I don’t talk about baseball much anymore. After several years, I determined my enthusiasm for and thoughts on the game would never align with other Pirates fans. Besides, while the game is great, the discussion hardly changes over time. I said my peace years ago.

Jack Wilson was one of the reasons I became obsessed with baseball starting in 2001. In 2009 I’m still apologizing for every single move the Pirates make. Jack Flash, as he’s called was able to make even a bad team (because of bad pitchers) enjoyable at their worst (when pitching) with his amazing defense. Every night he delivers a play in the field more magical than any three-run home run.

So it was pretty sad when the Bucs traded him at the trade deadline. Worse yet, they traded him from the National League to the American League, in his best year of work, defensively, thus removing him from Gold Glove cosideration.

Shortstop – Jack Wilson, Pittsburgh and Seattle

Wilson won’t win a Gold Glove this year. Just like Mark Teixeira didn’t win one last year. He split time between leagues, and the Gold Glove voters don’t know which league to put him in. Not so with The Fielding Bible Awards. Jack Wilson was the best shortstop in baseball last year. Period. We don’t care which league he played in. He led all shortstops in Run Saved by a wide margin (27 runs saved to Brendan Ryan’s 19) and has taken over the MLB lead for most Runs Saved over the last three years (51). Mr. Wilson is the Fielding Bible Award winner at shortstop for 2009.

-The Fielding Bible – 2009 Awards

It’s’ a fact. This was his most amazing year.

Field Bible Award was found via the excellent Bucs Dugout

The NFL season is way too long. In my opinion it’s drags worse than baseball and hockey, even. College Basketball is perfect little package, both in length of game and season.

My frustration may have something to do with my six game losing streak in fantasy football.

I named my team the War Eagles, for the sole purpose of using this picture as my team avatar.

Hey, another Blogfest is coming up. Remember last year when I sang? Here’s the video…

A couple weeks ago I turned a friend’s email asking “What is knowledge and how do you know when you’ve acquired it?” into some of the most unwieldy cocktail chatter in history. I found a great cure for this epidemic in Merlin Mann’s description of the how people progress from beginner to expert to master (NSFW), which is where much of my knowledge chatter ended up, inevitably. He also includes a great explanation of why creative people have to “waste time” as part of their “work.” (If you have 40+ minutes, it’s a video anyone can appreciate.)

I’m overwhelmed by his tumblr feed, but lately I’ve worked through it because of how closely his musical interests align with my own. Specifically, I direct you to today’s post about Paul McCartney impersonating Ron Mael from Sparks. Merlin also co-hosts the podcast You Look Nice Today. I’m listening to the back catalog as therapy to overcome my anxiety with constantly interrupting and talking over other people. But Merlin is funny and smart when he interrupts, so it’s a lovely podcast, and you should consider subscribing.

There’s also this Captain Beefheart video, which you know I cannot resist posting.

Captain Beefheart – Bat Chain Puller

An aside: This is called Kung Fu Grippe because that’s the name of Merlin’s blog, but it reminded me of the G.I. Joe movie I finally saw. The movie was so awesomely bad, in part because it forced mentions of the G.I. Joe toys (like the “kung fu grip”) and incorporated impractical technology only because they were iconic vehicles in the toy series. This absurdity made the movie an overall better experience than Transformers, save for Megan Fox.

“Mostly observant people appreciate my jokes.”

“Most jokes are based on observation. Perhaps you best communicate your  observations to people who’ve already made similar observations?”

“So only making observant people laugh is a failure in delivery?”

“Why are you talking to yourself in a blog post?”

Dots are the stragglers in the halloween candy herd. They always get picked off first.

If there were TVs in the jungle the translucent critters would be devoured first.

I’m finished with this guy!

November 1st is the best shopping day of the year. Bags of candy available at discount. The discount is a flimsy excuse to buy candy I didn’t need, but it’s enough for me.

One bag of candy I bought was an assortment of Reese’s products. After a day of extensive research, I have proved my initial hypothesis. There should be no assortment of Reese’s products. Only one product need exist.

My friend @mrscrappy congratulated me for making the cover of the Post Gazette’s Friday movie magazine.

Huh? Is there something about Andy Kaufman? I’m planning to dress as him for Halloween. (Btw, thanks to Dad for hooking me up with a 1979 sport coat, a turtleneck, and an ugly sweater in advance of the holiday party scene!)

Anyway, here’s how I made the Post-Gazette

The PG big review this week is of the latest Coen brothers movie.

The newest, and perhaps strangest, film from Oscar-winning writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen is a Jewish shaggy dog story of one man’s desperate search for clarity in a foggy universe with near-zero visibility. As such, it’s a brilliantly black-comic parable plumbing the depths of mortality and immortality, with Jefferson Airplane supplying the unlikely soundtrack and un-Judaic brackets to their parable.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

I don’t get to talk with Vasco Pedro enough, or I don’t know enough other people to teach me about the semantic web and with whom I can kick around my underdeveloped understanding of ontology. It’s pretty darned fun, though. The possibilities for marking up information on the web so computers can understand it, thus helping them find it or process it beyond human capacity, is delightful.

As complex and expansive as semantics may be, it is already totally relevant to our practical lives. (see Google.com) So here Vasco will provide Podcampers with a little summary.

Smarter Media: The Semantic Web

An explanation of the semantic web and its uses most practical to users who generate content. Vasco Pedro co-founder and CEO of Bueda, a semantic-matching platform, and a research assistant at Carnegie Mellon University. Intermediate to Aspergers.

For a different opinion, I plan to read Cory Doctorow’s 2001 essay “Metacrap: Putting the tourch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.”

Doctorow’s seven insurmountable obstacles to reliable metadata are:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy
3. People are stupid
4. Mission Impossible: know thyself
5. Schemas aren’t neutral
6. Metrics influence results
7. There’s more than one way to describe something

Of course, in 2001 Doctorow probably didn’t understand search engines would work as they do today.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

Let’s explain it one last time. My sister Cindy is also Cynthia, but apparently people think you have to be one or the other. I don’t get it. I call her Cindy most of the time, but often I refer to her as Cynthia, particularly whenever I state her full name.

Today is Cindy Closkey’s birthday. This Podcamp Pittsburgh she would like to tell you about professional use of social media, and personal blogging. She’ll also be helping my out by representing Joomla and WordPress on the Content Management System panel I’ve yet to find a sucker to moderate.

Re-Discovering the Voice of Your Blog

If blogging has stopped being fun and turned into a chore;
If you haven’t posted in weeks (or months);
If again and again you start posts but never finish them;
If you want to make a fresh start on your blog, then this session is for
you.

Cynthia Closkey, co-founder of Pittsburgh Bloggers, has a plan to
reinvigorate your blog. In this session, she’ll help you define your focus,
create a strategy, and streamline your posting. She’ll also discuss how to
get past writing blocks and give you tools to get the words flowing again.
Your blog and your readers are waiting for you.

When I mentioned these sessions for the first draft of the schedule, each got an “Ooh.” See, she’s totally relevant, even at this age.

Selling Social Media to Your Boss: A 7 Step Plan

You know social media is a great tool for marketing, customer feedback, and
developing valuable communities. Your boss thinks it’s a waste of resources
– or even a danger to the organization. How can you make your case?

In this session, Cynthia Closkey of Big Big Design will discuss what
managers and top-level executives need to know about social media and online
networking, highlights resources for finding examples and statistics that
carry weight, and shows you a simple plan for helping your organization move
ahead.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing you to Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

Dawn Papuga is another Podcamp Pittsburgh veteran, but she recently moved to Baltimore. Boo. Half serious, I long ago penciled her into the PCPGH4 schedule for “Memes: The 2009 Year in Review.” However, some folks felt such a topic might be a waste of precious Podcampers’ time. (As if!) We took it out.

Later, Dawn comes to me all, “Anthony, you left out my memes session!!” So I found a session we could throw out and offered a few brainier alternatives we could try. She took to one in particular, which touched on all her most special talents: literary criticism and online information.

A lot of people who may not have Facebook accounts or read blogs, and even get a printed newpaper delivered every day, will shop online, make a selection, and purchase it at their mall. The data about our consumer culture, specifically our consumed goods, is too good for the tech-illiterate to pass up, and too large for the tech-savvy to navigate without strangers’ opinions.

Some reviews are less social than others, some serve a more role in indexing and findability. Dawn’s session will give an overview of the major players and forms of online criticism. (Or at least this is my best guess.)

Comments & Criticism: The central nervous system of consumerism

Dawn Papuga of Lyrique Tragedy examines the importance of criticism and reviews as a means/tool for finding out about topics/books/issues you are interested in but have no idea where to start.

Kathleen Danielson is a senior studying International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, DC. When she isn’t studying political theory, she helps small to medium sized non-profits use social media to interact with their audiences in more meaningful ways. (She wrote that.)

Months ago, I saw the makers of a cool new gadget gave her a free sample of their product. It’s a “smart” pen. As you write, it records audio of the room (using two mics to filter the sound) and an infrared lens captures the position on the paper. You immediately get a digital copy of the audio and graphic, and by touching any area in the drawing or notes, you can jump to that point in the audio recording.

LiveScribe: Innovative tool for audio over graphic recording with web-ready playback

Student Kathleen Danielson will be showing off one of her favorite gadgets: the Livescribe smartpen. The pen records what you write along with audio and links them in their desktop program. As a student she uses it daily, and could see her reporter friends really benefiting from one of these. Come check it out and see if it might help you in your work. (No, she don’t work for Livescribe, she just like gadgets!)

Check out cool “pencasts” here. And check out Kathleen’s live demo at Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing you to Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

Artist T. Foley

I met Teresa Foley when she presented at Pecha Kucha Night in April. Pecha Kucha is a rather exciting new presentation format sweeping the globe. It was started in Japan in 2003.

What is Pecha Kucha Night?Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

The one I went to in Pittsburgh was organized by Dutch MacDonald, an architect. (He’s an old friend of my sister Laura, I think.) There is not another night planned for Pittsburgh, as far as I’ve heard, but I hope I get to go again. A series of creative ideas make for a pretty fantastic Friday night.

You can see more of Teresa’s fantastic idea at Podcamp Pittsburgh 4, and rather than 6 minutes and 40 seconds, she’ll have an entire session. She’s friendly, smart, and a lot of fun.

Locally Toned: Ringtone Project

Teresa Foley of Locally Toned an original ringtone creation and distribution project. social/digital/art

Locally Toned is artist T. Foley’s public art/original ringtone creation project. A not-for-profit venture, it involves Pittsburghers in the creation of original ringtones, and then provides free distribution via the Web and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). This art project utilizes the airspace as public property for purposes of sonic transmission–the work “performs itself” when Locally Toned participants receive calls on their cell phones. The goals of the project are technological empowerment, community service and thesubstitution of a system of shared creativity for one of commerce (the distribution of music industry ringtones). The project was realized and supported within deeplocal’s Old and New Media Residency program (with additional support from co-host Encyclopedia Destructica).

What a perfect fit for Podcamp. This is a digital media project that lives in our real world, produces better quality than the mainstream, and removes the sillier costs that too often come with technology. It’s the lo-fi-but-advanced kind of thinking we should hope to apply to any new technology we adopt.

Photos proved by Teresa.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing you to Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

This is a super double feature bonus appetizer, web design style.

Podcamp Pittsburgh tries to address all experience levels, while never trying to duplicate the other great learning opportunities around town. So when it came to website design for bloggers and podcasters, we called on Podcamp veterans who would knew the Podcamp Pittsburgh’s place the best.

John R. Carman attended PodCamp Pittsburgh 1 as co-producer of The G Spod. By day, Carman works as a communication designer for his social media consultancy Avenue Design Studios, and acts important as CEO of AJAX Street, Inc. By night, Carman is usually still consulting and acting important, but occasionally blogs on his own site and tweets like a madman. (John wrote all that.)

Mike Woycheck is probably best know as PittGirl’s Butler, but as co-founder of Pittsburgh Bloggers and part of the team at AlphaLab, he is geek to Pittsburgh geeks. (I wrote this.)

John and Woycheck are experienced WordPress users and developers, friends, and colleagues. And yet in recent conversations discovered that they did not know all the great plugins and premium themes the other was using lately. Their session is geared toward indermediate to advanced WordPress developers (bloggers may like this too, just to tell their geek what plugins to hook up).

WordPress Knowledge Exchange

There is a new version of This Session available. View version 4.0 or upgrade automatically. Plugins and Widgets can extend WordPress to do almost anything, but what are those plugins that you use on almost every site? Do you swear by premium themes, or do you build each site from scratch? Mike Woycheck & John Carman invite all other WordPress webmasters to share your best practices and favorite add-ons in a roundtable discussion, and you can win a CD from a podsafe artist if you show us a new must-have plugin. Intermediate/Advanced-ish

Someone said we needed a web design session at Podcamp. I said “Why do we need web design at Podcamp? Sessions are only 40 minutes.” If you want to see great web design stuff, you can look into Refresh Pittsburgh and PittMFUG. Podcamp cannot compete with Web Design Day or Flash Pittsburgh (which will be days after PCPGH4, btw).

What someone can, hopefully, cover in 40 minutes is simple web design resources for the blogger. How can bloggers begin to learn for themselves the ways to tweak their website? Norm Huelsman designs and works miracles for the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Podcamp Pittsburgh. He also likes to share design process on his blog, so who better to discuss design with bloggers?

Learning to Look Under the Hood: Web design for the common man.

As a blogger or podcaster, you enjoy the freedom to say whatever you want. Norm Huelsman teaches you about the resources and methods to free your website from templates, to say it however you want.

These are three very good friends of mine and I’m pleased as can be they have accepted our invitation to once again put together discussions at Podcamp Pittsburgh.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing you to Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

If you’re reading this you’re probably our friend Jess, or at the very least you’ve read Jess’s extended commentary on almost every post here. If you’re not Jess, you don’t get to hear the fantastic and super smart things she and I email about privately.

Well, Podcamp Pittsburgh 4 will be your chance to at least hear some of Jess’s side of the smart. Maybe if she teaches me how to do screencasts we’ll be able to record some of our private discussions in some way almost entertaining enough to share with the rest of you.

Take a Screencast, It’ll Last Longer

General topics covered: Use of screencasting (Jing, Camtasia) as a medium for instruction, social interaction and marketing. Beginner to intermediate

Jessica Knott is a producer for Michigan State University’s Virtual University Design and Technology department, helping professors learn to effectively integrate technology into their teaching. She currently pursues a PhD in Higher, Adult and Lifelong Education, holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism in with a specialization in public relations and a Master of Arts in Education, focusing on educational technology and K-16 leadership. She has worked in higher education information technology for ten years.

Today also happens to be her birthday.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing you to Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

In April I saw Geoff Barnes present at Pittsburgh Web Design Day. In his presentation, Information Architecture as Storytelling, he explained information architecture as the story told to each website visitor, to manipulate their action.

Geoff is also very entertaining on Twitter (@texburgher), so asked if he would discuss our online personae. What are the stories we tell online both personally and professionally with archives of statuses, blog posts, and photographs?

He gathered up a few friends and they ran off with the idea.

You Never Get a 2nd Chance To Make 141,202 Good 1st Impressions

Not too long ago, our internet privacy concerns pertained to fears of strangers discovering our physical location, doing dirty things while looking at our pictures, or otherwise using our online presence to invade our privacy. Now, transparency rules the day. We openly share the most private details of our personal lives – complete with images, videos, voice commentary, and even precise location information – with the help websites such as Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, Vimeo, and Brightkite.

In (this session) we will address issues related to maintaining a public online identity, including the intersection of your personal and professional lives, and how authenticity, consistency, and credibility can implicate employability, liability and safety.

Joining Geoff will be Jason Logue (@cranberryperson), and Catherine Specter (@catspecter), of the Post-Gazette’s advice column Cat’s Call.

UPDATE: Go to Geoff’s Tumblr to preview one of the dynamite visual aids they’ll employ.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing you to Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

The Pensblog, covering Penguins hockey, is one of the more incredible online communities in Pittsburgh. Its authors and fans are passionate, irreverent, often rude, and yet remarkably sincere. I just had to indulge and invite their Derek Rocco to participate in a panel discussion about sports blogging.

Sports blogging is pretty big in Pittsburgh, but to our knowledge no one here has put together a panel before. Sport blogs introduce a lot of people to blogging and podcasting, including fans and sports journalists. They also collaborate well.

Mike Woycheck, co-founder of Pittsburgh Bloggers, will moderate a panel of Jim Shireman of Sportsocracy, GoonSquadSarah of Draft Day Suit, and Carla Swank.

UPDATE: Chas from PittBlather will be on the panel, too, ambitiously fitting PCPGH4 in minutes before the football team plays Saturday afternoon. He claims PSAMP is in, but I had not heard confirmation of such rumors. You’ll just have to go and see for yourself.

This is part of a short series of posts introducing you to Podcamp Pittsburgh 4.

My sister Cynthia and I joined Pittsburgh Social Venture Partners (@PSVP) this year to learn about philanthropy and the nonprofit community in Pittsburgh. I invited some of my new friends to Podcamp to discuss the opportunities unique to nonprofit organizations and the challenges of investing their limited resouces.

The panel will include:

• Christopher Whitlatch (Moderator) from The Pittsburgh Foundation
• Jia Ji of Couch Change, a universal online donation platform
• John Denny, Director of Community Relations for The Hillman Company and Board Chair of PSVP
• Tim Hindes, Grant Manager for GSP Consulting Corporation
• Tim Lessick, Pittsburgh Human Rights Network

I think this is a really tough choice. Two videos of the same band playing the same song. One of the great music videos versus an in incredible live performance.

As always, cast your vote in the comments, on twitter #fridaynightvideofight, or in the poll. Vote as often as you like.

Beastie Boys – Sabotage (classic)

vs.

Beastie Boys – Sabotage (live)

I think it was a tie. I flipped a coin in my head and the challenger won. Two new contenders this week.

Cast your vote in the comments, on twitter #fridaynightvideofight, or in the poll. Vote as often as you like.

Beck  – Loser

VS.

The Beastie Boys – So What’cha Want?

Cast your vote in our toll-free comment thread or by including my name @anthonycloskey and the hashtag #fridaynightvideofight in a Twitter tweet.

Defending Champion:
Goldfrapp – Ooh La La

VS.

The Challenger:
Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart (Literal Version)

I was a big fan of MTV’s Friday night video fights back in the eighties. While I’ve never been one to call in to talk radio or txt votes to TRL or Idol, I called MTV every week to vote, usually for Duran Duran.

To celebrate this memory, and two of my favorite music videos since the passing of Friday Night Video Fights, I’m starting a Friday Night Video fight of my own.

Cast your vote in our toll-free comment thread or by including my name @anthonycloskey and the hashtag #fridaynightvideofight in a Twitter tweet.

Goldfrapp – Ooh La La

VS.

Devin the Dude – Lacville ‘79