New 80’s playlist

Published by Helen | Filed under Music, Playlists

Been a while. I really need to get DJ gear and start spinning at unconferences, given the reception these things have been getting among my social media friends. I have several more that I’ve been working on and hope to get to soon, including one of … gasp! current pop music that catches my ear. It does happen from time to time.

What-not: A short recap of where the heck I’ve been of late

Published by Helen | Filed under Faith, Life, Wedding, Weight Loss, Wellness

When last I actually talked about my weight loss, I believe it was shortly before Easter, and I had crossed the threshold past the 200-lb. mark to 199. I’m still there, for no other reason than the insane work and conference schedule I’ve been keeping these past few weeks has made it impossible for me to work out or eat as mindfully, so I’ve been working on some other things, like weaning myself off soda again and doing a series of stretches every morning. Twice in as many weeks I’ve succumbed to marathon sleep sessions, and my house looks like a tornado ran through it–something I shouldn’t joke about given how close one came to tearing up my parents’ house last week. (And I, being so swamped, didn’t actually find out about it til this weekend.)

In 10 days, I attended Podcamp DC, the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds expo, and an Alban Institute-hosted focus group on social media and congregational development. Amid all this, at work, I developed a new blog for their use, mapped out the June issue, and started training the new managing editor. I had houseguests last Saturday–local neighbors I’d met through Twitter (and how awesome they are, let me tell you!) and my brother and his new girlfriend came up on Sunday. I just really found myself hopelessly slammed.

Nearly gone nova
So it’s probably a good thing that Dean and I postponed our wedding last December; had I actually been getting married tomorrow as we had originally planned, I think I would have become a singularity in my own right and the universe would have caved in around me, gradually sucking all known matter into this Front Royal hillside.

Couple of things that have come out of this weekend: First, I’m writing an exploratory syllabus to formulate a course on social media for congregational leaders. Secondly, we’ve set a new date, September 1, and in so doing we’re already getting the “are we invited?” questions from several fronts. We’d love to have a wedding, but after the financial insanity of this past winter it’s just not financially viable. The ceremony itself will be private. However, we intend to have one hell of a party, probably a few weeks later as the fall colors set in out here in the Shenandoah, and we’ll make it a BYO/DIY-reception (an unreception?) with as many amenities as we can afford. Details to be announced, and if you would like an invitation, email me your address. (helenmosher at the gmail.)

So anyway, the weight loss. In about two weeks, I resume my more normal schedule of telecommuting regularly and having every other Friday off. I’m looking forward to returning to less harried relationship with food and being able to spend lunch hours with Jennifer Kries again, and let’s see if I can knock the next 20 pounds off. If I can do that in the same six weeks I did the first 20, I’ll be totally on track to lose a total of 60 pounds by August. That may be overly optimistic, but as long as I’m getting healthier, that’s what matters.

My reading. Let me show you it.

Published by Helen | Filed under Books, Faith, Memery

The funny thing about being tagged in a “what are you reading” meme (as I was by Jamie Notter) is that I do much of my reading through audiobooks, so the book I’m currently reading doesn’t have a page number, although I could dig up the physical copy of the book if I looked around enough, that’s not true of most audiobooks I “read.” See, I have a long commute, and what makes it bearable is Fairfax County library’s extensive collection of CD audiobooks. Granted, I am an NPR fangirl (we’ve dug up the evidence from the 2004 archives and will migrate it here soon), but I love being read to.

Sometimes I’ve wondered if it’s the result of getting burnt out on reading as a result of doing my senior thesis at Temple U. in 2004 on Virginia Woolf. Other times I know it’s a matter of the fact that I do more reading of online content than media-with-turnable-pages these days. And other times still it’s because the kinds of books I most like to read are hipster slipstream novels that libraries tend to avoid carrying, much less on audiobook.

Right now I’m rereading the Harry Potter series via audiobook, though. Jim Dale is a gifted storyteller, and I must admit I love the series more with each reading, and audio is adding a dimension to the books that’s helping me override the visuals imposed by the movies. I love nerding out on certain editing gaffes that happened because the books were rushed to print, and I love how the series was held up by fundamentalist Christians as antiGod when its good vs. evil rivals the Narnia series in terms of Christian allegory. I’m on Book IV (Goblet of Fire) and intend to listen to the entire series

For work right now I’m reading Wikis for Dummies because I’m planning to build some documentation for our workplace environment that I believe Wikis will facilitate, and Meatball Sundae a little bit although I find reading many of these books is like reading a digest of blogs I read six months ago, and I often wind up thinking to myself “dood, why didn’t i think to propose this book?”
I love Dummies books in particular because I can flip through the pieces I already know but always discover things I don’t know.

On the faith front, I’m not reading anything per se other than a devotional book one of my EfM colleagues passed along last week, and my second year EfM textbook. Have too many faith-related feeds I monitor for the Episcopal Cafe to be able to pick up a book. I have “read” several audio
books on the Reformation and Renaissance recently.

I used to be a bookstore manager and it’s a secret dream of mine to own my own book/coffee shop, with my own mixes spinning on the muzak and a bookstore cat winding about my ankles as I’m shelving. I love used-bookshops, too, and the evidence is mostly in storage at the Annandale house. I love reading kids books, too; I’m too saddled with Disney versions of children’s stories and being a touch of a folklorist with a couple of YA novels in my head, studying up on the real Mary Poppins and the real Peter Pan has been helping me cultivate and discern my own storytelling voice for the post-millennial generation to come–my grandchildren.

So I think there are five books in there somewhere. But I’d much rather be writing them.

Tagging? I’m still cultivating readers, but I think I need recommendations from the faith blogcircle right now, because I’ve been neglecting my gallycat readers since the migration. So I’m tagging:

Ann Fontaine

Nick Knisely

ePisco Sours

Kirstin Paisley

Progressive Pragmatist

Site maintenance under way

Published by Helen | Filed under About This Blog, Fail!

In the middle of ungreening this theme’s stylesheet to my preferred pastel-and-earth-tone palette, my macbook’s magsafe cord bit the dust. It kinda looked askew this morning and I had noticed it had gotten a short–typical of me; the cord I use to download my pictures from my now-five-year-old digital camera has the same problem. I’m slowly learning to pay better attention to whether I’m holding securely the connection part of the connection rather than pulling from the wire, but still, I thought I could buy more time with electrical tape, once I could motivate myself to get out of the house and up to Lowes to buy some. But just a few hours later, the crack was apparent, and no amount of jiggling or pinching seemed to restore the connection. So it’s over, macbook magsafe thingie. You’re being replaced just as soon as I can figure out where the closest apple store is, because for some god-knows-why reason, Fair Lakes is not a place you deigned to grace. The last time I was in an apple store, actually, was in Ardmore, Pa.

So anyhow, if you’ve stopped by tonight to read my latest on Podcamp DC, think of it this way: I never made it out of my workout sweats today, and neither did my blog template. While I could try to continue editing here on the pc, I know it would be frustrating as all get out, and besides, I do need to actually tend the house I own.

And a quick note on catching up with the A-list: I’m trying out utterz, but really appalled with how I sound. I think I’ll start talking in my southern accent just because at least then I can blame it on that.

Podcamp DC

Published by Helen | Filed under New Media, Social Media, Writing

The biggest thing Podcamp DC taught me was that I should be presenting. A number of times, a comment of mine would spin off into a conversation, and it gave me a lot of ideas about what people are looking for when they come to these conferences.

I’ve rested comfortably on the midlist for years, but I find myself with a lot to say on adapting organizations to the new media environment. That seems to come up from time to time, and it’s something I need to address more. But what I’m really dumbfounded about was that I came to a conference about social media, and could only engage the social media to the extent that I’m plugged into it by phone. I don’ t have a blackberry or an i-phone yet, and I’m still wondering if I wouldn’t be better served by, say, an N-95. What I do know is that I can’t afford a new subscription even if I do manage to come up with another gadget that facilitates my work. Today, case in point, I blew it on the Episcopal Cafe because I didn’t have a back-up way to connect to the internet. Although I’m going to try to post two posts this evening. I feel dumb. I look forward to my Saturday gigs.

I saw a post elsewhere that suggests bring a sponsor on board to provide wireless access. Priority one, IMO. Frankly, I was stunned that we couldn’t liveblog the event.

Generations and Social Media
But anyway, the two panels I found most useful were one on generations and social media and one on social media and journalism. In the first, Jessie Newburn debunked a number of my preconceptions about the reality of being sandwiched in between two generations–mostly the one that made me feel like our generation’s short shrift was something unique to generation x, when it’s not, per some academic models that track it as an 80-year cycle involving four 20-year generations, each generation having a distinct identity. Seeing generational theory tied to our own perceptions of what our generations are is a bit shocking when you find yourself nodding along (I’m square in the middle of gen x, and my son is square in the middle of the millennials) or when you find yourself violently disagreeing with how the archetypes don’t fit *you*.

Those were really long, barely readable sentences. Sorry! The long and the short of it, for me, was scholars recognize the short shrift given generation-x. Noting our dispensation toward survival, I wonder whether that is why some of us feel compelled to not be forgotten, to leave a legacy as best we can.

Social Media and Journalism
The second panel I really enjoyed was the journalism and social media panel. Andy Carvin and Jim Long have an unusual talent that they need to exploit more often: when you put two social media evangelists for major media networks together in a room and get them talking, the room fills to standing and flowing out the door. There’s a reason for this. They manage to have a nuanced discussion about very significant issues regarding the difference between new media and old media. As Jim points out, no matter how cheap technology gets for the citizen journalist who wishes to explore and exploit multimedia publishing, the traditional media outlets will always have the dedicated resources to break news fast, distribute the messages most widely, and to do so with the best technology.

The question that many of us ask, however, is whether traditional media will choose to continue their role as the fourth estate. Don’t get me wrong: I have never been a news reporter (although some of the coverage I provided certain political events at Temple University led debate and rhetoric professor Herb Simons to wonder aloud more than once why I wasn’t a high-profile reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer). The thing is, I chose not to go that direction in no small part because I had a gut feeling that my idea of news coverage wasn’t what sold newspapers anymore. Now, granted, I walked away from a Weekend Edition internship at NPR in 1991 because I decided to get married and have a kid instead, and wound up not getting my writing career off the ground for almost another decade. But, it seems to me that my instincts have been correct. After hearing former NBCer Jim Plante (now with the Bureau of Economic Analysis) tear into where he saw news media going 20 years ago and S. Dawn Jones rail against the trend toward infotainment, as well as several media people talking about their careers possibly becoming obsolete, I would put forward that the combined power of twitter-like tools, blogs, and platform-based solutions that integrate different kinds of publishing and conversation applications creates an environment of something like a fifth estate, acting as a watchdog to keep the fourth estate on track.

(Quick edit to add: I’m not the first to make the observation that new media can empower a fifth estate. What I’m suggesting is that the tools empower individuals to become a better “fifth estate,” and I’m encouraging people to think about how emerging media may in fact trump the fourth estate in terms of framing societal discourse in new ways that by definition involve the first-person account. That’s not new either. See Samuel Pepys.)

One question plaguing people accustomed to traditional media oversight: How can we, as responsible editors and publishers, surrender editorial control to the masses? The question came up, smack in the middle of Andy’s trying to answer my question about what new revenue models are emerging for traditional media in new media. I think answer to the control question has to do with how users interact in these spaces. In many respects, these communities police themselves.

Best quotes from the journalism panel, albeit paraphrased, both from Andy:
Twitter is a conversation in my pocket, and social media is NOT a publishing tool — it’s a conversation tool.

Watch the first 20-some minutes of their presentation (at about 13:45, I ask a question and find that my hands have a life of their own):

I think we could spend an entire day discussing these issues. I work for a monthly publication and I have a keen interest in alternative newsweeklies and their issues in this environment. There’s print and radio and television. And I know there are conferences that attract segments of this audience. But is there one that pulls them all, and do they ask these tough questions about “new journalism?”

All that aside, I think the word “new” is starting to degrade as a useful word.

While Twitter is down…

Published by Helen | Filed under About This Blog, Getting Organized, Social Media

Twitter has become the social networking site where I’ve made the most new acquaintances. Many of them are authors of blogs I had subscribed to but was struggling to keep up with, and more notably tended toward the A-list in the socialmediasphere.

I only started tweeting regularly when I went to AFCEA Solutions on behalf of Signal Magazine, where I’m new media editor. I soon after shifted the work-related tweets to @signalmag while keeping my personal but very public tweets at @helenmosher.  After only three weeks using twitter, traffic to my blog has quadrupled. Granted, part of that is the amount of traffic that’s showing up looking for Scrabulous secrets, but much of it has been the twitter audience that I’m cultivating, slowly.

If you were to comb through the archives of my blog, you’d see that I haven’t always been a social media strategist, and much of this blog serves as an interactive memoir, spiritual journal, and clip file archive (I was a feature-writing journalist for almost a decade, with stints as a music critic, university microphone, and financial services editor). While Twitter’s been down, I’ve made the archives a bit easier to page through by reacquainting myself with the Wordpress loop and creating my archives to run as full posts. The way I see it, if you are browsing my archives and only get titles, you might miss out on a post you might enjoy. If you are browsing my archives and only get excerpts, you’re certainly going to miss some of the punch lines. Fewer clicks to save your sanity and mine.

So browse away. I’d suggest using the category browse rather than the date browse, simply because there are entire swaths of time I talk about one topic seemingly to the exclusion of any other. This is partly a result of migrating content from something like 12 different blogs and journals as I vacillated over where I was going to wind up on the web. Over time, I hope to have these archives more fully populated; they go back to 1998 at least and I may have some material from before that.

Thanks for stopping by, and lo, I’ve already killed 60 of those minutes that Twitter is down. What are you doing while Twitter is down? Blogging? Sleeping? Reconnecting with family members you haven’t seen in years?

How I use facebook

Published by Helen | Filed under Social Media

Todd Jordan asks what Facebook apps we can’t live without, but to me the conversation lacks something if we don’t talk about how we use Facebook and the apps embedded in it. In other words, I can only tell you about what applications I use if I also tell you the why I use them, because, ultimately it’s a total YMMV situation. (One of my taglines, presently buried on another site, is that your mileage not only may vary, but should.)

Facebook is one of my content distribution channels. I’m there on a professional basis maintaining pages that pull in RSS feeds of the sites they are associated with, and keeping an eye on groups that I created for people to have a social space associated with the respective sites.

Because many of the friends I have on Facebook are through those two sites, there’s particular venn diagrams associated with how I use the service. I use the playlist.com API to embed my playlists and I use iLike to share music with those who came into my COIs from my music critic days.

I use the shared links and notes function to distribute content to the 60+ people who friended me because of my vocational work in the Episcopal church.

I’ve stopped using the status update as much since finally getting on twitter, but I do still use it to provide, well, status updates, since Twitter has become a conversation tool for me.

To express my personality, I love the pieces of flair app — when I was a teenager we actually wore those buttons on our jackets with the collars turned up, long before it became a joke on Office Space.

I feed my blog into the platform, too. I need to update this over the weekend, because I migrated my blog to a hosted wordpress version and haven’t updated my feeds yet.

Lastly, I use facebook to stay in touch with old friends (although LJ remains the best place for this), find lost connections, and to keep an eye on my teenage son, who’s living with his dad these days.

But scrabulous remains my poison, and I’m so glad to be able to play my favorite turn-based game asynchronously with all the folks in my various circles of influence. I just wish Hasbro would give it its blessing!

New playlist: The other 90s

Published by Helen | Filed under Music, Playlists

This is a selection of 1990s music, primarily British. It moves through the decade, going from shoegaze to Britpop to TripHop.

Enjoy!

Weigh In

Published by Helen | Filed under Family, Weight Loss, Yay!

Quoth the WWBot:

Weight Tracking Summary

This was a slacker week for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that we traveled down to Central Virginia last weekend to visit my folks for Easter. It was a nice trip, and we stopped off at Williamsburg along the way. I packed us a picnic lunch, and we walked almost the entire day. So I ate rather “large” over the weekend, and decided I’d take the week off. Wound up in a pattern of sunflower seeds for breakfast, a fairly hearty lunch, and a minimal dinner for the rest of the week, and that seems to have worked even without tracking points. But the scale has been fickle and stubborn, and while the sunny side of that 200 seemed easily attainable last week, this week I think it’s just random chance that had the pointer on the scale just short of the mark.

But I’m not complaining.

At any rate; it’s also time for the monthly measure-in–last Friday of each month. Since I have a lot of new readers coming in from my recent twitter activity, I should point you to this page as to why I natter on about my weight loss quest every Friday, especially since I got several compliments on my latest user icon today. Measure-ins also tie in with pictures, which when there’s some demonstrable progress to show I’ll share.

Measure-in under this link: Read the rest of this entry »

A rewrite: What about Generation X?

Published by Helen | Filed under Content, Life, New Media, Writing

I originally had this published at The Episcopal Cafe last fall, but I have a lot of new readers coming in from the blogosphere who aren’t of my faith persuasion, and, sensitive to their range of spiritual beliefs, I’ve recast it for the secular audience.

I was talking to a friend about the challenges we face by virtue of being born after 1970–well, of being gen-xers in general, and being caught between the “Boomers” and the “Millennials,” and how this affects us in our professional and vocational lives. It came up last week on an email group, and I passed it along to several of my friends who are doing their part, in my humble opinion, to attract people like me to organizations that share a concern that their membership may be overly grey-haired.

Not to put too fine a point on my own grey hair, mind.

On Sept. 20, that group, which I can loosely describe as a group of 20/30-something peers approaching spirituality with a bit of a noncomformist edge,  met over margaritas to discuss, as one friend put it, “the theological / ecclesiological / missiological / tequiliological implications” of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; indeed, the Harry Potter series as a whole. Decidedly not what my parents would call a church, by any stretch of the imagination, but it suits me better to “practice” than to “worship.” And I got to thinking about it: why was this something I could be so down with, especially knowing that somewhere out there, another focus group was emerging to study my generation. Yawn.

The more I see things with top-down architectures being applied to us youngish people, the more I realize it doesn’t work. I’ve seen great ideas committee-ed to death all because people older and wiser than me must control every outcome of every plan of every initiative. And the more input I got from friends of mine, the more I realized:

Your invitation to me to participate doesn’t mean much if you don’t let my input—and leadership—count. And that’s what I’m hearing from frustrated 30-somethings who want to take on leadership positions but still get flak for being slackers, which we really are not anymore and we’d like some credit. I originally wrote this about being a member of the Episcopal Church, but it’s true of many other organizations. I worked at a financial services magazine that refused every pitch I made about Gen-X prospects because we’re not buyers. I work for an association that’s trying to figure out how to attract people under 40 because we’re not joiners. One friend of mine added to the conversation that she’d like to see “‘young adult’ stricken from the cultural lexicon–for reasons that resonate with me: mortgage, career, family. Heck, my son is almost 15, and pretty soon I’ll be the young adult parent of a young adult.

So, if we’re not young adults anymore, and nowhere near middle aged (if 50 is new the 30, we’re actually teenagers), what are we? How do you address the wide demographic of a narrow slice of the population that’s holding an awful lot of cards and generating absolutely no buzz? Sure, skip us. Move on to the millennials.

Here’s my take on things, though. Generation X is the bridge between the Boomers and the Millenials. We were raised with enough technology that we’re conversant in the ways that today’s teenagers interact on social networks. But we also know how to dial a phone. We’re all wired in varying ways, but each succeeding generation is increasingly plugged in. Let me put it another way. Historically, many immigrants have come to America speaking only their native language. Their children, however, speak both languages fluently. But I know many cases where the grandchildren don’t speak anything but English, and the middle generation must help the bookending generations understand one another–literally. So what happens if you skip the middle generation?

Here’s an example I ran across recently. Blogs are a publishing platform that were adopted quickly by compulsive writers with varying degrees of web-savvy. I’ve had so many that it’s a wonder I can populate them all with random Helen/Gallycat brain noise on a regular basis, so I wax and wane with all of them. They’re a great way to distribute content, to self-publish (no, really, I’m more prolific than Stephen King!), to bypass censorious editors, to think aloud, to take the podium, to brainstorm in community. So of course, many organizations, seeing the value of being able to share content with one another, decided to barrel full speed ahead with a blog. Occasionally, some would enlist me to help get the blog off the ground, since I know the technology. One, in particular, was group that was looking forward to getting some ideas out there.

But they didn’t listen to my input on certain key issues that ultimately doomed the blog. The problem was that every post had to be approved by a committee. I felt like Cassandra, trying to explain to them why it would inhibit participation on the blog. It died a few months later, neglected and forgotten.

So how is this an example of why we, Gen X, are the translators? We are well equipped to understand social media, which is going to be the communications medium of choice for today’s young people. How is this changing the face of communications? My connections in the news media say it’s as revolutionary as Gutenberg and the moveable type printing press. Ignore this opinion at your peril. Blogs are just a part of what that next generation is coming online with. We can speak their language. We can speak the Boomers’, too, though. Did I mention my teenage son? Yes? What about my aging parents? How’s your retirement portfolio?

So anyway, back to the matter at hand. Don’t skip Generation X. We’ve seen it more than once. We’ve heard you ask how to reach us, and seen you form committees hoping to find the magic pill that will get us back in to your idea of an organization. To be honest, you might not. At least, not through the means you’ve traditionally reached out to people. In the new world, you don’t just program and broadcast; you invite, share and participate. I understand that it’s difficult to turn a ship around, and for an organization of any size to embrace change quickly is a frightening prospect. But by the time you bust out your magnifying glass and whittle down to the details of the new media environment and position yourselves in the emerging economy and get all that together in a strategic plan for the new millennium that started when folks my age actually WERE still under 30…

It’s not enough to study us. Listen to us, yes, hire us, absolutely. But most importantly—

Join us.

The original, published Oct. 9, 2007, is here.