My 2.5 mile one way jaunt to maplight these days. I need a bike or a bus pass.
Gene Lee Dancing Skateboarding Mystery
Last year sometime I saw this weird guy in an awesome pink outfit skateboarding up college ave near the Oakland Berkeley border. He was dancing and clapping, weaving through the stop and go traffic of a typical mid day weekend. I thought he was hilarious, talented, and for the 15 minutes or so that I got to enjoy his dancing, I thought he was everything that was great about the Bay Area.
Later he showed up in a New York Times travel article and I decided to look him up online. I told my mom about him, showed her some links and now she always asks if I’ve seen him lately. I think she is obsessed with him. So I’m going to collect here what I have found on him out on the tubes. Here goes.
All the videos I have currently found. I know there is more.
A flicker photoset of “Gene Lee as Seoul”. A blog post about Gene Lee’s death. A blog post about him faking his death, another one, and another one, his myspace page, which says he’s been logged in today March 7th 09. Oh and I’ve just uncovered some new stuff, a new vid “public display of fitness”.
And here on National headquarters it seems he has been going by Eugene International and is currently in the bay area. Awesome.
But no mom, I have not personally seen him skateboarding, clapping, and dancing down the street in a rad hot pink outfit lately.
Oakland Shootings
I watched another violent breaking news story today. Four Oakland cops were shot, three were killed as was the suspect. I’m not sure when I originally got the news but it was sometime early this afternoon and actually from the SFgate.com which is somewhat amazing. I then started following it on twitter and the feeling I got was horrible. It was similar to the way I felt after watching the story unfold of the slow speed chase of the white bentley in L.A. a couple months ago which ended with the driver committing suicide.
It seems as if it is actually harder emotionally to watch a story unfold or to “investigate” it yourself, than it is to just have it quickly reported to you after the fact. Information and news flows to us as fast as it does to journalists which is more immediate than it ever has been. Certainly in these two cases it is the subject matter that causes this shitty feeling I have but in years past I would have just caught this story in the paper sometime late tomorrow or perhaps in a quick TV news clip tonight. Instead I got only a small blurb about it this afternoon not long after it went out on the police scanners then followe the twitter updates all day. This evolution of how we gather our news is amazing, but this is twice now it has kind of taken a toll on me emotionally.
thoughts
I was thinking tonight that perhaps the next evolution with the internet will not be so much in the internet at all. Maybe web 3.0 will really be about our institutions being forced to change because of it. The invasion of web based business models might be the change that is most noticeable in the next few years. I think in this worsening economy we’ll see our brick and mortar establishments being forced to innovate or die, often because entire industries are collapsing.
I think the twitter phenomenon is going to soon enable a type of collaboration that we are (I am) just barely beginning to imagine and I think this will totally destroy some while giving life to many new ways of doing business. Many new hybrid types of organization should be on there way. Just thoughts, maybe I’ll keep adding to this.
My 2.5 mile one way jaunt to maplight these days. I need a bike or a bus pass.
Gene Lee Dancing Skateboarding Mystery
Last year sometime I saw this weird guy in an awesome pink outfit skateboarding up college ave near the Oakland Berkeley border. He was dancing and clapping, weaving through the stop and go traffic of a typical mid day weekend. I thought he was hilarious, talented, and for the 15 minutes or so that I got to enjoy his dancing, I thought he was everything that was great about the Bay Area.
Later he showed up in a New York Times travel article and I decided to look him up online. I told my mom about him, showed her some links and now she always asks if I’ve seen him lately. I think she is obsessed with him. So I’m going to collect here what I have found on him out on the tubes. Here goes.
All the videos I have currently found. I know there is more.
A flicker photoset of “Gene Lee as Seoul”. A blog post about Gene Lee’s death. A blog post about him faking his death, another one, and another one, his myspace page, which says he’s been logged in today March 7th 09. Oh and I’ve just uncovered some new stuff, a new vid “public display of fitness”.
And here on National headquarters it seems he has been going by Eugene International and is currently in the bay area. Awesome.
But no mom, I have not personally seen him skateboarding, clapping, and dancing down the street in a rad hot pink outfit lately.
Oakland Shootings
I watched another violent breaking news story today. Four Oakland cops were shot, three were killed as was the suspect. I’m not sure when I originally got the news but it was sometime early this afternoon and actually from the SFgate.com which is somewhat amazing. I then started following it on twitter and the feeling I got was horrible. It was similar to the way I felt after watching the story unfold of the slow speed chase of the white bentley in L.A. a couple months ago which ended with the driver committing suicide.
It seems as if it is actually harder emotionally to watch a story unfold or to “investigate” it yourself, than it is to just have it quickly reported to you after the fact. Information and news flows to us as fast as it does to journalists which is more immediate than it ever has been. Certainly in these two cases it is the subject matter that causes this shitty feeling I have but in years past I would have just caught this story in the paper sometime late tomorrow or perhaps in a quick TV news clip tonight. Instead I got only a small blurb about it this afternoon not long after it went out on the police scanners then followe the twitter updates all day. This evolution of how we gather our news is amazing, but this is twice now it has kind of taken a toll on me emotionally.
thoughts
I was thinking tonight that perhaps the next evolution with the internet will not be so much in the internet at all. Maybe web 3.0 will really be about our institutions being forced to change because of it. The invasion of web based business models might be the change that is most noticeable in the next few years. I think in this worsening economy we’ll see our brick and mortar establishments being forced to innovate or die, often because entire industries are collapsing.
I think the twitter phenomenon is going to soon enable a type of collaboration that we are (I am) just barely beginning to imagine and I think this will totally destroy some while giving life to many new ways of doing business. Many new hybrid types of organization should be on there way. Just thoughts, maybe I’ll keep adding to this.
