I never thought I would actually have the chance to meet the great digger Tal Siach. He’s Israeli, and since he’s on the other side of the Earth, that means I’m never going to get to meet him right? Not so. He visited the States over the last week for the Consumer Electronics show in Vegas. Then he went to Southern California to visit another friend Jason Lankow briefly. After that, he came up to San Francisco, where he and several other diggers hung out for an impromptu social media meet-up.

We met at Medjool’s, a club in San Francisco’s Mission District. We socialized, shot the shit and hung out on their roof. It was good meeting Tal, who turns out to be one of the nicest guys around. I also hear that his web site Walyou is having a lot of success. I am very happy for him! Much thanks to Sharon, a.k.a. SunGoddess808, for the group picture she took!

Here is Tal Siach in the flesh people. Yes he really DOES exist.

Two nice diggers. Cas Ruffin is a new-ish Digger (@dahrecords) on the scene, and Tal is an old man.

This is the first time that Jerry James Stone, the environmental Digger, and really-long-timer Jason Lankow, a.k.a "Jaybol" had ever met. Digger JMRitchie, or Josh Ritchie, was hovering somewhere nearby but for some reason I can't find the pic I took of him.

Tal and Ben had a bit TOO much fun I think at this point in the night.

This is the group shot taken by Sharon, a.k.a Sungoddess808. That's Jerry, Me, Ben Bicais, Tal Siach and Cas Ruffin.

Ben and Jerry don't make ice cream, but they can bring the page views.

I have learned so much about my FICO score from Larry Chiang. But more than that, he is one of the nicest people I have met in the Bay Area tech community so far. When I went the latest Crunchup in San Francisco, a mutual friend kinda “handed me off” to Larry and next thing I know I was being introduced to people, talking all about what I do, and generally being made to feel like I matter. It’s always nice when someone does that for you.

He apparently doesn’t just do that for a few people. This video is a perfect example of how how he includes all sorts of folks and interviews them on camera. Chiang made this video at the Crunchup. In it, he interviews a bunch of people, including myself. Towards the end, I talk about Village Voice’s new marijuana blog “Toke of the Town” and my company’s goals for the new year.

Chiang is an interesting guy and has a lot to say about being a mentor, getting mentored, how to work a room, and what you aren’t taught in business school. He gives advice to people looking for better credit at this site. Check him out on Twitter here.

In the spirit of self-promotion that I sometimes engage in, let’s take a trip down memory lane with some of my on-air TV reporting work that I use to do for KEYT Channel 3 in Santa Barbara.

For years I worked as a part-time reporter at the small-market TV station and ended up working on hundreds of stories. By the time I began searching for other TV jobs, I had quite a few TV stories to choose from as I edited together my resume tape. Because all of the material on the tape combined to be longer than six minutes, I thought it best to divide the footage up into two segments.

I worked at KEYT in Santa Barbara for 10 years in total. For 5 of those years, I did part-time reporting work. I began to work more regularly the last two of those years. This tape, in addition to being a nostalgia piece for me personally, represents some of the best TV journalism I did while I was in Santa Barbara.

The first part of the tape was put onto just one YouTube video and it contains a montage of some of my “stand-ups” from various stories. Some of the stand-ups are actual live intros or wraps that I did into and out of my stories which aired on TV. Others are during the stories themselves.

Here is Part II, which contains two stories:

You will notice that my old address is on one of the tapes. It is customary for someone looking to find a job in TV to place their address at the beginning of the tape so the employer can contact the job seeker. I haven’t lived at that address in years, so I didn’t think it would cause any harm.

It’s rare these days that you come upon a new meme in its infancy — or to be honest just another bizarre oddity that makes you laugh a little while consuming alcoholic beverages at the local watering hole.

I was carousing at Murio’s on Haight Street in San Francisco a little while back with my buddies Kevin and David when some dude with a PBR 24 ounce made all friendly with us. In addition to telling us why he had moved out to San Francisco from the Valley of the Sun in Arizona, he made mention of the dick chicken. “The what?” you say. Why the picture in this post of course.

The guy was a little unsure of where it all began, and quite frankly because of my Pabst-induced silliness I’m not all that sure what the heck he even said. But he had a button on his sweatshirt to prove that the meme exists and i captured it on my Blackberry for you to see.

I had to do a Google search and I found one site that had a picture of the phallic bird on the streets of Brooklyn. The Urban Dictionary has a couple of very explicit definitions.

A Brooklyn neighborhood paper reported that the meme is originally the work of a street artist who actually has become so popular that at least one art show focusing on the Dick Chicken has been held. “Maybe it is about whimsy, the idea that something can affect you on a base level. You can laugh and dance and play, without looking for meaning, like when you hear a good song. … Maybe it’s about none of those things.” Maybe all these people who say Brooklyn is filled with Hipsters now are telling the truth, because this seems suspiciously like hipster activity to me.

There is something about the crisp fall evenings in San Francisco that can just hit you the right way. The design director for SF Weekly was leaving so we all headed to the Hotel Utah on 4th and Bryant Streets for a goodbye party. Right as I was about to enter the bar there, I noticed that the eastern sky was turning the most lovely shade of pink. The 3.2 megapixel camera on my Blackberry doesn’t quite capture how cool it felt, with the noise of the traffic and the city, but I knew I wanted to document that moment. What a beautiful town I am lucky to work in! Please also click on my Flickr stream for a close look at all the photos I’ve been taking lately from my Blackberry. For the full size version of the photo click here.

I have spoken recently about using pictures in your tweets to engage people and build followers. Including pics with your tweets keeps people up to date on your life, and actually adds value. It’s fine to say that - but why is it true? Over a long period of time, if people know they have pictures of your life to go with your words, they will be more likely to follow you and listen to what you have to say, because they have visual pictures in their head that are associated with your life. They may feel a little more like they know you as opposed to someone whose life they have not seen before in pictures.

If you are attending, or have been assigned by a news organization to cover, an event that people may care to know about, then consider live tweeting it. On many occasions I have learned from people that they appreciate the periodic or rapid updates that tweets provide. Many people say that they enjoy watching an event unfold through the lens of tweets. I feel that focusing the lens further by adding pictures to the scenario is a great way to further add value and interest to followers. As I have learned throughout my years as a journalist, added benefits like this add value that people do not soon forget.

Case Study: Exotic Erotic Expo 2009

I’m not really into the sexual bondage scene, but thousands of people who attend the Exotic Erotic Ball at San Francisco’s Cow Palace each year certainly are. The event is essentially a chance for exhibitionists, gawkers and the curious, to come together a week before Halloween to have fun. Tila Tequila and Coolio graced the stage this year. In year’s past Snoop Dog showed up and pleased all the half-dressed fans.

1.) Beginning, Middle and End

Try to tell the story of the event you are covering in such a manner that people can see your experience there, from its start to its end. When I went to the ball, I made sure to tweet the first thing of note that I saw, which was the group of protesters stationed out front who wished to let the attendees know that they were, in fact, going to hell because of their decisions in life. The only thing that disappointed me about the shot was the heavy glare coming from the upper right, which made the shot not as good as it could be. At least it was usable - and informative. As a journalist, who wants to give people interesting information about events, I felt I had already given my followers their money’s worth. (Thank God they aren’t paying anything)

2.) Highlights of Your Stay

No matter what you do and what you see at a news event, it’s important to give updates as you go about happens. You’ll know what to take pictures of when it happens. That’s what occurred with this picture, in which somebody displayed what was one of the more funny Halloween costumes of the night. You do not, by any means, have to have pictures with every tweet you send. But some scenes just scream - “Take a picture of this and tweet it.”

In addition to that gem, I also took pictures of people entering the arena, laser light shows, and some of the more randy action on the stages in the VIP lounge. I also took a picture of the main stage, which didn’t turn out so great because of the smoke that was everywhere. All of the pictures are in the gallery at the end of this post.

3.) Make Sure to Mention Who Brung Ya

I would not have been able to go had I not been an employee of SF Weekly and Village Voice Media, where I work as a social media strategist. Therefore, it was imperative to mention in one of my tweets that SF Weekly had helped to put on the event by being a sponsor. If you are representing an organization at a news event, it is important to brand yourself so people who are following you know you are working in an official capacity. In this particular tweet, I made sure to mention @SFWeekly. That alone caught the eye of the web editor there, Alexia Tsotsis, who immediately retweeted the thing - and gave me twice as many views.

I’m starting here what I would like to think would be an ongoing case study in how to build fans and followers on Twitter, through the use of pictures in one’s tweets.

It’s good enough to tweet compelling articles and other content  from third-party sites through your tweetstream. It’s good to allow people to see pieces of your conversations. It’s great to speak with everyone you can. However, I am of the opinion that you need a little something more in order to truly give people that icing on the cake. Tweeting pictures from your smart phone is an excellent way to go.

Tweet Your Life

That thing on the right of this post is at least 75 years old. My grandmother, who is 88, said it was already a large tree when she moved into her Sonoma County house 40 years ago. Now, the tree is protruding into her house slightly, and none of us care. It is beautiful, and all I think of when I stand next to it is that I need to respect it by taking several pictures of it.

The eventual point I’m trying to get across is that, after tweeting this bad boy, I received a half a dozen tweets, both publicly and private, from people who were happy someone tweeted a picture such as this. I am engaging my followers, and they are liking it. I’ve had no complaints. Here’s an example of a positive comment I received.

The “picture tweets” brought several comments. This is one of them.

On this one I allowed a bit of my artistic side to come out. I use a down loadable Blackberry app called Snap 2 Twitter that makes tweeting out the pics a piece of cake. Those of you with iPhones and other smart phones have other favorite apps you may know about.

In order to build a base of people who want to listen to what you have to say, be yourself. Let what you do come out in the things you tweet. When people respond to you, respond back. You will find that some of them just enjoy talking to you and will follow your activities. Follow their activities too as much as you can and actually care about these other people. It’s a fun process — an ongoing interactive diary of life with some nice people coming with you on the ride.

The pics don’t all have to be representations of your real life. They can involve your job, especially if you work in social media or are a journalist. In a future post, I plan on showing some of the tweets that I have sent that have augmented my work as a social media strategist and a journalist.

There has been a lot of talk all over the internet about the wonderful development at SF Weekly, the San Francisco alternative weekly newspaper, where Alexia Tsotsis is arriving Monday after her sojourn at LA Weekly to become a web editor in the City by the Bay. I am super excited to get to work with her regularly.

Numerous blogs have written about Tsotsis and just how much they would miss her in the LA Tech community and at the LA Weekly offices in Venice. Alexia brings a special presence and connectivity to her work. I have met few people who are truly there with you in almost every way during a conversation the way Alexia is. She has a natural talent for bridging differences and connecting people like few I have known.

LA’s loss is SF’s gain indeed. But SF Weekly is experiencing a loss of its own. Alexia is replacing a truly wonderful social media maven in Janine Kahn, who is moving to Dogster.com to be a community manager there. In the year or so since Kahn took over at SF Weekly traffic has more than doubled, much of it through her own special brand of social media magic.

1.) The Freelancing Edge

Kahn has built an array of strong freelance wordsmiths all over the Bay Area and the country for that matter who can turn a phrase or two about food, music, marijuana and the environment. She knows how to find good feeelancers, manage them and try and make it worthwhile for them to keep churning out content.

Most notably, Janine has helped marijuana viral article guru Steve Elliot and the tremendous food/travel/enviro writer Ariel Schwartz put some of their best work onto SFWeekly.com

2.) The Viral Knack

She’s one of the best. Most of the social media people out there in the world would kill to have developed the sharpness and nimbleness that she has displayed on social media sites like Yelp, Foursquare, Twitter and others.

3.) Speaking of Twitter…

Have you read her tweets on @SF_Weekly? If you didn’t you missed out. She ran contests, took pictures, and updated everyone on her life, while simultaneously running a feed on the latest headlines from the Weekly. if you want to know how to actually engage people and get them interested in what you have to say, you really need to read what she wrote.

Alexia is going to come in and hit the ground running and do a great job filling Janine’s shoes and even expanding on what she did, so things should be excellent. But both Alexia and I, as well as all of the people at SF Weekly will miss the great attitude and on line prowess Janine displayed.

Fortunately she’s only moving just down the street a little to the Potrero Hill District in San Francisco at Dogster.com so we will still be tweeting about happy hour at the Hog Island Oyster Company.

As I was reading about the life of Nixon speech writer William Safire yesterday, I came across this little piece written by Ted Pease with “Today’s Word” that I knew I had to show here.

In my time as a journalist there are things I learned that I MUST pay attention to, like spelling and grammar. Lord knows, the younger crop of journalists who are coming up today, don’t always even realize that such things exist.  So youngins, here’s some advice, from one of the best in the business, William Safire.

Safire offered this useful writing advice.

1. No sentence fragments.

2. It behooves us to avoid archaisms.

3. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.

4. Don’t use no double negatives.

5. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, “Resist hyperbole!”

6. Avoid commas, that are not necessary.

7. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

8. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

9. Writing carefully, dangling participles should not be used.

10. Kill all exclamation points!!!

11. Never use a long word with a diminutive one will do.

12. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

13. Take the bull by the hand and don’t mix metaphors.

14. Don’t verb nouns.

15.  Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.

16. Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.

—William Safire (1929-2009), Pulitzer Prize-winner, wordguy, presidential speechifier and columnist. And curmudgeon.

“Curmudgeon,” Safire said, means, “a likeably irascible old man.”

Sometimes things just work out perfectly. That’s what I thought as I sat down with my buddies Alexia and Janine for a cookie on Friday. Once I was done it was smoke time. And the pack of cigs had the exact same color tone as Alexia’s finger nail polish. And the same color as Babby Man’s avatar on digg. Me being a silly person, I had to take the thing and tweet it.