brewery33

I’ve lost something

In the past few weeks I have noticed something happening. The subtle nuance of this wretched annoyance has been gaining momentum and advancing upon our community with the grace of an ogre pillaging a rural Swedish community. The white elephant in the room has taken its place on the stage and announced that he is present. Everyone at the party has been empowered to acknowledge the subject that we all spoke of indiscreetly.

University of the Pacific is an institution that is quite honestly one of the most immaculate grounds in the City of Stockton. A short stroll through the meticulously pruned rose garden to admire the art of maintaining these visually delicate yet astonishingly resilient plants allows escape. A saunter into the small forum of columns that is easily recognizable as you have seen the image in a coveted family portrait that takes proud residence in the living room of a beloved friend or family member. These and many more monuments of visual expression are valuable to the atmosphere of experimental and free thought, as well as the surrounding community.

Stockton Beautiful is an organization of concerned individuals that have a mission to beautify their community. The board and membership of the philanthropic group from the young and energetic to the wise and accomplished infuse each other with the notion of beauty. Beauty goes further than its superficial stereotype. Beauty creates a culture. Pride comes from beauty. Stockton Beautiful is no stranger to efforts of invigorating a community of individuals to accomplish unthinkable feats of excellence. We can see the fruits of their work in the collaborative spectacle made possible through driven community philanthropic exertion, in the Rose Garden that resides in Victory Park on the north side of the Haggin Museum.

Greg Bahr is a citizen of Stockton. If you have spent any time on the Miracle Mile enjoying a sunny walk on Sunday, or patronizing one of the loving merchants, you have probably come across Greg. He is responsible for community events in the district such as the wildly successful Miracle Mile Night through his interaction with a group of focused individuals that serve on the little known, highly experimental, yet overwhelmingly effective Neighborhood Renaissance Committee. This group is of the mind that if neighborhood events are present the fabric of the community will be strengthened. Communities with strong fabric tend to employ a lighter outlook on the grim offerings that life brings. My opinion of Greg is rather skewed, due to my respect for his efforts, but I am fairly confident that if you stop and listen to his pleas for a cohesive effort in the infinite quest for betterment, we will most definitely agree.

These three groups evidence the presence of positive movement in our City. People are working to create the nirvana of community. As we spoke of earlier, a white elephant that has come from the shadows of civic conversation in Stockton. His presence has been embraced. It is all too easy to make fun, stay cynical and ignore our emotions. The perception of mediocrity and ignorance is lavished upon us by our national media publications. Our local media has become snarky and arrogant to the population of new media consumers. I have found myself embroiled in passion fueled discourse that is not contributing to the solution but rather of symptom of the white elephant. This is the most troubling to me.

It is through my faith that I have weathered the stormy waters of loss. I am no person to preach and ladle my ideological rhetoric upon you. My only mention of this is to make apparent of my plans to regain my imagination and focus my efforts. In my loss of imagination I plan to embark upon a spiritual journey in search of the treasure that has befallen me.

The white elephant’s message is a dangerous path. His call to acceptance is my cue to reboot my operating system. With the Lenten season upon us and the coming of Ash Wednesday, I will be disconnecting from the matrix of chatter, and focus on real efforts. I will leave the acoustically challenged halls of Twitter to find the voice that I have lost. I plan to engage the philanthropy that is meaningful to me and shed the cynicism that has polluted my mind. I plan to detoxify my spirit in an effort to return with the child like wonder that I desire.

Words are not meaningful if not built upon action. My grand plans of success through philanthropy are on trial and it is my turn to stand in front of the judge and plea our case for freedom. I will not be participating in any form of social media other than blogging. I will not be Twitter alerting my blog. My reason for this is that the core of my answer lies in personal discovery. Vanity and narcissism are the foes in which I am at battle with. It is the constant quest for the laugh, that I have lost the ability to entertain myself.

Easter will be the day in which I emerge back to the scene with a hopefully fresh look and box of hustle. I will look to the people that are fixtures in my life for support and share the journey through this little piece of real estate on the internet I call brewery33 aka my stupid writing.

I leave you with a quote that hopefully bounces around your cranium and ferments for a while. I actually don’t know who said it, but it is in no way my work. I hope that works for citing purposes.

“In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”

Stockton will win.

St. Baldrick’s Day Massacre

Today was potentially a big day for philanthropy in Stockton. During my daily lurk of the Siders blog I came across the young Lincoln high school student that stood before City Council offering the opportunity to help children that have cancer merely by shaving your head. The poor student got the political treatment and walked away with a meager offer from vice mayor Kathy Miller to hold the clippers, rather than get scalped for charity.

This event gave me the idea to ask my current favorite City Council member (due to her presence in the playground we nerds know as Twitter) @susanEggman if she was game to shave her head. My initial tweet to her was in complete jest and I actually was waiting for some of the faithful to say that I was acting like a bully again and to stop being so rude. Side note, I have found that sarcasm and jokes tend to not translate so well in the written word.

Much to my surprise @susanEggman accepted the challenge but added a caveat, raise 5 thousand dollars. It’s basically a political trump card. It puts me in a position, which began as a common chide, of now becoming a fund raiser for a cause that while is very worthy, doesn’t really fire me up enough to take even more of what little precious time that I have with my family, away from them.

I have received a lot of support from the Twitter community from Stockton and abroad encouraging the pursuit of the goal (thank you by the way), but much to the displeasure of the crowd I will have to bow out. Let’s say politics have won this round. While in a perfect world I would love to drop everything and raise the 5 thousand dollars that it would take to have @susanEggman shave her head, not only embarrass her, but more importantly provide the funds to whatever children’s cancer society that Lincoln High school is benefitting, I must swallow my pride and accept defeat.

I am still game to get my head shaved, and invite fellow Stockton Tweeps to do the same, as long as it doesn’t cost any money. With my stupid start up and educational pilgrimage, I really have very little cash to spare. The only tangible thing of value that I could give to benefit the research of children’s cancer at this point is my dignity by allowing my locks to taken.

Feel free if you are a philanthropist in search of a cause, to take this episode of Parks and Recreation and run with it. It will not be considered poaching and you will be assured run in the paper and possibly TV coverage. It has some legs, but will take a lot of energy to meet the goal, especially in this recession. I hate pussing out, but through many battles and wild stunts I have learned to fold my hand. Thank you Kenny Rogers. Now excuse me while I go to write a check that the City Council is making me do, because I do business in an Enterprise Zone.

Politics 1, @brewery33 -100, Lincoln High School St. Baldrick’s Day complete win, because lots of people are talking about your event. Keep it philanthropic.

With a little help from my friends

I have been at an odds with the @recordnet’s decision to paywall their content. My initial reaction was that they were basically slitting their throat. As the notion of charging for content has fermented in my mind a while, I think that the decision is not far from the solution. Definitely not anywhere close, but closer to solution than to total and utter failure.

Being in business myself, I respect the ideal that a business must make money. Profits are not the only reason a business must produce a black bottom line. For instance if an organization plans any sort of future, innovation and pushing limits is essential. In order to innovate and push limits the organization must employ some pretty talented staff. Talented staff costs money. I get it.

Rather than outline the history of the newspapers presence on the web, we will just assume that if you have made it this far in the essay that you understand the newspapers are charging for previously free content. If you are not aware of that, let me Google that for you.

Enter the paywall. A blogging colleague by geographic area, stated some pretty good criticism of the new fangled business plan that the Record was embarking upon. @slickDiaz noted that if we are supposed to pay for this content, make it worth our while by offering some dynamic content such as podcasts, video, and supporting documents, just to name a few. I have a whole long winded opinion that addresses this approach, but since people like to read 500ish words, I will practice brevity and speak on it another day.

What if we allowed people that are paying customers, to share the article with their friends by providing a link to the paying customer. This special link would end with a number that a script on the referenced page recognizes and allows the person who followed the link access. Influence by creating a social following. I am sure through scripting this could all be possible and traceable to analyze what type of content is popular, by digital word of mouth. Yes there will probably be some sort of hack that will generate scripts to allow common journalism thieves to view the documents without receiving a link from a subscriber, but I don’t think that I would worry so much about people pirating my writing, because at least they are receiving my news and have worked hard to get the news from my source. It is actually kind of flattering.

The notion of allowing people to share is not so crazy. Liken the concept to making a copy of an article to share with a group that you are working with, or to post on the bulletin board at work. Copyright laws are probably broken when people share writing this way, but you just reached an audience that would have otherwise never read your offering. It creates a sort of affiliance program that might encourage people that do not subscribe to the online version of the paper to realize the value of the product through a little taste, from a person that they trust. You could even leverage the power of suggestion by offering local influential bloggers a free account to offer to their readers a peek behind the paywall at the green pastures of dynamic content.

People such as myself and the rest of my generation, digest news a touch different than say our parents and grandparents. Through a completely un-scientific poll I conducted, found that the only people that have agreed to the new paywall model the Record has offered us, are the old people who probably use an aol email start their web surfing by reading the news at Yahoo!, and think that an email client is someone that I sell things to. In my opinion it is time to upgrade your news criers from the kid on the corner and the creepy guy that hangs out in front of the grocery store to the revolutionary idea of social sales.

If anything, the managing staff at the Record could allow this notion access onto the agenda of whatever meeting that whatever board of executives deal with the online subscription department. At that point they can realize that I don’t know what I am talking about and continue down the path of alienating their audience.