Friends of Seattle Public Library: Because Even Libraries Need Friends

If I could add a subtitle to this post, it would be: "Especially when budget cuts mean that our libraries are closed for a week". While the libraries might not have been able to do much about it, the Friends of Seattle Public Library didn't take the closures sitting down. Instead, they blogged about it. (Twice!)

"Wah, wah, more blogtivism," you might say. But getting the word out, especially word that this closure is hitting disadvantaged folks hardest, is important. Turn their word into action by donating your time or your money, whichever one you have the most of...which, these days, is probably time.

A quick way to help is to fill out the Friends of SPL's "Neighborhood Survey of Library Value". If you'd like to do the survey in person, set up an interview by emailing Sarel Rowe, Advocacy Chair of the Friends of The Seattle Public Library: advocacy(at)friendsofspl(dot)org. I recommend the latter option - Sarel's really nice and a delight to talk with. If you end up having a really neat conversation with her, it just might end up on the Friends of SPL blog :D.

The Blogger's Blog and 1001 Ways to be Popular on the Interwebs

Thanks to Twitter and @TheNewsChick, I just discovered EcoConsultancy's blog. Within two minutes on the site I found articles on 25 things journalists can do to future proof their careers, how to write for SEO, and the A-Z of online copywriting.

Usually when I find how-to's like this, they're boring, semi-useless, keyword-crammed search engine attractors. Instead, EcoConsultancy has created a blogger's blog, a gentlemanly club of experienced online writers sharing their knowledge with their peers and the next generation. It makes sense since it's the blog of a digital marketing company...but where's all the class coming from? Does EcoConsultancy just hire really cool people?

Any minute now, I will ease off the awe. I'm just really impressed at finding that much bloggy usefulness in one place.

PS Just found out why they're so classy - the blog's based in the UK.

PPS In case one blog is not enough to satisfy your need to know more about blogging, here are some online journalism tutorials. Not necessary for the "here's a picture of my cat" blogger, but probably useful for indy neighborhood news chasers like myself.

What's in a name?

I saw this in my inbox last week, but jseattle got the scoop - a handful of Cap Hill domains are up for sale. With 40,000 people in our neighborhood and more blogs per square mile than I thought possible, any interested parties better make a bid while they're still up for grabs.

Gnomedex 9.0 - In the Room

I was on deck for Girls in Tech for most of the time I was at Gnomedex, so a lot of the experience has been a blur of networking. However, I did actually make it into the conference room for two of the presenters I really wanted to see, Mark Horvath and Amber Case. They appeal to the two very different sides of my fascination with technology: Mark covered online networking for social justice and Amber covered humans as tool-users and tool-users as cyborgs.

Mark Horvath is a former ad exec who was once homeless, is now unemployed, and is using his "time off" to scream and shout on the internet about homelessness. He has a great website, a following on Twitter, and is now equipped with a cool camera phone. But that's all he has. And with just that, he's gotten onto the front pages of newspapers spreading awareness about homelessness. The moral of the story is, you don't need money to have influence.

Amber Case is...well, let's just say she's awesome. And she knows a lot about the interface between humans and their technology. Her talk on prosthetic culture and cyborg anthropology was a really funny take on humans as tool users, tools as prostheses, and the explosion of the use of these prostheses in recent years.

When she started saying tools and prosthetic, I was thinking hammers and artificial limbs. But those terms also apply to cell phones (ear tools/prostheses), hard drives and the internet (brain t/p's), keyboards (finger t/p's) and so on. And since the definition of a cyborg is a "being to which exogenous elements have been added to aid an organism in adapting to new environments" (approx. quote!), the moral of the story is that we're all cyborgs. Neat. Well, neat until all our prosthetic bits are in the shop :(.

(Photo of Mark courtesy of Pelago.com and photo of Amber courtesy of Amber's Twitter profile.)

Gnomedex 9.0

Surprise Tech Conference! My friend MJ Kelly of Girls in Tech (Seattle chapter) put out a call for volunteers, so I find myself at Gnomedex 9.0 in the Bell Harbor Conference Center chatting up people who are famous on Twitter. So far I got to play with Microsoft Surface tables, watch Bre Pettis make a resin mini-replica of someone's skull with a MakerBot, and get lots and lots of swag.

Oh, and I also started by very own Twitter wave - meet Chrissa, the Girls in Tech booth mascot. Yes, that's a throwboy pillow of Chris Pirillo's face with a bow on it.