High Holy Mass of Contradictions

I've disabled the cross-posting by default from my Honey Bowtie Music blog. This is for several reasons:

• It's too repetitive, and I dislike the fragmentation of comments. 
• I'd already planned to separate my posting there and here, but didn't really follow through on it, and I think the cross-posting feature was a crutch.
• I've got several other blogs now besides the one at honeybowtie.com (there's my internet marketing blog and the Corporate Idealist blog), and it seems a little arbitrary to cross-post only the content from one, but it would be overkill to cross-post the content from all of them.
• I keep trying to get myself to write more consistently about music and songwriting over at honeybowtie, and instead I keep thinking about it as my personal blog when, really, this is and has been my personal blog.
• Thanks to therealjae, I created a Dreamwidth account and I want to give it a fair try, but I want to use it more for the features that probably make it a good community blogging platform and not what might make it a poor mainstream blogging platform.
• I'm trying to get back to setting time aside each day for blogging for a variety of reasons, so I think I'll be better prepared to keep up with having separate places to write, which was a problem of priorities for a while.
• I felt like I was doing myself a disservice here by largely posting content that wasn't intended for this format, and I don't think my friends were reading as consistently as they would have if I were standing in the community and actively participating in it rather than throwing stuff over the wall from outside. And non-acknowledgement is a pretty fair response to non-authentic participation, if you ask me, so I want to change the way I participate.

So there you go. The upshot: more content written here, intended for here. Hope you like the change, and if not, let me know why not. If you want to follow my blogging elsewhere, the links to the blogs are above but I'll make it even easier for you: here are the links to the RSS feeds: 

Kate and Karsten's songwriting blog feed
[meta]marketer web marketing blog feed
Corporate Idealist blog feed

Did you know I started a new blog yesterday? It's called Corporate Idealist, and I'm really excited about it. I think it will be a source of encouragement to people to feel like more than cogs in a corporate machine, and to do something positive in their workplaces and in their lives beyond the pursuit of money. (Hey, I like money as much as the next capitalist, but it isn't enough by itself to feel good about.)

I hope you check it out, and subscribe to the feed, and comment on the blog, and spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested!

I also want to attract contributors and eventually pay them, as well, to provide a really diverse set of perspectives on how to be happy at work, what constitutes good corporate citizenship, how to advocate for positive change within a company, and so on.

Sound like anyone you know? Send 'em my way and we'll talk.

I know I shouldn’t have a favorite, but I do. I can’t help it. I mean, just look at her:

More puppies - just waiting to be adopted! - over at Newscoma.

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

These aren't related (I don't think), but on Friday someone broke into our car window (annoying, but not that big of a deal really), and yesterday I started getting sick again, presumably from my thyroid acting weird (very annoying, and increasingly a big deal). Nothing much more to say about those, I guess: the first is already repaired, and the second will be handled soon enough by surgery and medication. I hope.

I'm also posting this directly in LiveJournal, you may notice. I've been working out my posting strategy for my LJ and the honeybowtie.com blog, as well as the new one I'm about to introduce, which has more of an interactive marketing focus. I want to keep the two blogs more topical, which means I think I'll be posting more of my non-topical observations here.

[And I just posted this by accident. Clearly I need to re-familiarize myself with the LJ posting tools. ;) ]

Just wanted to add that as many people's online presence gets to be more fragmented for the SEO benefit, not to mention the personal/professional delineation most people want, I suspect there will be a lot of this back and forth, changing strategies. It's an evolving process. So please bear with me. :)

I'm not ready to announce the new marketing blog yet, but here are the other relevant places where I spend time if you want to keep up with me:

The Bee Hive (http://www.honeybowtie.com/blog/)
Has been serving as an all-purpose blog, but increasingly, I'd like to start using this to capture my observations about songwriting, the creative process, the music business, etc.

My personal Twitter account (http://twitter.com/kateo)
Where I do a lot of my intermittent chatter. If you're not using Twitter, consider it. I find it's a good outlet and a great way to feel connected to friends throughout the day without needing to have specific IM conversations or whatever.

My work Twitter account (http://twitter.com/magazines_kate)
Where I chatter intermittently about work projects, complain about productivity issues (like, say, Twitter ;) ), and muse about marketing and e-commerce. It's not always as boring as it sounds, I swear. ;)

My FriendFeed account (http://friendfeed.com/kateoneill)
If you want to subscribe to an aggregation of my online activity (and/or anyone else's, for that matter), this is a great tool. It's always passively in use for me, and I use it actively off and on, mostly when Twitter is down (which is mercifully less common than it was a few months ago). If you haven't checked out FriendFeed, it's a pretty neat way to keep up with people who are spread out all over the web. Like me. :)

My colleague pointed me to a letter a friend of his wrote to American Airlines, “breaking up” with them.

Dear American Airlines,

I don’t think we should see each other any more.

I know that’s hard to hear. But you’re not the same airline I met a few years ago. You’ve changed. And not for the better. Sure, you say you love me… that you’ll take care of me… that I am “Elite” in your eyes… but those words just seem empty now. I need you to show me that your love is genuine.

There’s more. Lots more. And it’s brilliant. Check it out.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I think porn is kind of boring, frankly–it’s like watching monkeys type. Yeah they can do it and it LOOKS real, but you know it’s all a setup.</p>

- Kat Coble

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Thanks to the fine folks at ContentRobot, this blog is now equipped with an iPhone-ready theme. If you view www.honeybowtie.com/blog from an iPhone, it will automatically show up in a minimalist iPhone format.

And thanks to Dan Dickinson’s simple explanation, the whole honeybowtie.com site now has a custom webclip icon if you add it to your home page.

Whee!

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

• checking out chris wage’s project 365 slide show — it’s wonderful! http://www.flickr.com/photos/cwage/sets/72157594455834211/show/ #
• Thinking I should probably get my overly knotted neck and shoulder looked at. #

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

Hey, I’m testing out posting to the blog from Jott. Let’s see if this works. If so, it could be a real time saver while I’m driving home on my long commute. listen

Powered by Jott

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I’m so lame. I never got around to posting on Blog Action Day. But my excuse is that I’ve had a real roller coaster of a week. I went from, well, managing myself on Monday to having two direct reports on Wednesday, and that’s only part of it. So yeah, I really do think activism is important, I just didn’t take the arbitrarily designated day to talk about it. I wish I could link to my activism category, but I’ve been slow with this whole content import and re-tagging thing, so I’ve only gotten around to tagging one of my old posts with it. Oh well. There’s always next year.

***

On Thursday evening, Karsten and I went to hear Peter Plagens give an art lecture at the Frist with our friends Brad and Jed, and I’m pretty sure we were all creatively inspired. It was awesome. He basically talked about the struggle to embrace the new once you’ve become comfortable and familiar with the not-so-new, but unlike that rather trite-sounding summary, he was articulate and witty and insightful.

***

Speaking of embracing the new, I spent this morning working on updating the top-level honeybowtie.com site. I needed to replace a lot of the clunky tables, image-based text styling, and Dreamweaver-generated Javascript from oh-so-long-ago with a more adaptable CSS-based design. I’m not in love with how it looks yet, but it’s definitely a step in the direction I’m trying to go. The idea is to incorporate the blog and the rest of the site a bit more seamlessly, but I’m obviously not there yet.

***

Karsten is spending the day working (and I’m occasionally collaborating with him) on a project we’ve been trying to get around to finishing for several months now. Between all the chaos of the house renovation, my day job, our flea and rat troubles, sick cats, and vacation, it’s been delayed a bit. So with any luck we’ll have a scratch demo recorded by tomorrow night, even if it’s only a chorus. The artist we’re communicating with about this song has been waiting long enough and we need to get this one wrapped. I’m also trying to round up some other song ideas she might be interested in, so I guess we have next weekend already planned, too.

***

This vodka and tonic is simply perfect. I am a bartending genius, I tell you.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

Jae got me thinking (in a way totally unrelated to what she was talking about) about how I found myself thinking fondly of the U.S. a few times while we were in Paris and Amsterdam. Not of the government, mind you, and certainly not of this current administration’s policies or whathaveyou.

But just thinking fondly of some of the little cultural niceties that I take for granted and which were notably absent from many of my dealings with folks over there. Maybe some of it is my having grown accustomed to the U.S. South and the culture of extreme gentility that underlies everything else around here, but I can easily understand why Americans who visit Paris, especially, would walk away thinking the French rude. I don’t think it’s really a matter of being rude, but I think there are a few characteristics that are typical of parts of U.S. culture that are either missing or very transformed in some of Europe’s cultures.

I’m thinking, for example, of the kind of you-first-no-you-first awkward politeness, or the face-saving that goes with conversations with strangers, or the extreme emphasis on customer service and the “customer is king” mentality and expectation within retail and food service. Certainly each of these has their analogous counterpart in other cultures, but I imagine it can be jarring for Americans visiting, say, Paris for the first time to be condescended to by a waiter, to be reprimanded by a stranger, to be bluntly addressed, and so on.

Know what I mean? And yeah, I’m sure this has been studied and documented and all, but when has that ever stopped a blogger from making dull observations about anything? So feel free to add your insightful thoughts in the comments and help me class this joint up, would ya?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

Ivy seems to think so and I’m starting to believe her.

My Amazon redesign post took me all of two minutes to write, yet is getting read by folks from various corners of the globe. That’s nice and all, but an awful lot of those links lead to my LiveJournal account instead of honeybowtie.com. Bummer! I could have used that link love to build my search presence.

Also, of the folks that did end up on honeybowtie.com, Site Meter tells me a few have been from Amazon. Nice. Had I known the good folks in Seattle would actually read my feedback, I probably would have been a little more thorough about giving it. Ah well.

Lesson learned for the future: when writing about something that someone is probably emotionally invested in (and projects that people have presumably been working hard on for some time would, yes, fall into that category), remember that people do ego searches and write knowing you’ll be read.

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Ha! Here's me all nerding it up at BarCamp and liveblogging the goings-on. (And that great-looking guy next to me? The one and only musician/restaurateur/blogger Nashville Knucklehead.)

It was already sweltering by this point at Exit/In. I was desperately thinking about exiting.

Or, in other words, about Music City Bloggers.

It's packed. It's very warm. But it's also very cool.

Grace of Graceless in Love at tonight's blogger meetup at Blackstone's. Ain't she cute?

At the North End Night Out Against Crime: S-townMike, me, & Hutchmo. This is picture #2 because they wanted to suck in their guts. Of course, my own gut looks unjustly large in this shot, but I'm going with it because that's just the kind of crime-fighting neighbor and friend I am.

That's not me making the bunny ears, by the way. I'm being framed!

Liberadio included me in its roundup of "notable" bloggers endorsing Briley. Or, well, now that I read it again more closely, I guess they called the endorsement notable. Not so much me. Oh well, back to insignificance.

I'm really excited to be part of a new blogging project. There's a lot that it can become, but right now, the core group of people behind it are just trying to pull together everything we need to do right now. There's been a flurry of email, a few of us met for lunch today, and there's talk of a field trip for some research and networking, but more on that later.

The blog's most basic purpose is to serve the community of middle Tennessee that was built through Nashville Is Talking, and which has been left wondering what comes next ever since Brittney left.

My take? This. This is what comes next. It's grassroots, it's cooperative, and it's people from differing social and political views coming together with a common purpose. That just rocks my little world. After wondering what would happen to the community without a central voice to pull it all together, I feel really good about the way this has the potential to come together.

The Fug Girls get self-deprecating about blogging:

Occasionally I change out of my pajamas in the morning and into a different pair of pajamas.

Thought some folks might enjoy that reference.