Coffee on the Keyboard

The McCain campaign will probably go down in history as one of the worst-run campaigns in American history. Not because of a few horrible gaffs (“helped create” the BlackBerry? intended to insult the Prime Minister of Spain? speaking in front of a green screen?) but because they forgot who their candidate was.

The following does not constitute rigorous proof. Just observation and conjecture.

For an experiment, I went to Google News and searched for “mccain” “palin” “obama” and “biden”, all separately, and just looked at the total results. (I looked on the second page because Google’s duplicate-finding algorithms usually seem to pare down results by the time you get to page 2.)

Here are the results:

• obama — 433.631
• mccain — 416,804
• biden — 86,164
• palin — 202,033

Obama and McCain are fairly even (unsurprising, since most articles that mention one mention the other). What shocks me is that Sarah Palin, who almost no one in the country had heard of until two months ago, has already caught up to half of the candidates, who have been on the trail for a year and a half.

Unless Michael Palin has been making tons of news, lately?

She’s got two and a half times the press of Joe Biden, who’s been a US Senator for 35 years, so probably has some old mentions in there.

We see a similar trend in the regular Google search:

• obama — 206,000,000
• mccain — 146,000,000
• biden — 37,900,000
• palin — 107,000,000

Here I attribute the difference between Obama and McCain to Obama’s lead among young voters. But Palin has even more momentum here, half of Obama and two-thirds of McCain. (I re-ran this search several times, because Google said it was customizing my results based on my recent queries.)

Why?

McCain picked an ambitious, photogenic campaigner. He, on the other hand, is an occasionally ornery, but usually soft-spoken old man. Barack Obama is a well-spoken Black man with a thousand-watt smile. Biden is the soft-spoken older man on that ticket.

Unfortunately for Senator McCain, he also picked an unknown, inexperienced Governor who usually sounds like a high school student who didn’t read the book, and looks like Tina Fey. Comic. Gold.

I realize that picking someone less exciting that John McCain may have been difficult, but picking someone much more interesting, and not in a particularly good way, was definitely a bad choice. Yes she energized the base. She also energized every comedian and reporter. So much so that they forgot about John McCain.

They are “voting for the chick.”

For disclosure, I only identify as a Democrat because they’re as far left as I can get and still have a realistic chance of winning. I’m roughly in the left side of the British Liberal Democrat party.

But, if I was a Republican, I would be angry about this. As a liberal, it’s just funny.

Google your name. Right now. I’ll wait.

Good. What came up?

Look at the first page of results and ask yourself these questions about each one:

1. Is it really me?
2. Did I create this?
3. Do I control this?

You need to be able to say “yes” to all of these for at least the top two or three results. (As I write this, the RSSmeme page repeating my Google Reader shared items has crawled above my blog, and I’m upset about it.)

Creating Identity

I’m lucky. My last name is very rare, so even if you Google just “Socol” I come in second—only to my father, and ahead of Wikipedia. You may not be so lucky, saddled with a name like Jones or Smith or, even worse, you might have the same name as a celebrity. You may have an uphill battle.

People with common names need to get creative. It can be as simple as adding an initial—my friend became Alec R. Johnston to distinguish himself. Something a little more creative—Lisa Bettany named her blog Mostly Lisa. Or you can geek out, like Ben Lew, who uses the name n0s0ap. (Those are zeros.)

Ben uses the name n0s0ap on del.icio.us, flickr, Last.fm, Digg, Twitter, etc. Lisa uses a combination of “MostlyLisa” and “LisaBettany.” I use a combination of an old name, “UrbaneExistance” (I know it’s spelled wrong) and “JamesSocol” for all new registrations.

But all of us, Alec, Ben, Lisa, and I, make sure our real names are linked to our identities. It’s no Clark Kent: n0s0ap is Ben Lew, with the glasses on or off.

Owning Identity

Do you own your own domain name? Why not? Go buy it. Now. Go!

I have this conversation with friends all the time. Would you want someone signing your name on paper documents? Of course not, so why would you let them do the same thing online? I own jamessocol.com, jamessocol.net, and jamessocol.org, just so no one else does. Even if you do nothing but have it redirect to your social network of choice, you should own your name.

If your name is taken, reread the last section and get creative.

Now, about those social networks. You don’t need to be on every one, but get on a few, build a profile, and put your name on it. You can create and control your own Facebook and MySpace pages without knowing a single HTML tag. Once you’ve got a name, whether it’s your real name or something else, use it. last.fm/user/you. twitter.com/you.

Controlling Identity

The best way I’ve found to control what the web knows about you is to start your own propaganda campaign. Put your name on a lot of things, preferably with links back to your own site.

An easy way to start is by commenting. Blog comments help the most, since you spread that influence around the whole internet, but within MySpace or Facebook posting real, meaningful, interesting comments on profiles and walls will make sure people think of you when they hear your name.

If you have the time, try blogging. There are a lot of blogs with great advice, but you can always just “write what you know.” Once you find your voice, the writing flows.

What else? It depends what you like. If you take pictures, get a Flickr stream. Last.fm is a great way to share and find music you like. GoodReads is a similar site for books. Twitter is great for finding people with similar interests and building connections. LinkedIn is a professional social network, particularly good for people in marketing or new media. Blogger, while not the best blogging platform, has some good community features. There is a lot out there.

Be Yourself

Don’t let someone else be you! Own your own identity and be proud of it. It will help you build authority and when a potential employer or client googles you, they’ll get a good idea about you from the first page of results.

What else, 2.0-savvy readers? What did I forget?

So many apartments around here, and the whole local method of finding apartments, are based on these out-of-the-city, suburb-light developments. I don’t want to live there. Continue reading

Norman Mailer died today.

It doesn’t matter much to me. I didn’t know him. I’d never read any of his books. I rarely read any of his articles or columns, and then only when we crossed paths on the internet.

Norman Mailer

But I have not been reading lately, and the death of such a well-known author did give me cause to think about literature and reading in general. Soon, if the next month goes well, I will suddenly find myself with more free time than I have had in the last 42 months: I will be a college graduate with a 9-5 job and a few friends still in class.

In those 42 months, I have developed a nasty habit of spending my free time idly at my computer; scouring the vast emptiness of the internet for interesting things to read or to see and occasionally talking to real-live humans. I want to break myself of this habit and nurture a new dependency on reading that other great invention: the book.

To that end, I’m starting a list of books I want to read, which is something I should have done years ago. Below I am reproducing this list as an open call for additions and suggestions. This is in no particular order and is based only on what I’ve read recently.

• The Name of the Rose* Umberto Eco.
• The 42nd Parallel John Dos Passos.
• 1919 John Dos Passos.
• The Big Money John Dos Passos.
• The Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer.
• Armies of the Night Norman Mailer.
• The Executioner Norman Mailer.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey.
• The Odyssey tr. Stanley Lombardon.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being* Milan Kundera.
• Carrie Stephen King.
• William Marshall* Georges Duby.
• Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell.
• Moby Dick* Herman Melville.
• L’Étranger (in French) Albert Camus.
• The Plague Albert Camus.
• Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov.
• Camera Obscura Vladimir Nabokov.

An * means I’ve already started the book.

So I did end up going to Urban Outfitters. I was about to blow almost $100 on a jacket and hoodie, but then the jacket rang up for 90% off. That’s right. 90%. I don’t think she typed in enough 9s, because it was sure supposed to be $50 and came out to $5.

I think people have appreciated the fact that I wore a <gasp /> different shirt.

I love Sushi. Even more than that, I love being the type of person who eats sushi.

One of the few local restaurants around here, completely independent, is a sushi place down the street called Q Sushi. It’s run by a family, I think they’re Korean but I’m not positive, and they really roll some quality fish.

It’s not as “nice” as some of the other places around here, but it’s cheap, it’s fast, and it tastes good. And it’s the closest. What more could you want?

On an unrelated note… Only having one hoodie (and one or two long-sleeve t-shirts) is starting to bore me, so tomorrow I think I’m wandering down to the vintage store and/or Urban Outfitters.

To me! It’s my 21st birthday, and rather than be at a bar at midnight, I strapped on my boots and walked out to the fields behind my house. That’s right, the first thing I did on my birthday was kick a soccer ball.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the “orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us…” But what did he mean by that; how can the future recede before us? In the book, Gatsby is driven by his desire to rekindle the past; to create a future that is no longer possible.

It is said that when we are born, for roughly the first year of our lives, humans have the ability to hear and distinguish all possible sounds, but at some point, those sounds become more limited to what we hear regularly. Hence, constantly expose a newborn to music, they will retain a better “ear” for it than others; expose a child to several languages, they will be more able to learn and understand them, simply because they can hear all the tones–like African “click”
languages or Chinese’s four intonation. We are all born with the ability to learn any language, but we lose if it we do not use it: the ability to learn new sounds “year by year recedes before us.”

I would give anything to talk to myself at five–as I’m sure we all would.

I am a shallow person: I want to be great at something–successful–in a way that people remember me and I compete at the top level. More than that, I just want to be good at something. Really good. I want to excel at one thing. Not to be the best in the world, but among the best.

That future is rapidly receding before me. At 21, if I were going to be really exceptional, I would be already. If I were going to be a professional musician, I would be in a conservatory practicing and writing. If I were going to play football professionally–even semi-professionally–I would either be on a team or a starter on my college’s varsity team. These are the only two things that have really managed to hold my interest.

Teaching is a consolation prize. It’s a way I can hope to help a few people, hope to coach some high school football, hope to be remembered by an old student or two. There is still time to be an exceptional mathematician, but I think I would have already shown some signs, and I am too glad to be done with math at the end of the day/week/semester.

So today I am 21, 5 months and 8 days older than Wayne Rooney, and watching my orgiastic future recede just a little farther as I “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”