Yesterday, my unit moved to our new office on Delaware Ave. My portion of the new office is rather spacious, and I’m happy about that. I also have plenty of natural light now, which rocks. Aside from random office noise, it’s easy to focus and get things done, which is a luxury I’m very grateful for.

It’s funny how being uprooted opens your eyes to your surroundings. Tonight, after my trip to the gym, I stopped by the old office just to see what it looked like without us in it. The carpet was dingy (always was), and it smelled like rats and dirt. The hallway was always cramped in that office and I could hear every single phone conversation on my hallway via the ducts of the asymmetric heating system. There was a quant charm and character in the old office that there will never be in our new office. I will miss those “old building” oddities about the Carriage House. It will always have a soft spot in my heart. But if you stay too long in one place, it’s easy to stagnate. With the UC budget situation the way it is, I think we moved out of the old office at the right moment; a moment when fresh ideas need to be born to deal with unprecedented difficulties.

Every night, Tank hops up and lays between us until we fall asleep. It’s quite adorable even if we know his intended outcome is a free massage.

This time last year, I set an ambitious goal of writing 50 blog posts in 2008. I wrote 7. The last one I wrote was in August. That’s four months between blog posts. The real shame of it is it doesn’t reflect my online life, which is spread across no less than 4 social networks I use daily. Engaging in those communities takes my time away from here, leaving this site to become a placeholder for one forgotten aspect of my life: writing. One could show up here and assume I fell off the face of the earth sometime after August of 2008.

So, with all of that in mind, I decided to go Apollo 13 on this site and take drastic measures in order to bring it back down to earth.

The Changes

• Removed the blog listing from the front page. From now on, the latest post will be teased on the front page. But since I don’t write as much, it can’t have the whole page. I do aspire to write more in 2009, but acknowledging the obvious, I realized if the site is primarily focused on an act I only perform 7 times in 365 days, it’s going to look dusty and old most of the time.
• Added links to most of the online communities I belong to. I know that list is long. I’m not active on more than 4 of those sites on a daily basis. But I’ve realized that I have friends (in real-life or online) on all of them. You may use one of them or all of them. Friend me up on any of them you choose. The goal for me is to allow people who find me interesting to find me in the context they prefer. You don’t have to come to me, instead we meet in our favorite community.
• Aggregating the other stuff here. For the online content I create most often, I’ve collected a short list of the recent items I’ve added to those sites here.

That’s it. I could go on about how I painstakingly chose a new font for the header (Optima Pro Demi Bold). Or, how I had a colorful design comp and abandoned it for the minimalist look of grays and white. But it seems rather trite to use what has become a rare event to tell you how awesome it is that my tweets are now on the home page. That said, the site is somewhat rough around the edges, so bear with me. I consider all redesigns on this site to be an iterative process (read: search and archives will come back, I promise).

Part of Something Bigger

This redesign is the first accomplished goal of a process I’ve initiated called acknowledging the obvious. I wasn’t writing blog posts frequently enough to warrant blog posts being the center piece of my website. I acknowledged that and redesigned the site to accommodate things I do more often. I’m not sad about it and I’m not going to beat myself up for not writing more. I’m just adapting to the obvious. The process has been quite liberating because I used to avoid doing anything here because I wasn’t writing. Now, I can relax because casual visitors will at least be able to see that I’m not dead and they can find me in other places if they wish.

In acknowledging the obvious, I plan to remove some mental barriers I’ve had toward accomplishing some long term goals in 2009. I do plan to write about those barriers here (but as you’ve no doubt come to understand, don’t hold your breath :-). For me, the year 2008 was simply to surreal of a year to not record somewhere.

Cheers,
Rob

Through bleary eyes and lack of sleep, I just spent a great day at CopyCamp, a barcamp-style event hosted at the Mercury News building in San Jose. There were about 40 participants, including several Mercury News reporters and editors. We had a couple of group discussions and 4 breakout sessions. The discussions centered around the Mercury News’ style, tone, and technique in its coverage of race, immigration policy, the work of non-profit organizations and activism groups, technology, and business. The discussions were passionate and eloquent. I was moved by the obvious impact the Mercury News has in all of the diverse communities of the Bay Area

I am very grateful to the Mercury News reporters and editors who participated. As representatives of the paper, they were asked pointed questions. I thought they did a great job of listening to critiques of the paper’s performance and explaining the philosophies and realities that govern their jobs. At this moment in time, it is impossible to discuss print news without getting into the topics of staffing cuts, the move from printed paper to the web, and the pressures of being in a for-profit, corporate environment. In my previous discussions of those topics, I had rarely considered the people in the newsroom, instead thinking of the Mercury News as a single entity. Sitting down with the journalists from the Merc and members of the public, it brought home to me the reality that the Mercury News is employing people. Real people who are trying to bring important information to my attention. I may disagree with the content or the tone of the Mercury News sometimes, but I have never been more certain of its importance in the Bay Area, here in Santa Cruz, and all over the world.

The beauty of CopyCamp’s open format (and BarCamp in general), it encouraged discussion among participants. I’m always inspired by what people are doing and it is often quite striking what is going on in your community that you don’t know about.

I learned a great deal about the Merc’s online setup from Randy Keith, the Merc’s online editor. I briefly talked to Goro, who helps Japanese start-ups relocate to the Bay Area and blogs about Bay Area news in Japanese so recent Japanese immigrants can read about local news in their native language. I also chatted with Jorge Zavala of TechBA, who works with start-ups in Mexico and Canada to help them relocate to the Bay Area.

I had some excellent post-camp discussions with CopyCamp’s organizers, Chris O’Brien of the Merc and (Digi)Dave Cohn, a recent Knight News Challenge grant winner (along with Margaret and Quiddities), who’s creating a non-profit for local investigative journalism called Spot.Us, Chris Amico, a freelance journalist (and UCSC alum) recently back from China and Rex Pechler (also a UCSC alum), a future Google-ite who’s working on a citizen journalism start-up. Here’s a video of Rex, Dave and I recorded by Chris Amico as we left CopyCamp:

Update 6/30, 10am PDT: Chris’ video goes along with his blog post about CopyCamp. I recommend the post and the video, so I’ve removed the video so you can see his post and the video together.

Note: I think I came off kind of harsh in my description of my “ownership of the newspaper.” In my rambling, I was attempting to address the newspaper industry in general, where I feel coverage tends toward the broad, sensational story and not get to the details and underlying “meat and potatoes” of a community involved with the story. I think that directive comes indirectly (via staffing cuts and profit-motive) from the higher levels of the media industry as a whole and not from a conscious effort on the part of the newsroom staff. So, you could say I pretty much blew it on that question.

I want to thank Chris O’Brien and Dave Cohn for organizing CopyCamp, the Mercury News for hosting and everyone who came on a Saturday to participate in the discussion. I had a great time and I will carry many of the ideas and concerns I heard today with me into the discussions I have here in Santa Cruz about newspapers and citizen journalism.

Update 6/30, 10:03am PDT: Dave Cohn has written about Saturday’s CopyCamp.

If you’d to participate in the ongoing discussion we started today at CopyCamp, go to MajorityofNone.com.

Last night, Keith Olbermann delivered the monologue I had hoped to write. I can finally point people to something that truly expresses how I feel about this president.

Thank you, sir.

So, I hit up my friend, The Internet, for some ideas on how to reduce my paper mail footprint. The Internet, as always, came through. Here are a few ideas for reducing your paper mail (and thus your carbon) footprint.

Direct Marketing

The Direct Marketing Association has a website, dmachoice.org where you can opt-out of their mailing lists. Since their mailing lists account for most unsolicited catalogs and other mailed advertisements, this action alone can reduce your volume of unsolicited mail significantly. The process is pretty simple: you create an account and opt-out. Done. You can change your preferences at any time, so if you ever want to go back to proxy-slaughtering trees, you can ;-).

One aspect of this process I found amusing was the DMA’s reasoning that you should not opt-out of their mailings because you’ll be harming the environment. On the confirmation page, they warn that, if you don’t receive paper catalog mailers, you’ll just get in your car and drive to the mall. As opposed to not receiving a paper catalog, not getting in my car, and just shopping online and getting better prices? You lost me.

If you’re hooked on some of the catalogs you get already but want to opt-out of the mailings you haven’t asked for, you can try catalogchoice.org. Catalog Choice gives you more granular control over what you get and don’t get, allowing you to unsubscribe to individual catalogs.

Credit Card Offers

In my search to remove myself from the paper nightmare of direct marketing, I discovered that you can also opt-out of pre-screened credit card offers. AWESOME! optoutprescreen.com is a website setup by the Consumer Credit Reporting Industry to allow you to remove yourself from pre-screened credit card offers. Again, the process is simple although it requires more sensitive information: your Social Security number and a valid credit card. This is information they already have and they use it to verify your identity. I wasn’t quite comfortable giving that information out, so I did some poking around and found an article from AARP Magazine recommending optoutprescreen.com. I thought that was a trustworthy endorsement, so I signed up. You can opt-out of pre-screened credit card offers for 5-years or for life. In order to opt-out for life, you have to sign a form and mail it in. I will sacrifice a little paper now to save reams of paper later.

I’m hoping that these two actions alone will reduce my paper mail footprint by more than 90%. In addition, I have all of my bills sent to me via email now and only receive paper bills from a couple of companies. Please pass on any other ideas to reduce your paper mail footprint. I’d love to hear more.