Category: Blogging

There’s an economics concept called moral hazard that I kept hearing on Bloomberg and finally did a little research on.

Moral hazard refers to the prospect that a party insulated from risk (such as through insurance) will be less concerned about the negative consequences of the risk than they otherwise might be; for example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking the car even though locking the car is a simple risk reduction strategy. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution in a transaction does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency or incentive to act less carefully than would otherwise be the case, leaving another party in the transaction to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions.

Moral hazard goes by another common name – rewarding behaviors with an outcome that’s opposite the goals you want to achieve. See also mixed messages, mixed signals, and rewarding stupidity. The most prominent example of moral hazard I can think of is an electorate that was tired of the Iraq war re-electing the president, thereby reinforcing behaviors it didn’t want.

I mention this because a number of times during this past weekend, the topic of giver’s gain came up. Give to get, give, etc., and the only caution I would mention is to keep moral hazard in mind. Give to get, but make sure that you’re doing so for the right reasons and not providing an incentive for unwanted behaviors.

Got tired of WuCoco, so I changed up the decor around here along with a new mission statement: Awaken Your Superhero. When I thought about it, the moments in my life that have been the most powerful and moving are those when a friend or loved one suddenly stepped outside their comfort zone, stepped up, and became something – someone – greater. I hope to be able to bring that experience to as many people as possible in my lifetime, starting with PodCamps. PodCamp won’t make you a superhero, but it will give you the venue and time to help you find it within yourself.

Adam Curry had an interesting post on his travel experiences recently, especially with his TSA experience. I’ve had some interesting experiences with the TSA, and I generally assume I’ll take half an hour to get through security these days.

Frankly, I really worry when the TSA doesn’t pull me aside and search all my belongings. If I were a TSA employee and saw the stuff I carry when I travel, I’d probably request a background check and fingerprints.

On my most recent trip to PodCamp Philly, my luggage contained:

• A 750 GB external hard drive plus firewire cables and AC adapter
• A Logitech MM50 media player plus cabling, case, and remote
• Two sets of headphones, one noise cancelling, plus battery chargers for them
• A Nikon D40 plus USB cables and battery charger
• A Sanyo VPC CG65 plus cables and battery charger
• A MacBook Pro plus cabling
• A 5 GB iPod plus dock cable, AC adapter, and USB
• An M-Audio Microtrack plus adapter and charger
• An Audio Technica PRO/24 condenser mic plus cabling and batteries
• A Samson C01U large diaphragm condenser mic plus cabling
• An Airport Express wireless access point plus Ethernet cable
• Several Ethernet cables
• Lots of USB to mini-USB cables
• A Nokia N91 phone plus data cable, car charger, and desktop charger
• Two USB card readers plus cabling
• A Plantronic bluetooth headset plus charger

I worry when security looks at all of that in the X-Ray (because I don’t check the luggage – it’s all a carry-on) machine and doesn’t wonder what the heck I’m doing. And all of that, by the way, weighs only 38 pounds.

A Day to Remember, A Day to Act

Lots of folks today remembering, looking back at September 11, 2001, six years ago. Remembering what was.

Remember also who you were and how much you’ve changed, what powers you have now that were unthinkable back then.

In 2001, there was no podcasting. Blogging was relatively limited.

In 2001, there was no Twitter, and IM presence was silo’ed heavily.

In 2001, there was no Flickr. No YouTube. No Blip.tv. No TubeMogul.

In 2001, there was no Facebook. No MySpace.

The reach, the powers, the abilities you have as a digitally connected human being six years later VASTLY eclipse what you could do in 2001. You have at your fingertips more tools, more methods, more strategies for communicating and sharing with your world than ever before, more ways to tell your story and experience the stories of others.

You have the power to change the world.

Fundamentalism, be it neoconservative ideology, radical Islam, or Jerry Falwell (how’s the temperature down there, buddy?) requires an absence of knowledge. It requires an absence of differing points of view, a willful deprivation of any information that does not conform to a single party line. Now more than ever you have the ability to engage those around you and share your knowledge, share your stories, and in doing so chip away at fundamentalism.

If you lament 9/11 and what has happened since, commit ever more strongly to using the tools of new media to make the world and your community a better place. Only together, through our direct connections to each other and to the world around us, can we defuse the potency of fundamentalism.

How do you get started?

As my good friend Chris Brogan says, “Just press record.”

For every light that shines, a shadow falls. – munk

Last year, 19 close friends and colleagues contributed $2,010 towards leukemia and lymphoma research. This year, my wife and I are walking again in the Boston Common to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Research program. What’s being researched? This caught my eye:

Multiple myeloma is a lethal malignancy for which cure remains elusive. Stem cell transplantation results in improved disease free survival but ultimately fails to prevent recurrence. A promising area of research is the use of cancer vaccines to educate the immune system to target and eliminate tumor cells. Studies demonstrate that the immune system is particularly sensitive to cancer vaccines following stem cell transplantation. We have developed a novel tumor vaccine involving the fusion of potent immune stimulating cells known as dendritic cells (DC) with a patient’s own tumor cells. The vaccine presents a wide array of tumor proteins to the immune system. Laboratory studies have shown that DC/myeloma fusions stimulate lymphocytes to recognize and kill myeloma cells.

A lot of the time, pleas for donations and contributions go the human route – here’s little Johnny who needs to be saved, please open your hearts and wallets. I call Bravo Sierra on that – it’s nice, but this shows you how your money is being used.

If you’re not biotech minded, cancer researchers are looking at treating cancer like the flu or any other communicable disease, using the body’s own immune system to fight tumors, rather than just pump someone full of drugs and hope it takes. How cool is that? Going with nature and natural defense mechanisms rather than trying to sidestep them.

Please continue to support innovative research (which will in turn save little Johnny) like this with your generous contribution to Light the Night by clicking here.

Jeff Pulver, and by extension, Chris Brogan, have been enjoying some robust commentary on Jeff’s recent BusinessWeek article and post about switching his business social networking to Facebook. Comments – some rather direct – have been made back and forth about Facebook and LinkedIn and who’s on what. Here’s a different perspective.

Christopher Alexander, in his seminal work, The Timeless Way of Building, makes the point that how we use a space defines the space. Put a bunch of benches in rows in a long rectangular room with a pulpit up front and you have a church. Put a bench on a lawn in the middle of some greenery and you have a park. You’ll get variations, of course, but the function defines the space.

So it goes with social networks, and how you use them. Facebook is a social space, used to develop and grow community, but the odds of you getting data out of it are very, very small. They rigidly enforce the walled garden on data, so for managing contacts and relationships in the sense of a CRM, Facebook wasn’t built for that. LinkedIn is both a resume manager and a CRM of sorts. You can push and pull data from LinkedIn with great ease, but its interactive capabilities for things like discussions, polls, and community activities are very poor.

To force LinkedIn to become a community or Facebook to become a CRM would be futile – each has its purpose, and you need both, at least from my perspective as an online marketer. If you have a list of email addresses and incomplete contact information, nothing will help verify and clean that list faster than LinkedIn – but if you want to create forums for the people on that list to have a conversation, Facebook is the place. If you want to market music or media online, MySpace for all its flaws is still the best place to be, as I’m discovering marketing my Student Loan Radio music podcast.

And if you, like me, are tasked with doing it all for a company or organization, you’d better have a flag planted in the soil at each place, and have appropriate media deliverables for each.