Buddhist Marketer

Content Syndication: A Peek

For the fraction of my 508 monthly visitors that are not marketer-types, here’s a li’l peek at content syndication in action.  First, some FAQs:

• What is content syndication? Content syndication is when the property that creates the content lets their stuff appear somewhere else.
• Why would you syndicate your content? You might syndicate your content for appropriate credits if you’re trying to build your name as an expert in a particular area.  Or, you might be doing it for SEO.  However, most entities syndicate their stuff because they’re getting a percentage of ad dollars generated by their “shown elsewhere” content.
• Why would you put syndicated content on your website? Well, let’s say you have advertisers who want eyeballs that are interested in topic X.  You might have eyeballs, and you might have eyeballs interested in topic X, but you might not be an expert in topic X in particular.  What to do?  Find a content provider that knows topic X and ask if they’ll syndicate their content onto your website.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make content syndication engine Mochila work for any of my li’l ideas but haven’t yet figured this one out yet.  So since I can’t show you within my own media empire … of 508 monthlies … how content syndication works, take a gander:

• Visit PR Landmines to Avoid as posted at WomenEntrepreneur.com
• Visit PR Landmines to Avoid as syndicated to Fox Biz’s Women In Biz channel

I’m guessing that

• WomenEntrepreneur gets a cut of ad impressions their syndicated content generates
• Fox Biz gets to save money by not hiring their own in-house women in biz writer
• Fox Biz can tell advertisers, “Oh, you want to reach the women demo?  Here are some content channels that reach that audience …”

Anyone have any other examples of content syndication that they’d like to show and tell?

Maybe You Shouldn’t Unleash “The Book That’s In You”

Academite Jane is, IMHO, right-on in her recent “5 Common Flaws in Memoir Projects” blog post @ Writer’s Digest blog There Are No Rules.  From it:

1. You have written a story focused on pain or victimhood—and nothing more…
2. Your source material is a diary or journal…
3. You want to tell about your experience as a means of self-help for others—that is, you mix the memoir and self-help genres…
4. You have no definitive story arc or story problem…
5. The story is not told with a fresh or distinct perspective…

Jane is completely right and I say this having performed a one woman show focused on pain or “victimhood”, written a book (which no longer exists in any form … phew) sourced from a diary, imagined the book tour for my “You Can Learn From My Life Story” theoretical future best-seller, assumed that clever phrases and a strong voice will obfuscate the fact that there’s neither hero nor journey, and …

Well, okay, if there’s one thing I bring to the table it’s a point of view.

But still.  Most bright-eyed wannabe memoirists that I’ve met in my years of creative nonfiction writing classes need to let their story percolate for a while.  Self included.

A+, Jane.

A Different Kind Of Burning Sensation

Nietzsche once wrote, on writing, something to the effect of, “Writing for me is an embarrassing need.  I do not know any other way.”

My friend Lilit, who makes my heart spilleth over in an ersatz big sister kind of way, writes in “brooklyn is burning” {emphasis mine}:

After this, the book won’t be so much mine anymore. It’s off to be edited and printed and illustrated. Of course the words will be mine, and the name on the cover will be mine. But I feel as if I’ve given birth to something that won’t be born until next April. Once the little bundle of mine is sent away, I’ll still get up and look at that empty screen every morning, and the words will come, because they always have, because they don’t know how not to, because I don’t know how to live without them burning out of my fingertips.

It makes me happy to know that good people who craft good things sign good book deals.

I am very proud of you, Ms. Marcus.  I hope that those slender fingertips of yours keep on setting the world on fire.

It Rub Me Wrong Way

Several months ago, my blood went cold when I saw what I perceived to be a photoshopped mockery of a horrific incident during the Vietnam War.  I’m confident a portion of my reaction was a bundle of projections motivated by the no good very bad way in which my ethnicity was treated by many of my Protestant Caucasian hometownfolk.  Regardless, that post inspired the following comment from one quasi-literate lurker self-dubbed BillyBob:

Wow you are the most oversensitive person on the entire internet. Get over yourself…you are not a victim. That Starbucks picture is FUNNY.

Well, okay BillyBob.  You have a point there.  If you numb yourself out to the history of the photograph, it is kind of funny.  I get it.

Several weeks ago, though, I was reading a review of banh mi (a Vietnamese sammich) in Edible Manhattan. The glowing review ended with

Banh mi po’boy, me love you long time.

Now, when I read this, I was a little annoyed.  So naturally, I checked the article author’s name to see if it was Asian.  Then I thought, “Wait, people wouldn’t know that I’m Asian …” so I let it slide.

In the May/June 2009 Edible Manhattan, however, a reader named Kim from Manhattan ain’t gonna take it.  She writes:

Your last line … was extremely offensive and made me glad to have read the bigger articles first, because I immediately wanted to put your publication down and never read it again.

I understand that you were trying to praise the food and tie your blurb together.  However, those words to me, as an Asian-American woman, represent some of the worst racist and sexist stereotypes on the planet.  Let me put it to you another way:  If you were praising a soul food restaurant’s fare, I’m sure you would think twice before printing something like, “Fried chicken?  Yessuh, mastuh!” In the same token, “Me love you long time” is used to reduce Asian-Americans into flat, appalling stereotypes.  For you to use that to “praise” an item of food only makes it worse.

Phew; thank pork-bellied Buddha Kim wrote in because she was more articulate than I’d have been (You dirty honkey bitches, etc. etc.).  Now, of course, I use that line mockingly but it’s allowed; I already checked with the Yellow Consulate consisting of me, myself, and I.  But if you’re not a card-carrying member, the rules are different.

Sadly, the reply of Gabrielle Langholtz, Edible Manhattan’s Editor, makes me wonder if she actually understood what Kim was trying to say.  She replied:

Before printing this line we asked friends whether they considered it offensive, and none knew the original Full Metal Jacket prostitute reference, only the 2 Live Crew lyric or the later Mariah Carey lyric.  We finally were persuaded by a diversityinc.com article that pondered whether the phrase is “empowering or insensitive.”  You clearly found it to be the latter, for which we apologize.

So basically, Ms. Langholtz

1. Asked her (likely) white friends what they thought
2. Ultimately decided that she was going to use the phrase to empower that little banh mi
3. Is really only apologizing to Kim for the fact that Kim took the phrase as “insensitive”

Furthermore, Ms. Langholtz fails to acknowledge that the phrase might be inherently insensitive, nor does she apologize for having included it — she only says, “I’m sorry, Kim, that you found it insensitive.”

Well, I’m sorry, Ms. Langholtz, that you’re a dumb cunt.

And I’m allowed to say that.  I’m a card-carrying member of the Cunt Consolate.

—

In other news, I highly recommend the $8 spicy catfish banh mi at Baoguette on the east side of Lexington, just north of 25th Street.

—

Should you include that potentially insensitive, racially-charged line in your content?

1. If you’re not sure, there might be a problem
2. If you’re not a card-carrying member of the race infused in the line, there might be a problem
3. If the first three card-carrying members of the race in question that you ask about that line don’t give you the thumbs up, then it is definitely controversial

Remember: Racial Sensitivity Cunt Happen Overnight

Avoid Third Prize

Fellow Academite Jane, an editor at Writer’s Digest, just posted a great clip from Glengarry Glen Ross and annotated it with some good stuff.

On Avoiding Negative Energy

Lesson #1. Where You Expend Your Energy Is Vital

If you want to sit around and complain about your situation, is that helping you succeed? No. If you go to a writers conference or critique group, or to an online forum, are you the type of person who’s just there to air complaints and talk about how rough you’ve had it?

On Maximizing The Conversion Funnel ;)

(Blake flips over a blackboard which has two sets of letters on it:
ABC, and AIDA.)

Blake
A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!! A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention — do I have your attention? Interest — are you interested? I know you are. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision — have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action. A-I-D-A.

Lesson #5. Always Be Closing

Click here to read “Are You Ready to Be a Bestselling Author? Then Listen to Alec Baldwin”.

Open source copy-editing

I really want another apostrophe in the word ‘writers’.  Am I wrong to want this?

From the Summer Writers Colony email:

From The New School’s landing page:

I mean, if it’s ‘Writer’s Life’, couldn’t it also be ‘Writer’s Colony’ or, better yet, ‘Writers’ Colony’?

Help a girl out?

Cutting-room floor

In opposition to the conclusion one may draw upon reading my blog, assessing the material contents of my overstuffed apartment, or having one (1) conversation with me, I am a firm believer in editing, establishing boundaries, and adopting constraints.  Rivers of abundance are born from denial (R D R R!).

That said, the following paragraphs are being snipped from my work-in-progress “Camping Out”, which I’ve been working on for almost two years now (off and on).  Lest anyone suspect that me devoting 120 minutes to writing is a deviant violation of my earlier stated autumn priorities, let me go on record and state that I’m allowed a couple of hours once a month to work on personal writing in order to avoid going entirely berserker.

A few paragraphs that should illuminate that insouciance is a state that, for me, shall remain elusive until the earth collides with the moon, are as follows:

By the time I left my hometown high school at sixteen, I had the pretend-boyfriend routine down pat. I imagined an elaborate going-away party for me to be held on the beach of my hometown’s state park lake. Tiki torches, music, perhaps little white lights on a string. Dusk. A cake.

I imagined the cake in great detail. Perhaps I considered this the one component that could actually become reality. I couldn’t imagine the friends that I’d invite (aside from pen pals from nerd camp, I didn’t really have any), or how I’d get to my own party (I couldn’t drive). Let alone Tiki torches (I had no money). But the cake I could handle: chocolate frosting and a colorful design. I remember sitting in my family’s TV room (green shag carpeting, jungle print wall paper and dark fake wood panel accents) and sketching out designs on the back of paper that Dad brought home from work. I think I may have even spent some babysitting money on frosting tips, probably imagining myself practicing the designs in anticipation of my real going-away cake.

But all this obsessing was simply set design for the main show: Sean Skinner – the blonde-haired, blue-eyed jokester who sat next to me in the unfortunately named Mr. Feece’s English class and took a ball point pen to write on the soles of the Adidas sneakers into which I would never grow – was going to kiss me. He was going to be the first. And it was going to be away from the lively, energetic party. He’d walk me down the shore, music fading behind us, and then – was there a full moon? – a kiss.

But I didn’t know what to think about when it came to the details of actual kissing. Nearly a decade of imagining my first kiss and I had no concept of what it entailed. It was just nice to fantasize about it. Something. Anything.

Matty Charles’ new album comes out 10/30

One of my favorite artists in the whole wide world is Matty Charles, whose music was put on my radar as his bassist, Josh Stark, is the oldest son of my ‘god’mother Neal, the ‘N’ in ‘ANP’.  When I lived in Brooklyn, every Sunday evening I’d hop into my Jetta and drive over to Pete’s Candy Store in outer Billyburg to experience the intimate live show.

As a marketer, I know that people are more likely to buy Product X of Quality N if it’s framed against Product Y of Quality Less Than N.  As a human, I love to sing, an experience I treasure all the more for its concomitant demons that I had to slay.  So, here:  you can play this YouTube video while reading the rest of this post.

The song I am singing along to is “Valentine Song” by Matty Charles and The Valentines from their 2003 album Land Beyond the Sea.  The lyrics — and the lyrics are one of the reasons I love Matty’s work so — start out:

Would you be a flower just for me
When the days are short & cold
and I won’t have to face the darkness all alone
if I have you there to hold

* Swoon *!

From his MySpace page (bolding mine):

If you want to know where I’m from, all you need to do is listen to my music. I don’t hold well to the idea of mere geometrical placement but the land is one of long rains and low clouds, stolen from the past and lurching unsteadily towards the future. In fact, the place of my childhood no longer exists. It’s an old brick building that has since crumbled. It’s a framework upon which I hang my thoughts and my feelings but it’s impossible for you to see just as my own vision of it has grown dim and unreliable.

My haunts were junk stores, old movie theatres, used book stores, rooms containing boxes and bins of old records and the people who would hang around looking for something exceptional in those dusty catacombs. Most of it was garbage but occasionally the needle would slip into the groove and colorful flowers of music would grow right out of the speakers. The clock would stop and so would the rain and monotony would cease to exist for a while. Most of my life happened internally and this is how it’s always been.

With any luck, my strategic inclusion of my own novice singing alonging butted up against Matty’s own have made you fall in love with his music too.

I am so grateful for artists like Matty who reach deep inside themselves and place palms out to the universe so that the rest of us can experience the ways in which they see the world.  And when their vantage point seems sympathetic to my own, it makes me feel like

I won’t have to face the darkness all alone.

Come to think of it, I think this is why I write.

Collaborative GRE Analytical Writing scoring

I just took my first Princeton Review CAT practice test for the GRE.  I took two written practice tests earlier this summer but I’m glad I took this one as I totally boffed the first antonym question, not realizing that it was an antonym question (this is what I get for practicing first thing in the morning).

Though I got my score spit back out at me immediately (1420!  My target goal of 8000 is within striking distance!) I didn’t feel like paying to get the essay portion graded.  So, here, people.  Parse these bad boys and let me know if there’s anything you think I should be mindful of moving forward.

Essay one:  45 minutes (completed in 25)

Only once one has known real sadness can one feel true happiness.

Does one must know real sadness in order to “feel true happiness”?

The challenge with feelings, besides from having to endure their existence, is that they are difficult to pin down with a measuring stick.  Even the pain scale that’s standard practice within the medical establishment is fraught with normative challenges:  does Bob’s 3 equal Nancy’s 3?  What about Bob’s 3 after watching a comedy?  Is it the same as Bob’s 3 after seeing his favorite football team receive a bruising?  Alas, we cannot stick our heads inside of a machine and spit out an objective document that tells us how much pain we are currently enduring.

All of which is to say:  what is “real sadness”?  This seems a concept subjective and impossible to measure.  So, here we have the first difficulty with trying to determine is “real sadness” is a prerequisite for “true happiness”.

The second difficulty with a statement such as “Only once one has known real sadness can one feel true happiness” is, as you may have guessed, the challenge with defining “true happiness”.  Again, who am I to say that the slovenly man noshing Doritos in front of a sitcom is not truly happy?  I have no more right to impose my definition of happiness onto him than he has a right to strap me into a La-Z-Boy and force me to watch South Park (egads).  And so, trying to figure out if “real sadness” is required for “true happiness” ends up sounding like:

“Only once one has known ’some entity we cannot objectively define and/or measure’ can one feel ‘another entity we cannot objectively define and/or measure’.”

This is true not only within a person (again, Bob Pain 3 may not always equal Bob Pain 3, depending on the situation), but also across people.  Just as these conditions are not fixed or measurable within a human, they are similarly in flux across people.  “One man’s treasure is another’s trash,” says a familiar maxim.  Take divorce, for example.  For some it might bring great devastation; for others, liberation.

Not only is it hard to compare these conditions across humans, to complicate matters further, even within humans a moment of “trash” can also be a moment of “treasure”!  And it is true:  how many of us can recall a moment of pleasure bringing about a moment of sad, or vice versa?  “Oh no, not me,” you might think, but take a deep breath and think again.  If you ever suffered a scrape as a kid, through the tears and snot was it not also lovely to have your mother soften and embrace you?  Was it not, through this sadness of injury, also a moment of happiness to have someone, normally distracted, turn her attentions and love towards you?  The Buddhists do not have a monopoly on dhukka (the slight undercurrent of sadness in moments of happiness); not only are our feelings conflicted as we try and compare then across people, but even as we try to compare them within ourselves.

Who or what is to be the arbiter of “real sadness” or “true happiness”?

I will allow that perhaps in moments of self-defined “true happiness” we can each reflect back on the moments of “real sadness” and think to ourselves, “Wow, this victory tastes that much sweeter remembering the earlier bitter loss.”  But the assumption that trueness of happiness is inversely related to reality of sadness is predicated on states that cannot be truly measured within man or across men.

Within the ecosystem of the self, perhaps as new events that are sadder than ever experienced previously help us to appreciate the events that bring happiness. But we all have moments of sadness and happiness alike to reflect upon, and to judge and calibrate across men who has felt “real sadness” in an attempt to hand out ribbons that declare who has the right to feel “true happiness” is a deeply simplistic model that not only fails to appreciate the complexity of our fellow man, but also takes a reductive approach to appreciating the complexities of our self.

All of us have a right to feel true happiness, no matter how trivial we may perceive our claims to sadness and no matter how much worse everyone else around us may have it.  Happiness is not a function of previous sadness, nor is it a function of the feelings of everyone else around us, nor is it a function of anything else outside of the self.

Perhaps, then, the way to approach matters of happiness prerequisites is:  “Only once one stops looking for it can one feel true happiness.”

Essay two:  30 minutes (done in 22)

We have decided to institute a policy of all-day kindergarten, instead of half-day kindergarten, for all students at Greenwood School . All-day kindergarten will help all our students achieve at their highest levels. The classes will be ‘tracked’ so that average students are together, but high-achieving and low-achieving students will be put together in classes. In this way, the high-achieving students will be able to help pull the low-achieving students up to their level, so that no student falls behind. The all-day kindergarten classes will cover the same material previously covered in the half-day kindergarten classes, but will go at a slower speed to accommodate learning differences. In addition, the students will receive extra instruction in music, art, and physical education. One of the greatest benefits of the plan, however, is that students will be in a structured environment for longer hours, reducing the numbers of hours that otherwise would be wasted at home or in day care.

According to the principal of Greenwood School, a new policy of all-day kindergarten has been instituted with the stated intention of helping all our students achieve at their highest level.  While this may be true, the argument for the policy, as delineated in the letter sent to the parents of all incoming kindergarteners, is deeply flawed.  There is no cogent argument supporting the claim that all-day kindergarten will cause “all our students” to “achieve at their highest levels”.

The letter states that “high-achieving and low-achieving students will be put together in classes” so that “the high-achieving students will be able to help pull the low-achieving students up to their level, so that no student falls behind.”  Falls behind what?  Is there proof that high-achieving students will not suffer negative externalities from being in a classroom with low-achieving students?  Would Michael Jordan have been the basketball phenom he was had he limited his basketball-playing to a court full of third-graders?

The letter continues that the “all-day kindergarten classes will cover the same material previously covered in the half-day kindergarten classes, but will go at a slower speed to accommodate learning differences.”  Is there any evidence that this slower speed will not negatively impact students who might become bored, disinterested, or fatigued?  Is there any evidence that the existing pace is flawed or suboptimal and in need of tweaking?

While the letter does not state this explicitly, the “extra instruction in music, art, and physical education” in addition to the fact that twice the amount of teaching staff will be needed (assuming that the teacher : student ratio will not be compromised with the move from half-day to full-day kindergarten) will cost money.  These additional costs will be shouldered by all taxpayers in the Greenwood School district evenly, while the disproportionate benefits will be seen (assuming that this move is a benefit which, as detailed above, may not necessarily be true) by the citizens whose offspring are in kindergarten.  Is this move to full-day something for which the district’s taxpayers have shown support?

Finally, the letter’s final sentence reads as follows:

“One of the greatest benefits of the plan, however, is that students will be in a structured environment for longer hours, reducing the numbers of hours that otherwise would be wasted at home or in day dare.”

Let us set aside the notion that doing in eight hours what previously only took four is not a waste of time, a point which is arguable.  So, assuming that classroom time is not wasted, this assumes that hours at home or daycare are not structured or, even more troubling, that structured time is superior to unstructured time when it comes to helping our students achieve at their highest levels.  Is there any evidence to support the claim that structured time at this age is the best way to help our students achieve their best?

In sum, the move to full-day kindergarten classes is deeply worrisome. It is predicated on a number of claims that do not appear to have any grounding in evidence, which may not be terrible in a silo but is very problematic as it involves allocation of taxpayer dollars — taxpayers who may not necessarily have shown support for this policy.

For all the reasons above, institution of this policy should be put on hold until the concerns above can be addressed in a public forum.  Perhaps the claims are correct and can be bolstered by evidence.  Until that time, however, it does not seem prudent to proceed as detailed in the principal’s letter.

50 cent words, part V

All your multi-syllable verbiage are belong to me.

1. ecclesiastic

Raised by a Methodist-turned-agnostic father and a Buddhist mother, it’s no surprise that knowledge of things ecclesiastic is a bit elusive to me.

of or relating to a church

2. factitious

I suspected at the time that her proclaimed sympathy and understanding was factitious, but I chalked it up to her being German and regrettably didn’t listen to the voice in my gut that said, “This person should not be trusted.”

produced by special effort; sham

3. gadfly

I sympathize with Dostoevsky’s underground man’s ceaseless barbs at those around him; I know the groove of solitude around which his head loops and have often been a bit of a gadfly myself.

a person who annoys especially by criticism

4. hackles

Mean-spirited heckling can often inflame hackles, though it’s true that even affectionate badinage can situationally rankle a sensitive soul.

tempers; also, the erectile hairs along the back and neck, esp. of a dog