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Everyone’s got their own little village

They say it takes a village, whatever “It” is. Now everyone wants to build their own little community within a nice safe wall to keep people doing business within the village square. It’s a theme worth investigating. The biggie, Facebook sometimes is too huge. It’s getting like New York City, where you fear being trampled on. And there’s a need for professional hubs for people with similar interests. Here’s a site with several groups for HR folks at different levels of the personnel stratosphere.

There value proposition?

The new cyber race: Twitter-squatting

Don’t have a Twitter account? You’d better act fast. If you want a catchy title for your account in your field, you need to try to get it ASAP. I recently got involved in the elearning industry and wanted to create a new Twitter account to tweet about learning resources.  Here are some of the Twitter names that were ALREADY taken:

1. elearning
2. welearn
3. imlearning
4. learning247
5. live2learn
6. liveandletlearn
7. learnandearn
8. learnatic
9. yearning2learn
10. yearn2learn
11. yearntolearn

So I finally settled on learnophile

Here’s one of my first tweets

“There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”R. Buckminster Fuller

To learn of others, find me on Twitter…http://twitter.com/learnophile

Living in a virtual world

I’m thinking of George Harrison’s song, “Living in the Material World” as I write this, only with the word Material replaced by Virtual. We do, increasingly, live in a virtual world. For the most part, it’s pretty cool.  I’ve met some great people through social networking, and people I’ve lost track of have re-emerged through the wonders of Facebook.

Today I attended the third in a series of virtual conferences.  Digital Marketing World 2010 is held once a month, and offers a pretty decent line up of live sessions with seasoned pro’s, speaking on a variety of  topics related to social media and marketing. It’s fun to participate because it’s still a novelty. Plus it’s free and there are no worries about finding a parking space or having wasted gas if the speaker or content is not your cuppa java.

One thing I like about these conferences is the “briefcase” option. You can fill up your virtual “goodie bag” with PDFs, recorded presentations and whitepapers.  I personally recommend skipping the vendor booths (bored sales reps waiting to pounce on whomever strolls by, similar to real conferences!) and also avoid the blatently self-serving, commercial downloads like company brochures in the information

Make sure you pick an avatar (don’t worry if it doesn’t look just like you, go for something friendly and remotely similar to your real-life look) and participate in scheduled chats after the sessions to hear and chime in on very informative Q&A’s.  You can even download the complete chat, which makes a nice supplement to the speaker presentation downloadable slides. If you’re into Twitter (and if you’re reading this, I assume you are), you will find plenty of intelligent folks to follow via the #mpworld.

If you’re interested in attending upcoming conferences, go here to sign up: http://www.marketingprofs.com/events/24/conference.  You probably don’t need to use all the time they allocate, but the date falls the first Wednesday of each month (11:30am ET–4:30pm ET). The upcoming schedule includes the following topics:

See you there, and look for me to say hello!

that which doesn’t squelch us makes us stronger

In the past week or so, I’ve come across a recurrent theme: life’s obstacles can be catalysts for greatness and learned optimism.

Here the real-life story of two individuals who so beautifully illustrate the power of the human will to surmount great barriers and persevere not only in spite of their lot in life, but because of their challenges:

Aimee Mullins: In the inspiring TED video,“The opportunity of adversity,” Aimee explains that her accomplishments were precisely because of the life of being different since birth. Born without fibular bones, she had both of her legs amputated below the knee when she was an infant. She learned to walk on prosthetics, then to run, moving on to compete as a champion sprinter on prosthetics designed with cheetah legs as a model. She went on to become a model, actress, advocate, motivational speaker, celebrating her “glorious disability.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_the_opportunity_of_adversity.html

The second individual whose story reminds us to think twice before griping over minor annoyances is Patrick Henry Hughes, who movingly narrates in his autobiographical work, I Am Potential: Eight Lessons on Living, Loving, and Reaching Your Dreams, how he, with his parents’ support, overcame enormous obstacles to excel in music and become a national source of inspiration. Born with no eyes and malformed limbs, early videos of him picking out tunes at the piano at age two seem to show that it is human nature to gravitate towards areas of strength to compensate for being short shrifted in life. Some of his story, in addition to the book (see first chapter), is accessible on Youtube, (for instance this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qTiYA1WiY8).

Stories like these give a virtual kick in the pants should we find ourselves grousing or rationalizing why we can’t get something done, and hopefully push us towards greater hope for each of our lives.

blinkers/blinders for surf control

I am breaking my promise. I had pretty more sworn to the dear computer geek who optimized by system a few weeks ago that I would reform my errant ways and have fewer apps and browser windows open. Well, I am getting much better about not having Word open, along with my Internet browser and Paint, and Photoshop, all at the same time.  But the ‘net gets the best of me every time.  I start with the best of intentions. Yet somehow the lure of the quick click and learned AADD combine to get me all hopped up on a cyber shooting-spree.  Making matters worse, I used to be a Mozilla Firefox fan but plug-in problems freezing the browser caused me to turn to Google Chrome. Wowzer, once I discovered that with Chrome I could shut down my Internet connection without losing open tabs, I was a goner. Enabled and abetted by the knowledge I didn’t have to close out and bookmark pages, my criminally diffuse manner of surfing went wild.

I think I was intentionally pushing the limits, but here’s was 50+ open tabs looks like:

Why do I publicly share such a predilection to dereliction? Because I believe one of the first steps to change is self-awareness, then acknowledgement. It’s yet to be determined if I’ll change my ways, but even Chrome is prone to locking up when I get too out of hand, and I’m going to be putting the blinders (blinkers, if you’re in the UK) on this strung-out mare.

New Habits/Old Habits

Listening to a podcast with Elena Verlee (of PR in Your Pajamas, yeah, that pretty much sums up my past 2 months, stumping Eras Del Tango, which had a full-house, hallelujah!)  while similutaneously trying to form a new habit. New habit is to post on my blog every day. How do you build a new habit? The old saw says practice daily for 2 weeks solid. Okay, I can commit to posting every day for 2 weeks. That’s not hard. The secret for me? Don’t micro-manage the posts. Just throw them up on the wall. I can (ugh, if I MUST) edit later. But I won’t save them as a draft. I’ve learned that with other blogs, and they sit, getting stale. As Nike says, just do it. Another something I heard recently is habits are like cables, to undo them you have to unravel the threads one at time. Okay, so some cables I must unravel, others I will weave together day by day.

Later today, I’m headed back to 43 things to see where my other goals have been gathering dust.

PS. Other coaches, Elena suggests that coaches target people in November and December, as MOST people are looking to start setting their new habits at the beginning of the year. She also recommends Blogtalkradio.com. Will check it out too. Thanks for the tips, Elena!

Getting past the goalie

Watch in this space as I tackle a ridiculous laundry list of ambitions!

anticipation

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