Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

Last week Valleywag wrote about Mission hipsters taking on the Google with spray cans.

This past weekend on my walk home after a Friday night tutorial at Zeitgeist on how to graffiti like the pros (it involves a paper bag), I noticed the same stencil spray painted on the corner of 24th & Guerrero.

I walk past the Google shuttle stop every morning and I don’t know that I’d go as far as to call them “trendy professionals”, but I think the graffiti guys and the googlites have a lot in common, per Richard Flordia’s thesis in “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Florida posits that creative professionals are simply seeking communities with a sense of ‘authenticity’… that would be panaderias over Banana Republic.

Shootings > Starbucks?

It’s too bad the salaries of Googlites can’t take care of drive-by shootings on the same corner. From SF Gate on June 23:

…

San Francisco police also were investigating a shooting Sunday night of a man in his mid-30s who was attacked near the corner of 24th and Guerrero streets by a person who jumped out of a car and started shooting. The shooter then jumped back into the car and fled with a driver, according to police.

In related news, if “young professionals” don’t do it, the government will take care of public blight for you:

Sad chapter in Western Addition history ending

The Fillmore, where 60 percent of the residents were African American, was declared blight in 1948. The first demolition project began in 1956. The second phase, the brainchild of the redevelopment agency’s then-head Justin Herman, began in 1964 and expanded the area to 60 square blocks. Eminent domain was used to purchase Victorian homes and buy out local businesses. The thriving black business community was destroyed as owners of nightclubs, barbershops, banks and retail stores were forced to close up shop.

…

The city plans to turn over 1,300 acres - more than half of the Bayview-Hunters Point area - to the Redevelopment Agency to help clean up blight, build affordable housing and stimulate business. The project creates the largest redevelopment district in San Francisco history.

** Update, Aug. 18: The graffiti lesson was delivered on Day 14, check out Notes from the Zeitgeist

Yesterday BNET held a Lunch 2.0 speaker series with Mary J. Foley talking to Dan Farber, CNET editor-in-chief, about Mary’s new book, “Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era.”

The summation seemed to be that Microsoft will continue throwing a lot of money around for the foreseeable future.

As the talk wrapped up and Dan gave the final pitch for the book, he asked Mary how much the book cost and she responded with, “Free, like beer.”

The book in fact was not free.

Web 2.0 mistake… assuming the drinks are always free?

Lunch however was on CNET, which was enjoyed out on their sunny patio.

Two news items burning up Twitter and Facebook feeds in San Francisco today:

1. Olympic Torch Run
2. Flickr’s launch of video

Scott Beale from Laughing Squid posted some amazing coverage of the run/protests on Flickr, photos and video. Check it out at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/2401435793

I linked to ARS Electronic in the last posting and feel compelled to point to Arse Electroknia, as so many other blogs have recently.

Besides having an amusing name, Arse is holding a conference in the city in early Oct on the theme of PrOnnovation - the history of how pornography has driven technological innovation for several hundreds of years.

The last major story of porn related innovation (prior to the current VC funding for adult social media sites) was about the problems HDTV was causing for actors in skin flicks as the sharper HD image was revealing physical imperfections that had not been previously visible to the naked eye.

Read more here: In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real

It appears that the porn industry is now getting into the swing of social media and picking up some of the VC money gushing aroudn so freely ($29B this year).

A few stories on recent funding/launch announcements for adult social media sites:

Zivity: Silicon Valley Elite Dabble in Adult Content

New Playboy Social Network Built On Ning

Playboy Launches Social Network: “High schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join

The last line of the “your Mom can’t join” article, cites young people lamenting the loss of certain social networks as the exlusive domain of the young and that they’re looking for something new that provides that seperate space.

I concur.

At a online communities meetup I went to earlier this week, the main subject was Facebook, and I managed to inadvertendly insult at least half the room when I blurted out something to the effect of people 35+ only using FB as a job networking tool or to check up on thier kids.

The diversity of my ‘friends’ on Facebook has led to a panopticon effect as I alter my behavior due to the different venues my contacts extend across. It morphs from a (semi) private venue to further extension of one’s public persona. Of course there are those who just don’t care who knows what, and kudos to them if their skill set is valuable enough that they’ll always be employable no matter what they do in their personal life, however mixing the two worlds and treating it as one is fraught with all sorts of complications.

The creep of blurred networks is something perhaps I’m more concerned about than is necessary, but is due to having just recently researched and written a chapter for my thesis dedicated to the work/life balance issues the BlackBerry raises by blurring the boundaries between networks, which contribute to what I call “the professionalization of the personal.”

It seems to me that there’s significant room for some PrOnnovation in the space of social networking, if only in that it creates a separate space that is clearly off limits to any networks beyond the social.

Although, as the TechCrunch posting asserted, it’s highly unlikely that Playboy is the brand that wins over the kids.

1. “Zombies are the new Pirates”

From flash mobs to Facebook app…

Hilarious mash-up video of White-house journalist interviewing Dubya about zombies:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoXgRtDysLY]

2. Red Invasion in SF - Hammer and Sickle red hot marketing gimmick

It has moved way beyond the annoying hippy kids with the dirty Che Guevara t-shirt… communist-era propaganda has never been more popular as evidenced by the plethora of red I’ve seen in the past few weeks (and I ain’t talking the [Red]emption through consumption campaign)

First there was the introduction to the uber-hipster coffee scene at Ritual Coffee in The Mission where you can pick up your red “Loyalist” frequent coffee buyer card alongside your biodegradable drinking straw.

Then there was my friend with a boi-diesel revolution bumper sticker on his VW:

At least he’s from Russia…

And THEN, this is the kicker, and what ruins the rev-chic of the other logos: Fashionista Diaries.

From the makers of Laguna Beach… another reality TV show. Such an obvious connection between fashion and communism.

Who doesn’t like hats? Or red for that matter? I’m a big fan of both, but based on this show alone I will not be bringing back the red beret I wore last winter.

How do I know about this amazing show you ask? I usually eat lunch in Union Square, and last week there was a troupe of young women wearing little black dresses and jaunty revolutionary caps handing out fliers for what I thought would be something interesting based on their outfits (like a burlesque show or something).

From bio-diesel, to coffee, to reality TV; the hammer and sickle is used to promote it all. Poor Stalin.

3. Valley (Silicon) Speak

I’ve been making a lot of trips out to Silicon Valley for client visits since I arrived, but the campus I visited last week was by far the shiniest and happiest place I’ve been so far (and I’ve been to Googleplex).

From the sun, to the chatty banter with the receptionist and security guard, to the ubiquitous smiles. Maybe it was the sun that disoriented me, or the fact that people were walking around free on the campus grounds. Something seemed very unusual. Beyond that, there were a couple of funny terms I heard out there:

Term: $100,000 ponytails

Definition: Ponytailed programmers who command salaries of $100,000.

Beyond the salaries, these guys are treated with a level of preciousness I’ve never seen anywhere else. No one can afford to upset the guys cranking out the code.

Term: Tribal knowledge

Definition: Any unwritten information that is not commonly known by others within a company. This term is used most when referencing information that may need to be known by others in order to produce quality product or service.

Colloquial: “The $100,000 ponytail created a competitor site using tribal knowledge.”

Egawds!

Due to the topic of my thesis - “Constant Connectivity in a Wireless Age: The Discursive Promotional Strategies of the BlackBerry” - I was asked several times during my interview process if I thought the iphone would wipe out the BlackBerry.

Like most other people, I was completely enamoured with the iPhone when I first used it. I stopped into an Apple store just before heading into the city to look at an apt I wanted to rent and I was able to use Google’s Street View to get a virtual tour of the neighbourhood beforehand (seriously, the price of a wash was visable at the laundromat across the street). Beyond all the gee-whiz features of the iPhone, my response to the BlackBerry vs. iPhone question was always that the BlackBerry’s features were unique enough to hold its own.

First off there’s the superior email function of the BlackBerry which is really the application that drives its use. Plus,  I don’t think the iPhone’s entertainment focus will sway the BlackBerry’s core professional-user base (the iPhone may cut into adoption of the multimedia Pearl, but that’s another story).

A few weeks back TechCrunch published a comparison review of the two products, based on the feedback of an annonymous valley venture capitalist. To summarize, “You’ll have to pry the BlackBerry from my cold, dead hands.”

iPhone v. BlackBerry: Side by Side, Two Week Comparison

With the Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry 8820 coming soon to an AT&T store near you, business folks around the country will be faced with the decision of switching to the trendy new iPhone or upgrading to a more iPhonesque version of their trusty CrackBerry. To determine whether the grass really is greener on the iPhone side of the fence, we have chronicled the experience of a venture capitalist (who wishes to remain anonymous) who has been using an iPhone and a BlackBerry 8800 side-by-side for the past few weeks. His conclusion: despite the overall attractiveness of the iPhone, it lacks too many vital features to replace the BlackBerry as the corporate weapon of choice.For starters, a BlackBerry set up with Microsoft Exchange Server sports intelligent push email while the iPhone does not. When an email is sent to an account on a BlackBerry, the message is downloaded immediately and an LED on the phone notifies the user that he or she has a new message. The iPhone, on the other hand, recognizes new messages at most every 15 minutes and must be checked actively to see if anything has arrived. This deficiency makes handling email on the iPhone slower and less efficient; it also translates into wasted battery power as users need to perform the extra step of opening the iPhone’s email program every time they want to check for new mail.

Perhaps even more significantly, the iPhone fails to synchronize as well as the BlackBerry. When a BlackBerry user changes a calendar event or some contact information on his or her desktop computer in Exchange, the changes automatically appear on the BlackBerry. This makes keeping track of basic business information a snap because one never has to worry about acting on outdated data or manually updating one’s handheld. In contrast, the iPhone does not synchronize calendar and contact information wirelessly, which makes it less dependable for information ultimately stored on a server.

In addition to these major drawbacks of the iPhone, our venture capitalist cites the following as reasons to prefer the BlackBerry:

• The BlackBerry 8800 possesses GPS, which makes Google Maps much more useful, especially for turn-by-turn directions
• The iPhone lacks basic cut and paste capabilities
• Despite Apple’s reputation for superior user interface design, the BlackBerry possesses keyboard shortcuts that make navigation around and between applications a breeze
• The BlackBerry’s phone quality is better than the iPhone’s
• The Safari browser is certainly more stunning than the BlackBerry’s primitive browser, but the iPhone seems to load even text-only pages more slowly than the BlackBerry over the EDGE network
• The BlackBerry possesses a general contacts application that makes contacting people by any given method more convenient
• The battery runs out faster on the iPhone simply because it is used for more tasks. This makes it less reliable for when one must take the device somewhere overnight without the opportunity to recharge.

Despite all of these criticisms of the iPhone, our venture capitalist admits that he would switch over to the iPhone if only it supported push email, calendar and contacts synchronization, and GPS. For him, the prospect of ridding his pockets of a separate device for music (an iPod nano), as well as enjoying all of the iPhone’s slick features (such as full-featured web browsing, stocks and weather apps, and its YouTube program), makes the iPhone very tempting. However, until Apple resolves these shortcomings (and perhaps Google makes its applications, especially Gmail, work as seamlessly with the iPhone as Microsoft makes Exchange work with the BlackBerry), others are going to have to pry his BlackBerry from his cold, dead hands (his words, mind you, not ours).