Perspective: Senseless Shootings in Kirkwood, MO
What were you doing last Thursday evening at 7PM? An ordinary night probably for most of us ordinary people.
There was a city council meeting at the Kirkwood, Missouri City Hall, A zoning meeting. Ordinary stuff. And then something far out of the ordinary, something mind numbing happened in a town that describes itself as “where community and spirit meet.”
A gunman who had recently lost a lawsuit against the city of Kirkwood who had banned him from speaking at city council meetings, opened fire, killing five people before he was shot to death. The mayor, Mike Swoboda was wounded and is in critical condition. Suburban Journal reporter Todd Smith was shot in the hand.
Those killed were Police Officer William Biggs, Police Officer Tom Ballman, Councilwoman Connie Karr, Councilman Mike Lynch and Public Works Director Kenneth Yost. I didn’t know any of them but I would imagine they were not expecting that on February 7th that they had a rendezvous with death.
Officer Biggs was on his way to get a pizza when he crossed paths with the shooter. One minute he was probably thinking ordinary pizza thoughts as he headed to IMO’s. The next minute he was gunned down but managed the extraordinary as he died; he pushed the alert button on his radio and probably saved many lives in the community of Kirkwood.
Officer Biggs died a hero; no doubt those who knew him and loved him and miss him would have preferred that he had lived an ordinary Kirkwood police officer.
We live in a town that borders Kirkwood. My sister raised her family there and her daughter, my niece, lives there now. Kirkwood IS a community. A community that does not Bowl Alone but seems to personify the currency of social capital: trust, community, involvement, neighbors, belonging. Kirkwood has annual festivals and a hundred year old football rivalry with neighboring Webster Groves that is the subject of a recent book, The Turkey Day Game.
As I read about the lives of those gunned down, they stood in stark, tragic contrast to the shooter who seemed to believe that the community was against him and that he was “at war” with Kirkwood.
According to his brother, he left a “suicide note” stating “the truth will come out in the end.”Â
The truth as I see it is captured by the words of the Deputy Mayor Thomas Griffin as reported in the New York Times : “This is a tragedy of untold magnitude.”
Earlier today I had to run a quick errand to Ace Hardware, just across Manchester less than a mile from home. My mother asked me to get her some lunch at the Daily Bread.Â
As I walked to my car I noticed a number of people walking across the parking lot towards Manchester. Then I noticed car lights; finally realizing as I got to my car that there were hundred of police cars from all over the city driving in a procession down Manchester Road.
I sat in my car for over a half an hour, traffic halted in every direction as the funeral procession for Officer Thomas F. Ballman drove from his home in Ballwin to Kirkwood City Park. I used my Blackberry camera to take the picture above. It was something to see….
 Bob McCarty Writes has photos on Fickr of “the sights and sounds of Kirkwood the morning after the shooting.”
President John Edwards Delivers the State of the Blogosphere…
A John Edwards presidency may be that moment that we look back upon and say, "He was the first president of the social media age." He seems to "get it." His wife, Elizabeth seems to "get it." I am not saying that just because he was the keynote speaker at Gnomedex. Visit his website and you will see a veritable showroom for social media…not only does he have a blog, he launched it in Beta.
You can receive updates on your mobile device; he has podcasts, he has video. He is using YouTube. Want to know what he talked about at Gnomedex? That’s correct, go to YouTube. He has a blogging family, Elizabeth and Cate. You can chat and there is community.
If John Edwards delivers the State of the Union in January of 2009,
can we expect authenticity and transparency? Will we nod and say, "its
the blogosphere, stupid." Will there be a national dialog on the
question: "Are all links created equal?" Will we need laws that state
that discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, age and Technorati
links is not permitted? John Edwards, if elected will become our first
blogging president; Elizabeth will become the first blogging First
Lady. Pass the Kool-Aid, please.
Tags: John Edwards, blogs Gnomedex, podcasts, videoblogs, Elizabeth Edwards, Technorati, YouTube
Net Squared Live Online!
The Net2 conference begins on May 30th in Santa Clara and if like me you are not one of the lucky 350 participants, Marshall Kirkpatrick informed me that there is a remote conference, live online at http://netsquared.org/remote. How cool is that going to be?
There is chat which features "special Q&A sessions with NetSquared speakers and other guests." The agenda is here and a speakers list is here….there is even a frappr map. Net2’s mission is to help non-profits understand and use the tools of the social web, or as they put it remixing the web for social change. Relationships are, of course what non-profit capacity building is all about and the tools of web 2.0, blogs, wikis, online social networks, RSS, podcasting, vlogs are transformational tools to enable non-profits to achieve their missions faster and further than ever before.
So, if you haven’t been to Net2, you need to; and sign up for the remote conference. I’ll see you there!
Tags: Net2, Net Squared, non-profits, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Web 2.0
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Ad Age Says There Is No Such Things as Blogging..But The Name Is Cool
A story in today’s Ad Age by Simon Dumenco said that there is no such thing as blogging and no such thing as a blogger…"it’s just the software, people." He says that blogging is instantaneous, "voice-y", and opinionated but says this is not different than old-school media. He says that just because there are blog specific seach engines, blog content is not different than non-blog content and as news sources blogs and traditional news sources are given equal weight. I guess he means by himself.
He goes on to say that bloggers are only bloggers because they believe in blogging as something distinct, in the mythical blogosphere, and because traditional media types think that bloggers are amateurs and that they are the professionals… professionals don’t "work way faster, interact constantly with readers..{and are} not vastly more voracious." Not sure what "vastly more voracious means exactly"
His conclusion is that "blogging software" will become the universal online publishing solution and that there will be two types of media people, fast and slow. He also thinks blogging is a cool name. Actually, I think the name is kind of stupid and I think he is really missing the point about blogging so I have to say that I disagree with most everything he wrote. Blogging is not just about writing faster and interacting with readers.
With lots of help from the not so mythical blogosphere, here is what Simon didn’t say or see:
Steve Rubel summed it up in one word: dialogue. Blogging is different than traditional media writing because blogging is a dialogue and writing for tradtional media is a monologue…comments to the former go instantaneously to the blogger, to be read by blog readers in the context of the post while in the latter, comments go to the editor long after anyone remembers what was written.
Bloggers interact with other bloggers and with readers who may or may not be bloggers. Lots of participants, no editors or refereeing. Big difference.
The Eide Neurolearning Blog say that "blogs foster conversations, interactions with other blogs and other information sources, and invite feedback from their readers. " This would include comments but also includes links, another distinctively blog attribute. Links form the structure of the blogosphere. They can be reciprocal links, explicit or implicit but links drive the speed of the information; not bloggers working "way faster". They also bring up another distinctively blogging attribute, associational thinking. They write, blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking. And yes, this is maybe about "faster" and technology driven, but it is also that faster "promotes a kind of spontaneity and ‘raw thinking’–the fleeting associations and the occasional outlandish ideas–seldom found in more formal media." How does that work? You read it, react to it, associate it, and you blog it. And of course, there is always another blogger or a blog reader right there, ready to comment, link, correct, disagree, or expand upon the thought or idea.
What else differentiates blogging from writing? Well Simon said something about amateurs and professionals….an important difference though not necessarily in the context that he was referring. Writers in traditional media are professionals in that they get paid to write, have editors, bosses, deadlines, page requirements; bloggers typically do not. We might write our blogs so that someone will hire us to DO a job…but writing the blog is not our job. They have editors, we have spell check.
OK, the summation of all of this, blogging is a social media, it is about social networks. Conversations, relationships, social capital, connections, that you don’t get from just writing or reading. Writing is about the page, staying within the lines…blogging is not about the limits of the page; it is about stepping off the page and beyond the lines and engaging rather than reading, writing and listening.
Technorati Tags: social media, blogging, neuroscience, traditional media
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