I can never turn down an opportunity to write lists, so I’ve added a more fleshed-out hobbies page, complete with a list of my wild catches from BookCrossing.
I’ve also added a couple more sites to the Writing Prompts Websites list, but I won’t make a separate post every time I do that.
In sadder news, my softshell turtle Matey died yesterday, so I’ve updated the about section accordingly. I’ll miss that ugly little turtle.
The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter
On note: the copy I read was written between the releases of Goblet Of Fire
Also posted on BookCrossing.
The Eight
Side note for those who’ve read the book: my sister was in love with Solarin, but my heart belongs to Nim. :)
Also posted on BookCrossing.
Everything Here Is Mine
Also posted on BookCrossing.
The Ig Nobel Prizes
Also posted on BookCrossing.
The Kite Runner
Also posted on BookCrossing.
Since Geocities is closing, I’m moving what little I still had over there to here. Today I added the Writing Prompt Websites list. Hope you find it useful.
The Day: …was very long. My husband and I arrived in Baltimore around 1:00 PM and immediately got in line for the autograph signing at 2. It’s not that we wanted a good place in line; we just didn’t have anything else to do for the next hour so we might as well hang out. Fortunately, the three guys in front of us were friendly and funny, so the wait wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately, it was hot and extremely humid, and the signing started nearly an hour late. The process itself was smooth – they let in a few people at a time, and Kaz and Hyde graciously signed everything and shook everyone’s hand – but we didn’t get out of there until after 3:30. Several of the more die-hard fans proceeded to sit right back down in line again for the concert almost five hours hence – and indeed, the first person in line at the signing session had arrived at 7:00 that morning, presumably intent on spending an entire day waiting in line on a scuzzy sidewalk. We, on the other hand, had other things in mind. Feeling the onset of heat exhaustion, we drove down to the Inner Harbor and chilled out at the Barne for quite a while. My husband more or less recovered, but I felt pretty wretched for the rest of the day.
Shortly after 5:00 we wandered down to the Convention Center to pick up my husband’s badge for Otakon. The staff, in a flash of brilliance (or maybe just common sense), designated a separate line for those with tickets to the show. We were then shuttled in first so we all had time to get signed in and still make it to the show in time. I thought that was quite decent of them, since probably 99% of the concert attendees were also registered for Otakon. After grabbing some dinner, we drove back to the club around 7:00, when the doors were supposed to open.
The Music: I admit that Vamps is probably my least favorite of Hyde‘s musical projects, with L’Arc~en~Ciel and his solo album ranking first and second, respectively. But it’s still Hyde, and I still love Hyde’s voice, even if he’s a touch too screamy for my tastes in many Vamps numbers. Their cover of Life on Mars? is especially interesting.
The Venue: Sonar is a converted warehouse located a few blocks north of the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. We were leery at first, as the line was over three blocks long. Where were all these people going to fit? Would we be jammed in like sardines, violating every fire code in the book? Since it was general admission with no chairs, we didn’t bother rushing to get a good spot in line. Instead, we relaxed in our air-conditioned car for quite a while, then on a bench across the street, before finally joining the line near the end. By the time we finally got inside (around 9:15, though our ticket claimed the show started at 8:00), we were absolutely stunned at how much space there was. The room didn’t look especially large, but somehow we all fit with ample room to move around. Multiple fans were running, creating plenty of air circulation and keeping the temperature pleasant. I even got to and from the bathroom with no problem. (The bathroom, by the way, was clean and fully stocked with toilet paper in all eight stalls.) We’d forgotten our ear plugs and were gratified to see they were selling quality disposables for a buck each. For the most part, it was a surprisingly clean and comfortable venue. Though we were near the back, the band was easily visible on two huge monitors, and when the Vamps members weren’t slouching too much, I could see their faces clearly over the tops of the crowd’s waving hands.
The Show: Alas. As soon as they struck the first note around 9:30 PM, I knew I was in for some trouble. The sound, especially the bass, was turned up far too loud. This isn’t just aural sensitivity on my part: warehouses are not built with acoustics in mind, and when things are that loud you create standing waves, drastically distorting the sound. It was so severe that I could hardly recognize the first few songs, and the bass made me feel physically ill. Oddly, this was not the case for the entire show. Several songs sounded fine, then the distortion would be back a little while later, once again rendering the song completely unrecognizable. It was worse in the bathroom, as the ladies’ room is right next to the stage. My teeth were literally rattling against each other. But when I wasn’t being utterly assaulted by the noise, it was a fun concert. Hyde is hilarious, though perhaps unintentionally, with his poofy hair and itty bitty vests. The bass player was totally awesome as The Guy Who Gets The Crowd Excited. (Every band needs one.) And though my image of Kaz was ruined by the observation that he looks like Yoko Ono (OMG he so does!), his guitar playing was excellent.
Epic Parenting Fail: One guy brought a baby. Yes, I’m completely serious. He covered its ears with his hands for the whole show, but come on. A baby? At a rock concert? Really? I guess he’ll be picking up a book on sign language soon.
We had to leave around 10:30, since I had to get up early for work the next morning, but we suspect there wasn’t much show left anyway. We both felt completely wrecked from the heat, humidity, and rapid switches between outside and air-conditioned indoors. It was a decent experience, but I wish we could have seen them in a venue that’s built specifically to handle those kinds of volumes. And, to be perfectly honest, I hope the next time I see Hyde it’s with L’Arc~en~Ciel. I just like their music better.
This post is a collaboration between Mashable’s Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell‘s “10 Ways” series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs.
Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.
Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.
Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.
Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.
You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.
Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.
You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.
In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.
Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.
You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:
Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)
The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)
LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)
WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)
Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.
It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.
Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.
For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.
Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.
Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.
You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.
Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.
As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.
Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.
If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.
There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.
Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.
Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.
In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.
Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.
The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.
A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.
Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code “SOSG”to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there’s no risk.
The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.
This content was originally written by Mashable’s Josh Catone.
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