Gordon Ryan

Fare thee well, Boston University.

Nearly seven months after leaving Boston for the South, next week I will begin a new stage in my career, working for another esteemed institution of higher education. Starting Monday, February 15, 2010, I will be joining the staff at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Specifically, I will be undertaking the duties of Public Communications Officer for the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History. I am eager for my transition from the academic department setting into a university center where I hope my talents will have an even greater impact on the campus community and beyond.

Now that my job search is over and I have finished my master’s degree, blog activity should pick up once again, as should my photo blog, and music endeavors (As a celebratory gift to myself, I just invested in my first high-end acoustic guitar, a Larrivée D-03R. It’s incredible, and I’ll likely post about it in the near future).

Great things are ahead, that’s for sure.

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.

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.