Lost in addendums... back soon

Well, after the mammoth declutter of our house, where we've lived for 20 years, we put it on the market and were lucky enough to sell in less than 48 hours. So we're buying a new place. Meantime I'm awash in addendums (addendi - ?) and other offline details. Back soon...

P.S. If you're thinking of selling your house, decluttering really works. Our house looked twice as big! (Great before & after photos in Decluttering to Make the Sale from HGTV.)

Mark your calendar for BlogPotomac in Washington D.C., June 13, 2008

It's coming! Co-chair Geoff Livingston and I are delighted to announce that BlogPotomac will be held on Friday, June 13, 2008 at The State Theater in Falls Church, Virginia.

Sponsored by Livingston Communications, The Point, Viget Labs and WordBiz.com, Inc., BlogPotomac is an “un-conference” on best marketing practices for the social media community in D.C. Our goal is to provide advanced marketing insights beyond the average social media 101 event.

Great line-up of speakers including Dell's chief blogger

Our excellent line-up of seven keynotes includes:

Opening Keynote: Lionel Menchaca, digital media manager and chief blogger, Direct2Dell

Lunch Keynote: Frank Gruber, community manager, AOL and author of Somewhat Frank

Additional keynotes (in alphabetical order) will be given by:

• Social Media Group’s Maggie Fox on integrating social media
• Kami Huyse, Communication Overtones on ethics
• Author and consultant KD (Katie) Paine on measurement
• Jeremy Pepper, The Point and Pop! PR Jots on strategy

The current invite for our final keynote is MyDD’s Matt Stoller on political blogging.

I am honored to be emceeing the event with BlogOrlando Creator and BlogPotomac Advisor Josh Hallett. BTW, without Josh and his original concept there would be no BlogPotomac.

As the financier and organizer of the event (hey, he's an impresario), Geoff has elected to pass on participation. Full disclosure: my company, WordBiz.com, Inc., is one of the sponsors.

Because there will only be 150 seats, to recoup costs, and to avoid a Podcamp Boston situation (lots more folks registered than attended), estimated ticket cost for the event will be $75. 

Financial accounting for the event will be open and published. Any profits from BlogPotomac will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Next on the agenda is creating the BlogPotomac logo and site, publishing our full agenda and of course opening registration. Hope to see you there! Washington D.C. is beautiful in June.

BTW, where is Falls Church, VA?

It's right outside Washington D.C. proper and is accessible by metro. Stay tuned for details.

New Year's clean out: uncluttering, digging down and uncovering who knows what...

After 20 years in our house we decided recently it was time to declutter. Clean out. Pare down. We started yesterday in my home office and quickly realized that "cleaning out" was far too polite an expression.

It's an archaeological dig. (At left, uncovering the Pyramids.)

Found the original copy of my college thesis

I was down in the basement rooting through an old file cabinet. I found the original copy of my undergraduate thesis for Harvard. It's not in digital form so I decided to save the bound copy. I've always been rather proud of it: A Comparison of the Poetry of Stéphane Mallarme and the Paintings of Pablo Picasso. I kid you not.

A complete documentation of my children's childhood

Moving on... I found that I took motherhood *very* seriously. I have three children and for years I maintained a file for each of them for every single year of their lives, well into college. During the early years, of course, the files contain those awkward drawings and misspelled stories you can't part with. Their report cards. The slip from the pediatrician with their height and weight. And so on.

But I'm severing the umbilical cord(s). I'm shipping boxes of files to each child. Let them have fun on a rainy afternoon sifting through their childhood. I'm movin' on...

Luckily, client files also live on the computer

And more... today I tackled client files going back almost a decade. I threw out most of the paper folders because I have (to my immense relief) digital folders on my old computer dated neatly, 2000, 2001, 2002, etc. Yes, I've also put them on a back-up drive.

Oh and I forgot to mention newspaper articles - crammed into bulging folders - that I wrote in the 1980s and early 90s for The Atlanta Constitution, Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau and Roll Call. I'm tossing most of those out but keeping a few yellowed clips for old times sake (none of the articles seem to be online, as far as I can tell).

Declutter your office and your brain... let the clutter live on the Web

Thanks for listening. Now let me make this little brain dump relevant to corporate blogging and social media.

I read a great article in Wired several years back that pretty well sums it up: We Are the Web. I highly recommend printing it out and reading if you didn't catch it in August 2005. It starts out with Netscape's IPO in 1995 and does a year-by-year analysis of the Web up until 2005, calling it "10 years that changed the world" and "a decade of genius and madness."

There is also a side-bar on the birth of Google, of course, written by John Battelle.

Author Kevin Kelly refers to the Web as the Machine. The Machine will do a lot of the work for us, he posits. It may do some original thinking; that remains to be seen. But it will certainly do almost all the remembering and cataloguing and keeping track of stuff. As he puts it:

A riff from Kevin Kelly's article on how the Machine (aka the Web) will become our memory...

The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it.

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves [my italics]. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

-- from We Are the Web, Wired (August 2005)

Anyway, I find this comforting to a degree. Also a little scarey and Big Brotherish. But as far as feeling free to throw out all that "stuff" -- phew, I couldn't be doing it at a better time. And now for the closets... the endless T-shirts, mismatched socks, prom dresses that will never be worn again, etc.*

The business corollary... if you're worrying about where to put all those bits and pieces of information you run across that you might use on a company or organizational blog or stats you need to back up an assertion or images to illustrate a blog entry, no need to fret. Whatever it is you need, it's stored on the Web somewhere. And you can just leave it there til you really need it.

Your thoughts? Your New Year's Resolutions??

* If I'm not online much for the next week or so, it's because I'm offline and thigh deep in heavy-duty black trash bags.

Social media for social good (24 days left for Parade Magazine / Case Foundation Giving Challenge)

It's no surprise in this election year that we're realizing how powerful social media can be for making things happen -- whether it's support for a candidate, the launch of a movie or a a car. Or for a cause.

Cause marketing has been around for a while. But established players are now waking up to how to use social networks (Facebook, for example) to raise money for charity. Parade Magazine and The Case Foundation joined forces in December to launch the Giving Challenge. (Watch the YouTube video.)

Parade and Case will contribute $500,000 to the charities which attract the most individual donors. The deadline is Jan. 31, 2008.

I confess I didn't know about this worthy effort until yesterday. I had my head in the sand (really, it was snow) over the holidays. In addition to battling a case of the flu.

Yesterday I received an email from a Washington D.C. business contact, Susan Trinter, asking if I'd help spread the word. She is asking for contributions to two of her favorite D.C. causes: Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund (donate here) and Washington Animal Rescue League (donate here).

Remember, any amount helps garner the matching gift from Parade / Case as it's number of donors and not just dollars that they're tracking.

Wow... it took 5 minutes to set up a donation page through Facebook Causes

I then decided to spend a few minutes on Facebook Causes to see if I could set up a Giving Challenge page for Global Community Services Foundation, a Fairfax, VA-based group I'm on the board of. We support village-level, community projects in Southeast Asia including housing, schools, cultural centers for ethnic minorities and self-sustaining micro-enterprise.

We're holding our first major fundraiser, Adopt-a-Village-Gala, in Hanoi on Jan. 18, 2008.  Of course you can still support GCSF (even a token amount) here, if you can't make it to Hanoi.

All I can say is wow... it really works. I created the GCSF Giving Challenge page in minutes and was able to immediately donate $50 via credit card to test it out. (You have to register if you're not already on Facebook).

Hope you'll join in with a small gift to Global Community Service Foundation, Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund or the Washington Animal Rescue League.

Note that the Hoop Dreams and Rescue League links are powered via Network for Good, which is also affiliated with the Giving Challenge.

The controversial issue of ''data portability" (or what we used to call "privacy")

A brouhaha involving the temporary shutdown of the Facebook account of popular tech blogger Robert Scoble sparked discussion recently of a new issue for 2008: data portability.

Scoble tried to export the names, email addresses and birthdays of his close to 5,000 "friends" on Facebook into a beta version of Plaxo (the address book updating service).

His Facebook account was shutdown but then quickly reinstated when, presumably, the Facebook folks realized how powerful he is in the blogosphere. (Scoble's blog is currently ranked #36 on Technorati - so Top 50 - out of over 100 million blogs.)

There is no privacy

Translated... there is no privacy. If you're using any kind of online service, your "data" -- your name, your username, your email address -- can, potentially, be passed around (scraped is the geek term) between these networks.

So if you're using gmail or yahoo mail or Flickr or Delicious or YouTube or belong to Facebook or LinkedIn or another of the popular social networks, you've given up complete control of your personal information. You don't, so to speak, "own" it anymore. Surprised?

But there is trust

Don't be. Just don't forget that your personal data may also include your photos and videos and your carefully assembled networks of contacts and their information. And if an online service decides you're persona non grata, your stuff / data / digital trail is gone. Erased (as Scoble put it).

I guess we all know this on some level. It's part of the bigger and more thorny issue of privacy. With so many of us living so much of our lives online we are trusting both that our "data" won't be misused and that it won't disappear.

Silly us. But what can we do? The utility of these online services outweighs their risks -- at least for most of us.

The issue of privacy is one I will be exploring in 2008. I'm fascinated by it. I've had my own hiccup with being more visible online than I'd like to be (and being judged and criticized by folks who don't know me). Not fun.

I wonder sometimes... if I decided to crawl into a closet and "disappear," would it be possible? While I love my life online -- and the wonderful interactions and discussions with smart and interesting people around the world -- I sometimes long for the old days of no computers, no social networks, no email, etc.

Useful Links

dataportability.org