Do you manage social media for a Washington food business?

I am conducting a survey and interviews about food industry use of social media (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumblr, blogs) for a presentation at the 10th Farmer-Fisher-Chef Connection presented by FORKS on March 21st. If you are responsible for posting to social media for your Washington based food business, please take a few minutes to take the survey, you could win a registration to the event! If you’d like to have a cup of coffee and talk about how you use social media, get in...

Bernie Sanders’s Revolution Needs a Better Plan

If Bernie Sanders is serious about a political transformation in America, he needs a better plan. Source: Bernie Sanders’s Revolution Needs a Better Plan I am particularly interested in this section of the article: But Sanders could invite artists from all around the country, famous or not, to create work that spreads the message of his campaign. Culture shapes norms: about inequality,  racism, violence. And culture that isn’t made by the campaign but by the people packs a punch. Which reminds me of the Creative Action Network, of my blog post about leveraging art and artists for social change from back in 2013, and of Downtown4Democracy, which once again seems defunct, but was active in 2004, and it seems again in...

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”

Read more

Hacking and password security

My recent article on why password security matters to all of us, and especially those of us who run accounts for organizations and businesses, originally posted on the Resource Media Blog.   Another day, another data breach. We have been inured to the news of corporations being hacked and our data being spilled out into the black market: Target, Home Depot, Anthem, Primera, American Express, Chase, Twitter… These represent large scale, sophisticated hacks, in most cases, targeting personal and financial information. But they are by no means the only security breaches that take place and affect millions of people. Individually we may be concerned about our bank account our email account being hacked. But as is often pointed out, we humans tend to worry about the wrong risks (stranger abduction rather than accidents as a threat to child safety, for example).  But every day many of us do something that puts us and our organizations in jeopardy. We use weak passwords and we share them in plain text over email. For the average individual, the chances of this vulnerability being exploited may be rather low and the impact can range from a relatively minor inconvenience to a major headache. But for individuals that manage organizational media, the damage can be major. Take, for example, the recent hacking of Big Think’s Facebook page. While the details are not yet clear, it is very likely, from what I understand, that a hacker gained access to one of the page admin’s accounts. The hacker then made his or herself an admin and deleted the legitimate admins. Though Big Think was able to...

I love pie, I hate pie charts

Reading through Tableau’s recent white paper, Which Chart Or Graph Is Right For You, I was heartened to see this explanation of pie carts: Pie charts should be used to show relative proportions – or percentages – of information. That’s it. Despite this narrow recommendation for when to use pies, they are made with abandon. As a result, they are the most commonly mis-used chart type. If you are trying to compare data, leave it to bars or stacked bars. Don’t ask your viewer to translate pie wedges into relevant data or compare one pie to another. Key points from your data will be missed and the viewer has to work too hard. AMEN! If you have to create charts or graphs, or interpret data for work or fun, you should review this white...