The Mosher Pit

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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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.

Posted in Content, Life, New Media, Writing by: Helen
4 Comments

Whatever the intellectual property issues surrounding Scrabulous, the Scrabble clone is a total craze right now among my friends on the blogosphere, especially on Facebook, where the knockoff is supposedly the most popular game app on the platform.

Invariably, I get hit with all kinds of “how did you get so good at this game?” when dealing with a new competitor who’s not accustomed to my regular “bingos”–plays in which you use all 7 tiles and land a 50 point bonus–and often 400+ score. The honest answer to this is that back in 2000 and 2001 I spent way too much time on the games.com site before AOL purchased it and reduced it to the latest place to play Bejeweled and Alchemy.

The original games.com site had several classic game titles including Battleship, Sorry, Upwords, Monopoly, and Boggle. Scrabble was another option. It was there that I started learning Scrabble strategy, mostly from people far better than me. A year later, I had a rating of 2000 and was a force to be reckoned with. I was out of practice, though, when I started playing Scrabulous on Facebook a few months ago. During my time off from the game (and from Boggle, where I learned the Scrabble dictionary from watching other users get credit for words like “mho” and “rotl”), the Scrabble dictionary had been revised to include more words, including “qi” and “za.” So I missed out on some big point opportunities in my early games, but playing people with more recent experience, I quickly reacquainted myself with strategy.

Each month on Facebook, I post my Bingos for the month and any notable events, such as new high scores or very competitive games. But I’ve been promising for ages to post a tipsheet to help scrabnewbies go up against scrabvets and not feel like they were plummeting feet first into a meat grinder. Before I begin, let me encourage you to check your archives, if you have them, and see what the scores of your past few games are. Put the following tips to the test, and see if those scores go up. If they do, consider shooting me a donation using that link (points to the right margin).

And so, here it is:

TEN THINGS YOU CAN DO TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE IN SCRAB*L*

1. Powerful scores are built on tiny, tiny words. Learn by heart the 2-letter words; this will be an important key in step two. There are also lists of three-letter words — and you can just search on scrabble word lists and find everything from u-less q words to what to do with those racks where your only vowel is a y.

2. Play more than one word whenever possible. While it’s possible to get an awesome score if you can place a high-point tile on a dark-blue (triple-letter) square, it’s also possible to score in the single digits. You should try to leave each play with at least 10 points, and the higher, the better. One of the best ways to do that is by playing more than one word each play. There are two ways to do this:

a. You augment an existing word. Say the person before you plays “chunk.” You have, on your rack, sryrloa. Perhaps, in starting out, you might play “sorry” off the end of chunk — and make “chunks.” But another option may to shift the entire word over so that you play chunky and sorry.

b. You stack your words. For more punch, that 2-letter word list comes in handy. By aligning words together, you get points for every word you make. Say, for instance, you have the word “mead” spelled across, and you have tozrobl on your rack. You could build “orzo” on top of mead and also get the words om, re, za and od.

3. Save your ‘S’s. The entire reason there are only four s tiles in the game is that they are almost like the queen in chess. So many words take an s for a plural that it is the natural place to start combining a la the technique in tip 2a. Now, there are perfectly good reasons to play a noncombining s — such as using the s to lengthen a word to a pink or red word bonus square — and when those happen, go for it! But be judicious in how you use this all-important letter; once they’re gone, they’re gone!

4. Mix your tiles up. Online versions often have a “shuffle” button that allows you to rearrange tiles randomly, but if you’re using a rack, mix them up and watch what words emerge. Your goal is to start identifying potential bingos — those monster plays that carry the 50-point bonus.

5. Practice anagrams. Another way to get the hang of spotting bingos is to play other anagram puzzles. Scrab*l* is, at heart, an anagram game. Anagrams are words that you can rearrange into other words; with Scrab*l*, you’re rearranging letters into words. But those seven tiles may have innumerable possibilities. Some anagram-based games online (some are competitive):

• Anagrammatic
• Text Twist
• Boggle clones such as Scramble (Facebook app) — I’m so bummed that Boggle and Scrabble are no longer available on atari.com. Boggle taught me more about the Scrabble dictionary’s obscure three- and four-letter words than several hundred games of Scrabble ever could.

6. Play with score previews, if available. Or, play against yourself. Learning how different combinations score differently makes all the difference in your ability to score more points, and can help you determine whether it’s better to play “bark” across off an existing B, or “ba” across and “ark” down off that same B. Playing against yourself allows you to explore and experiment. Similarly, online engines with score previews let you see just how many points you are going to rack up before you commit to the play. That’s a tool–use it!

7. If you truly cannot play something worth more than 10 points, you might be better off swapping tiles. You might have a rack with six vowels, most of which are U, and a Z. (I had this happen yesterday.) That rack is not going to get better in a hurry, because at most, I might be able to place the Z with an A and score 11 points, and spend the next four turns trying to figure out what to do with the litter of grunting noises I can maybe spell. Or, I can hold on to the Z (because it’s a high-point tile) and one or two of the better vowels, and swap out. It’s a gamble, but four turns of crappy scoring is a lot more difficult to bounce back from than one turn of no score at all.

8. Use–or block–bonus squares strategically. Pink/red indicates a word bonus, meaning the score for all the tiles is combined and doubled or tripled. Blue (light and dark) indicates a letter bonus, meaning the score for that tile ONLY is doubled or tripled. It is, however, possible to have a word stretch across such that tiles touch more than one bonus square, particularly where the light blue squares are concerned. If you can place a high-point tile on the light blue tile and make the word cross a pink or red tile, you’ll start seeing higher and higher scores–even more so if you’re using a combine or stack multiword play. But a caution: if you try to set up an awesome play for yourself on one of these tiles, chances are your opponent will see it and play it before you can. Sometimes it’s better to use tough-to-play-off letters such as C or V adjacent to these squares to block your opponent from making a high-scoring play off that bonus square.

9. Buy a Scrabble dictionary. Using online tools to learn the Scrabble dictionary can backfire, especially if an application is using the SOWPODS dictionary, which is more common in international versions of the game (and therefore has more words, if you ever thought that could be possible.) But having one handy is not only a great reference for your scrabble games, it can also illuminate some of the more obscure answers in Sunday crossword puzzles.

10. Watch those last few plays. Towards the end of the game, if the Q, Z or J haven’t been played, keep an eye out to leave appropriate vowels open to be able to play these tiles if you get stuck with them late. Qi, za, and jo are the last minute saves to remember, but V and U can be particularly problematic. The real problem is that whatever points are left on your rack when the game ends? Those points get subtracted from your score and added to your opponent’s, and it will make or break a close game. You also don’t want to hold a tile for a better rack only to find that there are no tiles left in the “bag.” There should be a tile distribution window that will let you see how many of each letter are available: if all four S tiles have been played, for instance, you know that your opponent can’t do a trick combo using that letter. But if there are only three on the table, SOMEONE has it.

Lastly, here’s a recent Scrabulous game between me and a friend that shows some of these techniques in action. I won this one, 399 - 363. If you’re friended with me on Facebook and have that application, you can pull up some of my archives on my profile page, complete with turn by turn history (”move list”). Start by keeping track of your score. If you’re presently scoring 150-200 points per game, aim for 250. Don’t be afraid to challenge people of all skill levels: it’s the best way to learn!

Posted in Friends, Games, Tipsheets by: Helen
3 Comments

Posted in LOLZ!, Pets, Pictures by: Helen
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When all else fails, have tea. I think it’s just been that kind of week. But finding this mug at a grocery store yesterday for $2 really just made things much better.

Even Hooter was impressed.

Posted in Pictures, Yay! by: Helen
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Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: lolcats

Posted in LOLZ!, Pets, Pictures by: Helen
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Temple at some point in the past year or so has restored its online archives for the Temple Times, of which I was associate editor between 2000 and 2004. I’m so happy about this, because it means I can restore that portion of my online clip file.

I discovered this when I had this random notion to Google an amazing student I interviewed back in the early days of my writing career. I wasn’t surprised to find that she indeed went on to Harvard Law School, and I believe we’ll be seeing more of her in years to come. I hit her up on LinkedIn, and hope she writes back, because I’d love to hear what track she’s on now that she’s out of school.

I should note that there was a story I wrote in 2001 that has been tickling around the back of my mind as being an influence on my faith journey, but I didn’t have a copy of it — I found it here. I was pretty much a nontheistic, nonpracticing Buddhist at the time.

Posted in Career, Higher Education, Writing, Yay! by: Helen
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Updates continue… have the beginnings of my blogroll, mostly faith-related at this time but will be expanding gradually.
The archives are slowly coming up to par. Much of what I’m doing right now is migrating livejournal posts in from my old Deviathan journal and then editing both old gallycat posts and deviathan posts to reflect the style format of an open blog–using first names only or internet handles for personal friends, calling my son “K” and my partner “DFH”. But as I go back in time, the partner names will change; I’ve had several relationships since I started keeping an online journal. So I guess for them I’ll try to come up with nicknames that will reflect who they were at the time to me.

Right now, the meat and bones of this journal is still primarily faith-related, but that is going to be changing rapidly as I incorporate other content here. Also, for those of you who read this via a feed, you may occasionally see backdated posts appear when I create a new entry for old content without using the import tool on wordpress.

I love going through my old content, however. There have been a lot of LOL moments in the past few years that I had totally forgotten about.

Posted in About This Blog, Memories, Meta, Writing by: Helen
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I’ve rearranged my feedreader so that i have an a-list (read daily), a b-list (read weekly) and a c-list (read when I have time). it’s made it so much easier for me to keep up.

I have a separate category for the blogs I work for, which will help me stay up to date with them.

And a third category for the blogs that don’t have much to do with faith, because that’s what I primarily use the hhthompson google reader for.

On an irrelevant note, I registered a new gmail account today, in my married name. Even though it’s still a good six months out, just wanted to get it before some other helen mosher goes, I want a gmail account! like all the helen thompsons did.

cat news: the stray that’s definitely adopted me, whom I call Rocket, goes to the vet tomorrow for a physical and to schedule his boybitectomy. i am now officially a 3-cat household, which probably means i’m a crazy cat lady. the cats sure are crazy, anyway.

Posted in Getting Organized, Pets by: Helen
2 Comments