Gordon Ryan

It infuriates me when people whom I otherwise respect for their intelligence or philosophies decide to address or rant on a topic and in the process fail to discuss obvious counter-arguments or key facts that may poke holes in their thesis.

This is an issue that cross-cuts all political leanings and ideologies, education levels, and creeds. Most people, when attempting to promote their point of view, are intellectually lazy. Or worse, they are devious with intentional omissions.

Here’s the thing; if your argument has merit, there is no reason to avoid conflicting opinions or challenging facts. If potential land mines can be defused, the idea carries exponentially greater weight, interlocutors will have more trust and fewer questions, and the influence of your position will be profoundly greater.

Don’t insult the intelligence of your audience, regardless of how much smarter you think you are than them. If you leave something out just so your word will be taken without debate, you’ll soon enough be outed as a fraud and your stock will be severely diminished.

Be a philosopher. Be an expert. Don’t be a deceptive ideologue trying to win by promoting selective ignorance.

Image by Ben Heine

So the first launch of the photo blog was a dud—the system just didn’t work the way I hoped it would. However, I decided to give Pixelpost another shot (I had experimented with it many months ago) and everything is working great! Go check out the new and improved photo blog at www.gordonryanphoto.com.

The new system is incredibly easy to navigate, the photos are front and center (as they should be), and everything just has a nice polish. I’m definitely excited to get to work producing new photos to post there, but in the meantime, you can browse some of my back catalog stretching back to 2003. I’ll be adding more of the older photos throughout the next week or so and hopefully getting some time to get out and capture new photos to add to the beginning of the time line.

In other photography news, I’m looking into a serious upgrade to my equipment collection over the next few months. The plans right now are to add a Nikon D700, 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, 85mm f/1.4 lens, and portable studio lights (and accessories). Obviously, that’s a ton of premium equipment, so it will be incremental, but it should be a blast to start shooting with some pro-level equipment.

In blog news (meaning, gordon-ryan.com), I’m planning to transition the site to focus on a portfolio/resumé as I continue my job search in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina. this will include a more polished design, a static front page, and a focus on my professional work. A blog will remain part of the overall site architecture, but it will be a page that has to be navigated to.

So, I have a lot of work ahead of me. Without a doubt, though, there are good things in the pipeline and I’m eager to get these new endeavors off the ground.

Just launched my new photo blog, Gordon Ryan Photography. I’ve been sitting on that project for much longer than I should have.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

I’ve been to see a doctor a couple of times recently for two unrelated maladies. I’m ok, no need to worry about me, but the experiences got me thinking about how we communicate information that could perhaps be critically important.

A visit to a physician inevitably entails a series of questions regarding your condition. It usually starts with “why are you here?” or something similar. These questions are asked so that the doctor can extract insight from the patient, possibly revealing information that can help avoid unnecessary tests and procedures, or prompt them, depending on what is revealed.

Regardless, this is one of the most critical stages of the health care process. If the patient can give first-hand information regarding his experiences, it enhances the doctors’ knowledge and provides them with a tool that would otherwise be impossible for them to obtain. If only part of the story get told, or the patient lies because he is afraid or embarrassed about something, the matter becomes far more complicated and treatment failure becomes much more probable.

This is an important idea for marketers to grasp. One of the key elements of a sound marketing initiative, regardless of it’s communications vehicle, is an intimate understanding of what drives its target audience to convert. This understanding is usually gained through all sorts of research tactics, but the ultimate goal in every situation is to know why people will or will not do what your marketing is attempting to get them to do.

The problem is, how do you know that the information you are collecting on and from these people is accurate and depicts the whole story? Unfortunately, short of becoming mindreaders, we can’t with 100 percent certainty.

Our best chance for success is to channel “the doctor.”

What does that mean? Listen really, really well. Use your professional training and formal education, but don’t forget to be human. Learn from each person you meet and bring that knowledge to your analysis of others. Understand your targets better than they understand themselves. Make this a lifelong endeavor.

And finally, always—always—respect them.

Apparently, people in New England are either really into birth control or they’re so socially averse that their relationships have ceased to culminate in biologically productive couplings. Either that, or every other state in the U.S. is full of people who are very keen on procreation.

At least that’s my hasty interpretation of one of Datamasher’s government data mashups:

Most Reproductive States

Number of births divided by Population: Census 2008

Datamasher was the winner of the Apps for America 2 contest that concluded yesterday. Briefly, the contest was a competition for groups to come up with novel applications that utilize the data made publicly available by the U.S. government at Data.gov. Datamasher (whose project manager is fellow new media nerd and friend, Michaela Hackner) takes a simple idea—combining two disparate sets of government data to create state rankings—and opens up what could be a seemingly infinite source of thought provoking and sometimes humorous visualizations.

Other mashups include $$ spent per student and SAT scores, How Likely Are Your Gun Owners To Shoot Somebody, and Which State Has the Dirtiest Water, among many more (and the list will keep growing).

If anything, this is a great source for sparking conversation and the mashups are certainly good catalysts for inspiring blog topics. And if you don’t see anything interesting (likely impossible), you can always suggest a new pairing of data sets to mash up.

President Obama wants some face time with the school children of the United States on Tuesday.

Seems pretty reasonable to me, seeing that he is the freely elected leader of the country and all. But to a particularly incensed part of the citizenry (whom I can only assume think Ronald Reagan was the cowboy messiah), allowing the American Chief Executive to speak directly to kids is unconscionable.

So what’s the uproar about? According to the NY Times, Obama has the gaul to think he can “urge students to work hard and stay in school.” What a jerk. Sounds downright criminal.

But, of course, if the situation is interpreted through the reality distortion field of fear politics, you wind up with conservative leaders, pundits, and parents convinced that Mr. President is out to corrupt the youth. You know, like the way Socrates did back in the olden timey days. Except Socrates wasn’t a black Indonesian Muslim communist illegally brought to power by a bunch of hippies to govern the Land of the Free. He was just an old philosopher making people question their flawed logic. But I digress.

Here’s some of the reasoning from Obama’s detractors:

1. The speech wasn’t screened for political content. (reasonable)
2. The speech wasn’t review by the school boards, which is mandatory for the curriculum. (also reasonable)
3. “The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child. I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.” (this man, naturally, will remove his children from school during the speech)
4. He’s trying to create a cult of personality a la Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. (this was from a Rush Limbaugh guest, naturally)
5. And then there’s this gem: “I wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone.” (oh boy…)

Even though the first two are “reasonable” (as in, a reasonable person could have developed those thoughts), they’re still not valid (and neither are the others):

1. The speech won’t have political content; Obama and his speech writers are too smart to take that risk.
2. The speech doesn’t need to be reviewed by the boards; he isn’t teaching…he’s giving a pep-talk.
3. Anyone who knows what socialism is would know Obama is nowhere near being a socialist.
4. Obama is like Hussein and Jong-Il? ¿Que?
5. The President is the most monitored and controlled man on Earth. Every action he takes is finely tuned by a team of people who know how he should behave and what he should say. He wouldn’t say anything out of line to a child, nor would he attempt to indoctrinate one. Like I said in #1, it’s just not worth the political risk. And for crying out loud, it’s not as though he’s someone you’ll see on the next “To Catch a Predator.” Your neighbor, however, probably is.

Luckily, the United States is still primarily inhabited by sane people (and that includes most conservatives) who care about their children and know what a great opportunity this is for them. If there is anyone in the country that children should be able to look up to (besides their parents, of course), it should be the President. Instilling fear of the President in a child without any exceptionally good reason is shameful. And that is exactly what the few parents that are excluding their children from this experience are doing.

That said, if those parents just disagree with his politics, they should feel free to talk to their children about why they think he is wrong. And when they do, they should talk about the specific policies and stances that they believe he is wrong about. These are value discussions, and are incredibly important for helping children grow up with a proper sense of what good values are.

In other words, parents should play a major role in educating their children. It’s their job. It’s what Obama is hoping to make children yearn for. He’s not attempting to pollute their minds. He’s using his voice to encourage a universal good.

The most influential man on the planet is going to use his voice on Tuesday to be a cheerleader for growing up smart. It would be a travesty for any child in the USA to be deprived of his message for silly, hateful reasons.

Update: Here is the full text of Obama’s speech (released ahead of the presentation, no less). I don’t care who is delivering these words, no child should be kept from hearing them. Absolutely inspirational.

I’ve finally come to grips with what I should be doing here; write about whatever is on my mind, regardless of subject matter. For months I’ve contemplated growing this site as a topical blog, but it just never made sense. This site is an extension of me, and I’m certainly not one-dimensional.

Ultimately, a couple things will come of this.

• Posts on this blog will not necessarily have a unifying theme. One entry might be about higher education. Another might be about video games. It’s a brain dump.
• I’m going to work on at least two new blogs. One will be a stand alone photo blog. I haven’t decided what the focus of the other will be, but it will be topical, and it will not be branded as “Gordon Ryan.”

End pointless blog post. Real entries to follow. Really. I have a system now.

Now go pre-order a Boy and His Blob and get yourself a blob stress toy. It’s already a visually stunning game; if it’s as good as the original in terms of gameplay, it’ll end up a classic.

Pear Analytics is not the first group to throw down the “your life means nothing to anyone but yourself” gauntlet in regards to Twitter chatter. But they certainly did a great job of backing the claim up.

As reported on Mashable, a group of party-poopers at the marketing intelligence company meticulously combed through a deluge of tweets over a two week period, sorting each message into such memorable groups as “conversation,” “self-promotion,” and “news.” Naturally, there was a semi-respectable degree of actual content floating around in the Twitterverse. Believe it or not, there are some smart humans churning out real content and striking up meaningful conversations. However, the single largest category—by a long shot—was pretty depressing.

They called it “pointless babble,” and there was a lot of it. To the tune of 40.55%. Yikes.

Pointless babble takes on a variety of forms. Some examples from the current public timeline:

• Sushi night with Steffi. Perfect end to a perfect week!
• so happy right now.
• Lala land :-*
• with kat going to kendall’s to see katie laterrrrr
• 片手剣メモ２：罠は２回使え。なんと３０分位で

OK, I have no idea what that last one was, but you understand what I mean. And the scary thing is, those all popped up within seconds of each other.

So here’s a fun experiment. Take a look at your last 50 or 100 tweets. Categorize them based on the Pear Analytics categories, and post a comment below letting the world know how you ranked.

Here are the categories (and how I fared):

• news (8%)
• spam (0%)
• self-promotion (0%)
• pointless babble (16%)
• conversation (54%)
• pass-along value (22%)

How did you do?

(time to self-promote this on Twitter!)

photo by нasн

Last night, I was pondering my overall lack of blog entries and attempting to figure out what it is about my my time online that keeps me from writing more (besides pondering such things, of course). Very quickly, I came to two realizations:

1. I read. A lot.
2. I participate in social media that is not focused around me.

I blame the Internet for the reading thing. There’s just too much information out there that I’m interested in. My Google Reader feeds constantly need to be pared down because I simply do not have the time to read everything that gets published. As for participating elsewhere, that includes Twitter, Facebook, other blogs and communities…basically actively engaging in conversations not hosted on the gordon-ryan.com domain.

Now I have a question for myself: What am I doing here?

I’m not going to give up the reading, so that time is not freeing up. But am I spending too much time sharing my micro-opinions throughout the Web when I could be crafting more fully developed pieces here?

The long-form nature of blogging is certainly appealing to me. I was a philosophy major in college and I have written professionally in the past. It definitely nurtures my desire to hear myself talk.

But in having a platform to publish on, I’m also burdened with the responsibility of having good content. Of course, there isn’t some third party overseeing what I write, but there are millions of potential readers. And of those potential readers, there are undoubtedly a handful who could have an impact on my career or some other facet of my life. If I’m not delivering the goods, I’m damaging how people perceive me. That said, it also offers me the opportunity to enhance that perception.

Every time I think about this, I come to the same conclusion: I should be blogging more. It gives me the chance to take my micro-participations throughout the Web and expand on them in a meaningful way. Even if I don’t have an audience, I’m still improving myself by regularly engaging in critical and creative thinking and writing.

With that said, expect more from me. I certainly do.

Now if I can just find some focus…

Hey hey, look who still exists. A cursory glance at the archives reveals that I haven’t posted in a month and a half.

I have excuses. Pretty good ones (I think).

The wife, one Mrs. Jessica Ryan, thought it would be a fantastic idea to enhance her already stellar high-tech PR career by taking a couple of years off from being gainfully employed. Yikes. Fortunately for our sanity and financial well-being, her employment hiatus wasn’t a ploy to chill out with our dog watching DVRed episodes of America’s Next Top Model for the next 22 months. Instead, she decided she’d be a big show-off and get an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Seeing that I’m an awesome husband (and sick of New England weather and Red Sox fans), I signed on for this little life-altering experiment. That was several months ago. Since then, we’ve been in preparation mode, getting all of our affairs in order, working through budgets to compensate for the ensuing loss of income, negotiating with my employer to ensure I have a steady paycheck until I secure a permanent position in North Carolina, hanging out with our soon-to-be geographically distant friends, and finishing up the formal classes for my MS in Advertising.

Oh ya. Then we had that pesky 813 mile drive from Boston to Durham via Albany (where our families live) with a truck full of our worldly possessions.

So, there are the excuses. It’s been a busy summer and I’ve been neglectful of my digital presence. However, we’re now in Durham, somewhat unpacked, her classes have officially started, and I have my desk set up for my first experience with full-time telecommuting. Things on this blog and elsewhere are undoubtedly going to pick up again, since life has stabilized, so stay tuned.

And honestly, I haven’t been too bad. I was still dispensing whimsical 140 character nuggets on Twitter, keeping up on Facebook, and dropping photos on Flickr the whole time.