Your brand is more than just a label, it's what people think you are

Every Facebook post, every Tweet and every blog a writer uploads contribute to the formation of an online identity, but what contributes to the writer's "brand?"

That key question was addressed this week by a guest lecturer to a San Francisco State University journalism class.

According to Pueng Vongs, the San Francisco Bay editor for Yahoo! Local (and the class instructor), one of a journalist's most-important tools is their "brand." A good brand can open doors, bring (or push away) credibility on a subject and drive readership.

To that end, Vongs arranged for Sherbeam Wright, founder of AndaCommunications, to address students at SFSU's "Social Media for Journalists" seminar on Wednesday. Wright's bio states she has developed and driven communications programs and supported the sales efforts of market-leading high tech companies.

Sherbeam Wright addresses a class at SFSU.

A journalist's brand is "a personal identity that stimulates precise, meaningful perceptions in an audience about the values and qualities of the person," Wright said. That statement means that a brand is not necessarily who you actually are, but what the public thinks you are from the content you produce.

According to Wright, before the advent of the Internet, a journalist's "brand" was actually that of the organization for which they worked. There was little opportunity for the general public to actually engage with a working journalist, or vice-versa.

Now, however, the trend is for news to be a "conversation," rather than simply a broadcast. Aspiring journalists (or public bloggers at large) are expected to have their own brand, be it through blogging, Twitter or some other form of social media.

So how does one build a brand? First, one has to decide ahead of time what they want their brand to be. Wright said that if you want to cultivate a business brand, get involved with LinkedIn. If one has a desire to be a breaking news source, invest heavily in Twitter. Facebook will generate fans, but a personal blog illustrates personality and builds readership.

Wright pointed out a couple examples of people she thinks have been successful in promoting an outstanding online brand. One was Derrick Ashong, who Wright said turns social media into "socially meaningful" media. Another was MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow, who "blew up" past her radio roots due to social media.

While many online media promoters suggest one specializes in a few topics (vertical integration) in order to become a "go-to guy," Wright said covering a wide-range of topics can also pay off, but you "have to know how to package it." In other words, be consistent. You can address many subjects if you, for example, put your own consistent spin on it -- tie it into your locality, put your own humorous take on it, or analyze everything in one certain way.

That revelation prompted Vongs to concede, after some debate, that "horizontal is the new vertical."

Great news for me ... this blog goes all over the place!

The fog of war(planes)

Blue Angels: "We came, we saw, we flew off."

On Sunday I decided to brave the Embarcadero crowds and take one of the young'uns downtown to see the Blue Angels.

The Blue Angels, the US Navy's premier aerial acrobatics team have been a fixture of San Francisco's Fleet Week for decades. The have brought cheers and also jeers, mainly due to noise complaints, but also their symbolism in an area where the military can be unpopular.

The Snowbirds complete
a loop.

We exited BART at Embarcadero Station and walked about a mile-and-a-half up to Pier 37, where we set up a picnic about two hours prior to the scheduled start of the Blue Angels' demonstration. Luckily, there were a few opening acts.

First up were our neighbors from our north, the Snowbirds (left), representing Canada's Armed Forces. While their jets weren't quite as fast or powerful as the Blue Angels' F-18s, the Snowbirds made up for it by using their greater numbers (nine CT-114 jets). The numbers enabled the Snowbirds to pull off some pretty complicated tricks -- such as drawing a heart in the sky with smoke, then piercing it -- back-to-back-to-back as smaller groups broke off and performed along various parts of the waterfront.

Canada's Snowbirds fly in tight formation during their Oct. 9, 2011 show in San Francisco.

F-15 on afterburner.

Next up were a couple single-plane demonstrations, a Marine Corps F/A-18 and a US Air Force F-15, which delighted the crowd with very-low (and very loud), high-subsonic passes on afterburner (right). It also did a fairly good cobra maneuver and generously showed its high-thrust abilities with quick climbs from the deck to about 15,000 feet and back down again.

Another highlight was seeing a United Airlines 747 pass low and do some pretty tricky tight turns that you don't want done on your next flight to Chicago, but are pretty impressive at an air show. The big, lumbering jumbo jet was a surprisingly exciting part of the show.

(Click on the pictures to "embiggen." The photos are perfectly cromulent.)

A United Airlines 747-400 does some impressive low passes over the San Francisco waterfront.

My son and I had enjoyed the show, thus far, and its a good thing we did, too. When the Blue Angel's C-130 support craft, "Fat Albert," (below) appeared and did a few tricks, the crowd was led to believe the main show was about to start and got excited. As "Albert" left, the F-18s came into sight and began circling.

And circling.

And circling.

The Blue Angels' C-130 support plane, "Fat Albert," does low-level turns for the fans.

Turns out some fog had rolled in, and the Blue Angels didn't feel that conditions were safe to fly 18 inches apart 20 feet above the water. They eventually had to cancel the demonstration. Alas, while the crowd was disappointed, I think a majority understood. Certainly, we had been amused in the meantime.

The fog, seen here over Alcatraz, which caused the Blue Angels to cancel  their Sunday performance.

Erasure pops at the Fox

Erasure performs at Oakland's Fox Theater on Oct. 4, 2011. Photo by John Baker.

Way back in high school, in the summer of 19(mumble, mumble), I went to "yearbook camp" in San Diego in order to learn the proper way to arrange page layouts and proportion photos. Someone brought in a cassette from some pop band I'd never heard of.

The tape was Erasure's "The Innocents," and -- enraptured by the smooth lyrics, bouncy electronics and the (then) quirkiness of a lead singer who was out and proud -- I began a long association with the band that continues to this day.

Andy Bell

Fronted by flamboyant singer/frontman Andy Bell, the English duo has had limited mainstream US success, mostly in the late 1980s, but has charted 34 top-40 singles in their native UK. Erasure is currently touring in support of its new album, Tomorrow's World, which will be released stateside next week.

On Tuesday, the tour came into Oakland's Fox Theatre. I got in line about three hours before the scheduled 8 p.m. start and ended up with a space in the second row (I would've been on the rail, but I had to use the restroom after standing in line for three hours). The show was fantastic. Bell, who admittedly sounded less than prime and was a bit soft the last time I saw the group perform, was svelte and in top form.

Vince Clarke

Clarke, who cut his teeth as a founder of Depeche Mode before forming first Yazoo (Yaz in the United States), then Erasure, has always been the "look at him"-type when compared to Bell's "look at me" demeanor. But he's always been a genius on the keyboard and lately has been becoming more and more involved with the live shows. He spent an extensive time at the fore of the stage on Tuesday carrying a guitar -- a relatively new instrument in Erasure's repertoire.

The show went off with nary a hitch, save for a brief flub in the lyrics of "Blue Savannah" by Bell. The setlist of 22 songs (13 from 1992 or before) was a good mix of the classic and the modern, with the five songs off the new album -- including the first single, "When I Start to (Break it all Down)" -- received well.

Personally, it was the closest I'd ever been to the front at a concert, making pictures and video a snap. I'm not normally a fan-cammer, but I was impressed with the quality of video taken by my relatively new camera. Below: A brief snippet of "Sometimes."



This was my seventh Erasure concert, and it was among the best. The enthusiastic crowd (admittedly dominated by gay men in their mid-to-late 40s), Bell's better physical shape (which led to better showmanship) and a great set list all contributed to a perfect show.

Not bad for a synthpop group that's been together 26 years now.

Erasure bows off the stage following its encore performance of "Oh L'amour."

Life goes on after people die, even Steve Jobs ... or my mom

Apple's webpage the night Steve Jobs died.

Today is a sad anniversary for me. Two years ago tonight, my mother lost her short battle with cancer.

Yesterday, another personal icon, Steve Jobs, lost his much longer fight against another form of the same scourge.

Death is a funny thing. For one person, it’s obviously the end, at least on this plane of existence. For those close to the deceased, depending how close, their lives can sometimes also be measured as “before” and “after.”

But last night, as I walked into my downtown San Francisco classroom after reading about Jobs’ death, I realized that for others, life goes on. My classmates were concerned about finishing their papers, discussing the ethics of California’s High-Speed Rail project (our assignment for the week), and curious about their colleagues' job prospects. Traffic along Market Street was as busy and frantic as ever. I couldn’t see the Apple Store a block away, but I’ll bet it was bustling, albeit with a sense of sadness.

But all in all, it looked rather normal, and I wondered, “is that fair?”

My mom and my son bond about three
months before her death.

It reminded me a bit of two years ago, after my mom died. I remember going out into the streets of Klamath Falls and seeing people moving along, doing their business. They read, laughed, ate, walked as if everything was the same as it ever was. I wanted to go up to people who seemed chipper and ask something along the lines of, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t you know my mom died?”

But no, these people didn’t know my mother, nor did I know theirs. If their mothers were dead, even if I’d known it, I might feel sad for them, but I’d recognize the need to carry on – and I would, just like they did.

Those of us who’ve worked in the news business are familiar with the phrase, “One death is a tragedy, thousands of deaths is a statistic.” Yet, we’ve all seen how a single death can seemingly go unnoticed.

But do they really go unnoticed just because people haven’t changed their routines?

One of the best tributes to Steve Jobs is that so many people read about his death on devices he had a hand in creating, then went back to their business on another one of his devices. Jobs’ legacy lives on, just like I think that one of the best legacies of my mom is the love and understanding I give my own children.

We all incrementally contribute to the human race. One man might invent a better way to listen to music. Another woman might instill a sense of dedication to one’s family in her offspring. In the end, though, any single individual’s contribution – even an individual as famous as Steve Jobs – might seem negligible (heck, there are roughly seven billion of us).

But multiply the contributions, however small, of that individual by a few billion times and you can see that every life has a meaning and is important in its own way. My little contribution to society is important to its continuing development, and so is yours (whoever you may be). When a person dies, we may have lost their contribution, but they also did their part to build this society (no matter how screwed up it is).

In fact, it would be an insult to not carry on after they’re gone.

The iPhone 4S announcement, as it happened:

Omni predicts the distant future of 2010 -- Part I: Inflation

Omni magazine predicted the future, or did it?

Omni was a strange combination of a science magazine and a science fiction journal that published from 1978 to 1996. It specialized in "gonzo" science journalism, as well as publishing cutting-edge sci-fi.

In 1980, the editors published The Omni Future Almanac, which aimed to predict the trends of the next 30 years or so. Some predictions, they got pretty close on -- I plan to look at their views on e-mail and the Internet later. Some predictions were not so good -- the geo-political ones, for example (who saw that darn Berlin Wall falling within the next ten years?).

One area that Omni tried to predict was consumer costs. As the chart below shows, and remember that these predictions were made during the stagflation of the late Carter Administration, they were not so accurate about 2010 prices:

From Omni predicts 2010 prices

Wow! Obviously the rate of inflation has gone down. My local Safeway wants $1.49 (club card price) for a head of iceberg lettuce, not $5. The most-recent Big Mac index I could find shows the sandwich goes for about $4.07 in the United States, making $22 for a pound of ground beef seem high. The average monthly rent for a three-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco market is $2,662, not $10,000 (although a million dollars for a home purchase is close!). Current New York MTA subway fare is $2.25, not $20. The average US car sold for $28,000 in 2009, not $70,000. $2.75 for a daily newspaper? What's a newspaper?

The price of gas mark is interesting. Omni thought that better fuel efficiency in cars would drive down demand and greater drilling in Alaska and elsewhere would increase supplies, making the costs of fuel DROP significantly after 1990 to about $2 per gallon in 2010. The average price of gas in California right now is $3.84 per gallon. Interesting to see how geopolitics (and SUVs) affected gas price predictions.

To be fair, Omni also predicted that secretaries would now be making $95,000 a year and the average public high school teacher would pull in $110,000, over-estimating current rates in both cases. Of course, Omni also said a Major League Baseball player with "average skills" would make $330,000 per year. In 2010, the mean salary for a MLB player was about $3.3 million!

So the next time you see an economist predict the rate of inflation, take it with a grain of salt.

Why the Giants failed in 2011

The Colorado Rockies beat the San Francisco Giants 6-3 at AT&T Park on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011.

It was an amazing day for baseball on Wednesday as four simultaneous elimination games determined the final wild card participants in the playoffs.

At San Francisco’s AT&T Park, however, it was a bittersweet day as the Giants officially relinquished their status as defending World Champions. It was a disappointing finish for the hometown fans, as the visiting Colorado Rockies won, 6-3.

The game was in some senses a microcosm for the G-Mens’ year. They fell behind early, made a spirited charge, missed scoring chances, then ran out of gas.

The residual buzz of 2010’s World Championship brought a franchise-record 3,387,303 people through the turnstiles in 2011, but the Giants could never get on track this season.

The main culprit was undoubtedly the horrendous injury suffered in May by 2010 Rookie of the Year Buster Posey, which cost San Francisco an MVP candidate and a big bat. Other injuries to All Stars Freddie Sanchez and Pablo Sandoval, when coupled with a mid-season cold streak and a late-season Arizona hot streak, made the loss of Posey difficult to overcome. Essentially, the rest of the Giants couldn’t mount any offense.

As it turns out, the Giants needed less of this:

Pat Burrell striking out in the sixth inning of Wednesday's game.

And more of this:

Rookie Brett Pill doubles in the sixth inning Wednesday, during a three-run Giants rally.

Wednesday's game also likely marked the final appearances in a Giants uniform for 2010 standout Pat Burrell, who is likely to retire, and Mark DeRosa, the oft-injured utilityman who never got a chance to shine with the Giants (although he had two RBI during the game).

Next year the Giants will likely be back in contention. While it’s almost certain to lose free agent slugger Carlos Beltran, the team will feature a healed Posey, possibly a healed Sanchez, a Brandon Belt who’s a year older and wiser, and the returning core of its rich pitching rotation.

San Francisco will again fill AT&T Park to the brim, and young fans like the one below (my son), who never lost faith, will lead the charge.

Ian Baker is no bandwagon fan.

Turandot or Turandon't? San Francisco Opera at the Ballpark

Our view from the Club Level as the SF Opera Company's performance of "Turandot" was simulcast at AT&T Park.

I have to admit, as cultured as I like to pretend to be, I have never been to been to a live opera (I've never been to the ballet either, but I did have tickets for the Boshoi's 1992 tour of Los Angeles that was cancelled due to the Rodney King Riots). So when the family was invited to the San Francisco Opera's annual performance at AT&T Park on Sunday, I jumped at the chance to see Turandot. And, to live Tweet it for a class:

GAO: Eliminate dollar bills in favor of dollar coins, save more than $5 billion

If not for gold dollars, Millard Fillmore would be under-representated on US currency.

I love my Congresswoman, Jackie Speier. She’s never backed down on a fight, despite having been shot five times for her political work. She’s been a strong representative for my community (including its transit issues) on the local, state and national level.

But I think she’s on the wrong side of one of the latest fights she’s taken on. Speier announced over the summer that she would introduce a bill to kill the dollar coin program.

Dollar coins? Yes, the United States has dollar coins. You don’t see them much, unless you actively seek them out or buy some straight from the mint, but they’re there.

And there should be more of them. The non-partisan Governmental Accounting Office recently issued a report that stated swapping dollar coins for bills could save the US Government $5.5 BILLION.

Annual savings to US government by replacing dollar bills with coins.

The United States recently got a few million more dollar coins into circulation by doing two things: starting the Presidential Dollar Coin Program, in which every dead president gets his own coin (hence my Millard Fillmore coin); and introducing a direct ship program to the public.

The problem with the latter deal was that frequent fliers got word of the program, buying literally nearly a billion dollars worth of coins in order to get miles or points, then depositing them right back into the bank. The government recently discontinued the direct-ship program because of “ongoing activity by individuals purchasing $1 coins with credit cards, accumulating frequent flyer miles, and then returning coins to local banks. Local banks, in turn, returned coins to the Federal Reserve. While not illegal, this activity was a clear abuse and misuse of the program.”

The result was more than $1 billion of dollar coins stuck in the Federal Reserve, raising the ire of Speier and resulting in her bill. (Disclaimer: I bought about $20,000 worth of dollar coins through the program, accumulating miles, but I also spent about $5,000. The coins are great for everything from bus fare to tips to Tooth Fairy Money for dentally challenged seven-year-olds.)

So let’s look at the numbers. The average cost to print a dollar bill was about 9.6 cents in 2010. The cost to make a dollar coin was about 30 cents – but as coins last about 20 times longer (40 years, versus two years for the “paper,” actually cotton/linen, dollar), the US would save millions in the medium-to-long term.

Let’s also look at some of the most-traded worldwide currencies. None of them print anything nearly as worthless as the US dollar:

Country/region -- Currency -- Lowest denom. bill -- Value in US $*
Europe -- Euro -- €5 -- $6.71
United Kingdom -- Pound -- £5 -- $7.70
Australia -- Aus. Dollar -- $AUD 5 -- $4.85
Canada -- Can. Dollar -- $CAD 5 -- $4.85
Mexico -- Peso -- Mex$20 -- $1.42
* As of Sept. 23, 2011

The U.S. government’s huge mistake, of course, is to continue printing $1 bills while producing dollar coins. Canada, Australia and the UK introduced coins of similar value into circulation by replacing the corresponding notes, eventually leaving the public with no alternative but the coin (the Euro has never had anything less than a €5 bill). That is what needs to happen here.

Freshman Congressman David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) has introduced what he calls the COINS Act, which would replace dollar bills with dollar coins. Is Schweikert’s bill going to go anywhere? Probably not, but it’s a start.

I love dollar coins, but with the direct ship over the Internet program ended, I’m running short on Tooth Fairy money. Luckily the kid says he doesn’t have any loose teeth.

Neutrinos faster than light would have profound implications

A small portion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. Flickr photo by Ars Electronica.

A discovery was announced today that will either revolutionize science or be one of the biggest busts since the Fleischmann–Pons experiment in cold fusion, if not attempts to turn lead into gold.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN), announced in a paper to be released soon that they had measured subatomic particles that seemed to travel faster than light. Essentially, scientists launched neutrinos from a source near Geneva, Switzerland, to a detector in Italy about 453 miles away. The neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds (0.00000006 seconds) faster than a photon (the particle [or wave] that makes up light) would have.

First, this discovery is somewhat shocking because it violates Einstein's theory of special relativity (you know, "e=mc squared"), which states nothing can travel faster than light. Relativity has been proven correct in experiment after experiment for more than 100 years. It's as if someone told Newton that there wasn't an equal but opposite reaction after every action.

Part of the CERN research center.
Flickr photo by dirtybronson.

The discovery is still doubted by other scientists, perhaps due to what would have been the sheer ludicrousness of proposing it before today. In fact, Occam's Razor (given multiple explanations, the simplest is the most likely) applies here. For example, "superluminal neutrinos are much much less likely than subtle systematic errors in a complex experiment the length of a country."

One might ask, "OK, but why is this important?" There are several reasons, although the ultimate effects -- if the experiment pans out -- might not be seen for years, if not centuries. Certainly, the everyday life of people alive today is unlikely to be affected. But the long-term effects may be enormous:

• First, the implications for computing are significant. Think quantum computing will be fast? Then, what about computers that solve problems almost before they're entered?
• What about astronomy? If neutrinos can go faster than light, one day we might have detectors that can almost literally see back in time to the beginning of the universe.
• And not even finally, but perhaps most profoundly, neutrinos going faster than light means that information (although probably not objects) can also be sent faster than light. If mankind is not alone (and with billions of galaxies containing billions of stars, being alone is unlikely), then we might have the means to communicate with other beings in a reasonable time frame.

But the best part of this business is how it demonstrates the scientific method. These scientists came up with an idea, tested and experimented it into a hypothesis (that neutrinos can travel faster than light under some circumstances), and submitted their work to be peer reviewed for more experimentation en route to forming a theory. In fact, they basically pleaded with scientists from the United States, Japan and other scientifically advanced countries to try to replicate their experiment to make sure they didn't make a mistake.

The results may or may not pan out (probably not, I must admit). But the scientists' efforts at confirmation are a huge relief in times when those on both the left and the right often refuse to recognize the teachings of science because it doesn't fit their social or religious agenda.

Edit (Feb. 22, 2012): It appears that a faulty GPS reading caused the distances between the two sites to be overestimated, accounting for the unexpectedly short time it took for the neutrinos to hit the detector. Again, this shows the wonderfulness of the scientific method and its system of checks and balances.

Review of "New Girl," in live Tweets

As many of my readers have noticed, I've been blogging more lately. Most of the output is due to a class I'm taking at San Francisco State University, Journalism 650: Social Media for Journalists. One of our assignments is to live-Tweet something before Friday night. So I decided to do it while I was doing something I already do: watch television.

The best candidate for a live Tweetfest this week was Zooey Deschanel's new show, "New Girl." So here's my second-by-second reaction (via Storify):