Back in 2009, I wrote and performed a piece about life at Playboy for You, Me, Them, Everybody (before it was a talk show when it was an evening of readings and performances). None of my other ideas for that night panned out so I threw a framework around a few anecdotes I’d share at parties about work. The best thing I can say about my performance is…I met the lead singer of White Mystery that night and she was really cool. The piece was a dud. Didn’t play well in the room and reading it three years later I can see why. I come across as pompous and the piece has nothing interesting to say about me or the experience of working there. (I never posted it.)

I’d always wanted to revisit Playboy as a topic and talk less about what it was like to work there and more about where that brand is in the current cultural landscape. But the press coverage I’d garnered thanks to tweeting (and talking) about my departure earned me a cease-and-desist letter from Playboy so writing about it would mean writing less about my very brief time there and more about what happened since then.

My appearance at The Paper Machete last week coincided with the last days of Playboy in Chicago and followed a mash note from Hugh Hefner to the city in the Chicago Tribune. I finally felt like I had something worthwhile to say and Christopher Piatt – the EIC of the Machete – liked my pitch so it seemed time to revisit the topic. The Machete keeps to a strict word count for time and this is one of those pieces where I was both writing up until my deadline but also struggling to get all the ideas in without going over. Part of me wants to have another go at it but once you connect with the ball you don’t linger, you just head to first.

—

There are few things sadder than throwing your own going-away party. But that’s exactly what Hugh Hefner did this past Sunday in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. To mark the departure of Playboy magazine’s editorial operations for Los Angeles, America’s horniest octogenarian threw one last party via an 800 word, misty-eyed eulogy to Playboy’s nearly 60 years in Chicago.

He was one of the few who marked the occasion. There was no retrospective in the city’s glossy culture magazines, no historical timeline in either of the daily newspapers. Even television news, which rarely passes on an opportunity to cover newsworthy nudity, didn’t seem particularly interested. Aside from an op-ed here or radio segment there, Playboy’s departure from the city of its birth went largely unnoticed.

Perhaps it’s because you only get one going-away party. Playboy, for all intents and purposes, left Chicago in the mid-1970s when Hefner – after decades in the first Playboy Mansion on State Street – headed west to establish a new mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Now, before I go on I want to offer some disclosure: From March of 2009 to March of 2010, I worked for Playboy.com, first as its Senior Editor then as is its Director of Content. I stopped working as Playboy.com’s Director of Content when Playboy…ordered me to. More specifically someone from HR ordered me to in a conversation that featured the words “severance” and “can stay until the end of the day…if you want.” But the year in between was a lot of fun. It’s hard to bear too much ill will toward a job that once asked me to write a script for something called “Playboy’s Naked Yoga.” That’s right, I said a script.

Any personal animus I might bear toward the organization is tempered with affection. I’m more a fan of Chicago than almost anything and knowing this city was the birthplace of THE iconic magazine brand of the 20th century ought to be a point of pride for anyone who calls Chicago home and particularly for someone like me who’s spent his formative working years in media.

In his Tribune piece, Hefner offered a detailed highlight reel of the magazine’s first 20 years in Chicago including the Hyde Park apartment where he laid out the first issue, the first Playboy Jazz Festival in 1959 at the old Chicago Stadium, the first Playboy Club in 1960, and the company’s move into the Palmolive Building in 1965 with its nine foot high letters spelling out Playboy. And then the following:

By the mid-1970s, I moved to Los Angeles, the land where my dreams had come from, but Chicago remained the company’s base, headquartered in the Lake Shore Drive offices we’ve occupied since 1989.

Now, after nearly 60 years, the Playboy offices in Chicago have closed as we consolidate our operations in Los Angeles.

So by Hef’s own admission, there’s been nothing worth mentioning about Playboy’s time in Chicago since the first Bush administration. At least from his point of view.

And this is exactly the problem with Playboy magazine: It’s all from his point of view and long ago stopped leading the culture in favor of following it. Last month’s cover promised features on The Walking Dead, Bruno Mars, Jon Hamm and Meghan McCain. Contemporary, sure. But territory most other modern major magazines had already covered.

In the book Mr Playboy author Steven Watts quotes Hefner as saying  “I’ve always edited the magazine for myself, on the assumption that my tastes are pretty much like those of our readers. This was fine when Hef was in his 30s. But now a magazine that’s supposed to be about contemporary culture and aspiration is trapped in amber, held hostage by a 84 year old who long ago sought to wall himself off from the concerns of the everyday man.

I can’t remember where I read it now but Hefner said he moved into the Chicago mansion, in part, because it allowed him to centralize his work and social lives. This freed him, he said, from worrying about pedestrian things like how he was going to get to work or what he was going to wear that day. I suppose life is easier when you can go to work in your pajamas. But eventually the young men who were Playboy’s core audience – and had to worry about things like wearing pants and getting to work on time – realized Hef and his magazine didn’t have much to say to them. Do people still want to visit the Mansion in L.A.? Sure. But people still want to visit Disneyworld. But nobody ever talks about wanting to live there.

A couple years ago, Playboy’s CEO said the company was going to shift to “brand management” as its core strategy with an emphasis on opening new Playboy Clubs around the world. Essentially, Playboy as a company was going to be about being Playboy. The trouble is the modern Playboy brand – particularly the clubs – isn’t all that strong. Last year’s NBC TV show “The Playboy Club” – a show about its Hefnerian heyday that essentially said life stopped being cool after the 1960s – got yanked off the air after three episodes. Rumors of a Chicago Playboy Club re-opening after a 20 year absence turned out to be little more than trumped-up publicity for the show. Even The Playboy Club casino at the Palms in Las Vegas is closing. It almost sounds like a bad joke. “Your mama’s so dumb she couldn’t even keep a Playboy Club open in Las Vegas.”

Two events last year symbolized both Playboy’s reversal of fortune over the past couple decades and its reaction to it. First, Playboy sold off its online business to a company called Manwin. You’ve probably never heard of Manwin but they run a whole bunch of websites that offer free porn on the Internet. It’s exactly the kind of company that’s made it hard for Playboy to make money online. So hard that Playboy decided to get out of the business altogether then turn around and sell it to the very people who put them in that position in the first place. Also notable was Hefner’s decision to take Playboy from a publicly-traded company available on the New York Stock Exchange to a private company controlled largely by him. It was yet another example of Hef doing everything he can to turn inward keep his world free from external forces.

So if this week’s end of Playboy’s party in Chicago was met with a collective shrug it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The party’s location was really far away and seemed like it’d been over for a while now. Plus, Hef was the only one on the list.

To be honest, it’s probably a little advanced for her age. Sure, at nearly fourteen months she’s an active, physical toddler – climbing, running and lifting large items with one hand are standard for her. And she’s still considered tall for her age (no idea where she gets it). But the place where one stands and…er, sails the castle boat is about as tall as she is and she doesn’t yet understand that a slide is something you experience while sitting and not something you jump off the top of while making the international hand gestures for “Catch me, Dad!”

No matter. She is our daughter. If it is in front of her, she will try to conquer it.

Footholds? They are for the weak. She grabs onto the landing for balance and swings her right knee to the top of the ramp, putting her weight on it. Clawing her way forward onto the landing, she pulls her other leg up, now practically standing on the top of the ramp if she weren’t bent at the waist and executing a fireman’s crawl across the landing as she works to bring her whole body together again so she can sit at a great height and let out a small laugh. At these moments, I imagine she’s laughing at how easy it is for her now and how she used to struggle with this climb and give up momentarily, only to try again and learn a little more each time.

I wonder if she remembers that those struggles were just last week.

I wonder if she’ll remember this feeling of triumph after several days of effort and how the difficult things become easier with repeated attempts.

I wonder if she realizes she’s making it hard on herself – those footholds are literally there to give her a leg up – or if she just doesn’t care. She knows there’s one way to do it, but she wants to see if she can do it a different way. Her way.

I wonder if she realizes the world doesn’t make it easy for people like that.

I wonder if she thinks that’s part of what makes it fun.

I hope so.

***

A day after I wrote the above, Abigail figured out how to go down the slide…by turning around, lying on her stomach and pushing herself backwards. It was a rough adaption of the method she uses to get down off chairs, couches and our bed but definitely not the “correct” way to use the slide.

Of course it wasn’t.

When I woke up this morning, I walked downstairs and saw balloons stretching up to the ceiling and streamers hanging from the chandeliers and door jambs. The colored, helium-filled balloons said Happy birthday in white letters and fake confetti. At the end of the streamers were pink cardboard flowers and white cardboard circles with scalloped pink edges which read, in pink lettering…

Happy 1st Birthday

None of the decorations were for me. In fact, the streamers had been up for days and some of the balloons now drooped a bit from their once ceiling-level heights. The balloons and streamers were for Abigail, whose birthday had been four days prior.

Doesn’t matter. Her birthday has made me enjoy celebrating my own again.

***

Last year it was already clear to me that my birthday would now and forever be overshadowed by my daughter’s.

Abigail wasn’t even a week old yet so I know I hadn’t gone back to work but other than that I can’t remember much about my birthday last year. Whether that’s a result of the ongoing betrayal one’s body and mind commits with increasing frequency as the years go on or some stress-induced by-product of the first week of our daughter’s birth – maybe there wasn’t anything worth remembering other than how much parenting we did – I don’t know. I think it was the day before we came home from the hospital. If Erin were awake right now, I’d ask her and she might remember as she’s always been better about birthday-related matters than I am. But she’s asleep and so I turn to the electronic tools that I use as crutches in countless moments now.

Google Calendar says on the night of my birthday last year we were working on “paperwork [for] lactation consultant.” That, I remember: The struggles Erin went through trying to breastfeed and all the stops we pulled out to try and make it the primary means of feeding our child before realizing a good while later we weren’t going to be able to no matter how hard we tried. Rude Parenting Awakening #7 by that point.

Gmail and Facebook don’t reveal much else aside from a pregnancy-related to-do list I emailed myself on my birthday that read:

To Get:
Ibuprofen
Lunch
Guinness
[REDACTED ITEM THAT RELATES TO WHAT HAPPENS TO A LADY AFTER GIVING BIRTH THAT ERIN PROBABLY DOESN'T WANT ME TO REVEAL TO THE WORLD]

But a big parenting high-five to 2011 Erin and 2011 Scott for March 4th because the Calendar also says that day we A) Had a 9am pediatrician’s appointment B) met with a lactation consultant at 11am and C) went to a midwives’ appointment at 2pm. How insane is that? There’s no way we’d attempt that kind of schedule now, for crying out loud.  Although our subconscious rationale at the time was probably “Let’s surround ourselves with as many people as possible who know that the fuck they’re doing.” Come to think of it, I think we might have gone right from the hospital to the pediatrician which means I probably spent that day in the hospital.

So whatever else was going on that day – aside from finishing up this cathartic post – I did not trust myself to remember a four-item list that was crucial to the happiness of my still-recovering-from-daylong-labor wife. I certainly wasn’t celebrating my birthday. My mind was on other things. (On the plus side, I had beer.)

***

It’s a little later in the morning now. Erin’s now up and off to Derby Lite and Abigail’s down for her nap. We spent the first part of the morning as we always do on Saturdays, giving Abigail her breakfast and enjoying some extended playtime that our jobs don’t allow for during the week. The house is quiet aside from the occasional rustles from the baby monitor as AG kicks and moves in her sleep.

I generally don’t like making a big deal about my birthday. I think Ron Swanson has it right:

Well-wishes from friends, a nice dinner out with Erin and time to read and relax is my idea of a perfect day and that’s how today’s shaping up.

But now that Abigail’s birthday is days before mine I have a whole new reason to celebrate. At 37 – jeez – I get more joy out of buying presents for Abigail than I do getting them myself. We had a party last week for her and I don’t know about you but I enjoy making a fuss over someone else on their birthday way more than I enjoy having a fuss made over me. Especially when they look like this.

I’ve never been big on reflecting on the past but I’ve spent the morning revisiting Abigail’s birth, looking at pictures of how tiny she was and thinking about how far she’s come in just a year. I’m sure next year I’ll re-read this and think about how we spent that morning playing with her ukulele, listening to James Brown during breakfast and entering Day 3 of No More Bottle. A day full of things worth remembering.

Best birthdays ever.

This piece pretty much speaks for itself but keep in mind I write this to read them so the italics, the caps, etc. are more cues for me as I’m reading than proper written form. Also, I wish the story about NBC wanting to do a sitcom with the Muppets had come out last week because, boy, it really sells my point better than anything. (I had lots more to say about the NBC/Muppets arrangement on Twitter today.)

—

This week, NBC Nightly News announced it hired Chelsea Clinton as a correspondent for “Making A Difference,” its series of heartwarming feature stories. This was really good news because woo! Someone in media is hiring! Or rather, someone…is hiring.

Before I sat down to work on this piece I thought “This is not a big deal. The real issue here is the larger story about how NBC’s news and entertainment divisions are completely lacking in ideas that aren’t brought to them by a bold-faced name” – an idea I promise you I’ll get back to in a moment. But then I finally read the New York Times report that broke the story and I can understand why media critics, bloggers and people on barstools everywhere all turned into little howler monkeys over the news.

Back in July, “an intermediary” contacted Steve Capus, the president of NBC News to tell him Chelsea Clinton was “kicking around what she wanted to do next.” This is amazing for a couple of reasons: 1) In 2011, someone can describe looking for a job with the same words I used in 1997 to discuss hippies on the quad…

And 2) If you found yourself both in need of a job and employing an intermediary wouldn’t you just lay off the intermediary and save yourself both the money and the trouble of getting a job?

But it gets worse. The president of NBC News starts the conversation – and I can’t emphasize this enough THIS IS THE PRESIDENT OF NBC NEWS – by asking “What are you interested in doing?” This is the equivalent of him sliding a piece of paper over to her and saying “We’d like you to take this piece of paper and write down a number…and a job description…and the number of weekly spa appointments you’d like us to make for you. And that! Is our final offer.”

The article goes on to say that “One person close to Ms. Clinton said she had been quietly raising her profile for some time, though the public had not been completely aware of it.” which again says to me you really ought to think of firing your intermediary but also if there’s anyone to blame for the public’s lack of awareness of Chelsea Clinton’s profile-raising…that person is Chelsea Clinton. Not only did Chelsea refuse to make herself available for comment after NBC’s announcement, she also – while in the process of campaigning for her mother’s run for the Presidency in 2008 – refused not only questions from the national press but also a question from a 4th grade reporter for Scholastic News who dared to ask her how good of a First Man her Dad would be if her mom was President. To that question, Chelsea replied: “I’m sorry, I don’t talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately.” Burrrrnnnn….

To be fair to Chelsea, she did participate in a press release. In it she said “I hope telling stories through ‘Making a Difference’ will help me to live my grandmother’s adage of ‘Life is not about what happens to you, but about what you do with what happens to you.’ ”

Look, I don’t want to shit on anybody’s grandma…but that kinda crap is what privileged people say when they don’t need to do anything but wait for things to happen to them. The president of NBC News said “Hey, do you want a job?” And Chelsea said “Yeah” and now, Chelsea, you’re going to do be on NBC News because of something that happened to you after your intermediary made a phone call when you were “kicking around what to do next.” When you are Chelsea Clinton or the children of Tim Russert or John McCain or George W. Bush, life is only about what happens to you. You don’t actually have to go out and make stuff happen. You just wait for someone at NBC to say “Hey, do you wanna work here?”

Because when you’re NBC, you hope that familiarity doesn’t so much breed contempt as it does ratings. This year, NBC famously rolled out three shows to much fanfare: The Playboy Club, a show about pretty much what it sounds like; Prime Suspect, a reimagining of a popular British television show and Whitney, a sitcom built around a woman best known as the sidekick of Chelsea Handler, the late-night cable TV comedian. The Playboy Club was cancelled after three episodes and Prime Suspect is dead as well though Whitney is still around despite…I swear I tried to come up with an explanation here or a joke or something but seriously no one knows why the fuck this show is still on the air.

This insistence on television as a security blanket even extends to NBC’s midseason replacements. In a list of upcoming shows on nbc.com are shows based on a book by Chelsea Handler, a reality show about wild and crazy senior citizens starring Betty White, a reality show about fashion starring Elle McPherson and finally a show called The Firm which, yes, is based on the John Grishman novel WHICH CAME OUT ALMOST 20 YEARS AGO.

Unfortunately for NBC, cliches – especially the one about familiarity and contempt – are often true for a reason. New York magazine’s Vulture blog recently released…uh, a slideshow that detailed Nielsen’s recent ratings book and the news was not good for NBC. The network has zero shows in Nielsen’s list of the 40 most-watched shows on TV. Zero. Out of 40.

If you listen to my dad, the problem with America is it doesn’t make anything anymore. NBC has a similar problem. Its fortunes rise or fall on the strength of brands it has little connection to and that mean more to most people than the network itself with the exception of Chelsea Clinton’s future colleague Brian Williams, the current NBC Nightly News anchor and host of the newsmagazine show Rock Center, which is such an awful title you have to imagine that Brian Williams Is Handsome, Smart And Such A Nice Boy was running a close second. NBC’s made Williams into an almost one-man viral video generator, having him appear on The Today Show, Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock and Jay Leno. For a network devoid of product it can call its own, this is an incredibly smart move. According to Vulture’s…slideshow, under Williams, NBC Nightly News is averaging more viewers than all but two of its shows. Sure this is like raving about the turd with the most polish on it, but the fact remains NBC’s most important brand is its news. A brand it decided was best served by the addition of Chelsea Clinton, who once refused to answer a 4th grade reporter’s question.

Maybe if NBC’s lucky, she’ll agree to stick around until Malia and Sasha get tall enough for the camera.

1. If you’re not yet signed up for Klout – as you’ll soon read, this doesn’t prevent Klout from creating a profile on you – go to this link and scroll to the bottom. Click the opt-out links there. Unfortunately, you still have to sign in to Klout via a social network to opt-out of it. (Yes, that’s weird.)

2. If you’re already signed up for Klout, click the button that looks like a gear in the top right. select Unlink Networks. On the page that opens, click Unlink next to each account. Click the gear again and select Profile settings then scroll to the bottom and click the words “click here” after the words “If you would like to delete your account…”

If you did it correctly, you’ll see this cute little guy:

UPDATE: A commenter notes that Klout has removed the opt-opt link from the Profile Settings page. Try this link to opt-out (which in my late-night posting hours was missing from the above graf as well).

Now, here’s why you might want to do all that:

Last week, I decided to delete my Klout account. Doing so was something I’d considered for a while now but the inciting incident was a tweet from @misterjayem that linked here. The post doesn’t make an airtight argument, but it did make me realize my own problems with Klout:

1. Little about Klout is transparent

Consider this: You stumble on a website that asks you to tell it who you talk to on a regular basis, where you go out to eat, who your friends are and where in Chicago you spend the most time. In exchange, it will tell you how truly Chicago you are. It will also rate your Chicagoness on a scale from 1 to 100 and tell you how much you affect how others in your social networks move through the city. But you have to agree to let it store and use the data you give it and can’t object to how it might use it in the future. Otherwise, it will stop telling you or anyone else how much of a real Chicagoan you are. What would you do?

What does Klout do with the data it gets from you? What will it do in the future?

If you can’t answer the questions I posed above – I can’t despite reading its Privacy Policy – but are OK with using Klout, you are more trusting than I am.

Moreover, it’s not clear to me why Klout wants me to link all my social media accounts to its service if it already creates profiles for people based on their social media usage (more on the problematic nature later). Perhaps it’s to make it a more accurate rating but I never noticed my Klout score change even when I added several new streams to it. If I contribute content to those streams and link them to my account, Klout should be able to adjust my score up or down. It did neither. But it’s obvious they’re collecting a lot of data on me and not giving me anything in return.

When Klout recently made changes to its ranking system, it touted “a more accurate, transparent Klout score.” On the issue of transparency, Klout said:

We’ve always been transparent about the various activities that could impact your Klout Score but we now have the power to share the specific actions that are helping or hurting your score. When your Klout Score changes you will be able to match it to a corresponding change in one of these subscores and understand why the change has occurred.

It was never clear to me how the old system worked – it was good about saying what changed but not why – and the definitions of amplification, reach, etc. were what you’d find in an average dictionary and not specific to Klout. The new system didn’t offer any additional clarity either in its blog or in the system itself. And I’m speaking as a savvy user.

Granted, you can’t give people all the details behind your secret sauce; if you do then they’ll either game it or steal it – Google is similarly tight-lipped about its algorithms. But if you tout yourself as the leader of determining influence you need to either show people how it’s done or display great results. Klout did neither, as I explain below.

(I’ll note here that under the new system my Klout score went down ten points but this has nothing to do with why I left. In fact, I was OK with with the downgrade. It felt more accurate to me and the people I consider most influential had a similar drop.)

2. What I was giving Klout was greater than what it was giving me

I was giving Klout quite a bit of information about my online identity. What did I get out of it? Perks (theoretically) and information about who I interact with online.

How’d that work out for me? Well, the only perk I took advantage of was a discounted bottle of wine from One Hope. And, admittedly,  it was pretty good. But for the most part, the few things offered to me through Klout were like the free t-shirts you get when you sign up for a credit card: you don’t really want them and what you gave up to get them is worth far more.

As for its list of who I influence or am influenced by, it was filled with people I was already familiar with or people with whom I had little in common. It included few people who tweet about the same kinds of things I do or might be interesting to follow. Plus, the people I am most influenced by online never showed up in Klout whether they were people I @-replied to or people whose links I often clicked on (a true influence measure) but did not retweet.

I know there are ways to discover more people via Klout (here’s one from the company’s blog) but very little of it was a service unique to Klout or very accurate.

Now, you might be asking yourself why I stay on Facebook or Twitter or any other site that takes user data and builds a business on top of it. Simply put, I get much more out of those services and am – for the time being – still getting a fair deal from them in the exchange since they provide me with the best news of the day and updates on the lives of my friends  And speaking of friends…

3. Klout depends on you to do its dirty work

Anyone who uses Klout is familiar with the message “You influence [WHOMEVER] but they’re not on Klout yet. Invite them now!” (I’m paraphrasing since I can’t get the exact wording unless I sign up for Klout again). As anyone knows, social networks are only as good as the number of friends you have there. But unlike other social networks, you aren’t asked to convince them to sign up like some social media Ponzi scheme. This is a small matter compared to the rest but rather than just track influence, Klout wants you to use yours to make their service better.

Still, the biggest advantage of Klout for someone in the social space should be the measure of influence. But not all influence is the same…

4. Klout’s ability to measure influence is questionable, at best

For a while, my Klout list of topics I was influential about included the NBA.  To this day, I have no idea why. I know nothing about the NBA, never discussed it in my social spaces, didn’t follow any NBA players or link to news about it. On the other hand, I was able to game Klout by tweeting about booze enough over a couple of days that for a while I was influential about “alcohol” and “hangover.”

Klout’s measure of influence is only for people who don’t know any better. Despite all the streams of data it reads, Klout doesn’t do a very good job of providing influence insight beyond what can be gleaned through a learned read of someone’s social media streams. In essence, it’s just a self-disclosed social media profile…of social media profiles. If someone is really accomplished in social media, his or her footprint will be easy to find and discern. Someone who knows what to look for on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. will get a much better read on a person’s influence in the overall social space as well as on a particular topic. And as the graf above illustrates, the data Klout gets from all the profiles it tracks isn’t turned into anything useful (which really ought to make you wonder why they want so much of it).

All this explains why Klout’s biggest failing as a service is its inability to provide useful influence information on topics, particularly niche topics. For example, let’s say you want to discover who is influential about the topics “Chicago” and “journalism.” Take a look at the Klout topic pages for those topics.

Right now, when it comes to the top influencers on Chicago, you get Red Eye, Chicagoist and Time Out Chicago. On journalism, it’s Jay Rosen, Nick Kristof and Nieman Labs. If you’re at all knowledgeable about these topics, your response is likely along the lines of “No shit, Sherlock.” If you know even the basics about a topic, Klout won’t direct you to anyone influential about it.

Looking at the top Klout-getters (or “top +K recipients” in Klout’s vernacular) it seems each topic lends itself to people with engaged, active audiences but not necessarily those engaged and active about the topic in question.

“Chicago” and “journalism” were topics Klout said I was influential about. I’m not, really (take my word for it) . But you could make a good argument that I’m influential about “Chicago journalism” (again, take my word for it). And Klout can’t measure that:

http://klout.com/topic/chicago-journalism

(If you’re a Klout user, you just got bounced back to your profile. If you’re not, you got a Not Found page.)

So instead it just breaks the larger topics up into separate components which overstates my knowledge/influence about the general topic and understates my knowledge about the specific topic. More to the point, Klout can’t measure this niche topic, even though much of the Web is about niche topics. Weird, huh?

But none of this matters as much as my last point:

5. Klout – unlike every other social network with any claim to integrity – is opt-out, not opt-in.

That’s a complicated way of saying if you aren’t using Klout, it doesn’t matter: it’s using you. The service probably has a profile on you, your friends or your family if they’re connected to people who do use Klout. Even your kids. This New York Times article goes into detail on this point. Even if your social media profiles are private, Klout might have built a profile from them. (A friend of mine tweeted today that Klout created a profile on his 7 year old even though the kid’s Twitter account is private.)

Imagine Twitter building a profile and bio of you without you ever sending a Tweet. Imagine Facebook saying who your friends are even if you’ve never accepted a friend request.

Until very recently, you had no choice about this. Klout had a profile on you, like it or not. It was only recently that it created the ability to opt-out.

All of this means Klout – which is supposed to be a service for people who are serious about social media influence – isn’t very serious at all about how it measures social influence. If people whose opinions I respect didn’t care about Klout, I wouldn’t either. But they do. And it’s time they stopped.

The facts are these: No serious social media service makes people who don’t use it, opt-out of it. No serious social media measurement tool asks for so much data but seemingly uses so little of it or is so prone to major mistakes or gaps in measurement. And no serious measurement would try to convince you that using it would mean you’ll be treated like a high roller in a casino. When casinos do this, it’s because they’re trying to convince you to part with something valuable: money, time and good judgment. Why does Klout do it?

When it comes right down to it, Klout is little more than a game, like Foursquare. But the sum total of data about your online identity isn’t something serious people take for granted. And just like you can’t learn much about what it’s like to have a job or a family from the Game of Life, you can’t learn much about a person’s influence from Klout.

Is there any benefit to staying on Klout? It’s as I said above: Only if you want to demonstrate your supposed influence to people who don’t know any better.

UPDATE: A friend of mine noted that even after she opt’ed-out of Klout she still had a Klout app in the Applications section of Facebook. I checked mine and I did too. Even more curious? It said the app accessed my account yesterday even though I left Klout last week. Very strange. To check this yourself, click the arrow in the top right hand corner of Facebook, select Privacy Settings then click Edit Settings under Apps and Websites. Click it again on the page that opens and click the X next to Klout.

Tonight I attended one of the first 2011 Chicago Ideas Week events. It was a roundtable Q&A moderated by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman with mayors from a few of America’s great cities: Mayor Rahm Emanuel from Chicago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg from New York and Mayor Kasim Reed from Atlanta. The following Storify post contains tweets from myself and others who tweeted during the event using the #CIWMayor hashtag. Some of the tweets are slightly out of chronological order to better serve the narrative but I’ve attempted to retain the spirit and meaning of the discussion. Between-tweets commentary is mine.

Overall, I enjoyed the discussion and thought it concluded just as the participants settled into a comfortable groove. Reed came off the best as he was plain-spoken and funny. Bloomberg was his usual sacred-cow slayer. Rahm was in his usual politician mode. I feel like he’s so careful not to play into the HULK RAHM SMASH! storyline that he holds back too much.

Quick postscript: When you sign up for a Chicago Ideas Week session, you’re asked to list three topics that someone can ask you about. On your badge it says “Ask me about…” and then shows your three topics. I was in a hurry to fill out the registration form and just wrote “journalism, comics and scotch.” When I picked up my badge tonight “comics” was changed to “education” and “scotch” was changed to “civic engagement.” Heh.

Comics: DC relaunched and renumbered its entire line last week. I’ve read Justice League and Action Comics so far. Justice League didn’t reveal where it was headed while Action suggests the new Superman is a mix of Spider-Man, Batman and…a 1930s-era Superman (with nods to that era’s mob and wife abuser villains). So both are wait and see. This post from AV Club explains why that’s a good idea when it comes to comics arcs (starting with the third graf of the Justice League review).

Politics: Elizabeth Warren is gunning for Scott Brown’s seat. I think she got hosed by the Obama administration and I wish her all the luck in the world but unless I’m missing something, he’s not exactly vulnerable. Kerry’s caucusing with the dude, for crying out loud.

Internet: Pat Bruno was fired from the Sun-Times and wants to start his own food blog. The Atlantic Wire discusses why this might be harder than he thinks. Why do professional writers – particularly print writers – wait until they are fired to develop an online presence? It’s much easier to do this when you’re employed at a publication that will help you build your audience and, fair or not, it lends your efforts a credence it might not otherwise have that you can leverage into a larger online buildout or a new job.

Media: Spent the better part of 36 hours recovering from what your grandma would call a stomach bug. Upside: I got caught up with a bunch of Quantum Leap episodes I missed when they first aired. Downside: I only missed episodes of the fifth season when the show jumped the shark so…blergh.

Music: An e-mail with the subject line Here is your FREE ukulele lesson book brightened my day.

From my Tumblr: A couple 9/11-related posts, skepticism about Playboy going retro and I’m going to miss Alex Kotlowitz’s writing at chicagomag.com because of posts like this.

Jeff Tweedy recites “My Humps” from Jasmine D on Vimeo.

A totally subjective list but…

5. The Chief Technology Officer of the city of Chicago, John Tolva (@Immerito), DJ’ed the party last night which is probably the best commentary on how this whole project brought the Chicago tech and arts scenes together in one crazy mashup.

4. The Young Chicago Authors kids from Louder Than A Bomb who turned in one of the best live poetry performances I’ve ever seen. In particular, were two girls around 16-17 whose piece on sexuality, body image and adolescent relationships was wisdom so far beyond their years I felt as if they knew more about life than I do, twenty years their senior.

3.The actual Mayor Emanuel showing up, shaking hands and doing an Entourage-like walk through the club before signing @MayorEmanuel author Dan Sinker’s book with “You are an asshole. Mayor Emanuel.” *

2. Jeff Tweedy singing “I Gotta Feeling” and reciting the lyrics to “My Humps” (above via). Just go watch those videos now and be in a good mood the rest of the day.

1. Dan reading the fermented baby food in the crawlspace bit where @MayorEmanuel meets Sweetness, hugs Studs Terkel’s heart and talks with Curtis Mayfield. If anyone still thinks this whole project was just a bunch of vulgar tweets, the literary passion Dan poured into that reading – and this whole event – put the lie to that notion.

I was so proud to be a Chicagoan last night.

* A couple other folks I know got the actual mayor** to sign their books and he signed all of them “Mayor Emanuel” as if to say “No, motherfucker, I’M THE MAYOR. It takes more to get this shit than starting a fucking Twitter account.” @AnnaTarkov told me she asked the mayor if he was a fan of the book and he said no. That answer may have been more persona than anything else (another friend of mine said the mayor exchanged good-natured f-bombs with Hideout co-owner Tim Tuten) but it’s also worth noting how he goes out of his way to show he’s a good sport about the whole thing.

** I love how I keep having to say “the actual mayor” to avoid confusion.

I’m hoping to bring all of this together here now, including my work on Twitter and Tumblr.

The categories are, for the most part, self-explanatory. Uncategorized is a place for housekeeping matters, life updates and stuff that just doesn’t fit anywhere else.  Some things aren’t quite in their right places after the move but that’s life.

Speaking of, my efforts to redirect all the links from my old blog to the new were for naught despite three nights of trying. So I’m leaving the old blog up until I end up in the hospital with a broken leg and have so many hours to kill that I fix all the links manually. Until there, here is a selection of posts from over the last four years of this blog (links for which have all been updated).

The day my daughter Abigail was born.

When Erin and I got married on the Internet (not really).

My Paper Machete pieces on the Chicago mayoral race and Rahm Emanuel.

The evolution of my thoughts on the color pink, why comic books are for girls and how to find superheroines for your daughter to emulate.

Why I think social media is important for journalists.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Christmas.

I might be the reason why Lady Gaga is blonde now.

Open letters to a guy at my gym, Marilyn Manson and Nine West.

The time I met Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan and he was really nice.

A deconstruction of the announcement that a guy in a Filipino Journey cover band would be the new lead singer of…Journey.

My issues with R. Kelly, Parts 1 and 2.

1000 words on The Ultimate Coyote Ugly Search.

The time I offered free non-alcoholic beer on Craigslist. And who I gave  it to.

80s metal, starring White Lion and Lita Ford.

A really good recipe for salmon burgers.

So why ourmaninchicago.net instead of .com? Well, some other guy is already using the OMIC name at .com. Frankly, that’s largely what stopped me from making the switch until now. But I figured, what they heck? .Net will do.

There’s a bunch of stuff I want to change/fix but for now this is the new home.