I Coulda Been A Contenda

I'm happy to report I've actually made it through one semester of going back to school. Granted, I took one class, but new life experiences sometimes require baby steps. Sure, my team "lost" in our presentation to the client, and I'm fairly uncertain of the grade I'll get in this class, but I sit here now -- in all my post-final-presentation glory -- and look back with satisfaction.

What I've learned:
1) There's more to social media than tweeting about your lunch. Facebook and Twitter can exponentially help or hinder your brand. Be smart about how you use these platforms. Know what's going on in the background and what "allowing" a Facebook app really means for you and your information. Knowing the implications of posting/saying/linking something on any social media platform is key to using them successfully. Why? Watch the 7-second video below:

 2) Group work and clients - you never know what you're going to get. By the grace of our professorly overlords, I was in a group who worked really well together. Would I have rather been on my own for a project? Yep. Am I a control freak? Sure thing. Does the real world let you work by yourself all the time? Ah, nope. So yes, I get why groupwork is important. And about clients: Good ideas sometimes don't have a place in their reality. Knowing the full scope of the reality of your client will help you deiver a product they can use. I believe our group had a pretty solid "big idea," the trouble is, that big idea didn't fit in with what the client could best sell to the bosses. No matter how much the medicine will help, you can't make the clients take it. Sometimes, you have to treat the symptoms instead. Our group made the medicine and we can hope they'll take it -- someday.

3) My social graph is what I want it to be. Before this class, I struggled with my digital identity and what it should be. Facebook was for friends and my "IRL" folks, while Twitter was for the connections I'd made with my faceless crew - my digital editing friends, knitting circles, etc. I had a hard time reconciling the two sides - one was definitely more anonymous (Twitter), while the other one was what I wanted people to see about me and my life. What did I learn? It's OK to focus certain channels at certain facets of your digital identity. 

4) I coulda been a contenda. Or, at least a know-enough-to-be-dangerous programmer. Little did I know that this class would take me into my very own hell known as Object-Oriented Programming. With the introduction to App Inventor, we were able to create basic, mobile apps. Now, this Google Labs products is headed out to the big world of open source (and Google is closing its service as of Dec. 31) - read more about that news here. I've always been fairly technically inclined, but having no programming experience like this made for a challenge. A big challenge. I learned I really enjoy the technical side of this digital media stuff, but am not ever going to be a developer. I think the creative side needs to know a bit about how the "other side" works so the two can communicate better. This foray into codeland was truly interesting. Am I glad I won't see App Inventor again? You bet your boots I am. But in the end, ours was one of the only groups with a functional app. We were so proud. And we still lost... cue the next video:

 5) Use it for good. With digital media comes the risk of negativity. Since it's such an immediate entity, allowing you to instantly communicate or react to pretty much anything that's out there, you run the risk of typing before you think. We should all take to heart the immortal words from the SpiderMan comic, "with great power comes great responsibility." With digital media, it's no different: Make sure what you're putting out there is really what you want someone to see with your name by it.

Social Media is Not for Dummies

Over this past weekend, I learned far more about water valves -- and the importance of exercising them -- than I ever thought possible. Actually, I never thought about water valves, so it makes this past weekend's adventure even that much more bizarre. And considering I use the word "thingy" as a technical term, you'll see why the idea of me working on marketing the machinery in this video is a pretty hilarious thought (video courtesy of Valve Boss and YouTube).

As a naive student at the beginning of the semester, my altruistic self volunteered to help Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week (BREW) promote their cause through social media. Three other members of my class volunteered, too. We divided up the week's events and decided who would attend what. We were to be social media reporters, sitting quietly in the background, updating Facebook and Twitter with gems pulled from these talks/luncheons/workshops/etc.

Or so, I thought. On Friday, I show up to Startup Weekend, a 52-hour event where smart people bring their smart ideas to develop with the help of the other smart people who've shown up, to set up my laptop and dutifully report on the night's events. And then I was participating. My plan of coming back for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday to report on the developments changed to helping a man named John Singleton refine his pitch and marketing tactics for his baby, The Valve Boss.

I spent 21 hours over the next 2.5 days working with this team of strangers who had come together at this event. And in the end, we were winners. Not First Place, Blue Ribbon-type winners, but winners because John's pitch resulted in him winning three months of office space at Springboard, a co-working space in downtown Baton Rouge (slated to open this December), where other entrepreneurs and experts will gather and help each other through advice and expertise. Were we the most dynamic, digital team there? Not by a long shot. Did each of us learn something? Heck, yes.

Many people discount social media's power, or worse, assume any well-trained pet could figure it out. This weekend, through all the flying hastags (#) promoting new product ideas, real people came together -- in person -- to help each other succeed. Real, smart people. And through it, I helped someone understand its use, complexity, and power a little more clearly.

How did I help John? I helped, along with another teammate, explain the importance of his Facebook page and Twitter account. He already had them, but wasn't sure how to use them effectively. As a result of this weekend, his Twitter handle (@ValveBoss) has multiplied its followers three-fold, and his Facebook page (which I checked in on today), has new posts and videos to share as well as a new description of the product based on the repositioning we worked on this weekend. I feel like a proud Mama whose child has listened to her advice. It's not a sexy product, so who but a Mama could love a face like this: 

(photo from The Valve Boss)

Facebook Makes Me Laugh

Usually my status updates on Facebook are meant to give people a taste of my keen sense of humor. Sometimes they offer my witty observations of life, but mostly they're talking about the husband's antics, or those of the cats. It's a quip that marks what my life was like at a specific moment in time. What surprises me, though, is how people react.

Take, for example, a popular post:

My husband was wearing his ridiculous lounge wear with the stylish addition of a pot holder. Why a pot holder? Because the mug of hot cocoa he microwaved became too hot. Why not a pot holder might be a better question. Posts like this garner the most responses from my bizarre network of friends and family. In this post, nine people liked it and 14 felt the need to comment.

Enter the cat:

People on the Internet love pictures of cats, that's been made clear. Nine people liked this picture, too, but a different nine people than those who liked the husband-sporting-a-pot-holder photo.

Upon scrolling through my Facebook wall for the past few months, I've come to a few conclusions:

1. I do not go to Facebook to share "real" news about myself. People in my Facebook world want light, fluffy musings and I am happy to give that to them. I do not go on to Vaguebook about life trials and injustices. There's enough of that crap. And if it's really important that you know about something, I'll call you.
2. Part, if not most, of my online "brand" is my sense of humor. Life happens, and as Jimmy Buffett would say, "If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane" (horse's mouth at 1:07). I believe that you get what you give, so giving off post after post of negativity will only make fewer people listen when I have something to say. Not good to drive away your potential audience, right?
3. People are more apt to respond to a picture with a cat, than a picture without one. The exception is including a picture of the husband in a funny scenario. Combine the two and you get a new level of comment glory:

The difference is people still talk about this picture to us in person. While there were four comments on the picture and four likes, we've had multiple friends bring this up when we run into them in real life. What did I learn from that? Humor is memorable. Work it in to your daily life not only for your own sanity, but with the knowledge that it may help people remember you some day. Only (ok mostly) good things can come of that, right?

Tweeting from the Id

I'm helping, along with three other folks, to promote Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week through social media. At first, I thought, "What in the world have I gotten myself into?" Now I'm thinking, "How do I love Tweetdeck, let me count the ways..."(Seriously,  I can schedule a week's worth of tweets at once and then not have to remember to tweet at specific times. Brilliant stuff.)

Through a class I'm taking at LSU, and through talking with these PR and Tourism professionals about this week-long event, I've discovered being the "voice" of an organization on a social media account is kind of up my alley. I suppose it goes back to my newspaper days and writing what we called refers. (Not pronounced as "a doctor refers a patient," but as "hey, I never would have guessed your Dad smoked reefer in the '70s"). Refers are those little gems found on a section front of a newspaper that -- appropriately -- refer you to other stories or information inside the paper. These nuggets of personality and wisdom were anonymous - no bylines or photo credits. And they were generally my favorite things to write.

Being one of the voices for @BREW_2011 on Twitter (and for the organization's Facebook page) has brought me back to the days of writing short, informative quips that are designed to grab your attention and gain your interest. These quips come from a special side of  my brain, the part that can boil things down to its essential ingredients with just enough snark to - I hope - make people either turn to that page or click on that link. Freud called that part of my brain (the dark, desire-centered part) the Id. Tweeting from the Id works for me. And apparently it works for the masses, too. I saw this tweet in my newsfeed this past weekend and laughed at humanity:

What' I've learned is not only does your message on social media  have to have "meat" to it (good information), it has to be engaging and, preferably, funny. People gravitate toward funny and informative. They retweet funny. They follow informative. If my Id can continue to think of snarky things and turn it into a conversational tweet, then I'm fairly certain my help for the BREW project will be useful. And it can only help this sweet digital brand o' mine in the long run, too.

A Third-Party Response

As if Mashable read my story (c'mon, it's entirely possible), today it offered a solution to help Netflix in its quest to, oh, stay alive and offer me more movies.

Here's a quick synopsis in case you're too lazy to click the link above:

"5 Ways Netflix Can Stop the Bleeding," by Lance Ulanoff at Mashable.

1) No More Reversals 

2) Sign One Big Studio Now

3) Create a Lifetime Membership Option

4) Sell

5) Make Hastings Chairman Only and Bring in a New CEO

What I love about this: Idea No. 2. Yes! Isn't this what all streaming subscribers have been screaming for months/years? Offer us more! If you provide a streaming-only option, give it some legs to stand on. I won't go back to getting DVDs, but eventually I will work my way through your sad streaming offerings. Don't make me cancel because of -that-.

What about the other ideas? Sure. Fine. Whatever. Selling, Idea No. 4,  makes me nervous, because with selling comes more change, which kind of contradicts Idea No. 1. Lifetime membership? Meh. I don't want to shell out $300 or $500 right now, but I'm sure some people would. And the new CEO option? I don't really care who the CEO of Netflix is, honestly. I want a broader assortment of TV shows and movies. If Reed can do that, great. Hooray Reed. If not, I'm happy to see what a new CEO can do. I think. Unless that means more change for me, which I'm really kind of over at this point.

My "Love and Hate" show, featuring Netflix

Tonight I tell a tale of longing and resentment. The object of these feelings, I'm sure, cares little of them; but I'm here to tell a story.

Picture it: the year was 2006 and I found a new (to me) service called Netflix. It sent me movies just a few days after I requested them, it even offered streaming, though we weren't yet ready for such bold moves then. It suggested titles that might interest me, and it let me pause my membership if ever we were on holiday. We carried along in this fashion, embracing the streaming feature in 2009, all the while still receiving the occasional movie by mail.

And then came the year 2011. Netflix approached me and demanded I choose between its mailed DVD feature or its streaming. Oh, but I had grown to love the streaming, as we are without cable. And, yes, we had neglected the DVD by mail feature, but we loved it no less! And now we must choose? We chose streaming.

Oh, how Netflix deceives. Its sting, shown here, denies the longevity of our relationship. May 2010? I think not! We've been together since at least 2006, but Netflix's fickle past -- its brief affair with Qwikster, mainly -- tries to imply our relationship is fleeting.

Our relationship is anything but fleeting; I've been loyal, but lately, I must admit, I long for more.

Enter resentment. I now have far fewer options to watch. And I am far from the only one noticing. My dear friend Conan O'Brien announced he'd like to watch "The Golden Girls" on streaming, but he most certainly didn't check to see if he could before this post.

And my plea for more content:

My call has gone unanswered. Dear readers, please respond to this heart wrenching tale and help make it so no other feels this loss. Let @Netflix know our longing for more options and our desire to remain faithful. Let it not test our resolve, let it not toy with our emotions. Let it give us the "Golden Girls."

Bones

I think the husband and I are realizing our mortality through our Halloween decorations.  This year, I haven't gotten into the Halloween spirit as obsessively as I typically do. The decoration bins were dragged out by the husband in early October -- weeks after I typically would have done it. Once he started placing things willy-nilly around the house, I was forced to step in and do it the right way (my way).

As I sit here pondering birthday presents and potential parties, I realize I'm surrounded by death. Gone are the mostly happy, smiling pumpkins and ghosts; they've been replaced by skulls. Lots of skulls. It seems in almost 9 years of marriage, the husband has slowly, but steadily, ossified the tone of the Amanda Fall Festival. (I am not going to dwell too much on how this might be his interpretation of life after marriage.)

Just look at this - a five-second tour around my condo:

My husband's beloved glow-in-the-dark skull he got as a kid from Disney World's "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride (the original one!) way back when. He added the blue candle he got from my grandmother about 4 years ago. I believe this guy would be one of the first thing he'd grab in a house fire -- I might come in a close second or third.

This is a Dollar Store find that has somehow managed to stay out year-round last year. It lived in the garden until I noticed it and put it back in the Halloween bin.

His newest obsession: glowing things. This year, we've been to far too many different stores looking for the "right" glowing decoration to add to the arsenal. So far the $2.50 lights at Target have made him happy. There are two strands of glowing skulls in my house now. I'll update ya'll if more appear.

Every guest bath needs a little bit of morbid, right? There are two of these in there now.

I admit I bought this cute little pirate skeleton dish off Etsy because I adore it. I think once you add in a little bit of pirate, the skeleton becomes a little more loveable and a little less harbinger of death.

I suppose I should be thankful that he's not the "bleeding body parts" kind of Halloween decorator. This time of year isn't about gore, it's about me and my birthday. And costumes, candy, and pumpkins. Oh, and of course his birthday, too.

Big Bites

We were supposed to go to Philadelphia for our birthdays this year. Yep, supposed to. The husband was going to present a paper at a Political Philosophy conference there, and I was going to tag along since I'd never seen the city before. A perk of grad school, I'm told, is a conference in a cool city. Unfortunately, the research didn't come together for the husband's paper, so he decided to withdraw it from the conference. Withdrawing the paper also meant withdrawing our travel plans from the docket. (Practical note: We were even going to fly there for free, thanks to me complaining on Twitter about a delay on a Southwest Airlines flight. I recommend you follow airlines/hotels you frequent and be vocal, but not rude, about your experiences. I got some serious Southwest dollars for my comments.)

A little back story: both my and my husband's birthdays are around Halloween. When I was a child, fall celebrations started popping up in September. The St. Peter's Oktoberfest carnival was the big event in my hometown, followed by a harvest fest at school, my birthday, then Halloween. I was convinced at a young age that the world celebrated me for a good 6 weeks. My parents called it Amanda's Fall Festival. And the sentiment has stuck. I adore the fall, and Halloween, and pumpkins, and (except in Louisiana) cooler weather.

This year was supposed to be a new kind of Amanda's Fall Festival since I got to travel on our birthdays to a cool new city. Now, we must come up with a Plan B. The trouble is, I'm just not feeling it this year. The husband bit off more than he could chew with this conference paper whose focus was a little outside his research area, and I think I've bit off more than I can chew with the idea of big plans for birthdays, pumpkin carving, and Halloween. My sights were set on a weekend of travel and a weekend prior filled with events. Now all the plans are kind of up-in-the-air, and I just don't feel like sorting them out.


The husband always says his birthday comes at exactly the right time: the day after mine to stop the insanity of Amanda's Fall Festival. This year, I think he might be right.

I do?

So, I'm a bridesmaid again. This is a role I kinda thought I was done with. I've done the bridesmaid routine for high school friends and college friends, and of course family weddings, but at a certain (yet still very young, really!) age, you assume you're too old for this stuff.

A good friend I've made since moving to Baton Rouge is getting married in May, and she's asked her two knitting cohorts, of which I'm one, to be in her wedding. Don't get me wrong, I'm honored to be asked, and any excuse for a new dress and shoes is great, but the last two weekends of dress shopping and detail discussing has made me realize how "20s" this activity was to me. I'm not in my 20s anymore, and this experience has definitely made me feel it.

She's determined to have the bridesmaids in dresses they'll "wear again." Oh, isn't that the most naive thing a bridesmaid can hear? We never wear those dresses again. Just accept it. I finally had to say, "honey, every bridesmaid has accepted the fact that she'll never wear this again except for maybe a Halloween costume*. Choose a dress you love and we're happy to wear it." Yep, that's not the 20s talking. That's the full-blown 30s, baby. Bridesmaid experience, I has it.

How is it different this time around? Well, the iPhone for one**. Although we all have different models, we all have some way to take pictures while dress shopping and send them to anyone who can't be with us. Back in my day, we found pictures on the internet and attached them in an email to friends out of state. I know, that's so early 2000s.

While I won't be able to get the new, fancy version of the iPhone any time soon, I can dream. I can dream of asking Siri, "What's the easiest way to be a thirty-something bridesmaid?" I'd love to see what it says.

*Note only one of my bridesmaid dresses has been hacked into a costume, but I have a nice red number that has potential, circa 2007.
** The iPhone 4s was announced yesterday. Did you miss the details?

Comfort Zones

Every so often, I have to force myself to do things I wouldn't normally do because I've noticed myself leaning toward the safe and familiar. Since moving to Baton Rouge, I've had to put myself out there more than I used to. The husband and I packed up our house, left our circle of friends, our family, and our financial solvency to go on this trek of his (he decided after 10+ years in the IT industry that he wanted to get his PhD in Political Science). Enter new friends, new (and much smaller) living spaces, and new routines. Comfort zones suddenly get smaller as everything around you is unfamiliar or uncharted.

I've spent the last two  years stepping out of these comfort zones (new friends, new state), but recently I've started a new round (school and projects). This time it hits both literally and figuratively.  Here's my Comfort Zone Smackdown:

Volunteer Work
I've helped out the International Hospitality Foundation at LSU with a new letterhead, and now I've volunteered to help with Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week (BREW). Why is this hard? By volunteering to do something for someone, you're admitting you have a skill they want and can help them. In a weird way, I believe it takes some measure of ego to volunteer. It's similar to being a freelancer; I'm still getting used to being my own advocate.

Running
I've set a goal to run a 5k by next August. To some, this is no big deal; but to someone who's never been a runner, it's a lot of work. I'm not exactly an athlete (understatement), so working up to a 5k will take me a while. I'm using this app based on a series of free podcasts called Couch to 5K. It's the first app I've paid money for ($2.99) and it was worth every penny. I'm going to stay on Week 5 for a few weeks to build up strength and maybe a little speed.

School
I've decided to try going back to school. People have been telling me to do this since I got to Baton Rouge two years ago. Problem is, you have to put yourself out there to do it. It's likely something I've dreamed up in my head, but I feel going back to school at my age puts added expectation on my skills. I feel that not being the "typical" age of a graduate students means I shouldn't be turning in "typical" work. When I was an undergrad, I absolutely despised having non-traditional students in my classes. They worked harder, asked more questions, and always made us "regular" students look bad. I don't want to be that person to my theoretical cohort. The comfort zone smackdown comes when I get over this and just do the $(%*@&#(* work to the best of my ability, right?


This Blog
This is my first blog, primarily because I've never felt like I had anything to contribute to the blog-osphere that wasn't already there. I don't mind sharing the occasional musing on Facebook or Twitter, but a blog, again, takes a bit of ego to start. You're just sure there's an audience out there who wants to read your golden words. In my head, it's the equivalent to "those people" who post their every. flipping. move. on Facebook. I'm fairly certain the world doesn't care when I go to the grocery store, just like I'm fairly sure they don't care about the comfort zones I'm writing about now. But the smackdown comes as I get over the fact that I think I'm being vain in writing this.

In Appreciation

Thank you for the music, REM. 

I’ve loved you since my tennis coach in 7^th grade introduced me to Green.

You were one of the first things my husband and I discovered we had in common; he went to a concert on your Monster tour in Orlando while I was away at college being a poor freshman who couldn’t afford a ticket. When you came to Iowa, I had a friend buy me a T-shirt. The boy and I traded shirts through the mail, and 15 years later, we still have them.

I am thankful I did eventually get to see you twice in concert over the years. My only regret is not getting a T-shirt at the Vote for Change show. Springsteen didn’t hold a candle to you that night. Sorry, Boss.

I wasn’t saddened by yesterday’s news of the band ceasing to be. It made sense; I understood.

The fans will be fine. And I will always have “Catapult” on my playlist. And probably “Electrolite,” too.

Editor's Note: All the "It's the end of the world as we know it" headlines have just got to stop. Really people. It's not clever.

One Big Clusterflix

I'm a loyal user of Netflix, but I gotta tell ya, when the terse email came a few months ago saying they're raising rates and splitting services, I was irked. That could have been done some much better - and the socialmedia-sphere let them know it. Netflix-bashing exploded over Twitter and Facebook, making Netflix drop its customer projections by 1 million. Its stock also tumbled. Ouch.
  
Well, today I got an email -- from the CEO himself! He apologized and explained why they did what they did. That was supposed to make everything better, right? Oh you're splitting the company, renaming the most-established half, and creating two separate websites for each service that won't talk to each other. Fabulous. Now that it's explained, I'm totally on board. If you missed it, that was sarcasm.

Today, Twitter again comes alive with response. Mashable tweeted this article about Qwikster, the new name of the DVD-mailing portion that will be the "formerly known as Netflix" part. Problem is, the current @Qwikster Twitter handle is owned by a highly-effected muppet who has gotten quite a few new followers lately, and likely has no idea why.

Other funny people chimed in, like this:

 

I made this screenshot!

So, a price hike that could have been less traumatizing for its users again lives in infamy in the Twitter-verse. Consumers know prices are going to go up -- we don't like it, but if we love your product enough, we deal with it. Netflix simply could have explained the split, and branded it as having more options (hooray options!). Today's email from the CEO admitted the streaming audience is pretty darn different than its DVD-delivery subscribers; they should have addressed each separately and been a little more transparent on out outset. Now we're just left with a bad taste in our digitally streaming or DVD-receiving mouths.

I won't cancel our Netflix subscription, but I certainly won't pay two separate companies. I'll choose one and they'll get less money from me than they did a few months ago.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Qwikster.

2 Apps, 1 Very Happy User

On my phone live many apps. But only two of these make me smile and start in on thisreallylongexplanationofwhyyoumustgetthemtoo. One speaks to the ABC of me (yay communication all the time!), and the other to the OCD (I must have order!).

Fring

See, I'm a very important person. I need to be available to people should they need to plan something, or ask a very important question. My husband, friends and I all have divided loyalties when it comes to which instant messenger we use. And no matter how much I love these people, I am not about to have 14 different clients on my phone or computer. Enter Fring. It's just a simple little app that lets you sign into all of your IM accounts at once. GChat people sit in the same buddy list as AIM and Yahoo! folks. It's a glorious world, and buddies are none the wiser. While typing this blog, my husband and I had a very important conversation, see:

Because I have Fring on my phone, I wouldn't have missed this conversation had I been somewhere more exciting than my living room. Thank God for technology.


StitchMinder
The best free app ever for knitters/yarn people. Is your phone set to automatically go into sleep mode after X minutes? Not when you're using StitchMinder! What? You don't knit? Ok, I'll start from the beginning. In knitting projects, often you'll have a chart to follow, repeating the design in the chart over and over until you want to throw something (this blog post describes how the knitting rage begins for me quite well. Read it later.). Or sometimes you are given a really long list of row-by-row instructions. Sometimes that list has 14 billion rows on it, and if you can't remember if you just finished row 13,789,342 or row 13,789,343 the pattern gets all mucked up and you become violent. Just look at this instruction sheet I started before I knew about StitchMinder. It would make anyone twitch.

What StitchMinder does is allow you to tap the screen as you finish rows, and it remembers even if you shut off the app. When you return to the app, there are your numbers, sitting there like angels, awaiting your next session of knitting. You don't have to make hash marks on paper, or use the silly dot system like I did above.

When my IM buddies are all in one placing using one app, my knitting projects are nice and neat, and my patterns are hash-mark free, it's a beautiful world. Things line up, everything has its place and the knitting rage monster doesn't have to come out and fix things.

SocialMedia Me

I have circles; we all have circles. If you were to narrow down to 5 the things that make me who I am online, you'd get an odd mix. This odd mix, in fact:

The Daytona Beach News-Journal
The newspaper where I spent about 9 years. Most of my Facebook connections are friends and former colleagues I met here. Many have since become like family and most have left the paper, but we're all still connected to it (no matter how much we hate to admit it).

Drake University, and my home town
I have smaller circles -- all roughly the same size -- from my new friends at LSU, my old friends from college at Drake University, and high-school and home-town friends from growing up in DeLand, Florida. This is the second-biggest area where I use Facebook -- as a personal and social tool. I use it to keep in touch with friends (mostly) and some family. 

LSU
Since I married into the LSU Political Science grad student association, this group and I all use Facebook to keep up with each other, plus we use the Groups function to coordinate outings/happy hours/events.


Knitting
My social graph has an element I'm sure most in my class won't have -- a little community called Ravelry. It's not a site that gets a lot of mention in the social media scene, I'm sure. But if you knit, or have anything to do with yarn, you know about it. You logon multiple times a day. Your stash of yarn is categorized and photographed here, you've compiled a much-too-long list of projects of which you may someday complete a fraction, and you've stalked other people's projects to see how certain patterns *really* turn out. It's a closed system, but its users are rabid and incredibly loyal. They don't care that you can't post directly to Facebook from here or Tweet their recent yarn find. Anyone who cares will already be on Ravelry, clicking that little heart-shaped button by your latest creation. Despite that, I still tweet more about knitting and freelancing (more on that below), than I do life in general.
 
Being a freelancer
This is where Twitter comes more into play. I tweet about freelance projects. I also use Twitter to follow people and organizations that relate to my freelancing personality. @ChicagoManual, @MightyRedPen, @MerriamWebster, @APStylebook, @APA_Style, @AmerMedicalAssn are all folks I make a special effort to pay attention to when they appear in my newsfeed.

So what: I need more time to really process what all this means, but for now I'm fairly happy with the way I portray myself out in cyberland. I tend to want to separate certain personalities -- keep the freelancing away from Facebook, and keep Facebook away from anyone who really doesn't know me personally. Will this have to change to brand myself well in the digital-verse? Probably. In the mean time, I'll be contemplating how to give myself a digital make-over while still keeping some of my identities compartmentalized.

Coming later this week: A better blog post than this one.

5 Things I Think I Already Knew

So, there's this thing called a social graph. And, unless you're living under a rock (in which case you're likely not reading this), you have one. Your social graph shows how you are connected to all the rest of us in this virtual, social world. Whether you like it or not. In old school terms, it's the Six Degrees of Separation Game -- involve Kevin Bacon if you must.

So, to get a glimpse of my social graph, I turn to Facebook (who else?). There's this nifty little app called TouchGraph that magically pulls in your info and maps out how each of your friends is connected to you and everyone you know. Here's mine (I'm the big red blob in the middle with a rectangle in the center):

What this shows:

1. I have the majority of my connection from my former workplace, the newspaper.
2. I have a lot of friends, too, through my husband's former workplace, the aeronautical university.
3. High school friends make up the fewest dots.
4. College friends take up fewer circles on the graph, but I know I have more of them than high school friends on Facebook. I'm unsure of the color-coding/grouping on this.
5. The university in my hometown holds a fair number of connections for me, even though I never attended.

What I learned:

• The top-ranked "friend" was my husband (whew!). We look normal to the world. Hooray.
• The person who shares the most connections with me is not my husband, but the woman who sat next to me at work for nearly 9 years. This said a lot to me; it showed just how much what I did influenced who I knew, who I became, and who I associated with.

What I already knew:

• Of course (whew!) my husband would be my number one connection -- I see him every day.
• I know a lot of (former) newspaper people. I consider many as family. Why wouldn't the place where I spent the majority of my time and professional energy generate the most connections? It was a media outlet for goodness' sake, why wouldn't my coworkers also be members of the social media, too? Print people aren't all lame.
• While high school and college generated life-long friendships, I'm not nearly connected to most of them as I am the people who shared more of my adult life. It's true -- school is a time of social growth, but truly only a few stand the test of time (cold, hard fact. Sorry, classmates.). Those standouts rank as the big blue blobs on the social graph.

While it was interesting to see the lines move from friend to friend as I hovered over their name, ToughGraph's at-first creepy look at my life didn't really tell  me too much I didn't already know. What my bigger question (and later blog post) will ask is, how do I go about creating and managing this online identity/social graph/whateveryouwanttocallit that covers my professional, personal, and creative identities?

Mea Culpa

Welcome to my testimony.

When you correct someone's grammar, or point out a misspelling or errant apostrophe, you give permission for the rest of the world to scrutinize your own work ten-fold. Such is the case in my blog post below, where I repeated a word and had a missing comma. Two words were also run together. In other words, it was the 'touche' moment every editor/writer/word person has, and hates.

For this class I'm taking on digital brands/media, we are to produce a blog. Me being who I am, I must include some rantings about grammar or design. It's what I do. Or did, but whatever.

In the spirit of admitting mistakes -- and internet transparency -- I've corrected my blog below. I'm human, though sometimes I don't like to admit it. See a typo here? Let me know, and take some satisfaction in knowing you brought about the next set of red edit marks.

Enjoy!

Two out of three is pretty bad

So I read three articles today. One discussed the differences among Blogger, Tumblr and Wordpress, which was concise and useful. It's the type of article we would have run in the Features section of the paper where I used to work. "Chunky type," some called it -- our editors loved the idea. It brought in the kids, they said. There wasn't much to it, but there didn't need to be.

The second and third took opposite stands; one said blogging is somewhat dying out, its audience marching to social media sites like Twitter. The other said blogging isn't dead so much as it is reverting back to its origin of niche topics. Both had their points, but ultimately I think the in-the-industry writers (i.e. not the <added a space!> 18- to 22-year-olds who are still in college) should reconsider saying "blogging is dead"dead, and rather revisit and redefine what blogging is.

What irked me: In two of the three of these articles, there were typos and/or grammatical errors. Yes, blogging may not be dead and may indeed be going back to the smaller niche areas of expertise where it began, but lordy, you undermine what you're trying to put out there when it's dotted with bad punctuation or misused words.

Edited to add the sentiment that it's hard to be both writer and copy editor.

A is also for Apple

I've always used the Internet as a tool. I use it, I expect it to have what I want, and I get frustrated when what I want isn't accessible in two minutes or less. And after reading Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet," by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, it seems I'm not in the minority. These were the longest articles I've read on the Internet in I don't know how long. And that's kind of sad considering I'm former newspaper person who encouraged reporters to turn in a shorter version of their stories for the paper and a longer (more golden wordy) version for online.

As much as I hate to admit it, I think I fall on the side of Anderson, who argues narrow and niched apps will overtake the openness of the Web.  With Wednesday's resignation of Steve Jobs, Apple -- with its app-driven gadget empire -- will be the company to watch in the coming year. Will its brand suffer from a changing of the guard, or will it be improved with its new, though handpicked by Jobs himself, leader at the helm? Will we see an iPhone 5 this fall? These are the questions.


Awesome: Self realization. The scholarly part of me -- albeit a small one -- sighs a bit when thinking about how instant-gratificationed we've become. I'm just as guilty as the rest, but I truly believe lounging with a good book and burying my iPhone deep away restores part of my over media-ed soul. So, on a trip I'm taking this weekend, I'll be sure and pack a good book to help foster the kind of reading Carr describes in his concluding graphs as, " ... valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds."

Not Awesome, a sidenote: From a former newspaper designer's standpoint, I found the Anderson-Wolff article difficult to read mainly because of its presentation. Do I read all of one side, then the other?  What's up with the horizontal red lines breaking up the story -- are these different sections, or merely there to break up the sections for Internet readers? Do I go section by section reading left, then right? Don't make me think about how to read your article, Wired. Design it so that thought never even occurs to me.