I’m on a listserv that isn’t very useful.  We all have a common professional interest, but we have all joined at different times, and the list has devolved into a more social hodgepodge than a true professional community.  I’ve been thinking about online communities at work, so I used my broken list as an opportunity to think about what true professional community entails.  I just wrote to a friend about this.  Here’s what I had to say (information that would identify the list has been edited or removed):

I think our listserv is broken.  I think it is is irreparably damaged.

Well, obviously not, right?  It’s very active, and participants from a variety of backgrounds send messages regularly.

However, the list is dominated by just a few individuals who have been active participants for quite some time.  Very few posts come from participants who have joined in the last two and half years.

A healthy list would have more broad participation from a wider variety of voices.  But most of my peers, the people who joined recently (I have quietly surveyed, but obviously there’s small sample size, unrepresentative sample, and confirmation bias, all at work here) have expressed that the reasons they don’t use the listserv are:

• The volume of messages unrelated to our professional topic is too high.
• They end up deleting most everything because they don’t want to sift through the unrelated stuff.
• Not very many discussions are directly related to the professional topic; those related to it are often tangential and focused on employment or “meta-”topics.
• The listserv seems to be dominated by a few “power users.”
• There’s the perception that there’s a lot of in-joke-iness that isn’t welcoming to new participants.
• There’s no sense of shared vision on how the listserv is used.
• There is no mechanism for knowing who the posters are.  (Other than their e-mail signatures.)

Part of my job recently has been looking at virtual communities, including professional learning communities.  At heart, I believe that’s what the listserv was designed to be.  But the barriers to entry keep it from realizing its full potential.

So, my early brainstorming around the issue has led me to a series of steps.  Keep in mind that this is all still a braindump.

Fixing the listserv requires a dedicated group of users to:

1. Identify the power users.
2. Convince power users that there is an issue and building consensus that it can be fixed.
3. Find out what power users want from the list.  Figure out how that is different from what new users want.
4. Devise and offer an alternative venue for power users.
5. Make sure that the alternative is somehow more appealing than the listserv.
   • The alternative must have clearly stated, shared values and principals which anyone can access at any time.  (community norming… those norms must remain negotiable)
   • The alternative must have some directory function so that people can find out more about who they are talking to.  (encourages new users)
   • The alternative must fulfill the social needs of the power users which are currently prevalent on the listserv.
   • The alternative must separate purely social discussion from discussion of our professional topic in meaningful ways.
   • The alternative must support and encourage shared and reflective practice of our learning goals– our true, core professional topic.
   • The alternative cannot be more demanding technologically than e-mail.
6. Engage the power users in making (and promoting) a shift to the alternative.
7. Recruit more casual users to the alternative, which should reinforce its value to power users.
8. Repurpose the listserv so that it serves a more discrete purpose.
9. Enjoy the benefits of increased  engagement and a more robust community of practitioners, as well as an inbox that isn’t so crazy.

What do you think, dear reader?

So, yeah, Ladybug and I used to be Sprint customers, but when our service contract ended on Friday, we were ready to bail.  I’d been with them since 1998, during which time the customer service had gone from bad to worse.  (The low point was when they made us get two lines of service that we didn’t want or need.  Why two people would have four phone numbers is beyond me.)  So we’re now AT&T customers, and we have been playing with out phones pretty incessantly since picking them up yesterday.

That is about all I have to report.

Ladybug and I bought iPhones and man am I way too freakishly excited about it…

We know your iPhone is the greatest machine ever invented.  Thank you so much for posting about it in fifteen consecutive Twitter messages.  How do you say “unfollow”?

Seriously, Ladybug and I just had a conversation this week where we decided to buy iPhones when our Sprint contract is up in October.  They are nice machines.  But I swear to God, if I become one of those people whose every breath is spent in praise of Apple, I want you to shoot me in the face.

I’ve had the horrible feeling this evening that my domain name is about to expire, at which point I’m reasonably sure it would snapped up by pornographers. Then there would be lascivious pictures and videos of a man purporting to be Ross White, but who would, in fact, not be named Ross White. It would all be a clever trick by the makers of the pornography.

If you consider this a far-fetched, futuristic fiction, consider the case of HeidiWhite.com, a domain I have tried to buy for my beautiful wife several times only to be foiled.

In 2001, it was operated by a blonde actress who looked like she had been turned into a clone of Brigitte Nielsen, circa 1992. And, be still my heart, this Heidi White wrote poems. link

In 2002, the clone was replaced by a normal-looking girl who, unable to come up with a new logo or back-story, used the clone’s back-story as her own. Her poems, however, became much shorter, though no less trite. link

On August 8, 2003, the clone captured the normal-looking Heidi White and resumed control of the web page. link

Presumably drugged with clone-altering substances, the clone let the domain, and perhaps her own body, fall in the hands of pornographers. Follow this link to the Wayback Machine, and click on any of the 2004 links. You’ll be presented with a “you must be 18 to enter” page, following which you will see one of any number of porn sites. Presumably, if you were to pay these archived sites using some of your own archived funding, you could see shockingly graphic representations of the clone engaged in lewd acts. You might also find the normal-looking girl in some sort of bondage, since presumably the clone, having kidnapped her to resume control of the domain, and the pornographers who subsequently took control of both the clone and the site, would not have released her for fear that the site would once again change hands and the poetry featured therein would become even more trite.

In 2005, GoDaddy assumed control of the site, and neither the clone or the nice-looking girl were anywhere to be found. This was, I believe, the same year GoDaddy bought Super Bowl airtime and filled it with boobies. So we’ll assume they were in cahoots with the pornographers. link

It appears that clip art took over the site in 2006. link

Finally, in 2007, GoDaddy once again took control of the site, and the clip art was vanquished to 1992, where presumably, it will send a clone of Brigitte Nielsen forward into the future to purchase the most important domain in the history of mankind: HeidiWhite.com. link

Jeez, by the time I’d finished mapping out that horrific sequence of events, I finally found my login for my registrar, and discovered that BullCityPress.com was set to expire in 20 days. Thankfully, I caught it in time, so you won’t find surprising bull-porn at your favorite press web site for the next 5 years.

Tomfoolery and sheer idiocy, in bullet format:

• The list of people I’m following on Twitter has swelled from 15 to 34 in the last couple weeks.  Twitter is infinitely more satisfying now.  If you’re reading this, and you’re on Twitter, and I ain’t following you, let me know.  Perhaps you interest me.
• This is kind of amazing.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for the guy.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for anyone who’s going to have to return the stuff they hauled away.  You cannot help but wonder how anyone came up with it.
• Spent most of yesterday moving furniture. We now have the corner cabinets that Ladybug’s grandfather made.  And some other crap.
• I’m headed back to the classroom!  Well, for a day.  I’m subbing for a colleague’s poetry workshop next week.  I have missed being around poetry students.  Badly.  I realized it once more when I was writing a recommendation for a student and I read over his creative sample.
• I’m currently badgering Tom McHenry to make me into a cyborg.

I got back and forth on Twitter– sometimes I think there’s a ton of value to it, sometimes I think it’s a complete and total waste.  It is, of course, only as good as the people you’re following, or the content you’re adding.  I’ve felt like a less-than-adequate content producer of late, so that part of the equation isn’t up to snuff.  And I don’t follow a huge number of people– a poet friend-of-a-friend that I respect a great deal, my boss and a handful of co-workers, Smalls and Ayse, a couple improv peeps, and the biggest twit on Twitter, my great friend Lee Creighton.

Some days, my sidebar is full of tweets from just one or two people, and I feel like there’s not much to it– some political linky-linky (important, yes, but not what I use Twitter for), a bunch of @soandso tweets that say good morning or discuss coffee, a little bit of technical discussion (I follow a kickass coder).  None of it makes my life richer.  But you do get things like:

• This morning a friend posted that there was a new traffic pattern at one of the best places to hang out in Carrboro.  This isn’t earth-shattering news, and I am quite sure I would have noticed when I tried to turn in the out lane.  But still, it’s cool to know those things as they happen.
• Found out that an author I have a great deal of respect for is speaking in the Triangle soon, and since I don’t regularly read the Independent, I would not have known that otherwise.  (Alas, I’m spoken for that evening.)
• @arsepoetica tweets about the music she’s listening to, and when she talks about a band I don’t know, I make a point to check them out, because we like a lot of the same stuff.
• A couple of times, I have looked at a recent tweet by Lee and thought, “OK, he’s available for hijinks.”  And then we hijink.

I’ve thought frequently that I would be more interested in following poets; fiction writers would be good too, but poets would be my top targets.  The compact nature of tweets could/should produce some interesting results among a group of like-minded, twittering poets, one that I would be very keen to watch even if I wasn’t an active participant.  But I cannot find that group, if they exist; I can’t find more than one working poet twittering right now (and she tweets about her day job).

So how to make Twitter more useful, if the people I most want to follow aren’t on it?  As it turns out, it may be following more people.  I have been very selective thusfar about who I would follow because I was trying to keep up with everything that people close to me post.  But that actually might not be what serves me– I might do better to follow a bunch of people, and if I miss tweets, I miss tweets.  If I miss tweets aimed at me, so be it.  Because if someone wants/needs to talk to me directly, they know how to find me via more reliable means that Twitter.

Following more people seems like it would create a sort of conversation slipstream– the real world happens, and the conversation on Twitter is the backwash.  So one could reasonably step in and out of that at will; it would be the nerd equivalent of the evil movie character who goes to his room with 100 TVs on 100 different channels and simply sits and absorbs all the information.

Now I just have to find interesting people to follow.  I suppose the problem is still the same… but where, in the past, I would only follow someone I knew in real life (or, at least, had some level of private communication with), I’m going to follow some people who just strike me as interesting.  I added one earlier today, who saw my tweet about wanting to follow more poets and writers, and direct messaged me about it– we have a similar desire to see it happen.  (She’s also a proponent of 140-character microfic, or, as I’m calling it now, “tweetfic.”)

Perhaps I’ll be more interesting as a result.

One of the joys of carpal tunnel syndrome is that you get to use voice recognition software, which leads to some strange misunderstandings. Almost invariably, you end up making some sort of slurring your speech, because not everyone can talk like a newscaster (which the software recommends for excellent dictation). This isn’t so much a problem when you’re writing an e-mail, because you can prove the e-mail before you send it. But when you’re talking to a friend on Google talk, and you want to keep up the pace of conversation, you’ll almost always say something embarrassing in print that was perfectly innocuous when you spoke aloud.

The proof of one’s manliness is his willingness to make these mistakes in his blog entries, and leave them uncorrected.

Well, damn. About ten minutes after I Twittered that no one else should start a new Scrabulous game with me because I have nine going, Scrabulous is no longer available on Facebook. I broke the Intarwebs.

Update: It came back. False alarm.

Should you find yourself looking to sample fine music before purchasing it from the industry that treats you like a criminal, BeeMP3 is a terrific search engine for mp3s. I’m currently listening to Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain,” which is much cooler in my memory than it is in real life.

Check this class description for an upcoming class at WWC:

The repetition of phrases and sounds is a technique many of us use to give our poems rhetorical as well as emotional emphasis. Too often, though, our poems are overwhelmed by this gesture and devolve into so much noise. In this class we will look to Whitman and Hopkins’ highly charged poems of ravaged landscapes to consider how one might “repeat” (or return) as a means of making the poem and its argument /more/ muscular and fluid at the same time. We will look to issues of craft to guide us. As such, students will be expected to participate fully in lively discussion.

Friends have already e-mailed to ask if I’m drooling with delight. I’m drooling.

The following bullet points consist of links you should follow and the context for following them.

• A parody of “The Office,” created to make you miss the striking writers even more. My friend Charlie directs, my friend Anthony stars.
• My little magazine gets a mention in the News & Observer’s holiday gift guide.
• I called American Gangster “fair.” Creighton liked it a lot better. Metacritic says 76. (Creighton, notice that Michael Collins got the higher ranking.)
• Pinksy gives some love to Van Jordan’s terrific Quantum Lyrics.
• My 14-year-old brother is now allowing me to stalk him via Twitter.
• I felt the need to end this short list with a lolcat.

via LoFro: The Death of E-mail

I may not be ready for e-mail to die. But I think I’ll be ok if it does.

Continuing my push towards the perfect inbox, I have gone ahead and arranged GTD folders for my personal e-mail account. And my Gmail account now has IMAP, so I’m finally bringing that into Thunderbird. Will the wonders never cease?

(Answer: no.)

Planned obsolesence is a pain. A relatively inconsequential rubber button my phone popped off, and the sprint store can’t repair it. Their solution: ship me a new phone. Over a thirty- cent part! sigh

Since I got home from work at 5:40, I have been steadily working on my technical manual, with short breaks for dinner and bathtub + short stories. About 15 minutes ago, the power blinked out, and I lost the last hour or so worth of my work. Word’s autorecover didn’t help… well, not much. I guess I did keep the stuff from before that last hour. I am so angry / disappointed right now.

Yikes. I tend to sign my business correspondence with “Best,” because, well, I generally do wish the best for my clients and co-workers. But apparently, some of them are thinking that’s a brush-off!

Dear reader, know that if I e-mail you and sign the e-mail “Best,” I still love you. If I sign it “Sincerely,” I’m keeping my distance but you can trust the contents of the e-mail. If I don’t like you, you’ll see a signature like “I hope you die.” Or perhaps “Until the next time I hear from you.”

I’m with Jennings. The lolcatz are the greatest thing that has ever happened to teh Intarweb.

Long overdue: I just purchased a sound card. My music sounds much better than it did before this purchase. I don’t hear the rattling of the CPU’s fan making digital noise in the speakers. I am making good use of this new purchase by listening to Natasha Bedingfield. *sigh*

I would be willing to bet that any nutritional value in the green beans I am eating has been offset by the fact that I made them with butter and soy. I do love soy sauce.

*today’s microfic archived to offline environs*

I accidentally overbid on an iPod on eBay, and won it. It was still cheap, just more than I should have spent. It was a 30GB black 5th gen. When the box came, it said 30GB on the outside, but the iPod itself is a 60GB. Not such an overbid now.

Well, after several months of suffering through the stutters and the syetm freezes associated with iTunes 7, I finally ditched three months of user data and ratings, and went back to iTunes 6. Sigh. That’s several times that I’ve had that happen. I’m hoping that’s the end of the nightmare that was iTunes 7. I’ve seen several blogs calling for an “iTunes Lite”– something that would take advantage of all the neat stuff you can get in the iTunes store, but not all of the bloated features. Gapless playback might be nice, CoverFlow is not anything I want my memory wasted on.

Wrestling last night. We went to dim sum this morning, I got a haircut, and I did a little research. All of this was a means of delaying the real work; some days, some weekends, you need a little procrastination. When I finally started, I had a great deal of fun looking at student poems. I’ve begun re-thinking which assignments I’ll give to my students. I’m now a little in awe that I didn’t assign sonnets last semester. I’m close to giving up the sestina, villanelle, or pantoum assignment; my apprehension comes from the fact that one of the best poems submitted last semester was a sestina that came in for that assignment. And sestinas are hard little buggers.

I am reading a friend’s book, and I feel like I am being taken to school all over again. Holy cow.