Untitled Handwritten Post

Ok, Eric started this meme, and PurpleCar got me thinking, so it is time for me to join in.

What is this meme? Well since I can't just link it here I'll tell you. Write a blog post. No, not type, write. And now you can see my fine hand :)

So a few thoughts popped up when I read PurpleCar's post.
1) All fo my fountain pens were dry. Shows how much I write.

2) If google can't scan and index this is this a way to have a private chat?
(and can google really not scan this - I am reminded of evernote.)

3) The difficult in providing links in a graphical post, andhow on my old websites I used image maps.

Of course if you are reading this (unspellchecked) post in its original you both can see and are good at deciphering handwriting. The text to speech converters won't work on this, and it pr is a slower read, just as it is a slower write.

Goldie



Of course I can link in the transcript, so I will.

Twitter, The Sichuan Quake, and Emergency Response

Eric Rice started a thread of discussion on The Sichuan Quake and the Hubris of Twitter Users on his friendfeed. I had more than 255 characters worth of though (or whatever the comment character limit is), so I thought I would blog about it here.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

For those not on twitter or not following the twitter/earthquake discussion, there was much discussion about how the Earthquake in Sichuan China was reported first on twitter (see Scoble's article for an example) and a counter discussion on how we are overstating twitter's importance. What follows is my take on the subject.

Ok there are a few levels here. First off for local response first responders are going to want a coordinated form of communication. Hand talkies - whether ham or other format that convey voice would be my first choice. During a lot crisises these days people are relying on cell phones - everyone has one and they seem reliable. This isn't necessarily bad (at least in the US) because the phone companies have disaster plans and set up temporary communication towers quickly and drill on this. Yeah a ham radio may be more reliable but if you don't carry it on you and your standard system is cell phones it isn't going to help in a crisis. Finding a way to make the tools on-hand work is going to be way more useful.

Does this mean there is no use for Ham radio anymore? No, I would say that Ham radio is still very useful - they can be part of a disaster response, they have an ability to send messages great distances when local trunks will be overloaded even if functioning. Ham radio operators are part of RACES and ARES (and I suspect other country equivalents) and they drill and prepare to respond to emergencies. Ham radio is often part of the backbone that coordinates the overall response.

So that's great for local but what about outside of the local area. Well Ham radio will get some messages out, but tools like Twitter have the ability to spread the message quickly - among those who are watching. This means friends on twitter may be updated by a single SMS message that their friend is ok. This is way more efficient and taxes the phone trunks much less. This also means that interested people can know faster, and it may provide a connection to those in the situation that is helpful. Yeah it may not get a first responder to their door but when you are in a situation like that you can be perfectly healthy and safe but concerned about your friends. Twitter can provide a comfort that way.

More important than the local and the immediate friend/family connections twitter has it's true power in a great way to get the news out beyond the local area. It does give a personal face to a disaster, and it may become the source for news reports in the future, but even more importantly it can be part of early detechttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftion and early response, both of disasters, but also of potential epidemics. If you look at the INSTEDD program (video) it was started on the basis that scanning local messages for reports of diseases and disasters (as GPHIN was doing) was finding diseases like SARS months before organizations tasked with detecting this - such as WHO. Things like twitter are going to only speed this up - because the crawling can now see near real time chat rather than blog posts which tend to come a bit later along. I believe it is these features that extend outside of the locality of the crisis are where tools like twitter are adding something new.

So yes, twitter is an awesome tool and it is reporting things earlier - and better yet it is reporting it in a way that gets the message out with details that may help with early detection and early response. Should it be the only communication system. Of course not. Relying on any single system in an emergency creates a weakness in the response system, a single point of failure. Are we overstating twitter's importance. Probably, but some of this is the amazement that twitter does provide this feature so well and part of it is our desire to help explain why twitter is useful to those who look at it and go "Why?" Our excitement about our new tools shouldn't reduce our response and attention to disasters, for that would be true hubris, but at the same time these new tools have a place in improving our response and reaction time to these events.

Thoughts on Location and Local

I mentioned PodcampXL and an interest in doing one locally back in July which is when Eric Rice first mentioned it. Its nice that I was interested, but until now not much had happened with that.

Recently I took a road trip, which was prompted in part by a need to reflect on where I am and where I am going. Of the many topics of thought one was about location and community. Between twitter and Second Life, and the chatrooms of BlogTV, Ustream and Operator 11, and the recent advent of Seesmic a lot of what I think of as my community and my friends with like interests are found all over the globe. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. We are living in an increasingly global society, that is one of the effects of fast ubiquitous communication. However, when it comes at the expense of the local community that is a problem.

Sure I do have friends locally and a community that I live within, but the majority of the local community has no idea what I'm talking about when I talk about global friends, video on the net, cool new technologies, and the desire to think deeply of the consequences and future of these technologies. For that discussion I go to the net.

The network will always have a broader pool of people with similar interests. Yet at the same time the ease of finding such people with such interests over the network sometimes causes a person to overlook the local. Case in point, I was visiting Seesmic in San Francisco and Loic pointed out that there were a lot of seesmicers in Colorado. I had noticed that, but the truth is that I have not yet met any of them. In a sense it is kind of silly. People with similar interests are living (figuratively) in my own back yard and yet we wave from the distance over video.

So...that brings me back to PodcampXL. I know, it sounds like a super big podcamp (extra large) but as Eric Rice describes it the focus is local, extra local perhaps? Community comes together from doing things together. Sure gatherings are nice but what seems like the next step for me is to start working on this PodcampXL. It is inspired by podcamp but the focus is participation and presentation - of one sort or another - by all. I'd like to see this PodcampXL be the start of something rather than just a great event. Afterwards I'd like to keep the discussions going the working together going. How that works isn't clear to me, but it shouldn't be - it should come organically from the process of the PodcampXL.

Rather than describe the ideas of how I envision PodcampXL and make everyone scroll through my thoughts I will write more on my PodcampXL idea in the next post.

Regional Elitism & Web 2.0 - A Video Response

A video response to the thread that Eric Rice started on regional elitism.
(Scobleizer's rejoinder to Eric can be seen here. Other parts of the discussion are scattered about the web)

Promote Yourself

Eric Rice was talking about the skills rating feature of 8apps on Twitter, and there was a bit of discussion of whether people like/don't like such a feature. Given the way the tool is implemented, the feature can be a great tool, because it lets you know how other people perceive your skills.

You know what you are good at and what you like to do, but if others aren't seeing it they aren't going to think of you when they need that skill. Tools like these help let you know how others are seeing you. By knowing how others rate you, you can know if you need to work on how your being perceived.

Perception, in part, comes down to promotion, or more specifically self-promotion.

I don't know about you, but for me for years self-promotion seemed selfish and egotistical. My attitude was "I did it, that should be enough for me to get recognized." (Ok...now what attitude was egotistical.)

The truth is, everyone is busy living their lives and has their own priorities. They may notice that the job was done but not bother to see who it was that did it. Alternatively, maybe your work was fundamental to the success but not the flashy front-line work that everyone notices. In our fast paced information filled lives there is only so much we can pay attention to.

This means that we need to promote ourselves if we want to be recognized for what we do. AND...and this is the part that took me a while to get... it isn't selfish. If you don't promote yourself people won't know what you can offer and you will be denying them the use of your skills.

Now how to promote yourself, well Chris Brogan has an excellent post on this. As he points out: make it about your audience. This is true whether it is your new product/website/gadget or if it is about your skills at your everyday job.

There is a time and place for anonymous action. Just make sure your anonymous actions are chosen and not caused by an oversight.

Podcamp XL

Ok, I should be going to bed, but instead I'm thinking about Eric Rice's blog post about Podcamp XL. You see, when I first heard about podcamps I thought "That's cool I want one here". And the thought that usually pops into my mind shortly thereafter is "well you could arrange one." Of course the counter to that was "But I've never been to one, I hardly know what happens at one..." Now I'm thinking about it again, and when I mentioned it to my husband he thought it sounded cool. Ruh roh...

So before my "top of my head" ideas fade I thought I'd quick blog about this and share the initial thoughts.
1) Talk with the Boulder Weekly and get them involved.
2) Have the event at the Boulder Theater (I've never been in there but a lot of discussive/disruptive events seem to happen there.)
3) Boulder County Council of Arts...sponsorship? Promotion?

Other ideas will go here as they come up. Anyone in the general Boulder/Denver area interested in joining in on this? Let me know what you think. I think I'd best go sleep on it.

Rez Day Writings

Eric Rice just twittered about it being rez day for when he first joined Second Life (SL), and that reminded me that today is my rez day too. One year ago today I joined SL. So what prompted me to join SL. Well, Robert Scoble had been blogging about SL so I had a bit of curiosity. What finally tipped the scales was when I heard that they were having a Barcamp in SL (which I later found out Eric Rice had something to do with). I figured that if there are having conferences in SL it was high time I figured out how to use the tool.

Of course, that's what I thought I was joining SL for. In truth I think I was joining for other reasons. I am a rather social person. Right now I work from home, and at the time I was in serious pain and not leaving the house for anything, except maybe a doctor's appointment. SL gave me the opportunity to meet people again. It also gave me a way to rethink movement. Even though movement in SL can be a bit wonky compared to how I was moving in real life it was a big improvement, and there was no pain when I walked.

So far I've only gone to a few conferences here and there. I tend to spend my time role playing, dancing, building, and getting to know people. I've been adopted as mom, been the one to talk to about problems, planned and executed a coronation, and done a whole bunch of fun stuff in a year. And the friends I made gave me the courage to go through with two hip resurfacing operations, go to England (6 weeks after one and before the other) for my graduation at the University of Liverpool, and think a lot about who I am and what I can contribute.

And now, here I am wandering the web2.0, social network, blogosphere, virtual and real worlds one year later.