Archive - 2007
Chasing After the Wind
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/31/2007 - 21:45
2007, the year that wasn’t. At least it feels, in many ways, that way to me. I’ve gone back and looked at the year. I wrote over 4,500 emails during 2007. I wrote 572 blog posts, totaling over 270,000 words. Over 2,000 people a month read something out of my blog.
I wrote my first draft of my first novel, adding another 50,000 words to the total. I went to Washington to blog about the Libby trial. I wrote extensively about the Avery Doninger trial. I went to the National Conference of State Legislatures and wrote about their annual conference. I wrote about various marketing conferences. I wrote about Second Life, and especially the developing financial markets.
Yet in the end, I find myself in a small rented house on the verge of bankruptcy without having made any discernable difference during 2007. The words of the prophet comes back to me, “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
I know I’ve written other posts recently that are not all that upbeat. I don’t want to drive people away by being a downer. Nor, am I looking for sympathy. Yet I also feel that I should write about things as I see them and I can’t seem to find my rose colored glasses right now.
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Rate on NewsTrustSecond Life Major Stock Holders
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/31/2007 - 15:00
As I watch stock trading in Second Life, I like to pay close attention to who some of the large stock holders are, and what they are doing. When looked at on a day-to-day basis, the information isn’t often all that interesting. Marc Attenborough has bought an additional thousand shares of INC. Maelstrom Baphomet has bought 500 more shares of DGD and Skip Oceanlane has sold 3,000 shares of ITA.
Sometimes, however, larger shifts are noticeable. For example, Patrickj Ah recently sold 50,000 shares of AVC. Stryker Yoshikawa bought 27,890 shares and Monkey Canning bought 44,000 shares. This caused me to take a closer look at the major holders of AVC.
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December 30th
Kenya
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/30/2007 - 19:35
At church today, Father Peter spoke about his phone call with Evelyn. Evelyn is a priest from Kenya that has often visited our church. She is back in Kenya, as things are getting a bit dicey there. She is in western Kenya and her family is in Nairobi.
For those who haven’t been following politics in Kenya, they recently had a presidential election. In what is being reported as a very close election, the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki narrowly defeated Raila Odinga in an election that the New York Times calls “deeply flawed”.
Peter said that Evelyn and her family are currently safe, but things seem to be worsening in Kenya since Church this morning. After church, we went to Kim’s parents house. I went online to get more news about Kenya.
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RIP Fred Lemieux
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/30/2007 - 19:33
Fred Lemieux was my uncle. This morning, I got a phone call from my mother. Uncle Fred has died. Uncle Fred was my mother’s sister’s husband. I’m not sure how old he was, but I’m going to guess he was in his 80s. My understanding is that both he and my Aunt Susie have been fairly ill, so this didn’t come as a great surprise. The wake will be Wednesday and the funeral Thursday. I’ve spent some time figuring out my travel plans. It isn’t all that far from where we live, but I have to figure out how to juggle everyone’s schedule.
When I was young, we would see Fred and Susie and their kids a few times a year. My mother was the youngest of seven kids. Susie was the next youngest, so Fred and Susie and their family had the cousins that we closest in age. When my grandparents grew too old to live by themselves, they moved in with Fred and Susie. My memories of the visits are vague. There was a mulberry tree and we would eat mulberries. There were large bamboo stocks. They lived on a long road and we would walk or ride bikes. There was an old house behind the main house which is where my grandparents initially lived when they moved down there. Later, they moved into the main house as their health declined.
I remember that the TV was usually on in one room or another, that many of my relatives smoked and that there was an endless supply of food. I believe it has been thirty years since my grandparents died, one soon after the other and I can’t remember the last time I was at Fred and Susie’s.
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December 29th
Dealing with the difficult questions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/29/2007 - 11:36
My daughter Fiona asks the hard questions every six year old asks. John Edwards is the only candidate addressing these hard questions.
(Hat tip To CarolinaGirl for the clip of Sen. Edwards at the end.)
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December 28th
Additional developments in Second Life Brokerage
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/28/2007 - 23:08
Since I first wrote about LLBT opening up its brokerage, another 2,751 shares have traded on their site. That’s still a very small number, but it is the end of the year and trading is thin. What is more significant is that 1,151 shares were of BBX, and that was enough to move it from the IPO stage to regular trading. This gives us a chance to look a little more closely at how things are likely to work.
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An Invitation to Innovate, and Collaborate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/28/2007 - 19:23
The following is a comment I added to Tracy Joan’s diary on DailyKos about the Edwards My Vote, My Voice contest.
I’ve been fairly critical of all the Presidential campaigns this time around, including the Edwards campaign, even though I’m supporting Sen. Edwards. I’ve felt that they’ve looked at the tools that contributed to some of the successes of the 2004 election cycle, but have missed what is really important, the invitation to innovate.
I believe this is a step in the right direction. The Edwards campaign is inviting people to, hopefully, come up with some innovative advertisements. However, I would like to push this even further. We are at our best when we work together.
I thought about this as I worked on my submission for the contest. I recorded my daughter asking a bunch of those hard questions that six year olds are likely to ask. No, not where do babies come from. She’s asked questions like “Why can’t some of my classmates afford to go to the doctor?”, “When will Joey’s daddy come home from Iraq?”, or “Do you think I’ll get to go see a glacier when I’m older”? I’ve recorded a bunch of these questions and spliced them together into a video. You can see the video on Blip.TV. You will note that it is tagged with a Creative Commons license, “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” This means that someone more creative than I am is free to take it, work with it, and come up with something even better, if they also share it and acknowledge they got it from me. It is part of the reason I like to use Blip.TV. Videos there can be downloaded in their original format and then edited with programs like Movie Maker of iMovies.
I haven’t added the final part of my ad. I’m hoping to get a clip of Sen. Edwards talking about the Moral Test of Our Generation:
America lives because 20 generations have honored the one moral commandment that makes us Americans.
To give our children a better future than we received.
I know that CarolinaGirl has put great videos up on vSocial, so I’ve contacted her to see if I can use extracts from one of her videos. Hopefully, she’ll get a chance to extract a piece I’m looking for and share it with me.
I think that represents the real challenge. Can we work together, to share ideas, scripts, video clips or anything else so that we can come up with an even stronger message reflecting why we believe John Edwards is the person we need in the White House? I’m up for it. I might even be able to get Fiona make a clip for people if you need it.
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Second Life Trading Predictions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/28/2007 - 14:02
Okay, all of you Second Life traders out there, who wants to make any predictions about trading in Second Life for 2008? I have two types of predictions. First, big picture predictions, how many exchanges will there be in Second Life at the end of 2008? Will any major corporations step into the fray? How many IPOs will there be? How many companies will fail? Will brokerage emerge? Trading in futures, options, commodities, indices, other types of securities? What else is likely to emerge? Add your comments below, or send me an email with your predictions.
Then, for the more serious Second Life trader, I’m putting up a list of current companies on the SlCapex, ACE, and VSTEX exchanges. These are the exchanges that have good data feeds to run analysis on. I’m posting the support level, resistance level, as well as the bid, ask and last as of creating my spreadsheet. There are two columns at the end of it. One is to predict the share price at the end of 2008 and the other is to put in the predicted average monthly dividend. It is a comma delimited file that can easily be loaded into Excel or other spreadsheets. Down the file, add your projections in the final two columns and email your predictions to me at aldon dot hynes at orient dash lodge dot com.
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December 27th
Second Life Brokerage
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/27/2007 - 20:26
Yesterday, L&L Bank and Trust issued this statement about what they have been up to. Of interest to many is the addition of brokerage to their services. What will this really look like? Xavier Mohr addresses the idea here. Will this be the first brokerage, or a sixth exchange, Xavier asks. Is this a good or bad thing?
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Exploring Blogger Bias
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/27/2007 - 17:24
Yesterday on a mailing list I’m a member of, someone pointed to Kaye D. Sweetser’s article, Blog bias: Reports, inferences, and judgments of credentialed bloggers at the 2004 nominating conventions. Since I was one of those credentialed bloggers, I was particularly interested what the article had to say. I contacted Kaye and got the longer version of her article.
In her research, she had people code each sentence in the blogs written as part of the convention coverage into three basic types; reports, inferences and judgments. Each of these were further broken down into whether the reports were attributed or not, whether the inferences were labeled or not, and whether the judgments were favorable or unfavorable, and whether they were attributed or not. She did further analysis on the role of gender in the coverage as well as the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans.
The results were about as I would have expected. Traditional media has a higher percentage of ‘reports’, approximately twice the percentage that bloggers use. Given that many traditional journalists are called ‘reporters’ and that ‘traditional media coverage holds objective reporting sacrosanct’, this isn’t surprising. Yet even for the bloggers at the conventions, the most common form of sentence was the report.
I went to the convention with no pretense of being a reporter. I wore my bias on my sleeve and in the form of buttons and stickers on my shirt. Since that experience, I have blogged many events. I have not shied away from expressing my biases and try to be as up front as I can be about what underlies these biases.
In light of this, I wonder how I compared with the other bloggers who were credentialed in 2004. Did I use more reporting or judgments than other bloggers at the time? How has my writing changed over the years? How has the writing of other bloggers changed? What will the blogging at the 2008 conventions be like? Beyond the political realm, how does this apply to other bloggers?
The academic would say that this report, and these questions illustrate the need for further research. I agree. It also provides material for those hoping to blog the 2008 conventions should think about as they prepare to cover them.
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