Blog Action Day 2011 – Food, For Thought

October 16, 2011 1 Comment

Refugees in EthiopiaToday, October 16, 2011, is global Blog Action Day where bloggers from all over the world blog about a singular topic and this year, falling on World Food Day, it’s food (or lack thereof). (Ed. note: 2011 participation: 2,710 bloggers located in  109 countries).

As I write this entry, one of my daughters, Adriane, is flying to Ethiopia as part of a United Nations Foundation global health observation team. Situated between the Sudan to the west and Somalia to the east, I hope she has a safe, informational and inspirational journey.

Ethiopia has the dual distinction of being both besieged by famine, poverty, health crises (TB, Malaria; HIV/AIDS), the worst drought in 60 years as well as the added burden of refugees arriving daily from its neighbors.

The United Nations defines famine as a region or country where:
• At least 20 percent of households face extreme food shortages
• Acute malnutrition affects more than 30 percent of the population
• Malnutrition leads to at least two deaths per 10,000 people every day

Ethiopia easily qualifies. There, as elsewhere in the famine-torn  Horn of Africa, foreign aid is essential to bringing relief to this humanitarian crisis.

What YOU can do to help
Contribute to a reputable disaster relief organization. The American Institute of Philanthropy rates a list of charities that best help East Africans. So, the next time you push yourself away from the dinner table, complaining that you “ate too much,”pick one, donate and think of those who suffer hunger everyday.

Until then, chew on this for a while

Click here for more Global Blog Day 2011 entries. On Twitter search #bad2011

Filed under Blog Mob, Community, philanthropy, social media, web2.0 Tagged with , , , , ,

Of Jobs, Jobs and Social Media as Disruptor

October 11, 2011 Leave a comment

Three points I’d like to touch upon:

  1. Jobs, Steve Jobs, that is. The passing of a tech giant.
  2. Jobs, lack thereof, that is. And bringing socio-economic change via protest.
  3. The job social media has as disruptive agent, and the blame it doesn’t deserve.

I was saddened to hear of Steve Job’s passing last week. Not as a Mac fanboi; I have always used Windows-based PCs, have an Android smartphone and except for a video iPod none of my gadgets begin with a lower-case “i”. But there is no denying his greatness as a tech visionary and pioneer. My Facebook post acknowledging his transition said it all:

“When we were young, we learned about the great explorers: Magellan; Balboa; da Gama and later Lewis and Clark; Byrd and Amundsen. And the great inventors: Da Vinci; Franklin; Marconi; Babbage. Steve Jobs was a little of them all.“

Jobs, and the lack thereof. Mark these words: More change comes about in this country by protest than by working within the system. Think about it. Women’s suffrage in the U.S. culminating in their right to vote in 1920; the Civil Right’s Movement’s victory in 1964; the end of the Viet Nam war, until last week the longest war in U.S. history; equal marriage rights and military rights And now we have Occupy Wall Street, sounding the clarion for increased employment and narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots by exercising their constitutional right to free speech and assembly. You may not agree with what they’re saying, but you must admire the way they’ve made themselves heard. Their movement has spread to other cities across the U.S. The Arab Spring has given way to the American Autumn.

Which brings us to social media’s job as disruptive agent. They key to this is, social media is not the causal factor for disruption. It is a tool. Like the telephone (and cell phone) before it, the radio before that and the newspapers even before that. Silencing, censoring or otherwise attempting to control social media is a losing proposition.

Riots in London? Squatters on Wall Street? Don’t blame social media for fomenting the masses. It is simply a tool like the ones before it. Instead, look to cure the disease, not the symptom.

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9/11: 10 Years Later, Like Yesterday

September 11, 2011 Leave a comment

wtc

Image via Wikipedia

I was going to write my memories of the attack on our country on 9/11, in my New York, that occurred 10 years ago to the minute that this post was published, but I can’t. Each time I tried the emotions overcame me and I just cannot relive the details of that day and its aftermath. So let’s just say that living in the NYC area that day deeply affected me — and still does.

If you’re not from here (or D.C.) you may think you know what it was like — but you don’t. I don’t mean to belittle your personal 9/11 experience but for those of us who live near where the planes hit the effect was, and continues to be, devastating.

But I do want to mention one name to you today. Ernest James. What’s that? You don’t know him? Not surprising, he was a night janitor, one of the 2,753 average people for whom that sunny September morning who at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan would be their last day alive. Why mention him? His remains were just identified August 23, 2011. That’s right, almost 10 years later the identification effort continues. Most people don’t realize that even now, over 1,100 victims have yet to found.

The pain remains. So, God bless the victims, including the first responders (343 New York City Fire Department firefighters, including FDNY Fire Chaplain (and childhood friend of my father and uncle), Franciscan Fr. Mychal Judge,, 23 New York City Police Department officers, 37 Port Authority Police Department officers, 15 EMTs and 3 Court Officers. God bless their families.

And God bless the U.S.A.

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Filed under history, new york Tagged with , , , , ,

Great Infographic on Social Media Use

August 30, 2011 Leave a comment

See full infographic after the jumpEveryone likes a good infographic — a chart or visual that conveys important information in a visually compelling way — but not everyone who creates them does it right. I love this one called “The Growth of Social Media” by the good people of Search Engine Journal. A ton of info, such as:

  • If Facebook were a country it’d be the third largest in the world
  • 1 in 4 Americans watches a YoutTube video every day
  • 49% of Twitter users rarely or never check Twitter
  • 80% of companies use social media for recruitment and 95% of those use LinkedIn

And there lots more. See the full infographic after the jump.

Read more of this post

Filed under facebook, LinkedIn, social media, Twitter, web2.0, YouTube Tagged with , , , ,

Everything AOL Is New Again, Again

August 23, 2011 1 Comment

American layout roulette wheel.

Image via Wikipedia

I can’t help it. Maybe it’s because I spent 10 years working at AOL during it’s rise and fall. Maybe it’s just that things happen in cycles. Regardless, when I saw this headline today it made me think of something I’d written about previously:

StumbleUpon passes Facebook in US referral traffic

So what does this have to do with AOL? First, some background for those of you who have never been an AOLer. Navigation within the walled garden of AOL content was aided by the use of shortcuts known as Keywords. Want to jump directly from the Welcome Screen to content regarding vacations? Enter keyword: Travel.  Want to go from there to see how your favorite team did last night, use Keyword: Sports. With both major and sub-categories there were literally hundreds (if not thousands) of keywords on AOL.

So what does this have to do with StumbleUpon passing Facebook as the number one referer on the ‘Net? Well, at AOL we were privy to the list of most popular keywords (as determined by user clicks), and invariably every month positioned near the top was Keyword: Random.

Enter “random” in the keyword box and a roulette wheel would appear. Click it to spin and when it stopped you’d be taken to a random page somewhere on AOL. Some pages were great, some not so great. But people loved the, well, randomness of the result, something I refer to today as “serendipitous discovery“– where you (literally) stumble upon content you previously had no knowledge of.

It worked back then for AOL, and to StumbleUpon’s benefit it still works today.

♫… No need to remember when
‘Cause everything old is new again …♫

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Filed under AOL, Community, did you see that?, facebook, social media, web2.0 Tagged with , , ,

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