At some point, life got in the way of this blog. And then at some point, I started an Ashtanga yoga blog, which has taken a lot of care and nurturing. But the spirit — and archived posts — of Beyond 140 lives on, in the form of a Posterous blog. I’d love to see you there. (I’d also love to see you at YogaRose.net!)
Thanks, as always, for reading.
As a subscriber to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s text service, I received a Valentine’s Day text that read: “Put UR heart into it! Take our quiz about heart health.” By replying “heart,” I received another text testing my knowledge of how often American have heart attacks.
This started me thinking about the effectiveness of text messages, especially as new media darlings Google Buzz and Foursquare
Even our feline friends are addicted to texting.
dominate discussions centered around how organizations can make effective use of social media to reach larger audiences. On some some levels, text messages can seem almost dated. No geolocation function? No sharing or posting?
But the power of a text message lies precisely in its simplicity — and I don’t think we have even begun to see texting’s full potential. Just consider the way text messages were used to rapidly raise millions for the recent Haiti humanitarian crisis. It’s unfortunate that there will always be humanitarian crises, but it’s heartening to think that the ways for people to globally support relief efforts is expanding in innovative ways.
And what about personal finances? Can text messages save me bill-paying time in the future? I’d rather send a text to pay rent than write out a check, find an envelope and drop the whole thing off.
Back to heart health. I think the text I received shows that the CDC is trying to maximally leverage its text messages—this time, incorporating a little user interactivity. For the record, I texted in the correct answer to the quiz question. Do you know whether Americans have heart attacks a) every 25 seconds b) 10 times an hour or c) 200 times a day? If you said a), nice work on matters of the heart.
Stressed? Who are you calling stressed?
I attended a guided meditation workshop at Hilltop Yoga this evening. The timing of the workshop before Thanksgiving was no coincidence — it was geared toward helping everyone find ways to reduce their stress levels during the holidays. My teacher, Hilaire Lockwood, did a brilliant job, as she always does, of connecting us to the deepest parts of ourselves. With her talking the packed room through various meditation exercises, the process of moving toward stillness seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
On my own, however, I find meditation, and being still in general, very difficult. If I’m watching my daily dose of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, I’m probably also scanning TweetDeck or my Google Reader account. I do yoga (primarily, power yoga and Ashtanga) because it’s the best practice I’ve ever found to keep the world at bay and achieve true inner focus. I meditate best through movement.
With the guided meditation still fresh on my body, mind and spirit, I’m thinking about whether social media, which makes up an important part of my day-to-day life, can be employed as another daily tool to reduce stress. Whether it’s a steady stream of 140-character messages in the form of tweets, live news updates on Facebook or constantly updating RSS feeds, the social media world does not exactly promote focus. But as someone who finds a certain calm through movement, I don’t think the idea of social media and focus should be diametrically opposed.
Here a few ideas I have for using our favorite social networks and the like to keep the stress at bay this holiday season:
Use RSS feeds to help you do your holiday shopping more efficiently
For many of us, holiday shopping is a huge source of stress. Let’s face it, no matter what level of zen we can manage to achieve, it’s hard to be looking at the calendar on Dec. 19 and counting how many shopping days are left till Christmas, and it’s hard to maintain total calm when circling around the mall parking lot for the fifth time looking hoping for a spot to open up. Add gifts that need to be shipped and everything else, and high blood pressure seems inevitable.
I’m a huge fan of Etsy.com, the online store that features handmade goods from artists and craftmakers from all over the world. So when I find a store I like, such as this one, I subscribe to its RSS feeds so that I can see new products added throughout the year. Every now and then, something new catches my eye that I know would make the perfect gift. So I do a little shopping all year long, which takes some of the pressure off of the pressure-cooker months of November and December.
Identify yogic tweeters, and follow them
I get much of my news through Twitter, by having tweets sent to my phone. This is a blessing and a curse. I know I won’t miss any important news, but on a day when I’m running from one meeting to the next, or jammed with deadlines, it can be overwhelming to scroll through 35 tweets all about breaking local and national news, all about crime, the economy or military developments. So I follow Twitter accounts like @HilltopYoga and @shareyoga. I get updates from Hilltop Yoga about upcoming workshops, which gives me something to look forward to on especially stressful days, and offers the periodic yoga philosophy. @shareyoga tweets yoga breaks. These tweets help break up what can be a heavy Twitter stream.
Tell your Facebook friends how stressed you are
Inevitably, when I do a status update about how stressed I am, I get several comments from friends that either remind me to take a deep breath or make me laugh despite my bad mood. Status updates work every time. So if you’re pulling your hair out because you’ve got family coming in 48 hours, your place is a mess and you haven’t even started thinking about cooking, say so — you’ll have a lot of support.
Do you actively use social media to make your life less stressful? Given that Thanksgiving is just four days away, and I have so much to before then, I’ve love to hear any suggestions you have.
(Photo credit: Dave-F)
How did E.T. manage to phone home in 1982 with this set-up?
Ping.fm, which is what I use both on my laptop and on my mobile networks to update microblogging accounts, describes itself as a “simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.”
It definitely delivers as promised. If only all services in life did that.
And even though I don’t have an iPhone (yet! — just a matter of biding out my current contract) and use a severely limited BlackBerry (my workplace has a policy of restricting access to a great many useful Web sites and disabling other features as well), I can post updates here too. There are times I still have to pinch myself when thinking about how many more communication options are open to us now compared with just a few years ago.
What are your favorite ways to take advantage of these advances?
(Photo credit: Mattingly23)
Is it me, or have you changed something about your look?
So here’s the thing — I don’t hate the new Facebook redesign. In fact, I kind of like it.
I must be joining all of about 9,773 people among the social network’s 175-million-strong ranks who aren’t up in arms over the redesign. The criticisms of the changes are numerous, detailed and widespread — so much so that there are reports even Facebook employees hate it.
The consensus out there is that the new look was inspired in part by the real-time stream of the current “it” network, Twitter — and I can’t deny that that probably has something to do with why I like it.
It seems to me that Facebook took a page from Twitter, FriendFeed and now-defunct Pownce in how it presents aggregated information about what people are doing and saying. The new Facebook stream gives more equal weight to the individuals and groups (in the form of fan pages) you want to be connected to — it’s no longer a friend’s status update here and a note from one of your groups way over here. When Mashable posts a new article, I see it in the same stream that tells me which of my friends just blew their March Madness brackets. This makes much more sense to me, because I use social networks to gather information, whether it’s about friends, trends or news events. If I’ve gone to the trouble of becoming a fan of a group, business or organization, I want to know what’s new there as much as I want to hear about what a former colleague is up to.
Believe me, I am no Facebook defender. When the social networking completed its last redesign six months ago, I was quite annoyed. Although the redesign aimed to keep pages from looking too cluttered (an especially admirable goal in light of how MySpace looked), I thought the changes ended up parceling out information over a greater number of pages, which was the last thing I wanted.
Despite the latest uproar over a rumored e-mail from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying, essentially, that he could care less about user complaints, I can’t picture Facebook doing what Tropicana did recently and bending to the will of its customers. So unless we all feel like doing a mass-migration to Bebo, we’re going to have to live with this. Good thing everyone has Facebook and Twitter to vent their complaints through.
How about you? Will you be part of the user revolt? Am I wrong to not join the cause?
(Photo credit: Jacob Bøtter)
Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh sends his birthday wishes
Twitter’s growing up so fast. The microblogging site just celebrated its third birthday — and it’s 1300 percent bigger than it was just a year ago.
Mashable said this of the milestone: “Thank you Twitter for giving us real-time news, creating a community of Twitter application developers, and for giving us THE_REAL_SHAQ.”
@Zappos tweeted: “Happy birthday Twitter! Like most 3 yr olds, u make me feel happy, sad, surprised, overwhelmed. But in the end I still love u.”
So hey, happy birthday, Twitter. I’m sorry I thought you were incredibly stupid when I first heard about you. I was wrong, and all those people who were busy tweeting about coffee and weekends and politics and everything else under the sun were actually right. Without you, I wouldn’t have had the chance last Thanksgiving to talk about turducken with Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. I wouldn’t have learned about the Detroit Pistons’ Allen Iverson trade before all my friends did. I wouldn’t have known about Creative Commons. Thanks for showing me how much can be accomplished with just 140 characters.
There’s an interactive you-be-the-journalist game at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. in which you race against another team to pull together the front page of a newspaper by answering sticky questions about what’s ethical and what’s not.
I’m thinking about this game because I’m thinking about the controversial police photo of pop artist Rihanna that leaked two days ago. The searingly tight shot shows Rihanna’s face with welts and bruises that were made, it’s widely speculated, at the hands of R&B star Chris Brown the night before the Grammy Awards.
As with a lot of news these days, I first learned about Rihanna’s beating through Twitter, and when TMZ.com posted its prize photo, I learned about that through Twitter as well, when someone I follow tweeted the link to TMZ.com.
This case offers a striking reminder about how little we need an interactive game at the Newseum to play a journalist, because social media lets us do that in countless ways large and small every day. In the past, the public at large would scrutinize a decision by a media outlet on whether to show the photo. Now, we are faced with a similar dilemma ourselves as we decide whether to tweet, retweet, use a Facebook status update or write a blog post to link to or embed such a controversial photograph.
Gawker addressed the journalistic ethical gray area by outing the publications that ran the photo (outlets that included Gawker), calling the photo a “media ethics lightning rod.” What about the rest of us? Shouldn’t this also be a social media question? I didn’t tweet or retweet the photo, and I’m not linking to it anywhere here — which means I can’t link to TMZ.com at all, since the photo is still on its homepage. But does that matter? I looked at the photo the second I saw that tweet — and if I had read a news story that didn’t publish the photo or include a link, I would have Googled it.
I think it’s also interesting to note that this was not the only controversial image that made headlines this week. The New York Post ran an editorial cartoon that appeared to compare President Obama to a chimp shot dead by police. I was at home sick for three days this week so I watched a lot of cable news shows, and it seems that just about every show invited guests on to talk about the issue — and rightly so. The publication of the Rihanna photo, though obviously widely covered, received far less critical attention. I didn’t see guests brought on to weigh in on the controversy, and I think it was a missed opportunity to discuss domestic violence and how media outlets handle — or avoid — the issue. Were we more interested in seeing this red-hot celebrity exposed in such a vulnerable position than we were in what made a man think he had the right to do that to her?
Earlier this week, a friend of mine tweeted this of the Rihanna story:
I’m really getting tired of intelligent men I know saying, ‘I wonder what RiRi did to set him off like that.’
That’s the kind of honest discussion we need around domestic violence (and MTV News does a fine job getting into it here). It would be nice to see more of it on national media outlets, but if we don’t see enough there, the power of social media is that we can make sure it happens ourselves.
Photo credit: Gawker.com
Reflections of a sort
I swore off New Year’s resolutions a long time ago because every year, my list involved the same general types of goals — get to the gym more often, make more yoga classes, get back into Spanish. Like so many Americans, I’d make headway for all of about three weeks before work and life inevitably got so busy that something had to give.
For some reason, 2009 has reinvigorated my resolve to — well, resolve. Maybe it’s because so many people around me have high hopes for year — a few because they passionately supported Barack Obama, some because they have a gut feeling, and others because 2008 proved to be such a personally difficult year that they have no choice but to believe 2009 will be an improvement.
I can’t deny that my enthusiasm for social media has something to do with it too. 2008 was the year that I discovered the potential and power of microblogging, blogging, feed aggregators, social bookmarking and all that good stuff — the year that I took the leap from reading and only dabbling in the Web 2.0 world to actually engaging it and integrating services and apps into my daily life. Reading Mashable is as much a part of my routine as checking out the top stories on Washingtonpost.com.
So I’ve decided to give resolutions another try. But I’m sticking to social-media resolutions. If this goes well, I’ll consider doing New Year’s resolutions in 2010 and adding goals that don’t involve social media — like losing 10 pounds.
1. Get more in tune with online music sites
I always get incredible music recommendations from friends and people I meet — I’m lucky that way. But that shouldn’t stop me from discovering new music on sites such as TheSixtyOne, Favtape, Pandora and Last.fm.
2. Pull together a podcast
I’ve been meaning to do this since I attended Podcamp Michigan 1. Still haven’t had the chance.
3. Open my heart to OpenID
I am a pretty private person, which is one reason why it took me so long to get on Twitter, start a blog, or even do something as basic as starting a Facebook account. As a former reporter, I feel far more comfortable handling other people’s stories than I do broadcasting aspects of my own life. But I’ve gotten past all that, and now, I can’t picture going back. Having a single digital identity across sites — whether it’s through OpenID, Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect — that follows me around the Web is the logical next step.
4. Practice less moderation — at least for a while
An end-of-year Ars Technica titled “New social media tools, same old lesson: moderation” offered a good reminder about the pitfalls of spending too much time with social media. In fact, back in November I logged off for a weekend to prove to myself that I still could. That said, I’m far from the point where I’m putting in more than I’m getting out, and I’m looking forward to spending even more quality time maximizing the usefulness of sites such as FriendFeed and Delicious.
5. Get an iPhone already
Apple rocks my world, period. I’ve wanted an iPhone since it first came out, but I’m stuck in my current family-plan contract and I’m pretty sure my sister would have to kill me if I break my end of it. I need to whip up an escape plan — plus, I can justify it by saying that getting an iPhone will help me with my other resolutions, right?
I just received a New York Times news alert in my inbox reporting that Tribune, the Chicago-based media company that used to issue my paychecks, has just hired bankruptcy advisers to try to stay afloat. “It is only the latest — and biggest — sign of duress for the newspaper industry yet,” according to the Times’ DealBook blog. The Wall Street Journal says on its Web site that a possible bankruptcy-protection filing, which insiders believe could come as soon as this week, opens “a new front of trouble for the newspaper industry.”
When Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast in September, I mainly followed developments through a @TrackingIke, a Twitter account constantly updated by reporters of the Austin American-Statesman. I found their updates to be more interesting, more informative, and more poignant than watching the same CNN reporters providing the same updates from the same exact spot hour after hour.
I’ve been tracking the devastation that’s touching down in newsrooms across the country in a similar way — through Twitter and Paper Cuts, a tremendous mashup that plots buyouts and layoffs, along with corresponding news stories and company memos, onto Google Maps.
As a J-School grad, it's painful to see this shifting landscape.
When I followed Hurricane Ike, it was in the way anyone does — out of general concern for the people (and the pets) involved. Tracking the severity and frequency of buyouts and layoffs in the news industry this year has been far more personal for me. Although I work in advocacy communications now, I started out my career in journalism, and spent seven years doing the daily grind in newsrooms in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The Hartford Courant, part of the Tribune chain and the last newspaper I worked at before moving to Michigan and switching careers, announced earlier this year that it needed to cut a quarter of the newsroom. I remember a friend e-mailing me a list of who had taken the buyouts. There were so many names. I just kept scrolling and scrolling, wondering who was left to put out the paper and keep the Web site humming.
The storm — which ended up including buyouts and layoffs — passed through, and The Courant, which likes to remind the public that it is the country’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication (“older than the nation,” as the line goes), kept on publishing. As with any community after a calamity, the people left had to rebuild and move on, and my friends there continue to do great journalism, whether it’s good old-fashioned Fourth Estate reporting or providing the public with data on demand.
In more recent weeks, it seems as if grim news is announced increasingly frequently. In Lansing, Mich., where I work now, the Lansing State Journal was forced to make the difficult decision to lay off a total of 31 employees this past week in response to a weak economy, and as part of parent company Gannett’s national directive to reduce payroll by 10 percent. These layoffs follow cuts at Booth newspapers around Michigan.
When Hurricane Ike did its damage, CrisisWire — an aggregator that pulls content about disasters from Flickr, Twitter, news sites, blogs and other sources — hadn’t been launched yet. But it’s here now, and recently covered the Santa Barbara fires. On some level, I think it would make sense for CrisisWire to expand its definition of crisis and cover the newspaper industry layoffs — it’s a cliché, but true, that good journalism strengthens and protects democracy. The scale of these cuts is should be seen for what they are — a loss to a community as devastating as any storm.
Jonny Greenwood during a 2008 tour stop in Bristow, Va.
It’s been a visually stimulating week for Radiohead fans (I say this as one of the visually stimulated). The band this weekend premiered the last of its new batch of official videos for its In Rainbows album — videos that are actually fan-produced and selected from a worldwide competition.
Radiohead grabbed a lot of headlines last year by releasing In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-want (even if that meant you took it for free) download. By erasing the line between music production and music distribution, the band prompted everyone from industry executives to has-been rockers to wring their hands and wax poetic about an inevitable music-industry death spiral.
Whether it’s a groundbreaking album or a brash business decision, the members of Radiohead always seem to be bending, blurring and breaking. They’re not always the first band to push boundaries in a particular direction, but they are typically the most influential.
The production of these newly released videos are the latest example of how attune Radiohead is with the Web 2.0 spirit of taking down artificial barriers to make room for creative communities to thrive. Earlier this year, Radiohead broke down some In Rainbows tracks into “stems” – separated tracks of voice, guitar, bass, strings/FX and drums — for fans to remix and post for votes.
In this video competition — conducted in conjunction with the independent animation network aniBoom and TBD Records, and promoted on Adult Swim and MySpace — fans helped determine finalists by voting on one-minute video submissions. AniBoom says it received more than 1,000 entries that represented more than 150 cities in 40 countries. Radiohead originally sought just one winner, but in August announced four instead. Talking some syntactic cues from Yoda (for unknown reasons), lead singer Thom Yorke said at the time: “The aniBoom video competition, totally blown me away it has. We are proud that In Rainbows songs were the source of inspiration for so many amazing creations.”
Each creative team received $10,000 to produce the full-length video. MySpace Music previously premiered the final product for “Reckoner,” my favorite track off of the album, and over the past week, the full-length videos for “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” “15 Step” and “Videotape” were released. Envisioned and executed in France, the United States, Japan and Germany, these winning entries reflected Radiohead’s international fan base.
I really dig the Japanese-animation style of the “15 Step” video. And while I thought the other three were more innovative, I wasn’t immediately enamored of them — they’re probably acquired tastes, like natto maki or something. But whether I aesthetically like the videos doesn’t really matter, because it’s how they were seeded and grown that makes them so interesting to me.
YouTube helped music fans wanting to consume videos to bypass MTV. Perhaps by blurring the line between “official” and “fan-produced”— and the line between music consumer and music creator — Radiohead is helping to train fans see past the band itself when looking for creative inspiration.
How did I survive 48 hours without the Internet?
When this weekend started, I celebrated by logging out of all my accounts — Gmail, Twitter, Ping.fm, Facebook, FriendFeed. I turned off my personal cell and my work BlackBerry and noted the time: 8:01 p.m. I didn’t think I could make it 48 hours without tweets and text messages, but I liked the idea of being liberated from it all, no matter how brief.
The second after I had shut it all down, my first impulse was to send a tweet about how energized I was at starting this experiment.
Yeah. This was going to be a long 48 hours.
Getting through the first evening turned out to be surprisingly easy, and I started to feel that stillness I was looking for. But on Saturday, stillness turned to immobility — the list of things I couldn’t do got longer and longer.
Couldn’t go online to browse for ideas for my youngest sister’s birthday. Couldn’t tweet about the Mediterranean orzo omelet I had whipped up. Couldn’t post a LinkedIn recommendation for a former colleague. Couldn’t look up the lyrics to the Blur song I was listening to. Couldn’t even look up a word, since I don’t have a hard copy of a dictionary at home. Couldn’t make a phone call to set up a hair appointment, since I don’t have a landline.
Like a New Yorker who’s had it with the city, I told myself I had to get away for the weekend. But it didn’t take long to realize how much I missed my little space in this Web 2.0 world — even if it means that my BlackBerry constantly vibrates from incoming work-related e-mails. Logging on and powering up at 8:01 this evening felt like turning the key and flipping on the light — it’s good to be home.
Beyond 140 