Knock off the “both sides are the same” act.

Knock off the “Obama hasn’t done enough” act.

Not voting doesn’t make you special. Not voting doesn’t demonstrate some sort of philosophical high ground. Not voting doesn’t mean anything other than this: you have not been paying attention.

A Romney presidency would be disastrous to middle class families. A Romney presidency would be disastrous to women’s rights. A Romney presidency would be a death sentence to LGBT individuals, especially young LGBT individuals, already at a higher risk of committing suicide, as the country would be led by a man who believes they are freaks/they are abominations. A Romney presidency would be a return to the Wild West fast-and-loose days of an unregulated Wall Street (see: 2008 crash). A Romney presidency would be a return to the disastrous policies of George W. Bush (especially foreign policy, as Romney’s foreign policy team is made up almost entirely of former GWB staffers). A Romney presidency would be a return to the days where insurance companies could deny you coverage based on a “pre existing condition.”

So knock it off.

Whether or not the web gurus behind the Romney campaign are the ones pulling the strings on the “.co” page is unknown, as the owner is running the site behind GoDaddy’s Domain By Proxy service, keeping their information private. Obviously, this could just be anyone setting the redirect (I mean, if I wanted, I could set chadmolloy.com to redirect to that page if I felt so inclined).

The question is: is there value in getting traffic to your site by way of a URL typo? My thoughts: Sure. While the user’s intent is clearly not to land on your page, the investment involved is so extremely small (ranging from a total of anywhere between $10 and a few hundred dollars), that the cost per action (a vote, in this case) is absolutely tiny when compared to other, more expensive methods (TV ads, print ads, general SEM and/or display ads).

Others might argue that this approach is tacky (which, it is, to an extent). Either way, interesting stuff.

Enjoy this, from the actual someecards.com:

The author of the particular article (not the journalist who linked it/I was in contact with) is a conservative opinion writer for the Chicago Tribune named John Kass. Now, I typically don’t agree with much Kass has to say, and honestly, when it comes to his thoughts on issues not related to human rights – fine, I’ll sit there with my mouth shut (for the most part) and not care.

But this article followed what I had viewed as a disturbing trend in media today: take a narrative, run with it without giving the full story. “It’s just a sandwich,” or claims about a boycott of Chick-Fil-A being a violation of the First Amendment (I would recommend Mr. Kass actually read the First Amendment and get back to me on how he believes this was a violation – “free speech” is not the same thing as “freedom from criticism for your speech”), were one-sided points that made no effort to illustrate exactly why people were boycotting Chick-Fil-A.

In my mind, the media has a responsibility to educate the public. This was the topic of the brief exchange I had with this journalist. As the article failed to point out the genesis of this boycott, let me illustrate a few points I wish they would have included:

• In 29 states, it is legal to fire someone just for being gay. Chick-Fil-A has donated to organizations (namely the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family) who have actively lobbied to spread that human resources practice to other states.
• In 34 states, it is legal to fire someone for being transgender. These same organizations hold the belief that all states should have the right to fire someone on the basis of gender identity.
• It is illegal to be LGBT in 75 countries in the world. Yes, 75 countries. (Crazy, right?). In 9 countries, the punishment is death. The Family Research Council, the Marriage & Family Foundation, and Focus on the Family have all voiced support for these policies, most recently in regards to Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, which had backing from members in the U.S. Congress (sadly).
• The Family Research Council has officially taken the position that they would like to outlaw LGBT individuals.
• The Family Research Council has officially been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
• The American Family Association has officially been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
• The Marriage & Family Association has officially been designated a “hate group.”
• Exodus International has officially been designated a “hate group.”

If someone tries to tell you this is just about upholding what they view to be the “traditional view of marriage,” they’re just… they’re just wrong. Studies have shown that being LGBT is not something someone chooses to be. Why are these groups trying to hurt people just for being who they are?

Chick-Fil-A has donated more than $5 million to those groups, among others. This money comes from the profit made from consumers like you. That’s why it matters whether or not you eat there, and that’s why it’s sad that people will go out of their way just to eat there to support these “values.”

As Wayne Self at owldolatrous.com has so perfectly illustrated it:

This isn’t about mutual tolerance because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t. There is no “live and let live” on this issue because Dan Cathy is spending millions to very specifically NOT let me live. I’m not trying to do that to him

Asking for “mutual tolerance” on this like running up to a bully beating a kid to death on the playground and scolding them both for not getting along. I’m not trying to dissolve Mr. Cathy’s marriage or make his sex illegal. I’m not trying to make him a second-class citizen, or get him killed. He’s doing that to me, folks; I’m just fighting back.

All your life, you’re told to stand up to bullies, but when WE do it, we’re told WE are the ones being intolerant? Well, okay. Yes. I refuse to tolerate getting my ass kicked. “Guilty as charged.”

But what are you guilty of? When you see a bully beating up a smaller kid and you don’t take a side, then you ARE taking a side. You’re siding with the bully. And when you cheer him on, you’re revealing something about your own character that really is a shame.

He goes on:

Please think about this: How would you feel if KFC came out tomorrow and said they were spending money against equality for Asian Americans, or African Americans, or religious people? Really. Think about it. What would you do? How would you feel? How would you feel if, after their announcement, there was a big increase in KFC sales and I was all over Facebook supporting KFC. Please stop reading right now and imagine this. I’m serious.

You can stop now because it’s ludicrous. It would never happen.

Oh, I don’t mean the part about KFC being against some group. That COULD happen. I mean the part about me supporting them. Let me tell you something, and you can damn well believe it: I’d sign on for the boycott IMMEDIATELY.

Why? Well, because I believe in equality for all people, that’s why. But also, personally, from the bottom of my heart: because you are my friend, and I don’t willingly support people who harm you for just being you. How could I? How could I, really? But, more importantly for our purposes, how could you?

Seriously, how could you? What has Chick-Fil-A ever done for you? Sold you some fatty chicken at a ridiculous mark-up? Made you chuckle at semi-literate cartoon cows? You mean more to me than KFC possibly could. If I, in turn, don’t mean more to you than a chicken sandwich from Chik-Fil-A–if my life, my quality of life, and my dignity are such afterthoughts to you that you’d not only refuse the boycott, but go out of your way to support someone who was hurting me? if I let this stand, if I don’t stand up to the bullies and if I let my friends egg the bullies on, what does that make me?

That’s why we’re so angry. This is personal for us. There are times in your life when you have the opportunity to stand up for your friends. When you let that opportunity pass, your friends notice. It doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, but it diminishes you, and it diminishes the friendship. That’s how it is, no matter what the issue or what the venue.

So stand up. Stand up for us. Do the right thing. You don’t have to agree with us on everything, but repudiate Chick-Fil-A. Unlike them on Facebook. Withdraw your support for them. Join us in the boycott. If you can’t do that, then please ask yourself whether I’m your friend. In fact, ask yourself whether anyone is.

The issue is that the media doesn’t seem interested in digging deep into these stories for fear of alienating a reader here or there, so they take the path of least resistance: cover the anti-boycott side with the only mention of the pro-boycott side being a cutesy bit on the Muppets. I tried digging to find a Chicago Tribune piece where they made mention of any of the above points made, or even an anecdote or opinion piece by someone who is actually affected by this (like Mr. Self), but I was unable to. Instead, the views we hear merely fill the echo-chamber with more frivolity on the issue, with straw-man arguments about the First Amendment.

What does Mr. Kass know about having his rights trampled on? Is there a group that is actively trying to enact legislation that would lock up middle-aged white guys who stand in front of the Tribune Tower smoking cigarettes?  If there is, and I’ve overlooked it, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ve seen that happen just yet.

It’s frustrating that this view is limited to my low-readership blog and to Mr. Self’s blog and ignored by major media outlets like the Chicago Tribune. By not putting all the facts about Chick-Fil-A’s donations out there, and what those organizations use those donations for, I feel like it’s a systemic failure of the media as a whole.

POST SCRIPT:

I didn’t mention above, but Mr. Kass’ article also included some disturbing language that can be interpreted in a variety of negative and condescending ways:

Racism (assigning a Hispanic man, who happens to also be an elected official a nickname like “Chicky”):

For those of you who haven’t been following the Freedom of Chicken movement, it began when Chicago Ald. Proco Joe “Chicky” Moreno, 1st, vowed to use his powers to kill a planned Chick-fil-A proposed for his ward.

Sexism (condescending paternalism, implying nepotism – because apparently Mr. Kass doesn’t believe a woman could become Illinois’ Attorney General without her “daddy” as Mr. Kass so delicately implies):

The GOP filed a complaint with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan (whose daddy is the boss of all Democrats in Illinois) and with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, asking for an investigation into the abuse of government power and overt religious discrimination against Chick-fil-A. But nobody — not even a chicken sandwich — expects Lisa to do a darn thing about it.

It makes me a little sick that language like that made its way into print and online for what should be a reputable publication.

I went to Wicker Park Fest yesterday and, sadly, it was one of the worst street festival experiences of my life. I went there with my girlfriend to enjoy some food, some drinks, some music, and the wonderful weather.

However, our experience was ruined as the organization of the festival was a complete and utter mess. The first issue: it was hard to discern which stage was which. I understand that the “North” stage was the northernmost stage, and the “South” stage was the southernmost stage, but the overall layout made this slightly confusing, as the stages being on Milwaukee (a diagonal street) and vendors not being made aware of what stage they were positioned near (I asked a vendor at the “Melt” sandwich tent if they knew what stage they were in front of. They said, “North.” This was wrong. A craft vendor provided a different answer, and a beer vendor provided yet another answer.), this resulted in crowds of people pushing to get from one side of the Fest to the other, trying to see the band they wanted, hoping they were at the right stage.

Why the stages were not labeled and maps weren’t readily made available is beyond me.

Around 9:00pm, at the North stage, as the band Cursive was just beginning their set, things started to get dangerous. There were simply too many people in one area. What made this situation even worse and more dangerous was the fact that there was nary a security guard in sight and there was no easy way to exit the festival as (unlike other summer street fests I’ve been to), the sides weren’t blocked off and guarded against people standing there to watch the band. Generally, these areas are reserved for people entering and exiting the festival.

Just 2 songs into Cursive’s (one of my absolute favorite bands, by the way) set, my girlfriend and I decided that the situation was too dangerous to stay in, and we needed to get out. We made our way to the side, only to find that no one was moving. The vast majority of people along the sides were trying to exit, however, they were being blocked from moving forward toward the designated exits.

A girl was screaming for help, saying she was about to pass out; my girlfriend got pushed, luckily caught; and the crowd around us got more and more frustrated, deciding to take the situation into their own hands. “Fuck these people! We don’t know them! Push!” yelled a man behind us as he began moving us forward like an offensive lineman blocking for a running back.

This, sir, is how people get trampled to death.

Why wasn’t there any security present to stop this?

Why were there that many people allowed in at all?

I don’t know if anyone fell, if anyone got trampled, and I certainly hope that all avoided harm, but it could have gotten ugly.

Once we made our way to the exits, a new horror became visible: people were STILL being let in. Things were a chaotic mess inside, but a line of people was still being let in. Finally, we saw someone who appeared to be working security. One man said to him, “no, no, you can’t let anyone else in! It’s too crowded. It’s dangerous!” The security guard said, and I quote, “whatever.” I said, “Come on! Do your job, protect the crowd, someone is going to get hurt!” and he replied, “COME OOOOOOON!” in a voice mocking me.

I don’t need to be treated like that, Alderman. I was scared inside there. I don’t need to be mocked when I try to tell security that there is danger.

I lived in your ward for 3 years. I was a huge supporter of everything you’ve done: from the time you went out of your way to hire private snow plows in the winter for the ward to the ordinance you introduced earlier this year to protect members of the LGBT community from being unfairly searched and to be treated equally regardless of gender identity, to even your recent stance on the Chik-Fil-A in Logan Square. You’ve accomplished so many great things as the 1st ward alderman. But overseeing the safety and security of the 2012 Wicker Park Fest? You failed me on that, and I’m disappointed in you.

I’m sending this letter to your office, to the Bucktown/Wicker Park Chamber of Commerce, to various sponsors of this year’s WPF in hopes that they reconsider future sponsorship, to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Reader.

Attached is a photo demonstrating the crowd at roughly 9:10pm, as people were still being allowed in. Why, if outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza and Pitchfork have capacity limits, does a smaller street festival like this seemingly not?

UPDATE: RESPONSE FROM THE ALDERMAN’S OFFICE

Line 1: 35 characters
Line 2: 35 characters

Use them. 

Anyway, here’s the story, which I found on paidContent:

Arizona man David Elliott wants a court to declare that “google” is a word that means “search on the internet” and to cancel Google’s trademarks for the term.

…

The complaint, filed in Phoenix, says that Google is a common transitive verb for internet searching and notes that the American Dialect Society declared it be the “word of the decade.”

…

Brands can lose their trademarks if consumers start treating them interchangeably with an everyday word.

…

This won’t happen, however, if Google can show that consumers still associate the word with the company.

While there’s roughly a snowball’s chance in hell that Mr. Elliott will succeed in his battle with Google, defending a trademark is something huge brands like Coca-Cola, Band-Aid, Xerox, Kleenex, etc. have to spend millions of dollars on annually through advertising and legal action. All have had trademark challenges brought against them as they came close to being genericized. (zipper, aspirin, and yo-yo all were once trademarked terms, but are now considered generic).

Neat little story, in my opinion, and it’s always good to be able to reference some of the stuff I learned in those “Legal Aspects” classes I took in college.

Now, before I go on, I’d like to reiterate that this is not the same thing as looking up an individual’s public Facebook account to see what information that individual has chosen to willingly publish. I think that sort of investigation is perfectly fine. What we’re talking about here is someone saying, “please give me your e-mail address and password; I am going to log into your account as if I am you and go through your sent messages, your received messages, and any other information that was never intended to be viewed by the public.”

To me, this is the equivalent of someone interviewing you for a job and then concluding the interview with, “okay, thank you for coming in, I’d like to look through your sent text messages, your recent e-mails, bank statements, garbage, USPS mail, and hey, maybe I’ll just stop by your house to sift through your closet.”

Just because this is new technology doesn’t make this type of activity any less an invasion of privacy. The individual in my group who seemed to be in favor of employers having the ability to log in to these accounts proposed the “if there’s something a potential employee doesn’t want seen, they shouldn’t post it on Facebook/have a Facebook account.”  But again, this isn’t about someone publicly posting party pictures, etc.

This is about giving someone private log in information so that they can impersonate you, read through your messages (basically, the Facebook equivalent of your e-mail), and try to use context clues to find the answers to questions they cannot legally ask during an interview. Is it legal for someone to ask you if you’re gay during an interview? No. But with your log in information, they’d have free reign to see who you’ve messaged, what you’ve said to them, and base their hiring decisions off of that (on illegal grounds, mind you, but it would be nearly impossible to prove). If you’re a 30 year old gay man or woman who has exchanged messages with your partner, there, this potential employer now has information that would have otherwise been illegal to obtain. Is “Honey, I’ll pick up a gallon of milk on the way home” something “you wouldn’t want an employer to see?” No, but if it’s an employer who, in seeing that exchange between two women would use that as an excuse to not hire them, there goes the job, and you would be extremely hard-pressed to prove the employer discriminated… It’s a slippery slope, and it opens up a wide range of loopholes for employees to discriminate against protected classes. It’s near impossible to prove that that is the reason they didn’t hire a particular employee.

Congress now has another bill in front of them that would make it illegal for employers to request the log in information of candidates’ Facebook information. If you’re not in favor of an employer being able to read your texts, your e-mails, your mail, your bank statements, or your trash: I’d hope that you’ll see where I’m coming from.

On the way to the game, I received a direct message from the @Cubs account, asking where I was sitting. I replied, letting them know, and mid-way through the game, a team representative stopped by my seats to wish me a happy birthday and drop off some free Cubs gear. Earmuffs, gloves, wristbands, a copy of “Vineline”: nothing that really breaks the bank (most of the stuff was leftover from stadium giveaways), but the impact was huge.

Want to talk social media ROI? Here it is: I’ve told at least 10 people about the experience, I’ve since tweeted about it, posted on Facebook and I’m writing this blog post. The Cubs organization went out of their way to take care of their fans, just for engaging with them through Twitter. A simple reply would be great, but going the extra mile and creating an in-person connection was a (pardon the lame reference) “home run.”

The @Cubs account has almost 120,000 followers, but they had time to reply to my offhand tweet that wasn’t even directed at them. As in Gary Vaynerchuk’s “The Thank You Economy”: If you’re managing a brand and you’re not doing this, you’re not doing it right. Engage your customers! Do more than just broadcast your message… that’s boring, anyway. Ignoring a complaint is unacceptable, ignoring praise is rude, but ignoring general conversation: that’s just a missed opportunity.

As could be expected, the younger adults (Generations X, Y and Z) were far more likely to be “always addressable customers” than Baby Boomers. But why is this important?

For advertisers, the importance of this trend cannot be overstated: it. is. no. longer. okay. to. ignore. mobile. It’s just not. Your key demographic groups now take the internet with them.

Photo courtesy of Forrester Research.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos andcreate website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future.

This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come.

Get started with Drive today at drive.google.com/start

And in other notable Google news, for those of you who have completely maxed out your Gmail storage, Google also announced today that they’ll be increasing the free storage for all Gmail accounts from 7.5 GB to 10 GB.