The Mosher Pit

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

Posted in Books, Faith, Memery by: Helen
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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.

Posted in About This Blog, Fail! by: Helen
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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.

Posted in New Media, Social Media, Writing by: Helen
6 Comments

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?

Posted in About This Blog, Getting Organized, Social Media by: Helen
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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!

Posted in Social Media by: Helen
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This is a selection of 1990s music, primarily British. It moves through the decade, going from shoegaze to Britpop to TripHop.

Enjoy!

Posted in Music, Playlists by: Helen
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