Goldie's Stories - Episode 4

This week we are reading a story about the Rebbe Maharash, the fourth Lubavitcher Rebbe. Although he was known as the Baal Shemske Rebbe because so many miracles occurred when he was Rebbe this story shows the power of belief to cause a transformation.



For those who are interested in more from the behind the scenes I usually read through some of the dozens of story books that I have in our house (many of them collections of stories) to find ones that seem right for the time (season/calendar wise) and length. One story I had considered I realized was too long, and I didn't feel up to rewriting the story. I decided that the bagel story would be a good one, but I couldn't find the book I had read it from. So, while I am reading the story, what I am reading is my writing of the story as I remember it.

Goldie's Stories - Episode 3

This week's story is a story about Rabbi Akiva and his wife Rachel. When Rachel met Rabbi Akiva, then a shepherd in her father's employ, he was illiterate. But she saw wisdom in him and agreed to marry him if he would go to learn Torah...which of course first meant learning to read. The long story short - he became a great sage and his teachings are still taught and studied today. But this story, based on Midrash HaGadol, takes place earlier in the story.

This story can be found in the book No Greater Treasure: Stories of Extraordinary Women Drawn from the Talmud and Midrash.

Goldie's Stories - Episode 2

This Thursday will be the 18th of the month Elul, which is the anniversary of the Baal Shem Tov's birthday. In honor of this, this week I read two Baal Shem Tov stories from the book "Extrodinary Chassidic Tales"

Thin Air Summit - Speakers and Registration

I know my blogging about the Thin Air Summit, the New Media Conference in Colorado (Nov 7-9), has been a bit sparse here. In our Web2.0 and New Media discussions on the web one of the mantras that runs through them both is "try something beyond what you've done before." With the Thin Air Summit I've been doing just that, and it has been a little scary, and thus the blogging sparseness. Luckily I have an excellent team working on this with me and it has really come together. I am really looking forward to the event.

To tell you a bit more about the conference (and to quote our website):

We are offering hands-on learning sessions and discussion panels presented by nationally-recognized and local New Media professionals. The size of the Summit is limited to 100 attendees, ensuring an intimate, intensive weekend of collaboration, education and community.

We have our Keynote Speakers, Dave Taylor and Jerimiah Owyang. Right now we are working on finalizing our speaker and panel line up and we are still accepting speaking proposals until September 18.

If you speak on new media, specifically blogging, video or audio and would like to present, I'd love to have you submit a proposal to present.

Proposals will be reviewed by the planning committee and speakers will be selected based on their knowledge level, experience presenting in a 'learning' environment and the relevance of their proposed topic to the conference theme. This is our first year, so we're on a shoestring budget, but the experience we're planning to create should be well worth your time.

You can submit your proposals at: http://www.thinairsummit.com/presenting/

We will be opening registration shortly and I will post an update here (as well as twittering about it.)

Goldie's Stories - Episode 1

At the last Denver Area Podcaster's meetup Len Edgerly spoke on his Kindle Chronicles podcast and gave six lessons on podcasting. One of his points of advice was to start before you know what you want to podcast on, and when your subject finds you, you will already be ready. He also told a story about a poet, William Stafford, who advised his students to write a poem a day. When one complained that he couldn't do that the teacher told his student "Lower your standards."

So in that spirit, I have started a podcast now rather than waiting for all pieces to come together, knowing that it will improve as I continue.

Without further ado - Here is "Goldie's Stories with Goldie Katsu - Episode 1"

Life Streaming and Sweetcron

Sometimes I hang back a bit before trying out a new application, especially in a crowded app space (another X app?). At other times I seem to jump in at the beginning. The past couple of days there has been a lot of talk about Sweetcron (no not corn, cron) even though it wasn't released until this morning. This afternoon I downloaded the latest version (already 5 revs out from the version I downloaded this morning) and installed it at http://www.goldiekatsu.com which until now just had a placeholder wordpress blog that said come here for more.

Sweetcron bills itself as an "Automated lifestream blogging service." What that translates to is - a way to create your personal friend feed friend on your website and throw in a blogging tool on top of it. The visual style lends itself to a "tumblr" sort of blog, and it will throw in whatever feeds you send it.

I set it up and threw some feeds at it and looked at the result. It is an interesting seeing my "output on the net" in a sequential format. You can see when I blogged relative to my tweets and plurks and photos and whatnot. Even though this isn't that different from friend feed, somehow the visual format, and having it on my host as my website made it a different experience. The stark list made me look at what I was putting out on the web, and variety there was or wasn't in that output.

Interestingly I have never done a "today's tweets" post because I tend to think of my twitters as primarily chatter and conversation and not something to list daily as something of consequence. Ironically on the website that bears my name, that is exactly what most of the content is. 140 characters is much easier to write than most other output.

Right now my sweetcron is an experiement, and it has proved to be a bit of an exercise in self reflection. What am I putting out there on the web, and is it what I want to be the reflecton of me?

The Trouble with Twitters

I must confess, I am a twitterer. But you probably already knew that, and possibly wandered here from my twitter profile in the first place. I find I get a lot out of twitter, from useful information, social connections, news about events local and virtual, and more. The challenge is in taming the flow of the information.

Way back when I started using twitter I followed the basic policy that as long as someone who follows me isn't a bot, a commercial, or way too offensive I follow back. That was great at the beginning but once exceeding around 200 people being followed it became hard to follow the tweetstream as so much information and so many people are twittering. Sometimes the things I wanted to hear about just got missed in the rapid scroll of tweets. Some people only follow select people I can completely understand that policy, the nature of twitter changes significantly when the number gets large. Some people consider this elitist, I just consider this a different way of handling information flow.

I have considered cutting back the number of followers, but how do I pick. Once I went through a winnowing process and the next day got into a really interesting @ discussion with someone I had just unfollowed, who was promptly refollowed.

I tried setting up a second account with a "short list" but I usually ignored that stream, and keeping it up to date with new connections of people I do want to hear just proved too much bother.

The other problem is it isn't like I have one list of people I want to listen to. I'm involved in many different groups and activities and different people speak to different focuses. What I have wanted for a while was a way to group friends and be able to chose which group to look at. Twhirl's searches came close, but Tweetdeck really seems to have hit the nail on the head. I think that tweetdeck may be the start of a new breed of twitter clients.

For the first time in ages I can actually catch the conversations I was missing, and that also means I catch the main timeline more often too because I am getting value out of twitter again. It isn't enough to just "read what's current when you have time" because not all tweets are equal - I wanted the volume up higher on some tweets, and now I can have that. Thanks tweetdeck for giving me my twitter back.