Follow Along as the World Votes

twitter vote report

Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

OK, if this isn’t a teachable moment, I don’t know what is.

Another giant in the social media world, Twitter, will be making Election Day instantaneously more interesting for anyone who wants to follow along as-it-happens or wants to keep a wary eye on the day’s voting operations.

Calling all teachers! What a great lesson for high school students on Tuesday.  Log on and watch the action.

Specifically, Twitter has created  Twitter Vote Report to assemble reactions and reports from Twitter users, whether they’re standing on a long line to vote, watching TV reports, or experiencing something unusual at the polls. You can use the Twitter “hashtag” #votereport for tracking tweets and to participate.

You can also do any one of the following, according to Twitter:

If you currently use Twitter, send a message after you vote that begins with #votereport (this is critically important for ensuring that your message gets to the right place.) Then write some or all of the following:

#[zip code] to indicate where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″

#machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”

#reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”

#wait:minutes for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”

#good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience

#EP+your state if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH

If you want to use your cell phone, you can also text messages to 66937 and begin your message with #votereport.

I hope we can all report in that things were #good.

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More on Social Media, Colleges and Universities

Many thanks to Heather Mansfield of Diosa Communications for promoting my post, “Why Schools Need to Get on the Social Media Bandwagon,” on her website. You can find my post here and at PROpenMic, one of my favorite Ning social networking sites. Speaking of Ms. Mansfield, she’s a web 2.0 consultant and expert with a great site that, among other things, lists good reads on the topic of using Web 2.0 tools in education. On her higher education page, she lists Web 2.0 Articles, Blogs, and Resources for Higher Education.
She also highly recommends the use of MySpace by colleges and universities, since they’re listed there on MySpaceSchools anyway. Here are two great links she sent along:
Her MySpace Portal
Her FaceBook page
Let’s see if her hard work pays off and if colleges and universities eventually get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

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Don’t Know Where to Vote? Ask Google

While working on a Hubpages article tonight called “10 Ways to Protect Your Vote,” I stumbled across Google Vote, the latest foray by Google into making our lives easier.  The site allows anyone with the basic questions about voting — who, what, when and where — can discover the answers to their questions with this handy little tool.

Google notes that of the people who failed to vote in the last presidential elections, 10 percent said the reason was that they did not know where to cast their ballots. Now, thanks to the wisdom and foresight of Google, there are no more excuses. Think back to 2000 and even 2004, now think about how much the Web is having an impact not only on the presidential election, but in our knowledge of the candidates, the issues and the controversies.

Here’s the quick tutorial Google provides for using Google Vote:

watch?v=QUn0hMIMy5M

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Why Schools Need to Get on the Social Media Bandwagon

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Blogger Andy DeSoto wrote an interesting post on his blog way back in June, which I’m now just getting around to reading. In “Social Media for Colleges and Universities,” DeSoto notes that an alum of his alma mater,
The College of William & Mary, created a Facebook page for alumni that caught on like wildfire, with 141 members signing up per day.
What DeSoto argues is that while these alumni Facebook pages are great, they’re unofficial. As a result, they’re often not much more than membership-only and networking sites. If colleges and universities created their own sites, official college news, events, photos and links could be posted, deeply enriching the site for alumni.

If colleges and universities wish to employ any social media leverage whatsoever, and I highly recommend it, it’s essential for them to establish or gain control of their brand on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and Digg. More is better, but the aforementioned services will provide the biggest bang for the buck. If administrators are unwilling to go digital or are uncertain how to proceed, it’s highly likely that several to many students have the technical know-how to do what’s necessary. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to reach your students, faculty, and staff.

I agree and would venture to add the same advice to K-12 public schools. It’s time that the stigma schools have attached to social media be wiped clean, and that schools, colleges and universities begin to explore these places — particularly FaceBook and Twitter — to network, raise funding and get the good word out by serving alumni. (I recently did a social media/Web 2.0 workshop for school PR professionals in a public school facility where FaceBook was blocked. This is a frequent occurrence, borne out of logical security fears, but perhaps it’s time to revisit that.)

Millions of people are using social media today, and it might be time to jump on that bandwagon.

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Invisible Girls

Two girls smiling.

Image via Wikipedia

My daughter is about to step into young womanhood, frantically working through her final year at Loyola College in Baltimore, embarking on a nerve-wracking internship with an investment bank, and shopping with her Mom this weekend for business clothes required for a young woman on the cusp.
She’s gorgeous, smart and hard-working. But she’s also lucky, living in a country and society where the efforts of young women are valued and encouraged. Since I’ve been on a social change kick these days, I recently stumbled across a website with good intentions aimed at girls ages 15 to 24 who aren’t as lucky as my daughter. The Girl Effect is dedicated to improving the lives of young girls in our world, particularly those in developing countries. Browsing through the site is a humbling experience.

Here’s what The Girl Effect says:

Girls living in poverty are uniquely capable of creating a better future. But when a girl reaches adolescence, she reaches a crossroads. Things can go one of two ways for her — and for everyone around her.

Among other things, The Girl Effect Fact Sheet lists some disturbing statistics about girls living in developing countries:

1. More than 600 million girls live in developing countries.
2. One-quarter of girls in developing countries are not in school.
3. One girl in seven in developing countries marries before the age of 15.
4. Medical complications from pregnancy are the leading cause of death among girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide.
5. 75 percent of 15- to 24-year-olds living with HIV in Africa are female.
6. When a girl in a developing country receives seven or more years of education, she marries 4 years later and has 2.2 fewer children.

You can donate money to Girl Effect, publicize its efforts (particularly on your website or blog), join its FaceBook page, and simply learn more about the imperiled future of girls on our planet.

You might want to begin by watching the Girl Effect video here.

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A Global Cookbook — Courtesy of the Web

Just one more thing I love about the Web.

Fuelmyblog and Blurb are teaming up this month to create a global cookbook. Any blogger who has joined up with Fuelmyblog as a member can contribute a traditional recipe (they prefer recipes that are generic to your location in the world) and photos to be included in their Global Cookbook. Fuelmyblog says their membership represents just about every country in the world.

At the top of this post, you can see one page from Fuelmyblog’s last book venture, “The Human Behind The Avatar,” also published on Blurb.

All bloggers need to do is send in the recipe and photos taken of the completed dish, and Blurb will actually compile the book. Blurb is a web company that allows anyone to create customized books by downloading their free software and then creating books. Blurb is known for the high quality of their books. The actual printed version of your book is what you pay for.

Recipes should be sent to: cookbook@fuelmyblog.com. You need to include your name for credit and the URL of your blog. The top 10 recipes in the book get a free copy of the cookbook from Blurb. Fuelmyblog members can also get a 10% discount off their first purchase from Blurb.

Hurry to participate. The deadline is Nov. 30 and the cookbook will be ready in time for the holidays.

Last year, the FMB community created a book called “The Human Behind The Avatar” (you can take a look here). It was a great initiative and we have had hundreds of great comments.

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Learn How to Elect a President

Common Craft has done it again, producing a simple and amusing how-to video, this time on how we elect U.S. presidents. Common Craft, an ingenious company started by Sachi and Lee Lefever of Seattle, Wash., produces videos (public and available on YouTube and other video sites, and enhanced versions for corporate use) about somewhat complex topics in a simple-to-understand way. Using narration, paper cut-outs and animation, Common Craft videos include “RSS in Plain English,” “Twitter in Plain English,” “Wikis in Plain English,” and more. They’re fun to watch and easy to digest, and I often use them in my Web 2.0 workshops.
Their latest entry is “Electing a U.S. President in Plain English,” a must for anyone still confused by our popular vote vs. electoral system of electing a President. I can tell you it helped me, and this might be the perfect teachable moment for anyone — adults, kids, first-time voters.

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Andrew Sullivan’s “Why I Blog”

Ichimame, an 19-yea...

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, a writer I admire, has written an ode to blogging that I like very much. Considering the fact that I’ve suffered from my first real bout of writer’s block over the past few days (thanks to a two-day trip to Rochester, NY, my work on a presentation about Web 2.0 technology, picking up a writing award in Manhattan, and a visit from my two college kids), reading Sullivan again has put me back on the right track.
Blogging is a solitary pursuit, and for me a pursuit that doesn’t pay the bills and attracts only a small (though loyal) audience. So occasionally, I run dry. But posting to my blog is constantly a thought that nags at me, reminds me that I’m still a writer. I might be getting older, I might be on a damned diet again, I might be finding excuses to avoid the gym, but my brain is still working. I want to learn, read and write.
Here’s what Sullivan says about blogging:

You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log. A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering. But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

And when I’m feeling that this is so solitary a pursuit, I’ll try to remember how Sullivan describes the immediacy and companionship provided to a blogger by his readers, commenters and dissenters.

On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night. There is a vividness to this immediacy that cannot be rivaled by print. The same goes for the 2000 recount, the Iraq War, the revelations of Abu Ghraib, the death of John Paul II, or any of the other history-making events of the past decade. There is simply no way to write about them in real time without revealing a huge amount about yourself. And the intimate bond this creates with readers is unlike the bond that the The Times, say, develops with its readers through the same events. Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

The next time I run dry, I’ll return here for water.

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Blogging for the Lost Boys of Sudan

God Grew Tired of Us

Image via Wikipedia

Today (Oct. 15th) is Blog Action Day, and I intend to do my small part by joining more than 9,000 other bloggers who are writing about poverty today.
According to United Nations, more than 25,000 people die of conditions related to poverty every single day. That’s one death to poverty every three and a half seconds. Hard to believe if you, like me, live in relative peace and prosperity in a suburb populated by some of the very Wall Street folks we’ve all been reading about lately. Where often the most pressing problem of the day is whether to purchase a BMW or a Mercedes, or where you’d prefer to eat lunch: Bloomingdales or Bergdorf.
I had the distinct advantage of being able to read some of the blogs already written today by bloggers on the other side of the world, where today for them actually happened yesterday. On the Blog Action Day website, I’ve read posts already filed by bloggers in Sydney, Tokyo, Delhi, Beijing, Istanbul and elsewhere. They have written, often passionately, about how we all need to pitch in if worldwide poverty is to someday be obliterated.
For me, one of the most disturbing and moving examples of poverty is taking place in the Sudan, where civil war and genocide has wiped out so many people. Those who are left live in abject poverty, in refugee camps, and without a future. And as the United Nations has pointed out, so many victims of poverty, including in the Sudan, have been children.
I have been most inspired by the story of the Lost Boys of the Sudan, the young boys who were able to escape the genocide that took place in their country because they were away from their families, working on farms or tending to livestock. Many of them were able to barely escape, and some traveled for years in search of a safe place where they could get help.
I dedicate by blog post today to the Lost Boys, whose stories have been told in a number of documentaries in recent years and in several books. Make the story of the Lost Boys a lesson in your classrooms or your comfortable homes in the coming weeks. After all, knowledge is power. Here are some resources:


The Lost Boys Film Website
God Grew Tired Of Us, the website dedicated to the film of the same name and the book by former lost boy, John Dau

The John Dau Sudan Foundation, the foundation started by former lost boy John Dau

The Alliance for the Lost Boys

Refugee Council USA
South Sudanese Friends Council
Project Love Sudan (organization the helps U.S. schools send books to children in Sudan)

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Working with Scribd…

I have a presentation coming up on Thursday about using social media, and thought I’d root around in Scribd to see how it all works. I’ve heard a lot about how easy is makes work and blogging. The first thing I did was upload the PDF of an article I wrote last year that recently won an Excellence in Writing Award from the National School PR Association, and just accomplished that. It means my article is now online for everyone to see, complete with tags. But I also noticed an “embed code” for the document, which allows you to place it on your blog. So let’s see if this works! Very cool!

NSPRA Award Winning Article – Upload a Document to Scribd
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