There’s been some great conversation on the web lately about women and their work. My favourite by far is a two-for-one. Jess Zimmerman asks over at The Toast, “Where’s my Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor. The article is thought-provoking but the discussion over at Metafilter about it is pretty stunning, if only for the list of emotional labour from various women.
And while you’re reading Zimmerman don’t miss her feature about her midlife crisis over at Hazlitt: “I realized that, like many women, I had made all the decisions of my life on someone else’s behalf.”
Nick Levine over at Vice’s i-D encourages us (who is us? Nevermind…) to rethink Courtney Love. The point that her behaviour would basically be standard male rock star behaviour is a pretty good one, and now I need to dig out more Riot Grrrl tracks.
Maybe rock star men should start speaking more like women, or at least middle management should consider it…please? (Debbie Cameron at her blog language: a feminist guide)
Shameless plug: Melanie Nelson is running an online course on how to run better meetings. It’s only $20! What?!
The Comic Con Batman vs Superman trailer does indeed have Wonder Woman in it. Briefly. I will scream if she does all the emotional labour.
Featured photo: from Pete via Flickr/Creative Commons
I’m a weird reader in that sometimes I read just the comments on things like advice columns; the actual advice is that not relevant to me but watching people duke it out over social norms is my reality TV fix.
One of the best jobs I’ve had was at the now-something-else 50Plus.com watching retirees chat and post on our forums. (Pro tip: People do not necessarily get wiser, but you can love them anyway.) But how to maintain great online communities can be tricky, even when you invest resources into it–which many sites do not.
This post over at Autostraddle about healthy online communities and the struggle to maintain them as we’ve moved from a homepage culture to a Facebook culture is pretty great, outlining top issues and their response to those issues.
There have been a lot of analyses of the big Reddit meltdown but I pick Davey Alba’s summary at Wired. I’ll also point you at Gina Bianchini’s piece for Re/code solely for the phrase “control is not an option.” Any brand manager or editor worth his or her salt knows that once you forget about the reader, you’re in hot water. But in online communities it’s your animator/moderators who are your bread and butter. When I was playing PernMUSH lo so many moons ago, I learned this one the hard way.
Josh Dzieza’s profile of The Awl at The Verge is a great read but buried in is this important quote which I would summarize as “communities of interest are currently winning, just not your community”:
The transition from media hosted on websites to media built around social platforms is more profound than people realize, Herrman says. As more content is published directly onto Facebook, users will gradually lose a sense of who’s producing what. The most consequential journalism becomes just another unit of content in a single stream of music videos, movie trailers, updates from friends and relatives, advertisements, and viral tidbits from sites adept at gaming fast-changing algorithms and behaviors. Readerships that seem large now will turn out to be as ephemeral as Snapchats.
And finally, an oldie but a goody…Internet Commenter Business Meeting
Here at casa Gruden, I’ve been mired in confronting our family’s stuff; my mother-in-law is moving in with us at the end of August (yay!) and so we are clearing out some rooms, in a house we’ve occupied for 10 years. It’s an amazing gift of time to be able to do it drawer-by-drawer, but it’s also an exercise in meeting my younger self…books that changed my life, books that didn’t; art supplies and home projects; notes for articles that didn’t take off.
Maybe that’s why this set of links turned out so airy-fairy.
Why Kickstarter is good for you! Over at The Atlantic, Kathy Gilsinan looks at research into compassion and brain chemistry.
I linked to this piece on Twitter last week (follow me!) but it’s stayed with me long enough that here it is for posterity: Brett Martin’s The Chef Who Saved My Life. I have been gifted with a few moments like this at terrible times in my life, and I hope you have too. But we can’t all write about food and camraderie and dark times of the spirit this nicely.
A hat tip to Cloud at Wandering Scientist for sharing this ThoughtWorks piece by Ted McCarthy on why designing apps to be addictive might be, you know, wrong.
However, if you want a little adrenaline spike before your next meeting, try the Great White Shark Circles Around Surfer video below. My parents took me to Jaws at the drive through in 1975, thinking that I would go to sleep in the back seat. I only sat up for the parts with the spooky music, and once the attack was over my parents would realize I was sitting up and tell me to lie back down. As a result, I both have an irrational fear of sharks and I thought for the longest time, well past my teens, that the entire movie was filmed underwater.
Which is why I am sucker to click on any link like this one. Fear as a motivator: Check!
President of the United States weighs in on peas in guacamole. Internet outrage at its finest! I predict a slew of recipes-with-unusual-things-in-them. Also, yum, guacamole.
Op-ed or blog post? I’m still a bit bemused at the variations on this one, sample from The Atlantic: “On Monday evening, President Obama took to the Huffington Post to announce that he would more than double the threshold for what a person can earn and still be eligible for overtime pay.”
Reply All’s podcast #25, Favor Atender, is a pretty amazing story of Twitter, a head of state, and how ranting online can get you into trouble.
Covers of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is kind of a hobby of mine and so here’s one of the latest. Not related to world leaders but maybe a nice break.
If you’re fascinated by how journalists/sites/brands get content online and measure its success, Caitlin Petre’s report The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism is totally worth a read. A tip of the hat to Jim Romenesko’s blog for that one, lo these months ago.
Navel-gazing but still fun: J. Freedom du Lac reports on ‘LOVE SUPREME’: How newspapers played the landmark gay-marriage decision at The Washington Post. It’s a lovely roundup but I found the Facebook rainbow tool and even the WordPress Pride header I’m looking at equally fascinating. It was definitely time.
We have a coyote in our neighbourhood; do you? Drew Nelles looks at the issue over at The Walrus. Also spotted at the Walrus: A username “TooManyCrayons.” Love the name but spent way too many seconds figuring out whether you really can have too many.
I saw Inside Out and it was really great. After Up I guess we all know Pixar can tell a life story in a short montage. Here’s the little memories clip.
Faux dek for this piece: As fresh as a Far Side cartoon.
Lots of running around today. There’s a long post brewing but meantime, a few old favourites. I will actually use this batch to highlight that on the web, content can live forever…which is awesome for finding old links. Sometimes it makes it hard to compete with every article/web comic/video out there ever.
It’s also Friday, so hey, let’s start with the very funny way to learn customer reviews can far surpass the product: Bic Cristal For Her Pen reviews at Amazon. Don’t miss the customer questions either.
The Five Geek Social Fallacies at Plausibly Deniable, circa 2003. Post with legs…it keeps getting quoted and quoted until it becomes as well known a principle as a quote-unquote real self-help system…at least within certain pockets of the Internet.
The rise and decline of mommy blogging is a thing, but the classic And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles is always worth a re-read.
Total Eclipse of the Heart Literal Video
A theme developed for this post, so let’s have at it: stories about adventurous women.
The Toughest Woman on Two Wheels by Grayson Schaffer for Outside answers a question I’m sure we’ve all had, which is, once you’ve survived growing up in a cult and written a bestseller about it, what next? Ride around the world, apparently, if you’re Juliana Buhring. If you fall in love with this woman, there’s also the Telegraph‘s profile of her. But the real add-on is to follow the links to the piece Schaffer wrote about Buhring’s boyfrield for Outside in 2011, Consumed, which wins for a fantastic one-word title (that is completely un-web-friendly). The piece follows the career and last days of whitewater kayaker & boyfriend Hendrik Coetzee, who, in the style of The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Hankered To Retire But Was Eaten By A Crocodile.
(Boy that doesn’t scan.)
Next up is Blair Braverman (name love!)’s Welcome to Dog World! at Atavist Magazine. (There is a paywall but you get three free articles.) Beautifully produced, I keep thinking this piece’s elevator pitch is Clerks meets Never Cry Wolf.
And finally, Eva Holland’s Unclimbable at SBNation (oh Vox Media, we love you, with your crazy mix of content) stands out as an adventure story which tackles failure in just about the best possible way. The pictures are stunning. Now Cirque of the Unclimbables is on my bucket list.
To stay on theme, here’s a pretty adventurous girl.
Featured picture: Cirque of the Unclimbables, Nahanni National Park. Photo: Alison and Fil via Flickr.