Today, I finished reading Tracey Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine." Tomorrow, I go into work to test and re-test a site re-launch. I may never think of debugging the same way.

This book has more to say about how we work now than things written now, and it's older than I am. Like technology? Read it. Care about startups and talent? Read it. Like using computers? Read it. Just read it.

...I think the New York Times is trolling me.

A mere ten days after they made my head explode with an Op-Ed claiming my generation doesn't move without acknowledging they can't afford it, they rejoin with this.

The premise was interesting: Staid, old GM doesn't understand the young'uns, so they turn to the youth whisperer, MTV, who've cleverly set up a consulting shop to explain those same young'uns to the brands. 

The anoying parts? The same poorly-sourced data from two weeks ago.

Today Facebook, Twitter and text messaging allow teenagers and 20-somethings to connect without wheels. High gas prices and environmental concerns don’t help matters.

Sure, high gas prices are WAY less important than a website. Because given the opportunity, teenagers OBVIOUSLY want to hang out in their parents' earshot. There's NOTHING a teenager wants to do that can't be done on Facebook that used to happen in cars. Nope. Not a single thing.

Ugh.

Not to fault MTV for identifying a strategic opportunity, but maybe GM overpaid. There was a great breakdown of the milennial generation's car apathy in last Tuesday's Washington Post Express. And it was free.

I'm weirdly into generational theory. It started in my previous job, when a very smart colleague recomended I read The Fourth Turning. It's only gotten worse - I'll read anything about Millennials and Boomers (and the poor, put-upon Gen Xers) and I've been known to theorize once or twice about how the age groups impact our culture.

So I was pretty excited to read "The Go-Nowhere Generation" in Sunday's New York Times. I was up early and a friend living in Asia had tweeted it out. I certainly learned a thing or two about where my generation is moving, or isn't.

And I 100% disagreed with the analysis.

First, of all, as I explained to my friend on Twitter:

So the article a) discounts all of our gen's entrepreneurship and b) doesn't suggest our parents may have a role? No vacuums.

That's a 140-character truncated version of me trying to grok how a published author and a Cambridge student can ignore two key themes that have led Gen Y to be, as they say "literally going nowhere."

1. Entrepreneurship

In a 2011 study from the Young Entrepreneurs Council

• 23% of young people started a business as a result of underemployment, and;
• 15% started a business in college. 

So, Buchholzes, maybe let's not say they're less risk-averse. The YEC data talks about what this entrepreneurship looks like, but let's not assume that all young people will "hang on to lousy jobs longer." 

2. Culture

Here's the thing you learn when you read a lot of generational theory. Generations are shaped from inside and out. Millennials are shaped not only by 9/11 and tech, but by the ways we've interacted with our older siblings and with our parents. This is not to say it's about fault, rather the tools a group is equipped with to face the problems the world presents. 

• So is the problem that Millennials are risk-averse? Perhaps we should examine the culture their boomer, former Yuppie parents created. Failure was simply not an option!
• Oh, so we don't get driver's licenses? Isn't that a positive indicator that all the lessons we sat through about the hole in the ozone layer sunk in? A driver's license is only a valuable commodity in a place where there's no other way to get around. 
• Is the issue that Millennials won't deign to accept jobs drilling oil in North Dakota? Maybe we should ask the self-fulfilled Boomers and Xers who told us never to accept less than our full potential and our true passions, whether or not they did the same for themselves.
• Or is the concern the same as my boomer dad's - that he and his cohort have made our rooms "too comfortable" so we never want to leave? Well, what do you expect from parents who invented all kinds of securitization options on mortgages so the dream of a McMansion could be widespread?

Again, I'm not placing blame on the baby boomers. I'm just wondering how an article can claim Facebook is more impactful on a life than a driver's license without asking who pays the cable bill and why.

The more I stewed on the article, the more I also noticed one final, glaring omission. The word "debt" never appears once in the Buchholz' piece. To say that my generation is hamstrung by student debt is an understatement. No generation before us has so deeply internalized the calls that we should be educated and literally paid the price. The Ohio youth who wouldn't take the bus to North Dakota? Maybe his problem wasn't fear, maybe instead paying $200 on top of his crushing monthly payments was out of his reach.

I don't always feel the need to jump to my generation's defense. We've been called selfish, spoiled, and worse. But just because we may not be rushing around like our parents, don't assume we're not going anywhere. We might be close to home, creating new opportunities and figuring out ways to build up and improve on the hand we've been dealt with the tools we've been given. 

I don't normally make a big thing of my politics online, but one thing I'm proud of my side for doing is really understanding how to learn and optimize to be successful in digital organizing. I've spent some time doing testing and analytics training with folks from OFA and MoveOn (through the wonderful New Organizing Institute - if you want to learn something and sit on the left side of the aisle, you MUST check them out), so every so often when I get emails from them, I pay slightly more attention to try to figure out what they're trying to learn.

About two weeks ago, though, I got an email that made me really admire what they're doing. The subject line was "I'm writing to ask your opinion" and the sender was frequent asker Rufus Gifford. (Side note: Do you think that his personal email open rate has dropped since he's so frequent a mass list send? These are the kinds of things I think about.) I figured I was being surveyed and I wanted to know what the new learning was, so I opened.

I'm not writing to ask you for money again. I'm actually writing to ask your opinion about why you haven't given, and what you think would inspire you or other Obama supporters like you to decide to take the leap and donate.

Well, I sure do love telling people what I think. i also think that was a clever ask. But it gets better.

I get to the survey and as "Rufus" promised, it was a mere two questions long.

1. Are you planning to donate? 2. What will cause you to donate?

I answered 2 honestly. Something to the point of "I'm planning to donate, just waiting for the right opportunity or reason."

And that's when things got clever. As soon as I clicked that option, the page changed to ask me to donate, right then and there. Seamless.

Of course I donated. They knew I would. They made it as easy as possible for me to follow through on my commitment. Easiest donation experience I might have ever had. And super, super clever.

Well done.

This thoughtful essay by Nick Judd from TechPresident skewers our obsession with social media counters, opaque scores, and indicators that lead nowhere. And it's absolutely applicable to business, to nonprofits, to "personal branding." 

The things we measure, no matter for what field, need to be related to what we hope to achieve. Otherwise, as Judd cleverly puts it:

If candidates actually respond to the metrics that measure them online — if that can drive a conversation that influences their behavior, even the behavior of lesser-known candidates — then this is a missed opportunity. Dear Internet: You're doing it wrong.

As I'm working through a lot of year-end data and indicators at work, trying to get it all into context, this rings very true for me. Regardless of what we're doing, we need to make sure we're responding to the right stimuli. Any recommendations on how best to do this would be great. Leave them in the comments. 

Part of the reason I'm not a highly interesting blogger is that I'm much more interested in consuming great content than creating it. I guess I haven't found my great idea yet.

But I love this one: http://theruinedcapitol.blogspot.com/

It's pretty polemical, and if you find yourself liking some of the new architecture in DC you may be offended by its "nothing new is good" standpoint. But it's the kind of thing the web is best for. Photographs that would have been lost, aligned with their current locations. Local, mobile, and image, all those great buzzwords. 

Here's hoping that there's more great stuff - online and off - to talk about in 2012. 

My last post was kind of a downer. I do think, though, things can get better. If I've learned nothing else in this job I didn't expect to be in, it's that you can make change. If I can't have hope this time of year, when can I?

So as I promised, 

Wishing the happiest and brightest season to you and yours. 

Note: This is not very holiday cheerful. Maybe in the next few days I'll do a post of a panda in a Santa hat.

Maybe it's just me, but do the prospects of the Internet look very ... apocalyptic lately?

First of all, there's SOPA, which others like Public Knowledge and EFF can tell you about far better than I can. It's not good. Call your representative, if you're fortunate enough to have one who can vote, unlike me.

Related to that is this article about the future of Google and its donations to the Mozilla Foundation, and what that means for the open web. (I've explained my wariness towards the big G before, although it hasn't stopped me from digging my own data hole even deeper with Chrome, Apps, Mail, Docs, Analytics, and the rest of the data-miner's dreamkit.) 

I guess it's not too late to say I hope they take "Don't Be Evil" seriously? Or that they decide that ad revenue is enough? Sigh. Unlike many, I'm not opposed to people making money on the internet, or on data. But still... sigh.

I'm also inclined to be pessimistic these days because I finished reading The Net Delusion last week (on Kindle - I support Amazon and Apple as opponents to Google, I guess). I don't agree with most of Morozov's conclusions, dark as they are, and I nodded vigorously along to Zeynep Tufecki's review from The Atlantic. But updates from Egypt, Syria and Bahrain align with what he was thinking, and it's hard to say what kind of future we're moving toward.

I guess the answer is education and activism, but it's hard to imagine we haven't gone too far already. If you have any good recommendations for ways to feel more empowered about the future of the web, share them in the comments!

I've been trying to figure out what I'm doing when I've been too busy to blog. I know I'm stil using the internet, so where have I been?

Reading:

• All the Single Ladies - I figured since everyone was talking about it, I should read it. It's a bit too "this happened to Gen X and it's going to happen to EVERYONE" for me. I don't always make this distinction, but I feel like the post-9/11 generation might have different values.
• A Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API - It's a big long-winded and pleased with itself, but I do think the key points of the OWS movement are tied up in its portability, like an API. 
• Why Millennial Women Are Burning Out At Work By 30 -  I kind of hated this. It's a shallow take on what could be a really interesting issue, I feel like their reliance on Kelly Cutrone's POV is counter-productive (fashion PR chews people up and eats them out and people like Cutrone like it that way), and there are no recommendations as to what we could all do to fix this.
• Twitter vs. the KGB - A different take on the "social media leads to openness in other countries" story, the true tale of how Twitter helped an American avoid unpleasantness with the Kyrgyz security force.

Listening:

• Florence and the Machine, "Ceremonials" - her voice is phenomenal and it's an amazing place to go after "Lungs" - shows growth and potential, but that same strength that we all fell in love with.

Figuring Out:

• Pinterest - I'm more into words than pictures. Which is to say, I like to look at pictures - I love art - but I am more comfortable expressing myself through writing. It's a site to catalog things you like looking at, basically, which seems to be a really different experience than things you are reading, listening to, thinking about, and so on.
• Uber - I'm SO excited Uber is coming to DC. I can't stand cab mafias, and the one here is particularly bad. Plus, I tried to book a car yesterday and although they didn't have one for me, they sent me a really nice note apologizing and giving me $5 in credit. There's a crew that knows how to build a brand...