The Best of the Red: Dust Bunny Edition

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While doing some recent housekeeping in the back end of this site I uncovered some posts in my archives that many (read: most) of you missed, and I thought they were worthy of having the dust bunnies brushed off them.

I realize that the majority of you are newer readers and/or haven’t known me as long, so here are a few of that damn redhead you’ve likely never read:

• What my small town dentist can teach us about social media
• The internet is one big expo – what is your booth like?
• The high school notebook – social media casualty?
• How I accidentally started #ThankYouThursday
• Social media lessons from water skiing (and vice versa)
• Social media is like plastic baggies
• Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter are NOT the Holy Trinity

You can’t see it yet but I’ll be doing some restructuring of the direction of this blog in the near future. Everybody’s blog evolves over time, and this one is no exception. For details, visit my new “About” page.

Enjoy and thanks for reading. Stay tuned.

I am not dead – I’m just too busy driving lately to blog for realz.

I’m not sure why it took me four months of working at the chamber to realize that although I didn’t have any time or energy to blog because I was busy driving and being tired and exhausted, I could easily video blog while driving.

(It takes me a while sometimes.)

So this morning, even though I’m relocating very soon, I decided to do a video blog, and I’m not sure why because I HATE to be on camera. And then I did one on the way home, because I apparently like to be thorough. (OK, well I actually did three, but the first one was long and I wasn’t sure I recorded it, and the third one I’d prefer to use but I’m not sure what happened to it.)

I posed the idea on Twitter, and although I hate seeing myself on camera, the demand was enough either publicly or in direct messages I decided to give it the ol’ “what the hell,” so here ya go, morning and night driving vlogs (DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any boredom that may ensue.):

I’m officially an S.O.B.

I know, some of you who know me in person are thinking “we knew that!” but I’m not talking about the context you’re probably thinking.

It is with great honor and humility that I announce www.thatdamnredhead.net has been officially anointed by THE Liz Strauss of Successful-Blog as a Successful and Outstanding Blog, which means I am among bloggers who, in Liz’s words,

“. . . take the conversation to their readers, contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.”

Obviously, the SOB program could not exist without readers who are brave enough to come out of Lurk Ness and comment, so I wanted to thank all my readers who have participated in a conversation here, with a big shout-out to the amazing community of wildlife enthusiasts from WildEarth.tv, whose support was overwhelming when I shone some light on  what a true “social ecosystem” is all about.

If you’ve been reading this blog and haven’t commented yet, I invite you to de-lurk and say something sometime — it won’t hurt you and you may even find new friends. Also, I wanted to thank Liz publicly for letting me be among the “cool kids,” it’s a privilege to be among such great company.

More information about the SOB program and its origins can be found at Successful-Blog.

The difference between print & web, + how NOT to launch a student campaign.

(This is cross-posted from my other, more local blog, Regeneration Genesee, but I thought it was applicable over here, too.)

I love my alma mater, University of Michigan – Flint. It’s a great school, a great value, and its mere presence, especially with dorms now in downtown Flint, are doing wonders for the city. I still subscribe to the e-edition of their newspaper, The Michigan Times because it’s nice to know what’s going on at the school. (I was never a fan of the paper when I went there but it’s improved a lot since then.)

Being the web geek that I am, imagine my delight when I saw a headline yesterday in the email edition of M-Times that said, “SGC tells students to ‘Blog or Shut-up’: Student Government’s mobile efforts aim to raise awareness, get responses.”

This was a great idea from the Student Government Council for a campaign that unfortunately was only half-planned and half-executed. You may not be able to read the article because their platform may make you register or something (that’s a whole ‘nother post), but in a nutshell, SGC decided that in order to raise awareness on campus of their existence and get students to voice their concerns about different issues, they’d set up a “Mobile SGC” station in a busy part of campus and bribe them with pizza to fill out a “Student Concern Form” . . .

After filling out the form, students received a t-shirt voucher, to be redeemed at the SGC office, also on the third floor in the UCEN. The t-shirts are black, and read, “Shut up or Blog,” like the maize shirts for SGC members. They are attempting to draw students to the “Student Concerns” blog connected to the SGC homepage to give students a place to voice his or her issues. LeMay said she would probably use the blog.

There are two big issues with this:

They forgot something

1) Nowhere on this article was a link to said “Student Concerns Blog.” I literally had to go to the school’s homepage, search for “student government” in the search box, and then find it on the left column of the student government page. If you are going to write about a blog or some other kind of site, you need to include a link in the article. Nobody is going to do this kind of searching. It’s your responsibility as a writer to provide appropriate links for your readers.

Since my comment M-Times redeemed themselves and added a link to the blog at the end of the article, which is good, but somebody pointed out in a comment after mine that “The printed article has the info graphic that gives a direct link to the Web site…” and I couldn’t believe that I had to remind somebody that print and internet are two different media and there is no such thing as a “direct link” in print. Can I click on a newspaper and suddenly be brought to a web site? I just tried it — all I got was ink on my fingers.

What is written for print does not always translate to the internet and vice versa. Many a print-editor-turned-internet-news-editor discovers this every day, this which is common sense to those of us in my generation that grew up knowing and being able to understand the difference.

They more than “forgot something”

2) The second is the bigger issue, which is not M-Times, it’s SGC. If you follow the link to the student concerns blog, you will see that it hasn’t been updated since November 12, 2008. (I included a screen shot because I have a feeling this will change after somebody reads this… at least I hope they will.) The very blog they’re sending students to in order to voice their concerns hasn’t been updated in four months.

Read more

A nice alternative to Google Reader (for Mac users, anyway)

I know that according to some of you, I may be committing blasphemy when I say this,  but . . .

I’m not a fan of Google Reader.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it. I know it’s the most popular RSS reader, yada yada yada . . . but I prefer something else. It’s this awesome little freeware program called Shrook.

Why do I like it so much?

Well, for starters, you don’t need a browser to read your feeds. Sometimes, I have so many browsers and tabs open that I really don’t want any more. So Shrook puts all your feeds into one nice, neat little multifunctional package.

You can easily organize your groups by creating groups on the far-left panel and then just dragging and dropping. For example, you could have groups of feeds for Social Media, Favorites, News, Writing, Local, whatever. You can get as creative as you want, and yes, one feed can belong to more than one group.

But, if you really want to see the actual page that the entry you’re reading is on, a push of a button and suddenly you’ve got a mini-browser right inside of your application:

So now I can read Chris Brogan and look at his smiling face without opening yet another browser tab. A click of the same button and the mini-browser function collapses and you’re back with the XML.

Another favorite feature I have is the flag option, which is indicated by those diagonal red lines next to some of the entries above. I flag items in all sorts of feeds, usually as reference points of things I know I’ll need to return to in the future. (I know Google Reader has that option, too, but I like it better in this app.)

Shrook also can synchronize with the web, so that if you’re without your computer and in a computer lab at school or something and still want to read your favorite feeds, you can login to Shrook.com and read them there, so you’ve got the flexibility and portability of Google Reader, as well.

Something else that I think is cool about it is that you can subscribe to podcast feeds with Shrook, and when it finds a new podcast, it will download it, add it to iTunes for you, and when you sync your iPod, Shrook will grab the text from the podcast and that will appear on your iPod’s screen for you, with links to the audio and everything.

Other fun features about Shrook, from its site:

Instant Notifications – Built-in support for Growl

Spotlight support – Shrook items appear in Spotlight search results.

No Browser Required – View webpages directly in Shrook.

Smart Groups – Define almost any combination of rules to pick out items you want, all updated in real time.

Scrapbooks – Save individual items to look at later.

Blogging Integration – Use external blog editors directly from Shrook

Real-time search – Enter a word into Shrook’s search box, and the list of channels or items instantly reduces to those matching the search.

Secure access – Shrook provides access to private channels via HTTPS encryption (including self-signed) and password protection. Passwords are stored securely in your Keychain. It also shares credentials with Safari, so if you log in there you can read private channels in Shrook.

Channel Guide – Shrook comes with an integrated channel guide to help you find new channels. It’s loaded from the web, so it’s always up to date.

Quick subscription – Shrook supports feed: links, which allow you to add a channel to Shrook just by clicking a link on a web page.

Sadly, this fun little application is only for Mac, so if you’re a PC person you don’t get to play. But for my Mac user friends, I highly recommend you give Shrook a spin. When I first tried it I was skeptical to say the least, but now I love it and wouldn’t use anything else.

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