Villagers with Pitchforks

In Defense of My City

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:51:00 -0700

When I first moved to San Francisco I hated it and was surprised to hate it. I lived within walking distance from the western terminus of the Underground Railway, the former home of the Six Gallery and the legendary 60’s rock venue The Fillmore. I was so earnest and enthusiastic to meet new people, but at the time my excitement was turning people off.

The first party we went to was in Russian Hill where after an hour of contributing nothing to a conversation about triathlons, I hid in the kitchen talking to someone’s younger brother. My second party was in the Lower Haight where everyone was trying to look working class and I was in my best clothes but really WAS working class. My third party was in the Marina where I was the only woman to arrive in a mustache to a “mustache and wig” costume party.

My uncultured, working class, small town Canadian-ness was seeping out, making me say offensive things like “Frisco”. San Francisco was bringing me down and it took me a year to unlock the secret and cut through the bullshit to assemble my crew of friends.

SURVIVAL
There are about 4000 people under “Born and Raised in San Francisco” on Facebook and more than 66,000 people on the “Pickles” page. Most San Francisco residents are transplants — and it was at this point that I realized that I owned the city just as much as anyone else around. There was something strangely comfortable about meeting venture capitalists from Winnipeg, leather-clad post-punk lesbians from Minnetonka and goths from Rancho Palos Verdes. I realized that all these transplants were coming to this city as a beacon of innovation, inspiration and above all else, weirdness. I wasn’t expressing my full range of weirdness. I stopped worrying about people liking me and I started doing stuff.

Now I like San Francisco. I like that the sadomasochist community does its part to fundraise for breast cancer awareness month. I like that no matter how wealthy the tech industry gets, they still dance like Snoopy characters at the end of the night. I like that between the Beats, Black Power and the Technologists there is a rich history of legendary weirdos - the lunatic fringe that lassos mainstream America into changing their perceptions and beliefs.

Hang in there newbies. It gets better. In a year you’ll feel like you own SF and defend it too.

RESOURCES FOR NEWBIES
- Magazine with some events and cool hidden SF: The Bold Italic
- 6 Awesome SF Hours of YouTube: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City featuring Laura Linney and Parker Posey
- Local Happenings: SFist
- Arts and Culture: Squidlist
- SF Kickball Association: WAKA

Two Words for Sucker? Art Collector.

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:04:00 -0700

A year ago when we visited Base Elements Gallery in Barcelona, the owner was hesitant to let me film some quick shots of Pez’s graffitied canvases. Now I understand why.

I just got out of Exit Through the Gift Shop - a Banksy film about Thierry Guetta’s rise from amateur filmmaker to Warhol-esque copycat art sensation. Essentially it’s the realization that if you’re even anecdotally related to artists like Banksy, Shepard Fairey and Dave Kinsey, you can pretty much dupe hipsters into buying your screen prints.

Jesus. It’s all pretty simple. If all you want to do is collect eyeballs and money, you simply placate the egos of those with influence, get them to talk about you and then emulate their style as best you can. Forget the concept of a magnum opus. If you don’t care about offering any value or insight to others and you just want to swim through money like Scrooge McDuck then let your minions stencil an eyepatch over someone else’s work. Or better yet, just retweet it and remove the attribution.

Maybe I’m too earnest about constructivism, but this movie made me depressed. There’s nothing wrong with producing a hackneyed piece of steaming crap if your intentions are good. It just seems callous when you reduce the value of works that do aim to move beyond the trivial.

I really do hope this film is a prankumentary like some writers suggest.

How True Culture Happens Over Beer

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:12:00 -0700

Twelve years ago, under the shadow of a huge bodhisattva, a Taiwanese priest threw my i-ching and told me I’d have a good career but that I was a “horse in the gate”.

In Chinese astrology horses are strong, determined and animated, but a horse in the gate is one that is stubborn and impatient. This is the type of employee I am. When I’m given a problem and I’m given the freedom to solve it on my own, I’m happy and I do a great job. But when I’m held back by unnecessary process or bureaucracy, I get bored and I’m bad at hiding it.

ON CULTURE

A few weeks ago I interviewed Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh about his latest book Delivering Happiness. He talked about motivating people and the importance of culture. After just completing NetShelter’s summit, I’m beginning to understand what all this “culture” talk means.

While I was the official project manager of the event, the reality is that much of my planning was simply a checklist for Office Manager Carrie Ann Cleveland to execute upon. If I was onsite by 7am, she was there at 6am hauling furniture. If I was eating lunch with publishers, she was tearing down the rooms. If I was changing the program order, she was calling caterers, delivery people and maintenance staff.

She was and is phenomenal, and if she didn’t already have enough on her plate - she was also answering the switchboard and greeting people as they came into the office. If Carrie wasn’t patient and professional under pressure, imagine how that greeting might appear to an outsider.

CULTURE HAPPENS OVER BEER

There’s a common misconception that the President of the company is its face. But the reality is that a company’s face is formed through unscripted interactions between employees, vendors, partners and even friends of employees.

Happy people unknowingly advocate for you when they’re drunk with their friends. Frustrated people bitch to anyone who’ll listen. Trust me, I know. As an animated “horse”, I’m really good at weaving drunken tales of victory and defeat.

While we can’t expect people to be happy all the time, whether we like it or not, the conversations about our companies and ourselves are happening. The next drunk conversation I have about Carrie Ann will be this:

“If it weren’t for that chick, my head would have freaking exploded. Shepard Fairey should do a poster of her. In the event of a zombie apocalypse I will be choosing her for my team of road warrior renegades.”

While I can’t expect the one she has about me to be as glowing, I hope she feels appreciated. I’m ordering her a gift as I type this.

Gentrifying the Web

Thu, 13 May 2010 00:48:00 -0700

I recently came across an article written by former Knight News Challenge organizer Susan Mernit asking the question, “Can you Gentrify the Local Web?”

After creating the Oakland Local portal/aggregation site, Mernit’s group has quickly gained visibility and as a result has been accused of harming older area-specific sites including the more established Block Report Radio.

In researching traffic patterns after the launch of her site, Mernit hopes to answer the question,“Does Oakland Local, merely by existing and gaining visibility, inherently harm older local sites (particularly those few run by people of color) by diminishing their audience and attention?”

I found this fascinating. Traditionally gentrification is used to describe diaspora and one ethnic group displacing another from a finite geographic location. But we’re talking about the web here - real estate is cheap, so the finite resource being usurped is audience mind share.

The argument criticizing Oakland Local is then this:

a) There’s only so much mind share in a community to go around; and,

b) Those that share similar identities to the perceived community majority deserve amplified voice.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Firstly I like to believe that netizens have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and an increasing agnosticism regarding web information. And secondly I wonder - do most netizens consume news to look inwards or outwards?

Hype Machine Rant

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:18:09 -0700

God I love me a good rant. It reminds me a little of Dave Olson’s Northern Voice 2008 presentation entitled, Fuck Stats, Make Art.

This presentation at the 140 conference by writer Chris Weingarten is pretty darn fascinating. It’s true that those listening to Hype Machine believe they’re getting an alternative rather than the aggregate of common blogger tastes and it’s true that negative reviews rarely get clicks or SEO juice. But, I’m not sure I see it in quite so bleak a light.

I think there are a fair number of netizens that are curious enough to seek out great content and art rather than listen to the “bland middling taste of the internet hive mind”. And regardless of what we think about other people’s content, I really believe the accessibility afforded to so many voices is a good thing for obscure writer, artist and music discovery.

My favorite line of this rant by far is, “Don’t click on things that just exist for you to click on them” - the irony of it is that when someone tells me not to click on something, I totally will.

A Long Lunch

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:44:00 -0700

This past week has been amazingly different from my old days of blogging. I’ve started redirecting urgent pitches to tips[at]readwriteweb.com, I am no longer on the RWW payroll, and I no longer have the authority to publish at will. The reality is, I just write and they take it or leave it.

I’ve written one guest post on Labor-as-a-Service being applied to Haitian disaster relief. No one read it, but I enjoyed writing it and I’m tickled pink that I didn’t feel the need to write about Twitter or Facebook. I am beginning to understand that I no longer have to ignore my bladder or skip lunch in order to do well at my new job at NetShelter. I still have an enormous amount of respect for full time bloggers and while I love writing, I personally am so much better when I’m not under the gun.

The Humanity! The Privacy Breach!

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:51:48 -0700

I recently received an angry email explaining that UK Facebook profiles have been “hijacked” as a popup survey is asking users whether or not they’ve registered to vote. A “no” response sends them to the UK Electoral Commission’s page.

The note reads, “Facebook should not be a political tool. It should NOT favor voting or not voting. It should be neutral. Some people don’t like the government and don’t like any of the political parties…This is a huge privacy breach.”

I think this is interesting for a number of reasons:

1. This guy thinks I matter to his cause. Not a problem dude, just let me take the glass casing off my red Zuck phone and dial that shit in.

2. Facebook is so huge that users treat it like a public service. But public services are funded by tax dollars and Facebook is a private entity. So basically Facebook can contribute to political campaigns with cash, in-kind donations and any number of political advertisements. Think of it as putting a sign up on your own front lawn.

3. The term “political tool” is being used from a purely utilitarian sense as rather then using Facebook to further a specific party agenda, the service is actually being used by the Electoral Commission to encourage the civil act of voting. As a person who works within the general confines of society, I see this as a convenient method of outreach with a clear conversion funnel. I guess if you’re railing against the system it marks the further marginalization of libertarians / anarchists? Can anarchists really be surprised that the electoral commission isn’t counting them? Those zany and unpredictable kids… Sigh.

4. Special interest messages often appear on Facebook as targeted advertising. This is no government conspiracy, it’s just about the fact that people who start companies like to make money from them - even if that money comes from your government. If you’re a particularly pissed off Brit, write your MP a terse email for letting American Mark Zuckerberg roll around naked in your tax dollars. I’m sorry, this is outside of my jurisdiction. My hands are tied.

Aww, That's Nice

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 13:06:10 -0700

Two years ago I sent myself a letter on FutureMe to be delivered on my birthday this year. I just read it and it makes me feel incredibly grateful as I’ve gotten to blog for others, my student loan is paid off, and the love of my life is now my fiancé.

I distinctly remember wanting to send a FutureMe email to myself at 50-years-old, but with the way things were already going then, I doubted that email would be the protocol of the day. So I sent it to 2010 and then it appears I blogged about forgetting what I’d sent.

It occurs to me that buried time capsules really may be the easiest way to send your future self a note. I guess you could be like the dude from Memento and tattoo yourself. You could get inked every year with a stream of consciousness birthday rant. For those with a love of cheese, here’s what I wrote in 2007:
———————————————

Dear FutureMe,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
When you were me you liked to blog: http://www.hiyaa-a.blogspot.com/, if you can’t find that site you should type “Way Back Machine” into the latest search engine and then plug in the URL.

The guy in the photos is the love of your life. At first you hooked up with him because you thought you’d never see him again, but then he was sweet and kept making the 10 hour Greyhound trip to see you. He must’ve thought you were one sexy dame.

You and your love live in San Francisco and are riding a second, albeit more cautious, dot com boom. You like all of the things that other nerds like including: pirates, tesla coils, monkeys, graphic novels, robots and ninjas. You specifically also giggle like a schoolgirl whenever you see former City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and you wish you had something profound to say to him. Today you wish you had something profound to say to you. Sorry, I’m just not a Hallmark kind of person.

In any case, I hope you and your love are happy and healthy. I also hope you’ve paid off your student loan or at least changed your name.
Love,
PresentMe

On Quitting While You're Ahead

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:52:55 -0700

META-SPLOSION! Yesterday I saw a blog dedicated to a blog - and it was climbing up the Y Combinator front page. JWB’s blog will summarize Joel on Software’s many lessons down to one sentence per essay. While this may not sound like a useful exercise, it’s a great way to index the thousands of essays written by software guru Joel Spolsky. Spolsky recently wrote that he was hanging up his blogging hat.

While he started Joel on Software as a way to drive users to Fog Creek Software, the now famous programmer / blogger finds that maintaining the property requires 1/3 of his time.

QUITTING WHILE THE GETTING’S GOOD

Said Spolsky, “My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear and eye path on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows - how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel.”

While Spolsky’s single channel has earned him a number of contracts and more than 1 million unique visitors per month, his decision to concentrate on new markets is an interesting one. Says Spolsky,”It can’t be about you. It has to be about your readers, who will it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.”

Complaining about Noise is Noise

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:14:58 -0700

If one more coddled internet celebrity complains about “breaking through the social media noise”, I’m going to tip them out of their Aeron chair and dump 6 kinds of recycling and an Odwalla juice on them. Noise about noise is not only noise, but it’s noise that is 5-year-old rhetoric. Ummm, Kanye West called, he wants his attitude and noise back.

There’s tons of awesome stuff happening right now. For instance, last night I found a CERN link on Twitter that just so happened to be broadcasting a live cast of the the large hadron collider being fired up to collide subatomic particles at three times the energy levels as previously recorded. At every moment I worried that all those Swiss scientists would be engulfed into a gigantic black hole. It was riveting.

Hate is Like a Black Hole - It Sucks. Lamenting the web as an echo chamber is dumb. Now you can say my hate for haters is also part of the echo chamber but I have a brilliant new discovery - not subatomic - but brilliant nonetheless:

1. The web is not a television set: You set the programming for the channel of your choosing. If you find too much of what people are saying is the same, then cancel them. Reduce the number of feeds, friends and followers that are exactly the same. It’s not other people that are ruining the internet. It’s you. Stop publicly complaining and scrub your channels for duplicates.

Streets of Plenty

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:58:53 -0700

We just watched the movie Streets of Plenty - a documentary about a coddled College kid who attempts to live in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for 30 days in order to experience homelessness. Given that I’d worked with a bunch of active intravenous drug users through a women’s services clinic in that same area, I was intrigued.

Once I realized the student was approaching the experiment with a “homelessness is laziness” hypothesis, I was bummed out. Obviously, after trying crack and heroin, getting a stomach virus, and sleeping outdoors under a cardboard box, the kid learns that homelessness is not easy. However, despite the sympathetic epiphany, I still can’t get over the fact that he used social services and took a warm shelter bed when someone else could have used it. After all, it was mid-December in Canada.

At least when Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy Trade Places no one loses their spot at the Salvation Army.

I realize I’ve spoiled a great deal of this movie for you, but if you’re interested in seeing the very un-Olympic side of Vancouver (and this doesn’t even touch on the issue of Vancouver’s sex trade) - the film’s 7 parts are available here.

Gyrobike & The Importance of Pain

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:26:21 -0800

I just read an article about the Gyrobike. It’s a $99 dollar bike wheel that provides stability at very slow speeds. In other words, it’s a really expensive training wheel to make sure your kid doesn’t get owwies. You’re going to think I’m a bitch for saying this, but what’s wrong with letting your kid wipe out?

If you’ve never experienced pain or embarrassment, then you probably aren’t a fully developed human being. The first time I went to a tech networking event, a minor web celebrity treated me like shit and I spent the rest of the evening doing shots and then eventually, crying in the bathroom. It was this first humiliation that gave me the resilience to ignore the rampant social disorders of tech industry workers and get to the substance of the human beings standing before me. Today, when someone is being a dick I tell them so playfully and with a smile on my face. Once you learn to recover from unpleasant moments in business and in life, you can rise above them and learn how to become a more productive person. I’m not telling people to send their kids to an island with a piece of flint and a knife. I’m just saying a little bit of controlled pain might be good for everyone.

I'm Wearing Pants...and an Additional Hat

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:05:00 -0800

For the last week my usual blogger cave of pajamas and dirty cereal bowls has been dormant. Instead, I’ve been scheduling my ReadWriteWeb posts, showering and making my way to SOMA every morning before 10am. In other words, I am putting on pants.

THE STORY
In 1999, only 2 years after Larry and Sergey had renamed the BackRub search engine to the now search-giant Google, brothers Pirouz and Peyman Nilforoush turned their love of blogging into a business. From a basement in the Toronto burbs, the two decided that in addition to working on their own properties, they’d offer hosting services to a network of indy gaming, entertainment, music and tech blogs. In exchange for all their hard work, they received ad space and revenue share. A decade later they’ve got 200 major tech and consumer electronics partners, deals with major manufacturers like Sony and Verizon and more than 120 million unique visitors per month. That company is now known as NetShelter and I’m happy to say that as of this week, those brothers are my bosses.

WEARING 2 HATS
I’ve just taken a position as NetShelter’s Senior Social Media and Publishing Strategist. While I’ll keep contributing as a writer to ReadWriteStart, my daytime gig will be working under the direction of former CNET Editor in Chief and GM of Yahoo! Tech, Patrick Houston. Patrick is already teaching me about the wonderful world of publishing, and soon I’ll become a resource for publishers like MacRumors, SlashGear, the IEEE and IntoMobile. For the next couple of weeks, instead of producing a ton of public content, I’ll be sponging up everything I can learn from NetShelter’s many publishers and staff.

I’ll keep checking my RWW email, but if you’ve got a breaking story, the best way to pitch them is to email tips[at]readwriteweb[dot]com. If you want to chat about NetShelter, email me at dana.oshiro[at]netshelter.net or better yet, hit me up on Twitter at @suzyperplexus. Huzzah to a new year and a new gig!

Foundry Group’s Brad Feld recently posted a video where...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:10:39 -0800

Foundry Group’s Brad Feld recently posted a video where individuals in Time Square were asked whether or not they knew the difference between a browser and a search engine. Lucky for search-giant (and now Chrome creator) Google - most did not. The video of the mistaken search engine had the blogosphere in an uproar as the tech-savvy marveled at what they believed to be the stupidity of the masses.

It reminded me of Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans” series in a which a CBC television personality interviews Americans and gets them to comment on fake Canadian factoids. As a Canadian myself, I know how much Canucks love this program. While many believe that Canada’s favorite pastime is hockey, it is in fact making fun of Americans. The stereotype (at least in Canada) is that Americans are less intelligent than their northern neighbors. However, it seems to me that intelligence has little to do with both the Canadian and the browser exercise. It’s more a reflection of the sad fact that most people outside of the realms of tech and Canada just don’t feel the need to care about either subject.

Using a basic web cam on augmented reality markers, the varied...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:38:04 -0800

Using a basic web cam on augmented reality markers, the varied space between the two markers prompts different sound and feedback with the idea that the entire process is creating a new type of musical instrument. I think this idea would be even cooler if it were recreated using 3 phones: 1 as the video camera and the other 2 as the markers. In this way you could come together with your friends for a collaborative tabletop music experience.

Intimacy and Search

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:53:00 -0800

When a woman is on the verge of tears and you’re having an argument, don’t stop to Google something. It will only make it worse. Don’t change your Facebook marital status to read “Married to Bitch” and don’t start a Twitter thread to rally your friends into the argument. Really intimate moments, especially fights, are best kept offline. Up until about 2003 or so, people actually understood that as common sense.

Did you know that when Larry Page and Sergey Brin first started working on Google it was originally called BackRub? In 1996 a back rub was something tender given to sick family members, colicky babies and spouses. If someone you weren’t familiar with tried to give you a back rub you would have whipped your head around and screamed, “Back off hippie!” or “Who told you to be a pervert?”

The name “Google” is less intimate. It’s the number one followed by 100 zeros. For someone who lives for intimate moments with the people I love, I find it strange to see my identity become so infinitely searchable through other people’s uploads. And I find it even more strange for it to be searched by anyone other than my mom and potential employers. No one’s ever really crossed the line, so it doesn’t bug me that my past thoughts and mistakes are there for everyone to see, it only bothers me that I don’t get to offer more indication as to who I aspire to be.

…Well, that and the immortalized mullet.

Being Prepared...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:40:00 -0800

Since Hurricane Katrina there has been a steady influx of disaster and zombie apocalypse movies. The fear that communities will be unprepared in a state of emergency has suddenly become a realization and that collective fear is manifesting itself in our pop culture.

I’ve never been the sort of person to subscribe to survivalist antics, but I happen to make San Francisco my home and if you look at the USGS quake mapping system, we’ve had hundreds of small readings from the past week. When my friends Carey and Joe talked about the NERT classes they are taking, it struck a chord. NERT is the SF Fire Department’s National Emergency Rescue Team. You can become a team volunteer by taking 6 classes on earthquake awareness, basic disaster skills, light search and rescue, medicine and team organization. The point is to reduce the stress on government emergency services and ensure that your own family members (and possibly neighbors) are as safe as possible.

Rumor has it that San Francisco is the only city with a disaster plan for parasitic alien invasions :) For a quick look at the NERT program, check out this video.

Why Popjam Misses the Point of Chatroulette

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:47:00 -0800

While panel talks on large social networks often turn to questions of privacy, safety and personal space, I cannot help thinking that there is an entire generation who is fearless in the face of an anonymous crowd. Yesterday at 11:00pm there were 20,000 people online at Chatroulette.

The premise of the service is that two anonymous strangers turn on their webcams to stare at each other through the great digital divide. Most participants are civil with a few exposing themselves or looking for others to expose themselves. While the nudity contingency is the minority, it’s the hint at a possible live freak show that seems to draw new users. The Chatroulette site has become such a meme that users are already posing as others including the entire male cast of Jersey Shore. Why am I writing this you ask?

In looking at mainstream sites, I wonder how online norms have shifted. Pornography always had a huge presence on the Web, but for those not looking for porn, it was YouTube and MySpace that formed the kernel of a meme. My generation of slovenly hipsters thought we were so edgy when the service once touted as the smallest, fastest and most standards compliant Mozilla image library was named libpr0n. The site FAQ is upfront in stating, “The main goal of the library is to render pornographic images in an efficient way.” But these aren’t live images. It’s just image rendering with a memorable name.

It’s time to face facts. In comparison to kids nowadays, we’re thoroughly vanilla. And if we actually think the new roulette style of Facebook chat Popjam is the same as Chatroulette, then we are missing the point.

In the last few years, Youtube videos and jokes once considered taboo have become perfectly acceptable for my father to print and post to the office bulletin board. Like a real life Quentin Tarantino film, the repetition of oddities and recorded perversities have desensitized even our parents. With a real-time feed, constant mobile connection and decent streaming video, a site that offers the slight hint of live soft core pornography may well be the last vestige of youth.

Correcting Real Time Analysis

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:19:29 -0800

The other day I met Jeff Jonas for an hour long meeting at his PR agency’s office. Jonas is the chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group, he built the system that foiled the MIT Blackjack Team in Vegas and he’s since gone on to do all sorts of interesting things like thwart criminals for the CIA and participate in several marathons. Essentially, Jonas is a finely tuned machine, and that day I’d had 3 hours of sleep and I arrived with toothpaste on my face. Needless to say, I was a little intimidated.

Halfway through the meeting Jonas tells me the story he likes to tell at the podium during banquet dinners. While on the last leg of a triathlon in South Africa, he saw a runner with what he thought was diarrhea on his backside. He asked him if he was alright and the man reached down, touched the substance and licked it saying aloud, “It tastes like mango.” A juice packet had broken in the man’s back pocket without him noticing it. Said Jonas, “This is what I do. I build data analysis systems that make real time assumptions and then build them to correct themselves.” At that moment I eased up and corrected my own assumptions about Jonas.

Experience Points

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:41:04 -0800

Experience Points This week is Social Media Week and there’s a heavy focus on cause-related activism and social good. However, when we arrived yesterday at the San Francisco Food Bank, organizer Jeremy Toeman of Stage 2 Consulting pointed out, “They can get 250 people to a demo night, but we can only get 3 of 7 who committed to show up to volunteer for 3 hours.” Jeremy suggested that there should be a Foursquare for social activism. I was thinking about it last night and if Foursquare itself decided to award more points for being on-site at a 401c3 charity then at a bar or restaurant, then perhaps the leader board would be a little more meaningful. In the past I’ve written about the Foursquare for Charity pilot project but on second look I feel like this is a bit of a money grab from sponsors. By awarding more points for volunteering and even for fair trade businesses the game mechanics would remain fun, but it would alter the value system.