened bankruptcy. This decision by Ford may have been the right one, but the News‘s spin — despite its later endorsement — along with Chevy Chase’s libelous depiction of of the President as an oaf on Saturday Night Live, were probably the two most significant MSM contributors to the advent of the Carter Administration.

What’s really, really interesting is the second subhead. The first one reads, “Abe, Carey rip stand” — that meant, for you youngsters and those tuning in from overseas, “New York Mayor Abe Beame and New York Governor Hugh Carey criticized the President’s statement.” Of course, they were not only Democrats; they were as responsible as any two people then living for the disastrous situation in the first place. But the second headline? Dig this — and now I present you with the JPEG in all its glory:

Twelve points of separation

That’s right: “Stocks Skid, Down Down 12.”

TWELVE POINTS.

This was back in the ticker-tape days, when stocks were bought and sold the old-fashioned way. A million shares sold, as I remember it, was a “heavy volume” day on Wall Street. And the Dow Jones average for the month of October in 1975 was 836. The Dow overcame that eight-point “slide” and finished the year at 852.

Now, we were talking about Twitter…

Posted in Americana, Gelt, Nuvo-Techno, Social networking | 1 Comment »

Martindale and me. Ok, well, mostly me.

Posted by Ron Coleman on July 3, 2008

I only mention this here because we can talk. It’s just a few of us who read the blog, and by now we’re mostly pretty good friends and no one here is going to take this wrong way. I mean, the premise of most blogs, including this one, is some aspect of self-promotion, yeah, but that’s not my point here, right? By now it’s pretty much just us guys and we all know where we stand vis-à-vis each other. The post is pretty self indulgent, though, even for a blog, even for one of my blogs, but if you’re interested in kind of higher-end lawyer marketing thingies you might find it instructive.

A little while ago I kicked up a little lawyer-directory dust by axing the musical question, Why does upstart lawyer – ranking – promotion – and – directory service Avvo.com rank me so super high and all? This was meant as an entirely honest question in light of the fact that I know who the real killers are in this profession and I in all unsimulated modesty I wasn’t so so sure I was one of them.

Fine, I was sufficiently… humbled… on that point.

Now it turns out that (somewhat embattled) Martindale-Hubbell, the definitive (and remarkably costly, to firms) old-line law directory rapidly catching up to the Internet age, is showing me some cyber – law – marketin’ – lovin’ too. Tell me this isn’t kind of cool:

Ronald D. Coleman Lawyer Profile on Martindale.com
Visibility Rankings
#68 out of 53,913 lawyers in New York, New York
#862 out of 892,508 total lawyers Overall

Number 68 out of the whole New York City? Really? I must be very successful!

At something. Like getting people to look me up.

Isn’t attention useful when paying your electric bill? I know in Heaven that is one of the first question they ask at the pearly gates: “Coleman, Ronald, eh? Jewish name, Henech ben Yankiv. Hmmm…. mixed bag here I see but — hey, nice page view stats!”

I suppose 862 out of 892,508 nationwide is cool, too. Top one-tenth of 1%, right? But, er, you know how we New York types are. So, yeah, of course, that’s nice. But 68 out of almost 54,000 is such an incredible achievement….

Of getting looked up. Do I maybe get, I dunno, some coupons or something?

I also like how they’ve integrated LinkedIn.com, which is improving phenomenally as a grownup networking tool, into Martindale, though I don’t quite understand how they did that. I just see that my profile has a LinkedIn icon.

Whoa — ok! I just clicked the icon and it said, hey, you want to connect your LinkedIn profile to Martindale? Of course, natch, that’s the idea, right? Okay, so somehow it knew it was me in both places, but it didn’t know it was me reading the profile. Okay, that I like. So, fine, what happens now when you click the icon is it tells you how, once you’re identifed as a LinkedIn user yourself, how you’re already connected to the profile on Martindale you’re reading. Which in my case was easy, okay, but… wow. Pretty cool.

Another pleasant surprise: My AV rating kind of got upgraded, too. That’s a gooood rating. I actually was “awarded” this rating when I was an associate at the old Pitney Hardin law firm in New Jersey. I haven’t met anyone else who was rated AV as an associate (i.e., means of production) in a big firm, though I am sure there are other such people. But —

Humility break, kind of: That ranking didn’t mean Pitney Hardin even remotely considered me for partnership. In a firm where virtually no one without government service tries cases to juries, I had just tried and won a jury trial, got a “no judgment” verdict where the exposure was in the seven figures, on behalf of a fairly important firm client — Volvo Cars of North America. The firm’s response? They offered to transfer me to the corporate department!! Nice touch.

— my listing in New York always had this kind of asterisk on it next to the AV, because, really, I had “earned” it while practicing out of state. It was a way for Martindale to say, on the New York listing, “this guy is really good! For New Jersey, that is.” Evidently they’ve changed that somewhat; according to their FAQ, it now goes like this:

Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Ratings are generally transferable within state boundaries. If a lawyer moves to a different state, his or her rating will appear in the Law Directory with the state abbreviation, indicating that it was established in another state or province.

Well, guess what? No abbreviation, dude! Looks like by virtue of the last few years having my mail sent to this side of the river, I is … legitimated!

They like me! They really, really like me!

If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere!

You… you could look it up!

UPDATE: Maybe this is even easier than I thought — Monday, July 7th: