Thursday, December 30, 2010

Kids Making Money



An Open Letter to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth of America:



Hold tight for a little while longer, kid. It gets better.



There. That's what I've got so far.



"The Huffington Post would like you to write an 'it gets better' piece," said the email I got a few weeks ago from Katie, the publicist for the new Sundance Channel series Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, in which I appear (as a boy who likes boys) along with my best friend Sarah (as a girl who likes, etc.).



(To bring you up to speed, just in case: In response to the recent publicized rash of suicides by gay middle school, high school, and college students--at least eight kids dead in less than a month--author Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller filmed a terrific YouTube message to American kids who are bullied or abused or rejected or beaten up or made to feel like outsiders because of their sexuality. Savage and Miller hated their lives in high school, they explain, but the day they finished, their lives changed, immensely, for the better. They were making this video, they said, to tell you, Hold tight for a little while longer, kid. It gets better. The video obviously sparked something in the national consciousness, because, within days, thousands of people across the country were sending similar--and similarly beautiful--messages to http://itgetsbetter.org; they're sending them still.)



"Great!" I typed enthusiastically back to Katie, sat down, and started to write.



Many of the it-gets-better videos, I'd noticed, began with a recounting of the difficulties the speaker(s) faced when he or she was or they were the age Billy Lucas was when he killed himself on September 9, the age Cody J. Barker was when he killed himself on September 13 (fifteen), the age Seth Walsh was on September 19 (thirteen), the age Tyler Clementi was on September 22 (eighteen), Asher Brown on September 23 (thirteen), Harrison Chase Brown on September 25 (fifteen), Felix Sacco and Raymond Chase on September 29 (seventeen and nineteen). I knew this would not be hard. Thirteen? Fifteen? I had known I was doing something wrong from the age of six, when the Jewish Community Center summer camp counselors said I wasn't allowed to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging and stuck me in gymnastics instead, though to be fair my front handspring is even today a thing to be proud of.



Growing up, I felt like an alien from outer space, stranded on this planet with the half-finished first draft of a guidebook in a language I didn't speak.


So far, so good, I thought. I am a brilliant writer!



I was more or less okay until seventh grade, at which point things began to come apart. I didn't understand why Winslow Barnett snickered when I walked into the boys' locker room for PE wearing my purple bow tie and my fabulous bright green pants with the white piping down the side, but I knew that it was not his intention to convey approbation of my fashion sense. I didn't see why it should be cause for concern to anybody when I started writing all my in-class history exams on pink paper in green ink, with circles over the "i"s, but I didn't need to see that to interpret the look Mr. Somerville gave me when I handed them in. It was a mystery to me why my mother's face fell when I used my birthday money to buy a pair of floppy bunny ears, but I knew enough to wait until I went away to summer camp to start wearing them.


Hmm. Something seems off, I thought as I sat back and reread what I'd written. I probably need chocolate. I went to the bodega on the corner, bought some M&Ms, ate them on the way back home, and sat down at my computer again.



By the time I was fifteen I'd figured out what was really going on, so I went to the library, checked out all the books I could find on being gay, and left them on the kitchen table, which in retrospect might not have been the best way to come out to my parents but it got the job done. They nixed the green ink and the bow ties and forbad me to see the one other openly gay person I knew, a man who ran a chocolate store not far from my house and who had been playing a very effective fairy godmother to my Cinderella; when I defied them and saw him anyway, they grounded me for a year, not that I had any friends with whom I would have spent my time anyway. In the meantime school got trickier to navigate; I can't remember the name of the kid who intercepted the note I passed to Kathy Weld during first-period French about George Lindenmayer, but my face flushes still when I remember having my own lovestruck mooning quoted sneeringly back to me as I passed him and his friends in the hall for the rest of the week. They'd translated the French badly but that was cold comfort.

But it got better. It got much, much, much better.


It's not the chocolate, I realized.



The problem was that I had had it easy.



I was pretty fey, to be sure, but I never flouted gender norms in any significant way for any significant length of time, so I was never the target of constant bullying; furthermore, I went to a fancy-schmancy private school where the shoving match Kinsey Huggins got into with Chad Rawe during the break before Latin II one Tuesday was the talk of our ninth-grade class for weeks, so what bullying I was subjected to was relatively de bon ton. While Winslow Barnett's snickering and that of the kid whose name I can't remember may therefore have stabbed me to the heart, they were small potatoes compared with the bullying some of you go through every day. Nobody ever filmed me having sex without my permission and live-streamed it online. Nobody ever pulled my chair out from under me and told me to go hang myself, and I never seriously considered doing so. Nobody ever kicked me down a flight of stairs. And sure, my parents' reaction when I came out to them was ridiculous, but they were still civil rights workers; I'm sure the idea of throwing me out of the house never occurred to them, unlike the parents of many of the 40% of homeless kids who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. And they could no more have beaten me senseless than they could have campaigned for public office as segregationists. I had no reason to run away.



I mean, really. A few of my classmates laughed at me? A teacher thought I was weird? That was the best I could come up with? My parents overreacted to something and grounded me for an unreasonably long time?



Cry me a fucking river.



Okay, I thought, unnerved. Remember, I am a brilliant writer. I'll just leave this alone for a few days and see what my fecund brain comes up with.



"Sarah's piece was posted yesterday," Katie's next email said. "Do you know when we can expect yours?"



"I'll get it to you any day now!" I wrote back. "☺," I added, in hopes of keeping her from getting angry at me.



Why don't I just keep writing, I asked myself rhetorically, see where I end up, and then go back and fix the beginning later? "But it got better," I deleted and retyped three times. "It got much, much, much better."



I went away to college, where I felt free for the first time in my life. I did well and had a great time and made friends for whom I would even today drop whatever I was doing and fly halfway around the world if they asked and if my debit card permitted. I moved to New York and went to grad school, made some more of the same kind of friend, joined a cheerleading squad, learned to knit, taught step aerobics, danced as a go-go boy, taught math to elementary-school kids, went to gay summer camp, wrote some musicals, saw a few of them produced, wrote some books, saw a couple of them published, dated some boys, had sex with a lot more, got a dog, moved in with one of the boys, got another dog, married the boy, and somewhere along the way became myself and watched as the world made room for me.

And today, the day before Thanksgiving, as I write this on the downtown 3 train, trying to figure out what kind of pie to bake to bring to my mother-in-law's tomorrow for dinner, I look back at my 13-year-old self and am filled with gratitude that he held tight.

Hold tight for a little while longer, kid. It gets better. I promise.


And I read what I had written and I was like, oh, fuck me. I might as well have ended it, "and they all lived happily ever after."



I mean, every word of what I'd written was true, I promise you that. But there was so much I'd left out, like the couple years during my early thirties when I did want to kill myself, desperately--my fantasies went back and forth weekly between jumping in front of a subway train and overdosing on prescription medication--for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with my sexuality or anybody's response to it. Or like the heartbreak that having musicals produced and books published tends to bring one instead of making one happy, and like the fact that these enterprises have earned me less money than I would have made temping--enough less, actually, that I lie awake at night figuring out which companies and utilities are least likely to descend upon my credit rating like avenging Furies if I don't pay them this month.



And like the fact that, unlike some gay people, I've never walked into a sex club full of men fucking each other--I mean, I've walked into a sex club full of men fucking each other; Mary, please--but I've never walked into a sex club full of men fucking each other, been approached by none of them, and had to assume it was because they were white and I wasn't. And that, since both I and my body are male, I've never dated somebody who seemed like the perfect man, revealed to him that I was biologically female, and had to grab hold of a credenza so as not to be sucked into the vacuum created by his instant departure. And that, as somebody attracted only to one sex rather than to both, I've never been mocked both by straight people for liking boys and by gay people for liking girls too, and left in the end with no community at all willing to accept me. And that one night a couple months ago in New York three gay men were beaten, slashed, burned with cigarettes, and sodomized with a baseball bat and a toilet plunger; I don't know what their adolescent years were like so I can't say for sure that this wasn't a step up, but I have a hard time believing that at this moment they feel it's gotten better.



Or like the fact that much of the time I still feel like an alien from outer space, stranded on this planet with the first draft of a half-finished guidebook in a language I don't speak.



Which struck me as a lot to leave out, so I deleted the whole thing and wrote a new piece about all this and the cry-me-a-river stuff and I showed it to my friend Sarah and she was like, "You're kidding, right? This might as well be called, 'I Wish I'd Had it as Bad Off as You When I Was Your Age So I Could Have Just Killed Myself Then.' "



This seemed unwieldy as a title, so I scrapped that version too.



Which is how I find myself here, terrified that Katie will hate me because I have no idea what to write. "Maybe It Gets Better"? "It Sort of Gets Better, Unless it Doesn't"? "Congratulations! It May Already Have Gotten Better!"?



And yet I think there is something true, deeply true, in what these "it gets better" messages communicate; I think it does get better. It's just that "better" doesn't necessarily mean that the day you graduate from high school and leave your podunk town somebody is going to be waiting there to hand you a gorgeous boyfriend, a great job, and a puppy. Certainly this may happen, and if it does then please don't tell me because it will make me hate you and cry. But things are probably going to unfold a little differently. The boyfriend may prove elusive. You may get stuck in a frustrating job. You may live in a no-pets building.



But here are some things that are definitely going to happen:



First, the world is going to get bigger. Right now, the only territories you can inhabit without anybody's permission are your house and your school. If you're anywhere else--at the mall or the movie theater or the beach, whatever, I have no idea where you kids spend your time these days--you're there on the sufferance of your parents and any adults who happen to be around. Fuck up and display your real self for a moment, and the next thing you know you're sitting in front of somebody in a tie who expects you to be ashamed of yourself.



When you finish high school, you get to leave this dynamic behind. (Oh, there'll be no shortage of people in ties expecting you to be ashamed of yourself, but you can tell them to go fuck themselves, and there's no such thing as detention in real life. There's prison, of course, but usually you have to do more than tell somebody to go fuck himself to end up there.)



If you go every day to a place where idiot cretins bully you, then when you finally get sick of it you have the choice to go somewhere else instead. Somewhere else might be another job, it might be your own place in New York or some other metropolis, it might be a shelter in whatever town you can get a bus ticket to or walk to, but the point is that if life sucks where you are, you're allowed to leave.



The second thing that's going to happen is that, because the world is going to bigger, other people will stop mattering so much. Right now your entire life has forty people in it, or two hundred, or however many are in your class, plus your parents and a handful of other people. If one person is mean to you, that's a pretty large percentage of your world; if that person is popular, then probably a bunch of others follow suit, and before you know it half the people in your life hate you. If half the world is bullying you, mistreating you, ignoring you, insulting you, and abusing you, what other conclusion can you reach but that you deserve to be bullied, mistreated, ignored, insulted, and abused?



Well, when you leave high school, the population of your world increases by several billion, and, if people you spend time with are bullying you, you can recognize them as assholes and find other people to spend time with. Depending on your circumstances, you might find more or fewer of them, and they might be easier or harder to find--but no matter what they'll be the people you choose to allow into your life. If you're lucky, you'll find some wonderful close friends, as I have, but if you're not as lucky, and find yourself in a group of people who hinder you from becoming the person you want to be, you can dump them and get some new close friends, because as it turns out the planet is covered in stranded aliens, and chances are good that if you meet the right ones and put your guidebooks together with theirs you'll find some of the answers you're looking for.



But in the end, no matter where you go or who you encounter there, here's what it comes down to: when you reach eighteen, you become the only person allowed to decide anything about what you do with your life (unless, again, you are in prison, where issues of sexuality become very different). Nobody else has the right to decide where you live, who you live it with, what you do with your time. There are practical limitations to these questions, and you will face obstacles in life after high school--Tyler Clementi was a freshman in college, Raymond Chase a sophomore--but you won't need to get anybody else's permission to try to overcome them.



There's one last thing to say, which is that leaving, though it's what many if not most of us have done, isn't your only option. If the nearest town with any LGBT services is a four-hour drive away and your family has no car, or if you're caring for an ailing parent, or any of a thousand other reasons, or you just feel like staying put, the world can still get bigger--if you make it bigger. And if you're going to finish that guidebook on your own, you might as well start now.



Get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union LGBT Project (http://aclu.org/safeschools) and sue your goddamn school; there are a lot of things wrong with this country but at this moment one thing that's very right about it is that when kids like you are in trouble and nobody does anything about it and the ACLU and other LGBT rights organizations find out about it, a lot of people around the country get very upset, and often things change for the better. Or talk to somebody at Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays (http://pflag.org) about how to get your parents to support you. Or file a complaint with the federal Office of Civil Rights (http://community.pflag.org/claimyourrights). Or contact the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/student/index.html) and start an anti-bullying program so your pathetic Neanderthal classmates can learn that there are other ways to assuage their existential confusion and terror than by beating you up. Or all of the above, or something else that nobody has thought of yet. You have the power to make it get better, and there are a lot of people out here who are on your side, and all you need to do to get their help is ask them for it. And the great thing about asking them for it is that, with their involvement, you can help it get better not just for you but also for other kids like you.



Taking action may or may not be the right choice for you. But either way--and I think this may be what I need to give Katie--there's one thing that you can and should do, no matter who you are, no matter where, no matter what your circumstances:



Hold tight for a little while longer, kid.



It gets better.



Sincerely yours,



Joel Derfner



P.S.: If you're thinking about killing yourself or you just feel alone or want somebody to talk to, please, please, please call the Trevor Project, a 24-hour hotline just for LGBT youth, at 800.488.7386 (800-4-U-TREVOR). If you're homeless, then you've already learned much of the above, tragically early, but it can get better for you, too; there are people out here who want to help you, and you can find a list of supportive, welcoming resources for LGBT homeless youth all over the country at http://aliforneycenter.org/resources.html. And if anything I've written here speaks to you, you should go to your local public library and check out my book Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, which some LGBT kids have told me has helped them see how it can get better. If your library doesn't have it, email me at joel@joelderfner.com and I'll try to send you a copy, or, if you don't want to risk being seen holding a book with such a title, email you the manuscript.










I like it when the mainstream media drops by to take a look at the student debt crisis. I’d like to think that, unlike the housing bubble, this impending crisis can be avoided with sensible government regulation and individual actors making smart decisions about their own financial futures.

The government regulation is, strangely, the easy part — Congress will care that younger Americans are being crushed under their own debt load, or it won’t. This seems to me like a non-partisan problem. So if our elected officials get a clue (a pretty big “if”), then perhaps something positive will happen.

Getting individual actors to behave in their own economic self-interest is the hard part. Trust me, I talk to students thinking about going to law school almost every day. These kids seem to be allergic to facts and figures. But maybe with enough media spotlight, families will actually start thinking about how their kids are going to pay off their debts, and behaving rationally.

There was a big article on MSNBC.com yesterday showing just how far we have to go, as a country, to get the student loan crisis under control…

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When I rail against the educational racket being practiced by so many law schools, readers remind me that the problem really starts in college. Parents pay and kids borrow exorbitant amounts of money to get degrees that seem to confer no practical economic benefit. And we all know that so many people who go to law school end up there only after they realize their undergraduate degrees were functionally useless.

The MSNBC article focuses on one family and their choices:

The Kuipers’ nest is already half-empty. Chris is a college freshman, studying engineering at Calvin College, a private school in Grand Rapids, Mich. Kaylee is a junior, also at Calvin, where she recently switched her major to international development after a trip to Africa left her with a keen interest in travel.

Hold that thought in your head: family struggling to send their two kids to college (and they have two more on the way), daughter is majoring in… “international development.” Got that? Okay, let’s continue:

“We went around and we visited a bunch of different tribes and villages and just learned about what they were doing for development,” [Kaylee] said. “We got to do some fun things, like a safari. And we just, like, studied the land.”

It hasn’t been easy for the Kuipers to save for college, especially after putting their kids through parochial school. Rick drives a garbage truck, at work every day before dawn. Tami commutes an hour each way to a law office in downtown Chicago, where she’s a paralegal.

Your dad drives a garbage truck and your mom busts her ass as a paralegal and you, you are majoring in international development? Because you went to Africa once? I went to Europe once. It was pretty neat. I particularly enjoyed seeing all the castles. But I didn’t come home and change my major to Folklore and Mythology (an actual major at Harvard College) because I’m not a freaking trust fund baby. I had to pay some minimal attention to my financial future.

Kaylee, a daughter of working-class Americans, apparently feels no such pressure:

“I don’t really know how much (debt) I have,” [Kaylee] said. “My mom handles a lot of it for me. … I just feel like I’m in the career field that I love, so it’ll somehow work out.”

Ladies and gentlemen, meet future law school student Kaylee Kuiper. Let’s see how much she loves this career field when she’s the one trying to put food on her table on a dollar a day. Maybe she’ll try it for a year and then somebody, probably her paralegal mother, will tell her that becoming a lawyer will allow her to pursue a career “international law.” It won’t be her mother’s fault — from her perspective, the lawyers in her office are doing a lot better than she is. So Kaylee will go to law school and she and/or her family will end up doubling down on the educational bet. Three years later, Kaylee’s debt will be approaching $200,000, and she’ll be trying to get firms to offer her an “international” law job… whatever the hell that means. Of course, even if she gets a job, she won’t “love” her career field anymore. And we’ll have another bitter associate who is in the profession only for the money but feels like she’s serving a term of indentured servitude until she can get out and do what she really wants to do with her life. And partners will wonder why she looks like she’s about to slit her wrists when they tell her about her crappy, crappy bonus.

(I wrote that entire paragraph without taking a breath.)

And that’s why we have figures like these:

Americans now owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards — a debt fast approaching $1 trillion with no end in sight…

America’s student debt at the end of 2010 is nearly $880 billion. That number is growing by more than $2,800 dollars per second.

And to my mind that whole process starts with some 20-year-old taking a trip or having an experience and going back to school with no economic plan whatsoever. When did American parents lose the ability to tell their kids: “No. That’s stupid. You’re going to be an engineer like your brother, and that’s that.”

The process ends, of course, with a debt that is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy (absent a showing of undue hardship):

Alan Collinge, an activist and author, who drew on his own student loan default to found the group StudentLoanJustice.org, says the student loan crisis is potentially far worse than the mortgage crisis.

“A defaulted home mortgage borrower — and don’t get me wrong, it’s a horrible outcome — they walk away from their house wearing a barrel and not much else,” he said. “In the case of student loans, there is no walking away.”

Unlike most other forms of debt, student loans carry almost no consumer protections and little ability to refinance. By law, they can’t be wiped out in bankruptcy. Those laws were passed in response to the last student loan crisis in the 1980s. But Collinge believes it created a system he calls predatory.

Is it a predatory system? Absolutely. But there are way too many students and families eager to put themselves in the position of being “prey.”

You can’t help people who won’t help themselves. Kaylee Kuiper has working-class parents and is a college junior majoring in international development at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The next economist who tells me people can be expected to act in their own rational self-interest is getting punched in the mouth.

Student loans leave crushing debt burden [MSNBC.com]


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Windows Phone Marketplace hits 5000 Apps and is Cracked

There's been good news and bad for Microsoft this week. The good news is that the number of apps available in the new Windows Phone marketplace has been growing steadily since October and has now passed the 5000 mark. ...

AOL Weird <b>News</b> Top 10: The Best of the Bizarre

What does a one-legged man, a fly-sized frog, a bacon sculpture of Kevin Bacon, conjoined twins who can see out of each other's eyes and a 115-foot Jesus statue have in common? They've all made the list for AOL's Top Ten Weird News ...

Fox <b>News</b>, Hypocrisy, And “Politically Correct” Journalism

My earlier post about Megyn Kelly's absurd equation of illegal immigration and rape in a discussion about changes to the Associated Press Style Guide.


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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Making Money Online With

The Education Tech Series is supported by Dell The Power To Do More, where you’ll find perspectives, trends and stories that inspire Dell to create technology solutions that work harder for its customers so they can do and achieve more.

Non-profit organizations and passionate individuals have found a slew of creative ways to leverage social media and the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet to make the world a better place. Online campaigns help provide clean drinking water, food and malaria-preventing bed nets to people who need them.

Creative uses of the web are helping to provide and enhance education. These four projects, for instance, found innovative ways to help build schools through digital campaigns.

1. Epic Change

Epic Change has become a model for raising money using social media. Since 2008, its annual TweetsGiving has asked people to tweet about what they’re thankful for while making a donation. The strategy was so successful that #tweetsgiving became a trending topic on Twitter during the first year’s campaign.

Starting out, the benefactor of TweetsGiving was a school in Tanzania that was founded by Mama Lucky Kamptoni, a passionate local woman who started the school using money she earned from her poultry business (now there are two more benefactors). Epic Change wanted to help her rebuild and expand the school.

The organization also launched To Mama With Love, a website where users can make a donation by creating a “heart space” for a mother they care about. The “heart space” is a collection of photos, videos and words dedicated to that mother. Other people who care about that mother are invited to donate in her honor.

From one of the classrooms that was built using donations from these campaigns, the students now tweet and connect with the rest of the world.

“So often, we hear the stories of children in the so-called ‘developing’ world from the perspective of the media, non-profits or friends who have traveled or volunteered,” explains the Epic Change Blog. “What happens now – when these students can share their own stories, and build relationships with the rest of the world, for themselves? How will the world be different when these children, who live so geographically far away, move into our virtual backyard? What difference will it make in their lives to know that their voices will be heard?”

2. Stillerstrong

When Ben Sitller launched the Stillerstrong campaign on YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube, Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter and a branded website, he did it with a video that poked fun at Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign. It was hard to tell if he was kidding.

But the campaign, which sells Stillerstrong headbands and accepts donations by text message and credit card, has raised about $300,000 to help provide temporary schools for Haitians displaced by January’s earthquake. At the time the campaign was announced, the organization and its partners Causecast and the Global Philanthropy Group were expecting each school to cost between $45,000 and $55,000.

3. TwitChange

Instead of auctioning off celebrity memorabilia to support a charity, TwitChange hosts eBay auctions for celebrity Twitter interaction. The donation’s bidders put down to have a celebrity follow them, retweet their tweet, or mention them in an update. The proceeds go to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will use them to build a home and school for children with disabilities in Haiti.

The first auction in September raised $531,640.25. The website instructs us to “stay tuned for the celebrity tweet auction coming this holiday season.”

4. University of the People

Less of a “campaign” than a full-blown effort to democratize education, University of the People provides tuition-free higher education through an online campus.

Since launching last year, the university has accepted about 700 students from 100 different countries to its three- to four-year programs for business and computer science. Recently the university opened computer centers in Haiti so that students with limited Internet access could enroll in its courses.

“I do believe that if we take the millions of people around the world who could not afford going to university and teach them tuition free, we’re not only changing their lives, and their family’s lives, we also change their communities, their countries,” founder Shai Shai Reshef says. “And if we have a lot of them, we will change the world for a better world.”

Series Supported by Dell The Power To Do More/>

The Education Tech Series is supported by Dell The Power To Do More, where you’ll find perspectives, trends and stories that inspire Dell to create technology solutions that work harder for its customers so they can do and achieve more.

More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

- How Online Classrooms Are Helping Haiti Rebuild Its Education System/> - Why Social Media Is Reinventing Activism/> - 5 Creative Social Good Campaigns for the Holiday Season/> - 4 Real Challenges to Crowdsourcing for Social Good/> - 9 Creative Social Good Campaigns Worth Recognizing

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, urbancow

For more Social Good coverage:

    class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Social Goodclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Social Good channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for Android, iPhone and iPad
I'm exploring the site now. First impressions:

1. Promoted Tweets: "When you promote a Tweet, only the most relevant users see it—put simply, that's users that follow similar accounts to yours." OK - so Twitter has some kind of (proprietary) segmenting algorithm. Does that mean "If I'm promoting tweets about RC Cola, users following Coke and Pepsi will see it, but someone who isn't following either of them won't?" What about someone who's following a celebrity that Coke or Pepsi sponsors? I guess if I were a brand, I'd want something a little more specific than that. On Facebook, I can say, "Only 18-35 year old males who are fans of any NBA team will see ads for my basketball shoes." What's the equivalent on Twitter?

2. Promoted Trends: Yeah, Carri's right about this one *and* there's another hitch. The way this has been described, a trend has to *already* be a Trending Topic before you can promote it. That means the brand has to sit at a console, watching Twitter, or have a script watching the world-wide, local and regional trending topics. When a new trend is "born", the brand has to decide if it's relevant, compose a tweet, then hit the "Promote" button.

I've seen Promoted Trends, so they must either have had a strong clue that it was going to make it into the Trending Topics ahead of time, like a sports event or TV show, or they were camped out on a console. I know the W+K people had a whole control center for the Old Spice campaign, complete with home-brew analytics, creative and legal teams working in real time, and so on. In any event, this seems to me to be a big-brand tool only, in conjunction with mass media and real-time campaign management and lots of data integration.

There are a few other issues with Promoted Trends. Every user can choose to see "World Wide" Trending Topics, or trends from certain cities or regions. If you're promoting a Boston restaurant, I'd think you'd only want to show the Promoted button to people who were viewing Boston trending topics. Another issue is spammers. When the list of trending topics updates, there are spambots that latch on to multiple topics - if I viewed "Boston Celtics" during a basketball game, sure, I'd see a Promoted Tweet for the restaurant at the top, but right after than I'd see a bunch of garbage. Twitter needs to filter the spam out of Trending Topics before Promoted Trends will be effective. I think it's an easy piece of code to write - just ignore any tweet that matches more than one trending topic.

3. Promoted Accounts: As far as I'm concerned, I don't know that I'd buy a promoted account if Twitter was filtering who saw it. I don't think Twitter's "Who To Follow" algorithms are that good yet. For example, I followed a math teacher in the UK recently who tweeted something interesting. For *days* after that, Twitter's Who To Follow list was mostly math teachers in the UK! Either they all follow each other or Twitter is looking at the profiles. If I bought a Promoted Account I'd want to either know how many people would see it and how they were selected, or I'd just want everyone to see it. And If I only pay per follower and not per view, I think I'd insist on knowing how they were segmented - I wouldn't want to have to spend my own resources qualifying followers.

4. Analytics: I'm really glad Twitter is providing those only for advertisers, because they're going to be tweaking the algorithms for months, and that costs money. Again, though, you really need to be a big brand before you can dedicate a real-time Twitter team to a campaign.

Bottom line: even with all the issues, I think it's going to be successful for campaigns like the Old Spice campaign, major league sports, mass market movies and television shows. It's working for Conan O' Brian, it worked for Old Spice, it probably worked for Best Buy and some of the movies that used it.

But for smaller businesses, with, say, a single person at a dashboard for a local business in one of the cities where Twitter captures Trending Topics, it's going to be a bit like day trading. Eventually, you'll learn how to do it, how to follow trends, promote them, compose a tweet stream that "resonates", etc., but there won't be much "science" in it. Spammers will figure out how to game it and "black hat Twitter resonance optimizers" will appear on the scene as if by magic.

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Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


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Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


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Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


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Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


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Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


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Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


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Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


bench craft company scam

Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


bench craft company scam

Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


bench craft company scam

Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


bench craft company scam

Fair &amp; Balanced? Fox <b>News</b>&#39; Big Year (VIDEOS) | TPM LiveWire

From lecturing President Barack Obama on racial sensitivity to inflating threats of terror, Fox News offered more than a few journalistic lessons this year. Fox's ratings continued to top the other major cable networks, while its news ...

Fox <b>News</b> - Ratings - 2010 | MSNBC - CNN | Mediaite

Fox News will mark 2010 as one of the best years since the network's launch in 1996. The network posted powerful ratings, beating the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC and marking the ninth straight year as cable's top news network.

<b>News</b> - Reese Witherspoon, Jim Toth Engaged! - Healthy Lifestyle <b>...</b>

The actress and her Hollywood agent beau are "extremely happy," her rep tells Us exclusively.


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Thursday, December 23, 2010

Start Making Money


This wasn’t the final vote on ratification, merely the vote to end debate, but if they’ve already got two-thirds in the bank for cloture, it’s a mortal lock that the treaty will pass.


The tax cuts deal, then DADT repeal, now this. Man, I’ll bet The One wishes every session could be a lame-duck session.


The New Start treaty was the last major challenge of the session for Mr. Obama, and in some ways the most emboldening for him. The tax-cut deal required the president to swallow a compromise that extended the expiring, lowered Bush-era tax rates even for the wealthy, costing him support within his own party. The overturning of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy was driven as much by senators as by the White House.


But it was Mr. Obama who decided to make passing the treaty before the end of the year a high-profile test of his remaining clout. Despite bleak prospects for the treaty just a month ago, Mr. Obama mounted an unusually relentless campaign to win over enough Republican senators on his terms, enlisting former Republican luminaries, the nation’s military commanders and Eastern European leaders to knock down any objections…


The White House and Pentagon have insisted from the beginning that the treaty would do nothing to block American missile defense plans. On Monday, Mr. McCain unveiled a proposed amendment to the resolution of ratification that accompanies the treaty affirming that the United States will proceed with all four planned phases of missile defense in Europe by 2020 as Mr. Obama has committed to doing.


The growing support from Republicans suggested that the White House no longer needed Mr. McCain and it may choose to pocket what seems to be shaping up as a victory without making further accommodations. At the same time, it may decide to come to an agreement with Mr. McCain in the interest of building a stronger bipartisan vote for the treaty beyond the bare-minimum 66.


Here’s the roll. Eleven Republicans voted yes — Alexander, Bennett, Brown, Cochran, Collins, Corker, Isakson, Lugar, Murkowski, Snowe, and Voinovich. Those not voting included Evan Bayh, Judd Gregg, and the ailing Ron Wyden, all of whom are expected to back the treaty on the final vote, so Waffles is right for once that they might very well hit 70. And I’d bet cash money that if not for the prospect of a tea-party primary challenge next year, Hatch would have been lucky number 71.


As for the missile defense objections that Ed outlined earlier, that’s been an issue since the beginning. But I think The One’s given so many assurances by now about not letting Russia use the treaty as leverage to extract missile-shield concessions that he couldn’t cave to them without doing himself some serious political damage. The latest promise came just two days ago, in a formal, detailed letter to the Senate which Kerry took to reading aloud on the floor. Putting it in writing doesn’t guarantee that he won’t cave, but it does make things nice and easy for GOP attack ads about Democratic weakness on national security if he does. If he wants to break his promise to the public and help elect a Republican president in 2012 or 2016, whereupon the missile shield will be duly reinstated, hey.


Here’s Lindsey Graham, one of the 28 votes, sounding off at the presser afterwards. Apart from Kyl, he’s been the most vocal objector to the treaty on the Republican side lately; whether that’s a byproduct of his hawkishness or a bow to the reality of his own primary challenge down the road is anyone’s guess. Said DeMint at the same presser, “We join millions of Americans who are outraged,” which is true — there are millions who oppose it. But if you believe CNN’s latest poll, those millions are in a very small minority.








Nick Rowe asks me three questions in his Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: If cows were money (a response to Brad DeLong):



Nick: If cows were money, an increased demand for milk would cause a recession. People would stop spending their cows to buy goods and services, because if you spend your cows you don't have as much milk. Was the recession caused by an excess demand for milk, or an excess demand for money?



Me: If the Federal Cow Reserve conducted expansionary monetary policy by selling cows in exchange for promises to deliver milk, then its open market operations in cows would have no stimulative effect on the economy: the cows it sold would not enter the circulating medium but would instead be kept in reserve to replace the milk that the Federal Reserve had bought. Since open-market operations that boost the money stock are ineffective, it is clear that the recession was not caused by an excess demand for money but by an excess demand for milk.



Nick: If gold bars were money, an increased demand for bling would cause a recession. People would stop spending their gold bars to buy goods and services, because if you spend your gold bars you don't have as much bling. Was the recession caused by an excess demand for bling, or an excess demand for money?



Me: If the Federal Jewelry Reserve conducted expansionary monetary policy by selling gold in exchange for other forms of bling, then its open market operations in gold would have no stimulative effect on the economy: the gold it sold would not enter the circulating medium but would instead be used as bling replace the bling that the Federal Reserve had bought. Since open-market operations that boost the money stock are ineffective, it is clear that the recession was not caused by an excess demand for money but by an excess demand for bling.



Nick: If dollars were money, an increased demand for savings would cause a recession. People would stop spending their dollars to buy goods and services, because if you spend your dollars you don't have as much savings. Was the recession caused by an excess demand for savings, or an excess demand for money?



Me: If the Federal Reserve conducted expansionary monetary policy by selling dollars in exchange for other savings vehicles like bonds, then its open market operations in dollars and bonds would have no stimulative effect on the economy: the dollars it sold would not enter the circulating medium but would instead be used as savings vehicles to replace the bonds that the Federal Reserve had bought. Since open-market operations that boost the money stock are ineffective, it is clear that the recession was not caused by an excess demand for money but by an excess demand for savings vehicles.



Now that that is clear, let me say that Nick's post is very good. He goes on:




It has almost come down to a semantic dispute.... e are arguing about the referential opacity of demand functions. If I demand milk, can I be said to demand the medium of exchange, if, as a contingent fact, the medium of exchange just happens to provide milk, and I want the medium of exchange only for its milk?



But it matters. Because the way you frame the cause of the recession may influence where you look for a cure.



If you say that the recession is caused by an excess demand for milk, you start looking for ways to either increase the supply of milk or reduce the demand. Can the government breed some goats, and increase the supply of milk that way? But if you see the recession as being caused by an excess demand for cows, you also start to think of other solutions. Perhaps the government could tax ownership of cows? Even, as a last ditch policy, make the cows stop giving milk? If you think of the recession as being caused by a shortage of milk, then taxing cows, or making the cows stop giving milk, look like totally daft solutions. They wouldn't cure the shortage of milk. But they would cure the recession. With a tax on cows, or if cows stopped giving milk, people would start spending their cows again.



But I also see the point of looking at it from Brad's perspective. An open market operation of cows for goats, where the government imports cows, uses them buy goats, and exports the goats, may not work. The total supply of milk is the same, and if cow's milk and goat's milk are perfect substitutes, people have no additional incentive to get rid of their cows to buy the goods and services that are in excess supply. If, at the margin, the demand for cows is a demand for milk only, the demand for cows will increase one-for-one with the increased supply of cows, if that increased supply of cows is the result of an open market purchase of goats. But why did the demand for cow's milk increase in the first place? Was it that all the goats went dry? Or might the increased demand for milk be a consequence of the recession, and so a consequence of the excess demand for cows? "I had better hang on to my cows, because I won't be able to sell my labour to buy milk in this recession!"



I don't know whether Brad is right about the shortage of other safe savings vehicles being the cause of the increased demand for money qua second best savings vehicle. But, even if he is wrong, this is something that might happen.... orrectly diagnosing the proximate cause of the recession as an excess demand for the good that happens to be the medium of exchange, even if that excess demand is not a demand for that good qua medium of exchange, lets us start thinking about radical solutions.



And we need to start thinking about radical solutions, because as history teaches us, and as this recession reminds us (and judging by the Eurozone we are going to be reminded again) stuff happens. Things go wrong. Safe assets become unsafe. Goats stop giving milk. And we need a monetary system that is robust in the face of human stuff-ups. A shortage of milk is a problem, but it didn't ought to cause a recession too. A shortage of safe assets is a problem, but it didn't ought to cause a recession too. And if it didn't cause an excess demand for the medium of exchange, as a contingent side-effect, it wouldn't cause a recession to compound the original problem. And it's just because those side-effects are contingent, and don't follow of necessity, that I insist on my way of framing the problem. A shortage of safe assets may cause an excess demand for money. An excess demand for money will cause a recession. We can break that first link in the causal chain, because it's only a contingent link. The second link follows of metaphysical necessity, unless we switch to barter.



What's the solution that could prevent an excess demand for the medium of exchange, and so prevent general gluts? Silvio Gessell? Barter on Ebay? Funny money systems where you can't hold a positive balance? God only knows. But we ought to start thinking about it. Quasi-monetarism (which is really Keynesianism too, if you are the sort of Keynesian that recognises that Keynesian economics doesn't make any sense in a barter economy) can be a radical approach.




The one thing this left out, I think, is that "money" becomes a first-rate savings vehicle and store of safe value only when nominal interest rates hit their zero lower bound.



Actually, it left out something else: in comments to Nick, Andrew Harless starts musing about money not just as a medium of exchange and a store of value but a unit of account...




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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


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The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


bench craft company scam

The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


bench craft company scam

The Health Care Blog: Health 2.0 <b>News</b> launches

Today I'm very excited to tell you that Health 2.0 News is launching. We've had the Health 2.0 Blog for several years now and of course have extensively covered the world of Health 2.0 and the Health 2.0 Conferences on THCB. ...

Neandertal Relative Bred With Humans - Science <b>News</b>

Previously unknown Siberian group left fingerprints in some humans' DNA.

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.


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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Who's Making Money



energy, Entrepreneurship, startups


How SunRun Applies Financial and Software Muscle to Home Solar Installation




Wade Roush 12/21/10

Sometimes we tech reporters get so wrapped up in writing about cool new technologies that we overlook other, equally important forms of innovation. Recently I visited SunRun, a San Francisco startup that installs photovoltaic panels on residential buildings and charges homeowners for the electricity they generate. I was expecting to hear a lot about the latest ways to engineer solar panels to produce more power—but I came away with a notebook full of thoughts about power purchase agreements, tax equity financing, and pricing engines. So while there are certainly people at SunRun who spend their time figuring out how to optimize the power output of the company’s 3,500 installed systems, this is largely a story about how three-year-old SunRun is spreading solar to more homes through clever financial engineering.


Despite the rapid growth of the Bay Area’s three leading residential solar companies—SunRun, Solar City, and Sungevity—there’s still a big puzzle about solar homes. It’s why there aren’t a lot more of them. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the California Solar Initiative into law in 2006, making more than $2 billion in cash rebates and tax credits available to utility customers who put solar panels on their roofs. The goal was to get a million residential rooftop systems installed in the state, but all that free money hasn’t translated into the envisioned acres of solar panels. “We’ve soared past a million Priuses shipped, but in terms of solar homes in California, we are only at 100,000 since the beginning of the solar initiative,” notes Steve Vassallo, a Foundation Capital general partner who oversees several of the firm’s energy investments.


It’s partly an awareness issue: the state’s Public Utility Commission has issued dozens of news releases since 2006, and has designated August as “Solar Energy Awareness Month,” but it hasn’t done much else to publicize the rebates or explain how consumers can get them. But it’s also an economic issue: homeowners hammered by the recession don’t have a lot of extra money to shell out for home improvements these days, and they aren’t sure how much money they can save on their utility bills by installing solar.


And that’s the first thing that’s so ingenious about SunRun’s business model. It’s designed to take most of the risk out of solar installation, by asking homeowners for a tiny down payment (averaging $500), lining up equipment and installers, handling all maintenance and repairs for 20 years, and finally guaranteeing that homeowners’ post-installation electricity payments to SunRun will be lower than their existing utility bills.


That simple pitch has won SunRun 7,000 customers in seven states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—and made it the fastest growing residential solar company in the country. But it has taken a lot of careful planning, and quite a bit of creativity on the financial and administrative sides, to make it all work.


“It’s a simple concept to take away the hassle and up-front costs of solar,” says Vassallo, who’s been working with SunRun since Foundation made its first investment in the company in mid-2008. “But to make it happen behind the scenes, a lot of fascinating challenges had to be overcome.”


The story starts back in 2007, when Edward Fenster and Lynn Jurich, who would eventually become SunRun’s CEO and president, respectively, were students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Fenster had M&A experience from …Next Page »



Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at 415-796-3024, or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush. You can subscribe to his Google Group and you can follow all Xconomy San Francisco stories at twitter.com/xconomysf.



This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja — a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!


As online marketers, we often devote a large amount of time to finding ways to attract eyeballs to our online assets. We put such effort into simply get the readers there that we allow the rest to take care of itself. Money will flow, Ferraris will be purchased, and we can all retire nice and young…


Then we discover the concept of sales funnels.


You may already know what a sales funnel is, but if you don’t, let me quickly describe it for you.


A sales funnel is a simple map of your lead-to-sale process.



  1. Let’s imagine you start with 1,000 leads (visitors to your web site).

  2. 100 might click on a sales page link for of one of your products.

  3. 50 might click your Order Now button and enter your shopping cart.

  4. Ten complete the checkout process and buy the product.


So your sales funnel starts and 1,000 and ends in ten sales—that’s a 1% conversion.


That’s a bare-bones view of a sales funnel, but as you can see it takes four steps, not one, to increase the amount of sales your site delivers. If we put all our attention on attracting new visitors, we’re essentially forgetting 75% of the puzzle—and we’ve all done that.


But that’s not where online marketers go wrong!


It’s not hard to sell people the idea of the sales funnel—it’s simple to understand and easy to quantify. It’s also been around for a long time. Offline sales professionals have been using it for decades.


The problem with the sales funnel is that in the offline world it’s a simple and straightforward methodology, but in the online world, it’s not.


The image below is a quick process map I prepared for a Managing Director of a large retail operation, who’s focusing heavily on online strategy.



As you can see, that organization’s sales funnel is a lot more complicated than the simple four-step process I mentioned above. There are some key points I want to highlight in this map:



  • Seven different types of traffic that visit the site.

  • There are multiple behaviors that we need to analyse: what pages visitors view, how long they stay, the navigational path, and their user profiles (locations, browsers, etc.).

  • There’s a connection outcome, as well as a buy outcome.

  • A visitor can become a customer in a range of ways.


Now my idea of a funnel resembles something I use to fill my car with oil, and this looks nothing like it. This depiction reminds me more of the tubes game I play on my iPhone. In even more bad news, I made this process map in five minutes. The reality is that this business’s online sales funnel is probably twice as complicated!


The key to sales funnel success


The key to creating a more successful sales funnel is: step away from the keyboard. While I work in an office, I actually have a whiteboard in my house. I actually use it, and it’s better than any online tool I’ve seen for laying out the bare bones of a real, live sales funnel.


I start by detailing every single way people can enter the funnel, identifying where they have come from, what their persona is, and where they’re at in the purchase cycle.


Then, I identify every activity that someone can undertake on the site: read some content, read some more content, subscribe to a newsletter, view a social media profile, buy something, or exit the site.


Finally I detail the measures I can put on each activity: time on page, entry path, exit path, and so on.


Then I start connecting the dots and putting together all the different pathways a visitor can take thought my funnel. The key here is not to change anything about your site yet.


Putting theory into practice


Once the funnel is mapped, and the measures are in place, I start collating reports at every step. What I’m trying to do here is understand how my funnel works in practice, not in theory.


Try this on your blog. Once you’ve collated enough information to start making decisions, I guarantee there will be obvious points of failure in your process, and they’re likely to arise in two main areas:



  1. a page that does a great job at encouraging a secondary behaviour (that is, rather than keeping someone in the sales funnel)

  2. a page that fundamentally fails to move a customer to the next step in the funnel.


Initially, you’ll probably feel like there is a lot to do, so you’ll need to prioritize the changes you want to make. Focus on the areas that are costing you the most sales (which might actually be at the bottom end of your funnel).

With time, effort, and focus, you could see huge improvements in the performance of your site, without your having to attract one new visitor to your site. Sounds good to me!


Have you tweaked your sales funnel recently? What changes have worked best for you?


Stay tuned from most posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Questions? Suggestions? Email him.



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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


bench craft company scam

After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


bench craft company scam

After Early Administration Denials, Director of National <b>...</b>

After initially suggesting that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's inability to answer a question from ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer about the arrests of 12 suspected terrorists in London was because her question was too ...

CBS <b>News</b> airs fake, typo-ridden cover of Bush&#39;s &#39;Decision Points <b>...</b>

During a Sunday book special, CBS News aired a misspelled, mocking cover of Bush's memoir Decision Points.

Fox <b>News</b> Dubs Elie Wiesel &#39;Holocaust Winner&#39;

shitlox news........are we morons........you decide? right wingnut garbage...delivered in a carnival barker style ! Reply. 5. 6. Flag as Offensive. Seems fair on Dec 22, 2:03 PM said: Since it never happened. Who cares? ...


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