I do not know how some of y’all do it. Out here looking flawless and know exactly the best way to show it. I’m amazed, inspired, in awe and let you know about it with all this stuff❤💜💙👍🏾👏🏾😍🥰🤩
Then you have folks like me, stay trying to get it all to work at the same time but failing miserably at the look and the mechanics of the situation.
I can’t take a selfie to save my life.
Y’all I must have assistance because I dont know how to hold the phone so I dont drop or take a photo of my palm. If I do manage to keep it on my hand part of my head or something else is chopped off. The only modicum of success I have is by using a tripod and still end up looking like this.
So I dedicate this post to the self portrait photogs of the world. I appreciate how you make the process look easy and you look bomb at the same time.
In the years following that first party, I always asked who was the DJ and there was one who was the dopes of all. His name was Jose. If I heard Jose was DJing, I was cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, DOING ALL THE THINGS so I could be there. Back in those days it was the DJ not a corporation or some A&R cat, who broke records. Two that Jose broke (for me), I remember vividly, though several years apart, were Rapper’s Delight and She Blinded me With Science at a club where I definitely was not supposed to be (LOL!). This dude was so dope and if you knew where I was from, you’d be shocked that we got down the way that we did.
I think of Jose now because of our current collective situation, under stay at home, shelter in place or quarantine. Covid-19 has us in the house, some have been home upwards of two months. There would be no concerts, no clubs, no DJs in our lives for the the foreseeable future until there was.
You see, Instagram (Twitch, YouTube) became the new Club 112 (only old Atliens know about that). It was on IG that the DJs saved our lives. Music fans had access to the best in the world. In the former time, most of us would never experience one of their sets. Now we’ve seen some of the best and youngest in the world. I was on Questlove’s IG the night Stevie Wonder called in, and was a regular at D-Nice’s club quarantine. I caught DJMaseo one morning playing Teddy Pendergrass and was hooked thereafter and twerked (allegedly) to Mannie Fresh. I watched the Rza v DJ Premier Verzuz battle, viewed in amazement the skills of DJs Amira & Kayla and every Saturday post his own recovery, I danced and sweated to the illest of all time (imo) DJ Jazzy Jeff.
These men, women and young women DJs saved and gave us our whole lives during a time that has been hella difficult. I love, thank and appreciate them all for sharing their love and their art with us and I thank Jose, for making me fall in love with the art of DJing.
Postscript: This post was originally drafted during early May. Since that time there has been an apparent DJ shutdown on IG over alleged publishing violations. Just so you know, this some b*((*$!t !
The 2008 presidential election is what brought me to Twitter. It was an exciting time for folks who are activists, zealots or fans of politics and political theater. I created an open account, dove in and started tweeting and responding to tweets about the election, following folks who were thoughtful and sometimes comedic on the subject of politics.
Post-election I began following folks people who tweeted about things I was interested in like football, technology and so on. I consider myself fortunate in the sense that those I followed were nice, knowledgeable, passionate and entertaining. Twitter was enjoyable and was my go to social media source. As it grew it became a great source of breaking news worldwide and now at least here in America it is so common that it’s joined at the hip with traditional media formats. It’s also a bit more than social, and a bit more than news.
Twitter is now the go to place for isms, none of the good kind. Because we now live in this always on always connected world we get wind of all those things that were backroom whispered things or things that may not have even been spoken at all. Isms are now tweeted, re-tweeted then amplified through other media. Now let’s be clear Twitter was never to my knowledge tame, what I am saying is that it’s reached an all new level of nastiness and that’s disappointing.
There is no “putting the genie back in the bottle”. I expect Twitter to continue to change and as that happens I will continue to adapt to it. My own ism, Optimism has me believing that the format is still good at disseminating information and getting people talking. That same optimism has me hoping that when we tweet we can do so without the negative isms.
I’d like to hear from you. Are you a Twitter user? How do you use it? Is the experience enjoyable? Let me know in the comments, on Google+ or Twitter.
I don’t know anything about websites, making them, coding them, hosting them or any of that stuff. I’m just a blogger who needs to blog more and wants to be able to post content easily. A few years ago on Twitter I kept seeing posts from this “dead-simple” blogging platform called Posterous. I checked it out and loved it. You could post by email, from a phone app or by web. So if the brilliant blog post came you could publish mind while in some random place, you could do it right there from our phone without even loggin in. I went all in on Posterous and in 2009 purchased a domain name let Posterous do the hosting. Now after 138 posts I learn that they were acquired by Twitter. Am I supposed to be happy about that?
Well I can tell you that I’m not. Again as a blogger and not a tech person, the thought of having to move all of that content to another service just puts me in full freak-out mode. I’ve done it twice. Remember a service called VOX? Not an Expert started out there about three years ago. They shut down and I moved it all to Typepad which was a mistake. The service was just weird and seemed a bit old and limited so I moved again to WordPress, hopefully for good. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in love with WordPress either, but it’s not because the service isn’t good, it’s pretty feature rich, so rich that I can’t figure it all out. Yet WordPress in the blogging world seems to be the standard and I thought it would be a relatively safe place to land. That Posterous blog may land here too because I just don’t trust this acquisition.
Back in the stone age (the 80’s) during my first round of higher learning, Mergers and Acquisitions and “corporate raiders” were all the rage. They’d come in, rip up your company and sell the parts, basically killing it. Here in the 21st century it seems that things haven’t changed much. Just in my limited knowledge of the web and web-based companies, it seems that that old corporate raider style is en vogue. A tech/social/web company gets gobbled up by the big boys some of the talent is retained but the product or service dies or morphs into something unrecognizable.
I am afraid that my “dead simple” posting days to Posterous will soon be over once Twitter gets fully hands on. I’d like to know what you think about the Twitter acquisition of Posterous. Do you think the product will be improved or enhanced or are we witnessing what the guys below are talking about. Let me know in the comments.
I read this post by Loic LeMeur, founder of Seesmic regarding Key Influencers. The post came out around the time that Google+ was being opened to the public and at a time when some of the tech writers (at least the ones that I saw) and apparently those LeMeur knows and reads as well were throughly trashing G+ as an utter and complete failure and jump ship. What I’ve thought about since reading the post is:
How much does the key influencer matter? What is a Key Influencer Anyway?
My first stab at social was in web forums and subsequently MySpace. For what I was doing (writing) and with whom I was interacting I certainly had no idea what a key influencer was nor had even heard the term. After moving to Twitter and finding a proper blogging platform, I still didn’t know who or what a Key Influecer was but stumbled on to some and start following them. The bell finally went off that the key influencer was actually an early adopter in marketing speak.
Based on the Twitter experience, I found that key influencers definitely matter, some are quite helpful and provide a wealth of knoweledge that I otherwise would have had to dig around for on my own. They save us regular users a lot of time because they see all the new/hot/useful stuff (and stuff that sucks) first and can help the rest of figure out if it’s worth our while to jump in or not. It was after my experience with Google’s Wave and Buzz where I first saw what LeMeur calls the Influencers Verdict.
via loiclemeur.com
I got in early on Wave and Buzz and thought I had arrived with the “cool kids”. Though “not an influencer” myself I rode this same graphic, probably a bit later than the influencers and decided on my own that the two services sucked. In fact Wave in particular was just beyond my understanding.
Google+ is just latest stab at social that is riding the above wave. I believe that the influencers have been important to its early success but I also think that the rest of are a bit more savvy as to how this social thing works. Influencer groupies will leave when influencers bail. The rest of us who dig it will stay and it’s us non-influencers that will keep G+ and whatever else that comes thereafter alive.
Not An Expert 