facebook articles

Butt Cream

2010-03-22T04:24:00.000+02:00

I’m thuper confused as of late, what with Talvid’s decision to enter the 140-character-or-less world of twittering. I just don’t know where to vent my ridiculously life altering (for you, not me) musings. Facebook? The blog? Twitter? Your mother? Here’s what I’ve discovered: they’re all basically serving the same purpose. The purpose of relieving what it is that ails you. Think of the void in your life that Talvid fills. Nay, not a void, a deficiency. Even better, , the void/deficiency is a hemorrhoid. And fucking Talvid’s Blog of Shit, his Twitter account, and his respective facebook profiles are travel sized, everyday sized, and Costco sized containers of Preparation H. Does your Mind’s Brown Eye ache? Rub some Talvid on it and have a good modereffen night.

[Via http://talanddavidsblogofshit.wordpress.com]

Things Arise

2010-03-22T04:22:00.000+02:00

Most of the time, I can ignore big world changes here on this blog. They might get a fleeting mention here or there, but I don’t usually dwell on it. Not usually. I feel like there’s something tonight that deserves a mention, mostly because of my own mixed feelings on this.

The Healthcare bill. That thing that Obama passed tonight, by a tiny nine votes. Not that we didn’t know it was going to be close either way, but this is interesting. Marnians got into this whole argument ages ago, and then consequentially banned it from the chat. They know my thoughts. Hell, I’m Canadian. Everyone knows my thoughts. I’m also pretty damn socialist, so lead on.

But I’m more interested in how it divides people. I have friends on both sides of the spectrum, and it always amazes me just how much policies affect people. I know. It’s a huge deal. I mean, Obama essentially has a cult following which was cultivated in a most interesting manner. But how much people differ in beliefs makes me wonder. As realist as I am, I’m still a little bit whimsical and hopeful. The human race hasn’t wiped themselves out yet, and there is a reason for that. The passions that flare over issues like this is understandable, expected to a degree. I imagine much of the world is seriously conflicted like this a lot of the time after big decisions. Hell, when I decided to apply for university, after I paid for it, I was seriously conflicted.

Politics is a divisor. It’s a heavy subject, but it is something that exists whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. We were born and bred to play the political game, and so help me if we ever stop. It is essential that in some form, we decide as a collective what will be better for us. It does more often than not show quite clearly the tendencies of people though. When we play politics, Machiavelli instructed us to illustrate altruism, even if our purposes have darker meaning. However, when decisions are made, it is as though all the masks come off. Any costume your wore during your play is now being returned to the box and any altruistic purposes no longer matter. What matters is how you have gained from the decision.

I’ve said my piece and I’ll say no more. I will neither rejoice nor weep at the decision made tonight, for it is not my place. I’m tired. School is tomorrow. As I said in my facebook status, I’m conflicted about a lot of things right now. Politics is the least of my worries, as long as I don’t have to think about it.

Seriously conflicted. About politics, boys, song lyrics, facebook statuses, shrimps, macs, mysterious men, french, couches, shoes or abs, sleep. You’d think the last night of march break would be less confusing.

[Via http://blackinkpen.wordpress.com]

Pioneer to an uncertain future: The Internet

2010-03-19T04:52:00.000+02:00

I often wonder of how our future will be with our relationship with the Internet and it’s minions driving fiercely forward from a mere casual to one…. something uber-serious!

I very clearly remember my first date with the Internet. It was a sunny summery day of the 90’s to remember. My dad was checking his emails and sipping away to glory his freshly grounded coffee made from the finest Arabica Coffee Beans that were handpicked from the most succulent coffee plants found in the high up altitudes of Costa Rica…(or wait, maybe it was tea, lipton…bought from the local supermarket )…but regardless, it was that Friday summer afternoon, when it suddenly dawned to my dad that I, his protégé, was ready and mature enough to take care of myself and venture off into THE virtual entity all by myself! Excited yet nervous about the decision, I picked up the courage and sat on that throne of a chair, sweaty palms and shaking thighs, I slowly moved the cursor over and double-clicked on the shiny blue icon, the Internet Explorer. It was a moment as if I had just surpassed the blinding white lights of the sky only to see that the doors of heaven had just opened up to me. That fine summers day was when this bond with the ever-so increasingly addictive Internet first started! Its been around 12 years now, we’re going stronger than ever!

Nowadays, the scene of getting introduced to the Internet is a little different. Its become something meaningless and completely ordinary. These days, even before a new-born baby gets the inevitable spank from the doctor:

#1 It has a Facebook account

#2 Has a picture of him/herself tagged and commented on!

Gone are those days when a newborn baby would either receive a gold or silver bracelet from his/her parents or cousins to welcome them into this world with luck. Instead, the biggest and most seismic gift the baby gets is the sacred password his lifelong Facebook and twitter account!

I strongly detest these means and solemnly swear to stick to means more traditions and gratifying in nature! When the little “Shah-Legacy Carriers” pop out, I’ll probably gift them something that’s more of a necessity than a luxury. Something logical and down-to-earth….something like, an iPhone.

I very much believe our generation, pro 1985, to be the one that’s a curve ahead than our parent’s generation in terms of adapting to technological advances. And to be honest, I don’t think the generation that will follow us, primarily our kids, will be able to outdo us in this respect either. Oh sure, holograms may become part of our daily lives, we’ll be flying in cars and all kids by law be will required to have mohawks…but seriously, we’ll adjust to it just as quick as we did with the arrival iPhones and beta versions of the X-Box Natal!

To give you an accurate idea of how our generation will never be outdone in terms of technological advances, here’s an image that just naturally played over in my head this very instance:

You know how quite a few of our parents are just starting to use things like Facebook, whereas we’re already established and esteemed gods and goddesses on the site…say in the near future, our son and his female-counterpart come back home from their very first day at kindergarten… and they’re all excited and pouncing on us to preach about what they learnt in school. They start, “Today we learnt about this really cool site called Facebook where” (we stop them right there…and we continue) ….”where u can make your own profile and stay connected with friends! YA YA…been there, done that. I have been a member on Facebook for the past 15 years and am deemed as great as Zeus himself there. Now tell me, WHOSE YOUR DADDY ??

SEE!! This is exactly what I’m taking about! The timing of our generation cannot be better! We’re an integral part of it all!

(Maybe I wont think the same way say…15 years from now, but oh well! I’m quite well justified for now! )

The only way the upcoming Generation Next will be able to outdo us, is if they start speaking like this:

For the time being, I’ll just hold on to my guns and best pray that I don’t see this day !!

[Via http://parajshah.wordpress.com]

Forgive me friends, for I have sinned...

2010-03-19T04:28:00.000+02:00

Forgive me friends, for I have sinned… it’s been over a month since my last news update on Facebook.

How did it happen? Why did I lapse? Where did my Facebook faith go?

I remember those first zealous days of discovery. The joy of reconnecting with old friends… and co-workers and high school classmates and college buds… and ex-girlfriends, in-laws, business associates, guys I played D&D with while Reagan was still president, friends of friends I met at a party once, and even the siblings of schoolmates from elementary school.

I proselytized, I evangelized, I got my friends and family to join.

I spent lunchtime on Facebook. I went on at night after my wife went to bed.

And then something happened.

I discovered Twitter.

I didn’t intend to convert. I avoided Twitter as long as possible. Josef Katz (@directmaestro) said I should tweet, and I resisted. Eleanor Haas (@EleanorHaas), one of the most forward thinking marketing professionals I know, started tweeting and still, I resisted. But then Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) tweeted while interviewing Twitter founder Biz Stone and I was hooked. It was all just so meta.

So I started tweeting.

For a while I did both. I even thought about connecting my Twitter (@jlsimons) to my Facebook.

But my Tweets tended to be about marketing and advertising, and that wasn’t really what Facebook was all about for me. Facebook was about reconnecting with friends, and Twitter was about business.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

But that wasn’t the truth.

It’s time to face the truth.

Twitter is just plain easier. Twitter doesn’t miss me when I don’t tweet, or at least, I don’t feel guilty about not commenting on every tweet I read. Twitter rewards me when I’m relevant… and challenges me to stay relevant. Some of the most interesting articles I’ve read recently I found because someone I follow tweeted them.

I’m not the most prolific tweeter. The total of my tweets wouldn’t add up to a single week of Kevin Smith’s tweets (@ThatKevinSmith). Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) gets more followers in an hour than I’ve gotten in almost a year.

And still, I tweet. When I find something I think people will appreciate, I tweet it and I feel like I’ve added something useful to a conversation I want to be part of.

When I post a new post on my blog, I usually tweet it. Heck, I might even tweet this.

I almost never tweet about where I’m going or what I’m doing. I never tweet about what I’m eating. I know some people do, and I respect their right to do it. Tweet and let tweet, I always say. (Well, actually, that was the first time. But I’ll probably say it more often now.)

Sure, sometimes I still go to Facebook, but it’s not the same for me anymore. I can’t tell you why, or maybe I just don’t want to know, but I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook is now the most popular site on the web and gets more visits than Google.

That would be silly, right, avoiding something just because everyone is doing it? Because then, someday, I’d have to give up tweeting for the same reason.

I’m not the kind of person who does things just because they’re new and shiny. Really I’m not.

But just in case I’m wrong, can someone please explain Foursquare to me?

[Via http://cansomeonepleaseexplain.com]

Kepribadian Manusia dari Status Facebook

2010-03-17T04:55:00.000+02:00

1. Manusia Super Update

Kapanpun dan di manapun selalu update status. Statusnya tidak terlalu panjang tapi terlihat bikin risih, karena hal-hal yang tidak terlalu penting juga dipublikasikan.

Contoh : “Lagi makan di restoran A..”, “Dalam perjalanan menuju

neraka..”, “Saatnya baca koran..”, dan sebagainya.

2. Manusia Melankolis

Biasanya selalu curhat di status. Entah karena ingin banyak diberi komentar dari teman-temannya atau hanya sekedar menuangkan unek-uneknya ke facebook. Biasanya orang tipe ini menceritakan kisahnya dan terkadang menanyakan solusi yg terbaik kepada yang lain.

Contoh : “Kamu sakitin aku..lebih baik aku cari yang lain..”, “Cuma kamu yang terbaik buat aku..terima kasih kamu sudah sayang ama aku selama ini..”.

3. Manusia Tukang Ngeluh

Pagi, siang, malem, semuanya selalu ada aja yang dikeluhkan.

Contoh : ” Jakarta maceeet..!! Panas pula..”, “Aaaargh ujan, padahal baru nyuci mobil..sialan. .!!”, “Males ngapa2in.. cape hati gara2 si do’ i..”, dsb.

4. Manusia Sombong

Mungkin beberapa dari mereka ga berniat menyombongkan diri, tapi terkadang orang yang melihatnya, yang notabene tidak bisa seberuntung dia, merasa kalo statusnya itu kelewat sombong, dan malah bikin sebel.

Contoh : “Otw ke Paris ..!!”, “BMW ku sayang, saatnya kamu mandi..aku mandiin ya sayang..”, “Duh, murah-murah banget belanja di Singapur, bow,”

5. Manusia Puitis

Dari judulnya udah jelas. Status nya selalu diisi dengan kata-kata mutiara, tapi ga jelas apa maksudnya. Bikin kita terharu? Bikin kita sadar atas pesan tersembunyinya? atau cuma sekedar memancing komentar? Sampai saat ini, tipe orang seperti ini masih dipertanyakan.

Contoh : “Kita masing-masing adalah malaikat bersayap satu. Dan hanya bisa terbang bila saling berpelukan”, “Mencintai dan dicintai adalah seperti merasakan sinar matahari dari kedua sisi”, “Jika kau hidup sampai seratus tahun, aku ingin hidup seratus tahun kurang sehari, agar aku tidak pernah hidup tanpamu”.

6. Manusia in English

Tipe manusianya bisa seperti apa saja, apakah melankolis, puitis, sombong dan sebagainya. Tapi dia berusaha lebih keren dengan mengatakannya dalam bahasa Inggwis Gicyu Low..

Contoh : “Tie and Chair..”, “I can tooth, you Pink sun..” dsb..

7. Manusia Lebay

Updatenya selalu bertema ‘gaul’ dengan menggunakan bahasa dewa.. ejaan yang dilebaykan..

Contoh..” met moulnin all.. pagiiieh yg cewrah… xixiixi” << lol~

8. Manusia Terobsesi…

Mengharap tapi ga kesampaian.. pengen jd artis ga dapat-dapat.

Contoh : “duwh… sesi pemotretan lagi! cape…”

9. Manusia Sok Tau..

Sotoy tenarnya. Padahal dia sendiri tidak tahu apa yang ditulisnya.

Contoh : “Pemerintah selalu memanjakan rakyatnya.. bla..bla…bla,”

10. Bioskop Mania..

Update film yang abis ditonton dan kasih comment..

Contoh : “ICE AGE 3..Recomended! !”, “Transformers 2 mantab euy..”

11. Manusia pedagang:

Contoh: “jual sepatu bla bla bla”

12. Manusia penyuluh masyarakat:

Contoh: “jangan lupa dateng ke TPS, 5 menit utk 5 tahun bla..bla”

13. Manusia Alay..

Ada berbagai macam versi, dari tulisannya yang aneh, atau tulisannya biasa aja, hanya saja kosakata nya ga lazim seperti bahasa alien.

Contoh:

Alay 1 : “DucH Gw4 5aYan9 b6t s4ma Lo..7aNgaN tin69aL!n akYu ya B3!bh..!!”

Alay 2 : “km mugh kog gag pernach ngabwarin aq lagee seech? kmuw maseeh saiangs sama aq gag seech sebenernywa? “

Alay 3 : “Ouh mY 9oD..!! kYknY4w c gW k3ReNz 48ee5h d3ch..!!”

(Khusus buat tipe ini, ga usah di baca juga gpp..saya pribadi juga mikir

dulu buat nulis ini, walaupun jadinya kurang mirip sama yg aslinya..)

14. Tipe Hidden Message

Tipe ini biasanya tidak to the point, tapi tentunya punya niat biar orang yg dituju membaca nya. (bagus kalo baca..kalo ngga? kelamaan nunggu) padahal kan bisa langsung aja sms ya..

Contoh : “For you my M***, I can’ t live without you..you are my bla bla bla..”,

“Heh, cewe bajingan..ngapain lo deket2in co gw?! kyk ga laku aja lo..” <<< (padahal ce tersebut tidak ada dalam jaringannya.. mana bisa baca…:p)

15. Tipe Misterius

Tipe yang biasanya bikin banyak orang bertanya tanya atas apa maksud

dari status orang tersebut..Biasanya dalam suatu kalimat membutuhkan

Subjek + Predikat + Objek + Keterangan. Tapi orang tipe ini mungkin

hanya mengambil beberapa atau malah hanya 1 saja..Dan pastinya

mengundang kontroversi.

Contoh : “Sudahlah..” , “Telah berakhir..” <<< (apanya??),

“Termenung.. .” <<< (so what gitu, loh)

sumber : http://techno.okezone.com/read/2009/08/03/93/244457/93/kepribadian-manusia-dari-status-facebook

[Via http://copypastecopypaste.wordpress.com]

My contest, film audition, and new webisode!

2010-03-17T04:42:00.000+02:00

Yesterday marked the 2-yr. anniversary since we finished the actual filming on Bloodwine. In honor of that, I wanted to do something a little fun, so, I started a best impression contest on a site I found called ibeatyou.com

http://www.ibeatyou.com/entry/fae31b/vanessa-leinani-says-hi-as-carmilla-from-bloodwine

OMG, I saw Jessica Alba’s on there, too. That girl is such a trip! I got such a kick out of here “I Pity The Fool” picbeat. Hilaaaaaaarious!

Eileen Hadler-Pickard, a fan of mine, made a facebook fan page for me! J Check it out!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vanessa-Leinani-Official-Fan-Page/395759316833?ref=search&sid=896760579.3009560702..1

On Saturday morning, I went and auditioned for a feature length film and had a fantastic time. I was thrown a bunch of different roles to read, and it felt like I was on the playground just sitting around being goofy with a bunch of good friends. It was THAT fun and had a really great atmosphere!

Then the lead of the film for that audition sent me a friend request and said he heard I nailed the audition, so, it looks positive; however, in a casting situation, it’s never over until you have a contract signed, and even then…funding could disappear, a project can go on hiatus, or right as you’re talking about coming on, they could get the celebrity actor they were holding out for and you could get bumped out of the role. We’re talking a whole slew of variables that could change the casting situation. So, you go in, confident that the role is yours, prepare and present yourself as if it is yours (which is why you hear the common saying “own it”) and remember that it could all change at any second no matter how you have prepared. The point is, to present yourself in such a way that you become memorable, endearing, and above all, indispensable.

Also, on Saturday evening a filmmaker approached me with a pitch for a new webisode series. As I found out, he had written it with me in mind and wanted to know if I would be interested in the project. I happily accepted the lead role in the new webisode series set to film in September. I cannot even begin to tell you how PUMPED I am about this project. Not only is it going to be action-packed, but I’m also getting a chance to put my musical skills to work and already started writing a song for the show (with some delicious harmonies) and looking forward to more songwriting for it, too. More details on the way as soon as we’re able to let you know!

+++++

Vanessa

http://www.vanessaleinani.com/

http://vanessaleinani.wordpress.com/

[Via http://vanessaleinani.wordpress.com]

webflexx on: twitter, facebook, google and yahoo!

2010-03-15T04:43:00.000+02:00

These days, Twitter and Facebook are two essential websites that most would access apart from Google.com. Up till now, many are still in the dark as to how Twitter and Facebook works. It is true though when the industry experts and analysts mentioned that these two web giants can actually help propel a small business forward by miles.

Webflexx facebook is still very preliminary, but we have been actively advertising on Facebook. We started on Twitter not too long ago and came up with a lot of interesting observations. The amount of information is so vast that sometimes, I am beginning to wonder how does certain quarters pace up with these overloaded information.

We know more but the more we know the more I know I know much less than I thought I would knew!

My browser is telling me that Twitter is my most visited site in the past 7 days. Yeah I am addicted to reading the latest news online and get into the minds of some of these web intellectuals as well as some of our Malaysian politicians.

Here’s a tip for those who have just started.

Do not follow more than you could manage. It may send you into a frenzy and you may end up being more confused than ever.

I went surfing at some government websites as well as some big corporations. Most websites have yet to establish themselves with a Twitter or a Facebook presence. Seriously, if you were to ask me if Facebook is ever going to slow down, I would respond with a resounding NO. Not for the next few years at least.

From Facebook and Twitter, you can see how much Google is responding with the Buzz, and these days, Yahoo tried entering the market quietly though. Yahoo’s respond to enter the buzz market is nothing to shout about. It is plain boring and you can tell it’s done in a hurry.

Looks like we will all be twitting and facebooking for a long time to come!

[Via http://webflexx.wordpress.com]

When to use URL Shortening Services?

2010-03-15T04:38:00.000+02:00

Following the popularity of social networking and microblogging services, URL Shortening Services are springing up like mushrooms. In less than a year, I have used services offered by TinyURL, bit.ly, goo.gl. I also came across some shortened URLs with a twist, i.e. diu.li (The pronunciation of the URL sounds like 屌你 in Cantonese, which means “f*ck u” in the language).

URL Shortening Services is extremely handy when we have character limit in our way of communication. Twitter only allows user to use 140 characters in a tweet, Facebook allows only 420. If I would like to post a URL and tell my friends where Twestival is going to be held by linking to a Google Street View Image, I have to copy a 381 characters long URL and include it in my tweet.

http://maps.google.com.hk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=zh-TW&geocode=&q=Staunton’s+Cafe&sll=22.38131,114.168639&sspn=0.779675,1.212616&ie=UTF8&hq=Staunton’s+Cafe&hnear=&ll=22.282976,114.152541&spn=0,359.997632&z=19&brcurrent=3,0×3404007e811b3f95:0×47c863b8fcf83784,0,0×3403ff80eb6f67b1:0×46c3c89b39011247&layer=c&cbll=22.283108,114.152709&panoid=PGP8AwzKwwO5MtvtiN8wGQ&cbp=12,235.12,,0,5

Obviously, the tweet cannot be sent as the URL is lengthy enough to exceed the character limit of Twitter.

By using URL shortening services, the link can be shortened as a URL which uses only 20 characters (in bit.ly’s case).

http://bit.ly/d0ZT09

One of the assignments that I gave my class on “Computer-aided Translation” is on Terminology Management using Google Docs. Apart from building a simple bilingual or multilingual glossary which contains the term in its source language and the corresponding translations, I suggested them to include the following fields – “Created by” (to identify the creator of the entry”, “Definition”, “Source” (to indicate where the entry or its translations is from).

Not every group follow the suggestion strictly, but the group which did includes a column of shortened URL.

The layout of the spreadsheet is definitely more presentable with shorted URLs, however, readers got no idea on where the information comes from. I don’t know where the link will take me – a press release in the government’s website? Tech spec of a certain product? A blog post? Worse, a spam/virus spreading website! Not a clue!

My stand is URL shortening service is useful when it is used with microblogging services like Twitter or 2D matrix code like QR code. However, the usage must be limited to that. As the messages are like Instant Messages, it appears for a day or two, then being lost in no where. As an active twitter user, I never dig up my first tweet, and I think I do not need to refer to the tweets I posted a week ago for a new tweet.

For comparatively formal writing like academic writing, journals, essays, I do not think it is acceptable to use URL Shortening services as people may have to refer to your articles anytime. What if the shortening service is no longer available? What if people only want to know where the information comes from but do not want to verify themselves? Providing a full URL in this case can give people a better understanding on the website without really opening the browser.

In short, Shortened URL looks good, but not for formal writing.

[Via http://uituit.wordpress.com]

Realtor’s Top 10 Marketing Preferences

2010-03-12T04:55:00.000+02:00

No matter what business you are in, marketing is the KEY. Without great marketing, no matter how excellent your products or services are, it would not get too far. Today, we’re still in the beginning of the social media hype. Countless of business market themselves on the internet, but are they doing it the right way? Using the most effective tools?

HomeGain ®, a connection portal for realtors and buyers of real estate conducted a survey on the top marketing practices and preferences of realtors today. Parts of the result were a bit shocking to me.

According to HomeGain®, over 1,300 real estate agents and brokers in US participated in the survey. Each type of marketing strategies receives a score out of 10 for effectiveness; with 1 as the least effective and 10 as the most effective.

1= Least Effective 10= Most Effective

Networking and referrals for Realtors is at the top of the list as excepted. Word of mouth advertisement is at its best in this industry. Building a large and solid network should be the top priority for realtors, as a matter of fact for any industry. Printed Ads may become obsolete. The public views thousands of advertisements a day, no matter where they go. They have learned to look pass it and place them into their unconsciousness. For me personally, I will not complete give it up. Its low cost/investment will still give me an increase of 3.6%; it’s better than nothing.

This second part of this survey asked the agents and brokers what strategy they will choose in the future. Results show that they will continue to focus on referrals, e-mail campaigns and featured listings. They are less likely to invest time and money on strategies such as Twitter, banner ads, pay per click advertisements, outdoor advertising and MySpace.

Below is the Top 10 Marketing Objectives for Realtors in 2010. We will likely in all the top 10 strategies mentioned. Moreover, YouTube will likely to be used more than before in the future as a marketing tool in the real estate industry. (1=Least Likely to Use; 10= Most Likely to Use)

Referrals (8.9)
Email Campaigns (5.7)
Postcards/Mailers (5.4)
Featured Listings (5.2)
Facebook (4.9)
Print Ads (4.3)
Blogging (4.2)
LinkedIn (4.1)
Online Lead Generation Services (4.0)
YouTube (3.5)

A final note: NETWORKING IS AND WILL BE THE WAY TO GO

Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010-homegain/real-estate-survey/prweb3712784.htm

[Via http://daniel511.wordpress.com]

Recommending Scobleizer's The revolution at work

2010-03-12T04:49:00.000+02:00

Image by Hello, I am Bruce via Flickr The Revolution at Work (the industry reacts to Salesforce’s moves) Blog: the Revolution at Work; the industry reacts to @salesforce’s moves:http://bit.ly/cjls1e @yammer @socialtext @socialcast @zoho @jive (Scobleizer) scobleizer.com

Social Networking Will Kill Us All

2010-03-10T04:39:00.000+02:00

I’m trying to become famous here. How famous you ask? I guess about as famous as I can get while being a father/trophy-husband/son/friend/guy-with-a-life.

I don’t know what EXACTLY I want to get out of this blog. I can say with reckless abandon that “I don’t care how many people read my stuff. I do this for me as an outlet to pour my creative juices into for a little bit each day.” To a certain extent this is true… buuuuuuuuuuuuuut… it’s not entirely accurate.

I’ve always liked being acknowledged thus I always dreamed of becoming an actor… but then life got in the way.

After my dreams of talking with David Letterman on The Late Show about my latest flick were replaced with dreams of raising my daughter to be filled with nothing short of my unending love… I still craved some sort of recognition.

I think I would have proved a more valuable interview…

Even if it was in my mind.

I’ve always had a good imagination. When I was 18… I mean 8… I can remember setting up entire battle sequences with my sisters stuffed animals she’d indebted to me to keep safe while she went away to college. As I punched her large stuffed bear named “Beau” in his (rapidly deteriorating) fluffy neck… I imagined I was in an epic battle with some vicious animal from the netherworld.

That would be me, our family cat and Beau… right before I kicked him in the groin and then roundhouse kicked him in the temple

I used to be gone for hours traveling around the 300-acre farmland we had with my BB gun shooting trashed glass bottles. These glass bottles would represent my enemies… and each one I eliminated meant I was that much closer to “rescuing” Jill: my elementary school crush at the time who obviously had no idea what I would go through to rescue her from such evil empty Coke bottles.

While my battles with evil Coke bottles and innocent stuffed animals are long gone… they’ve been replaced with the all more real battle of trying to figure out “what the hell am I doing with my life?”

My imagination still rolls on.

These days, I imagine getting “discovered” i.e. Lorne Michaels magically reads my blog among the 10 million other things he’s doing and wants me to write some sketches for SNL. Or I could get featured on some “mega-blog” and start experiencing a paradigm shift in the number of readers who visit my site. Or I could actually get paid to do this crap!?

Lorne… first of all… what kind of name is “Lorne” and uh… I’m available

I realize this doesn’t EVER happen on accident… but rather, with hard work, marketing and perhaps a little luck. I know what I have to do. I have to visit other blogs, socially network myself like hell (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter… I got ‘em all), join other networking forums (Dad Blogs, blah, blah) and maybe even spend some cash for advertising or making my site a little more “flashy”.

Which brings me to a question: “How do I have time to do all this?”

Quick answer for you: “I don’t really”.

Uh-oh… Here comes the catch.

So, I have these ideas (they’re free!):

- Follow me on Twitter and catch up with all my random quips throughout the day that prove I’m really completely uninteresting. I more than likely will follow you as well.

- If you’re not a freak… you can ask me to be your friend on Facebook with the notion that you’re a reader of mine and I’ll accept you.

- If you’re still on the archaic social networking site known as “MySpace” you can find me there too… but not very often.

- Visit my Blogroll. There are some great blogs there that I read continually that would love to see some traffic directed their way from my site.

- Visit my Fanroll. If you have a blog, business or just want to see yourself on the internet the you could feature yourself in my fanroll… just read how to do so by clicking this sentence that’s underlined in blue.

- If you’ve never made a comment before… THEN MAKE ONE ON THIS POST! Seriously… I have tracking software and a guy named “Brutus” who’ll shatter your kneecaps if you don’t.

Did I mention he’s a tranny…

- If you’ve made a comment before… THEN MAKE ONE AGAIN! I’ve never made it over 25 comments (and some of those were mine) so why don’t we get it over 40… that would be awesome.

Okay… I’m officially done begging.

Help my imagination become reality (and inflate my ego)… and I’ll help you do whatever you need help with (within reason). I’m serious. Just let me know. It’s a big bloggy world out there… and we could ALL use a little help now and then.

[Via http://handstowar.wordpress.com]

Twitter Turns Tuesday Into Testing and Tweaking Time

2010-03-10T04:35:00.000+02:00

Twitter, the micro-blogging service and social media company founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone among others, has seen steady growth month over month and a combined growth over the past year of 294.26%.

So, if you are a social media networking site with 23 million unique visitors, what do you do to attract a revenue stream and more users? Apparently, spend a day testing out some new features and updates. And that is just what they spent today doing.

Twitter spent Tuesday doing some experimentation and some tweaking. These appeared and then disappeared like a blip on the radar.

One of the changes? Modifying the “update” button to “tweet,” seemingly to signify that it’s official. Those of you sending out those 140 character message aren’t twittering but in fact “tweeting.” It only took the stats to rise to 50 million tweets per day for them to make the update, but even then, only momentarily. It was noticed by a few and TechCrunch sent out a post regarding it, but at the time of this post, it still remains “update.”

In an attempt to timidly enter the location wars, Twitter turned on the geolocation function on its website. TechCrunch featured small screenshots of tweets with small location place markers, displaying a Google map showing the location of the tweet when a user hovered over it. This feature has also been deactivated since TechCrunch’s post broke the news and screenshots.

Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since November, but until today, there was no indication that Twitter was looking to fully integrate geolocation into the main website. Twitter has timed this move well, with the report from the New York Times earlier today that Facebook has finally decided to enter the location war by unveiling its response next month at its f8 conference. Coincidentally (or not), Twitter’s inaugural Chirp conference takes place 1 week before the f8 conference. Google is trying to get into the location war as well, but has made a disappointing debut thus far with meager offerings through Buzz and Latitude. Of course, each day it seems Twitter is bursting with the buzz of the new and shiny app of the day to throw their hat into the ring of the location wars. Most of the new apps are passing information back to Twitter, leveraging Twitter’s geolocation API, which further supports the timing and logic of Twitter to turn this function on within their own website.

Written by: Sara Paxton, managing partner, CTO, and Social Media Officer of Evans Media Group, Kansas City’s Social Media Agency, a boutique agency located in Overland Park, KS that specializes in traditional marketing, social media marketing, online marketing, and public relations.

[Via http://evansmediagroup.wordpress.com]

Gestures Across Cultures: Thumbs-Up

2010-03-08T04:47:00.000+02:00

Gestures do not have a universal meaning across cultures. Be careful when using body language in your business and social interaction and make sure you understand your audience.

While the thumbs-up sign might show approval in the Western world, it might be interpreted as obscene in other cultures. In some Middle Eastern countries this sign traditionally translates as the foulest of gesticular insults. In Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, and Thailand thumbs-up is an obscene gesture, equivalent to the use of the middle finger in the Western world. In Italy, in the right context, it can simply indicate the number one. In Russia and Finland the meaning of this expression is “good”, or “well done”. In the England, a single handed thumbs-up sign can be used as a farewell or greetings gesture between young males. In Egypt and Israel, it means perfect or very good.

In fact, Facebook users encounter the same thumbs-up sign every day. The most popular “Like” button allows members of the social-networking site to show their appreciation to messages, photos and videos by putting a thumbs-up. But do you think this feature communicates the same message worldwide? I doubt it.

[Via http://patiento.wordpress.com]

It’s Rahm vs. Axelrod, and Rahm Is Winning

2010-03-08T04:31:00.000+02:00

Sunday, 07 Mar 2010 11:19 AM Earth to Rhambo: I don’t know what you had to do with picking the people that surround the One. Clearly they haven’t a clue on how to create real jobs and turn the economy around. You see, Rham baby, it may be the desire of the progressives to make everyone except for the elite poor, news flash, It’s not going to happen. So get your tu tu out of the cleaners and start working on your game. You will be gone by January if not before. It’s said, you can better articulate the message? Here’s the message: It’s jobs and the economy stupid! Give up on all your progressive schemes. Random thoughts while watching the deck chairs being moved on the Titanic, J.C.

In the days of the old Pravda, one could determine who was winning secret Politburo power struggles by just looking at the official Soviet newspaper. Those winning simply got better press.

Perhaps it may be no different here in the United States.

This week two of the heaviest guns in American media, The Washington Post and The New York Times, unloaded their missiles at Obama adviser David Axelrod while heralding White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as a centrist and pragmatist.

This Sunday’s New York Times, for example, features Axelrod and describes him as the ideological courtier advising the president into darkness as Emanuel remains the level-headed counselor.

Here’s an excerpt from “Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him”:

“Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. ‘I’ve heard him be called a “Moonie,”’ dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, ‘the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.’”

The Times speculates that the “No Drama Obama” Team is indeed “fracturing.” The Times report follows the page one, top-of-the-fold story in Tuesday’s Washington Post that screamed “Hotheaded Emanuel May Be White House Voice of Reason.”

Sorry Ballerina Boy Following Axelrod, make your flight reservation

The Post story details the enormous transformation Rahm has been making.

Once considered a “caricature,” the paper says he has had a reputation as D.C.’s “resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.”

But then the dagger falls on Axelrod as Emanuel is played as the White House voice of reason, as the Post describes:

“But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.“

Emanuel could have saved Obama from falling poll numbers if only he had avoided all the agenda items pushed by Axelrod!

For instance, the Post notes that Emanuel pressed Obama not to allow Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed to be tried in civilian court.

Attorney General Eric Holder argued for doing just that as a matter of “principle.”

The Post says: “David Axelrod, senior adviser to Obama, supported Holder, the source said. The president agreed that letting the Justice Department take the lead was the right thing to do.”

The paper quotes Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham: “During this whole civilian-trial debate, Rahm’s gut instincts knew that taking KSM to New York for civilian trials was going to be a misstep. He has a better ear for domestic politics on this issue than anybody in the administration, quite frankly.”

Kremlinologists can see the handwriting on the wall. Axelrod will soon be ousted or sidelined. Rahm emerges, and so does a more pragmatic and moderate Obama.

[Via http://dancingczars.wordpress.com]

Should you cross-post updates to Facebook and Twitter?

2010-03-05T12:34:00.000+02:00

Here’s an article I wrote that was published on Ragan.com:

Published: 3/5/2010

Should you cross-post updates to Facebook and Twitter?

By Ari B. Adler

Consider your audience before posting the same update to multiple social media channels

The root strategy for any public relations initiative includes creating your message, determining your audience, and finding the best way of delivering your message to that audience. But now, with social media, technology has given people the ability to blast identical messages to different audiences.

LinkedIn allows you to post your status update simultaneously to Twitter. You can automatically feed your tweets to Google Buzz. You can connect tweets with your Facebook status updates or your Posterous feed. And with third-party software like Tweetdeck, you can post the same message to multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook and LinkedIn with the touch of one Send button. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on whom you ask.

“I don’t cross-post, because I use each tool for a slightly different purpose. Therefore, I target messages for each audience,” says Angela Dockett, marketing and communications manager for the American Cancer Society in East Lansing, Mich.

“I’ve done it, but am starting to back off,” admits Jason Dobson, a professional gaming blogger in Broken Arrow, Okla. “Audiences can be quite different between social media sites, and the messaging needs to reflect that.”

Although there is some mingling of followers and friends from one platform to the other, the style of how people communicate on those platforms differs, especially from a language standpoint.

While Twitter often is filled with abbreviations and symbols, those same messages appearing on a Facebook page could be confusing. Still, that hasn’t stopped some people from connecting their accounts.

“I post Twitter to Facebook, because I have friends and family finally on Facebook that don’t get Twitter. It’s too much of a hassle for me to keep up with both,” says Colleen Lin, senior rich media producer for the Dallas County Community College District in Texas. When asked if the audiences were ever confused, Lin said they were at first.

“I had some complaints, but I find that most people ‘hide’ me (on Facebook) if they’re irritated,” she says.

For some entities, particularly government agencies and universities, cross-posting may make sense.

“We cross-post, using Facebook for students and future students; Twitter for corporations, media and parents,” says Laurie Creasy, a new media specialist at Penn State.

Creasy said they aren’t using quite the same message everywhere, but Penn State hopes all the separate networks see similar messages. She noted the messages on Twitter are “more professional.”

In Rhode Island, the state Department of Transportation uses the exact same message on multiple networks, according to Dana Alexander Nolfe, RIDOT’s chief public affairs officer.

“I have a very broad target audience, and I think my goal is to get my message to as many people as possible. With so many venues, and to ensure consistency, I cross-post my message,” Nolfe says. “Some social media have a good-size audience, and some are very small, but my feeling is if MySpace, for example, is the only place someone is going to go to get RIDOT’s message, then I am going to continue to ensure that the message gets out that way.”

Some argue that business accounts should be given some leeway when cross-posting.

“The audiences are completely different if you are coming from a personal perspective,” says A.J. Teachout, owner of Ulu Marketing in Detroit. “My Twitter followers are likely not my Facebook friends, or friends at all for that matter, so they will not care to hear about what my kid did the other day. My Facebook friends actually know me and care to hear more personal details.

“That being said, from a business perspective, I think it’s a wise move. Your audience is in it for the same reason—to learn more about the business and, likely, your messages will be similar.”

In the end, it’s up to the individual whether to cross-post. With social media being such a new conduit, there’s no proven right or wrong way to do things—yet.

“The bottom line is: Know your audience and how they might be different across multiple networks and social sites,” Teachout says. “How would that affect your message?”

[Via http://aribadler.wordpress.com]

Are employment publications really helpful at all?

2010-03-05T12:03:00.000+02:00

A funny thing happened one day as I was out for breakfast in Saint Paul. Every now and then in the morning I would take a walk down the street and catch the first #21 bus to get myself an egg mcmuffin, hash brown, and orange juice at McDonald’s.

I would pick up the local newspaper the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and also each one of those freebie Employment Guide & Employment News publications and look through them while I sat down for breakfast.

This weekly issue of the Employment Guide was one of the smaller ones I had seen in quite a while. As I unfolded it I realized that it was only a four page issue. On further inspection, the pages were filled with only advertisements for job training in multiple fields: truck driver CDL training programs, a full page of medical assistance training advertisements, culinary training programs, online college courses, and GED classes.

What caught my eye was that there were no job listings! None whatsoever. Not one.

I was so surprised by this that it prompted me to make the following sarcastic status update on my Facebook page when I got home:

I just picked up the new issue of the Employment News. The unemployment rate in the Twin Cities must be at zero because there are absolutely no advertised jobs.

The recession is over!

[Via http://dahospitalityguy.wordpress.com]

Beware of Ganj A Fahma on Facebook!

2010-03-03T04:57:00.000+02:00

Totally not a forward, and completely real. A friend of mine has pics of her baby on Facebook and got a comment from someone she did not know named “Ganj A Fahma.” HE, SHE, or IT is a fake!!!

Beware if you get “Ganj A Fahma” (ganja farmer = weed farmer) for a friend whom you never added who starts leaving random comments about some awesome game that you have to check out or anything else that is irrelevant to you.

Report it FIRST by going to the profile by clicking on the name, go to the bottom of the page, and click the Report/Block link. Then, go back to your pics and delete the comments if they’re still there so no one clicks on the link the faker provides. They’ll get hacked or worse!!!!! Totally a faker, you DID NOT add this person!!!!

Please pass this note onto others.

View This Poll

surveys

[Via http://ejatpsyche.wordpress.com]

Facebook ads

2010-03-03T04:56:00.000+02:00

Creepy facebooks ads currently showing on my profile:

See what your baby looks like, all you need is a pic of you and a pic of anyone else! Subscription required.

You only live once, Make the most of it. Date wealthy and upscale men. Join MeetingMillionaires and meet the man of your dreams!

I’m not ready to think about having a child, and am not shallow enough to go to a site like meetingmillionaires

[Via http://creativityfromscratch.wordpress.com]

Mud is good.

2010-03-01T12:53:00.000+02:00

Well, it was muddy – incredibly muddy. There were all different kinds of mud. There was the shin deep mud that pulls your runners off your feet. There was the slippy mud you kind of skate on. There was watery mud – up to your waist at points, that you waded through. There was grassy looking mud that you thought was grassy enough to be safe, but wasn’t and you went flying. There was mud that looked like it had broken glass in it, but it was just muddy ice.

Last Saturday I participated in Ireland’s first ever ‘Mud Run’. It was in aid of MS Ireland and each runner had to raise a minimum of €150 to take part. Probably about 500 people turned up and ran on the day – it was out in Mondello Park. There’s an off-road tank track there and they marked out a running route through it. It was a lovely morning, cold, but bright. My running mate had flaked out, so I was on my own, but actually you couldn’t really be on your own there, because there was great banter and fun and helping each other out as you fell.

The event raised about €75,000 for MS Ireland and it was also sponsored by Persil – and that’s where it’s a bit interesting from a marketing point of view. What a nice fit for Persil. Not too big, not too clever, but some lovely touches. They had a giant clothes line at the finishing line. And when you finished you got a goodie bag including a sample of Persil Naturals. Of course what do you do when you go home, only chuck your gear in the wash? The facebook page for the event had about 800 fans, there’s photos and video up already – I found myself at 1:35 here: . Not to mention all the online talk and content outside of the official pages. Already the runners are talking online about next year.

Between the ideal sampling opportunity (proper old-school marketing), the on-course branding, the online presence and the good cause, it worked out pretty well for Persil. Sure, there are probably things they could have done better – but that’s something they can start working on for next year.

In the meantime, Dirt really is good.

John Clancy

[Via http://theinfluentials.wordpress.com]

so, is this Facebook stuff worth it?

2010-03-01T12:38:00.000+02:00

I asked this question about Social Media in general a few weeks back. I also noted how at the C.H. Nash Museum we do not want our newsletter, website, and Facebook to be simply different versions of the same thing. We routinely use Facebook to interact and with our fans. So how is that going and what are we learning?

The first thing I learned was the need to give up control. This seems somewhat contradictory to my position as the Museum Director, but all of our staff and graduate assistants are now administrators of the Facebook page. We routinely discuss the type of content we think will work. I thoroughly enjoy that the posts I at first might cringe at, are in fact those that engage our fans the most. Further, this interactivity is driving increased awareness and participation in our on-site events, such as our annual 5k run.

Second, the ability to interact with other Museums, cross promote activities, and simply share and be engaged with other folks experience is tremendous. The page Museums on Facebook lists some 600 different institutions with fan pages. I am a fan of a couple dozen different regional, Native American, and archaeological museum pages. The types of posts from these museums is diverse. Most museum web pages continue to just push product. However, an increasing number are becoming more interactive and “social” in their approach. For example the Newseum Facebook fan page always ends their posts with a question to engage their fans. On the C.H. Nash Museum page, we find that questions posed are always answered by at least a couple of fans.

A recent post on Beth’s Blog discussed Facebook analytics. Options range from the complex such as Google Analytics to not so complex analytic options. For example, the simpler Insights link available to administrators of each individual Facebook fan page actually has a wealth of data. There are also links with lots of Online data on Facebook fan page analytics. A good starting point for me was a download that reports on comparative data based on Facebook Insights. The report contains abundant detail on averages for Fan Pages, on everything from number of fans, average posts, number of comments per post – more stuff than you can shake a stick at. This downloadable report allows you to see how your Fan Page stacks up against the norm. For example, on the C.H. Nash Museum page, we are above the norm on the most of the various feedback measures.

However, these data still do not directly answer the question, is this Facebook stuff worth it? If a page maintains above average rankings on all measures, does that mean it is working and is worth the time expended? I’ll play with this more in the future.

What are your thoughts on how to measure if your energy expenditure in Facebook is worth it?

[Via http://rcnnolly.wordpress.com]

What will you post tomorrow on FACEBOOK? SMH (Shaking My Head)

2010-02-26T04:55:00.000+02:00

Some of the posts on Facebook are simply horrible, and the worst part is when you share the same DNA with the ignorant poster. Be careful Facebooker’s BIG BROTHER is watching, so is BIG MOMMA & Daddy too, your employer, and potential employers. I pray that your spelling on State exams aren’t as ebonic as your ranting on your page. I deleted so many people in the last couple of weeks.

FYI: “Just because you are an adult, teenager(who faked their age to get online), and its your page doesn’t mean you have to act your shoe size.”

Are schools still teaching phonics because when these ignorant Facebooker’s aren’t breaking verbs, cussing out their momma’s for asking them to get off of Facebook and study they’re dropping the F Bomb like they are in the school ‘elementary’ yard, and spinning nouns on its shoulder blades scraping compound words into phrases because your lazy. These Facebooker’s are inventing a new vocabulary worst than anything I have ever heard, and trust me you will not want your newborn reciting their ABC’s.

Perhaps it should be call lack of phonics. Okay don’t get me wrong, along with my mom, I know a little internet short cuts slong with texting (short messaging) lingo, but I am afraid if I begin to write this way (shortening the english language), I will then be in the cubicle with paper cuts at a deadend job, or at the window saying how may I take your order. NOT HERE, NOT EVER!!!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT/DISCLAIMER:

Although as a teen, I never worked for fast food restaurant’s if you need a job, fast food places are cool-it all depends on you, and your community-, but I believe you don’t and shouldn’t settle for fast food if you don’t have to, but if you continue to post ignorance fast food jobs may not be available to you either in your future. Be ever so careful of what you post on social networking sites since it can come back to bite.

What future are you carving out for yourselves if all you do with your precious time is rant and rave about nothing on facebook. Be reminded that once it is out there its in cyber land forever! Some are online going bizark over celebrities ( I have my favorites, but let us all be real), and rappers for some of the dumbest lyrics ever. Some of it is cool but come on must you post the entire backwards song that speaks of your downfall if you don’t become like the rapper you are holding in high esteem.

Seriously speaking are you planning on contributing something good and well worth speaking about when the social networking sites all are networked out. Consider posting something that ignites the brain to think and reproduce something creative that will never depreciate.

“Trust me in a couple of years the things that matter now won’t later but to your employer it just might, I am just saying!”

[Via http://dwritewell.wordpress.com]

Reading @Social Media Today:Moving beyond the industrial society

2010-02-26T04:53:00.000+02:00

Image via Wikipedia

Great post about these changing times. It enables me to act on the professional and personal level. Assume that it will have benefits for u2 (and probably also at the department and organizational level)

Found at Social Media Today | Moving beyond the industrial society.

Noted psychiatrist R. D. Laing said “we live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” We live in a world that is on the leading edge of a major business (or maybe that’s societal) transformation, but like any widespread change, the shift away from the industrial model will take time. The change to social business is cultural and as such, threatens a great many concepts that we were brought up believing. It’s ingrained in our education system, our organizations and our businesses. As Seth Godin points out “our entire education system is designed to prepare people to work in factories, consume stuff, and believe this makes us happy.”

To be continued at http://socialmediatoday.com/SMC/177706?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Social+Media+Today+(all+posts)

Fool me once, shame on you…

2010-02-24T04:25:00.000+02:00

…. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Pretty much sums up my thoughts on Facebook and its ever changing privacy settings. I understand the uproar every time a layout changes, or the settings change. People, for the most part, do not like change.

When Facebook started allowing people without a college affiliation, people freaked out. When Facebook changed its wall functions to status based, people freaked out. When Facebook changed its privacy settings, people freaked out. People love to freak out.

In the past couple of months, Facebook made some changes, or extensions, to current privacy settings. This gave the user MUCH more control over what people saw, how much they saw, and in what context. Facebook’s home page announced these changes on the main page, sent out emails, and gave step by step instructions on how to edit your privacy settings.

Facebook used to be all or nothing. If you weren’t friends with someone, you either set that they COULD or COULD NOT see your profile. That was when everyone was in the same network, and were using Facebook for the same means.

Now, with business and networking becoming a larger part of the social media outlet, it might be nice to allow people I am not friends with to access my work information, and hobbies. But no, I might not want them seeing photos of me out last Saturday night or a link to my family’s Facebook pages. The new settings allow me to share exactly what I want, every last detail, to who I want. And I’ve found it quite and I have no complaints about the changes.

If you were silly enough to ignore the memo the first time Facebook changed its settings, than I don’t pitty you when your future employer comes across photos of you doing a keg stand back in 2004. If you are smart enough to put the information out there, you should be smart enough to protect it.

[Via http://emilyblakem.wordpress.com]

QWS in Facebook

2010-02-24T04:21:00.000+02:00

Anyone heard of QWS? I bet some of you have. It stands for Quality of Worklife Seminar, a flagship values enhancement program which the D.M. Consunji Technical Training Center (DMCTTC) offers. And, as far as QWS is concerned, the bonding of the group members which this program fosters is not anymore confined to the four walls of the conference hall or venue area. It’s also in the WEB.

And, talking about the WWW, there’s no other place popular in the social networking sphere than Facebook. While in FB (shortened form for Facebook), all one has to do is to look for “Friends of QWS” under Groups. Or, you may type at the browser address the following link: http://groups.to/friendsofqws.

But wait, there’s a prior action you have to take before you can continue and get to know the people inside this group. The “Friends of QWS” Facebook group is an exclusive group for participants of the QWS. Now, that’s a prerequisite before one could join this FB group, since we treat the QWS experience as unique for the individual and for those who have gone through it.

Those in the DMCI group of companies (Construction, Homes, Water, Power, DMCI Mining, Semirara Mining, RMC, EMD) who have not taken this seminar and who would like to avail of our QWS, kindly email us of your request to this address dmcttc@dmcinet.com so we could include you in our future QWS offering.

Hope to hear from you.

[Via http://dmcttc.wordpress.com]

Random Post & Test

2010-02-22T04:37:00.000+02:00

So this is a ‘quickpress’ post. I’m not sure if that means anything until I publish it..but I’m giving it a whirl.

A football player with the University of Oregon was booted off the team due to a Facebook status update. Furthering my point before that Facebook is reaching its boiling point. Did you know Facebook started as a vehicle for making fun of people and things? Here’s the founders first status update, ever:

I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. —9:48 pm

Anyway! Better news.

The US defeated Canada in Olympic hockey tonight! It was awesome!

U. S. A.!

[Via http://mickerdoo.wordpress.com]

SEE.HEAR.SAY: Canada's reaction by Facebook Status Updates

2010-02-22T04:32:00.000+02:00

Canada’s reaction by Facebook Status Updates

21 February 2010

I’m actually finding the Facebook Status Updates post-game reaction hilarious, so I thought I would share:

canada bring on the excuses!!!!! WHO ELSE CURRENTLY HATES MARTIN BRODEUR going to start a riot Just because there’s a goalie doesn’t mean you can’t score i just…what do u say after that??? no. fucking. way. having about 3 seperate heart attacks right now… we can still win gold…….. REPEAT OF 02 CANADA! any other week of the year, I would love Kesler for scoring an empty netter…now…well, you can probably guess..

And the best post-game fan page is…..

Really Brodeur?

[Via http://avenuel.wordpress.com]

Warming up to blogging

2010-02-19T04:48:00.000+02:00

I guess you could say… I’m starting to like blogging. I think how it started was I’ve become obsessed with looking up how many views I get a day, anyone agree? My highest… was 33 views, but I think if I keep this up… writing about my discoveries and ranting about my life’s situations… that we’ll come across a few interesting stories.

[Via http://mattdenisonconfused.wordpress.com]

K&B Recap Thursday February 18th: Kat Von D

2010-02-19T04:39:00.000+02:00

On today’s show: Kat Von D stopped by to talk about the new season of L.A. Ink, listeners get busted for internet postings and The Internet Roundup.

Also, Mr. Skin gave us his list of the Top 5 hottest Canadians, Sal Masekela talks about Shaun White’s Gold Medal winning performance, American Psycho is now a musical and more.

Click more to listen to the podcast.

[Via http://kroq.radio.com]

Facebook's Project Titan

2010-02-17T04:48:00.000+02:00

Did you know that Facebook will be launching a full featured email capability? I didn’t know that, but I do now. It’ll be cool. I already use Facebook to do alot of my messaging instead of email because many of my students won’t even check their e mail anymore. Plus the whole network is there. Just when I was thinking about not using Facebook anymore, I learn that it’ll become that much more functional.

Your e mail address on Facebook will be your vanity name @facebook.com. Not sure when it comes out, but if you figure it out, let me know. Facebook – just when you think it’s going – comes out with new stuff. We’ll see.

What do you think is the next thing?

[Via http://identityspecialist.wordpress.com]

Drinking, farms, double-standards and that one time I took my pants off at the bar.

2010-02-17T04:38:00.000+02:00

Let me preface this entry by saying that I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to talking about age-related issues in the social media space. It comes from all of the times that I have been at a networking event and been shrugged off as some kid that doesn’t belong. It comes from all of the times that I have raised a legitimate question or concern via a social media channel and been ignored. It comes from that one time when I retweeted your f*cking blog post and you didn’t say thank you. Color me mildly pissed about that. So that’s where I’m coming from.

With that being said, if you are old enough to drive a car and you use Facebook for networking or professional purposes, put away the gifts, farms, mafias, and whatever other app you think will look cute on your Facebook page. Lately, all of the invitations and requests I have been getting have come from people who I have met at networking events. People who are using social networking sites for business. People who should know better. Sad face.

I would liken these requests to walking into the office of a small business to find the owner sitting on the floor playing with Troll Dolls or My Little Pony. What would you think about that small business’ ability to handle the demands of their consumers? Would that reflect positively or negatively on your perception of that company?

Oh, and please, please (please!) stop inviting me to join in on the fun. I would rather be hit in the head repeatedly with my own severed arm then join your mafia gang. I’m sorry, but Mafia Wars invitations are grounds for an instant unfriending. No joke. Try me.

Moving right along. So, since joining the big boy grown up world of working in a corporate environment about 3 years ago, I have heard one consistent word of advice regarding Facebook: untag any pictures of yourself drinking or partying that you have linked to your Facebook page. Employers will look at that sort of thing and they don’t want to see you looking unprofessional or, God forbid, having a good time.

Now let me ask you, who would you rather have as an employee? The jovial, good-natured person who goes out on the weekends and occasionally takes his pants off at the bar because it was really hot that day and they were restricting my range of motion and I really wanted to win the dance-off? Or the grown up person who spends all day playing with an imaginary farm and sending virtual gifts to their virtual, grown up ‘friends’? I’ll pause and let that question settle. I’m not sure why this issue is never brought up when people are talking about social media and professionalism.

Let’s face it, everyone likes to go out and cut loose every once in a while. From management to new hires, it’s all the same. For me specifically, that ‘once in awhile’ might be more than for some others, but that’s not the point. The point is that I look really good when I’m drinking. Like, better than when I’m wearing a tie and sitting up straight and there’s a lame photographer’s background behind me. Plus, if I had to untag all of the pictures of myself that were either taken at a bar or while intoxicated, I would be left with some throwback baby pictures and that’s about it.

So why would employers discourage the tagging of pictures where people are having fun? In our crazy, stressful, mixed up world, shouldn’t we be embracing the traits and activities that bond us together and make us human and condemning the activities that make us lame and weird? Sometimes I think the whole world has gone mad.

[Via http://colormesocial.wordpress.com]

Facebook Makan korban .. lagi !!

2010-02-15T04:39:00.000+02:00

bicara tentang facebook gak ada matinya. semua orang demam facebook. facebook jadi bahan iklan, marketing, nyari dukungan, hingga bisa menentukan kebijakan. ajaib plus sedikit memilukan. mungkin sang pencetus facebook Mark Zuckerberg gak menyangka booming facebook seperti sekarang ini. gak gaul kalo gak punya facebook, apalagi setelah ditanamkan sofware yang bisa facebook an di HP semakin merajalela situs pertemanan ini.

awalnya facebook hanya ditujukan sebagai situs pertemanan bagi mahasiswa di universitas. kemudian mulai berkecambah dan akhirnya menjadi situs pertemanan yang berkembang luar biasa pesat mengalahkan friendster, myspace, mungkin bahkan twitter.

dari peruntukan awalnya sebenarnya sudah terlihat bahwa situs pertemanan ini lebih ditujukan pada individu yang sudah dinyatakan dewasa, itu teorinya, nyatanya banyak anak smp, sd bahkan tk sudah punya account facebook. trus siapa yang salah, ketika kemudian FB disalahgunakan untuk hal-hal negatif (tergantung melihatnya dari mana) ada yang menggunakan sebagai media iklan buat prostitusi, jualan badan, jualan macem-macem, hingga bisa menjadi tempat curahan hati, hujat-menghujat. terakhir muncul diberita 4 anak SD dikeluarkan gara-gara menulis comment di tembok nya FB.

ada beberapa analisis yang bisa dikemukakan. pertama ditinjau dari ranah pendidikan banyak hal bisa dikritisi, bagaimana metode mengajarnya apakah sudah benar dan mengasyikkan bagi si anak? jangan-jangan memang cara ngajar dan metodenya yang gak bener atau justru gurunya yang benar-benar menerapkan student center learning yang menempatkan murid sebagai subyek sekaligus obyek pembelajaran, sehingga murid senantiasa dan seharusnya diberi tugas rumah yang seabrek banyaknya. atau memang muridnya yang kebangetan, malas, mengeluh ketika diberi banyak tugas, karena biasanya semuanya sudah diberikan oleh orang tuanya, plus pengaruh turunnya moral dan budipekerti terhadap gurunya. kalau dulu guru selalu diposisikan sebagai orang yang dihormati, digugu lan ditiru, sekarang menjadi koran salah asuh orang tua dan sistem pendidikan kita yang mengutamakan hasil akhir dengan mengorbankan moral dan budi pekerti.

perlu kiranya untuk bercermin apakah sistem pendidikan kita yang lagi-lagi mengutamakan hasil akhir yang penting lulus telah mengorbankan moralitas, budi pekerti.

analisis lain bisa ditinjau dari ranah keluarga. secara sosiologis ada yang salah dengan ranah keluarga. peran keluarga menjadi tanda tanya besar ketika pendidikan yang semestinya masih menjadii tanggung jawab orang tua selain pendidikan formal. tekanan ekonomi dan sosial yang semaikin hebat memberipengaruh pada pola asuh orang tua terhadap anaknya. asumsinya mulai ada degradasi alokasi waktu untuk anak yang berakibat pada munculnya perilaku menyimpang. kondisi ini apabila terus dibiarkan akan mencetak generasi-generasi yang buruk moral, acuh dan cuek terhadap lingkungan yang akhirnya secara perlahan-lahan akan menghancurkan budaya dan cirikhas bangsa ini.

[Via http://glindingan.wordpress.com]

A typical conversation. Client: Hi, is t...

2010-02-15T04:25:00.000+02:00

A typical conversation.

Client: Hi, is this Nono?

Me: yep (slightly irritated i have to answer the obvious)

Client: My name is _______. I am creating an app. I saw your work and I really like it.

Me: _____ , did you see my rate? I want to make sure we are clear on that. (curtly)

Client: yah, not a problem. I am looking for someone just like you. I am forming a team of the best. I have not seen anyone who gets it. and I have a revolutionary product that I need some UX design for.

Me: ok (still not interested at this point)…what is your app?

At this point, client tells me just how revolutionary his product is, how they’re absolutely going to rake it in, how they’re going to change the world, that they are well funded, and that I will benefit and that _____ can give me some guidance etc.

Me: ok, when do you want to start.

Client: ok, so right now, we are trying to watch our burn rate, would you possibly consider taking some equity or a lowered rate.

dial tone….

a click later

another person on my spam list.

Note: this guy is actually not the worst. Some people call me and start interrogating me as if I called them. They barely make it past their second question.

Some people might wonder how I can act this way when other designers are struggling.

Simple.

because I can.

[Via http://nonoumasy.wordpress.com]

Western carriers return to Iraq

2010-02-12T04:52:00.000+02:00

Iraq may not be among Western travelers’ most desired destinations quite yet, but some of the world’s leading airlines have decided that flying to the war-ravaged country can be profitable, so they are returning there after a 20-year absence.

Although two of Europe’s major carriers — Austrian Airlines and Turkish Airlines — have been serving Iraq since 2008, their re-entry in that market was viewed as only moderately significant at the time, and none of their peers followed suit.

Austrian chose Erbil, the capital of Kurdish Northern Iraq, which was never nearly as violent as the rest of the country. Turkish began flying to Baghdad, as well as Erbil, but Turkey is not a European Union member. Neither carrier has a truly global network to connect Iraq with many other countries on different continents.

Britain’s second-largest carrier, BMI, said in April it would also start flights to Baghdad, but those plans haven’t materialized.

Last week, Iraq received a major vote of confidence when Germany’s Lufthansa became the largest airline to announce renewed services for the first time since the first Gulf War, beginning this summer. It operated flights to the country from 1956 until 1990. Both Austrian and BMI are part of the Lufthansa Group.

READ FULL STORY

[Via http://nicholaskralev.wordpress.com]

I'm in a mood

2010-02-12T04:43:00.000+02:00

Ever just have one of those days? As the picture on my blog clearly shows, I do sometimes… and today is one of those days…

I am in a horrible mood for no good reason at all. Of course I am stressed about moving and money (the ever present stress… but it’s improving) and life in general… and it doesn’t help to be having that monthly fun time, as I like to call it, but yes… today is definitely one of those days.

So today, I am going to go on a rampage. This rampage is aimed at AT&T!

Today, on facebook, my good friend Lizzard posted something about being mad at AT&T and the Woodland Police Department. Upon further investigation, I discovered that AT&T is trying to royally screw her, as well as many other of her facebook friends and fellow commenters. And the Woodland PD has no tolerance for solving bill problems over the phone while driving (another perk of Nevada… can talk on my phone again!!) Apparently there are many ongoing lawsuits against AT&T all the time because they are always trying to screw people.

What is the deal?

AT&T is totally monopolizing the market, I have to say, and it’s totally ridiculous and unfair. It’s the only cell phone service that actually has service where I now live in Nevada, and it’s basically going to be our only real option for internet there, which is really telling about other cell phone companies, but anyway…Lizzard states her problem as follows:

“I have AT&T for my Internet and I wanted to upgrade my package (and pay more), so they told me I’d have to cancel my current package and pay $150 termination fee and then sign up for the upgraded package. Talk about a load of crap! And then I got a ticket for talking on my cell phone while driving because speaker phone doesn’t count if you’re holding the phone. So frustrating!”

Now that is ridiculous… on both accounts. It has just now occurred to me that perhaps the PD is in cahoots with the phone companies. They make a law that requires every California resident to purchase more phone gadgets from the phone companies (i.e. hands free devices), because clearly speakerphone is not a viable option! I digress…

AT&T: their family plan is also a joke. My husband and I can decide between plan one) way too few minutes for the two of us to share or plan two) more minutes than we could ever hope to talk through. We have 10,000 rollover minutes because when we were on the lesser plan, we over shot every month and had to pay unsightly fees… and now that we are on the upgraded plan, we pay for minutes that we are clearly not using. Now, if we were to downgrade now, because we have sooooooo many rollover minutes, we would lose them all. How on earth does that work? We have paid for those minutes. We have earned them. It’s madness!!! And the one time we did throw a fit about the over charges when we were on the lesser plan, they took like $100 off our bill, which only goes to show me that most of America is just rolling over and taking it in the butt and when you raise a stink, they take off the charges no problem because they know the charges are unfair. It’s just absurd!

How is this happening? There must be something we can do. If I were more political, I would start a petition for something! But for now, this blog will have to do. It will have to satisfy me and hold all my pent up aggression towards ‘The Man.’… whatever that means….

Luke Wilson… you’re all they got man!

[Via http://mrswatercloset.wordpress.com]

Click 'Deactivate'. Two Year Olds Aren't Allowed To Have Facebook Accounts.

2010-02-10T04:36:00.000+02:00

Facebook changed their homepage layout… again. I think they learned their lesson last time when they gave everyone a head’s up with screen shots, tours and notes n’whatnot. This time it was like a sneak attack. People’s pages just started changing and when they did, you got a link with a ‘how it works’ guide.

I kind of hate it when Facebook changes their layout, just because I don’t like having to figure out where all the stuff I use, went, and having to get used to it being set up that way. But I’m not going to be one of those annoying people who whine and complain about it. I have some Facebook friends that will freak out, protest and refuse to use Facebook if they dare change the layout.. They act like two year olds every time it changes, and yet… Facebook never switches the layout back, due to the complainers. They don’t fix it or try to make the users feel better about it. So why whine and cry over it? Honestly, if you’re going to throw a fit, stop saying you’re going to delete your account and just DO IT already! Please… For me. I’m begging. If only you could see me, down on my knees pleading with the morons of the world! … Okay I’m not on my knees, but really.

I don’t usually like the layout change either, but I just keep using it and try to get used to it as soon as I can. And honestly, I like the most recent change a lot better than the last one they did. So.

[Via http://voteforcoffee.wordpress.com]

Brooklyn Slur - Lodge

2010-02-10T04:24:00.000+02:00

The Slow Food NYC monthly Happy Hour! It’s fun, social, and informal. But it’s also your opportunity to talk to the leadership of Slow Food NYC and let us know what you think. Got a great idea for an event? Looking for ways to get involved? Want to learn more about Slow Food? Just looking to have a relaxing drink with other “Slow” minded people? The Slur is your opportunity.

Built from wood re-purposed from a 19th century Adirondack camp, Lodge is a bar and restaurant that offers regionally grown and sustainably produced foods. The menu features comfort classics like pulled pork with mac and cheese, and the drink list includes cocktails made with organic vodka, Six Point and Brooklyn beers and biodynamic wines.

For our Slur, Lodge will offer $3 pints of Yeungling along with its regular Monday night special–all-you-can-eat chicken wings at the bar with the purchase of a beer. We hope to see you there.

Where: Lodge – 318 Grand Street; Williamsburg, Brooklyn [website: www.lodgenyc.com]

When: Monday, February 22nd – 7pm to 9pm

[Via http://slowfoodnyc.wordpress.com]

Rss Feed

2010-02-08T04:49:00.000+02:00

What is an RSS feed? How do they work? I have so many questions and no one to ask. I can read whatever I find online but nothing has helped me so far. I’m trying to figure this all out but I don’t understand. What has an Rss Feed? I assume it’s something like twitter that is updated on a regular basis (for most people, but not in my case) but does Facebook have such a thing? I truly feel I will never figure this out….

[Via http://hajewell.wordpress.com]

Is it worth it?

2010-02-08T04:45:00.000+02:00

Which side are YOU on?

Are great pants really worth throwing away a friendship for? Well, in the case of Sherway educators Christine and Rachel, they sure are*. The Flashback Pant and Dance Studio Pant made their respective debuts in our spring line this past week, and these two normally-pleasant women have been butting heads since. Christine swears by the loose-fitting, chafe resistant cotton terry Flashbacks, while Rachel counters with the lightweight and breathable Dance Studios, which she comfortably wears to and from her hip-hop class (she’s training for the next Drake vid).

“Ewwww, I can’t stand her,” Christine says of her former friend.

“She’s ugly,” Rachel says in response. “Her pants are great, but mine are better.”

So, which pants do you like better? Get on in to Sherway and check them out! We can force you to come, but we highly recommend it!

Along with the Flashbacks and Dance Studios, we’ve got some new 5 Year Pima Tees and Modern Racer Tanks in that are worth a look too. If you like getting updates like this, be sure to sign up for our product notification…HERE! Also, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop!

* (Note: Christine and Rachel actually aren’t fighting. Sure, they have beef over the pants, but they still get along splendidly and encourage everyone else to keep the peace.)

[Via http://lululemonsherway.com]

New Facebook Look ... Again

2010-02-05T04:54:00.000+02:00

By Erik Qualman

Facebook revealed a new look today. If you haven’t seen this change yet, you will. In the meantime I’ve posted a screen shot below.

Facebook's New Look Came Out Today

My 3-minute reaction is that I like it. If over the course of the next 24-hours that opinion changes I will let you know! The main change is to the top and side navigation; specifically, it is easier to find the items you use most: messages, new requests, notifications, etc.

Another feature is they showcase who’s online now (left nav) in an attempt to increase the use of their chat feature. They’ve also made the reminders, like for birthdays, a little more prominent. I’ve only reviewed for a few minutes, but so far there is nothing glaring that I can’t find.

[Via http://socialnomics.net]

Facebook Passes the 400 Million User Mark

2010-02-05T04:43:00.000+02:00

Facebook is celebrating its 6th birthday in style, with yet another traffic milestone: 400 million users served.

Two months ago the social network hit 350 million, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reminds us that number was less than half of today’s 400 million mark a year ago. It took the site about three months to climb from 300 to 350 million users and only about two months to gain another 50 million, indicating Facebook’s explosive growth is actually still accelerating.

[Via http://lmd308.wordpress.com]

Facebook Hiatus

2010-02-03T04:46:00.000+02:00

For the past few weeks, one of my Facebook friends has been trying to gather Facebook junkies/addicts/socialites to join a small group called No-Facebook February. As I perused my friends’ status updates, photos, and favorite links, I found myself annoyed at the prospect of taking that much time (twenty-eight days!) away from the social scene, well, the online social scene. Who would do that? Why should I consider it like she kept saying I should?

For goodness sakes, an old acquaintance from high school who I haven’t talked-to talked to in, oh, eight years is about to give birth any day now! How would I know when the baby was born? It’s not like she’d call me or something. How would I know, know, know about my 130 close (not-so close) friends’ most facebook-able activities? Certainly they all are waiting for my status updates about what I’m making for dinner, or how Adeline’s nap for the day went, and would miss then should they not arrive in their live news feed. Surely, I cannot disappoint.

Uh-oh.

There was that twinge. You can chalk it up to conscience, God, or the little angel sitting on your right shoulder, but you know that feeling. It happens when you pass by the Salvation Army bell-ringer when you have plenty of change to spare, or buy what you want instead of what you need, or lean in a little closer to hear, out of genuine concern of course, what Jane heard about Jill. It’s when you hear loud and clear, “Examine yourself!!” So I did.

Facebook shows me a lot of blessings and keeps people in my life that I wouldn’t have contact with in any other way, but do I really need to know what movie Long-Lost-Friend #14 saw Friday night, or peek through the pictures Old-Coworker posts of her niece? Whether it’s my reading time, homework time, mama-ing time, doting on my husband time, is this how I need to be spending it? Commenting on what other people are eating for lunch or giving advice on how to spur on contractions to someone I met once is not teaching my daughter to count to three or getting me any closer to being who I want to be.

So, at 11:58 PM on January 31st, I made a spur of the moment decision and signed off of Facebook for twenty-eight days. I haven’t ‘liked’ anything, added anyone, or updated my status for two days now. And though I know that I’ve missed some good discussions and moments that people very dear to me have shared, I’ve also been more productive and realized some of the irritation I feel at social networking. So far, two days in, No-Facebook February is feeling fine. But I must admit – I’m glad it’s not leap year.

[Via http://moorefamlily.wordpress.com]

hoy, en todos lados, comieron tamales

2010-02-03T04:43:00.000+02:00

Si, hoy por lo del dia de la Candelaria los tamales estuvieron a la orden del dia, de hecho hoy desyunamos tamales y cenamos tamales… hasta la madre de tamales!

Tengo que agregar que esta foto tiene algo particular:

Este wey me hizo comprar tamales para los weyes del trabajo… ni modo, ya hace mucho tiempo que no me tocaba, creo que ya era algo justo.

emphhh… ya, tambien quieren que me vaya a dar de baja de la UVM (ahora si, hasta les urge a los cabrones…) para tramitar el reembolso de los pagos que ya habia hecho chinguen a su ma’ para mi maestria, en fin.

ya tambien quiero mencionar que he atiborrado mi Picasa con fotografias que he tomado en el fin de semana, lo bueno es que compre el espacio de 20GB por $5 USD y asi libero el espacio del disco duro, solamente no se que pasa con el intercable que ahora ha estado demasiado lento (torrents??) y se tardan un buen en subirse las fotos…

Ahh!!!, tambien hoy he probado el cliente de facebook basado en silverlight, de hecho se ve muy chido (la verdad no se porque al hablar de silverlight no puedo evitar relacionarlo con el Adobe AIR, supongo que no tienen mucho que ver el uno con el otro, quien sabe…) y aqui esta una captura de como se ve:

Lo que me gusto es que cuando checas el apartado de ‘photos’ se ponen de fondo, como mosaico (al mas puro estilo Windows Media Center) y solo eso, tiene un efecto muy chido, pero no esperen mas de eso, al probar por un rato la app creo que falta algo de trabajo, como para ver links y demas tienes que abrir tu browser, creo que para que este bien elaborado este cliente tienes que abrir o ejecutar todo dentro de la misma app, no?

y hoy, hoy es otro dia mas… ya casi llega el dia d…

sigo tarareando chiquitita, esa cancion (aunque no lo digo muy seguido, aunque ahora que lo pienso… no lo habia dicho salvo a una sola persona) me gusta mucho… y creo que la seguire tarareando un buen rato mas.

cheers!

[Via http://somethingtotalkaboutme.com]

'The Bachelor' Winner leaked? Spoiler Alert ....Pilot 'Bachelor' Jake Pavelka has reportedly chosen???

2010-02-01T04:47:00.001+02:00

The Bachelor’ winner leaked: spoiler alert. The rumored winner is named in the post.

Winner of the newest season of ‘The Bachelor’ leaked?

January 2010 — The newest season of ‘The Bachelor’ is just getting underway and already the name of the winner has been leaked. (The leaked name appears in this post.)

According to “Reality Steve” who correctly predicted the Molly/Melissa switch on last season’s ‘Bachelor’ the winner of this season’s bachelor has been leaked.

Pilot ‘Bachelor’ Jake Pavelka has reportedly chosen 23 year old Vienna Girardi to be his future bride. Other spoilers have also been leaked including the final four, Tenley, Gia, Ali, and Vienna.

[Via http://ctpatriot1970.wordpress.com]

Old Friends?

2010-02-01T04:47:00.000+02:00

Do you really need them in your life? Have you reconnected on Facebook and kinda regretted it? I have. I have reconnected with Bill, the God fearing, three time reformed alcoholic, sex addicted bass player and Fat Becky, the slutty pathological liar who never met a sandwich that she didn’t like. These people offer us NOTHING, right? Are we crazy to bring them into our cyber lives? Maybe. I guess it builds the ‘friend count’ and there’s nothing like ‘perceived value’ – I mean, this dude knows A LOT of people! He MUST be cool, right? Not really, kids. Bill, Becky, Lisa (who has 3 kids with 3 different dads), Jerry, Dan, Warren, Patrick ( who I never even MET before!) - All of Y’all are just padding my numbers on the Facebook, so thanks, I think. Like I said, Jim – Perceived VALUE.

[Via http://jeromejerome.wordpress.com]

Closing out a long week...

2010-01-29T04:46:00.000+02:00

No great strides in my journey this week, I am sad to say. Though, that may not be all together true. Yes, my journey is primarily one of weight loss, but I have forgotten, it is also about being happy and healthy… that is not merely weight loss. So, in that respect, I have actually done quite well this week, today being especially good. Work has been pretty slow, but, I am still bringing money home. I am definitely working tomorrow, but not sure about Saturday. I admit that I would love to have the weekend off to recuperate. I am getting used to having to be at work and on the road as much as I am. It’s a bit of a drive from my house to work, so I lose about 1.5 to 2 hours driving a day, depending on traffic.

But, even though I have not been the success at the gym that I have wanted to be, as of yet, I have been able to maintain the initial weight loss. I remain at 447 and have not gained or loss since that weigh in. I have been sticking to my “diet” (I hate using that word, but it is what most people tend to use, common nomenclature and all) and drinking massive amounts of water. I suppose that has been a help. I do need to get back on track with taking my vitamins and supplements, I really slacked off on that and I am really disappointed with myself about that. Tomorrow, I will start anew with the pills. I have also come to the conclusion that my all or nothing attitude has to be adjusted a bit when it comes to the gym, at least for now anyway. I had fully intended on working out 6 days a week with one day off… well, my spirit is certainly willing, but, my body is saying “oh… no, no, no…” And rightfully so, I mean really, you can’t abuse your body for so many years and then expect it to play ball when you come to your senses!

I am now going to work out every other day, no matter what. Starting either Tomorrow or Saturday. I am still a little on the sore side from earlier this week, and I think one more day of rest will prepare me for my return. I totally enjoy going and doing what I have to at the gym, I just need to convince my body that it is okay! I was happy to see that my blog has found its way, with no assistance from me, to other blog sites on the web. I don’t know how it is being found, but I am glad it is getting out there all the same. I would, however, welcome any and all suggestions on how I can better promote this blog and get more eyes to see it. I have tried a few things to no real avail except the one post in December when I had my record of 500 plus hits in one day. I have to say that I was a bit spoiled by that day, and have felt that my meager 15 to 30 hits on any given day is not so great, lol.

Once again, I am thinking seriously of pursuing a career in writing. I have been told by many, including a few people who I value their opinions very highly, that I should find a way to write for a living. I have been posting some articles on eHow.com and have really enjoyed that. I am looking for some opportunities to contribute to a few local publications if I can, even for free at first. I will be reviewing and writing a piece on the band “Particle Effect” after their show that is coming up in February. Info as follows: (Particle Effects is the band, and they will be kicking off open mic at Yeoman’s Road on Davis Island. 10pm Tuesday night on February 9th. at 236 Davis Blvd. Tampa FL. 33606. Mapquest it or GPS it. Come on out and support them, then hang out with them after the show.) One of the band members is a dear friend and former band mate of mine, Christian F. Rivas. I look forward to the opportunity to see them live for the first time, and to write what very well may be their first review. I will try to be as objective as possible, though, my bias may play into it a little. I am sure that it will be a great show! I am also still putting together some ideas for a book, I have a few working titles, but, I am going to leave the title until I am further into the creation of the actual main body.

Well, it is that time… I am tired and have a probable long day ahead of me tomorrow at the club. Please let me know what you are thinking and any of the aforementioned suggestions and/or comments are greatly appreciated!

Thanks to all of you for your continued love and support.

As always, take care and remember…

Every day is a chance to turn it all around!

- Kenny

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[Via http://kennyislosingit.wordpress.com]

Modern Technology Owes Ecology An Apology

2010-01-29T04:34:00.000+02:00

Oh, people in the 21st century…(sigh). Anything anybody’s interested in these days are the new “pea pods” or “tea books”. Now, many a “mature” being may have come across these grammatical mishaps given to the fact that they still probably think Lincoln is in office. Well, as these oldies resist, the younglings are practically more than welcoming. As I have just learned, from personal experience, these younger generations have become frighteningly dependent on these great technological feats, spending hours on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Seeming to have some kind of hypnotizing component to it, technology is anything anybody cares about nowadays. What happened to curling up with a good ole book without a glaring light projecting from a digitally processed page? Or actually writing a letter and taking the time to send it, postage stamp and all instead of typing it up and sending it off in a matter of seconds?

Yesterday, because of complications with my WiFi network, I could not access the internet on my laptop. My frustration turned into hysteria which turned into me crying over not being able to check my Facebook page. Oh. My. God. I felt so incredibly silly afterwards, recounting my rant on how important it was that I check up on my page right that second. Not to mention that I had an audience as well, equipped with friends and family.

I suppose the “moral” of the story is that maybe one of these days you should trade up that eBook for an original (antique) copy of The Grapes of Wrath or that email for a piece of looseleaf and a pen. Bring yourself back down to earth, buy that horse and not that Prius.

“Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.” ~Lewis Mumford

[Via http://aquavitae358.wordpress.com]

Twitter: Slightly less worthless now

2010-01-27T04:31:00.000+02:00

If you don’t own stake in a tech company, work in media or live close to a downtown metropolitan area, you are excused from thinking that Twitter is an over-hyped leftover curiosity from the now retreating mobile phone Short Message System era. Seriously, what the hell is the point of “tweeting” text when you are no longer bound by SMS’s arbitrary character limit or lack of graphics? Anyone with a slightly smart phone (soon to be just about everyone) has access to MMS or robust social media applications.

I stopped using Twitter for anything in October after Facebook did some heavy updates to its Blackberry application, eliminating my desire to use the lightweight Twitter app for quick Facebook updates. Despite some excellent content finally appearing on the service (Fake AP Stylebook, Shit My Dad Says and Time Lost Batman), I was done with the whole concept. I uninstalled the Twitter app from my Facebook account, locked down the Twitter account and walked away. The only thing that has been appearing on my Twitter feed since then are the update notices sent out by this WordPress blog.

However, as I’ve been helping The Redhead update her blog and Etsy store over the last two days, I’ve reluctantly returned to Twitter to see how it has changed. Overall, it’s slightly less worthless than it used to be. Site performance has definitely improved, although it is after the holidays. I like the retweet button, the local trending topic sidebar and the lists function…but where the hell are simple things like Twitpic integration?

Facebook made massive design and privacy changes to its site to head off the slightest advantage that Twitter might gain from its freewheeling, open-door nature, but Twitter has done little to integrate the Frankenstein’s monster of off-site services that make its system even remotely competitive. Where can I find a comprehensive list of popular off site Twitter apps? How about an automatically scrolling list of tweets, saving me from having to refresh the static site for the latest? This is basic, basic stuff that hundreds of other web noodlers and ne’er-do-wells have cobbled together over the last few months, but they are not reflected in Twitter’s web site, the first place people go when their friends finally harass them into using the service.

[Via http://fuzzybuzz.wordpress.com]

Facebook Note from Sarah Palin on Women's Rights

2010-01-27T04:30:00.000+02:00

From Sarah Palin’s Facebook Notes:

Women’s Rights Groups: Your Double Standard is Showing Women’s Rights groups, like NOW, commendably call out advertisers and networks for airing sexist and demeaning portrayals of women that lead to young women’s diminished self-esteem and acceptance of roles as mere sexed-up objects.

What a ridiculous situation they’re getting themselves into now with their protest of CBS airing a pro-life ad during the upcoming Super Bowl game. The ad will feature Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mom, and they’ll speak to the sanctity of life and the beautiful potential within every innocent child as Mrs. Tebow acknowledges her choice to give Tim life, despite less than ideal circumstances. Messages like this empower women! This speaks to the strength and commitment and nurturing spirit within women. The message says everything positive and nothing negative about the power of women – and life. Evidently, some women’s rights groups like NOW do not like that message.

NOW is looking at the pro-life issue backwards. Women should be reminded that they are strong enough and smart enough to make decisions that allow for career and educational opportunities while still giving their babies a chance at life. In my own home, my daughter Bristol has also been challenged by pro-abortion “women’s rights” groups who don’t agree with her decision to have her baby, nor do they like the abstinence message which she articulated as her personal commitment. NOW could gain ground and credibility with everyday Americans, thus allowing their pro-women message to be heard by more than just their ardent supporters, if they made wiser decisions regarding which battles to pick. They should call attention to and embrace the Tebow’s message, instead of covertly and overtly disrespecting what Mrs. Tebow, Bristol, and millions of other women have chosen to do (in less than ideal circumstances).

My message to these groups who are inexplicably offended by a pro-woman, pro-child, pro-life message airing during the Super Bowl: please concentrate on empowering women, help with efforts to prevent unexpected pregnancies, stay consistent with your message that for too long women have been made to feel like sex objects in our “modern” culture and that we can expect better in 2010. But don’t let your double standard glare so vividly as to undo some of the good to which you could contribute.

And CBS: just do the right thing. Don’t cave. Have the backbone to run the ad.

To the Tebows: thank you. America is listening. We appreciate you.

- Sarah Palin

[Via http://themoveright.com]

Pizza Hut's Intestinal Warfare

2010-01-25T04:43:00.000+02:00

If you’ve ever heard me on the subject of Pizza Hut, it all boils down to this… Pizza Hut = Gastrointestinal Distress. I have no idea why. I’ve heard the same thing from many other people when the subject is raised. I know I’ve gotten into it on facebook not too long ago too. I enjoy plenty of other pizzas from other chains & from the local shops, all with no digestional discomfort.

I wrote to Pizza Hut a long time ago… and this is all I had to say…

Hello Fine Friends at Pizza Hut,

Contrary to the belief held by your delicious pizzas, my intestines are not a waterslide. Can you please instruct the to not use my digestive system as a waterslide park? It would be very much appreciated!

Gotta go!

-ERiC AiXeLsyD

world.and.lunar.domination@gmail.com

Well, their answers back then were quite dissatisfying, and when I contacted them again via snail mail, my query went wholly unanswered.

Perhaps that’s why I waged another campaign of emails with a vengeance. I looked up several Pizza Hut and Yum! Brands executives online, found the syntaxt of their respective companies’ email addresses, and fired off a few notes… as well as filled out the webform once or twice or so.

from ERiC AiXeLsyD world.and.lunar.domination@gmail.com

to Scott.Bergren@yum.com

date Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 8:28 AM

subject Intestinal Warfare?

mailed-by gmail.com

Hello,

This isn’t about a specific incident, but a general observation. There was nowhere in the webform to indicate that, so I had to seek out some email addresses. I find it quite rude that there’s no general inquiry area, or a contact email address.

As for the purpose of my missive…

I would like to know why your pizza treats my intestines like a water park. Every time I enjoy your delicious slices of pie, I feel like I have swallowed a hurricane that’s trying to escape via my …well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

I can assure you that I’m not lactose intolerant, but perhaps I’m allergic to something in your sauce or pie? I don’t seem to have this problem with any other pizza places… chains or local.

Have any other customers written to you regarding gastrointestinal distress of any sort? My cousin who works in a Pizza Hut in Ohio swears that they use a different sauce there, devoid of the same effects.

Thanks for your time!

-ERiC

The email address experiment seemed to be to no avail. I’ve either been blocked by IT, spam filters, or wholly ignored. But, it looks like I did get a bite off of the webform…

from Dave Kronenwetter Davekronenwetter@aurorahuts.com

to world.and.lunar.domination@gmail.com

cc Ed Holt edholt@aurorahuts.com

date Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 9:16 AM

subject Pizza Hut Incident Eric Aixelsyd

mailed-by aurorahuts.com

Dear Mr. Aixelsyd,

I was sorry to hear about your experience at the local Pizza Hut. Let me assure you that the ingredients used here in Pennsylvania are the same quality ingredients that are used throughout the country. In most cases our ingredients come from the same suppliers. The following website lists possible allergen & sensitive ingredients : http://www.pizzahut.com/Files/pdf/Updated%20PH%20Allergen%20List%2004.17.09.pdf This website includes our nutritional information: http://www.pizzahut.com/Files/PDF/Pizza%20Hut%20Nutrition%20Info%2010.12.09.pdf. Please feel free to contact me with any additional questions you may have and I will handle them personally

Sincerely,

Dave Kronenwetter

Area Coach

Aurora Huts LLC

412-897-6775

davekronenwetter@aurorahuts.com

Interesting. Well, at least now I have two good contacts… but perhaps my query will take a more serous and inquisitive turn.

Upon viewing the interesting pdf linked to by Mr. Kronenwetter, I see that a bunch of items there are marked “prepared in common equipment and therefore may contain allergens” in the shellfish column. I’m not sure exactly why this is, because I don’t recall any shellfish on the Pizza Hut menu, and especially since the items marked are oddly random and specific… Garlic Parmesan wings, and no others… three different pizza sauces… 3 of the 4 Tuscani pastas, and breadsticks.

I can only assume that these things arrive at Pizza Hut pre-made, and may come into contact with potential allergens at the manufacturing/processing/packaging facility? Oh well, perhaps I can figure out a way to address this in a goofy manner, yet still yield some positive and enlightening results. I know that many people suffer from the pizza hut digestion demon, and I really hope it’s not just some sanitary/kitchen issues.

Perhaps this too must move into snail mail territory. For some reason, most companies seem to treat a real live letter with more respect than an email.

I thought of Yum! Brands today as we watched Spaceballs… In the characters Kernel Sandurz and Pizza the Hutt – both now Yum! Brands brands. Would it be wrong of me to write to them and tell them that Mel Brooks is working on a new special edition of Spaceballs with more scenes, digitally inserted characters and creatures, and better re-vamped special effects… and that they’d like to include more Yum! Brands characters… like Captain Long John Silver and Taco Bell, and some droid sidekicks, A & W?

[Via http://aixelsyd13.wordpress.com]

Cut to the Heart

2010-01-25T04:40:00.000+02:00

Acts 2:36-38 (ESV)

36 Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. 37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” 38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

—–

In our immediate context, verse 36 is the summary of Acts 2:14-35. Peter is proclaiming to an audience of Jews (see 2:5) that Jesus is in fact the Messiah, that He is not dead but resurrected and living, and that they did not embrace him but rather crucified him. Peter quotes from the Old Testament proofs regarding the coming of the Holy Spirit and resurrection. The Jews were cut to the heart by the Word of God and Peter’s apostolic testimony, knowing they were guilty and had greatly sinned against God. In a state of desperation cried out and exclaimed, “Brothers, what shall we do?” The first word of Peter’s reply?

Repent.

There are times when, as in Acts 2:37, God’s truth “cuts to the heart.” Your conscience informs you that immediate and desperate action must occur to remove sin that the Holy Spirit has shone His pure and holy light on. This is what happened to me tonight. Thanks to James Miller at my church, One Hope, for speaking the truth boldly and with humility from 1 John 1:5-2:1.

By the time you see this posted to Facebook, I will have begun a Facebook fast that will last until May 1st. God has led me in this direction for several weeks, and only finally tonight God grant the necessary brokenness to proceed. Here are the three reasons why this fast is taking place in order of significance.

1) Purity. As a man called to shine as light into a dark world, I must be vigilant keeping my eyes away from impure images. I have not more than once looked longer than I should have at a picture – be it an ad or posted by a friend – which have led to impure thoughts. I would cover up these transgressions against God by saying that these sins were not as bad as the ones I used to commit while lost/a new believer; a little linger of the eyes here or there is OK. Jesus had a much different answer to dealing with sins committed with our eyes. He said:

Mark 9:47-48 “And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, 48 ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ “

The application for me as a believer is not that I am going to hell, but that sin is so great of an offense against God that it must be eradicated at any cost. All sin is an offense to God because He is pure and holy. When I think a sin is not so bad in God’s eyes, I have actually replaced the true God with a false god that will let me hold on to “lesser” sins. When this happens, and are aware of it, a huge shift in thinking (repentance) must take place. A lie has been believed for far too long if it starts to resemble truth!!

2) Self-glorification. There is no greater sin than that of pride. True believers must fight against this sin. Here is another area where I have let down my guard and sinned against God. I can’t give you an actual comparison of time, but I am sure that I have spent more time thinking about my status, exalting myself when people write what I like, and making sure my Facebook profile represented who I am to the world than crying out before God in prayer. Lecrae in his song “Go Hard” puts it this way:

Aw mayne we ain’t focused on the war / We just kickin’ it

Worried bout our image / And our space up on the Internet

One would be foolish to think that something that inhibits a major activity like prayer, something Jesus did constantly and urged his disciples to do often, is worth holding onto.

3) Wasting time/idling. Christians are to redeem the time given to them to honor the Lord as the days we live in are evil (Ephesians 5:16, Colossians 4:5). This sin is closely related to #2 due to the amount of time it takes to make my representation of my life as correct as possible. There is a tract about the cross that God has put on my heart to write way back in April 2009. It’s now January 2010. What happened? Satan is so deceptive.

—–

Therefore, I will be zealous and repent, like Jesus told the church in Laodicea to do in Revelation 3:19. I do not know what will happen on May 1st. Jesus may have come back by then! I hope to be purer of eye, more humbled before the Lord, and a better steward of my time. I may be a little more excited by this than I should be.

Well, that’s all for now, early morning ahead! Comments, as always, are welcome. If there are grammatical errors, please let me know – they tend to frequent these late night blog posts.

[Via http://repentandbelieve.wordpress.com]

How to Un-Share your E-mail Address with Pet Society

2010-01-22T04:54:00.000+02:00

Did you have trigger-finger and clicked yes to this message without reading it?

If so, there’s a way to undo the damage. Go to the “Settings” link on the top right of Facebook. Click “Application Settings.”

Then find Pet Society in the list. Click “Edit Settings.”

Click on the “Additional Permissions” tab. Uncheck the box next to “Receive updates to my Facebook contact email address.”

It also looks like you can unsubscribe from any e-mails sent by Pet Society. While you’re at it, you may as uncheck the box, “Publish to streams.” This will prevent the application from blasting all your friends with constant reports of “Melody is now playing with her pet Muffintop in Pet Society.” No one needs to know about your game addiction, riiiight?

[Via http://petsocietyanonymous.com]

Fakta Website bagi Negara kita - Malaysia

2010-01-22T04:33:00.000+02:00

Saya terjumpa suatu ranking yang menyatakan bahawa Facebook telah memenangi hati Rakyat Malaysia? Kenapa? Saya discovered yang Facebook.com menduduki ranking pertama dalam Alexa!

OpppS! Apa itu Alexa? Saya akan cerita dekat anda semua, jangan risau. “Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and website. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the website where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company’s web traffic reporting.” Itu merupakan petikan dari wikipedia untuk syarikat Alexa itu sendiri. Ini bermakna, Alexa merupakan anak buah syarikat Amazon.com, syarikat retailer online besar di internet.

Dari statistik itu juga, saya lihat bahawa google.com.my – iaitu Google Malaysia dapat tempat kedua. Betapa besarnya Kuasa Google dalam internet di Malaysia..

Diekori oleh Yahoo! di tempat ketiga. Bagaimana dengan anda? Adakah ketiga-tiga laman web ini laman web paling banyak anda lawat sepanjang surfing internet? Kalau tiada, kita teruskan lagi carta kita dengan tangga keempat.

Juga Google, tapi google.com.. Fuuhh.. Betapa kuatnya influence google dalam Masyarakat Dunia. Untuk pengetahuan anda juga, mereka mendapat tempat pertama dalam ranking worldwide, juga di Alexa. Huhu. Kuat sungguh penangan Google ke atas kita. Sedikit info mengenai Google, pencipta mereka mencipta Google di bangku universiti. Dua orang muda ini ialah Larry Page dan Sergey Brin. Mereka telah menjadikan Google sebagai most powerful brand in the world. Moto mereka pula ialah “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Untuk lebih info mengenai ranking alexa untuk top sites in Malaysia, sila klik link berikut – http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/MY

Sumber rujukan -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Internet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

[Via http://immia.wordpress.com]

Where does one draw the line on social networks?

2010-01-20T04:44:00.000+02:00

First: I’m upset about Clemson’s ridiculous loss to Georgia Tech tonight – two sloppy performances, and we ended up on the losing end. ‘Nuff said.

My question tonight is: where do you cross the line w/respect to “friending” or “following” when it comes to business contacts?

I’ll admit, I was really urked when my boss “friended” me on Facebook. I felt backed into a corner… I couldn’t NOT accept him, for fear of retribution, but I really didn’t want to let him into my personal world, which Facebook represents for me. Since then, several vendor contacts have requested to be my friend on Facebook. Again, I like many of my vendor contacts, but I don’t feel the need to let them into that personal aspect of my life. But, again…do I feel that I can “ignore” them, without hurting the relationships? No.

What’s your take on the protocol for “friending” or “following” WRT business contacts? Please leave your comments, b/c I’m really curious.

[Via http://kerbehr.wordpress.com]

Meetup Rules: Taking Away the Social Video Fear Factor

2010-01-20T04:33:00.000+02:00

Less than two weeks ago, Team Vpype created “Social Video” group on Meetup. Last week, we invited social video enthusiasts, Vpype early beta users and fans on Facebook to our first Meetup in Santa Clara, California at Techmart. The attendance was more than we expected. People came from all over the Bay area (Silicon Valley). Everyone got a chance to test Vpype’s live, video broadcasting capability and learn more about the company and our unique position in the social media /social video space.

For us, the Meetup gave us more insight into how our newest broadcasters will use Vpype to connect with their friends and family, and promote their businesses, events, expertise and opinions.

We had experts at the Meetup, who talked about the Social Video market and where we fit, and how we are different. Vpype Product Manager gave a tutorial on how easy it is to use Vpype. Computers (Windows laptops and netbooks and Macs) were set up with Wi-fi access with optional coaches (if needed) so that everyone could try a live, interactive broadcast during the Meetup.

We covered how to practice live broadcasting with only “you” as the starring broadcaster. We also disclosed a bit of information about our future and more about Vpype Live Broadcaster options, including future ones.

Our attendees were enthusiastic about the forming their own social video community. They finally have a social networking environment that allows them to do more with their computers’ built-in microphones and webcams.

To learn more about Vpype Live Broadcaster, click here; and to get on the list for future Vpype Meetups, please visit us on Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/social-video)

[Via http://socialvideoceo.com]

Coming of Age – Generation Next

2010-01-18T04:30:00.000+02:00

5/13/08

Have you ever woken up and come to the realization that your generation is, well just is? For the last month I have been more perceptive to my online and television surroundings and have come to find that Generation Next is all over the place. We have become of age, many of us our in our late twenties early thirties. We are no longer the Next Generation but the Now Generation. In a 2005 article Newsweek called us baby boomers with MBA’s.

Growing up we saw older generations taking charge in politics, broadcast & cable news, entertainment and so on. However, with today’s growing age of cheap and shelf producing web entertainment, Generation Next Now has over come any ageism and created a new world of media.

The creation of podcast, blogs and vlogs has provided our generation an outlet that other generations at our age were never able to experience. After the start-up debacle you would have thought our generation would have stepped away from the information technology highway and walked down the road of safe and secure corporate America, like our parents and their parent before them. Not our generation, instead we stopped reassessed and tried again; we shall not be beaten or discouraged.

Self expression has seemed to follow our generation since childhood. Different styles, different views and a wide verity of ideas pouring from us. Instead of waiting until we grew up, we begin to express ourselves like our parents had in the 60’s. Our roll models were those who stood up for what they believed in, they protested the Vietnam War, they volunteered for political candidates and created a decade that will always be remembered. As the children of baby boomer’s it seems we are following in our parents footsteps.

With the war in the Middle East (Vietnam), the increasing gas prices (70’s gas crises) and job opportunities scarce, Generation Now has found a way to create and maintain their own road to success. The creation of new job titles, becoming a consultant right out of college, contributing commentators on cable news and CEOs of online companies is the world Generation Now has created for themselves. As our parents sit in their corporate offices amazed by the generation proceeding Generation X, the baby boomers second set of children seem to be making their way in the world.

What will come next for Generation Now? With the increase popularity of vlogs, webtv, online business opportunities and the continue growth and determination of the generation, anything could happen. Generation Now has proven to be fighters and survivors in a world of countless change. With the creations of Napster, Myspace, Facebook and youtube this generation will continue to amaze and bring to light new media outlets that will not just entertain but possibly change the world of politics, higher education and countless avenues that haven’t even been discovered yet.

[Via http://buzwriter.wordpress.com]

Monday Fuck #1

2010-01-18T04:18:00.000+02:00

Fuck Nina Simone. Fuck white collar crime. Fuck Iraq. Fuck animation. Fuck politics. Fuck 1991. Fuck Mafia Wars. Fuck the FBI. Fuck wizards. Fuck cocaine. Fuck fucking. Fuck Nosepass. Fuck cookies. Fuck 1,2,3,4. Fuck fedoras. Fuck love. Fuck Brooklyn. Fuck Aunt Suzie. Fuck wordpress. Fuck advertising. Fuck lemons. Fuck the ctrl key. Fuck poorley written fanfiction. Fuck Kathy Selden. Fuck life as we know it. Fuck my mother. Fuck honesty. Fuck condoms. Fuck rent boys. Fuck religion. Fuck 4am. Fuck sleeping.

Fuck everything.

[Via http://fuckthefollowing.wordpress.com]

When Your Cell Phone Dies...

2010-01-15T04:35:00.000+02:00

You never realize how much you depend on those silly things until they don’t work. Actually mine isn’t dead. My cell provider is “experiencing an outage in my area.” The chat representative online can’t tell me when service will be restored either.

I’m not really complaining. I don’t mind how quiet it gets at home sometimes. The kids are old enough now to keep themselves occupied during the evening hours if they’re home, and quite frankly, I feel a little less “needed” as they’ve grown. I’ve encouraged their independence; so if anyone is to blame in all of that, it’s me. I never wanted my children to grow up feeling as if they had to depend on another person to help them make their way in life. The only person we should ever truly be dependent on is Jesus.

So, why is it that now when my phone is on the fritz that I’m feeling a little more isolated than normal?

I have plenty to do. Between getting started on Etsy (announcement coming later this month), crocheting, writing freelance for a couple of websites, working full-time, being a mom & a wife…well, you’d think I’d feel plenty needed & I’d crave more isolation just to keep some of the chaos at bay. I guess most of the time I do crave that isolation and feel comfortable with the silence – or just the background noise of a movie I’ve seen more times than I care to count (The Mummy Returns is currently playing on my DVR.)

Mostly what’s bothering me tonight is the feeling that if I wanted to communicate with someone, my options are limited. Can’t find the home phone - again – we keep losing it since no one ever calls the plain old landline anymore – and since we lost it, the battery is shot & I can’t even page it. I don’t chat much online either. Something about all that typing & waiting to get a response makes it feel too stilted to me. I know my kids are much more comfortable with electronic “talk” than I am, so they think it’s silly to actually use a phone for talking…I’m so last week – or maybe last century – as my daughter would tell me.

So, I sit in the silence & wait for the service to come back on. Maybe I’ll go to bed early. Maybe I’ll check out Facebook.

Maybe I’ll just wait for the phone to ring.

[Via http://sandrascrochetcrafts.wordpress.com]

Cranking on the old table saw

2010-01-15T04:33:00.000+02:00

Santiago Miguel Wallace | Create Your Badge

Got the painting complete….still have to assemble and construct more frames.

Done with this round of constructed and painted hive bodies

[Via http://wallacefamilyapiary.wordpress.com]

Unique Promotional Offer - 10% off with Facebook Screenshot

2010-01-13T04:46:00.000+02:00

We’re looking for help to get as many people as possible exposed to our new line of commercials. If you’re reading this than I’m guessing you’ve already seen them. We’re hoping to get our name out there and get some greater awareness of what we offer. With as much help as we can muster we are hoping the videos go viral and people who have never been to BKB get some idea of what we’re all about. To encourage this we have come up with a unique promotional offer. Simply post the video on your Facebook status and printout a screen shot. Come in to BKB anytime with that printout/coupon and receive 10% off any purchase. Hopefully our loyal customers and supporters will help out and we can get as many eyes on the videos as possible. Hope you enjoyed the videos and stay tuned for more recipe video clips coming. Subscribe to our channel and receive email notification anytime a new video is posted.

[Via http://bkbrino.wordpress.com]

Facebook Resources

2010-01-13T04:18:00.000+02:00

As is the norm for academic research on novel technologies and phenomena, it seemed like we waited ages for quality research about Facebook using user-generated data instead of self-reported usage data. I was recently steered toward two sites that may be useful for staying informed about the latest trends and data analysis using Facebook:

Facebook Data Team, a group of researchers at Facebook who handle the collection, management, and analysis of Facebook data

Overstated, a blog by Cameron Marlow, an in-house researcher at Facebook whose research focuses on “various aspects of online communities including the diffusion of information across online social networks, access to information and social capital, and the incentives that impact social media production.”

These sites might generate interesting new ideas and reveal relevant trends that could improve our exploration of the effects of Facebook on political behavior and the transmission of political information. For example, it seems that there was a trend among Facebook users who supported the idea of health care reform to post a very specific status message this fall, leading to a sharp increase in the use of the word “health care” in status messages (much beyond the increase observed during the 2008 election.

[Via http://humannaturegroup.wordpress.com]

winter is long

2010-01-11T04:49:00.000+02:00

So yeah, here is that ”longer blog post” I referred to in yesterday’s “welcome to my new blog crib” post And rumor has it there may be other bloggy peeps looking to make a blog software switcharoo and join me here…ahhh once again, I am a trendsetter

So first off, how about those Jets? Wasn’t sure how their chances would be yesterday, as I’m sure the Bengals gave them last Sunday’s game just so they could choose their first-round opponent, so to say. And there was some sloppy playing yesterday, but it all came together in the end. (And I just also have to mention that Mark Sanchez is good eye candy ) So they take on San Diego next week…can they repeat the magic?

And now that the new year has started…yeah winter really seems long…everything seems long(er). Last week was the first 5-day week I worked in awhile and it just killed me Well not really. Though of course, the week cannot pass by without incident…well, besides being in an all-day training session for an online reporting tool and feeling so unproductive for one day, there’s a quasi-crisis on one project (thankfully was not my fault, and did not get fingers unfairly pointed at me!) and then I had to save someone else’s ass, who doesn’t follow directions when being told “re-map yourself to the new shared drive and don’t use the old one.” Friday couldn’t come soon enough…

And on that running thang, I got my new orthotics in and have started breaking ‘em in…not sure if they are drastically different from my old ones, but they do feel good and seem to be better made. And my PT is starting to kick my ass-literally-with squats and lunges…I think I am gonna have a chronically sore butt for the next few weeks

And a topic that I’ve mentioned briefly before, but just feel like raising the question again…what is the etiquette on family members being friends/keeping in touch with ex-boyfriends? Like do I have any reason to feel bothered by the fact that my ex-boyfriend (who I havent spoken to in forever) is Facebook friends with my brother and I see him posting comments on my brother’s status? (I give it 2 weeks before he friends both my parents…)

The weather is supposed to get into the 30s this week!! Break out the running shorts…

[Via http://nyflygirl.wordpress.com]

News Roundup: One Tree Hill, 90210, The O.C. and More

2010-01-11T04:39:00.000+02:00

TVByTheNumbers.com is speculating which CW shows will be renewed next year. Stay tuned for my own take in a few days.
Bethany Joy Galeotti (Haley, One Tree Hill) confirmed that she is now on Facebook.
Elizabeth Harnois (Shelley, One Tree Hill) is one of the stars of Miami Medical, a new show starting in April on CBS.
AnnaLynne McCord (Naomi, 90210) is starring in the film Gun, alongside 50 Cent.
Beverly Hills 90210 is mentioned in this article on The Simpsons celebrating their 450th episode.
Southland, starring Benjamin McKenzie (Ryan, The O.C.) and Michael Cudlitz (Tony, Beverly Hills 90210) has its TNT premiere Tuesday night.
Both Kerr Smith (Jack, Dawson’s Creek) and DC get cute mentions in this article on Life Unexpected.
James Van Der Beek (Dawson, Dawson’s Creek) will be on at least eight episodes of Mercy beginning January 27, which also stars Michelle Trachtenberg (Georgina, Gossip Girl).

[Via http://teendramawhore.com]

Refreshingly Fun: What we've been doing with Pepsi

2010-01-08T04:35:00.000+02:00

You’ve probably seen the billboards and bus ads by now, but in case you weren’t aware, we recently launched the digital side of Pepsi’s new Hit Refresh campaign. MTV are pushing it on television, we’re running it here on the ‘net.

It’s pretty cool, a mash-up of Pepsi re-inventing their image and placing a huge focus on digital marketing the combination of which turned into a Twitter based scavenger hunt, with the prizes coming in the form of cold hard cash. Well, not cash so much as 101 slick little EFTPOS cards loaded up with $250 each.

A brief run down: the refreshment company employees (known as Pepsi Refreshers) make their way out into the world, choose an obscure location in a well populated Australian city, and then start tweeting out clues about where they are from the Pepsi Australia Twitter page. We’ve rigged it so that game playing, money lusting, Pepsi fans can also catch these updates on the Facebook Page, or at the Hit Refresh site, in order to more effectively race each other to the prize.

This is excellent because the entire thing can essentially be run from a smartphone, an easy thing for a Pepsi Refresher to have on them at all times. Plus, the players themselves aren’t tied into any particular service in order to keep up with the clues. It’s infectious, interactive, and incredibly efficient – social media at its best, really.

Creative mastermind Toby Caves really took advantage of the fact that APIs and widgets basically rule the internet now, and the main campaign site grew into a deliciously crafted overview of everything that’s happened, and is happening in the competition at any given time.

The latest clues are fed in from the Twitter page, Facebook fans are prominently displayed, a schedule and Google powered map let people know which cities the Refreshers are going to pop up in next and the Winners Gallery shows off all those lucky sods with their fancy new free money cards. It’s all ruled over by an explanatory Flash header, and coated in a vibrant blue that only exists between shades of Pepsi and Twitter.

Speaking of those cards, we feel like they’re a bit of a win. Based on the global Refresh campaign posters and candy colour palette, they seem a bit more recognisable and fun than straight up cash in your hand while still being just as usable.

Stamped with the new Pepsi globe logo, we’ve also slapped some helpful thematic suggestions for spending the well won dollars. Things like style, scene, and so on – after all, if you win a prize you shouldn’t be using it to pay your bills (unless you really need to, then it’s ok). As a general rule though, prizes are fun, should be used for fun, should be spent on your self, and we wanted to encourage that.

We wanted the prize cards to be like the campaign, simple, effective, fun and it feels like we nailed it.

No, it’s not modest or polite to rave on about oneself, but this is a pretty exciting project for us, and the response so far has been amazing, so we thought we’d throw out a few more details and see what you all think.

Check out the campaign, hit us up in the comments and let us know.

[Via http://amnesiablog.wordpress.com]

This Blooming Thing

2010-01-08T04:27:00.000+02:00

Turning the page:

The leisurely planting of artificial crops and plants on Facebook has inspired a more fulfilling and refreshing hobby – growing blooming things in my backyard. There is more joy in bringing true beauty to my living space than virtual farming. My mother inherited my grandmother’s green thumb, and has a thriving home garden. Without a doubt, there is some latent floral capacity waiting for me to discover. It truly is satisfying to see colours popping in my potted garden.

Here are a few illustrations of the blooming things in my backyard.

A refreshing way to start or end an outstanding day! KK

[Via http://klassikurlz.wordpress.com]

10 Ways to Get Serious About Social Media in 2010

2010-01-06T04:37:00.000+02:00

10 Ways to Get Serious About Social Media in 2010

10. Discover your brand. My what? Yes, your brand. Be certain you are consistent with your brand – whether it is management of content, colors, or culture – be sure there is continuity across all channels.

9. Don’t Be A Bad Date. Social networking is centered around a couple of things. And guess what? It’s not all about YOU. It’s about listening. It’s about interaction. It’s about feedback. It’s about insight. It’s about your clients. Most importantly, like any other part of your business – it is built on relationships.

8. Social Media is not the Supreme Medium. You can not rely solely on any one marketing segment. Industry indicators show that numbers are projected to rise, in some cases significantly for 2010 and beyond across various other channels such as Outdoor, Direct Mail, Public Relations, and National Cable TV.

7. Develop a marketing plan and budget. Stick with it, and be sure to market yourself through channels that you can manage and measure your ROI.

6. Don’t know your fan from your follower? Stick with what sets you apart from the pack. Are you an entrepreneur? Didn’t you go into business because of a skill, service, or product that is unique? Focus your energy in those areas, do what you do best and let a true marketing expert handle your social media.

5. Define measurable objectives. If you aren’t going to measure it, why do it? Would you just open your bank account for a free-for-all without knowing where your money is going? No, that’s why we all love debit cards and online banking. Use the same school of thought when pursuing social media and any marketing objectives. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

4. Don’t get left behind. Is Social Media a fad? No. Is it going away? All signs say no. Quit waiting for the right time, or the perfect tool, or the next network. Do you know what is happening while you wait? Everyone using social media is driving traffic to their websites, increasing Google rankings, increasing revenue, and receiving key feedback from clients on ways to improve their products, services, and client interaction.

3. Be open-minded. Just because you hate texting or facebook, that does not mean your target customer does. Don’t let the small things hold you back. Jump in with both feet.

2. Don’t be paralyzed by the fear of Brand Suicide. Mishaps happen. Having the proper resource in place to respond to a misguided communication effort is key.

1. Bah Humbug. Quit counting fans and followers like they are pennies that will immediately impact your bottom line. If that is what you are using social media for – stop. You missed the point.

[Via http://evansmediagroup.wordpress.com]

Тракюрл

2010-01-06T04:05:00.000+02:00

Тази социална медиен мониторинг инструмент от ORM експерт Анди Бийл песни почти всеки елемент от онлайн медии, от блогове, RSS фийдове и Tweets, за изображения и видео. Trackur дава възможност не само за разговори ипотпал марка, но също и оглед на увеличаване или намаляване обема на разговора. По този начин потребителите могат да бъдат известявани за всяко шпайкове в бръмча от даден продукт започне или отрицателно събитие. Плюс това, Trackur предлага анализ на всеки сайт, се споменава срок да бъдат наблюдавани, която позволява на потребителите да се прави разлика как влиятелни този сайт е. Месечен абонамент за проекта Trackur до $ 18 на месец.

[Via http://ipotpalex.wordpress.com]

More shocking & disguting revelations from your serving staff...

2010-01-04T04:42:00.000+02:00

I wish I was done. Perhaps this blog will wrap up all of my current thoughts on the subject. Thanks for hanging in there, my friends. And, I have received some comments on Facebook at Pittsburgh Beat, please comment here too! Thanks to Trista & Dave for not being shy. If you have no idea what I mean, this is a follow-up to my last two posts…

A little background on my shellfish allergy before I write my next rant of a blog…
Don’t ever eat anything anywhere anytime.

You may want to read those 1st.

The first article/slide-show that I’d like to tackle is also called 20 Secrets Your Waiter Won’t Tell You and linked to from one of the articles as 20 More Secrets Your Waiter Won’t Tell You. Apparently originality is lost here.

I’ll tackle the most appalling slides here..

What You’re Really Swallowing

In most restaurants, after 8 p.m. or so, all the coffee is decaf because no one wants to clean two different coffeepots. I’ll bring out a tray with 12 coffees on it and give some to the customers who ordered regular, others to the ones who ordered decaf. But they’re all decaf.

—Charity Ohlund

Ridiculous. What’s so hard about telling people of this policy, or cleaning an extra coffee pot? Don’t they have dish washers for this kind of thing? Any kind of secrecy is just wrong. Granted, the opposite would be much worse for someone with a sensitivity to caffeine… but according to this butthole, it happens quite regularly. Is it too much to expect to get what you order? Really? I work hard for my money just like you, and ought to get what I want when I spend in your workplace.

What We Lie About

If you’re a vegetarian and you ask if we use vegetable stock, I’m going to say yes, even if we don’t. You’ll never know the difference.

I like that this is from someone anonymous. Whoever you are, please take comfort in the fact that you are one of the lowest forms of human life on the planet and that there are not too many out there worse than you. You’re sick. You have a mental illness of some sort or a form of antisocial personality disorder… specifically the following symptoms:

Apparent lack of remorse or empathy; inability to care about hurting others
Tendency to violate the boundaries and rights of others
Disregard for the safety of self or others
Persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social rules, obligations, and norms

This is a serious illness, and I implore you to seek help. This is just completely unacceptable behavior towards your fellow man, besides not doing your job correctly or with any sort of pride or responsibility.

I’m certainly not a vegetarian. In fact, serve up any animal that’s not shellfish, an insect, or having an opposable thumb, and I’ll most likely eat it or at least try it. I love red meat… and white meat too… but there is not much better out there meat-wise than a nice steak, roast, or even a burger. PETA annoys me to no end.

Still, I respect their life choices, life style, and dietary needs. I have several friends and acquaintances that are vegetarian or vegan. It doesn’t matter if their diet is because of personal choices, dietary needs, religious beleifs, or allergies. If I know they’re coming to my house for anything or if I’m taking food to a common event with them… I go out of my way to make sure that the food doesn’t contain animals or animal products. Over the past few years, I even learned about things that I never thought of as animal products like gelatin-free sour cream.

I harp on the allergy thing because it affects me, but someone out there may have a severe allergic reaction to beef or chicken… and if the stock was made from fish or shellfish and someone lied to me about it… well, I might not be around to complain.

I just can’t imagine that in this day and age that anyone would think lying about something like this was acceptable.

What You Don’t Want to Know

Now that I’ve worked in a restaurant, I never ask for lemon in a drink. Everybody touches them. Nobody washes them. We just peel the stickers off, cut them up, and throw them in your iced tea.

—Charity Ohlund, Kansas City waitress

Explains why I’ve gotten so many lemons with stickers on them in my iced teas. Aren’t there health codes or inspectors out there? I’m vehemently against big(er) government, but I would gladly pay higher taxes for inspections to be more frequent and with higher penalties. In fact… I’ll sign up to do them at an incredibly reasonable price.

What You’re Really Swallowing

Skim milk is almost never skim milk. Very few restaurants outside Starbucks carry whole milk, 2 percent milk, skim milk, and half-and-half; it’s just not practical.

—Chris

Skim milk is gross, but… Again, why with the dishonesty? Why not just tell people you don’t have skim milk, then let them make the decision if they want it or not? I’d leave a bigger tip if my server was honest with me about something like that.

What Drives Us Crazy

The single greatest way to get your waiter to hate you? Ask for hot tea. For some reason, an industry that’s managed to streamline everything else hasn’t been able to streamline that. You’ve got to get a pot, boil the water, get the lemons, get the honey, bring a cup and spoon. It’s a lot of work for little reward.

—Christopher Fehlinger, maître d’ at a popular New York City restaurant

Wow. I love hot tea, but don’t order it out much. From now on, every time I feel a waiter or waitress is treating me poorly, I’ll be sure to add to their aggravation and order this. Also, I find it funny that this is from a maître d’. Shouldn’t they be held to an even higher standard? And again… I don’t care what it is… if it’s on the menu, I should be able to order it, and it should not affect your attitude or opinion because… buh-bahhh… IT’S YOUR JOB.

What We Want You to Know

In many restaurants, the tips are pooled, so if you have a bad experience with the server, you’re stiffing the bartender who made your drinks, the water boy who poured your water, sometimes the hostess, the food runners, and maybe the other waiters.

—Christopher Fehlinger

This isn’t common knowledge by now? Surely everyone knows someone who works at a restaurant.

What You Need to Know About Tipping

The best tippers tend to be middle-class or people who have worked for everything they have, not the really wealthy or the kid who inherited the trust fund. Which is not to say that we mind if you use coupons. But when you do, tip on the amount the bill would have been without them.

—Judi Santana

Makes sense… people at about your level who work for all that they have. The coupon thing makes sense. Save a few bucks on the restaurant’s dime, not your server’s.

Well, those articles led me to Frothy Girlz where I looked for an apparently old blog post that keeps coming up to annoy the writer. I didn’t find the original post, but I did find a gem entitled In The Weeds: There’s a Food Allergy Community? Really?.

People just love them some communities. I mean, they must. After my Reader’s Digest piece was picked up by both the Today show and Msnbc.com, the “food allergy community” opened up a peanut and gluten-free can of whoop ass on me. Some scolded me for not caring if their children died, others asked for a full retraction and apology to the community, and others reminded me, again, that they could die.

Who knew there was a food allergy community? Can you imagine the poor restaurant that is chosen for their weekly meetings? The waitress nervously approaches the chef with an order the size of the Bible with all the special notes and codes and the words “COULD DIE!!!” hand written on half the tickets.

I’m disgusted by the cavalier attitude here. I can’t imagine being a parent with a small child that had to deal with this. It’s bad enough when it’s my own problem. Yes, there’s a bunch of us out here, and we’re growing more vocal day by day. Why? Any more, it’s the small groups who have to power. Wait until we start referring to ourselves ans a minority, and our right to eat out in comfort a civil right. Wow, could we ever abuse that if we got it out at the right place and time to the right politicians.

I have dealt with a lot of food allergies in my serving career, and I care, I really do. Every case was handled with extreme care. I would go talk to the chef, who would roll his eyes and then have to stop the line and talk to every cook. I then had to stop and tell every other server, busser, and assistant to make sure not to touch any plates at table 53 without washing their hands of any and all potential allergens. She could die! Meanwhile, the restaurant is completely packed and crazy and this person has put her LIFE in my hands and I have to trust – no, SHE has to trust – that all 95 people who could possibly come in contact with her or her food will completely sanitize their hands, the silverware, the plates, and the very air she breathes of any and all peanut dust.

A chef rolls their eyes? That’s sad. I think they’d get into the business wanting people to love their food, not die from it. Sadly, in with the rest of this, she’s right on. It should not be solely the responsibility of the server. Restaurants everywhere need to be made aware of the inherent dangers of cross contamination in food preparation, cooking, & serving. People suffering from severe food allergies are a small percentage of the population, narrow down the allergy & it’s smaller still. I run into people that aren’t aware of allergies or their possible severity all the time. Some people are taking steps to correct this, many others will be needed to join in & raise awareness.

But it’s too much for you, allergen sufferer, isn’t it? I mean, if you could truly die, how do you throw caution to the wind and hope that your 12 reminders have done the trick? Balls, you.

Yes, balls me. Again, you have to weigh this against the social pressure to dine out, and desire to be like everyone else. It’s much more than just the allergy that’s bothersome, and who doesn’t like to dine out every once in a while, especially in a place that doesn’t have a drive-through or a mascot?

That blog contained a vlog from this guy, who at best needs kicked in the teeth. I can’t really go point-for-point because I don’t really feel like typing out transcripts. If you’re interested in seeing what I mean, check out Would You Say “No Butter” to Julia Child!?. He speaks of how I shouldn’t eat out because I can’t trust anyone but him… even though he’s an ass. He does make one good point saying that people saying they’re allergic to things when they just don’t want them in their food is doing nothing but trivializing it for the rest of us. But, “Anonymous waiter in Hollywood, CA”, don’t pass the buck, you’re still the arrogant bastard here. Yes, I get it, you say things for shock value and to gain new readers… like I just said you need kicked in the teeth. I’m sure you’re fine with that though, & enjoy the reaction. If you’re teaching us to be better customers, who’s teaching you to be a better waiter?

Apparently people complaining upset the “In The Weeds” writer, and she posted another blog, again venting…

1) From Shellshock: “Wow. The author is going to kill someone with the attitude towards allergies. I guess the terms anaphylactic shock and death are words not found in the author’s vocabulary.”

I covered the topic of food allergies already, but again, if you can DIE from someone messing up your food, you might as well ask your waitress to perform your next open heart surgery. It’s really the same risk. I’m not insensitive to your plight. I’ll do my best. But it really sucks that you could die. Because if the Mexican kitchen workers don’t understand what I’m saying about “anaphylactic shock”…. damn.

Again, why not do your part and suggest to the owner/manager/chef that everyone be trained on food allergy awareness? No one’s asking you to perform open heart surgery… we’re just asking you to be clean. That’s all. Don’t let dirty stuff touch clean stuff. Shouldn’t that be in practice anyway?

I mean this stuff is genius…

Education | For Food Industry and Service Professionals

Labeling
Allergen Control Plan for Food Processors
Tips for Food Service Establishments
Welcoming Guests with Food Allergies
Food Allergy and Cross-Contact Restaurant Poster
Chef Card
Food Allergy Training Guide for College Food Services
Food Allergy Training Guide for Hospitals

To prevent allergic reactions, individuals with food allergies rely on accurate ingredient information and safe food handling procedures. The material in this section will provide food industry and service professionals with the information they will need to safely prepare, cook, and serve food to a guest who has food allergies.

Would that really be all that difficult?

Well, maybe I have one more blog left. One dedicated to tipping… and my take on it. I really hope to hear from some people in the industry about that one.

[Via http://aixelsyd13.wordpress.com]

China arrests over 5000 in porn crackdown

2010-01-04T04:38:00.000+02:00

China has arrested over almost 5400 people in 2009 in its latest Internet pornography crackdown, calling the new tougher policy a key piece of China’s “state security.”

In the last month, the Chinese government began offering up to 10,000 yuan (about $1500 USD) to anyone who reported sites featuring porn, and 9000 sites were taken down alongside the arrest of 5394 citizens.

For 2010, China says it will “strengthen punishment for Internet operators that violate the laws and regulations…severely punish operations that have serious problems with harmful information”.

“Purifying the Internet environment and cracking down on Internet crimes is related to long-term state security,” added the ministry, via the AFP.

While the number arrested may seem large, it is important to note that China has 338 million Internet users, and thousands of porn sites and operators remain active today.

Porn, certain Google searches, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are all blocked in the nation.

afterdawn.com

[Via http://mindmapsza.wordpress.com]

10 Resolutions You Can Do for the Philippines While Sitting Down (part 1 of 2)

2010-01-01T04:13:00.000+02:00

By Niña Terol-Zialcita

Last year I published a list of “7 Resolutions You Can Do for the Philippines While Sitting Down.” This being a new year, a new decade, a great round number, we’ll expand our list a bit to 10.

We learned in 2009 that the Internet and social media have become VERY powerful tools for demanding transparency, accountability, and better service from our public officials. What was once hidden and private (i.e., the Hayden Kho-Katrina Halili sex video scandal) was ripped wide open and escalated to the level of a Senate investigation. When the worst storm in decades hit our country, we used our mobile phones and social media to help send rescue and relief where it was most needed. (We also discovered that Metro Manila had only 13 lifeboats to use for emergencies!) When the forces of evil attempted to bury their monstrous deeds with a backhoe, a mobile phone helped avert what would have been the biggest, most horrifying cover-up of that decade.

Now, with the ubiquity of Internet access, WiFi-enabled mobile phones, and cheap computers, we have absolutely NO EXCUSE to not be online. Here’s how we can make the most of it this year.

1. Make the most of FREE information online. Researching for information online is not only useful if you’re a student. It’s also great if you want to get ahead in your job, scout for business or freelancing opportunities to earn more cash, earn a scholarship abroad, or be a better parent, or simply make your daily life a bit better with self-help and self- or home-improvement tips.

Some websites I love in this department: ChangeThis, TED, WhyNot? Forum, Entrepreneur Philippines, EntrepBuff, Hungry People, BabyCenter Philippines, ParenTIN.tv and The Daily Om, just to name a few.

2. Be in the know. While it can be fun to be updated on celebrity chismis, it’s even better to be in the know when it comes to current issues. It makes you look smarter and increases your rankings on the social strata. PLUS, it helps make you a better and more responsible citizen.

Some blogs and websites you can check out are: Blogwatch.ph, PCIJ, Good News Pilipinas; the blogs of Jim Paredes, Manolo Quezon, and Ricky Carandang; and Philippine Blog Awards winners and finalists such as Virtual Journals , The Professional Heckler, TonyoCruz.com, and Pagod Ka Na Ba Maging Si Juan.

If you’re on Twitter (and you SHOULD be), follow these Twitterers for great updates and insights: @ancalerts, @inquirerdotnet, @gmanewstv, @mlq3, @jimparedes, @juliusbabao, @parenTIN, @momblogger, @mindanaoan, @gangbadoy, @wheninmanila, among many others. Scout around the Twitter universe and find your favorites.

3. Be a more vigilant citizen. Use your social networks and your mobile phone to help others in times of need and also to report government irregularities. Nowhere was the power of Pinoy social media more apparent than during the onslaught of typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. Twitter and Facebook became our means of connecting to the authorities and of asking for urgent supplies and services. Google Spreadsheets became en vogue as people learned how to use a database to input and track life-saving information. Now that we have learned some very humbling lessons from this experience, plus a few horrifying ones from the Ampatuan massacre, let’s use what we’ve learned to more responsible and more responsive netizens.

After all, the Internet is the epitome of a truly democratic and empowering social space. Why not translate our online experience to help build a more democratic and empowering Philippines?

4. Know more about the 2010 candidates. Speaking of democracy: there’s the May 10, 2010 elections. With so much at stake for our family’s and country’s future, let’s not just rely on ads and our current perceptions in deciding on whose name to shade in our electronic-friendly ballots. Browse the candidates’ websites to get in-depth information about their profiles, use Google search to see if they’ve been involved in any scandals or corruption cases. Read blogs to see what other people think. Read online news to see where your candidates stand on certain issues. Know their platforms. Know about their history and character. Know about the people around them.

Canvass for a candidate in the same way you canvass for a great mobile phone—know its features and benefits, know how it can help make YOUR life easier, make sure there’s a connection between your values and the candidate’s platform, and make sure you’re electing someone who’s sulit in the long-term. (You don’t want someone who looks good now but who is actually unreliable and untrustworthy.)

Some candidate portals to check out are: Political Arena and YouthVotePhilippines.

5. Support a candidate (or candidateS). If you’re sick and tired of the old trapo ways and the old trapo names, then help elect fresh faces with fresh insights backed by solid principles and track records. And since many of these candidates have neither the money nor the machinery to launch massive ad campaigns, then they will need the help of volunteers like US to gather much-needed resources and communicate their platforms to more people. Let’s remember: TAYO ang taumbayan, TAYO ang pagbabago!

Niña Terol-Zialcita authors the blogs Changemakers Philippines and The Art of Changemaking. She is a political communicator by day, a poet by night, and a social advocate everywhere else in between. Find out more about her on www.ninaterol.com and Twitter.

[Via http://changemakersphilippines.wordpress.com]

Rating my Predictions for 2009 - Looking 2010 - KFed and Britney still not together. .

2010-01-01T03:53:00.000+02:00

Image by Express Monorail (vacation) via Flickr

Many Newspapers continue to struggle those that have high debt levels will consolidate, retrench through bankruptcy, or good old liquidation. .continue trend of starting to limit home delivery or not produce “physical paper” and go with pure web strategy like the Christian Science Monitor.

B – Right on this “old” media is dead . . release of new ereaders like Apple’s ISlate or whatever it is going to be called. . continues to kill physical newspaper companies. . Amazon will release a color screened Kindle by year end. .

Yahoo gets bought – Maybe News Corp, maybe Disney, probably Microsoft. This train wreck has got to end. (What was Jerry Yang and the board thinking when they rebuffed multiple offers from Microsoft?)

B- – Microsoft tried then did search deal. . .whatever next party is over . . Google has won. .

Facebook blows away MySpace Already happening MySpace is the Yahoo toFacebook’s Google . . .Niche social networking like Linkedin find place and start to chip at dominance of “general” social networking sites.

A- – No brainer

Android becomes more prominent Google’s open source smart phone OS challenges major phone Operating Systems with the exception of Apple’s Iphone. Google releases smart phone with major carrier that is free and is supported by advertising. Android powered Netbook released by year-end

B – yes and no . . before my time with free Google phone but will eventually happen

Iphone becomes more dominant moves into second spot behind Nokia for the most handsets shipped 2009. Apple release Iphone nano smaller, more compact, cheaper

B- – no Iphone nano but keeps whipping more and world best-selling smart phone

Twitter becomes hottest and most prevalent new social networking technology

A – yep right on

RFID technology begins to take hold in retail starts to supplement bar code technology to enhance retail experience. .ie checkout and inventory control. Huge shot in the dark without Wal-Mart this will never happen this is an idea whose time has come but will probably be pushed out a few years.

D- Wrong too early. . buy some more time will happen. .eventually

Google tries to make big social networking push (again) via its own technology or through a variety of in house development and key acquisitions (Twitter)

F- Still struggling in this area. .no key deals

New Apple products will include Netbook, New Mac Mini, and Iphone Nano

D – Tablet coming

Hottest Retailer – Justice

B – yep for tweens -but these are probably hotter. . Aeropostale . .Hollister. . Pacsun. . Juicy Couture. .really like Forever 21 and Tilly’s

Big Three turns into Big Two Ford has legs, Chrysler has no value with the exception of Jeep division and Hemi technology, GM who knows . . . but if they were smart they would jettison US operations and focus on international.

B – Chrysler now owned by Fiat, GM is a shell and Ford by far the strongest and still has legs

Real Estate market through most of the US gets worse before it gets better no recovery until spring 2010 at earliest. Although I do see Obama administration switch some focus of bailouts from big companies to homeowners who are in danger of foreclosure.

A – Obama administration stepped up with tax incentives and low interest rates. .

Brittany and Kfed reconcile and become greatest husband-wife team since Sonny and Cher

F- Sorry . .what can I say. .

Predictions 2010

Location aware technology becomes huge. . serving up ads and social networking . . to name a few . .Twitter and Facebook location aware posts going to happen this year. . providers will know where you are and serve up some really cool . .apps and services
Hottest Retailer. . Slow Growth . .Privately owned but very cool store. . Tilley’s . . . Southern California cool. .combined with discipled financials and expansion strategy. .
Green continues to be hot. . Solar cheaper. . Chinese manufacturer’s continue to make cheaper and cheaper cells squeezing other manufacturers. .wind is big. . solar will be bigger. .
e-commerce continues to grow . .but. . .consolidation starts happening. . would love to see Amazon buy Ebay. .but may have anti-trust issues. . Amazon continues to dominate and make good acquisitions like Zappo’s this year.. . will continue to grow. . nobody can beat Amazon online including Wal-Mart. . this year. . after 2010 . .look for Wal-Mart going straight at them. .
Google phone coming sold directly by Google over T-Mobile network . .Motorola and other partners not happy but no other alternative. . continue to get beaten in smart phone market by Apple
Apple in US brings in other partner for network other then ATT. . I say Verizon. . total long shot is Sprint Nextel. . which in turn may be bought by Comcast in 2010. . maybe T-mobile gets bought by Google. .maybe antitrust issue but would be very cool. .and allow Google to deliver universal WiMax type of service to United States. .
Google Chrome OS released . . Chrome browser continue to take market share. . hurt Microsoft and Firefox but biggest casualty will be Safari and MacOS . . this year
Apple tablet released. . Color screen Kindle released. .eventually be two horse race between Apple and Amazon. . in tablet. . ereader category
KFed gets back in action. . gets back in shape and cleans up. . and reconciles with Britney. .

Happy New Year. . .

[Via http://scotttesta.com]

The Obama Administration Gives INTERPOL More Favorable Immunities Than American Law Enforcement Agencies

2009-12-30T04:51:00.000+02:00

Red State

by Erick Erickson (Profile)

Tuesday, December 29th

“This is extremely important because it comports with Barack Obama’s world view in ways harmful to American sovereignty. ”

Okay, okay. I know a lot of you know about this already.

For about a week I have been getting emails about Barack Obama surrendering American sovereignty to Interpol, the international criminal police force under the UN’s jurisdiction, but I honestly couldn’t believe even Obama would do that.

The people emailing me were, frankly, mostly of the black helicopter crowd variety so I dismissed it is as overhyped.

Then RedState regulars like Kenny Soloman and Veronica Estrada started taking it seriously. I had to pay attention.

Finally, I got an email with several links from a friend saying I needed to say something about this. He wanted to make sure it was on my radar screen.

This is an extremely serious issue.

The best and most reasonable take comes from Andy McCarthy. Let me put this in perspective for you.

American law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal level are bound by open records act laws. At the federal level, the Freedom of Information Act applies.

Knowing that an intrepid reporter can, after establishing credible sources, file a judicially enforcible FOIA request to obtain information from a law enforcement agency is one of the chief deterrents to law enforcement agencies from abusing discretionary power.

Additionally, Interpol is a foreign power, but operates out of the U.S. Department of Justice inside the United States. While Interpol has some limited immunities given by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980’s, it does not — or at least did not until last week — have immunity from the 4th Amendment. Consequently, this international agency could, should it abuse its powers, have the federal government seize its assets, etc.

In other words, the international police organization Interpol was treated like every other law enforcement agency in America — it was subject to FOIA requests and could, like any arm of a municipal, county, state, or federal government agency, have its property taken by the federal government if it crossed the boundaries of criminal law protection for the accused.

For no discernible reason whatsoever, last Wednesday when no one was looking, Barack Obama signed an executive order giving all immunities of foreign powers to Interpol.

In other words, Interpol is now in a better position than any American law enforcement institution that operates on American soil. It cannot have its records searched or seized and it is not subject to the restraints of sunshine and transparency that FOIA requests can bring.

At a time when Obama is worried about ensuring the rights of terrorists against the abuses of the American government, he has no problem surrendering American rights to an arm of the United Nations.

This is extremely important because it comports with Barack Obama’s world view in ways harmful to American sovereignty. Obama has said repeatedly that he views no nation as greater than any other nation. He has said repeatedly that one nation should not be able to impose its will on another. He applies this even to the United States.

In Barack Obama’s world, the United States is no better and no worse than Iran, China, North Korea, or Kenya. In his world view, we are all players on an international stage with the United Nations as the leader. Therefore, while Obama will not give up American sovereignty to Peru, he is perfectly happy to give up sovereignty to the United Nations.

The man is not just an amateur. He is also a damnably naive fool.

This is also a backdoor to the International Criminal Court (”ICC”). The United States chose, before Obama took office, to avoid the ICC. Interpol has become the law enforcement arm of the ICC. By taking away the limits to Interpol’s immunity in the United States, Barack Obama has freed the organization up to conduct criminal investigations of individuals inside the United States on behalf of the ICC without any of us knowing about it.

And who does the ICC want to investigate? The lawyers, CIA operatives, and soldiers who have defended the United States in the War on Terror by setting up GTMO and prosecuting the war. These men and women now have yet another deterrent to keep them from being fully effective — the fear of an international criminal investigation that they don’t even know about.

How many Americans will get killed because of the policies Barack Obama is employing to undermine our safety and security in a dangerous world?

[Via http://socialismisnottheanswer.wordpress.com]

Hank Hill Finally On Facebook

2009-12-30T04:44:00.000+02:00

Those who watch King of the Hill (with the awesome Hill family: Hank, Peggy, and Bobby) know that it was earlier in September that the show ended it’s 13th and final season. Even now, I’m still disappointed about not being able to see more new adventures. My spirits are lifted once more as only a few days ago I received a friend request from an old and friendly familiar face on Facebook.

P.S Yes, I know it’s not really him…but it was rather exhilarating to be friend-ed by possibly the best salesman of propane and propane accessories. Now I’m off to play some video games…or as Mr. Hank Hill would call them “them dang vidja games“.

[Via http://brennanv.com]

Contest: Favorite Images of 2009

2009-12-28T04:49:00.000+02:00

I spent some time over the holidays sorting through the images I made during 2009. We didn’t take as many trips as usual and I didn’t get out with the frequency to which I am accustomed. Our little dude Jackson, who is now 9 months old, is to blame. Not that I’m complaining. I’m not – at all. Adding Jackson to our family is the most amazing adventure of my life. It isn’t his fault that he’s just so damn cute I’d rather lie on the living room floor stacking wooden blocks just to watch him knock them down than go out and photograph.

Even without traveling like gypsies I still managed to make a few decent images this year. I was in the process of narrowing them down to the top 5 when my friend CAZ suggested that I let my friends and fans make the selections from a larger group of photos. Brilliant idea, CAZ! So, I sorted through all my photos to select the top 15 for a gallery on my Facebook page. I tried and tried and tried to limit it to 15 but in the end, I couldn’t do it. So, I posted my top 17 images. Nice round number, eh?

You’re probably wondering, “Soooooo, what’s the contest all about?” Here’s the scoop: Votes are being accepted on my Facebook page until Jan. 8, 2010. After that I’ll tally all the votes to select the top 5 of 2009. Everyone who voted will have their name thrown into a hat. I’ll have my wife draw one name from the hat and that person will win a framed 12″ x 18″ print of their choice from the top 5 photos.

Visit my Facebook page to cast your vote!

[Via http://bretedge.wordpress.com]

2009-12-28T04:32:00.000+02:00

Fifty-five Year Old Cartoonist & Internet Entrepreneur Named 2nd Top Twitterer In The World

Rick London of Hot Springs, Ar. was named today the 2nd top Twitterer in the world by

Teqnolog the only statistics service that monitors the social networking industry.

http://teqnolog.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/the-worlds-top-tweeters-might-surprise-you/

London, who founded Londons Times Cartoons www.LondonsTimes.us and its

peripheral funny gift shops with over 80,000 cartoon gifts. London also created the world’s

only famous love quote shoes (ShoesThatAmuse.com) which he designs in conjunction with

U.S. Keds on ladies champion Keds shoes.

A sample Londons Times Cartoon "Salad Bar Exam"

London, 55, was born in Hattiesburg, MS and is now a resident of Hot Springs, Ar where

he enjoys mountain climbing, fishing, hiking, and just about anything outdoors or that has to

do with nature. He supports numerous animal and environmental causes. His cartoon has

been the number one ranked offbeat cartoon (by Google and MSN) since 2005.

——————————————————————————————————————–

Rick London is the founder of Google’s number 1 ranked offbeat cartoon, Londons Times. He also founded the world’s only famous love quote shoes ShoesThatAmuse.com. He has over 80,000 cartoon gifts and collecitbles in his funny gift stores such as Rick London Collection and his mega funny gift shops LTSuperstore.

[Via http://ricklondon.wordpress.com]

6 Social Media Tools Businesses Can Use

2009-12-23T04:52:00.000+02:00

On March 19 I will be fortunate to be one of the workshop presenters at the North Fulton Business Expo. I’m still working on that days presentation but today I’d like to help you by sharing a little information about social media and 6 tools that I think are essential for you to make it work for you.

Many people use the term “Social Media” to represent the vast array of social networking sites, social media sites, and tools available. What we’re really talking about is the Social Web. The Social Web is made up of Social Networking and Social Media.

Social Networking is about sharing the conversation. Social Media is about sharing content. Combined they form an effective toolbox to grow you business.

Sharing the Conversation

There are hundreds social networking sites available and you could spend unlimited time trying to determine how to use each. I’m looking to use social networking in as efficient manner as possible so I focus on two networking sites and one hybrid.

The two sites that I use are LinkedIn and Facebook. Both allow me to build communities of people, engage and interact with them, and communicate to on an ongoing basis. The results may include branding but the end goal is always monetization.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a natural fit from a membership perspective. The average household income per member is $109,000, close to 80% have attended college, and 49% are decision makers. The average LinkedIn member is a great prospect.

LinkedIn is a somewhat closed environment and it takes time and effort to build the right communities and typically most of our communications are indirect in nature. I want those in my networks to see the messages I deliver over time and to get to know, like, and trust me so that when they have a need for the services I provide, I’m top of mind.

It also doesn’t hurt that you have the ability to prospect and then see how you connect into each opportunity.

Facebook

Things are much looser on Facebook. Building communities of the right people still takes time and effort but you can reach out to others without some of the restrictions on LinkedIn. I still primarily communicate with indirect messages, but it just seems easier to do on Facebook.

Most of my prospects live in Atlanta and the Atlanta network on Facebook has over 1.8 million people. If I can engage the right ¼ of a percent, that’s 4,500 people to communicate my message to.

Twitter

The hybrid is Twitter. Twitter is a microblog which seems like it would be part of the social media side. But there is a community aspect in terms of those you follow and those that follow you. Relationships do develop and you can build a significant community of people.

Twitter to me represents a great communications tool. At any point I can tweet a message that will be seen by a percentage of my followers and a percentage of non-followers through the public timeline.

If I build a community of 10,000 followers then at any point that I tweet a message it has the potential to be viewed by a percentage of my followers who are online at the time. Not everyone will be online and see the message. But if I consistently tweet two times a day, every day for six months, then I should be able to place several messages in front of the majority of my followers during this time.

The goal is to communicate the right message that is viewed by a number of followers at the right time. It’s a numbers game and I trust that stars will align often enough to be an effective vehicle to drive traffic and eventually business.

Sharing the Content

The internet is nothing more than a super database of content that people search through to find relevant information. Your goal is to provide valuable content that can be found. If they find your content, they find you.

YouTube

On the Social Media side YouTube allows you to share video content. The site drives a tremendous amount of traffic and can be an extremely useful tool. The ability to tag your videos with keywords allows you to gain exposure to a targeted audience. You simply need to know the keywords your prospects use to find services such as yours.

Another benefit is that in video you can communicate your message in a more engaging format than with simple print. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a good video is worth a million. You can demonstrate expertise, convey an image, and create a mood. Do it creatively and you may find that not only do people want to view your “commercial”, but they share with those they know.

Flickr

Flickr is simply a photo sharing service. The key to Flickr is the ability to tag photos with keywords. Once again you simply need to know the keywords that your prospects use to search online for your services.

Flickr isn’t the most important part of the puzzle but it does play its part in creating your Digital Footprint…which we’ll discuss shortly.

Business Blogging

The final tool that I use to communicate with prospects is a business blog. Most people have websites and they should. A website establishes a presence. It allows you to list your products or services, it can provide educational or information content, and drive sales through ecommerce features.

Most websites “tell and sell” but don’t really do a good job of communicating. Blogs on the other hand are perfect for communicating to and engaging with your visitors. A business blog should convey what your business is about through what it talks about, the information it shares, and the interaction with those posting comments.

The SONARconnects website is designed to tell people who we are, the services we use to help our clients, and how to contact us. On the Social Media Sonar blog I’m more interested in providing valuable content to people, engaging in conversations, and building trust over time.

There’s a difference in the people who contact me through the website compared to those who contact me after reading the blog. The website prospects are contacting me because a service I provide interests them, where those from the blog are contacting me because through the blog they have come to know, like and trust me. They still have a need for a service I provide but the conversation starts from a position of trust.

Wrap Up

Back in the early 2000’s I used Pay-Per-Click campaigns to communicate my message to prospects at the right time…when they were searching for a need based on a keyword. For a while it was cost effective generating $5 for every $1 I spent. Over time the economics changed as more competition came online and competed for the keywords. As a small business I simply couldn’t compete dollar for dollar with the larger companies.

That’s when I turned to social networking. I can compete on cost because most of the sites are free. I only needed to out think and out hustle the larger companies. That’s much easier than competing based on dollars. (note: for some client’s we still conduct Pay-per-click campaigns where the ROI makes sense)

There’s also what I call your Digital Footprint. Most of the activity that you conduct on the various sites is googleble, meaning it gets picked up and indexed by Google. Over time with the right activity you have the ability to capture front page real estate on Google for specific keywords.

These are the six tools that I use on an ongoing basis. The key is to build your communities, engage in conversations, build trust, and communicate your message so that when the time is right you’re top of mind with the prospect..

What are some other social networking/media tools that are working for you?

I hope you’ll attend my workshop. If you need assistance we provide training for the six tools listed above and we provide ongoing management of social media strategies. Call me at (404) 939-7186 or visit the SONARconnects site for more information.

Sean Nelson

[Via http://nfbusinessexpo.wordpress.com]

Did I Say That?

2009-12-23T04:44:00.000+02:00

There’s a new app making the rounds on Facebook that generates the pretty little graphic below with a selection of status updates. It’s kinda silly, I realize, but it was fun to look back through all the stuff I posted through the year. There were a few recurring themes, including coffee, meetings, the Caps, beer, colds, and travel — not necessarily in that order. Facebook clearly remembers more about this year than I do. Maybe I should just use this for my Christmas letter…

Click to enlarge. It's much more legible that way.

[Via http://sweetpeasgarden.wordpress.com]

Issue 5: Personal Branding and the Evolution of the Resume

2009-12-21T04:45:00.000+02:00

Issue 5: The Rear View Mirror

On Apr 3, 2009 @ 14:13 , I posted “Personal Branding and the Evolution of the Resume“.

I have always contested that LinkedIn is the business equivalent of Facebook. However, in both of those social networking models, there is a fundamental difference as it relates to me. The sheer size of my business network compared to my social network requires the necessary toolsets that LinkedIn provides. It provides not only a framework for connecting professionals but also presents an opportunity to collaborate across multiple industries and disciplines like no time before through groups and connections. LinkedIn is now a required business tool in my opinion no different than Office, eMail, Business Contacts (i.e. old school Rolodex), Reference Materials, and your number one business card – your resume.

The resume has evolved a lot over the years. However, when you talk to many, they tend to still focus on the basic elements: work history, STAR stories, and keeping it down to a few pages. While these are still valid points to consider when putting together your resume, they only partially achieve the real goal which is Personal Branding. Personal Branding in my opinion represents the next evolution of resume writing and career development.

How does Personal Branding apply to the knowledge worker and how can LinkedIn help with your Personal Branding?

2009-04-01: The @RLavigne42 Tweet Round-Up

April 1, 2009 in The @RLavigne42 Tweet Round-Up

2009-04-03: The @RLavigne42 Tweet Round-Up

April 3, 2009 in The @RLavigne42 Tweet Round-Up

Personal Branding and the Evolution of the Resume

April 3, 2009 in Office Space

2009-04-04: The @RLavigne42 Tweet Round-Up

April 4, 2009 in The @RLavigne42 Tweet Round-Up

My Thoughts Enclosed…Rb

[Via http://rlavigne42.wordpress.com]

The UK’s Rage Against The X Factor Campaign Works As Rage Against The Machine Take Top Spot In UK Christmas Singles Chart

2009-12-21T04:41:00.000+02:00

A grassroots campaign led by UK-based Facebook users has done the remarkable, helping Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 single “Killing In The Name” take the top spot in the Christmas week singles chart in the UK. (The Christmas Number 1 single has been a big deal in the UK for years.) Over the past few years, the Christmas week top single has been taken by the winner of the UK TV talent show The X Factor. (The X Factor features and is produced by Simon Cowell of American Idol fame.) This year’s winner of The X Factor, Joe McElderry, has released a cover of Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb” as a single, and it was favored early on to be the Christmas week number one single in the UK. In the end, Rage Against The Machine sold 500,000 copies of Killing In The Name” to McElderry’s 450,000 copies of “The Climb” single. Rage Against The Machine is donating a large amount of the proceeds from this week’s sales of their single to the UK charity Shelter, which aids the homeless.

A statement from Rage Against The Machine read in part:

“We’ve shown that we can make a difference and that you don’t have a right to Number One just because Simon Cowell says so, especially with a bad cover!”

The top ten singles in the UK for Christmas week are:

1. Rage Against The Machine – ‘Killing In The Name’

2. Joe McElderry – ‘The Climb’

3. Lady Gaga – ‘Bad Romance’

4. Peter Kay’s Animated All Star Band – ‘The Official BBC Children In Need Medley’

5. 3OH!3 – ‘Starstrukk (feat Katy Perry)’

6. Robbie Williams – ‘You Know Me’

7. Cheryl Cole – ‘ 3 Words’

8. Rihanna – ‘Russian Roulette’

9. Journey – ‘Don’t Stop Believin”

10. Black Eyed Peas – ‘Meet Me Halfway’

For more on this incredible story, see the article from NME.com.

Powerline A.D. extends congratulations to the organizers of the Rage Against The X Factor campaign for showing that enough people still care about good music and are tired of having musical pablum shoved down their throats. Well done to everyone who was involved!

[Via http://powerlinead.wordpress.com]

chalkARTblast 006

2009-12-18T04:43:00.000+02:00

Strategic Relationship Engineering Both On & Offline

chalkARTblast 006

As we wrap up 2009, we wish to extend sincere holiday greetings to each of you. In addition we want to welcome new relationships; thank our stakeholders, clients and partners and generally give thanks to a very intriguing first six months.

Chalkboarder.com Client News

It’s been a very busy six weeks since we last released a chalkARTblast. We’re busy with some new clients and had to dive right in. Here’s some of the more intriguing things coming up on our calendar for the first quarter of 2010.

Filming “Deadly Claws” Aboard An Oregon Dungeness Crab Boat

We were approached by a Dungeness Crab fishing vessel the F/V Harvester sailing out of Coos Bay OR, to sail with them, blog about off-shore crab fishing and do some cooking dockside with the freshest Dungeness Crab you ever had. Well, one thing has led to another and its become a full-fledged video documentary. Now we’re planning (and writing the storyboard for) an hour long production for WebTV, telling the “farm to table” history of off-shore crabbing, the canneries and the danger. They’re going to put me to work as a deckhand in February catching crab for a day in the cold wet swells and then I’ll don a chef jacket and do some cooking at the cannery. The Captain states that this is twenty times more dangerous than “Deadliest Catch”. As an adventurer and complete extrovert, who is passionate about where our food comes from and cooking – its right up my alley.

I hope the Coast Guard Rescue stays close by!

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Marsha Collier Requests Chalkboarder.com Research Collaboration

Marsha Collier, author of “eBay for Dummies”, with over 1 million copies in print worldwide and the top-selling eBay author, requested Chalkboarder.com’s assistance and collaboration through two methods.

Marsha has been commissioned to write a book due in June 2010 on Customer Service, with a chapter on restaurants. After reading our “10% of USA Restaurants Using Social Media” study (September, 2009), she requested us to redo the study in March 2010 for inclusion in the restaurant customer service chapter.

Additionally, Marsha and I are launching this next week a Twitter-based discussion on customer service. This discussion will be weekly on Tuesdays at 9 pm eastern – you can participate by following #custserv.

FohBoh.com Conference on Social Media

We’re still waiting for confirmation of this one – but Michael Atkinson, CEO of the largest social network, FohBoh.com, for the restaurant industry internationally, invited me to participate as a panelist in a conference sometime in 2010. If the conference is confirmed, I’ll be joining Guy Kawasaki and the founders of LinkedIn and Ning.com on-stage to discuss how the social web can and does impact the restaurant industry. I’m extremely humbled and flattered by the invitation and do hope the conference happens.

“Branded” – The Legacy Five Generation Montana Rancher

We’ve been in dialogue with the oldest cattle ranchers association in the USA, Montana Stock Growers Association, for a long time. I started this relationship in 2007 when we were talking about bringing a line to the national restaurant industry of natural Montana beef, raised and processed from birth to box in-state.

Over the past three months we’ve been in dialogue with them about their social media strategies. Again, one thing has led to another and now we are talking about another hour long documentary exploring “farm to table” and what it means to be a five-generation Montana rancher. More danger! The ranchers want to bring me and the filmmaker out during spring branding, put me on a horse, make me handle a rope and possibly make a few Rocky Mountain Oysters (yes, cutting). At the end, after documenting the history of Montana cattle ranching and exploring the myriad issues they face today we’ll do some cooking of beef.

We have much more news below…

Customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty are

built from the table up.

Your food, service, management and corporate identity meet the customer in the restaurant. So why wait until customers leave to measure their experience? Through Rewarding Feedback your customers can articulate specific experiences that are important to them. Rewarding Feedback allows your managers to “hear” what customers are saying while they are still seated and at the height of their dining experience.

Rewarding Feedback

#####

The Oregon Truffle Festival

Seattle’s top food blogger and restaurant consultant, Traca Savadago (http://seattletallpoppy.blogpost.com) and I are headed out to the vineyards of Oregon at the end of January to blog the Oregon Truffle Festival. Willamette Valley Vineyards just seeded 16 acres of truffle spoor and Oregon truffles are rapidly edging out European truffles for reputation. Traca will be with the chefs in the kitchen over the two days while I am video-blogging the two day “Train Your Dog to Hunt Truffles” workshop.

Coffee Fest

We just started a year long relationship to handle all of Coffee Fest’s social media. As part of this, I’m seeking certification as a barista. Coffee Fest is the most respected tradeshow for the specialty coffee and tea industry internationally, with shows in Meadowlands NJ, Minneapolis and Seattle.

We’re launching an internationally comprehensive social media strategy for Coffee Fest, to increase attendance, exhibitors and overall show experience. A very intriguing part of this relationship is that we’ll be live web streaming the Barista Competitions at all three tradeshows! We decided to call this “bean-casting” (instead of sports-casting) the competitions. In addition, I’ll be speaking on the social web at each Coffee Fest Executive Summit during the tradeshows.

Renaissance Gourmet

We’ve been working with Renaissance Gourmet (British Columbia, CAN) on clarifying their casually elegant lifestyle brand and market the past month and finding them sponsors. As part of this, we’re helping to create and develop a strategic brand/concept in WebTV, e-Books, blogging and other content. The market for Renaissance Gourmet is international female 25 to 55, with significant existing traffic (over 125,000 views per

month) coming from the USA, Australia, Canada and the UK. This project also involves international strategies in social media to grow viewership and further monetization of the brand.

Renaissance Gourmet offers casually elegant lifestyle advice, simply upscale gastronomy, travel, farm-to-table documentaries and just shot a pilot for a non-exclusive series on the Australian Lifestyle Podcast Network.

Challenge Issued to USA Restaurant Industry

We’ve tossed a challenge down to the restaurant industry in the USA. With 945,000 restaurant operations in the country, we think we’ve got a great challenge.

We asked the industry to put over 100 marathon runners into the 2011 Boston Marathon, each sponsored with over $1000 in pledges. The fund-raiser would benefit Share Our Strength, a twenty-five year nonprofit working to end childhood hunger domestically by 2015.

We caught the interest of Share Our Strength, which referred the challenge to its Great American Dine Out steering committee and other C-Level industry leaders. Really, all this is my effort to get myself running again J. Just teasing… I’ve been involved with Share Our Strength since 1994.

Rewarding Feedback

Strategic networking on behalf of Rewarding Feedback (Toronto, CAN) continues. We’ve introduced them to several potentials on both coasts of the USA and are waiting for the crush of the holiday chaos to end to close these deals. A very intriguing inquiry occurred from an 87 unit restaurant outfit with four brands from South Africa. It’s really tough to coordinate communication between North America and South Africa.

Event Mingle

Event Mingle is a social web based community platform for trade shows. With extremely robust metric analytics and structure, it empowers tradeshows to largely expand the return on investment for both attendees and exhibitors participating. We’ve crafted a relationship with Event Mingle to introduce and refer them through our deep proprietary networks off line.

Great American Spice Company

Great American Spice Company is a large web-based retailer of spices. We’re spreading the word about them to consumers through a social media strategy.

Social Grub

Social Grub is a robust Facebook application for service industry businesses. This application has powerful back-office tools and empowers businesses to use the social web to offer promotions, coupons and broadcast of events and news both through smart-phones and personal computers. We’re in a mutual relationship with Social Grub, referring their product while they refer us.

Other News & Pursuits

In the first quarter of 2010, we’ll be combining our two identities (Chocorua Group and Chalkboarder.com) into one brand under the Chalkboarder.com logo and identity. We’ve asked a few diverse peers to provide us critique during this process.

We’re waiting for a yea/nay decision on a pitch we made a few weeks ago to the PR firm handling 1800 Tequila (a brand of Cuervo), 5WPR in New York City. This proposal laid out a six-month global social media strategy. The PR firm indicated to us they were taking the proposal to Cuervo and we’re standing by.

We’re in negotiations with a former client in KennebunkportMaine, Old Vines Wine Bar, to strategize and execute their social media.

We’re in negotiations with Wind Horse Coffee in MilwaukieOregon to strategize and execute their social media.

While there are other negotiations underway across North America and internationally, we just don’t feel comfortable yet sharing them.

Well, that’s all the news that we see fit to print this month. We’d like you to know that chalkARTblast will be distributed monthly from here on – distributed sometime right after the 15th of each month.

Peace On Earth and Goodwill To You!

Jeffrey J Kingman

Happy Holidays from Judith, Bill and Jennifer – partners.

chalkARTblast is produced and distributed by Chalkboarder.com

(503) 305-6397

info

[Via http://chalkboarder.wordpress.com]

Top 5 Ways Facebook Ruins Your Life

2009-12-18T04:35:00.000+02:00

1. The asexual girl from high school whose gunt stuck out farther than her tiny tits is listed as ‘married’ and has her recent ultrasound of her trannyspawn as her profile pic.

2. The guy you just banged after the office party posted a comment on the trampy hot girl from work’s page about how he wished her hot ass could have made it to the party.

3. Your alcoholic status being confirmed to your family and coworkers in the form of tagged photos where your eyes are half open and you’re dumping domestic vodka down your throat straight from the bottle. Other photos in the series show you sticking your tongue through your imaginary hand vagina.

4. Fresh photos of your ex dry humping the local cumdumpster keep showing up in your newsfeed.

5. The general realization that you are older, fatter, uglier, less successful and lonelier than everyone you have ever met. EVER.

[Via http://phfblog.wordpress.com]

Wednesday 16th December 2009

2009-12-16T04:47:00.000+02:00

WEDNESDAY 16th DECEMBER

Reasons to dislike Christmas: chavs decorating the outside of their houses with an inordinate amount of lights.

My rule of thumb is this… the more lights there are, the lower class the house owner is.

This looks shit

The chavs haven’t thought this through. They’ll have to pay for the electricity out of their benefits. They could’ve spent that money on the usual fags and booze and junk food.

Or maybe they get free or discounted gas and electric from the council.

Some lights are nice; a lot are vile. Just like the owner.

*****

So the winner of X Factor this year is a bland nobody, releasing an utter pile of dirge. Why does everyone get so excited about this show?

Let me offer a wager that his album will be in the discount bin in 12 months time, he’ll be dropped by his record label in two years and singing on a cruise ship in the Med in three years.

This guy is not a star and never will be.

*****

Good job I didn’t over-react to Leicester City’s back-to-back league defeats. Normal service was resumed with a 3-0 win at the weekend.

*****

More Christmas parties were out and about at Pussycats at the weekend and I guess the same will be true over the next week or so. You get people coming out who probably don’t do much clubbing for the rest of the year and certainly over-indulge to some comic effect!

It's a tough job

Check out the latest photos in the gallery at www.djwanker.com – the official club pictures are at www.telfordnightlife.co.uk – come and see me for a photo, you know where to find me – also get a sticker and a shout out. Just remember your manners…

*****

My services aren’t required on Christmas Eve at Pussycats this year so I’ll probably head into Leicester with my best mate Phil (that’s DJ Phat Phil, who plays funky tunes at Vox Bar every Saturday, by the way) for some liquid refreshments. I can see it getting messy.

It’s what Jesus would’ve wanted. If he ever existed. Which he probably didn’t. But let’s not let the truth stand in the way of an excuse to over-indulge. Quite a few £1 drinks at Walkabout have our names on them. And it would be rude not to partake at that price.

*****

I will be at Cats on New Year’s Eve in charge of the main room as per the last three years.

*****

The International Centre in Telford staged the UK snooker championships last week. One of the competitors was Mark Selby who, like me, is from Leicester. He returned from a match one night to find his room had been ransacked with several items stolen, including his car keys – and then discovered to no great surprise that his fancy motor had been nicked.

There’s a pretty good chance that the thief was from Telford and knew exactly what he was doing and who he was targeting. Selby is probably no stranger to scumbag criminals as he grew up in an area of Leicester called New Parks which is like a larger version of Sutton Hill or Malinslee.

*****

Sometimes a TV show is ideally named for those who watch it. Let me give you an example… a programme mainly viewed by people waiting for death: Countdown.

*****

Some status updates airing dirty washing on Facebook are funny. Some are out of order. Some are random. And some are like this:

“I TELL U WOT MUM U WANT ME TO SLATE U I SHALL !!! u need 2 grow up and wake up to the real world not everything is going 2 go ur way, u cant stamp ur feet just cuz it doesnt. i cnt believe u kicking off bcuz i cnt av 8 ppl in a 2bed flat. ur a spoilt brat and immature thats y every1 ends up fallin out with u in end. u seem to 4get how much stuff u put us ova 3 kids through and 3YRS DNT MAKE UP FOR IT!!

And go on disown me again us lot are used to it we never bin good enough as *****, **** and ***** (names removed) ..obviously….3yrs dnt make up for the rest of missin the rest of our life or wot u put us through wen u did have us…. OUR DAD IS NOT PERFECT BUT HE TOOK US ON AND IF IT WASNT FOR HIM WE DONT NO WHERE WE WUD B !!!”

Come on love, tell us what you REALLY think.

*****

Here’s what I’d write about my mum “I love you more today than I did yesterday and not as much as I will tomorrow.”

And the same goes for my dad.

Anyone thinking I’ve gone all soppy will suffer temporary memory loss and never mention what I’ve just said…

*****

You know you’ve turned into your dad the day you put aside a thin piece of wood specifically to stir paint with.

*****

Groups on Facebook I may avoid joining:

“Anatidaephobia – the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you” This group has nearly 100,000 members!

“I like spoons!” Congratulations to the 16 members who joined.

“I have texted lying down and dropped my phone on my face.” Over 200,000 members… grow up.

*****

From BBC news:

A woman who was given an anti-social behaviour order banning her from making loud noises during sex has admitted breaching the order. Caroline and Steve Cartwright’s love-making was described as “murder” and “unnatural” at Newcastle Crown Court. Neighbour Rachel O’Connor said: ‘The noise sounds like they are both in considerable pain. I have never ever heard anything like it.”

Here are what the sexy people look like…

Keep the noise down

Well, you can see the attraction…

*****

Nike sponsor Tiger Woods.

Their advertising slogan is: “Just Do It.”

I think he took brand loyalty a little too far.

*****

One of the women who claims to have had a fling with Tiger Woods told American TV this week that he would text other ladies while in bed with her. “I don’t think he’s an honest man,” she said.

As honest as sleeping with someone you know is married then?

For the record, and to avoid any accusations of throwing stones in a glass house, I must admit that I have slept with a married woman before.

I said to her: “Look Angelina, it’s a secret between us – I won’t tell Brad.”

*****

Why can’t women put on mascara with their mouth closed?

*****

Tesco have withdrawn a light-hearted Christmas card which said: “Santa loves all kids. Even ginger ones.” This follows a complaint from over-sensitive customer Davinia Phillips who has, yes you guessed it, three ginger children as well as way too much time on her hands.

Here is what the humourless bitch looks like…

Not for me, thanks

After looking at that I can imagine you’re thinking the same as me: “Who was the lucky man who shagged her at least three times?”

*****

I can see a day when someone complains about my blog to the police. Someone did actually threaten to do that earlier this year. She committed a criminal offence (but the complainant didn’t report it to the cops) and I berated her for her behaviour. I still have her email somewhere. I read it whenever I need cheering up.

*****

It’s very hard to have sympathy with the burglar in Buckinghamshire who tied up a man and his family in their home and then suffered permanent brain damage after being viciously attacked with a cricket bat as he fled the scene of the crime. I don’t agree with vigilante behaviour but none of this would’ve happened if he hadn’t committed the offence in the first place.

*****

Another joke from Jimmy Carr: “My mum told me the best time to ask my dad for anything was during sex. Not the best advice I’d ever been given. I burst in through the bedroom door saying: “Can I have a new bike?”. He was very upset. His secretary was surprisingly nice about it. I got the bike.”

*****

And finally… I hope plenty of postmen were intending to fly with British Airways this Christmas. See how they like it.

Cheers for now,

Geoff / DJ Wanker

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"Fuck You" by Lily Allen is perfect for anti-Arroyo protest marches

2009-12-16T04:35:00.000+02:00

An officemate introduced me to English singer Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” song a few months ago. It’s kinda cute when I first heard it, but only got to remember the catchy “Fuck you, fuck you very very much” chorus. It was only a few days ago when I got to read the whole lyrics. It was hilarious. The first person who came into my mind upon reading it was none other than she who pretends to be the President of the Republic of the Philippines: Gloria Macapal Arrovo (hey, I’ve been a champion speller since high school; so don’t antagonize the way I spell).

I posted it in my Facebook account. Then one of my friends commented that it was the same song made for George W. Bush. I thought it was interesting (especially for an Englishwoman to write an anti-Bush song). And upon quick research, here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The song originally appeared on Allen’s Myspace page in 2008 alongside the songs “I Could Say” and “I Don’t Know” (now known as “The Fear”) under the title “Guess Who Batman”. Despite its titular reference to the caped crusader, according to NME and Rolling Stone magazines the song is an anti-George W. Bush protest, while another source the Urban Review states that it was originally inspired by the right-wing British National Party, adding Allen now “feels the track is relevant everywhere now so has removed a particular target.” At the 2009 Glastonbury Festival prior to performing the song, Allen made reference to the elections to the European parliament that had commenced 3 weeks earlier in which the British National Party gained their first ever representative seats, citing this as a reason to sing the song. The song was written by Lily Allen and Greg Kurstin. Lily Allen wrote:

“ We are the youth, we can make coolness for our future, it’s up to us. Go green and hate hate.”

Well, if you ask me, the song is very relevant in the Philippines now, especially for GMA. Anyway, both Bushy and GMA have many similarities in common. Aside from downright evilness and an extreme urge to lie, both of them came into power in 2001. Their respective fathers were ex-presidents (♪ ♩ you want to be like your father / its approval you’re after / well that’s not how you’ll find it ♩ ♫). And George Dubya and Arrovo are now being hailed as the most corrupt and unpopular leaders their respective countries ever had.

I suggest to political activists that they play this happy-soundin’ “Fuck You” song whenever they stage protest rallies against GMA. Or better yet, let us all sing this song the moment she leaves Malacañang Palace next year! Who said protest marches couldn’t be this fun? LOL!!!

[Via http://filipinoscribbles.wordpress.com]

Airing Harry Reid’s Dirty Laundry: We Need a Laundry Czar

2009-12-14T04:50:00.000+02:00

December 13, 2009

A Western Journalism Exclusive By Steve Baldwin

Tips to Socialism is Not the Answer

This partisan dirt bag is beyond redemption, he has virtually no chance of keeping his job, he can barely fog a mirror, the people in Nevada think he is a scumbag. But he will so his best to screw us over and America trying to bring his Marxist agenda to our country. News Flash Harry, sure you have the fix in with the nuclear option, but the rest of your party is going down in flames, next November. If most of your wing nut ideas pass they are clearly Unconstitutional, the key will be finding a judge or court that still believes in the Constitution. Random thoughts while observing the passing parade, J.C.

Senator Harry Reid claims to be an ethical politician and he often employs his Mormon religion in order to demonstrate his alleged immaculacy. However, the reality is that he is, in fact, one of the most ethically challenged politicians in office today. This report will review his alliances with corrupt individuals, his support of ACORN, his ties with organized crime figures and his chronic failure to comply with campaign finance laws.

Harry Reid’s Alliance with Jack Abramoff

Soon after the Jack Abramoff scandal broke, Reid took the lead in attacking Republicans for fostering a “culture of corruption.” (1)

But shortly after making these comments, it was reported that Reid took almost $68,000 from Abramoff’s firm, its PAC and its Indian casino clients. (2)

Reid then tried to distance himself from Abramoff, stating, “[D]on’t lump me in with Jack Abramoff. This is a Republican scandal. Don’t try to give any of it to me.” (3)

Here’s the key passage:

Harry Reid wrote at least four letters helpful in Indian tribes represented by Jack Abramoff, and Reid’s staff had frequent contact with the disgraced lobbyist’s team about legislation….Reid collected nearly $68,000 in political donations from Abramoff’s firm, lobbying partners and clients…Abramoff’s firm also hired one of Reid’s top legislative aides as a lobbyist. (4)

The bulk of the donation money came from Indian tribes who were Abramoff’s clients, most of whom owned casinos in the region. Reid’s letters were meant to influence the Interior Department to reject applications that would allow certain Indian tribes to open up new casinos. Reid was not acting in opposition to gambling, but was rather protecting the existing Indian casinos (Abramoff’s Clients) from having new competition in their regions. (5)

Reid Protects ACORN from Investigation Complete Story

[Via http://dancingczars.wordpress.com]

PeopleString Sign Up

2009-12-14T04:41:00.000+02:00

PeopleString ‘Where You Own the Web’. It is the new wave in relationship and social communities; it has the Creativity, Culture, Expressive Forums and places to meet new people and network; but now it combines all that with giving you a share in the revenues that are created by the users of the website. The ‘other’ social sites keep all of the money for themselves and never give any to their users. They are making millions off of your actions and keeping it all. PeopleString shares the revenues that are generated by its members. This is unique for online social communities. Who other than PeopleString gives its members back 70% of the revenues? Find Out More In additions to the online community, what do you get? Self-Destructing Email, Email Tracking and you can aggregate your other Email Accounts. Video Emails, Contact Management. Web based IM: AOL, YAHOO. GTALK &MSN with Self Destructing feature, 1 on 1 Video Conferencing, Cash Back Shopping, Share Ad/ Search Revenue, Mailbox Cash. How do you get started? Sign Up for your PeopleString account for free and take a short survey. This will position you to share in revenue. PeopleString members get higher payouts when they upgrade to the entrepreneurs package. As long as you are an active member, which means all you need to do is login once a month, you get Paid!!! Oh, if you refer your friends and family and they make money. You make money! The PeopleString technology creates a digital link for life between users. So, are you online interacting on social sites, sending emails, clicking on ads? Then why not get paid for what you are doing? So, go ahead and join PeopleString and start making money on the internet. Whether you want to make a few friends, extra money or a second income you can find it all at PeopleString. Sign Up

[Via http://rtbkatu2.wordpress.com]

Dear Wordpress

2009-12-11T04:39:00.000+02:00

Dear WordPress,

Thank you for helping me solve a problem that it took almost a year for me to solve – consolidation of my live spaces blog and my blogspot page to produce one source of the truth. It was not easy, but I’m glad that the blogosphere that you reside in and google were available to help me close this chapter.

I credit this nifty little tool for helping me with the migration – http://suncan.net/2009/04/live-space-saver-v103-capable-to-export-comments/. Comments were able to come over automatically – the only work I had to do was ensure that my date fields were consistent in live spaces to ensure that the API could pick up my posts dating back to 2006.

Social media is the new shiny toy that everyone around me, professional or otherwise is gravitating towards. I was able to use wordpress’ stats to prove out that a simple push to various social media sites can drive traffic back to the blog. I pushed two of my recent posts to Twitter and Facebook and saw an immediate uplift in traffic from these sites. I’m slowly buying into this as the new shiny toy with little cost of entry and the opportunity to get instant feedback, if someone cares enough to give it to you.

[Via http://adrianduane.wordpress.com]

Local eateries use Twitter, Facebook to connect with customers (revised version)

2009-12-11T04:20:00.000+02:00

Downtown Raleigh restaurants turn to social networking to bring patrons in and keep them coming back

Note to readers: This is a revised version of an article written as an assignment for a course on digital writing that is part of the UNC Certificate in Technology and Communication. You can also read the original post.

By Noelle Talley

RALEIGH: Next time you’re hungry, you might want to check Twitter or Facebook to decide where to grab a meal or snack. Restaurants, including some in downtown Raleigh, are using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to bring in customers and to keep them coming back by highlighting specials, seeking feedback, and offering prizes.

Eric Harris started using social media to promote The Pit in March 2009, soon after becoming manager of the barbeque restaurant on West Davie Street. He said he’d read and heard about businesses using Twitter for marketing and decided to try it.

“With everyone having smart phones and being linked in with each other, the timing was right for it,” said Harris, who posts to both Facebook and Twitter on behalf of The Pit.

Gaining fans and followers

Harris estimates that he spends about an hour and a half a day using Twitter and Facebook for The Pit, which has 373 members in its Facebook group and more than 1,600 followers on Twitter. He initially gained followers by following local breweries and other people who posted about barbeque.

Harris posts photos of The Pit and lists weekly beers on tap on the restaurant’s Facebook page. He averages around six tweets, or Twitter posts, a week.

Recent tweets by Harris included a pre-lunch reminder about the restaurant’s pulled pork barbeque and ribs, a promise of a special desert for people who dined at The Pit that night, and a link to a song about southern barbeque on YouTube.com.

Staying local

Harris credits social networking with helping The Pit build and maintain relationships with its local customers following a wave of national publicity that helped turn the restaurant into a destination for barbeque lovers from beyond the Triangle.

“We want to keep our hometown, local flavor,” Harris said. “Our focus, when I finally figured out what I was doing with it [social networking], was to really emphasize local things. For example, highlight specialty beers on tap and that brings in customers.”

From no cell phone to social media marketer

Blaine Nierman, executive chef and general manager of 518 West Italian Café on West Jones Street, said he didn’t even have a cell phone until four years ago, but his restaurant started using Facebook and Twitter to reach customers in January of this year. Nierman, who had previously started a blog on 518 West’s website, liked the idea of viral, friend-to-friend marketing made possible by online social networking.

“It’s one more marketing tool to use to keep your name in their frontal lobe, in the top three or four choices,” Nierman said.

Enticing customers with gift certificates and prizes

518 West posts messages about once a day, with most posts appearing on both Facebook and Twitter. The restaurant tries to bring customers in by listing specials and giving away gift certificates and other prizes, Nierman explained.

For example, in early November, 518 West gave two tickets to South Pacific to the first person to comment on a Facebook post about the musical. Every Wednesday, 518 West offers gift cards to the first person to re-tweet, or repost, its drink special.

Nierman said he initially offered gift certificates more frequently and counted on word of mouth to bring in fans and followers. 518 West has 314 fans of its Facebook page and 242 followers on Twitter.

“Cost-effective and timely”

Sara Coleman, owner of The Cupcake Shoppe Bakery located at 104 Glenwood Avenue, said she started using Facebook as a marketing tool soon after she launched her business in July 2007, and then opened a Twitter account for her bakery under the name bakeshopgirl in 2008.

“We have a pretty varied client base, from stay-at-home moms to corporate clients,” Coleman said.

She thought Facebook and Twitter would be good ways to communicate with her customers quickly and cheaply, especially compared to printed advertisements and mailings, which must be planned months in advance and cost money.

“It’s a cost-effective, timely way to reach customers,” Coleman said.

As the owner of a busy small business, Coleman also said she likes the convenience of posting to Facebook and Twitter.

“I can do it at 5 AM, or I can do it at midnight,” Coleman said, describing her posting schedule. She said she spends one to two hours on social media in an average week, and three to four hours during busier weeks.

The Cupcake Shoppe Bakery has 853 fans of its Facebook page and 476 followers on Twitter.

Flavor of the week

Coleman uses Facebook and Twitter to share The Cupcake Shoppe’s special flavor for each week. Recent cupcake flavors of the week include sweet potato with marshmallow frosting, cranberry orange, chocolate bacon, and German chocolate.

Coleman also uses social media, especially Facebook, to invite customers to events at the bakery, like a holiday open house. To gain more fans, she said that she makes sure Facebook users can share her invitations with other friends.

Responding to customer feedback

Facebook and Twitter aren’t one-way streets; customers can also share their own views and respond to businesses’ postings.

During the week of November 8-15, 2009, other people mentioned The Pit more than 40 times on Twitter, including several re-tweets of Harris’ posts. A re-tweet means that followers of The Pit shared several of his posts with their own followers. During the same week, 518 West garnered four re-tweets on Twitter and six comments, or online responses from fans, on Facebook, while The Cupcake Shoppe got x re-tweets and 10 Facebook comments.

Nierman said he thinks responding to customers’ comments is key. A customer identified as Pamela posted a comment on Facebook on October 30 questioning a recent health rating of 90 for the restaurant.

“I hope this is something that is being addressed b/c [sic] it’s a shame to have such a low rating for such an otherwise fantastic restaurant,” Pamela commented.

518 West responded to the comment by explaining that the restaurant had purchased new coolers to fix the problem and had requested a re-inspection.

Nierman also recalled a comment from a customer criticizing a dish and suggesting ways to improve it, feedback he says was helpful.

“Any comment, whether good or bad, is going to help us be a better restaurant,” Nierman said.

Coleman said that most of the comments she’s gotten via Facebook and Twitter have been positive, although she recalls one post from a customer who was unhappy about having to stand in line for cupcakes on Valentine’s Day.

On The Cupcake Shoppe’s Facebook page, customers share photos and comments about cakes they’ve ordered for special occasions, like birthdays and wedding anniversaries.

“We send the cake out in a box. We never really get to see where it goes and who’s enjoying it. It’s nice to get to see that and nice to get the feedback,” Coleman says. She also pointed out that other potential customers get to see those positive comments, too.

Free marketing?

Neither Facebook nor Twitter charges money for posting to its site. The low cost of marketing through online social networking is a large part of its appeal for Harris and The Pit, and for Coleman and The Cupcake Shoppe.

But Facebook and Twitter aren’t free for 518 West. After starting the restaurant’s Facebook and Twitter pages, Nierman hired a marketing firm to take over posting duties. He’s considering bringing those duties back in-house to save money.

“We feed them ideas and they actually post it for us,” Nierman said, adding that it’s expensive.

Nierman said he recognizes the irony of paying to use a service that is usually considered to be free. He also thinks it’s hard to tell whether online social networking has actually helped his business’ bottom line.

Advice for other businesses

Doug Sutton, Jr., marketing and community relations manager at NBC 17 and MyNC.com, believes that most businesses can benefit from using tools like Twitter and Facebook.

“This is how people are getting their information. They’re not watching TV all day anymore, but they have their computer or their mobile phone with them,” Sutton said. However, he recommends against relying solely on social networking to bring in business.

Harris recommends that businesses strike the right tone in their messages, which he describes as jovial but professional.

“The real pain of it for me was getting what I wanted to say down to 140 characters and not sounding cheesy like a used car salesman,” said Harris.

Messages posted on Twitter can be no longer than 140 characters, spaces included. Messages posted to Facebook can be up to 420 characters.

Both Nierman and Coleman recommend against posting too many messages because customers may find it annoying, and Sutton cautions that businesses need to make sure they’re using Twitter and Facebook to communicate with their customers, not just to promote themselves.

“Don’t necessarily make it about selling something. People like to make friends online. People go to match.com to find dates. People go on Facebook to find friends. Make it about relationships,” Sutton said.

He recommends finding someone with the business who has the right personality to develop relationships with potential customers through online social networking.

Harris, Nierman and Coleman said they would recommend that other businesses consider using Facebook and Twitter.

“In this economic time, you don’t know what’s driving people to come to a restaurant,” Nierman said. “You need to be willing to try anything to see what’s going to work.”

“You’d be crazy not to use it,” said Coleman.

Tips for Businesses: How to use Facebook and Twitter

Learn how Facebook and Twitter work before you start using them for your business.
Find someone entertaining and engaging to post on behalf of your business.
Check out what the competition and similar businesses are doing and saying online.
Focus on building relationships with customers, not just on promoting your business.
Encourage and respond to comments from customers.
Don’t go overboard by posting too many messages.  Know your customers and think about how much information they’ll want to receive
Make Twitter and Facebook work with traditional marketing, not replace it entirely.
Be patient. It can take time to gain fans and followers online.

Sources: Sara Coleman, Eric Harris, Blaine Nierman and Doug Sutton.

[Via http://noellet.wordpress.com]

Cara melihat foto profil facebook tanpa add/jadi teman

2009-12-09T04:41:00.000+02:00

Cara melihat foto profil facebook tanpa add/jadi teman Ini adalah cara untuk melihat foto-foto orang yang belum kita add di facebook, jadi kita bisa melihat semua foto-foto mereka tanpa meng add mereka terlebih dahulu, cara nya mudah, berikut cara nya:

1. Login ke akun facebook anda.

2. setelah login maka copy URL di bawah ini ke browser anda.

http://www.facebook.com/login.php?api_key=63b7a5b8175cf509044b63af282108b4&v=1.0&next=http%3A%2F%2Fphotostalker.viewprivatefacebookpictures.com%2F&canvas=1&_fb_q=1

3.Setelah itu kita akan mendapati confirmasi untuk menggunakan aplikasi ini, lalu pilih “confirm”.

4. Ketikan Nama, ID atau URL dari profil orang yang ingin kita lihat foto ya (Biasa nya kita mengetikan “NAMA” orang nya karena ini paling mudah).

5. Selesai, sekarang kita bisa melihat foto-foto orang yang ada di fb namun belum menjadi friend kita.

[Via http://gameroms.wordpress.com]

How news organizations need to change to pursue a mobile-first strategy

2009-12-09T04:07:00.000+02:00

I used to watch the crowds in airport lounges when I traveled, studying how people read newspapers. Even with circulation declining, you could see people reading newspapers intently. Especially after 2001, people would have plenty of time to read while waiting for flights, and newsstands stocked a variety of papers to choose from.

Look around an airport lounge now. You’ll see more people looking into their phones than holding newspapers.

I get disgusted as people in news media companies fret over trying to squeeze some money out of Google or trying to charge for the privilege of reading our content. Whatever the merits of those arguments, they are essentially pleas to slow time down. But when I see people in the airport lounge, I know time is only accelerating with each tap of their thumbs.

My concern over this acceleration pushed me last month to call for news companies to pursue a mobile-first strategy. I was pleased with how many people agreed with my call, either in blog comments, tweets or their own blog posts. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wasn’t satisfied, though. He called for me to “describe what a ‘mobile first’ newsroom would do differently.” That’s what I’m trying to do here, start the difficult but important job of answering the question: How do we need to work differently (not just in the newsroom, Jay) to command the attention of those people reading and tapping small screens?

In a different context (not addressing me or the mobile-first strategy), Jeff Jarvis issued a similar call to “futureshockers” this week:

What would be helpful is to see you … flesh out your own visions for a sustainable future of journalism starting TODAY.

I’ll try to answer Jay’s question and Jeff’s challenge on six levels: journalists, designers, technology, sales, marketing and executives. A successful mobile-first strategy will require effective work by all these people (and probably more; please feel welcome to add an area, or to expand on any of my suggestions here). Both men called for detail, so this post will be long, though it won’t provide enough depth in some areas (I invite you to help me add to the depth).

The mobile-first strategy needs to be move beyond advertising and embrace new relationships with the community, as described in my blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. That principle is fundamental to mobile-first success. We can’t simply transfer our failing business model onto mobile platforms.

As with web operations, a crucial question will be whether mobile opportunities should be the responsibility of a separate operation focused exclusively on mobile or whether the full operation needs to share mobile responsibilities. My answer is that if news companies want to succeed in pursuing mobile opportunities, we need to make this success the top priority and responsibility throughout the company. News companies have not succeeded in doing that with the web and may not be able to do that with mobile either.

Certainly some of the companies disrupting us will be focused exclusively on mobile (or mobile and web) opportunities, and some news companies might succeed with small mobile-only operations. I recognize the cultural obstacles will be huge, but I believe the greatest opportunity for success lies in converting an entire existing news operation to a mobile-first strategy, so that is what I will address here. If you are either a mobile-focused startup or a news company trying to succeed with a mobile SWAT team, some of the suggestions here may apply, with adaptation to your situation.

I should also humbly acknowledge here that the best I can do is point a direction and share some ideas. The real answers to Jay’s question will come from the people pursuing mobile opportunities and learning from their successes and mistakes. Here is my effort to point in that direction.

Journalists

The traditional job titles of editors, reporters and photographers are painfully out of date, and the new titles seem inadequate, so I’m just calling them all journalists for purposes of this discussion. Journalists will need to change how they gather, process and distribute information.

Every journalist must quickly get serious and fluent with metadata, data about data (think of the story behind the story). This will feel scary and unreasonable at first. Even the term is a bit scary. But reporters and photographers have always gathered more information than we shared with readers. We often have to tell editors about a story or photo, to help editors understand the context and connections, so they can understand where and how to play a story. That’s sort of what metadata does; it tells the computer, or the phone, about the story (or photo, video or piece of information), so the mobile device knows what to give the user when and where. Think of metadata as context.

Location. Where has always been a journalism fundamental, the fourth of the five W’s. Well, in the mobile-first world, it might become the first W. In gathering content of any kind, we need to provide specific location metadata wherever location is relevant. Our technology staffs will need to automate this as much as possible, when journalists are sending text or images from a location, their phones or laptops should be GPS-enabled to provide the location.

But journalists need to be able to supplement and override automatic location information. Many events and stories have more than one location, and journalists don’t always have access to relevant locations. So a journalist should be able to quickly and easily supply locations not automatically generated and correct the automatic locations.

The data and technology specialists will need to develop ways to use this location in multiple ways. We need to be able to convert addresses automatically to GPS coordinates, because sometimes content gatherers will have an address but will not be at the location physically, so their phones cannot supply GPS data. The presentation needs to let people access information by proximity to their physical location or by other meaningful ways such as a route, a neighborhood, a city or political boundaries such as school districts, wards or legislative districts.

I just enabled geotagging on my Twitter account through Tweetie, so every tweet I send on my iPhone through Tweetie bears a map that other users of clients such as Tweetie and Tweetdeck can see. While it was an amusing novelty to see tweets pinpointing me while traveling in Russia, the value will grow rapidly as we assemble news, information and commercial opportunities from all around town.

We can only begin to imagine the possible uses of location-specific information. Think back to your first cell phone. You could see that it gave you mobility, but you didn’t imagine all the ways you are using it today.

Tagging. Where isn’t the only W we need to provide in the metadata. We need to tag content efficiently with the other relevant W’s: Who is pictured in this photo or video? What is happening? When did it happen? Sometimes why or how or how much will need to be in the tags as well, and some of those questions will need to be answered many times, for each person in a story, video or database or for each date in a narrative story. Efficient tagging is going to require effective semantic tools as well as disciplined use of the tools.

Tagging will help us provide relevant content for users and will help us link to more relevant content. We can’t afford to leave tagging to the whims of individual journalists or to the arbitrary reading of software. We need to train the journalists to use the software (and keep improving the software).

I saw a blog post a while back about a politician who had been “testing the waters” for the 2012 presidential election. A semantic program posted four links with the post: One was appropriate, about the politician in the blog post. Another was about a different candidate testing the waters in 2007 for the 2008 caucuses. A third was about a different politician testing the waters for the 2010 Iowa gubernatorial race. A fourth was about the University of Iowa Hydrology Lab actually testing water. Usually a good semantic program will do better than that in suggesting links or tags.

We need to develop (or work with vendors who are already developing) better software to analyze content and suggest tags more accurately. We need to train journalists to check and correct inappropriate tags and links. We need to train journalists to understand what sort of information needs tags, so they can quickly read and correct or approve the suggested tags and add any other tags needed. Just as journalists learned to use AP style widely, we can and should expect them to follow a uniform style in tagging content.

These tags will help the mobile-first operation quickly provide content that answers the questions and addresses the needs of the user.

Investigative. Newspaper journalists tend to equate investigative journalism with long text stories, so at first blush it might seem that a mobile-first strategy would downplay or eliminate investigative reporting. But effective watchdog reporting deepens a news organization’s bond with a community and it must be part of the mobile-first strategy.

I hope that Investigative Reporters and Editors will be a strong voice in taking advantage of mobile technology for investigative journalism, just as it has with teaching journalists to analyze data and to use the web as a tool both for gathering and distributing investigative journalism. As traditional financial models for news media have been failing, some of the most encouraging business-model innovation has been in the area of investigative reporting, including the community funding of Spot.us and the philanthropic models of ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting. I am confident investigative reporting organizations will lead the way on mobile-focused journalism as well.

Some ways that I think mobile-first strategy might shape investigative reporting:

Crowdsourcing holds great potential for investigative reporting, as some journalists are already demonstrating. A news organization that effectively engages its community on mobile devices will have a valuable crowd enthusiastic about contributing to investigative efforts. Imagine how quickly and effectively a community linked through a mobile-first journalism operation could identify election-day voting problems.
Emails, texts and tweets, the favored short communication forms of the mobile world, can give headlines and summaries of investigative projects, with links to full-text and video accounts or promotion for applications that users can dig into on their phones, on computers with bigger screens, on the printed page or television.
Increasingly video, audio and databases need to be part of the presentation of investigative projects. These can be presented effectively on mobile devices and should be designed primarily for the small screen.
Don’t rule out the possibility that people will read long text on the small screen if you engage them effectively with well-presented content. Amazon has a Kindle iPhone app for people to use for reading books on their phones. I do expect long-form writing to continue to be part of mobile-first journalism.
Newspaper staffs spend lots of time on the print (and sometimes web) presentation of an investigative project. A mobile-first operation might sacrifice some of the print or web package because the first presentation priority will be developing a killer mobile app for the project.

Data. Some of the best innovation of web-focused journalism has been the widespread and creative use of interactive databases, which I detailed in my Newspaper Next report, Be the Answer. Databases are an effective tool for delivering location-specific information and other answers that are valuable for mobile users. News organizations need to maintain (or strengthen) their commitment to development of interactive databases and make mobile presentation a top priority in design of the databases.

One of the best-known journalism databases, EveryBlock, has developed an iPhone application. Development of applications to easily and quickly deliver answers for mobile users needs to be an essential step in developing interactive databases. News organizations need to support the development of the skills and tools for developing effective databases for mobile use.

Archives. Newsrooms maintain extensive archives primarily to serve our staffs. Most archives available to the public are usable by search and for pay (pay that brings in only a trickle of revenue). A mobile-first organization will want to offer appropriate archived information relevant to your location. The information might be free, supported by businesses who want to reach customers at that location, interested in that topic.

Effective use of archives for a mobile-first organization will require tending the metadata of content you produce and collect. I’m sure I don’t know all that we need to do to make full use of our archives, but some possibilities:

We need to add metadata to content gathered from the public. We may do this by a combination of prompts to help contributors submit accurate metadata and staff supplementation of the metadata from contributors.
We might want to add appropriate metadata for mobile-first use to content the organization has created prior to the adoption of mobile-first metadata for new content. For instance, in Cedar Rapids, we might decide that information about how a certain location was affected by the 2008 flood might be valuable to provide, so we would add location metadata, where needed and possible, to content in our archives relating to the flood. Or an organization might decide topic pages on community landmarks or important community issues would be helpful to the mobile audience, so the staff would need to add metadata to archived content on that topic.

Social media. I have blogged and taught extensively about social media’s impact on journalism. I see social media overlapping with the mobile-first strategy, but not duplicating. Many people engage with social media primarily on their laptop or desktop computers, so a social-media strategy needs to be focused more on how to engage through social tools, regardless of which devices people use. However, lots of people use their phones to tweet or check their Facebook pages or watch YouTube videos, so a mobile-first strategy needs to consider at every step how to use social media.

Especially as Foursquare and other location-based platforms grow, and as Twitter and Facebook start adding location metadata, any location-based service needs to aggregate social content for that location. EveryBlock shows the value of aggregating Flickr photographs and videos by location. That’s just the start of how a mobile-first strategy will use social media.

Training. Newsroom training has taken a severe hit in the cutbacks of the last few years. We can’t succeed in shifting to mobile-first strategy without heavy training in a variety of areas, both concepts such as how journalists need to think differently in a mobile-first operation and specific skills such as tagging and using metadata. (I cover training specifically in relation to journalism, but we could add a similar paragraph under each of these areas.)

Design

In a mobile-first operation, design may be both a journalism function and a technology function, or it might be a separate area of the operation, combining both skills. However you organize, you need to make mobile service the priority of everyone involved in design.

Shifting resources. Newspapers spend lots of staff time designing the print edition, and spent lots of money and time over the past few decades redesigning print editions. Considerable but less time and money has been spent redesigning web sites. None of that investment has changed the fact that newspaper circulation is declining rapidly and that most newspaper sites provide frustrating user experiences. While I personally appreciate a strong newspaper design and valued that skill (partly because I lacked it) as an editor, we need to minimize staff and consultant time spent designing the daily newspaper. Other than section fronts, newspaper pages should be templated and even automated as much as possible, so copy editors can flow content into them with minimal time spent on design.

This will make the paper marginally less attractive, but it will have far less negative impact on performance of the print product than the positive impact of all those snappy redesigns on which newspapers spent millions of dollars in staff and consultant time. Print customers pay primarily for content, selection and convenience, which can be provided in a format, still allowing for news judgment, and reserving design flair on the covers. (Of course, when big news breaks, you still blow up the templates for dramatic headlines and photo packages.)

Some staff design time will be required to automate formats of inside pages, but that will be a wise investment of time, if it saves the daily cost of print design. If this is a difficult shift in priorities to imagine, try to remember the last time you spent a lot of time and money to make dramatic improvements in the presentation of your newspaper: Chances are that you received a lot of complaints from readers, even if you thought the redesign was a stunning improvement. Spend those resources instead on delivering a better experience for the mobile user.

Web design has already been formatted pretty tightly in many operations, and most news web sites do need improvements in navigation and design. A web-first operation would spend considerable staff time in improving web design. A mobile-first operation recognizes that the best design for the larger screen of a laptop or desktop computer isn’t the best design for an iPod or cell phone. You need to both minimize staff time spent in web design, to free resources for mobile design, and keep mobile web consumption in mind when you do spend staff resources on web design (for instance, simpler display and larger headlines and body type will make for easier mobile web use).

While vastly better print design delivers only a marginally better user experience (if at all), design is critical to the mobile user experience. Type that is too small or an application that loads slowly or is confusing to use can doom a mobile project. But a “killer app” can develop viral momentum as users talk, tweet and blog their delight. The mobile-first operation needs designers with visual and technical skills to design new products and to carry out the daily execution of existing products. Staff design resources need to be shifted to ensure top priority for mobile design.

Sometimes we will want to do multiple versions of content. For instance, we might change text size on a video clip so the TV and web versions are the right size for those screens but the mobile version has bigger type that is easier to read on the small screen. But in a mobile-first operation, if you can take the time to make only one version, you make the font large enough for the mobile screen and let web and TV users get used to larger text.

Technology

The information technology staff of a news operation faces multiple, constant and often conflicting demands from throughout the operation. Priorities need to be set to ensure that technology experts, whether part of a central IT staff or assigned to a department such as a newsroom, have the training and time to help other departments execute an effective mobile-first strategy.

Development. The web-first operation (or even a print-centric operation with a web site) can make constant demands on web developers. This staff resource needs to shift heavily into mobile development. To the extent that you still commit staff time to web development, you need the training and priorities to ensure that all products developed for the web provide a strong user experience for mobile web use.

Applications. A news operation needs staff developers who can quickly and effectively develop mobile applications. The evolution of mobile devices will dictate whether you can develop effective applications that work on multiple devices or whether you have to develop separate apps for iPhones, Droids, BlackBerries and other products. But applications appear likely to become the primary platform for content and commerce in the mobile world, so they need to become a high priority for the mobile-first operation.

Apps will be important in several ways. You will use apps to deliver content. For instance, you might have apps for specific parts of your routine content, such as a calendar app, obituaries app, local sports team app or business directory app. Or you may develop apps for an investigative project, a new interactive database or for coverage of a big event (for instance, Gazette Communications might develop an Orange Bowl app, providing access to a variety of content about the Hawkeyes’ participation in the Orange Bowl).

Don’t think of apps just as devices for delivery of your content. Apps should become a revenue source, too. Just as newspaper and television companies help business customers produce advertisements for their products, a mobile-first organization is going to help business customers develop mobile apps to promote their businesses and sell their products and services. Many of the aspects of the mobile-first approach will require shifting resources from current print, broadcast or web operations to mobile operations. But development and deployment of commercial applications will produce revenue to support eventual expansion of mobile operations.

Development of commercial applications will need to stress applications whose content can be updated easily by merchants. For instance, if a local pizza parlor has an application for ordering pizzas for pickup or delivery, the operator should be able to update prices or add new ingredients or menu items easily from an office computer, so that applications will update automatically when a user next opens the pizza application.

Sales

Sales staffs need to listen to consumers and businesses and learn how to help businesses serve the mobile audience. In the early stages of a mobile-first organization, sales efforts will be focused heavily on educating and training business customers on mobile opportunities and our organization’s role in connecting businesses in our community with mobile customers.

Traditional advertising was intrusive and often unwelcome. You open your newspaper to continue reading a page-one story and photos of women in bras attempted to catch your eye about the lingerie sale at the local department store. Or you tune in the evening newscast and ads for local car dealers shout at you between the news reports. We still need to sell those ads because they deliver value for businesses in traditional ways and because they are the revenue streams that keep us operating today. But mobile revenue will keep us operating tomorrow and, as I have blogged before, we need to learn how to help businesses pursue mobile opportunities.

Mobile commercial content will be convenient and responsive, rather than intrusive. Search advertising provides the answer that the potential customer was seeking. Location-based advertising should not be intrusive or people will devise ways to turn it off. Our community apps and sites need to provide location-based tabs such as “shop nearby,” “dine nearby” or “nearby entertainment.” The user can ignore those tabs if she knows where she wants to go and just wants information on parking, for instance. But a user who clicks on such a tab welcomes our help (and the help of businesses paying us for access to these customers).

As described in the C3 revenue approach, we need to be sure we don’t fall into the trap of focusing just on advertising. Some of the best mobile opportunities will go much deeper than simply delivering business messages to an audience. We may make the sale, using a customer’s credit card (or possibly an account with us that taps into a credit card, checking account or prepaid balance). We may make a reservation or enroll a user in a class or a business’s preferred customers club. We may send the business an inquiry from the customer.

We also need to be careful not to use just a single mobile tool, such as a mobile web site or iPhone application. Some businesses may want to sponsor breaking news alerts, reaching the text-message audience with a link to the company’s web site or to its enhanced listing in our business directory. Some may want to sponsor a podcast or an email newsletter, reaching people wherever they access email.

Sales staff will need training in how mobile opportunities can work and how to teach a local business to pursue those opportunities. While we need to be willing to invest heavy sales staff time in landing accounts and in training businesses to use their apps, we also need to design self-serve mobile accounts that the business customer can change and update after we get them launched, as describe in the pizza example in the technology section.

We need to develop pricing that helps businesses use our mobile services. We can’t discount services that we know will be valuable. We need an affordable base rate, with most of our pay based on performance as we deliver for our business customers. For instance, in the pizza example, we need to charge a reasonable fee for development of the app. But most of our revenue will come from pizza orders (of course the app needs to record orders accurately for both us and the business customer). We may collect the revenue ourselves from customers’ debit and credit cards, taking our cut before we pass most of it along to the pizza parlor. Or the merchant may collect the money (in this example, we might want to leave an option of paying cash) and we invoice for our fee. Or we may use a third party such as PayPal to handle the transaction.

More and more, we need to sell customers into a full range of services. We sell them an enhanced listing in the business directory, so we can connect them with customers searching for the services they offer. We help them determine the best way to use our services to move the customer toward the transaction or to actually make the sale. We sell them location-based premium listings. We develop an app for them and help them deliver the app to the phones (or other devices) of the right customers. Yes, web, print and broadcast advertising will be part of the package for some customers, too, but we can’t just call on our usual suspects. Location-based advertising will appeal to some merchants who haven’t been interested in reaching the full community through a newspaper or TV ad, but absolutely want to reach the person who’s nearby at lunch time.

Marketing

News companies know how to market newspapers and newscasts. We shouldn’t stop marketing those products and our web sites, but the mobile-first organization will have a mobile-first marketing department. The community knows about the legacy products and will continue to find them with a reduced marketing effort.

We will need an aggressive (and vastly different) marketing effort to tell the community about all the ways we serve your mobile audience. The effective marketing strategy needs at least a two-pronged approach: sophisticated and witty to alert the savvy mobile customer to our services and simple and educational to teach the new or confused mobile customer how many jobs we can help her with.

Of course, print and TV ads will still be a part of the marketing strategy (Apple’s “there’s an app for that” ads and Verizon’s “there’s a map for that” ads have helped both companies pitch their mobile services effectively).

We need to work aggressively in sales channels to get our apps onto people’s phones. Obviously we need to use iPhone’s App Store. We also need to connect with local retailers selling phones and other mobile devices, perhaps offering free apps that introduce and promote our apps or offering to load our package of apps on each phone sold (perhaps as part of a deal that includes advertising for the retailer). We can offer classes in the community on how to use our location-based services and our applications.

We might consider cross-promoting: Get a new iPhone with all our mobile apps with a full-year newspaper subscription.

Other departments

I am sure that I haven’t described all the ways that a legacy news organization needs to embrace a mobile-first strategy. The finance department needs to work with sales on the pricing issues I discussed. The human resources and finance departments needs to update compensation to include incentives for achieving mobile goals. Human resources also needs to work on training and recruiting issues. The details will vary with each organization and its structure and strategy.

Executives

Top executives of news organizations – CEOs, publishers and general managers – need to lead the way to a mobile-first future. If you want to launch a mobile-first SWAT team but not change the whole organization, then the top executive may not need to do much more than provide resources and direction. But if you want to transform a legacy media operation into a mobile-first company, executives need to lead the way aggressively, firmly and consistently. Our default settings are powerful and the whole company or individual departments will veer back to our print-broadcast-web roots if the top bosses are not demanding and vigilant.

The bosses need to set the example by using and mastering mobile apps for their personal use and by consuming our products and rival products on their mobile devices (and talking with managers and staff about how they use them and the lessons they learn). The top bosses need to spend their most time and attention on pursuing mobile opportunities. You can say mobile is important, but if you spend your time on print, broadcast or web issues and hold feet to the fire in those areas, managers and staff will see. They will know by your actions whether mobile first is a wish to achieve in spare time or a priority for all to embrace.

Unless you’re loaded with cash (and who is these days?), you can’t pursue a mobile-first strategy without risk. Traditional media such as print and broadcast provide the revenue that supports your company. The inclination will be strong to try to pursue a mobile strategy on the side, while you protect those core operations. Top executives need to acknowledge the short-term risk of shifting resources away from those core revenue streams and also to reassure managers, staff and shareholders that the long-term risk of timidly pursuing mobile opportunities is far greater.

The top executives need to coach all managers in pursuit of a mobile-first strategy. This means tolerance of mistakes and risks in pursuit of mobile opportunities but no patience for protection of the old priorities. If the top executives preach mobile-first and practice mobile-whenever, whenever will win.

Staffing

A mobile-first operation will need different skills and a different outlook from an organization focused on established pursuits such as print, broadcast and web. Through a combination of training and recruiting, we need to move quickly to the right staff for a mobile-first organization.

I have spent enough time in the training business and learned enough new skills and new thinking myself to know that committed staff members can learn the skills and outlook that a mobile-first organization needs. The more we can help staff members transform, the more we will benefit from their other skills and their community knowledge.

But some staff members will be unable or unwilling to make such a transition. And we will need to hire some people for skills so specialized or advanced that we can’t reasonably expect staff members to reach the necessary level fast enough.

Examples to come

In coming posts, I will provide some examples of how a mobile-first operation might work, both from the company and consumer perspectives. For now, I call your attention to an example published in May by Xark! blogger Dan Conover (the post has a long lead-in that I like, but it’s not why I’m calling this to your attention; the example starts with the subhead, “From documents to data structures”). While he wasn’t writing specifically about mobile-first strategy, Dan gives a great example of how mobile-first journalists would cover a fire. Recovering Journalist blogger Mark Potts also provides an instructive example, with his critique of how the Washington Post, a renowned journalism institution, fails in its mobile operations (again, the example follows a lead-in, in this case, praising my call for a mobile-first strategy).

Let’s get started

In the coming weeks, I will be discussing this approach with my colleagues at Gazette Communications. CEO Chuck Peters has praised the mobile-first approach, and I hope we can start making some significant steps in this direction. I hope your organization starts doing the same thing. As we make progress (or encounter setbacks) here, I will share the story on this blog. I hope others will similarly share the stories of your efforts to pursue mobile strategies.

As we proceed, we need to remember the “good enough” principle of disruptive innovation that Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen taught in the Newspaper Next project. An innovation doesn’t have to be perfect to launch; in fact the cost of pursuing perfection can doom a project to failure. “Good enough” performance along traditional lines is sufficient for launch, if it is providing a distinct advantage over existing products in some new approach.

The cell phone is a perfect example. One of the first times I used a cell phone to dictate a news story was in 1995 in Herington, Kan., as authorities were searching the home of Terry Nichols, Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing. The phone was huge. It dropped the signal twice during the call and I had to call the city desk back. I pretty much had to shout to be heard. And the battery was about to die (as it almost always was, because it didn’t hold its charge very long). By every respect that I would have measured the performance of the phone back in the office on my desk, this cell phone was just barely good enough. But the phone wasn’t back in the office on my desk. It allowed me to dictate from the sidewalk across the street from Nichols’ home as I watched the search. (I think Herington probably had two pay phones and 100 reporters that day; fighting for time on a pay phone to dictate would have been a nightmare.) I knew reporting would never be the same.

Now I carry an iPhone that I use to take pictures and post them to my Flickr page while traveling in Russia or to text tweets to my Twitter feed. And if my Siberian host tells me it’s minus-23, I can use my “Units” app to convert from Celsius and comfort myself that it’s only minus-9 Fahrenheit. That good-enough start didn’t mean we were settling for mediocre. It meant we were getting started on a new road to excellence I couldn’t even imagine then.

That’s what we need to do now with mobile-first strategy.

[Via http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com]

Responding to Facebook's privacy policy

2009-12-07T04:46:00.000+02:00

I read the privacy policy for Facebook, a website that I use daily. I actually did read the privacy policy before joining Facebook, but I read it even more carefully this time. The policy was recently updated on November 19, 2009.

Ways to improve Facebook’s privacy policy

To improve its privacy policy and better protect its users’ privacy, Facebook should consider making the following changes:

1. The privacy policy should be written in a larger font.

The first thing I noticed was that the privacy policy is written in much smaller font than is used for wall posts and other content on Facebook. The contrast made the information difficult to read and would likely discourage some people from reading the information. If Facebook cares about privacy as much as it claims to, it needs to make the privacy policy easier to read.

2. Users should get a direct link to prevent their information from being shared with advertisers.

The policy highlights three key areas at the top of the page: privacy settings for Facebook, privacy settings for outside applications you may use through Facebook, and advertising. Facebook provides direct links where users can establish their privacy settings and application settings. However, while the site states, “ We will not share your information with advertisers without your consent,” it does not provide users with a direct link or detailed description about how to do this. Of course, it is in Facebook’s financial interest that its users not request that the site stop sharing their information with advertisers.

3. Facebook should clearly tell users how long it retains information once they delete it from their profiles.

The privacy policy states, “you can visit your profile at any time to add or remove personal information about yourself” but does not indicate how long the site retains information that you delete. Users to deserve to know if Facebook keeps information that they have chosen to delete from the site.

The policy indicates that Facebook may keep information from deleted profiles for up to 90 days, but it’s unclear if this also applies to information deleted from existing profiles.

4. Facebook should not default any privacy settings to “everyone.”

The privacy policy states clearly what it means to let “everyone” see your information: that everyone on the Internet can access that information, even people who are not members of Facebook; that the information can be indexed by search engines; and that Facebook and others can use the information without regard to privacy settings.

The policy goes on to say that Facebook still uses “everyone” as the default privacy setting for certain types of information. To protect users’ privacy, all settings should default to “only friends” or, at a minimum, “my network and friends.”

5. Restrictions on information shared with third parties needs to be much clearer.

Facebook’s privacy policy outlines a number of instances when Facebook may share users’ information with third parties. “The privacy policy states, “Sometimes we share aggregated information with third parties to help improve or promote our service. But we only do so in such a way that no individual user can be identified or linked to any specific action or information.”

This is vague and does not inspire confidence. Facebook should provide an example that illustrates when, how and why users’ information would be shared with third parties, and what types of information may be shared. Being specific would build trust with skeptical users.

Good things about Facebook’s privacy policy

Facebook’s privacy policy does some things well:

Uses fairly plain language, especially compared to other website privacy policies I’ve read.
Provides contact information clearly and conspicuously if people have questions or comments.
Always links the words “privacy settings” directly to the page where users can establish their privacy settings.
Provides examples to illustrate points that might otherwise be unclear to some readers. In explaining what types of information Facebook shares about its users with advertisers, the policy gives this example: ”we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are.”
When discussing security, links to a helpful series of security tips on the latest threats on Facebook and ways to protect yourself.

[Via http://noellet.wordpress.com]

Spreading the AYCC word through Facebook

2009-12-07T03:52:00.000+02:00

I received an email from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition today (if you voted on YOUth Decide, you would have gotten it too!)

Essentially, using an video advertisement, the AYCC is trying to spread the word about climate change, an issue being advocated by them in the upcoming UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen. How we can help? By spreading the word about the 30 second ad.

“Our ad aims to raise the expectations of the Australian public about the negotiations. We’ve just organised for it to air on Channel 10 for the next two weeks and trying to raise money to put it on Sky TV – so millions of Australians will hear our message!

Now we need to make sure it goes viral online so all our friends see the ad as well.“

You can view and share the video on Facebook here (while you’re at it, become a fan too!). You can also subscribe to their Twitter and Youtube. Got ideas about what’s next for the AYCC? Email them at ideas@youthclimatecoalition.org

You can view the full email after the jump.

Dear Elisha,

We know you’ve already done a lot this year in the lead up to the UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen. Now our movement must be even more strategic, and we’ve made a 30 second ad that we urgently need your help for it to make a difference.

We’re working on the ground here in Copenhagen at the UN Climate Conference to influence the outcomes of the most significant global agreement of our time.

What happens in Australia – what you do – over the next 2 weeks will influence what happens here. So what can we do together? We’ve made an awesome 30 second TV ad that will cut through all the noise – but we need your help to spread the word about it:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Australian-Youth-Climate-Coalition/159082219490

Our ad aims to raise the expectations of the Australian public about the negotiations. We’ve just organised for it to air on Channel 10 for the next two weeks and trying to raise money to put it on Sky TV – so millions of Australians will hear our message!

Now we need to make sure it goes viral online so all our friends see the ad as well.

We’ve all put in some money to get in on national TV, now we’re going to make sure people can’t miss it by having it all over Facebook too. Can you spend a couple of minutes to share our new ad with your friends?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Australian-Youth-Climate-Coalition/159082219490

Today is the first day of the negotiations, and our team of 30 Australian youth and 11 young Pacific Islanders are already making our presence felt. But your actions at home are just as important. If each of us shares this with our friends, we can ensure our message cuts through when it counts most. Please help:

Watch and share the ad: help make Copenhagen a success,

Thank you so much,

Amanda McKenzie, Anna Rose — and the whole AYCC team in Copenhagen

PS – Want to help more? Help put this ad on Sky News where our politicians will see it, by donating online. Our team is producing live updates and blogs, be part of the COP Watch by joining our Copenhagen list here.

[Via http://internetcharity.wordpress.com]

Things I Don't Understand Thursday: Real-Life Ignorers

2009-12-04T04:32:00.000+02:00

Isn’t she cute? My daughter, that is

What’s not cute to me is what’s happening in the background [since I'm considerate and decent, I blotted out their faces]. I understand needing to check your phone in case the babysitter calls to tell you the house is on fire or your child is suspended from the ceiling fan, but this woman sat fingers-to-phone for at least 20 minutes! [Yes, I unofficially timed her.]

This real-life ignoring is reaching epidemic proportions. You see it in restaurants, airports, at the mall–even in church! [SHAME!] And while it can be argued that we have progressed as a society–that we enjoy more conveniences and are more “connected”, this photo exemplifies my point: are we really “more connected” when we ignore life happening around us?

Notice her husband/boyfriend/companion in the brown shirt. He is thoughtfully and fully engaged in conversation with the other couple. Red shirt lady is leaning forward on the table, apparently hanging on his every word. Meanwhile, Clarice is fingering her way into Carpel Tunnel Syndrome and being the latest friend voted off the island of real life.

What kind of message is she sending to her husband? To her friends? Even to me–a stranger secretly taking a picture “of my daughter”–the message I’m getting is that the people around her don’t matter as much as the next ring of the phone.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of being over-connected. To wade too deeply into the cyber-sea. It’s a diversion. It makes shopping easy. It’s fun to update your Facebook status and check your email. It’s enjoyable for me to sit here and blog.

But if it comes to the point that my real, 3D life–my children and husband and friends–have to compete with my phone…slap me. Having a loving community around you is too important to gamble on a text message!

[Via http://heartscape.wordpress.com]

Distribute or Die

2009-12-04T04:31:00.000+02:00

News organizations are coming to grips with the fact that they must engage their readers through new social networking toools like Twitter and Facebook. Excellent article by American Journalism Review

From the article…

Wilmington’s Star-News has gone on the offensive. It’s using Twitter to compete more directly with radio and television by streaming a live Twitter feed of accidents, gridlock venues and other road worries directly onto its homepage. Many are sent in by area residents. The effect is a give and take with readers, says the editor. “More and more people are expecting that kind of conversation with us” via social networking, Tomlin says, “not just pure promotion.”

[Via http://tweetjunk.wordpress.com]

Mark Zuckerberg Open Letter

2009-12-02T04:33:00.000+02:00

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

[Via http://onlineandloggedin.wordpress.com]

Facebook alcanza los 350 Millones de Usuarios y mejora la privacidad

2009-12-02T04:28:00.000+02:00

Recien hace unas horas, Mark Zuckerberg, fundador de Facebook, ha publicado una nota en la que ademas de mencionar que la plataforma ha llegado a la cifra de 350 Millones de usuarios en el mundo, anuncia un cambio en la forma en la que controlamos nuestra informacion en el site.

Como lo explica Zuckerberg, el modelo de privacidad actual de Facebook, se mueve alrededor de “redes” (que se entienden como las comunidades para escuelas, empresas o regiones), y funcionaba muy bien cuando el sitio era mas usado por estudiantes. Hoy dia, existen algunas redes para paises enteros, como India y China.

Segun el crecimiento de Facebook, algunas de estas redes regionales albergan hoy dia a millones de miembros, y el equipo ha conluido que ya no es la mejor manera para que nosotros los usuarios controlemos nuestra privacidad; ya que cerca del 50% de todos los usuarios son miembros de redes regionales; por lo que se vuelve en un problema que atender.

Y entonces cual es el plan?

“Remover completamente las redes regionales y crear un modelo de control de privacidad mas simple, donde puedas configurar el contenido que estara disponible solo para tus amigos, o amigos de tus amigos, o para cualquier persona.”

Y sigue:

“Estamos agregando algo que muchos de ustedes han pedido – la habilidad de controlar quien ve cada pieza individual de contenido que creas y publicas. Ademas, estaremos tambien cumpliendo con una peticion hecha por muchos de ustedes para hacer la configuracion de privacidad mas simple combinando algunas configuraciones. Si quieren leer mas sobre esto, empezamos a discutir el plan en Julio pasado.”

Cuando se hara el cambio?

“Dado que esta actualizacion removera las redes regionales y creara algunos nuevos settings, en las proximas semanas estaremos pidiendote revisar y actualizar tu configuracion de privacidad. Veras un mensaje que explicara los cambios y te llevara a una pagina donde puedes actualizar tus configuraciones. Cuando hayas finalizado, te mostraremos una pagina de confirmacion para que puedas asegurarte de elegir la configuracion correcta para ti. Como siempre, una vez que hayas terminado, siempre podras cambiar tu configuracion en el momento que quieras”

“Estamos trabajando duro para construir controles que pensamos seran mejores para ti, pero tambien entendemos que las necesidades de tosos son diferentes. Te sugeriremos configuraciones basadas en tu nivel actual de privacidad, pero la mejor manera para que encuentres la mejor configuracion es leer todas las opciones y personalizarlas por tu cuenta. Te animo a hacer esto y a considerar con quien estas compartiendo en linea.”

Ahora, aterricemos. Que significa esto para los casi 182,000 usuarios de Facebook en El Salvador? Que pronto (en un par de semanas) tendremos que unirnos a otras o crear nuestras propias redes, fragmentando la red que desaparecera (El Salvador). Aunque una muy buena parte de salvadoren@s no estan en la red “El Salvador”, sino en redes de sus promociones u otras, quiza el impacto no sea muy grande, pero estoy a la expectativa de ver la cantidad de redes que se generaran solo en un pais como el nuestro. Habra que notar tambien el impacto en las paginas y los grupos, ya que las redes regionales eran de gran ventaja para ambos.

Nos ayudara este nuevo cambio a encontrar mas comunidades? quiza veamos redes como Reporteros de El Salvador, Artistas de El Salvador, Musicos de El Salvador, Deportistas de El Salvador, Gente de Negocios de El Salvador, Politicos de El Salvador, Bloggers de El Salvador, Twitters de El Salvador, y quiza hasta encontremos una “Facebook El Salvador”.

Me parece mas bien, que la discusion ahora sera, a que red te vas a unir?

Saludos,

[Via http://communitiesdnablog.com]

Develop A Social Media Strategy

2009-11-30T04:46:00.001+02:00

If a church or a youth ministry wants to launch a social ministry presence there are some things that you can and should do to make it more successful.Whether it is through twitter, myspace, facebook, beebo, virb or any other social website, having a social internet ministry can enhance what you do as a church. Doing it with the right motivation and following through with it can be a way to keep people connected as well as break outside the walls of your church.Here are a couple of principles you can put in place to make it more successful:

Assign A Leader – Having someone lead this, just as someone would lead a physical ministry within your church, is key. This is something you just can’t throw up. If all you are going to do is start a myspace page or facebook page and leave it…DON’T. Do it by having someone lead it. This person could also become your internet pastor. Remember, the internet has quickly shrunk the world. Don’t let your presence be just another site.

Listen – One of the purposes is creating conversations with those within and outside of the church. This means a two-way communication. Remember you are creating relationships it’s not all about you.

Respond – When the tough questions come don’t shy away…respond. Respond in a way that communicates care and God’s grace.

Open the Dialog – It is said that America is the loneliest place to live. Many people want to belong. A social internet presence can be a great entry place for someone. Initiate the conversation. Ask a question.

Encourage – There are plenty of people that are hurting and need the encouragement that they can make it. Be that to them.

Acknowledge – Be aware of what is going on in the world of your community. When someone is hurting acknowledge and care. When someone is doing great…celebrate. Add something to their world.

Stay Transparent – Don’t be more than your not. It’s often easy to hide behind the anonimity of the internet. Be real as a leader and as a church.

Listen – Once again…we live in a world that is hurting. Make sure you are listening.

[Via http://jasoncurlee.com]

Effects of Drining-Hang over Problem.-Guardian UK.

2009-11-30T04:46:00.000+02:00

Hang overs and effects. You may read my blog on liver filed under Health.

Story;

My hangovers are much worse than they used to be, and they are also more delayed. These days, after a heavy night, I wake up feeling OK-ish, but then get progressively worse during the day, ending up with a migraine at around 3pm followed by vomiting until 7pm, and no desire to eat or drink. It used to be white wine that had this effect, but now it’s sadly all types of alcohol in excess. Why should this be?

It sounds as if your liver is being damaged by your excessive alcohol consumption – no hunger, no thirst, nausea and vomiting are all possible indicators of liver problems. The delay in getting over the hangovers is almost certainly because your liver is no longer as efficient as it was in dealing with alcohol. Alcohol in excess is a poison – sorry, but there is no other way of looking at it. As such, you must seek out medical advice on the state of your general health, and on that of your liver in particular. In the meantime, soft drinks can taste as good as alcoholic ones, and don’t give you hangovers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/28/hangovers-cold-numb-fingers

[Via http://ramanan50.wordpress.com]

New Moon: Comedy movie of the year.

2009-11-27T04:32:00.000+02:00

Because uncertainty is always certain.

Some time this week, my Facebook status went like this: I am sure that no one could drag me to the cinema to watch New Moon. My resolve not to watch the movie was stronger than steel, knowing that it was from the same nauseating book. I lived up to my promise… not until last night.

Labs didn’t need to literally drag me to see the movie. I have nothing to do at home so I ate my own words back.

The movie was not bad, honestly. Just exactly like the book, it was hilarious. I gave the comedy movie a five-star rating because it was funny and it was from the same funny book written by a funny author. Sarcasm aside, this is the comedy movie of the year. I love it.

Oh, there’s irony.

[Via http://nostalgiaoutbreak.wordpress.com]

Academic law libraries on Facebook: Please, please, please let me get what I want

2009-11-27T04:19:00.000+02:00

Academic libraries tend to focus on the needs of faculty and students, and the Facebook pages of the four academic law libraries I’m in the process of examining follow those aims with different levels of success. From the four examples I list below, it seems that academic law libraries on tend to use the same formula: information about the university, about the library (library hours, etc.), about what the faculty and students are doing, and what legal materials might help.

Attempting to find the Facebook page for the Dr. Lillian & Dr. Rebecca Chutick Law Library (a.k.a., the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Library) was a bit like pulling my own teeth until I thought, “Perhaps I should check their catalogue page.” Once I did that, the link to the Facebook page was easy to find. (On the left-hand side under the Law Library heading.) Still, not terribly intuitive. Instead, the library’s “homepage” was indistinguishable from the University’s overall page scheme; without any measure of separation, the result is an absolute muddle. That’s a pity, because once you get to the Bibliographic and Electronic Network (i.e., catalogue) page, it’s so easy to find what you want.

Digging into the Facebook page (second link in the paragraph above), it’s fairly conventional but presents a decent amount of material dealing with the law school, legal (and other) resources (for instance, the EU Bookshop), and information regarding the library itself, all of which would be fairly useful if I was a student there. Pity it took a while to find it.

By contrast, finding the Facebook page for the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Library is wonderfully painless: as long as you know what you’re looking for (i.e., the little Facebook icon), just click on it and you’re there. A link to the Facebook page is also available under the Quick Links header on the left-hand side of the page. Redundancy with clarity, I love it. Pleasant looking homepage, too.

The page itself isn’t terribly exciting (which isn’t to say it isn’t informative), although the Electronic Services Librarian is certainly keeping up on the free and/or useful legal resources and interesting stories front. Judging by her blog entry on Xyggy, she vets material pretty thoroughly and provides an honest, considered opinion on the blog.

On the oddities front, she included the case of a prisoner who sued Thanksgiving, among several other things (and people). Interesting, informative, and downright ridiculous. You have to admire the craziness of a prisoner who demands $100 million for damages against defendants that (to quote the decision):

“appear to be various private food companies, a baseball team, a holiday, and the day after Thanksgiving. To the extent any of these defendants are actual entities that may be sued, they are private organizations that do not act under color of state law, an essential element of a § 1983 action.”

Amazing, although it’s a pity I can’t find out exactly what a section 1983 action is because hyperlink (which I removed) links to Westlaw. Still, you have to laugh.

UBC Law Library’s Facebook page is also quite easy to find from the homepage; the link is right under the library name, as is that to the blog and Twitter feed. (Note on the homepage: It’s hideous, I know. Most homepages conforming to the UBC standard format tend to be unbelievably dreadful, undoubtedly to the chagrin of those poor devils tasked with updating them.) To a significant extent, the three social media form less of a triptych than a triplicate, but since not everyone is comfortable with all three services — despite Stephen Fry’s twillionaire status, the allure of Twitter still befuddles me (early days yet) — better to reproduce the information than to create an information gap. The Facebook page covers changes in library policy (extended hours and other events), additions to the electronic resources and links to blog postings announcing new books, as well as law faculty mentions in the media (UBC Reports, etc.). It isn’t exactly page-turning material, but Facebook isn’t all Terry Pratchett now, is it?

On to number four on the list: the University of Windsor’s Paul Martin Law Library. Dear sainted supernatural being, the homepage is a nightmare that ought to be broken up into a number of subsidiary pages. Hasn’t Wikipedia shown us the way? Yes? No? Anyway, forwards I trudge …

So, the Facebook page, where to find it. Nowhere. Maybe I’m as blind as a mole wearing one of those sleep masks at the bottom of an abyss, but I can’t find any link to it. Anywhere. Even using the search function on the page. Oh, certainly, I can find the occasional mention of it, but actually finding it without actually going on to Facebook? Silly me. (RSS feeds and whatnot and other news feeds can be found by clicking on News Feeds on the upper right-hand-side of the page. Maybe the youth of today can figure out that sort of thing, but me, I like it obvious and painfully direct.)

Searching on Facebook, I finally come up with the Paul Martin Law Library’s page. It hasn’t been updated since late September (28 September, to be precise). Unlike the Facebook pages of the other three academic law libraries, which are updated frequently, that of the Paul Martin Law Library is barely used and is consequently of little use, let’s be honest, no use whatsoever. This lack of utility is demonstrated by the distinct absence of fans to the site — only 18 to the hundreds who subscribe to any one of the other three — which makes me wonder what exactly the library was doing establishing a Facebook presence if it wasn’t going to use it.

Of the four Facebook presences examined here, Cleveland-Marshall’s Law Library crosses the line with a good lead with findability and general utility (with a headstart from the elegant library homepage); the UBC Law Library comes up second as it is easily found, is updated frequently, and has decent information; the Dr. Lillian and Dr. Rebecca Chutick Law Library (Benjamin N. Cardozo) comes up a distant third because though it’s updated frequently enough and it has many fans, it’s a pain to find from the Library’s homepage (unless you consider the OPAC the homepage); and having died before leaving the gate, it’s the University of Windsor’s Paul Martin Law Library (och lad, we hardly knew ye … ).

[Via http://bibliodaemon.wordpress.com]

Hacking Facebook: Cheat per Restaurant City

2009-11-25T04:45:00.000+02:00

Reastaurant City è un gioco di Facebook che ti permette di creare e gestire il tuo ristorante virtuale. Inoltre come per Farmville è possibile utilizzare dei cheat per modificare alcuni valori come soldi e livello.

Per Fare tutto questo avrete bisogno di:

1) Cheat Engine 5.5

2) Firefox

3) Flash Player 9 o 10

4) Piaip ’s Restaurant City Hack Tool v1.13

Seguire la guida in questo video di youtube

Per maggiori informazioni commentare.

[Via http://sistemazero.wordpress.com]

미국인들에게 있어 페이스북이란...

2009-11-25T04:42:00.000+02:00

Facebook의 창업자, Mark Zuckerberg의 페이지

지금 미국은 그야말로 소셜네트워크서비스(SNS)의 천국이라고 할 수 있겠다. Myspace로 점화된 소셜네트워크열기가 Facebook으로 옮겨붙어 맹렬히 타오르고 있고 Linkedin, Foursquare같은 유니크한 SNS도 속속 등장하고 있다. 또 올초부터 Twitter가 대박이 터지면서 완전히 Facebook과 Twitter의 쌍두마차가 SNS열기를 견인하고 있는 느낌이다.

미국에서는 TV만 켜면 뉴스앵커, 기자, 배우 등등 할 것 없이 수시로 Facebook, Twitter를 외쳐대고 있는 형편이니 SNS를 쓰지 않는 사람도 도저히 두 서비스를 모를래야 모를 수 없는 상황이다. 우리집에 들르신 부모님이나 우리 아이들도 나에게 “트위터가 뭐냐?”, “아빠 트위터가 뭐야?”라고 물어보는 상황이다.

올초부터 미국에 건너와서 50여명의 미국직원들과 매일 부대끼고 일하는 나는 미국인들에게 Facebook이나 Twitter가 어떤 의미를 지니는지 조금 더 진하게 느끼고 있다. 한마디로 Facebook은 “만인을 위한 SNS”, Twitter는 “할말이 많은 사람을 위한 Broadcasting형 SNS”라고 할 수 있을 것 같다. Company Meeting에서 Facebook을 쓰지 않는 사람을 손들어보라고 하면 대여섯명이 손을 들고, Twitter하는 사람을 손들어보라고 하면 한 10명쯤 손을 든다.

특히 Facebook은 광활한 국토에 흩어져 사는 미국인들에게는 참 각별한 의미가 있는 서비스가 아닐까 하는 생각을 가끔한다. 오늘 또 그런 생각을 다시 한번 하게 되는 일이 있었다.

우리회사에 최근에 입사한 젊은 친구가 있다. 막 대학을 졸업하고 조인한 풋내기인데 오늘 같이 점심을 먹었다. 보스턴에서 서쪽으로 2시간반정도의 매사추세츠의 중소도시에서 자라난 친구다. 이런 저런 이야기를 하다가 Facebook이 화제에 올랐다.

요즘 Facebook기반의 Farmville같은 소셜게임이 인기라고 하자 “맞다. 우리 부모님도 매일같이 페이스북에서 게임한다. 맨날 붙어산다”고 맞장구친다.

음… “부모님과 페이스북 친구로 맺어져 있나? 부모님이 40대후반 아닌가?” “그렇다. 그런데 사실 우리 할머니도 페이스북 하신다”

“헉, 할머니가? 할머니는 연세가 얼마나 되시나?”, “70세”

“아니 할머니가 페이스북에 사진도 올리고 하시나? 어려울텐데…”, “사실 내가 가르쳐 드렸다. 지금은 곧잘하신다”

알고 보니 미전역에 흩어져 사는 가족, 친척들이 모두 페이스북에 가입해 있고 페이스북을 통해 할머니가 자식들과 손자손녀들의 근황을 즐기시는 것이다. 할머니가 엄청 열심히 하신다고 한다.

Facebook의 Status Update를 통해 서로의 근황을 알고 안심감을 느끼며, 가족들에게 무슨 재미있는 소식이 있으면 서로 전화를 걸어 그 화제를 다시 이야기한다는 것이다. 그야말로 Facebook이 Family connector역할을 하는 격이다.

또 다른 직원 이야기. 30대중반의 그녀는 20대시절에 전세계를 순회하는 대형유람선에서 일을 했다. 당시 전세계를 돌며 즐거운 경험을 많이 했고 같이 일하던 승무원들과 진한 우정을 쌓았다. 그런데 그 일을 그만두고는 다 연락이 끊겼다. 그런데 Facebook에 들어간 이후 줄타래엮어내듯이 전세계에 퍼져있는 그 친구들을 다 찾아냈다는 것이다! Facebook을 통해 안부를 서로 전하고 서로 잘 지내고 있다는 것을 확인한 뒤에 뭔가 큰 마음의 안정감을 얻었다고 한다. Facebook이 아니었으면 평생 다시 볼 일이 없었던 사람들이 다시 이어지고 있는 것이다.

또 다른 우리 개발자 하나는 4~5년전에 서해안의 오레곤으로 이주해서 일을 했었다. 새로이 도전하는 마음으로 그곳에 갔지만 피붙이, 친구하나 없는 곳에서 외로움을 느끼다 결국에는 고향 매사추세츠로 돌아왔다. 그래도 당시 사궜던 친구들이 궁금했는데 지금은 Facebook으로 다 연결이 되어 있다. 자기 연락을 할만큼 친한 사이는 아니라도 Facebook을 통해 잘 지내고 있다는 것을 알면 기분이 좋다는 것이다. 게임을 개발하는 그 친구는 또 Twitter도 쓰고 있는데 Game업계에서 자신이 존경하는 멘토들을 Follow하면서 그들의 이야기를 들을 수 있다는 것만으로도 가슴이 설래고 기쁘다는 이야기를 한다. 자신은 트윗을 많이 하는 편은 아니지만 가끔씩 자신의 생각을 공유하고 자신이 존경하는 분들과 의견을 교환할때 희열을 느낀다는 것이다.

SNS가 여러가지 부작용이 있을 수도 있지만 이렇듯 내가 옆에서 관찰한 SNS와 미국인들의 모습은 긍정적인 부분이 많았다. (물론 보스에게 나 SNS 중독됐다고 하지는 않겠지만^^) 이런 SNS의 사회적 영향에 대해 수많은 학자들이 깊이 연구하고 있는 것으로 알고 있다.

그리고 Facebook은 정말로 남녀노소 가리지 않는 유니버설한 웹서비스의 자리에 등극한 것 같다. 글로벌하게 봐도 이제는 Facebook이 인기가 없는 나라를 거의 찾기 어려울 정도다. 굳이 따지자면 Facebook을 block한 중국. 그리고 한국정도라고 할까.

앞으로 2~3년뒤 Facebook과 Twitter의 미래가 궁금해지는 요즘이다.

[Via http://estima.wordpress.com]