There are three distinct issues that should be addressed by anyone looking to engage in social media that are generally under appreciated or overlooked by people when they present themselves on the Internet.

The key words related to these elements are Privacy, Personas and Persistence.

Let’s start with probably the easiest of those to tackle, Personas.

What is a persona? A persona is the image of yourself that you project to the world and therefore is the image of you formed by your audience, be they your next door neighbor or a million TV viewers. It is who people think you are and there are many factors that prejudice your persona even in a real-world face to face engagement.

For the greater part of the 20th Century people in many cultures only had to worry about managing at most two to four personas in their day to day lives; their “at home and unguarded image”, their “work image”, in some cases their “out on the town/with friends” image and let’s not forget their internal voice. For people in the Entertainment industry or in visible leadership roles, some of these frequently blur.

Let’s take for example the actor Mel Gibson. For the greater part of the 1980’s and 1990’s he presented a public persona of a strong alpha male role through his performances. His personal beliefs and opinions mattered little or were unknowable to the general population. Some people aspired to be like him… or really more like the roles he played in movies (his work image). Then there came a point in his life where his perceived personal beliefs on religion and ethnicity became public (these were parts of his private at home persona). This eventually led to his public/work persona evolving into an image of someone who appeared to be a representative for religious extremism. For some people this enhanced his image, for others it was detrimental.

The human brain by design performs pattern recognition. In order to optimize day to day living, your brain collates patterns into trends which in some cases are the basis for stereotypes (from Greek: stereo + týpos = “solid impression”). While stereotypes have a bad reputation due to their common use as a derogatory, like it or not your brain actively develops and validates these profiles. They are a critical aspect of being human and impact how you live and who you interact with.

I will provide two examples to illustrate. Let’s take two males situated at a bus stop in a major U.S. city as our backdrop for this thought exercise. You walk up to the bus stop and see:

• Individual #1 – this person is wearing work dungarees that covered with motor oil and dirt. The person is clean shaven but his hair is disheveled. He is holding a dirty box and smells slightly of sweat.
• Individual #2 – this person is wearing a clean business suit. He is clean shaven and hair groomed. He smells of cologne and is carrying a briefcase.

Who would you engage into conversation with? Why?

[read the other parts of this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

I knew this would eventually happen and it would appear that the day is drawing near where someone is going to delete the Game Zero entry for on Wikipedia. I know there are problems with the entry and how it got created. I don’t consider it a promotion piece though, I consider it a supporting piece to other content within the Wiki where the magazine was relevant.

The key problem as I note on the talk page:

“The key problem here is that most of the web from 1994/1995 is no longer available. Some of the promotion we did within the newsgroups is still locatable, but none of the IRC based promotion we did is archived. Also, most if any of the early links to the magazine are no longer on the web anymore. Archive.org only has 1996 and on for the most part. I can personally vouch for all of these statements as can the entire staff of the magazine as we were pretty proud to be setting these milestones. Some notable examples of sites referencing Game Zero were the NCSA What’s New page which is now gone, as is Iway Magazine (which was an early Internet spotlight magazine) which ranked Game Zero as one of the top 25 gaming sites/top 500 on the web in 1996.”

The magazine was a staple read for most game studios, we were the only one of two non-traditional news publication invited to the Meridian 59 launch party thrown by Trip Hawkins after Studio 3DO bought them out (yes, I got to shake hands with Trip and talk with him for a few minutes). The other was a Canadian TV based videogaming program.

It is with great distress that I can’t locate supporting information about this magazine and I fear that Wikipedia’s shitty content protocols will consign the historical significance of this magazine to the delete bin.

I just added a new group of links to my sidebar called “Eye candy”. These are blogs that I have run across that do nothing more than collect series of artistic images and photography that are great to look through. Generally you can count on loosing an hour on any of them just going back through their archive of posts.

Not that many of you care, but I think it helps to document these things sometimes for perspective.

I have been involved in the publishing industry in some form since the late 80’s. In 1994 I launched the first video game review magazine on the web (Game Zero magazine). I designed and deployed several corporate Intranets and customer facing web sites over the course of the 90’s. I currently spend the majority of my time in a Director position for a Fortune 500 company based in Phoenix, Arizona where among my many tasks I speak to groups about issues related to Social Media/Enterprise 2.0 deployments (both technical and marketing) and have been promoting the use of these technologies.

Personally I have been involved in exploring online communications for marketing and community building going back to the very beginnings of the medium. Starting off in the modem based BBS communities of the late 80’s, transitional spaces such as CompuServe and Prodigy at the start of the 90’s and adopting nascent Internet platforms such as Newsgroups, IRC, the World Wide Web and many others.

Additionally I assist my wife with her video game development studio (TFPSoft, LLC) providing Project Management and IT assistance as well as other duties as needed.

Well, here’s the deal. I actually used to write a pseudo blog from 1999-2006 over on the Game Zero news page. Most of my comments where about gaming news that I felt deserved some special call out, while other posts were just some general banter.

The software used to manage it was a posting tool that I wrote with the help of my wife in REXX (under OS/2) back in 1996 that I kept swearing I was going to someday cleanup and turn into a full blow proper distro to share with others. Of course the spare time never materialized and in 2006 when we finally turned down the last OS/2 server and migrated to Linux, that was that.

I originally played around with some blogging software called Pivot which I set my wife up to use on her site. But, I eventually ran into too many problems that couldn’t be resolved and I started shopping something else. I spent several months evaluating all of the various blogging applications with the key items being free (as in beer), ease of install/maintenance, community support and features. In my mind WordPress met all of these in spades. Plus, there was an easy migration between Pivot and WordPress, and there we are. I also moved my employers blogging to WordPress as well. I had started them out on Pivot, then we moved the company over to Blojsom under OSX Server 10.4 (which looked great on paper but turned out to be a dead end when Apple abandoned the software in the upgrade to Server 10.5). So, WordPress won out here as well and the Apple servers were out the door.

So with that done, I circled back to me.

My biggest challenge with blogging for me comes from my understanding of the three P’s of internet content authoring. Privacy, Personas and Persistence. I’ll cover these in my next post.

But needless to say I’ve gone ahead and set up my new pulpit here off of my personal homepage and here you are reading it 🙂

Cheers!