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 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.

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.

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 . . .

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.

As of the other night, yours truly is now a contributor* to a hilarious site for people who secretly (or-not-so-secretly) hate their jobs, Office Evil.

My first contribution is currently the featured MadLib on the home page. It’s a memo from your boss. He/she saw what you were doing on those social networks on company time and NOT very happy about it. Fill in the blanks to find out exactly why you’re in deep.

*Disclaimer: Potential future employers – Please do not interpret this the wrong way. Though I currently work for myself, anybody can tell you that I’m a workaholic, love what I do, and always go above and beyond. This is only for fun, and came about randomly. Don’t hold expressing my creative juices against me.

Yesterday my pal Robin of InnerMedia Coaching & Consulting and I took a field trip to Ann Arbor for one of the LA2M Marketing Meetings, whose speaker that day just happened to be one of my favorite people in all of Metro Detroit, the lovely, smart, and talented Ms. Shauna Nicholson, marketing manager for Biznet Internet Solutions in Wixom. She was leading a discussion on viral marketing.

Though I did RSVP on LA2M’s Facebook event page, I forgot to actually tell Shauna I was going to be there, and forgot to check to see if there was an official hashtag for the event. (I hadn’t been to one of these events before so I wasn’t sure.)

Robin and I were sitting at the far end of the room from Shauna. It was pretty packed, and there was a big table full of people in between us. I didn’t really want to get up just to ask her that, so what did I do?

I sent her a text message from across the noisy room:

is there a hashtag for this? #la2m?

I saw that she was just putting away her iPhone so I nudged Robin and said, “Watch this. . .”

Shauna suddenly looked at her phone, looked up, looked all the way down the long table of people and gave me an affirming nod.

I turned to Robin and said, “See? This is yet another reason I love technology!”

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.

Beware of cat.

I was preparing for a very productive weekend of catching up on my RSS feeds, writing a business plan, remodeling a website from the inside out, preparing a presentation, and putting together a video.

That isn’t happening now.

Thanks to my lovely, adorable, attention-demanding cat Zoe, all of the above and then some has been put on hold until I receive my replacement MacBook Pro keyboard anywhere between 3 to 6 business days.

Last summer she was the main proponent in a traumatic orange soda incident that I documented on my now-defunct other damn blog , but in a nutshell I graduated to a new level of geekdom when I decided to save a lot of money and fix it myself by taking apart the laptop, cleaning it up inside, and installing a new keyboard.  I decided to document the process because I’m that big of a geek. Little did I think that I would actually have to perform the exact same surgery again.

Fast forward to today, and I was just about to start on Task #1, when Zoe was being her usual self and not leaving me alone. She jumped on the table and was sitting on my notebook, then decided to jump down when she realized I wasn’t going to give her the attention she deserved was demanding. In doing so, the force of her pushing off the notebook to jump caused the notebook to collide with a glass of Coke, which in turn fell right on my keyboard in some kind of bizarre Rube Goldberg-like incident that lasted half a second.

Thankfully (?), this time I knew exactly what to do and took the proper procedures to reenact the prior surgery, thinking that after I extracted the keyboard from the rest of the laptop, could just pop the keys off, clean everything up underneath and (God forbid) inside the computer if it reached there, pop the keys back on, and put the MacBook Pro back together like nothing ever happened.

Or so I thought.

After taking everything apart and discovering that the CPU had not been touched (*phew*), I proceeded with the, well, procedure, and then spent I-don’t-know-how-many-hours later trying to pop the keys back on. I learned the hard way that it’s not as easy as “just pop back on,” and could not get them to stay all the way on … some not at all. Finally, I accepted defeat and realized I’d have to buy yet another new keyboard and do this aaaaaaalllllllll over again.

So basically, the majority of the stuff I wanted to accomplish this weekend and this week are on hold, mainly because the important data I need just happen(s) to be trapped on the hard drive of my naked, dismembered MacBook Pro.

I do have a PC from which I’m typing now and will be checking email periodically (even tweeting a bit), but I won’t be able to do very much except whatever I can do via cloud computing … which actually might be more than I once anticipated now that I think of it.

Still, my point is that I’m bidding adieu to the internets for what may be a week à la Celine Dion … meaning it’s not really goodbye but “I’ll be less around” … until I decide to go on another farewell tour or something.

Amber over at Altitude Branding has a great post on Twitter etiquette in the same vein as Shannon Paul’s “Don’t Be That Guy” that I mentioned in my previous post, and I can’t express my sentiments enough when people send me DMs that say, “Thanks for following, now click on my junk.”

I had to comment for the second time tonight just to share my recent revelation with everybody:

I was watching MAD TV the other day and it dawned on me that these “click my junk” tweeple are the online equivalent of that giant man-child character Stuart. You know, the one who’s always like, “Look what I can do!!” and does a stupid little dance just for attention. I am sooooo calling these people “Stuarts” from now on.

Don’t be Stuart, people. It will only make you look like a giant man-child.

Now go click on Amber’s junk. (This time’s OK, it’s for the greater good.)