Case-Notes from the Artsy Asylum

Can I Have An Amen from the Twitterers!

"By the way, the first place I go to get news is on Twitter now. The flow there is incredible and generally stories get discussed there long before they do on blogs."  Robert Scoble

I may criticize the man for using tacky terms like "me and other famous people" but when he's right he's right!

Link: Scobleizer.

Forget Mean : Just Say Stupid

The Second Life eye roll of the day*, goes to the blog: Mean Girls Guide to SL. Among their more insightful and enlightening posts they share this advice for other bloggers.

"grand-standing and name calling do not make you a better writer or "journalist"... it just makes you an ass. If that's all you have to offer, I would like to suggest you sit down & re-evaluate being a blogger of stuff.

After that mind boggler came another post proclaiming that drama is "the glue that holds us all together."

Oh please.

Are these girls over 14? In any case their parents must be so thrilled.

 

 

Wouldn't it be nice if people who have time to write this stuff volunteered at Orientation Island or showed newbies how to put on hair or built something or did something constructive with themselves?

Should we plan an intervention?

Yikes. It doesn't take nude dancers, gambling and would be terrorists to give Second Life a bad name. It's sitting right in front of me on the blog page. Ewww..

* normally reserved for the often irate diatribes of Prokify Neva

 

Things We Don't Know About technology

Somehow this information ripped from the pages at GoogleSystem, a blog about Google, doesn't fill me with confidence. 
What should be a great way to share a spreadsheet only with people to whom I gave a special URL, turns out to be less than secure, especially since even after I delete the image it will still be visible. Ack!

Ralf Scharnetzki:asks "How can we talk about privacy on the Web if we can NEVER be sure that our private content (like mails, draft mails, documents) will be ever finally deleted from any of the services out there today?"

Good question, without, I'm betting, an easy answer.

8apps Profiles for Noobies

My friend who shall remain nameless needed help getting set up on 8apps. The registration was easy but the pull down menu followed by tabs wasn't intuitive for her, as it wasn't for me when I began.

I identified to say the least.  Thus was born this little pictorial tutorial. Hey, use it. pass it around. I'm glad if it helps.

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Next,

A Toast to the Guys

My dad liked Bill Walsh and anybody that had eyes could tell that. He'd grin a sort of sheepish grin when Bill would be on TV or when his team came up in conversation.

But dad's prim and proper mother raised him in a certain way and I always figured that's why you could never get a story out of him about details. Little things like discussing how he knew Bill from their Ohio days, or even if he knew him were just not things he'd talk about.

Bill Walsh died today and reminded me of my dad. About men, and the past. About the good and the bad.

So here's to guys of a certain era when men were, well, like my dad and Bill Walsh. High expectations, precise, impeccable, serious but equally capable of pranks, sometimes emotional, but with a little glimmer in the eye that let you know that you'd never know everything that was going on with them. And here's to that same quick smile that I see in my son that tells me that sort of mischief is afoot.

After dad died I found a scrapbook with photos of all his old girl friends from the flapper and spats era. Apparently Jay McMackin was once the bees knees; he just wasn't about to let that out. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Bill Walsh could say the same.

The entirely imaginary but nonetheless estimable Empire of Ephemeria has this day issued a Bill Walsh commemorative Artistamp that is free to download and can be printed on your desktop printer using standard or gummed paper. Permission for personal use is granted by the copyright holder, Susan Reynolds. Download billwalsh.jpg

For ideas how artistamps can be used see Slideshow   Semper Fi Project   Card / Tag projects  or other freebies and articles in the Artistamps Category of the Artsy Asylum Blog 

Googlejewced

Behold the power of twitter and Google. A half hour ago Steve Rubel twittered "Here's a word that doesn't exist right now in their engine - googlejewce ."

An experiment was afoot, designed to find out how quickly the search engines would pick up the new term.

I checked after 5 minutes, then after 10. Steve's guess was that it'd turn up in about two hours.

Less than thirty minutes later it was listed.

Is it the power of twitter, the power of Google, or some magnetism of the words googlejewce and Steve Rubel in close aproximation?

Network Data Sharing - Could the Wall Come Down?

I have no idea what any of the complex and convoluted words mean that they're going to be saying at the Data Sharing Summit = Sept. 7th and 8th but I know that it's good news for those of us who like facebook and linkedIn but want more from both of them.

The organizers say that they will address interoperability between social networks and that their goal is "to get a number of the key players, developers and platforms in the social networking, blogging and associated 'social software' platforms together in one room and hash out a bunch of key issues"

With Facebook, Ning, 6Apart, Verisign, Yahoo & others among those confirmed attending, at least a door is open to dialog. 

I'm not asking that they join hands and sing Kumbaya but if they do I hope there'll be u-tube videocoverage.

Link Data Sharing

Podcasting : Audio Blogging for the Masses

It seems that the folks over at NPR are in the same boat as many of others and are trying to help us catch up. Figuring out that we're all a bit behind on the technology curve they are Podcasting and also helping us understand more about it

So here are some of their bits and pieces of podcasting information, plus links which I think you might find interesting

• What is podcasting?
• What do I need to hear podcasts?         
• How do I subscribe to a podcast?
• I subscribed to a podcast.  Why don't I hear anything?
• For information you can visit the NPR.org Help Center

In the meantime I'm happily learning new things and figuring out how they can be helpful to what I do - maybe what you do too. Today Podcasting; tomorrow who knows what. The sky's the limit.

I might even figure out Skype sometime this year. So far - one conference skype - but only in chat. I'll get there.

You Don't Have to Have a Lump to Have Breast Cancer

This post has nothing to do with me except for the fact that I'm a human being, And a mother. And a woman. And I want you to know about this.

Reprint from Toddler Planet, with permission of the author
Inflammatory breast cancer

Monday July 23rd 2007, 3:11 pm

"We hear a lot about breast cancer these days. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetimes, and there are millions living with it in the U.S. today alone. But did you know that there is more than one type of breast cancer?

I didn’t. I thought that breast cancer was all the same. I figured that if I did my monthly breast self-exams, and found no lump, I’d be fine.

Oops. It turns out that you don’t have to have a lump to have breast cancer. Six weeks ago, I went to my OB/GYN because my breast felt funny. It was red, hot, inflamed, and the skin looked…funny. But there was no lump, so I wasn’t worried. I should have been.

Ouch; My Eyes! It's About Color

If you're trying to figure out which colors look good together - hopefully for your blog not your outfit - pop over to the  4096 Color Wheel where you'll also be able to find out if the colors you're using are web safe - which would mean that we could actually see what you've put up for us to see.

Please, no red, blue or yellow against a black background. Oh wait - spare me also the black background with green or pink or orange or . , , ,