Nations of the world.

When I lived in Chicago and Sir lived in New York, we used to do all kinds of stupid things, like sit up late on video chat, watch this video and try to sing along.

It's close to impossible.

Two years and a life-move later, I had completely forgotten about the Nations of the World game until last weekend, when the world map shower curtain we had bought arrived in the mail.

After hanging it up in all its vinyl splendor, I stood there in the bathroom, looking at the world, when I heard the familiar tune coming from the other room. There was my Sir, playing Nations of the World on the iPad, a giant grin on his face.

In our apartment, with our world map shower curtain.

Do you remember when you were little and your very best friend moved away, and it was pretty much the worst thing that could ever happen to a person? It may as well have been a death sentence. Regardless of whether they moved to a town twenty miles away or all the way to Ohio, you were more or less guaranteed to never see that person again.

It never occurred to my eight-year-old brain that maybe I would grow up to a world wired up to a thing called the Internet, where anyone and everyone can be connected instantly, like it was nothing. Where my friends might take jobs in London, Milwaukee, Vietnam, Boulder and L.A., and I might still talk to them each and every day.

Where moving half a country away might not be the end of the world.

Despite what I know about the internet, when Sir told me he was moving to New York, I was devastated. But as it turned out, New York wasn't so very far away.

Granted, a bit of video chat doesn't hold the same value as being able to meet at the pub between our two apartments, and creeping on facebook doesn't have the warmth of a hug when you need one. But it's definitely a kind alternative to the untimely and dramatic friend-severances of my youth.

It's definitely better than losing someone important when all you need is the Nations of the World to keep you together.

When there are computers and magic available to make the world small, it's definitely better than nothing.

Four reasons why people hate Foursquare, and why they're wrong.

Note: This post was originally written as a guest-post on Adam Kmiec's blog; you can find it here, and also on the DRAFTFCBlog, here.

I love the internet. I really do. Truly, madly, deeply.

I love it for its quiet brilliance. I mean, after LOLcats, of course.

As a self-proclaimed digital kid, I am perhaps more inclined than the average bear to jump on internet bandwagons, due partly to my age, and partly to the fact that I’m such a savvy so-and-so (I kid). As such, I often find myself defending web ideas to my suspicious circle of colleagues and friends, and am always a bit surprised to have to do so. The things I find so incredible in their simplicity tend to strike my skeptical cohorts as stalker-esque, creepy fads. Can all my Foursquare haters please stand up?

For anyone who’s unaware, Foursquare is a location-based social networking community that allows users to state their coordinates and offer helpful tips to friends and other users who might also frequent that venue. Check off items on your to-do list, earn points, win badges, and become mayor of your favorite spots by checking in there more than any other patron. Fun, right?

This weekend, I found myself arguing on Foursquare’s behalf on two separate occasions. I know. I need to get a life. Anyway, both scenarios involved individuals in the advertising community, and both conversations, despite my fervent outpouring of Foursquare love, resulted only in blank stares and/or furrowed brows. What. Is up. With that.

Let’s all stop hating for a moment and contemplate what it is about Foursquare that launches it to the top of my list of quietly brilliant web innovations.

Here are the top reasons to hate on Foursquare that I’ve heard from the hater community. And, of course, the reasons I beg to differ.

1. It’s creepy.

Yes, there’s an element of weirdness to having a location feed available on the web for the masses, especially as a single female in a big city. I’m not stupid; I get that. Perhaps I will get kidnapped on the way home from my current location, and you can all have a good laugh about it (jerks). You know what? Life is creepy sometimes. And dangerous, always. This is one of those cases where I feel like the benefits outweigh the risks, so long as you’re smart about the information you share. Keep reading for more on that.

2. It’s annoying.

It's not annoying, it's information. Foursquare is a gold mine for consumer data. I really can’t believe that I would need to argue this to people in the industry. All pings, badges and tomfoolery aside, what Foursquare does, essentially, is give businesses a free list (a list! for free!) of digital-savvy consumers who love you enough to want to broadcast to their web community that they are a patron. These are people who carry a certain amount of digital clout that want to spread the word about you, and they are going to do it for free. And, you now have access to a list of them, what they think are the best parts about your business, and even some information about them (their Twitter handles, phone numbers, and so on). It’s a CRM-lover’s dream. How are you not excited about this?

3. Who cares?

You care! Especially all those ‘yous’ out there who are in the biz. Or, the business-owning ‘yous.’ Our job as marketers is to care. You care (a) what people do with their time (b) what they choose to tell their people they're doing with their time and (c) when you can put your brand in front of them at the right moment in time. Not to pontificate, but if the internet is spitting out free applications that help us to gather the data that provides a foundation for our profession, it is our responsibility to care.

[A caveat: this is not to say that no-one cares. I have seen a few cool case studies of businesses that have jumped on the Foursquare train, and are riding it to Consumer-Love Station. This post about the Pit BBQ in Raleigh, for example, truly warms my heart. Kudos to you, Pit BBQ management. Consumer interaction: you’re doing it right.]


4. Why would I want to do that?

Well, this one is really up to you. I like it because it’s a game, it’s fun to do, and it gives me a tool to coordinate nights out with friends. I also like the idea of creating a database of my existence, which is why you can find me tucking seemingly trivial information into many different data-ports around the web. It seems to matter to me. Personal preference of the digital kid, I imagine. But, fun for everyone who chooses to participate, I find.

Like I said, my romantic feelings for the internet lie mainly in its outpouring of tools that unabashedly display simple, beautiful, quiet brilliance. If nothing else, I love that I’ve been able to use applications like Foursquare to build out a community of web-adoring geeks such as myself. I simply cannot wait to see what awesomeness lies ahead for those businesses that have us geeks heading up their marketing initiatives.

For all those out there who choose to remain creeped out, annoyed, apathetic and non-participating, I apologize for wasting a moment of your time.

Thanks go to my editor, Clay, for helping to un-muddle my thoughts on this one. Virtual high-five. Thanks also to Adam, for asking me to guest-post. I'm flattered, and honored.

A book review, and a brief reflection on the science of web.

My goals for my day off were to finish the book I was reading, and to pen a new blog post. Let's kill two birds with one stone, shall we?

First, the book, whose tedious final pages went down this morning with a cup of coffee.

As a staunch Robert Langdon enthusiast and, to be quite honest, a sucker for the occasional mindless read, it pains me to say that I was pretty disappointed with the latest installment from Dan Brown. The Lost Symbol was predictable, and lacked the nail-biting, page-turny awesomeness that Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code brought to my bookshelf, and my poolside lounge chair, for that matter. Set in Washington,  D.C., around various national monuments, the plot is moderately interesting, but the cookie-cutter template more than resembles its predecessors. Without revealing any detail, the book doesn't quite live up to the hype.

Sorry, Dan Brown. I still love you. Angels and Demons FTW.

However, I wouldn't count the read as a total loss. In typical Dan Brown fashion, the story incorporates elements of a science that allows our symbologist hero to come to terms with whatever he happens to be interpreting at the time. In this case, he's tackling the Noetic Sciences, or study of the mind and intuition, and the quantifiable measurement (for real) of the energies that the mind possesses.  To quote our heroine, "We have scientifically proven that the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought."* Difficult to believe, but interesting stuff, to be sure.

And now, the post.

While Brown's character is referring to exponential growth of measurable thought energy,  her quote strikes me as a spot-on description of today's web communities, and perhaps explains some of our fascinations with the social web. With the various social communities we've adopted en masse, we have created a living experiment in the pluralistic aspects of Noetic Theory. And, by putting them on the web, we've created a permanent archive and searchable data mine of the pass-along power of human thought. We are able to quantify the effects of exponential thought-power on something as seemingly trivial as branding, via web analytics and beautiful, glorious infographics. It's what makes the interwebs webby, and frankly, interesting.

I know the Noetic stuff seems like total bunk. But, it's cool to see old-as-dirt theories and off-the-wall scientific subject matter being reflected and perfected in the technologies of the here and now. I just hope you won't think less of me for trying to pull thought-starters from the bowels of a sub-par novel.


*Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, Doubleday, 2009, p. 504