Month: July 2007

I’m now carrying two mobile phones around with me; one from work and my own. Those of you who know about my obsession with phones and other shiny objects might think I’d enjoy this, but it’s actually kind of annoying, and might just push me over the man bag threshold.

One of them is on Verizon, which has a news section in its mobile web browser. To fit in the limited real estate of the mobile screen they have even fewer words to play with than a newspaper editor, so the headlines are terse, often to the point of incomprehensibility. And they can only fit two on the screen at a time. Here are my favorite recent juxtapositions:

Congress Returns
Mice Overrun Lake Area

Space Shuttle Leaves Dock
Taliban Occupies Area

Heatwave Continues
Pre-teen Sisters Accused

Jerry sent me this cheery little greeting this morning, but the thing I enjoyed most about it was the message that accompanied it in the email:

A loved one, friend, admirer, or other computer user has sent you a card from someecards.com!

That pretty much covers the full spectrum of anyone who could have possibly sent me a card. At first I thought it ruled out 500 monkeys with 500 typewriters, but on second read, it does not.

Abe and Kathleen got married Saturday night in a lovely ceremony that included the best first dance I’ve ever seen. It was a full-on hip hop extravaganza complete with rump shaking, set to a tune that everyone younger than me no doubt has playing on their iPhone at this very moment. We asked Abe how much time they had worked on it. "Not much," he replied. "We worked with a choreographer and rehearsed three or four times for a couple of hours and then practiced about ten hours at home." Now that’s a dedication to the audience that you don’t often see at a wedding. So step up, people. From now on I don’t just want to be fed and boozed, I want a floor show.

Oh, and another thing. Abe and Kathleen had a tomato bar, with fresh local tomatoes, cucumber salad, pesto, olives and fresh mozzarella. I would also like this to be mandatory at all summer events, not just weddings. Why isn’t there a tomato bar on every corner instead of a Starbucks?

So here’s my next attempt at getting back into the tech swing of things: moblogging. I am composing this on my mobile. First impressions of moblogging: smaller, more annoying, less interesting but with more colons. Also, the predictive text feature doesn’t know the word moblogging. It wants to call it noblogigog, which is only just a bit sillier.

I just looked at three or four of the blogs I used to read on a regular basis, and all but one is either completely kaput or almost as sadly neglected as my own. “I actually had someone email me about a year ago to see if I had died. I had not.” I barely even remembered how to get here to post, and a lot has changed. This seems to contradict the general trend I read about everywhere that social media is the new black. Why is it then that all the blogs I first read are dead?

I know the reason I stopped blogging; I didn’t have any damn time. If you read the last post, you will see that I was about to start a job in the music bidness. I did that, and now I’m out again. Let’s just say it wasn’t as much fun as it should have been. And once I’d had dinner with Billy Bragg and met Chuck D, Robyn Hitchcock and John Doe, I figured I’d had enough to hold me for a while.

I’m now back on the corporate teat, doing PR for a big software company. Those of you who used to read this blog back when it had a pulse, or who know me from the real world, know that this is not an unusual move. It’s odd to be back in corporate America, but the nice things about it are pretty nice so far.

One thing that’s changed about PR in the six or seven years since I was doing it on a regular basis: blogs. Everything I read about the industry tells me that I’m a chump to be paying attention to The Wall Street Journal. I should be pitching to bloggers. Also I need to be on Facebook and Twitter and probably a bunch of stuff I’ve never heard of. Looks like I have some catching up to do.

I don’t have my blogging voice back yet. I’ll have to figure out what that is. I know that I probably won’t be writing the relatively long and thought-out posts I used to write back when I was unemployed. But I’m going to try to do something, even if it’s just posting the odd juxtapositions that come up on my mobile phone web browser’s news headlines. “I could give you a for instance, but that would squander another potential post, and I can’t afford that.”