Case-Notes from the Artsy Asylum

Just Do It: Letting Goodness Show

Recently Seth Goodin sent an order to customink for some shirts and within days had a note from them asking if the shirts were for a charity event.

Lori, from Customink wrote

"If that’s the case, CustomInk would love to make a small donation to your team or to the charity itself on your behalf.

Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page."

As Seth explained in his blog customink just does this as a matter of policy. It looks like they are straightforward about it, not making a big deal out of it or making one jump through hoops in order to "qualify."

"regardless of whether the customer has a blog or not. They don't do it as an inducement, they just do it.

"That's it. No policy, no standard operating procedure, no promise in advance. Just plain generosity."

Sometimes when we least expect it, gestures large and small touch our hearts.

And the good will that ensue can't be measured - unless my friend Katie Paine has figured out a way to do it - which wouldn't actually surprise me because she's a genius. But she says that some things are immeasurable, and if I read her right the measurement doesn't matter if we could manage it.

Still, Seth writes that "the value of a perk is inversely related to the expectation of that perk'"

In other words goodness for goodness sake, kindness for kindness sake is it's own best reward?

I was thinking that the values taught to me in parochial school should serve me well if that's the case. And that maybe the best lessons in life really are those we should have learned in kindergarten.

It's more than holding hands when we walk across the street. It's about seeing an instance where we CAN do something, even if not asked - and just plain doing it,

What good can we do today without being asked?

 

Please let me know if your order is for one of these events. If you would like us to pitch in and support your cause, please include information about your charity event, a link if you have one or the organization’s name if there is no link to a team web page."

As Seth explained in his blog customink just does this as a matter of policy. It looks like they are straightforward about it, not making a big deal out of it or making one jump through hoops in order to "qualify."

"regardless of whether the customer has a blog or not. They don't do it as an inducement, they just do it.

"That's it. No policy, no standard operating procedure, no promise in advance. Just plain generosity."

Sometimes when we least expect it, gestures large and small touch our hearts.

And the good will that ensue can't be measured - unless my friend Katie Paine has figured out a way to do it - which wouldn't actually surprise me because she's a genius. But she says that some things are immeasurable, and if I read her right the measurement doesn't matter if we could manage it.

Still, Seth writes that "the value of a perk is inversely related to the expectation of that perk'"

In other words goodness for goodness sake, kindness for kindness sake is it's own best reward?

I was thinking that the values taught to me in parochial school should serve me well if that's the case. And that maybe the best lessons in life really are those we should have learned in kindergarten.

It's more than holding hands when we walk across the street. It's about seeing an instance where we CAN do something, even if not asked - and just plain doing it,

What good can we do today without being asked?

 

Codgers and Computers

Shel Israel wrote today about where we "connected seniors" came from - I think some people think we retire and our kids buy us a computer as a way to keep us occupied - or to keep us from visiting them and the grandkids.

The observers may have been watching too much TV instead of interacting with connected people of all generations. That picture couldn't be further from the truth.

Not Pulled or Pushed by Offspring

Although I think that every house should have a computer sitting prominently in a public part of the house so a passing family member can sit down and do a quick google, my computer usage didn't start because of kids - either grown or in their shorter state.

No, I didn't start using them to share photos of my babies with my family, nor because I want to see photos of their babies now (although I do). And I didn't start using a computer because my kids were using them in school.

From the first time we as a young family could afford a computer I saw it as a tool we all - including me - could DO stuff with.

I remember the first house where the much maligned Commodore-64 sat in my kitchen. It must have been 1981 or 1982 and I was in my 30s with three children.

Apple was not in our price range, so the Commodore did the job of bringing computers to the masses - and me. Within no time a computer was part of my life and I've never looked back.

As computers evolved I was evolving too, thankfully.The decreasingly ugly box always had a prominent place in a well-used public room of the house. It got used more often and became more a part of what we did.

Jump ahead thirty years

If you'd told me that one day I'd be using a laptop computer to opine about the role of virtual worlds in business communication I'd have probably rolled my eyes. Researching and writing about my next step in the cancer wars I might have accepted a little better.

I'm not crazy about the term "seniors" but I don't like "silver surfers" either. Don't pigeon-hole me - just listen to me brag that at age 60 I'm ahead of three out of four of my offspring as far as being connected.

Those three born between 1971 and 1979 lag behind their sister born in 1985 and although I wonder about why that is I don't spend enough time pondering it to keep me from interacting with twitter, exploring plurk, or adding images to flickr.

PS - Dropping in on my Soup.io page will get you a collection of all my web content except twitter. Have you checked out Soup yourself?

Real People Feel Pained as Virtual Drawbridge Goes Up

The 3-d web and Virtual Worlds are - I contend - the future of communication and a big part of community as we connect with wider and wider diverse groups of people. But there are glitches.

If truth be told there's more than one glitch.

The Disney folks have discovered that.

Or should have.

The Wall Street Journal sums the situation up neatly when it points out that "For Walt Disney Co., the task of opening a virtual version of Disneyland on the Web was relatively easy. Closing it, though, is proving to be quite a bit more difficult, thanks to the wrath of obsessive fans of Disney's theme parks."

It started with the launch, in 2005, of the free online game Virtual Magic Kingdom, based on the design and feel of the real world Disneyland park.

Fans wanting to visit Tomorrowland or princesses in catles were able to do just that in virtual reality through avatars they created. Plus the Kingdom gave visitors - or did until tomorrow - lots of opportunity to interact with others who share an interest in Disney and online virtual reality games.Players, participants, or those who WSJ calls "Disney's notoriously obsessive fans" were quickly hooked and Disney bragged that over a million avatars had been created.

ChipIn To Help Cancer, Fire, Robbery Victim and His Family

I'll let Dr Michelle Calabretta tell this story because she's on the scene at the hospital in Houston and tells of the family and the situation so well.

"One of our patients, a resident here in Houston with Stage 4 cancer, arrived for treatment last week and mentioned that he lost everything in a house fire.

To make matters worse what he and his family did salvage from the fire they left in their car, which was broken into while staying at a hotel.

He is a lovely man whom we all adore and my coworkers are trying to raise some money to help him rebuild.

You can imagine how hard it is to deal with cancer when you have all of your comforts, but now this man truly needs our help.

I am creating a ChipIn widget page until Friday May 23. If you are moved to help this man and his family please consider donating whatever you can manage.

We will pool all the funds and get a Visa gift card that they can spend on whatever they need."
                                    May 16 3:24pm

 

I hope you will toss in a as much as you can to help the staff at M.D.Anderson Cancer Center do what we can to help this family rebuild their lives.

They will see him this Friday for his regular appointment and I along with the staff there hope to be able to provide the family with the basis for some renewed hope.

Walled Communications: Who Am I Here?

After writing here and on twitter about my granddaughter who was in the hospital in Pediatric Intensive Care. I got wonderful feedback and very supportive comments.

Following up, the diagnosis is that Emma has Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome which causes her heart to beat erratically from time to time. She has been stabilized on beta blockers and will be closely monitored. Thanks for asking and for caring.

There's a lot in life that's not easily classifiable

The reason I touch on this again is that we're people after all, and we - not to mention life - do not fit easily into nice little cubbyholes. At least my life never has.

In the late fifties I was asking neighborhood kids to find out whose mom would pay a quarter a week for me to teach them some basic baton lessons in my side yard. Was I having neighborhood conversations, kid conversations, business conversations?

I didn't pay any attention. I was helping someone else, helping myself, learning abut life, having fun, getting to know someone better and exploring, Communicating. Creating. Dreaming.

It was all about people and interacting and life.

Later I sold art to and created logos for people I knew. Then they would tell other people and I'd often meet and network with or do work for them. Or I'd meet someone at my date's golf tournament, my son's soccer game, on a PTA Board, and make a new contact.

Were these business connections? Friendships? Mom-connections? Consulting connections? Art connections?

I didn't know and I still don't.

In my world the topics of people and interaction and connecting and community do not have barriers between then. It seems artificial to act as if there are.

Yes, I hear the grumbling. "she tweets about her cancer treatments, not information we need," "there are thousands of babies sick right now."

Fact is though that not talking about new baby issues in a blog that is after all about life and the connections and relationships we make - and whatever else this blog is about - seems as artificial as only interacting with Second Life people in Second Life, or not mentioning my cat or my artwork or whatever else affects mine - or someone else's life.

And I think we learn something about business through learning about living, and learn something about community by caring about our neighbors' babies. And the list could go on.

The aspects of many of our lives are as permeable as those membranes we did experiments on in biology class.

Hard wiring, life-view, whatever you want to call it, that's how it works for me to function effectively in the world. I can't dissect myself into multiple little pieces.

Starting Boobs on Ice was an attempt to deal with my cancer experience but even that spills over in spite of my efforts. Magpie Genes is specifically as an outlet for my art pieces but there's some osmosis there too.

So it's OK for other people to have different guidelines for themselves and their blogs? Are they better compartmentalizers?

Totally! But I'm just too all over the place interest and life-wise to manage it myself. Let's face it. I couldn't if I wanted to.

I'm glad you're willing to put up with it.

ooVoo Means Community, Connection, Conversation, Comedy and Cause

It started on February 10th, which happened to be my sixtieth birthday and about sixty days since my cancer diagnosis. It was a hard time. But it was also My ooVoo Day which actually turned out to be ooVoo Week

I spent six hours interacting in six way on-screen conversations with the great people who read my blogs and tweets and it was more fun than a barrel of monkeys even before I ooVooed with Joe Jaffe who entertains while conversing.

What can I possibly write about what ooVoo, Crayon, Scott Monty, and their Big Idea meant to me? I can say: Community, Connection, Conversation, Comedy, and Commitment to a Cause. But the video says the rest.

During that week bloggers ooVooed with friends and fans. It was amazing. Then as if we hadn't already had enough fun, to thank bloggers hosting chats ooVoo donated an unbelievable $30,000 to the Frozen Pea Fund Fund established to support Cancer awareness, research and education.

This donation was made in honor of blogger and cancer patient who happened to be...me! . Although I could not be there, my husband and our daughter Bill and Kate Reynolds were part of a check presentation ceremony to the Frozen Pea Fund at Blogger Social in New York in April.

And not to sit on their laurels, ooVoo is right there in the community, making connections and planning more opportunities to connect. As we find ourself in election year, next up in June is a Political Edition of My ooVoo Day With.

I can't wait to see the momocrats in action.And who will take them on? Is there an opening for a new group called republidads in the making? Trust ooVoo to provide a forum for them if there is. 

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Dont want to miss it? Go to http://www.oovoo.com/ to download ooVoo

MEStream - A Question Of Interaction

Although it's supposed to be about conversation - or that's my view at least - sometimes web 2.0 becomes a MEstream. Millions of people around the world use twitter, flickr, viddler, youtube, soup.io, tumbler to broadcast the latest of me me me-ism.

It's no longer limited to our multiple blogs which can turn into our own version of CNN's constant loopy stream of what they consider to be information we need to know - or more likely their opinion about what's happening and what we should think about it, but don't get me started on CNN because we all have our filters after all.

Its not all one way streaming though.

In an interesting quirk of timing, just as Kristin Forbriger's tweet brought to my attention that the Philadelphia Inquirer was not only tweeting but was  being interactive I saw a tweet from Julia Roy that she was flip - filming us.

Julia's deadpan photos aways make me grin, so I had to go look. And then I got to thinking,

Julia's looking at us. Kristin's looking at us. The Inquirer is looking at us.

Are we looking back or just streaming US?

Lately my own stream of broadcasting updates gave way to our good new baby news, And who could miss the Frozen Pea Fund that started as two women tweeting ideas about how to show support for me when I got my cancer diagnosis in December?

There's an innate curiosity hard wired into me offset by a deep frustration that there's not time for everything. Not as social as some, I hope that's offset with placing being interactive high on my priority list.

Truthfully, I miss a lot. Commenting on blogs or videos gets little of my time in the past six months, though I do a little better sending conversational @ messages on twitter and looking through, talking back and marking other's flickr photos as favorites. (some of those pictured here)

But for many of us these are surprising and mind expanding times full of opportunity. We started small (thus say my tweetstats), learned about others in the interactive web community, got more involved and didn't try to become anything but participants. Sometimes we talk more about us and sometimes more about others. 

Steady - and genuine - interaction matters

And I think that's what the Inquirer is attempting. It's early for them in their experiment with twitter, following and being followed by less than 100 others as I write this.

It's not just because I went to school in Philly that I'm in their corner. It's because I believe in the potential of the very interactive, personally engaged Jim Long @NewMediaJim and Andy Carvin's NPR twitter model

It will be interesting to see how they develop their tweet presence and I'm rooting heavily for them to help show the other news outlets how it can be done.. . interaction by interaction; engagement by engagement; relationship to relationship.

Video as Bonding Tool

Not every online communication and community building moment is about connecting with potential networking buddies who will lead to clients and customers and commercial success.

Some of the most poignant times for me lately, and ones that use new media in a way I didn't expect it to be useful to me, involve the videos my elder granddaughter and I made when she and her mom were staying at the parental abode a few weeks ago.

It turned out that Kelsey liked to make videos, and the flipcam was right up her alley. The image here is from a video we jokingly call "the spoon"

She talked off camera about potential things we could discuss in future videos, including how kids feel about their families; about how cancer is scary for people of all ages; how moms having babies change things for grandmothers and children but make us worry and think about our relationships and where we'll fit in the picture after the baby comes too.

In short she had many good ideas.

There is a real potential for youtube, Viddler and flickr to develop into tools that are not simply places for showing photos and videos. They're serving - for me at least - as a tool for encouraging dialogue.

Part of my current dialogue is a video of my new granddaughter and Kelsey's baby sister, Emma. It's just another way of sharing who I am with my community. This teeny baby and her very big sister are a big part of my life, and connecting with them from the start - and then leaving something behind to document that and for them to have always is a tremendous priority.

Nana loves you, girls. . .

Twittering Lightly through Spring

You'd think someone in Grandbaby 2.2 mode could have managed more tweets than this in April. Cancer fatigue syndrome aside, I'm seriously slacking.

Click on image to get full size display of the usage I've made of twitter in the year since I began tweeting.

Do you use tweetstats? Did you know that going to http://tweetstats.com and entering your twitter name could get the graph for your twitter use too?

It's a great little goodie that Damon Cortesi aka twitterer dacort put together for us with love plus his techie know-how and who knows what else - like gum and shoestrings maybe.

It would be interesting to see if Damon could monetize this, so I asked myself how much I'd pay for more stats - like who's talking to me and what's different in my followers / followees or conversations this month versus last month given that what we have is an aggregate of all conversations since the beginning of tweetdom - or in this case since I started using twitter a year ago. My answer was really that it depended on what kind of information was offered.

I wonder how interesting it would be to see more about who it is we used to be talking to at 3AM vs those we talk to now after midnight (obviously the west coasters but are there more differences?)

Granted, I've got a social science background and used to produce monthly statistics reports for the employment and training program I monitored, so I'm a stats junkie. But the graphing available to us now is just so rich it's fascinating.

Beyond our curiosity about who's talking to who, what tools they use and when, Damon has written about how this kind of tool can be used to identify spam twitter accounts here. I could seriously spend a lot of time just looking and graphing and looking and thinking. It's probably time to donate via the button on TweetStats too.

..

end note: Recently I saw that Lawrence Simon aka Second Life's Crap Mariner had referred to my writing as a "fire hose" I don't know if that means he was still following me on twitter after my surgery when I was updating and thanking people - or not. That red line on the graph is kinda dramatic, even for a communicator.

About Emma; Is the Force With Her?

I have never been this excited before, even for the birth of my own four kids. And, if truth be told - I wasn't this psyched about my first grandchild, though I love babies and I welcomed every single one of them.

I've been thinking a lot about what makes THIS one so special. What touches my heart so?

Maybe this baby represents life to me

Maybe she's a symbol. And maybe with her birth I get a new birth of life-force myself, I'm feeing something special that I can't explain - yet I don't know anything for sure.

We can never certain of anything. Granted, I have a terminal illness and have been told in black and white that I have a 20% chance of not living longer than ten years. If I'm alive in ten years it's still a 50 /.50 proposition that I'll have a recurrence of breast cancer. But today I feel alive and happy and looking forward in a whole new way.

You're my extended family

And at least for today, all I know for sure is that the signs are that a new little bit of life will arrive before the day is over and I need to share the news further than my neighbors. My friends online are more like an extended family than any other comparison I could make,

So of course you're the first people with whom I share something spooky; I'm having some kind of Lourdes-like feeling - an almost healing power of regeneration today. Endorphins, miracles; I'll take whatever's being handed out. Don't get excited - and don't expect it to last but all I can tell you is that there's something in the Force today. I think her name could be Emma.

Energy that I have not had maybe five years is surging through me and it's all I can do to keep sitting. So I have to occupy myself.

Otherwise there will be an overdraft of the energy bank later today and I won't have enough to show up at Fairfax Hospital where I plan to tell my daughter Kerry what a wonderful job she's done, then proceed to cuddle, goo and coo over, and generally make a fool over the bundle of joy that will be my precious little Emma Reynolds.

What's in a name?

Kerry kept the Reynolds name and that means something to me. Emma will have it as well and that's just as special. Maybe there's a lot more depth to the meanings here.

In any case, Wow. Let's get a move on it, Miss Emma. You're going to be a sight for Nana's sore eyes.