shelbinator.com

It’s true; most scientists agree science is hard. I know this all too well first hand.

But that doesn’t mean you can mock and ignore it and still lead the free world. There are too many important decisions that rely on a healthy appreciate for and understanding of man’s ability to shape the world with intellect, without just waiting for Jesus to come scoop you up before the Apocalypse.

I’ve been meaning to rant about this ever since McCain decided to make planetarium-bashing a regular part of his debate and stump speech talking points. He keeps referring dismissively to an “overhead projector” as if people want to spend millions to show decaying transparencies of lecture notes, and not excite thousands of school children about studying the heavens. And to think I was once warned that a Clinton administration would be the end of NASA as we know it.

But I’m a little busy doing some science now, so I’ll just excerpt heavily from this article in Slate by Christopher Hitchens, who’s almost as pissed at the GOP’s anti-intellectualism as I am.

Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.

Anyone who escaped high school without learning about the fruit fly eye color experiments should stay in Alaska. Come on.

Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers…[and the] cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species…. [But] all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue….

Haw haw! Geddit?! Scientists are so stupid, I already saw this one on Law & Order!

[Palin] is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools…and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God.

Don’t forget throwing all those frozen, unused in vitro-fertilized eggs in the dumpster rather than use them to cure disease! Or maybe we don’t have to throw all those potential lives away; I’m sure Sarah Palin will take them in once she’s done with her doomed campaign.

Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Eschatological arguments aside, right-wing refusal to even think that maybe we had something to do with it — and even if we did, why should be bother starting to fix it before we convince China and India to do it first (there’s American greatness for ya) — has always infuriated me. It’s tantamount to pointing a gun at my head without checking to see if it’s loaded first (something I’ve experienced as well), and it’s doubly painful coming from people who care about their children and their children’s future in every other respect. If there was a chance that maybe their supermarket got a shipment of the scary Chinese milk and eggs with melamine in it, every Republican mom I know would drive across town to another store for a week. But when it comes to global warming, the “speculative” and “hypothetical” consequences — though orders of magnitude more devastating than a Publix full of melamine — do not warrant the cost to the businesses because commerce is our way of life. That’s just the entrenched culture of a party that is 20 years too late to the climate change wake-up call: the status quo of industry (in the generic sense) was more important than the consensus of eggheads in lab coats, so clearly there was some ulterior agenda here. And for the love of God don’t bring those CFL bulbs around here, Rush Limbaugh told me they cause EPA-level toxic spills.

I could go on, but just go read the book.

All of this comes from folksy folks that accuse liberals of being “elitists” over lobster dinners at exclusive country club enclaves — so I can only assume the “elitism” charge is a derisive mockery of our reliance on book larnin’.

The Dude cannot abide that kind of abuse of science. Whatever the downside of Democratic policies and their “wasteful tax-and-spend” practices, so long as any politician enjoys dancing on the grave of intellectual curiosity, I’ll have a hard time taking any of their arguments at face value.

John McCain’s campaign sent out a little funny today, and it may actually be the most useful thing those pandering liars can do to help out with our energy crunch. If you send in a contribution of at least $25, they’ll send you a handy-dandy tire pressure gage that reads “Obama’s Energy Plan” on the side. I guess they’re all out of those pens that have undressing ladies on ‘em.

This is to continue their cute little “Dr. No” meme in which they claim that Obama is basically against everything under the sun that might do a dang thing for the average American as far as energy is concerned. You know, the one in which they repeatedly lie about Obama’s position on nuclear energy? And when I say “they” I include McCain himself, as he has been shown on CNN multiple times in the last week stating flat-out lies about Obama’s nuclear position, and CNN, desperately afraid of being accused of Obamania, refuses to say peep about the fact that they keep airing lies from the “maverick.”

Anyway. Back to his dipstick.

They’re using this prop to mock Obama’s claims about oil conservation and production last week. According to the McCain campaign email, “Senator Obama’s solution to high gas prices is telling Americans to make sure their tires are inflated.”

That isn’t so much a lie as an incomplete statement. What Obama actually said was that “we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling - if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!” This ray of optimism naturally sent the idiots who think NewsBusters is news into hysterical fits bad science. (Hint: McCain campaigners seem to be just such idiots.) Let’s take a look at their bad right-wing analysis:

Just for fun, I did the math. Properly inflating your tires can improve gas mileage by 3%. Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let’s be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; that’s a net gain of 1.5% fuel efficiency.

Americans drive approximately 2,880 billion miles per year. If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 1.5%, that would be 1.8 billion gallons. A barrel of oil produces around 20 gallons of gasoline, so the total savings available through tire inflation is approximately 90,000,000 barrels of oil annually.

How does this stack up against “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling?”

ANWR: 10 billion barrels
Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned)
Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels

So, on the above assumptions, it would take only 11,308 years of proper tire inflation to equal “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling.”

First we’ll dispense with the obvious right-wing lying action. The blogger quoted above brings oil shale into the picture, which Obama wasn’t addressing in the Q&A period. You don’t drill for oil shale, boy, you mine it. It’s also unlikely that Obama was even referring to ANWR, since all the hubbub lately has been about getting Congress to follow the president’s lead and open up the outer continental shelf to drilling. (McCain’s email mocking Obama probably isn’t talking about ANWR either, stating “John McCain believes we should lift the federal ban on offshore drilling, enabling you to decide where we drill for oil.” The argument at hand is offshore, not arctic.)

Next, the analysis is rather optimistic in its assumption that we’re getting, on average, 24mpg in our cars. That’s a good one! The Transportation Research Board puts it at closer to 20mpg, based on a composite of cars (22mpg) and trucks (17mpg). But this comes out in the wash, because some of his other assumptions are rather generous in the other direction. The TRB puts annual mileage at 2,600 billion instead of 2,880 billion. And the 1.5% fleetwide fuel economy uptick is rather optimistic; Pearce and Hanlon wrote in Energy Policy (2007, v.35 n.4) that the impact of underinflation ranged from 0.16-0.22 mpg lost in the city and 0.22-0.29 mpg lost on the highway, suggesting we should at least be able to save about 1% on fuel economy. In the spirit of compromise, we’ll split the difference: 1.25%, saving 1.5 billion gallons of gas or 75 million barrels of oil a year.

Right-wingers go off the rails when they assume that the earth will just open up a gaping hole and spew forth all of her bounty in unlimited volumes, reaching the conclusion that Obama is ignoring an 11,000-fold increase in gasoline production off the coast of the Carolinas. Let’s see what the actual Department of Energy has to say about increased production if we listen to the petulant whining of the “Drill Here Drill Now” crowd and open up the continental shelf to drilling:

Total domestic production of crude oil from 2012 through 2030 in the OCS access case is projected to be 1.6 percent higher than in the reference case, and 3 percent higher in 2030 alone, at 5.6 million barrels per day. For the lower 48 OCS, annual crude oil production in 2030 is projected to be 7 percent higher—2.4 million barrels per day in the OCS access case compared with 2.2 million barrels per day in the reference case (Figure 20). Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

Subtract 4 years off those projected dates if the DHDN crowd immediately gets their way. Big whoop, look at that green line go. A whopping 0.2 million barrels a day from opening up the coastline and we come out to about…

73 million barrels a year!

Holy crap! That’s like, almost exactly the same number we just came up with in terms of tire pressure-based fuel economy savings! Saaaaaaay, you don’t think that’s what Obama was talking about in Springfield, do you? Nah, must be just a coinkydink.

Now just imagine how much oil we could stop importing if we just did something more aggressive with those CAFE standards.

I came up to North Carolina to visit the ‘rents for Father’s Day and, theoretically, get a good chunk of dissertation writing done. I wasn’t quite ready for my writing sabbatical, but on the day I was about to start my last experiments ever, my POS machine blew a piston seal and dumped oil all over the lab. It’s down for repair for, oh, you know, a couple of months, and I figured I’d better get out of town for some TLC before I went completely postal.

The problem with Mom’s TLC is the food, which comes at me from all directions at all times. And on weekend visits, that includes the nuclear assault of Sunday brunch at the clubhouse. Nothing like having all the time in the world to lollygag at your table with periodic trips to four buffet tables.

So I guess it’s a good thing I brought my bike up with me. And what better excuse than miles of quiet country roads and golf course cart paths to give the bike and the GPS-enabled application Sports Tracker a good workout.

And what better excuse than wanting to barf up a lung than to stop right there. Enough is enough!

Sports Tracker and the GPS in my phone did alright, although with the handset in the closed position (and tucked away in a sweat- and rain-proof plastic bag in my pocket), the resolution wasn’t as good as it can be when you’ve got it out in your hand. Variations of up to 50 meters from the true track in places raise some questions about its accuracy for total workout distance, but in less contorted routes, it should be pretty good.

And of course, the other bonus of GPS-enabled handsets: had I actually barfed up a lung and died out on the ride, since I had Fring updating my position in real time, my mother would have known where to look for me when I didn’t come home. You know, so she could bring more food.

Live mobile video is breaking out all over. Last week, Qik announced a new version of its video software for a couple of Windows Mobile devices, the Samsung Blackjack and the Motorola Q. This can really expand the pool of potential live streamers — and of course make us Nokia types feel a little less special.

But even more deflating for us anti-iPhone curmudgeons is today’s announcement by Flixwagon that they’ve developed a version of their mobile broadcasting software for iPhone. Great, now the iPhone fanboys will proclaim victory all over again, because some external vendor has been kind enough to fill in where Steve Jobs seems so egregiously lacking. I heard it before when those willing to hack their iPhone pointed to the “solution” of a really tragic, no-audio, sub-10 frames-per-second monstrosity of an app you could download and record limited duration clips with if you were willing to risk bricking your $400 investment and voiding your warranty. The Flixwagon app for iPhone also requires one to jailbreak the cloistered device — this is not something that’s going to be available in the iPhone App Store:

While we don’t condone or recommend unlocking iPhones, as avid iPhone users ourselves we wanted to experiment with ways to enable flixwagon on the iPhone, until the official SDK supports video. We’re going to continue working with the iPhone SDK in the future so we can offer this functionality to all users once video becomes a standard part of the iPhone.

And I guess since you have to beat the phone’s firmware into submission to squeeze some video out of it, the Flixwagon app, like its video capture predecessor, also has a framerate like molasses, somewhere in the 5 fps ballpark, as you can see below:

I know this is a market the makers of Flixwagon really want to tap into, but I wish they’d spend a little less time making software for a device that’s so dead-set against accepting it and a little more time on the next version of their Symbian software. I heard in the end of April, and then again in mid-May, that a new client would be coming “in a couple weeks,” the most notable improvement in which would be the end of the 15-second “hiccup.” Flixwagon uses a kind of local buffering approach to ensure the integrity of the video stream in the face of periodic bandwidth constraints, apparently caching the data in 15-second chunks; as a result, unfortunately, about a half-second of video is not captured every 15 seconds as the buffer turns over, and this can really screw up the intelligibility of whatever your interviewee might be saying. That is the primary, if not the only reason I started using Qik over Flixwagon, and I’ll be thrilled when the glitch is fixed, if we ever see this rumored upgrade to the client.

I can’t tell if the iPhone version of the app has the same hiccup problem yet, because it’s hard to tell with such a low frame rate if you’re actually missing something.

UPDATE: I obviously didn’t do my homework, because Qik also announced on Thursday that it’s releasing a client for iPhone as well. (But hey, Flixwagon wins the marketing points; that I missed this from Qik speaks to a rather muted release.) Can’t tell what the video quality is like because I can’t find the actual video from the iPhone, just this video of the iPhone. Hello, Qik, link plz! The iPhone isn’t listed yet on their Signup page, and I presume as with any other such app you have to lobotomize your device first. But hey, there you go.

Doug at Live Apartment Fire has an awesome critique of some recent science-bashing by WSB:

Tom Regan found that Georgia Tech had gotten a federal grant to develop a robotic drum machine. The video showed a rather marvelous gizmo that actually pounded a drum. Its distinction was its ability to improvise based on rhythms created by a human being on another instrument.

But to WSB, there was nothing marvelous here. It trotted out Herman Cain, righty WSB radio talk show host, to utter predictable banalities about wasted tax dollars. WSB also found a living, breathing drummer who wanted no part of a government-funded robo-drummer.

The icing on the cake of this post is that Regan himself dropped by to get indignant about being criticized. In so doing, he completely missed another boat, proclaiming that “there’s no ‘federal science expert’ available to talk about our reports. That’s because they [at the National Science Foundation] don’t want to talk.” You might think he was quoting Doug’s original use of the phrase “federal science expert,” but the post didn’t come anywhere near suggesting that Regan find and interview such a fantastic creature. All Doug said was that the piece might’ve been more balanced by the perspective of “anybody available to defend federal funding for scientific research,” in the absence of the professor directing the drumming robot. Hell, I’m available to defend federal funding for research, as a former NSF fellow myself, and I won’t just talk about how it helped me buy better beer than PBR. There are scores more federally-funded graduate researchers here at Tech for you to talk to, Tom, and just about every single professor routinely applies for those bucks, too. We all have tales of seemingly obscure experiments becoming life-altering technologies someday.

As for who should fund robotic drummers, Regan suggested that the music industry pay for such a silly project, still apparently unaware that the artificial intelligence algorithms behind the drumming, and not the making of music itself, is the purpose of the research. But hey, this is Georgia, where we are now sixth from the bottom of the list of states that can get its kids through high school. It doesn’t take much to blow our minds.

Go read the whole thread, it’s a hoot. And there’s no math required.

For a split second I saw the $199 price of the new 3G iPhone and thought I might soon be abandoning my Nokia N95, after a mere three months. Then I clicked through the pages and realized that the drastic price cut must come from the fact that Apple still doesn’t think its mobile device with a camera should shoot anything but still photographs. (And when you take them, it seems you still can’t MMS them to other normal phones.)

Even CNN iReport’s story request was characteristically boring-sounding because of it: “Ever used an iPhone to snap a pic? Send an iReport. http://tinyurl.com/5m733c,” they said on Twitter. Ever used a pencil to do math? Ever used a car to drive to the grocery store? Ever use a match to light a cigarette? Yawn; we want to see sketch art, Formula 500 and forest fires, not the most basic use possible for ordinary household objects.

Ever take a video clip that doesn’t blow on an iPhone? Now that would be an iReport!

This is really getting to be like packing for a family road trip and leaving the baby in the carseat on the roof of the damn car.

If you’re under 30 and plugged into the social web, chances are you’re an idiot, according to a book by Emory Professor Mark Bauerlein. I’m inclined to entertain his thesis, although that’s mostly because I’m not under 30 and I’m kind of a crotchety old goat when it comes to nay-saying the youths. If you can’t laugh at yourself, the saying goes, make fun of other people.

(Video source page)

I’ve also been a teaching assistant for way too long now, and I can’t say the quality of homework I see do anything to cast doubt on Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). Doing research these days doesn’t seem to stretch far beyond Google and Wikipedia, and God forbid anyone consult a dictionary or Warriner’s English Grammar & Composition when you have MS Word there to spell-check for you.

Bauerlein argues that while today’s American youth have more disposable income and more educational opportunities — and most importantly, more computational firepower at their fingertips that could be used productively — the techno-tools of the twenty-first century are instead being used to prolong and amplify the adolescent phase of life. Back in the days when teenagers at home were only connected to the outside world (and their adolescent peers) by “what is now known as a ‘land line,’” he reminisced, they were forced for a few hours a day to relate to adults (their parents), and perhaps even pick up a book for diversion. Teens born to the internet era are constantly plugged into the social web and relating to other teens almost 24 hours a day, and while it is the duty of all teens to resent quality time with their parents and other grown-ups, it is nevertheless a vital developmental process.

It is also the time-honored tradition of each generation to chastise the generation below it for straying from the status quo, Bauerlein concedes, but this holier-than-thou attitude is an important part of how we pass on our cultural heritage. And because of the pervasive influence of information technology on today’s youth, this somewhat condescending advice from old to young is more important than ever. Overloaded young people are under constant pressure to “check in” with their friends and maintain their social networks, and thus for some reason feel constantly rushed and busy even though studies show TV-watching time is on the rise. (I have no idea what he’s talking about here. *ahem*) And even though the internet can connect people all over the world for potentially limitless learning experiences and discussions, studies also show that knowledge levels in basic elements of our culture — fine arts, civics, current events, history, etc. — are on the decline.

In short, if you don’t wanna grow up, the internet says you don’t have to.

It’s an interesting argument, and I’d probably really enjoy reading it. You know, if I read books.

On Memorial Day, I always remember my maternal grandfather, Captain Edward F. Zimmerman, MD, USN, who served on the USS Shasta during World War II. Thoughts of him are usually accompanied by a twinge of regret that I didn’t follow in his footsteps in naval service, a career decision I am still trying to “atone” for. So this Memorial Day weekend, the words of Under Secretary of Defense John Young, Jr., who spoke at Georgia Tech last Friday morning, were welcome and reassuring.

Continue reading this post at ThinkMTV…

So this is the internet, huh? Well who do I need to shag to get ahead around here?

Alright, I don’t think I need to go that far. But I wonder if I need a better brand. The last few weeks have been pretty good for me and the internet, but my successes also just seem to serve to highlight in stark relief how much further I have to go.

Last week I went to the Intel ISEF’08 to shoot some video and do some of that citizen journalism stuff, after being contacted by New Media Strategies. The big old-school PR firm Burson-Marsteller (a name it took me all week to remember) was doing the bulk of publicity for ISEF’08, but NMS got pulled in by Intel (as I understand it) to make sure all the web bases were covered as well. Now, I was thrilled that NMS thought I was one of the right people to talk to for the job (hi, rocket scientist). However, had they not been referred to me by our local media commentator SpaceyG, I might have missed out entirely. Many thanks to SpaceyG for the referral, but the puzzle for me is, at what point do I escape the risk of going totally undiscovered save for the favor of the well-connected?

Now that ISEF is over (though my video-editing work is not), there are the thanks and the pats on the back and the connecting with each other on LinkedIn after a project well executed. And on LinkedIn you have that whole Recommendation thing going on — something I’ve never enjoyed yet but is starting to look pretty handy. Say, I think, maybe if I can get a Recommendation from NMS on LinkedIn, the next time someone’s looking for an aerospace geek to shoot video (naturally), I might show up on their radar! And that’s when I realized I had this problem:

I need a brand.

Where might NMS put a recommendation for me on LinkedIn? In case you haven’t messed around with LinkedIn at all, their system likes to file recommendations under the associated job title that the recommendee was operating as at the time. So if I wanted to recommend my primary NMS contact as a new media PR firecracker, I would select that NMS job title on her profile as opposed to the one she’s got listed for her other job on the side, with jess3.com.

But on my end, the only remotely relevant job title I’ve got listed is the MTV Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 gig. And frankly, I don’t really want to have any and every recommendation of my new media work filed under MTV. I was already doing this stuff and already had a style well before I ever encountered the sea of paperwork and red tape that is Viacom. The pieces that I produce for them are necessarily less creative and fun (for me and you) than I would naturally produce, so I went to ISEF primarily as shelbinator and not the guy from Choose or Lose with the stack of release forms and inability to turn on my microphone in the presence of ambient music.

That’d be an even bigger conundrum should my friend Emily want to promote my services. On a tight schedule and zero budget, I knocked out a basic but passable web presence — including video — for her campaign to be an Obama-pledged delegate to the DNC convention. She didn’t win the district-level race, but she’s in for an at-large position, due in part, it turns out, to the key guy at Obama’s HQ in Chicago being thoroughly impressed with her video and website. Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I’d like to start keeping track of, but again, there’s even less of a category on my LinkedIn profile for that to be filed under.

So why isn’t shelbinator.com on LinkedIn?

Tessa of DriveaFasterCar.com has her website listed on LinkedIn, with herself as Editor & Blogger, but that blog is in essence her business (after hours, anyway): it promotes local music and other artistic happenings. Similarly, Rusty and Amber list themselves as co-founders of the Georgia Podcast Network, so if they help you record an event, for instance, you know where to recommend their work. But shelbinator.com, well, it’s kind of a mess.

First of all, there’s my love-hate relationship with the name itself. Let’s face it: it’s kind of immature. It sounds kind of like that tool at the office, “makin’ some copies.” And I’m not entirely sure it’s all that appropriate — or that I even want — to be promoting it as a professional brand. I’d eventually like to do Very Serious Things with my career beyond online messaging, and if you have just as hard a time imagining Deputy Asst. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Shelbinator as I do, well, you know what I mean.

On the other hand, Robert Scoble is arguably among the most influential tech bloggers out there and Scobleizer is just as douchey a handle as Shelbinator. It’s also hard to just cast off the existing brand investment: I’ve been writing under this handle for almost nine years now, starting from badly hand-coded HTML on the defunct Xoom.com. It’s been cited by a presidential campaign, much to my shock and chagrin, and I think it’s finally picking up some currency.

Okay, not that much currency. I’m still incapable of standing on my own without the gatekeepers of internet greatness. That long, geeky tutorial on connecting an external mic to the N95 brought one of my biggest traffic spikes in ages, but I can still hardly take the credit for it. Not that there was much to take credit for: that Finnish Bloggerguy had the right approach in his video, but he wasn’t too clear on the particular connectors and apparently his Scandinavian cable used a different color-coding scheme. I just corrected and clarified his approach for the US market, something I can’t believe no one else managed to do the whole time they were clamoring for a fix from Nokia. (Like they say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, but it helps.) Mobile Jones wrote a post about her long quest for a solution finally coming to and end at my blog, and what happens? MobileActive.org Twitters about how Mobile Jones has the answer on her blog, and a mobile-tech blog carnival does pretty much the same thing. Steve Garfield, the rather prolific videoblogger in Boston, republished the solution on his blog giving thanks and a link to my original post — and his commenters come along with kudos for him, “Great stuff, Steve!” Even the Nashua Telegraph, whose web team hopes to use the N95 for some mobile journalism, links to my post, MoJo’s, and Steve’s in quick succession as “a few tutorials on the web,” as if they are indeed a few tutorials and not one tutorial and two posts about it.

Pardon me while I have a brief Tracy Flick moment. I’m sorry, but it’s been four months since I took you live inside an Iowa caucus (and ten since the YouTube debate) and I’m still getting my internet ass kicked by a life-caster who didn’t realize that Super Tuesday had already happened when talking about the MTV-Flixwagon connection.

So, the word shelbinator doesn’t exactly conjure up anything, and maybe that’s part of the problem. ISEF was also covered by Geek Dad over at Wired.com, but right away you kind of know where he’s coming from. There’s also the “proper noun” problem: shelbinator is me more than it is the body of my work, and part of my branding issue is that I’m trying to pimp that work as much as (or more than) myself. A couple other MTV Street Teamers used to add their brand to the end of their stories, but they had studio names separate from themselves: Corduroy Media and a Xolografik Production. That model just doesn’t seem to work with my current eponymous brand, so maybe I need a studio, someplace you would think to go for video and related communications work.

I took a decent step in that direction, brand-wise, when I stepped down from the Communications post at Young Dems of Atlanta. I wanted to keep working in online communications for progressive candidates and nonprofits, but I made the mistake of thinking I could learn enough Drupal to launch a major multi-user community website while still working on grad school and having a life. Thus, smarterasses.org was aborted in the first trimester, but its logo lives on in the corner of my homemade business cards:

That’s a fairly self-explanatory brand name with a logo to match, wouldn’t you say? Unfortunately, it’s also not something I feel like saying if I’m calling someone important on the phone. “Uh, Senator, it’s some…uh… smartass person calling about your web video?” That was meant to be a site for scrappy bloggers, not someone who wants to work on presidential campaigns. Next idea!

I’ve already rambled on so long now that I’ve lost any semblance of a train of thought, but I have even more questions yet to consider.

• Is it really a content problem? Maybe I just cant get out of double-digit subscribers because I suck. I contemplate that likelihood a lot, but then some complimentary schmuck has to come along and say they really like my work. It’s been suggested, on the other hand, that it’s just too much for one site: is it politics, or is it technology? Unfortunately, I’m not willing to concede on that front just yet. There are plenty of tech bloggers and plenty of political bloggers; I happen to be a quasi-rocket scientist in politics doing citizen journalism and I’m going to try my best to stand at — and report on — the intersection of those paths.
• Is it just a container problem? Would I be well-served by creating a new, clean space for some kind of “portfolio” of the things I might be able to contribute to your project or campaign? This might, at the same time, be a way to create a fairly dedicated channel for the citizen journalism and/or campaign messaging product around here (i.e., mostly the videos) — like, say, shelbinator.tv, or shelbination.com — while leaving the rambly and ranty at shelbinator.com. Granted, this would do nothing to solve my problem of not being able to crack triple-digit authority or get under a 100K ranking at Technorati as far as this blog is concerned.
• So then is there a new brand that would package it all properly? Do I just need to clarify the point of what’s going on around here and give it a proper name that would lend itself better to brand identification? Is the whole shelbinator concept a dead horse?
• What the hell am I going on about? Is anyone still actually reading?

Fear not, I probably won’t subject you to a follow-up post along these lines. But if there’s anyone still here, please do chime in.

I’ve still got a ton of footage from ISEF that I hope to boil down into a more in-depth review when time allows this week. But in the meantime, here’s what I could knock out overnight for the token MTV piece — embedded for your viewing pleasure, though it deprives me of any playcount data on our awesome website:

(Video page for you feed-readers.)

Home-schooled Parker Owan of Tucson, AZ took home four special awards and a second place finish in the Electrical & Mechanical Engineering category, making for a pretty profitable trip to Atlanta. He also found out that his work, “Design of a Hybrid Wind Turbine Using Active Solidity Control for Low Wind Speed Power Capture,” is getting a grant for development out to a fieldable design.

And here I am, just breaking stuff.