The obligatory Future Midwest post

If you’re in metro Detroit (and even if you’re not), unless you’ve been living under a rock and completely off the grid, there’s this “social media” conference coming up in Royal Oak starting tomorrow called Future Midwest that some good people I know have been working their butts off trying to put together.

I’m not going to get into too much detail about all of the events they’ve got lined up, because Dave Murr did a great job of it himself, so I’ll send you there.

Everybody and their brother has been publishing their own posts on what they hope and expect at this conference. This isn’t one of those posts. I’m just writing this to tell you where I’ll be and what Ill be doing. My hopes and expectations align with those of Sarah Worsham, however.

I had nothing to do with the planning or promoting of Future Midwest, but I will be covering it for the Detroit Regional News Hub.

It’s going to be a crazy next few days, to say the least.

Tonight I’ll be picking up my friend Beth Harte, one of the speakers, from the airport, then we’re headed directly to TechCocktail, where I’ll be doing a few interviews and a podcast.

Friday I’m pulling a double header with Future Midwest coverage all day, live blogging, interviews, yada yada yada, then heading over to the Detroit Music Awards to hang out with some old friends and cover that, too, for the Hub.

A couple days ago (with a little help from my friends Carolyn Striho and Kathy Vargo) I published a preview article on the DMAs and how they keep Detroit on the map, go check it out.

Saturday, so long as Friday doesn’t kill me, I’ll be back at Future Midwest.

Sunday, so long as Saturday and Friday don’t kill me, I’ll be sleeping. Then later that night, I’ll be found on my couch watching my hero Reba McEntire host the Academy of Country Music Awards.

(And to think I used to party with rockstars all the time, now I’m not sure I can even party like a geek trying to party like a rockstar.)

The stuff I can’t go without reading every day.

The other day I did something long overdue — I pruned through my RSS feeds and hit “mark all as read.” To you this may not seem like a big deal but to me it felt so liberating — like the geek girl’s equivalent of burning her bra. For weeks I knew I was falling behind on reading all my RSS subscriptions; it got to the point that I was actually afraid of opening up my RSS reader of choice because I knew it would asplode.

Now I’m starting over at Square One with my RSS feeds, but it’s not like I haven’t kept up with things. I always keep up with my email, and there are some subscriptions (mainly newsletters) that I read every day. I post a lot of interesting things to my Facebook, and people I see often in real life tell me that they love the links I post and ask how I find them all.

So I’m going to share with you my daily reads — what pops into my inbox every day that I usually take time to at least skim over to see if there’s anything interesting and worth sharing. My life is about to get a helluva lot busier in coming weeks so I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with them all, so if you’re that big of a fan of the information I share, here’s your chance to find most of my sources in one place.

In no particular order:

The New York Times - I’ve been getting their headlines in my inbox for years. In fact, for so long I can’t remember how long exactly. I’m a big fan of The Times.

Advertising Age - In particular, I get their headlines in AdAge MediaWorks, Creativity, Digital, and TalentWorks

Copyblogger – OK so it’s a blog & I subscribe to it via RSS, but it’s one that I absolutely don’t ever want to miss so I receive it via email as well. It’s all about copywriting, content marketing, social media, and full of awesome interesting tips and information. Oh, and it’s a lot of fun.

Lateral Action - also a blog and from the creator of Copyblogger, it’s just as fun and interesting. Per its about page, it “provides tips and techniques that help you focus on doing remarkable things, rather than getting trivial things done or never moving beyond ‘creative thinking.’”

Marketingprofs - I’m not an official paying member (yet) but I’m a big fan nonetheless. I highly recommend their Get to the Point! newsletters. I subscribe to a lot of them, maybe all, I don’t remember. They’re short, sweet little nuggets of marketing goodness that stay true to their name and well, get to the point. A couple of my favorites are Small Business, Marketing Inspiration, and Daily Fix, but I love them all.

Fast Company - words can’t express how much I love Fast Company. I receive their Best of Fast Company newsletter, as well as their Tech Weekly, Leadership Weekly,and their Ethonomics newsletters.

Social Media Today - it’s a weekly newsletter but I highly recommend visiting SocialMediaToday.com for a nice daily roundup of all the most interesting blog posts in the social media world. When I find myself neglecting my RSS feeds, this is where I go to get a nutshell overview of what’s being said in the sphere. If there’s something you’d like to see (or not see) on SMT, tell my friend Ari.

Ragan’s Daily Headlines - news, features, etc. for professional communicators worldwide. I don’t read this one as often as I read the others, but the themes are similar to the other stuff I read.

Help A Reporter Out [HARO] – a brilliant idea from Peter Shankman. The gist – it’s a 3x daily digest of queries from journalists from all over, looking for sources for all kinds of topics. It’s nice and organized into sections of topics/themes, and I don’t always have time to scroll through all of them but whenever I do, I usually find some reporter somewhere that’s looking for somebody I know, so I pass the info on to them to contact said reporter. For example, not long ago, a writer was looking for a feng shui expert for a story, and I whaddya know, I just happen to know a woman who is a feng shui expert, so I passed the reporter’s query on to her. This kind of thing gives you good karma and an insight into the trends that reporters are currently writing about. Also, it continues to remind me that I know some extremely interesting people.

So there you are. This is the stuff I at least skim every day, and where I find most of my news. Do you have any daily reads that you just can’t go without? I’m curious to know if other people are as spongy as I am when it comes to this stuff.

Bunny picture by tm_lv.

It’s time to play: Computer shortcuts I want for real life!

I had a really bad day the other day and sent out a tweet from my phone that said this:

This is a game I love to play: Computer commands/shortcuts for real life. It came up in a recent conversation on Facebook with Arno, a.k.a. @camera_obscura, one of my South African friends. He said, “My next few weeks will be much easier if I could uninstall the “sleep” function from my body. And also upload information to my brain.”

Amen to that.

I’ve played it before briefly on Twitter, but I’d like to see what we come up with in the comments. So far this is my list of computer commands/shortcuts I want for real life:

• An ESCAPE key for awkward situations.
• *CMD/CTRL+F for things like my car keys.
• CMD/CTRL+Z for “undoing what you just did as you get the sinking feeling that you have officially just been a dumbass” (that one was Arno’s)
• A service like shorten URL that you can plug long meetings into.
• A help file (per Arno’s friend Adrian)
• CMD/CTRL+S to save important things for later
• Copy & Paste to relay important conversations so you don’t get anything wrong.
• CMD+Q to just quickly quit stuff and get on to the next thing.
• CMD++ to make things bigger that are too small . . . like, uh, ice cream sundaes (be creative)
• CMD+- to make things smaller that are too big . . . choose your crisis & shrink it!
• CMD+H to instantly hide
• CMD+O to open doors and stuff
• CMD+R (or F5 for PC users) to refresh . . . could save money on your water bill
• CMD+SHIFT+DELETE to empty the trash . . . nobody likes to do that in real life!

Your turn!

What are some computer commands/shortcuts you’d like to apply in real life?

*Note: I’m a Mac person so I use the CMD key, which is similar to the CTRL key. Your shortcuts may slightly vary if you’re a PC person.

How I accidentally started #ThankYouThursday

Not long ago, I wrote about why I’m not playing the #FollowFriday Twitter meme anymore, and I still stand by my sentiments in that post.

This morning I met a Twitter friend, @TJList, for the very first time, and not only was he kind and generous enough offter to drive up to my neck of the woods and video my presentation, but he came to the rescue when we discovered that the projector supplied was not compatible with my Mac. With some quick thinking and editing, we were able to translate my Keynote presentation to PowerPoint, put it on my flash drive, plug my flash drive into his PC laptop, and edit it (for the most part) so that it wasn’t as jumbled up as many times the translation from Keynote to PowerPoint goes. I wasn’t familiar with his computer at all (PCs seem rather backwards to me these days, though I can navigate them), but for being blindsided like that I think overall it went pretty well.

But honestly, I couldn’t have done it without him.

When I came back to the internet on my own computer and logged into TweetDeck, I was hit by a TON of @replies from my twitter friends who were saying nice things to me about one thing or another, whether it was considering me an honorary Detroiter (truth be told, I’m more of a Detroiter than a Flintstone, except when it comes to my coney preference), complimenting me on my new avatar pic that I took earlier in the day, or whatever. I had so many people saying so many nice things that I @replied a lot of folks and said, “I’ll call this #thankyouthursday”.

It caught on, and I inadvertently started a new meme.

Now that I think about it, I am so grateful for so many of my Twitter friends, those that I’ve met in real life and those that I haven’t yet, that I can’t believe we haven’t been doing this all along. It seems silly NOT to recognize those who say nice things to us or do nice things for us, even if it is on this “silly little online microblogging thingie” called Twitter. Twitter is invaluable to me, as I’m sure it is to many of you. Let’s not wait until Thanksgiving time to thank our Twitter pals for whatever you want to thank them for.

From now on, every Thursday I’m thanking some of my Twitter friends and hashtagging it #ThankYouThursday, because I believe expressing gratitude to deserving tweeple is much more meaningful than encouraging people to follow others for undeclared reasons.

So for my very first #ThankYouThursday, I would like to publicly recognize the following Tweeple:

@TJList – as stated above, without him, I would not have been able to do my presentation at all this morning

@mcwflint – for her mentorship, assistance, and advice on the presentation I this morning

@nickstaroba – for designing my new logo (which will be soon revealed on this site) on such a time crunch & being patient with my pickiness

@simplyjennifer – for being my go-to gal (for years) for all things geeky that my geekiness can’t figure out

@MotorCity - for considering me an honorary Detroiter

@LaurenWeber84 @EstrellaBella10 @ddelonge @charbrown @ctham @davepeckens @lisarobbinyoung @DJPlazma @bethkostecki @sslyb @AmeliaHelen -  for the compliments on my new avatar picture

So there’s my first list of #ThankYouThursday thank-yous. Obviously, it’s a Twitter meme, not a blog meme, I just did this as an initiation.  So now on Thursdays, tweet your thanks to a person, say why, & tag it #ThankYouThursday to tell the Twitterverse why that person is so nice.

My only concern is that maybe the tag is too long – #ThankYouThursday is 17 characters long. Should we shorten it to #TYThursday? Or maybe #ThanksThurs?

Let me know what you guys think in the comments.

Thanks!

La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la . . .

My social network wish list for the internet deities

In the beginning of my recent post where I told the Facebook Luddites to stop whining, I pointed out some minor changes that social networks have made lately, and also emphasized that technology is constantly being improved upon, hence this thing we call innovation. Unlike these misoneists (had to use that word again), I actually look forward to new features on my favorite sites, and found myself brainstorming on what I’d like to see in the future from these mythical beings of the web known as developers, who are rumored to live somewhere in the cloud among the Google Gods.

Without further ado, I present my wish list of new features I’d like to see among select social properties, and hopefully They are listening:

Facebook:

• level playing field and include a “does not like” option in addition to the new “like” feature
• a “meh” button for the apathetic (this one’s from my friend Ian)
• “Not a Fan” pages (e.g.: “Stacy is NOT A FAN of the Yankees.”)
• allow users to be in multiple geographic networks (i.e.: for those who live in one and work in another, or those who recently relocated but still want to be in their home network)
• ban MySpace-like “surveys” and other similar memes, otherwise make those people go back to MySpace
• have a “3 strikes” policy that would forbid somebody from friend-requesting multiple times (If I’ve said no once, I’m not going to change my mind!)
• a way to bookmark inside Facebook the links of your friends that you like
• charge people who whine to “bring the ‘old’ Facebook back” every time changes are made

Twitter:

• instant visibility of locked twitter accounts that choose to follow you (much like how Facebook unlocks one’s profile to be seen by the person whom they are trying to befriend)
• some kind of 3rd party application telling you who NOT to follow and/or who has you blocked (this may already exist, there are so many Twitter apps out there I can’t keep track of them. Does it? Bueller?)

LinkedIn:

• rename the “Answers” section either “Questions” or “Questions & Answers,” because that makes more sense
• ability to group contacts much like Facebook’s “Friend Lists” with multiple privacy options (this was suggested by a friend, I’m ambivalent)

MySpace:

• please do not cease to exist, but keep all the annoying people on MySpace from invading Facebook somehow (I’m going to catch hell for this one, just watch)

Real life:

• have a service like “shorten URL” that you can plug long meetings into
• an escape key for awkward situations
• CTRL+F: car keys & other things I can never find when I need them
• incorporate hashtags into real life somehow so people would know what we’re referring to instantly

So there’s my wish list for social networks. I can only hope those in The Cloud are listening and ask for no goats’ blood. What would you like to see?

Flying Spaghetti Monster image via Perrenque.

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