farner(in)

The answer is yes – I’m doing so right now. It seems handy enough, though it could never replace the full browser-based WordPress admin. Too many missing features.

There are situations where speed of content delivery is key and, for those, I’ll likely utilize mobile posting. Keep an eye out for mopo’s both here and on gizHQ.

From now on, gizHQ.com is where I’ll be blogging gadget news.  

Go forth and let the gadgety goodness overwhelm you.

At least, it is for regular people. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have felt the need to create another blog where I could 100% be myself. I went back through my Xanga the other day and I genuinely miss that writing. I miss being able to talk like I’d talk to one of my best friends. So I decided to take all reasons why a new blog was a bad idea and totally ignore them. Blog = created.

We’ve created two worlds, now – I hope you all realize that. Before all these social networks crept into our lives, we already had two lives – our work/class lives and our personal lives. Social media has now taken the professional version of ourselves, usually kept in an 8-hour cage, and stretched it out to encompass almost the entire rest of our days.  We’re hiding our Myspace accounts.  We’re changing our last names on Facebook.  And if you’re like me, your own personal blog isn’t even yours – it’s a place for people to come and read thoughts from the “professional” you.  Ugh.  We do all of this just so we can keep what little of our lives we have left.  It sucks.

Personally, I’d love to be done with the nonsense, but too many “brilliant” people think that they can judge someone’s morality and work ethic by looking at some drunk camera phone pictures taken on the weekend.  The irony is that we’re all probably doing the same things – so why does anyone get the right to judge?

I wish I could just throw a link out there and say, “Here’s where you can find me writing uncut and without reservation,” but it would be tied to me through this site and, well – you know why I can’t do that.  I think we shouldn’t have to fear the reprocussions of what we say, but free speech is only free if everyone else is playing along.  Right now, they aren’t.  Until they are, we’ll all continue to hide who we really are online.  Transparency is a joke and will continue to be a joke until we all stand up to this crap.

It’s been 11 days since I emailed Alpha Phi Omega President Maggie Katz to offer her a few National Convention suggestions.  I still have yet to receive any kind of response; not even a canned “Thank You” in return.  This is exactly how you shouldn’t do things – then again, the National Office has never been good at communicating.

Here’s a Google Search result for Alpha Phi Omega blog.  The National Headquarters is nowhere to be found.  Instead of leading the way, they’re simply nonexistant.  There is an unofficial blog ranking in at #1 with individual chapters rounding out the top few (my chapter is the fourth result).  Here’s a results page for Alpha Phi Omega Twitter.  You won’t find the National Office anywhere in these results – they don’t seem to have a Twitter account.  The first result is my chapter’s FriendFeed account, the third result is my chapter’s Twitter account and eight down you’ll find our chapter’s web site.  National Office = nowhere.

In case you were wondering, my suggestions to Mrs. Katz revolved around social media and Alpha Phi Omega’s need to embrace the medium.  I offered to round up my chapter and host a “Social Media Workshop” at the National Convention.  It was my hope that other chapters could use these tools to converse with their communites as well as each other.  I even thought maybe, just maybe, our National office could learn something, too.

Judging from the lack of response, though, they’re exactly what they deserve to be. Social media ghosts.

 
Justin Kownacki, a Podcamp Pittsburgh co-founder. (Image credit: pittprjns)

This past weekend I attended my very first podcamp, Podcamp Pittsburgh 3.  All I can say is this – if a Podcamp has even half the energy of PCPGH3, it’s definitely worth going to.

Here are the sessions I attended:

• “Making Social Media Visible” by Michael Munz
• “Blogging 201: Blogging Best Practices” by Cynthia Closkey and Mike Woycheck
• “Social Media Business Plans”, which was a panel featuring Aaron Tainter and Alan Veeck of Meakem Becker VC, Meredith Benedict of AlphaLab and Julie Morey of ElasticLab.
• “Feedback: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” by Justin Kownacki.
• An impromptu session on Second Life by David Fisher.
• “Social Networking/Media 201″ by Jennie Roth, Dawn Papuga and Missy Sorg.
• “The Art Institutes: Social Networking Strategies” by Jamie Sterling and Kimberly Blackstone.
• “Your Weekly Music Lessons with Walt”, a live taping of Walt Ribeiro’s weekly video show.

A friend and I were reminiscing about the good old days of Xanga – a blog/journal hosting service that we used (along with many of our friends) to chronicle our lives and our thoughts.  As we moved from high school to college, our Xangas started to become less and less frequently updated until, finally, we stopped updating them altogether.

Since then, I’ve moved on to a more serious type of blogging.  I’ve started to write about the fields that interest me and have used my blog as more of a branding tool than as a place to talk about my life.  My hilarious (and sometimes R-rated) rants have been replaced by posts about Twitter and my thoughts about social media.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself – is this me?  Is this what I really want to talk about?  Would I use these words?

I’m finding out more and more that the answer has to be yes, at least here.  Shawn Farner can be found inside the domain name.  Shawn Farner can be found in the blog itself.  All of my social networking accounts, most of which have a link to this blog, have Shawn Farner as the user name.  There is no escaping the fact that this blog now belongs to Professional Shawn. Consider Professional Shawn an alter-ego of sorts, like Clark Kent is for Superman (except not as super).  As long as this blog serves to represent me to the social media world, I have no choice.

I suspect that a lot of people have found themselves in this situation.  Behind every blog you read is a blogger with a lot more to them than you could ever learn through their posts.  I suspect that someday soon, I’ll make another attempt at creating a more personal blog.  Until then, Twitter comes the closest.  And to get the full experience?  You’ll have to get to know me. :)

Since the traditional sidebar blogroll takes up a lot of room, I’ve decided to devote a whole page to bloggers I find interesting.  You can find the VIPs link in the navigation menu.

If you’re a Central PA blogger and you aren’t listed, shoot me a message on Twitter (@shawnfarner) or send an email to shawnfarner[AT]gmail{DOT]com.  Chances are, we’ve interacted and I just don’t know your blog address.

The VIPs list is in no way an authoritative list of who is great and who isn’t.  There are tons of blogs that are probably fantastic, and once I find them, they’ll be linked as well.  If you’d like to recommend your own blog or someone else’s to me, feel free to contact me!  To those bloggers whose blogs I read – thank you for the great content.

I want to give a thank you shout-out to Colette Cope, who got my blog listed on PennLive.com!

To find me, go to PennLive.com, click “Local” and then look under “More Local Blogs”.  Or I suppose you could just keep coming the way you always do, via my feed, a bookmark, Facebook or whatever else.  I’m hoping this brings in a few new readers, but we’ll see!

A few days ago I wrote a post about why I’d rather be here than in Silicon Valley.  While people there are more apt to become early adopters, Central Pennsylvania’s rate of adoption for new technology is much slower.  This basically makes those of us blogging, tweeting and FriendFeeding here the Robert Scobles, Louis Grays and Darren Rowses of the area.

Pretty cool if you ask me.

Now we’ve taken another step forward.  blogHarrisburg has been online previously, but today received a sweet new redesign that takes it to a whole new level.  What is blogHarrisburg?  Basically, it’s a web site that aggregates all the posts made about the area by local bloggers and places them conveniently onto one site.  This will do worlds to promote blogging in the area and will put much deserved eyeballs on some of the great work that local bloggers are doing.

Speaking of local bloggers and Twitterers, you can meet some of them Thursday (5/22) at the blogHarrisburg/Twitter meetup!  It’ll be going down at Appalachian Brewing Company on Cameron Street in Harrisburg from 6-9 PM.  I usually play volleyball during that time, but I’m going to try to make it anyway.

Tomorrow I’ll be looking at a promising Central PA web site that hopes to be your one stop for event information – Spotobe.

Of course, a lot of me wants to say yes.  Scobleizer interviews some pretty high-profile people in the world of technology.  He also gets to fly all over creation.  He has a multitude of eyes and ears hanging on his every word.

Unfortunately, I feel that being fully immersed in the startup world and the ever-changing landscape of the web has put him out of touch with those who will make or break many of these ventures; the every-day guys and gals.

That isn’t a knock on Robert at all.  I’m totally envious of what he gets to do, and if things go my way, maybe one day I’ll have as many eyes and ears on me.  You can call my BS if you want, but if I had to choose between being a voice among tens of thousands of voices in the Valley or being one of just a few here, I’d choose here.

I’m located within spitting distance of a state capital that is severely lacking in web presence.  There are not many people on Twitter in Harrisburg – how else would a college student be able to chit chat with local news reporters at will?  We have very few serious bloggers, but these bloggers consistently scoop our newspaper writers on a regular basis.  There aren’t many people here who get it yet, and to me, that’s exciting.

Those few of us bloggers/early adopters that do exist here have the opportunity to do something great, something not a lot of people can say they’ve done.  We have, in our hands, the opportunity to transform an entire city.  We have the chance to completely change the way this city communicates, consumes media and sees the world as a whole.

I would guess that 97% of Harrisburg’s citizens have never heard of Twitter.  They’ve never heard of FriendFeed.  Some might think that Google is the only search engine in existence.  These people use email, AIM, Myspace and Facebook.  They read their favorite sites using bookmarks, not RSS feeds.  They find new music through the radio and word of mouth, not sites like Last.FM or Pandora.  The early adopter pace is just too fast for them to keep up.

I do not look down on these people at all.  Many early adopters seem to think highly of themselves for having been on something “first”, before it was cool.  I do not think that way.  For me, these people are not a heavy anchor holding us back.  Instead, they are the sails.  When they flock to a service, then you know you have something special.

I look foward to helping introduce them to this new world.  And Robert, next time you go to Tel Aviv, save me a seat?