Believe Twitter Habit Under Control

After a week of restraint, I believe my Twitter habit is under control. So I'm cautiously tweeting again, but will no longer be a maniac about it. No more tweeting every review I post, every newspaper article of interest, or every clever thought to pop into my head. I do like the idea of using foursquare/tweeting when traveling, but not making myself crazy with #ff's or simply posting five tweets in a row after reading the New York Times. Hopefully this will have been a good lesson learned, or I'll just have to re-ban myself in the future.

Some 400 people are signed up as my Twitter followers, and more lists than I can comprehend tune in to my inanities as well. Only 20 or so of you visit this blog, which I'll continue to use for the majority of what I want to share with the world. I may be writing almost entirely for myself, but I find I'm my best audience anyway. <g> Do I wish more people read what I write here? Yeah, but if it hasn't caught on in six months, I accept that there just aren't many people interested in my meanderings. So be it. But thank you for taking time out during your day to stop by for a visit.

Believe Twitter Habit Under Control

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We just came home from Parents Weekend at Hendrix. It didn't go quite as planned, but I did have a great and intimate text conversation (apparently such a thing is possible) with Rachael while we were on the road back. Sometimes it's easier for her to talk to me via text than in person. So I take what I can get. She looks great, the young man she's dating is a nice guy - with some very gentlemanly attributes that only a parent of this particular child would notice - and she's making some (not all) smart choices when it comes to setting priorities. So I can't really complain.

I read three books on my Kindle while on the road and late at night and plan to review them within a few days. I have no PW reviews hanging on at the moment - I turned my last one in way early (the due date for it was to have been tomorrow) - so I can focus on reviewing the Anne Stuart, Tim Gunn, and Lucy Monroe books, and hopefully start on some other netgalley.com downloads before books from one or both of my PW editors arrive.

I tweeted today that I plan to "go underground" other than reviewing and blogging because the self-indulgence level has gone off the charts. There's another reason for it: I'm so frustrated right now about the state of our nation that I need to pull back. No more tweeting newspaper article links...or sharing Bill Maher quotes. While we were on the road on the way to Hendrix on Thursday, we vowed to stay away from talk of the news or politics and neither of us were able to do so. Then, on Friday night while we watched Bill Maher, I almost could not control myself whenever Amy Homes or that charlatan Andrew Breitbart opened their mouths. It was after Maher finished his New Rules segment that I realized I need to go on a news ban. Since much of my twitter feed is consumed with the news - and since the rest has gotten too "it's all about me" - it was pretty much a no-brainer.

Will I blog about anything other than books? Who knows? But since the average number of daily readers here on Toe in the Water is fewer than 25, I'm fairly certain those who tune in here are okay with whatever I share.

I'll leave with this small B&N tidbit: We visited the B&N-owned bookstore at Hendrix and learned that no more than 25% of the textbooks used by Hendrix students are available on Nook and that there are additional constraints to textbooks and e-book readers (laptops and printers and timing issues all play a part), leading me to conclude that while the eventual future of college reading will be electronically based, it's not quite ready for prime time just yet.

And, for those of you who haven't seen them on Twitter or Facebook, here are some photos I took with my phone at Hendrix. My DH took some excellent ones with a "real" camera, but for now these will do:

This chandelier in the student center was created by a glass artist who graduated Hendrix in 1988

Some on-campus apartments

I call this the "birthday fountain" because students are dumped there by their friends on their birthdays. They do the dumping based on the time each student came into this world; poor Rachael will be dumped in the middle of winter in the middle of the night

One of the main walkways on campus

Just one of many "thoughtful" spots on campus...this one particularly lovely

"The Pit," where the entire student body hangs out for college-sponsored events, like this month's Foam Party

The library (I didn't go close up on most shots because I wanted to include the surroundings, like the myriad of trees and shrubs that give this campus a very natural vibe

Student Life & Activity Center, which is where we started. In addition to the great art glass, the building is very tech-oriented, featuring many comfort-filled work/play stations utilizing large computer/TV screens with Internet hook-up and access to software programs. You can watch a football game, play Wii, or work on a presentation with classmates. I wish my den had a set up like this!

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Dallas Coffee Party...a Big, Fat Flop For Me

I joined the Coffee Party nationally and in Dallas earlier this year, and attended the first meetings with high hopes. As I reported on the Dallas Coffee Blog I started earlier this month, it's very easy to click a Facebook button and join a cause. It's a lot more difficult to create something sustainable afterward.

The Dallas Coffee Party kicked off with great fanfare, with local TV and print news coverage of the first meetings, and after the second meeting I volunteered to become an admin for the Facebook page. I was sick for the third meeting, and at the fourth, was one of six who bothered to attend...out of nearly a thousand Facebook members. Of course, that the meeting wasn't properly publicized or added to the national FB page where members looking for meetings could find it didn't help, but as a result of that meeting, I set up a Dallas Coffee Blog and an @dallascoffee twitter feed to gin up interest. I believed - and hoped - that if a local person wrote original content and tweeted other content of interest, more people might feel a connection and an inclination to actively participate.

In the interim, the originator of the DCP quit, and in-fighting broke out between two of the other three admins, leaving me stuck in the middle. Although the Coffee Party is thriving throughout the country, it's dead in the water in Dallas because of a lack of momentum and planning, and because too many of the few grown-ups involved actually decided to behave not as grown-ups but as petulant children. While I don't count myself as one of those pouting tots, it's obvious I've got some anger seeping through here, so I'll simply tell you what I did earlier today: Transferred all the DCP bloggings as a single note to the DCP page on Facebook, and after deleting the @dallascoffee twitter feed, I'll be deleting myself as a DCP admin.

It's true that not much time has lapsed between my first blog and tweet efforts and now, but with a thousand DCP members, and my RT'ing @dallascoffee tweets to the DCP page and linking to all the blog entries, I can't say that the word didn't get out. The word got out, but nobody cared. That's fine. I gave it a shot, and as I wrote on my DCP note, I'd rather write one blog nobody reads than two. Only one local person directly accessed the 28 tweets I've made...the other four are from CP's elsewhere. Almost 400 people subscribe to my @laurie_gold twitter feed and I'll concentrate on them rather than the five (again, including just one local person) who subscribed to @dallascoffee.

Because I'm proud of the blog entries I wrote for DCP, I'm going to insert them here onto my Toe in the Water blog...later today, after I've done so, I'll come back in here and provide links to any who are interested. And, as I wrote on the DCP page, I look forward to somebody with vision, patience, and a game-plan to reinvent the Dallas Coffee Party so that I can rejoin. In the interim, I'll look for another group to hook up with, possibly one in Ft. Worth. Sad that in one of the largest cities in the U.S. we were unable to sustain things here, but it's time to move on. My experiment failed.

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BLOG ENTRIES ADDED TO TOE IN THE WATER FROM SHORT-LIVED DCP BLOG:

Financial Reform...It's Complicated

Stand Up...Or Stand Down

What If You Gave a Coffee Party and Nobody Came?

Corporate Fascism?

An Experiment

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And, in case anyone's interested in links to articles from the @dallascoffee twitter feed...

Lost Decade Looming? (Paul Krugman NYT)

More on TX text book fight

New project of freepress.com invites us to keep media on its toes by submitting biased and or overblown reporting.

A nun is "automatically excommunicated" after sitting on hosp comm that agreed to perform abortion to save mom's life.

NYT: A generation gap on immigration

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the...

Coffee Party USA is launching Coffee with Main Street campaign from now throughout the month of June.

Million-Dollar Ad Blitz to Kill Net Neutrality

The Senate approved a provision putting space between bond issuers & rating agencies

NYT: U.S. Said to Allow Drilling Without Needed Permits

NYT: Senate Beats Back Efforts to Ease Regulation Bill

Commentary on Findlaw about First Amendment

Newsweek article on Walt Whitman important for us to consider

Huffpost - Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency, USA TODAY found.

Rabbit hole of corporate spending on campaigns.

Tom Friedman in today's NYT

Dallas Coffee Party...a Big, Fat Flop For Me

What if You Gave a Coffee Party and Nobody Came? (Transferred from Short-Lived DCP blog)

Yes...I'm impatient. And because there are multiple admins on the Join the Coffee Party Movement, Dallas page on Facebook, as well as members posting, it's difficult for members to find some of what I'd like them to find. Namely, this blog and the @dallascoffee twitter feed I set up earlier in the week. Because right now I feel like I'm giving a coffee party by myself.

This morning I decided to get pro-active about it...even more proactive than actually setting up the blog, twitter feed, writing up blog entries and finding articles of interest to forward via the twitter feed. So I searched twitter using @coffeeparty as my search item and clicked the "follow" button for other Coffee Party feeds, and, in addition, some feeds that look like they focus -on the Coffee Party.

Here's problem one: When you follow another feed, all their tweets show up on it, which is why although @laurie_gold follows @dallascoffee, @dallascoffee does not follow @laurie_gold. If, in fact, the feeds I selected focus almost exclusively on Coffee Party matters, everything will be copesetic. If not, though, if there are as many non-topic tweets that exist in my personal feed, I'll need to unfollow, putting me back at square one. Unless, of course, the feeds I've picked up pick me up in return, which has happened...just once...today. Meaning that I am no longer the sole follower of @dallascoffee.

Although I've used twitter for quite a while now, tagging is new to me. My @laurie_gold tweets are meant for family, friends, acquaintances, and those involved with books, publishing, and the like. Today I realized if I find a way to condense my tweets even more so that I can fit in "#coffeeparty" within the allotted 140 characters, my @dallascoffee tweets will get picked up and read by others searching for tweets on the Coffee Party, which is what happened earlier when I tweeted a link to the NYT on financial reform.

Now, back to the Facebook page for a moment...and the multiple admins. As it stands, there is no distinguishing which admin posted to the page - until now. In learning how to handle my new Droid phone, I've gone back and forth between using Facebook's "full site" in non-mobile mode and the mobile app because I'm still learning the ins and outs of copying and pasting on various apps. Today I discovered that when I post to the Dallas Facebook page for the Coffee Party using the full-site method, my icon is the generic cup of coffee. But, when I post using the Droid app, my personal icon is what appears after I hit the "share" button.

That still leaves one issue hanging out there - the ability to change the default on the Dallas Coffee Party Facebook page so that the "Info" page rather than "Wall" is where visitors land. It seems to me that if we want to actually use the twitter feed and this blog to their utmost, we need to direct people here.

For instance, I'd love to properly publicize the showing at the Angelika on the 28th of the documentary film release Captain Jack and the United States of Money, to direct readers to the Facebook RSVP page. I'd love to use this blog not only to publicize events and meetings, but to use it as a forum to talk about issues in a unique way to promote discussion.

I'd like to continue posting articles like the two I wrote earlier in the week. I believe that by making connections others may not necessarily leap to, I can educate and inform without being pedantic or partisan. But if nobody's here to read the content, what, really, is the point? It becomes nothing but mental masturbation.

Facebook is a terrific and easy way to introduce a concept, but as a way to motivate and mobilize, so far I've been unable to tap its potential. If you can help me figure it out, please do, either by commenting here, or through an email up at Facebook. In the interim, for those looking for something substantive and tangible, here is an urgent notice from the national Coffee Party page on Facebook, followed by local Event Listings, their links, and some detail:

Join the Coffee Party Movement
URGENT: We have at least one more day to convince our senators to support the Merkley-Levin Amendment. Lobbying from the Big Banks are at a fever pitch in DC right now because this amendment spells real reform. It would ensure that American tax payers don't guarantee Wall St banks' risky bets and would stop banks from engaging in Goldman-Sachs-style bets against their own clients. Let's put (202) 224-3121 on speed dial and call: Klobuchar-MN, Nelson-NE, Brown-MA, Landrieu-LA, Lugar-IN, Corker-TN, Alexander-TN, Bayh-IN, Lugar-IN, Snowe-ME, Collins-ME, Hagan-NC, Warner-VA, Schumer-NY, Gillibrand-NY #coffeeparty

Captain Jack & the United States of Money A documentary about Jack Abramoff	5321 Mockingbird Ln. Dallas, TX 75206 Friday, May 28th from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Leadership Training For those interesting in hosting a Coffee Party event	Fish City on Henderson, Dallas, TX Saturday, May 22nd from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm

Help spread the word about these pertinent events and notices, make plans to participate somehow, and forward the link for this blog entry to other Dallas Coffee Party members.

~Laurie G

What if You Gave a Coffee Party and Nobody Came? (Transferred from Short-Lived DCP blog)

Confusion Reigns

I joined the Coffee Party Movement in March, as did thousands of other people. It's easy, really...you press a button on Facebook and, voilà, you're a member. How to translate that membership into something substantial is a lot more difficult, for a variety of reasons: 1) The mission is amorphous (how does one translate "good government" into action?); 2) Grassroots organizations require more effort from the bottom; and 3) The original head of the movement for Dallas became overwhelmed by the enormity of her commitment, dropped out without asking for help, and left everyone floundering and trying to pick up the pieces. As a result, after ten or twelve local meetings in March and April, there was just one in May. Instead of fifteen to forty in attendance at each of those meetings, there were just six of us - including my now-adult daughter - at lunch yesterday.

While at the meeting I realized if I wanted the Coffee Party Movement in Dallas to succeed, I'd actually need to get off my ass and do something. The Coffee Party is thriving throughout all of Texas...but not in Dallas. So I decided to use my skill set as a writer and Internet guru by creating a new blog and setting up a[nother] Twitter account, specifically to communicate with the hundreds of people who have clicked that Dallas Coffee Party Facebook button.

After leaving lunch yesterday, I was supposed to have come home and read a rush book to review for PW by Monday (it arrived at my house on Friday). I didn't. Instead, I set up the bones of the new blog - Dallas Coffee Party - and wrote the first post. Then I left for work, and in the ten minutes before starting my shift, I set up the new Twitter account - @dallascoffee. It quickly became confusing. I'd thought if I input my @laurie_gold user name and password for one of my Droid's Twitter apps, and my info for the @dallascoffee using another, I could just click whichever app I needed depending on which account I was going to tweet from...so far I've not been able to get that to work. Equally confusing regards actual content for each blog - and what to tweet to each of the Twitter accounts as well. I'll be working with various Coffee Party members to suss out what to post on the other blog, but does that mean I should stop posting anything political here? The Coffee Party strives to be political but not partisan, and because most of my political tweets are simply links to newspaper articles, they can be tweeted from one and retweeted to the other, but other than that, I'm feeling more than a little Sybil right now.

As I wrote in my initial post to the Dallas Coffee Party blog yesterday, it's going to be an experiment, and the experiment will spill over onto Toe in the Water. Please be patient as I muddle through.

Confusion Reigns

An Experiment (Transferred from short-lived DCP blog)

In March, I did something I'd not done since the late 1980s...got off my rear and decided to do more than give money to causes I believed in. As an individual with an advanced degree in public administration whose first career was in municipal management, I'm a strong believer that government is not evil. It's not the problem. It's part of the solution, and we are government - or should be. Tired of all the yelling that passes for political discourse these days, I decided to join the Coffee Party Movement. That was the easy part.

It's incredibly easy to press a Facebook button and join a cause, be part of a movement, or proclaim your allegiance to something or somebody. It's a lot more time-consuming - and frustrating - to accomplish something. And with a mandate as amorphous as cooperation and participation in government so that it expresses our collective will and addresses our challenges in a civil and positive manner, it's all the more difficult. How to translate a wish for "good government" into action?

I attended a planning meeting in March, then one of the hundreds of local meetings held throughout the country. The planning meeting made the local news and another of the local meetings did as well. Though attendance at the first meeting was high, and even higher for the second, for today's meeting there were a grand total of six of us in attendance...and as far as I know it was the only group to meet in Dallas county. While the movement remains strong and vital as near as Fort Worth, it's died in Dallas, and I'm one of those committed to reviving it. I decided my skill set would be best used in communicating with Dallas area members via this blog and through a Twitter account I've yet to set up.

This will be an experiment, for me, and for those of you who decide to participate by reading this blog, posting to the local or national Facebook page, or deciding to attend or even lead a local meeting in the future. I've included the movement's official mission statement, a link for those who'd like to sign the civility pledge (it's a jump link because the pledge is hosted on the national site...click it and a new browser window will open, allowing you to toggle back and forth), and activated sharing and subscribing abilities for those who are interested. Next will come links, and then the blog structure should be complete, and the real hard work of communicating will begin.

That's where you come in. As a grassroots organization, we are all responsible for determining our direction, but at the same time, many policy issues are time-sensitive, which means that among movement members locally and nation-wide, we need coordination. I'll be up front and share that the topic of most interest to me is campaign finance reform in light of the January's Supreme Court decision that under the First Amendment, Congress may not bar corporations and unions from using their own money to make independent expenditures to support or oppose candidates for office. But right now banking reform is number one on the to-do list because of on-going congressional hearings. In fact, there's a documentary film showing at the Angelika Mockingbird in the very near future that we hope you'll consider attending.

Look forward to more from me on that in upcoming days, but please, please, please, share your interests as well. Comment at will. I've blogged, run discussion lists, forums, and websites since the mid-1990s and feel well able to keep my ego in check. I plan to be a two-way conduit of information more than anything else, and that won't work without your participation.

~Laurie G

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Sunday, May 9: @dallascoffee set up and Twitter widget added to the right column of this page. Please spread the word about the blog and the Twitter feed...feel free to use the "share this" links following each entry and the right column. Look for some substance Tuesday.

~Laurie G

An Experiment (Transferred from short-lived DCP blog)