It’s a Google-coded technology that allows real-time RSS updating for your blog.

Here’s a cheesy demo of “PuSH” with some helpfully contrived metaphors:

Joseph Scott has released a new PuSHPress plugin to bring the benefits of this technology to your Wordpress blog. See the documentation here

To install, just go to the area for adding new plugins in your dashboard, search by keyword “PuSHpress” and install. You might need to update to the newest version of Wordpress, but you should probably do that anyway.

So, good content or bad, folks will get a chance to read it faster. With any luck, it won’t be analagous to the food being terrible, but the portions being too small.

What do you think?

When: 6 pm: Registration and networking, appetizers, cash bar
6.30 pm: Opening remarks by Michelle Hudson of the News-Press
6.45 pm: Keynote address: Turning Social Media Contacts into Actionable Relationships
7.30 pm:  Executive panel
8.15 pm : Closing Remarks

Where: Holiday Inn Airport at Gulf Coast Town Center

Cost: Free, registration required

Featured speaker: Deborah Shane

Panelists:

Suzanne Boy, Attorney at Henderson Franklin Starnes & Holt, P.A.
Sarah Owen, CEO at Community Cooperative Ministries, Inc.
Dean Piccirillo, Principal and Senior Financial Advisor at HBK Sorce Financial LLC

Moderator:

Pason Gaddis, President and Publisher, Florida Weekly

Event description

Is there room for social media in the boardroom? At the next Social Media Club of Southwest Florida event, discover the opportunities social media provides for professional people in leadership roles.

A recent study by UberCEO found that in the Fortune 100 companies:

* Only 2 CEOs have Twitter accounts
* A mere 13 have LinkedIn profiles
* 81 percent do not have a Facebook profile
* Not one Fortune 100 CEO has a blog

The surprising lack of tweets in the C suite offers enterprising leaders a chance to differentiate their company by becoming the face of it, even — maybe even especially — if it’s not part of the Fortune elite. However, social media does present that “yet one more thing” to learn and manage, and many executives may have to break down long-existing silos in their corporate culture in the process.

Enjoy an in-depth overview of the time management and implementation issues that face busy professionals who decide to become the public face of their business, as well as the brand loyalty and corporate goodwill social media can facilitate. Explore the objections professional-level employees may have when embarking on a social media campaign, along with best practices and the opportunities for timely customer service intervention.

Keynote address:

Deborah Shane will present “Turning Social Media Contacts into Actionable Relationships”

Social media makes it easy to meet lots of like-minded people. Once you’ve harnessed the power of the social networks to gain all those followers, then what? The point isn’t simply to gain a huge list of online friends. However, many users haven’t learned the all-important next step: bridging the gap between online networking and real-world results. So, how do you turn those contacts into actionable relationships?

Deborah Shane will help us discover the fine art of social media contact conversion. She is a dynamic speaker and professional trainer who devotes her energy to helping professionals realize their full potential. Explore how and why “to put yourself out there, bring value to someone’s day, and get personal!”

Following Deborah’s presentation, stick around for a spirited panel discussion featuring local professionals who are also experts in social media relationship management.

Deborah Shane is owner of Train With Shane. She spent 20 years in broadcast media (radio) in sales, management and training in corporate America with Cox Radio and Clear Channel. In 1994, she began training and mentoring sales professionals both through continuing/adult education programs and broadcast media. She has designed and developed several original sales and professional development curricula. The expression you only come this way one time” has always motivated her to follow her dreams and take some risks along the way. TWS is an expression of all of her skills, passions and gifts. Find her on Twitter at @DeborahShane.

Executive Panel

Suzanne Boy is an Associate at Henderson Franklin, Starnes & Holt, P.A. She concentrates her practice in employment law and is the lead writer of Southwest Florida HR Law & Solutions, Henderson Franklins employment law blog. Suzanne also speaks to businesses and professional groups on various employment matters. In addition to her employment law practice, Suzanne also handles a variety of commercial litigation matters including contract and business disputes, foreclosures and bank-related litigation, landlord-tenant issues, and estate-related litigation. She serves as general counsel for several of her corporate clients. Suzanne also has an active civil appellate practice.

Find her on Twitter @suzanneboy.

Sarah Owen is Chief Executive Officer at Community Cooperative Ministries, Inc., the umbrella agency for The Soup Kitchen, Meals on Wheels, Faith In Action Senior Transportation, Hands & Hearts Montessori Preschool, and two United Way Resource Houses. The agency is dedicated to providing food to the hungry and transforming the lives of those in need through partnerships, collaborations and innovative social service solutions.

Her journey into the non-profit arena came by way of a career in public relations and corporate communications. Sarah has worked in investor relations, public relations and corporate communications for publicly traded companies on the New York Stock Exchange as well as private companies throughout the Southeastern United States.

Find her on Twitter @hungerfighter

Dean Piccirillo is a Principal and Senior Financial Advisor at HBK Sorce Financial LLC. Dean has been practicing for 20 years, working closely with families to help them plan for their long-term goals and with businesses and other institutions to help them establish or enhance retirement plans. He leads HBK Sorces Retirement Plan Unit, working closely with all of the firms corporate clients sponsoring qualified retirement plans. In addition to the Certified Financial Planner certification, Dean also maintains the Chartered Retirement Plans Specialist certification and the Accredited Investment Fiduciary Analyst certification. He was recently named as one of the Top 300 most influential retirement plan advisors in the U.S. by the 401(k) Wire.  Mr. Piccirillo writes online regarding pension and retirement planning matters on his professional blog at www.deanpiccirillo.com.

Find him on Twitter @deanpiccirillo or on his blog at www.deanpiccirillo.com.

Moderator

Pason Gaddis, President and Publisher, Florida Weekly

Pason Gaddis is President and Publisher of Florida Weekly. He is a 15 plus year newspaper advertising sales veteran. Prior to Florida Weekly, he served in a variety of sales and sales management capacities from 1998-2007 with Gannett, Inc. and successfully launched several new newspapers and magazines.

He is heavily involved in several local charities including the American Heart Association along with serving on the board of directors for the Lakes Park Enrichment Foundation, Great Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce and the Florida Press Service.

Florida Weekly on Twitter: @FloridaWeekly

ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO COST AND THIS EVENT IS FREE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, SEATING IS LIMITED AND YOU MUST BE REGISTERED TO ATTEND

A lot of “gurus” would like to tell you the best case scenario. Social media is free, powerful and fun. I couldn’t agree more.

However, it’s not a panacea. It’s not the only ingredient in your marketing apothecary, is it? I certainly hope not. Think of it like an insurance portfolio. You don’t just get one type then say forget it. There’s health, life, auto… Missing one coverage could be disastrous. But that’s between you and your agent to figure out – and in life as in marketing, disasters can be instructive.

In addition to my social media warrior princess gig, I also do some newspaper writing and editing. Recently I had to talk down a reporter who had gotten himself into a sticky place with his editorial subject. His report was just that – a report – and needed some serious reworking. My 11th hour rewrite for the paper didn’t please the freelancer, who had promised his contact a certain tone to his story.

Note to freelancers: Do NOT do this. Your editor will ultimately determine the tone in keeping with his or her editorial guidelines and the publication’s journalistic integrity. Your job stops at submission.

But that’s not my point to this piece. Wait for it…

The reporter’s subject is a marketer who’s brought an ultrapremium luxury item to market and…drum roll…left it to social media buzz to get the word out.

Here’s the truth: leaving it to social media followers to do your marketing for you means you lose a substantial amount of control over your message.

Balancing buzz with other marketing components will help insure your message.

So my advice to that freelancer: If he wants to write what the marketing company behind the product wants him to write, then he’s not a journalist, but a copywriter who has limited input into the creative vision.

My advice to his contact: When you “go viral,” you’re capitalizing on buzz at that point, not necessarily a commitment to product quality.You CAN have both, but that requires careful engineering and concerted marketing portfolio management.

It does strike me as a sort of dark genius on the subject’s part to squeeze all the blood out of his particular social media turnip, then cop a “poor me” attitude with the press. You want profile, you get profile.

Remember “the medium is the message?” This mantra was beaten into me as a young ad copywriter fresh out of college. It was true when Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. Is it as true today as it was then? How does it apply to new media platforms?

By the way, if anyone tries to pass him or herself off as a “guru,” take a good, hard look at the expertise they’re actually bringing to the table. You want substantial marketing chops, not a yogic hermit in a mountaintop cave – unless you’re the Beatles, in which case you probably don’t have to worry much about your buzz.

Intuit isn’t dumb. In fact, they’re freakin’ brilliant.

They’ve got this thing going called the “Love A Local Business” contest. A local business can win a $35,000 grant – a dream for an entrepreneur. I mean, THINK what you could do with that money! All that’s needed is votes from people who know your business. Yes, it’s an unadulterated popularity contest.

My husband does amazing stonework, providing dreamscapes for homeowners and commercial applications. He also does water features and rainwater harvesting. We run the business together. We do a pretty good job. Well, he does an incredible job, and I just try to be a shortcut for him so he can concentrate on what he does best. On the side, I do writing gigs and drop into the Hot Tub whenever I can.

We keep overhead low. It’s just the only way we care to operate – and the only way we could operate in the current economic climate.

So when we come upon an opportunity to get ahead with little or no investment, we jump on it. We entered the contest and immediately canvassed our social media connections.

Like I said, Intuit isn’t dumb. Not only do they provide a custom URL to post in emails and on social networking sites, they provide web site banners and how-to tips for social sharing. Of course, the expected side effect, is with all our canvassing, we’re becoming a bigger name dropper than Hilary Rowland. I never in my life felt compelled to tweet about Intuit. I’ve never once mentioned the company in all my travels in Facebook, LinkedIn and Digg. Except today.

Even more brilliant, Intuit provided us with a site to monitor the comments our fans provide and our current ranking. The more we see happening, the more we think we actually stand a chance and naturally, the more ways we want to find to get the word out about – not merely a contest – an Intuit contest. I even joined networking sites I wasn’t on before. Yeah, like I really need MORE.

I heart Elemental Stone and Waterworks. Please vote for us. Please. No, really.

And consider doing a similar contest for your business. As far as viral marketing, it’s as organic as you can get. And it works.

Now what?

You probably would like some visitors, comments – activity in general. Your blog doesn’t live in a vacuum, right? Or, at least, it won’t for very long unless you just like to hear yourself type. One important step is to register with blog directories, such as the one hosted by Technorati. Simply sign up for an account there, create a profile just like you would at any social networking site then file a “blog claim.” You’ll see this option as you set up your account. You will be able to furnish a description of your blog along with keywords and categories that will help readers find you.

Technorati will tell you it will take some time to investigate your blog claim – don’t worry, they won’t send a claims adjuster to your office or anything like that. You will, however, receive an email with your Secret Squirrel instructions. You’ll be given a “token code,” which you will put into a blog post. Then hit “publish.” When you tell it to go ahead, Technorati will crawl your site, find the code, and verify you are a human blogger who actually owns that blog. That’s it.

Yes, you will have a weird bit of code in your post. Mine is: 7E3NX6A3VE53  You can get rid of it when you get confirmation. Or just write about your experience and help other people with this handy household tip.

Don’t you love learning together?

What is your blog, and what is it all about? When did you start it and why? Tell us in the comments for this post.

UPDATE: Technorati will tell you it will take “some time” to complete your claim, and they’re not kidding. I posted the above the same day I initiated my own claim and only received notification that it was complete on Feb. 22 – almost a month later. Was it worth it? We’ll see.

It’s so simple, but not intuitive. To the best of my knowledge this works with Wordpress 2.7 and newer versions.

In the dashboard, go to “Media,” then click “Add New.” From there, you can browse for the file on your computer – no need to upload the .pdf into your server’s root directory or anything, like silly me tried to do.

After you’ve hit “upload,” you should see the Media Library, with your new file at the top. Click the title of your new file, and you’ll be able to see the “file URL.” It’s where your file lives now. Highlight the address and copy it to the clipboard.

Then, in your post or page, whatever you’re working on, you can make a link from text or a photo to your pdf’s new place of business. In visual mode, simply highlight the text you want to use to refer viewers to your pdf and click “Insert/edit link” or use the keyboard shortcut of Alt+Shift+A. Enter that saved pdf location into “Link URL.” In “Target” you can choose whether the pdf opens in a new window, or the same one.

Voila!

In html mode,  it will look something like this (the following is from my hubby’s stone masonry company blog, where I wanted to be able to allow folks to see his print brochure in pdf format. I linked the pdf’s URL to a photo of the front panel of the brochure. You can see it live here:

<a href=”http://elementalstoneandwaterworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/GreenBrochurea.pdf”><img style=”border: 0pt none; float:left; padding-top: 10px; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px” title=”Brochure front panel” src=”http://elementalstoneandwaterworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/BrochureFrontPanelJPG.jpg” alt=”Brochure Front Panel” width=”214″ height=”479″ /></a>

Time: 7pm – 9pm
Where: Holiday Inn Fort Myers Airport
9931 Interstate Commerce Drive, Ft Myers, FL
Speaker: Carlos Cardona
Sponsors: Fifth Third Bank and Kiss Your Web, LLC

Carlos Cardona is a one-of-a kind talent; a visionary with over 15 years of Web experience and proven success in creating and leading companies to include an Internet portal and search engine he invented and sold to Microsoft. Carlos has been recognized by Hispanic Magazine with both the Hispanic Entrepreneur Award as well the “100 Most Influential Hispanics” distinction in 1999 and 2000 respectively.

Register Here for free

Event Description

The Social Media Club of SWFL is partnering with Hodges University and the Southwest Forida Hispanic Chamber for this wonderful event. With 21 million Hispanic Internet users projected by this year, Hispanics are adopting social media as their primary source of communication, news and entertainment faster than any other group. The Hispanic community’s buying power is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2013. In order for businesses to connect effectively with this huge demographic group as it moves online they will need to understand how Hispanics are using these tools.

With 21 million Hispanic Internet users projected by this year, Hispanics are adopting social media as their primary source of communication, news and entertainment faster than any other group. The Hispanic community’s buying power is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2013. In order for businesses to connect effectively with this huge demographic group as it moves online they will need to understand how Hispanics are using these tools.

To help educate the local professional community about how the Hispanic market is growing on the Internet, the Social Media Club of Southwest Florida has teamed with the Southwest Florida Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Hispanic Institute at Hodges University for a workshop on Monday, January 25th from 7:00 to 9:00 PM Holiday Inn Fort Myers Airport at Town Center. For meeting will include a presentation that by Carlos Cardona an entrepreneur and web strategist followed by a panel discussion including local Hispanic professionals experienced with or experimenting with social media in their businesses.

Carlos Cardona currently serves as Chief Social Media Strategist for Welltok, Inc where he is in charge of reinventing how healthcare companies use social networks to help individuals better their lifestyles. Prior he served as the Chief Social Media Strategist to Newlink Groups a public relations firm where he managed social media strategies for clients such as Oracle, Pionner, Smirnoff, Skype Latam, Tourism board of Mexico and others.

Carlos also served as a Project Lead & Development Manager for Microsoft for several years and was the founder of Yupi Internet (now MSN Latino, and part of the global MSN network) a leading web-portal that targeted the Latin American and US Hispanic market, which attracted more than 10 million unique visitors with over 200 million page views per month in less than 3 years, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft.

Location

Holiday Inn Fort Myers Airport at Town Center
9931 Interstate Commerce Dr.
Fort Myers, FL 33913
Phone: 239-561-1550

ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO COST AND THIS EVENT IS FREE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, SEATING IS LIMITED AND YOU MUST BE REGISTERED TO ATTEND

13 is just a random number, of course. Well, maybe not so random, triskaidekamaniac that I am. However, as we reach a point where social media is a household term, and we’ve gotten a little bit past all the talk of adoption and more into talk about best practices it’s worthwhile to take into account all the little things it does for us.

How many of you have received a friend request from someone you had all but written off? Did you feel more than a little surprised? Did you experience an emotional churning as you faced all the feelings that person made you feel in the first place? Maybe you felt inconvenienced this person forced you to revisit those feelings. If you didn’t reject the request in a knee-jerk reaction, maybe you let the request sit in your inbox for a few days or a few months.

Then, after you slept on it, what did you decide? If you accepted the request, maybe you had the chance to talk rationally with your new-old friend and smooth out old hurts. What did you feel then? Relief? Release? Maybe you didn’t realize what a hold that person still had over you until you were faced with them again.

I’ve had this very experience several times during my foray into social networking. For me, there are different stages, similar to the stages of grief – with all due respect to Dr. Kübler-Ross, of course. From denial to acceptance. And isn’t that what forgiveness is, in the first place? A kind of petit mort where those things that bind us to the past are swept away.

If social media use helps us achieve that, I’d call it pretty handy dandy. How has it helped you come to grips with the past?

Social Networks are revolutionizing how we view our world. People are connecting, businesses are being created or transformed, and the world seems like a smaller place. As with any transformation on a grand scale, a plethora of consultants, gurus, blogs, and how-to books have risen to meet the demand for information about the social revolution.

However, it is very rare to hear anything about the underlying forces that actually drive the social network phenomenon.

It’s a shame because the story is a great one that has implications, not only for social media, but for fields as diverse as counter-terrorism, ecology, economics, organizational theory and cancer research. Network Theory has fundamentally changed our understanding about how the world works since its inception a decade ago. Most of all, by understanding how networks form and grow, we can build better ones.

Fireflies and the President of the United States

Our story begins in 1996 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where an adventurous rock climber and former Australian Navy Officer named, Duncan Watts, was thinking about how crickets, frogs, fireflies, and pacemaker cells all seem to be able to synchronize their behavior within large groups.

His mind must have began to wander because he suddenly remembered that his father once told him that everybody is just six relationships away from the President of the United States. The concept had existed in literature early in the 20th century and was documented in Stanley Milgram’s famous “Small World Experiment”.

In a flash of inspiration he went to his PhD thesis advisor, Steven Strogatz, and told him that he wanted to, yet again, change his thesis topic. Watts had a hunch that both phenomena might be related. Strogatz, somewhat used to giving his brilliant student leeway, consented.

The Strength of Weak Ties

As he began his research, Watts came across a highly cited paper written by Mark Granovetter called “The Strength of Weak Ties” about how people find jobs. He found that most people don’t locate employment through their friends, but through friends of friends.

Granovetter dubbed these relationships “weak ties” (after the attraction between water molecules that give the liquid many of its properties). Granovetter surmised that it is through weak ties that information is largely distributed. While we can maintain relationships with relatively few people, the people they know greatly increase our access to facts, knowledge and wisdom.

We have friends from work, school, our neighborhood, etc. While our ties may be strong ties to us, they are weak ties to our friends from separate clusters. For instance, the felon in our neighborhood can be connected to the law professor at our university in only two steps!

Spacemen vs. Cavemen

Watts also began thinking about his youthful love of science fiction and two Isaac Asimov novels in particular; one about spacemen and another about cavemen. The spacemen communicated remotely so that the people they knew didn’t know each other, while the cavemen lived in isolated groups and knew everybody their friends knew. He decided to build a mathematical model that would describe both situations and every possibility in between.

In addition to the “degrees of separation” metric (the average number of links it takes to get from one network member to another), Watts also created a “cluster coefficient,” in effect how tightly clustered communities are within the network.

A good analogy is a school lunchroom. How many people who have close relationships would be calculated by the cluster coefficient while how many introductions one would need, on average, to get to any particular person, would be the degrees of separation (or more technically, path length). This type of calculation has been second nature for poor note-takers and class-cutters alike for ages.

Armed with mathematical representations for both his “spacemen and his “cavemen” he could experiment with different types of networks.

Small World Networks

What he found was startling. In his model, as communities connect to each other, the social distance between people increases – up to a point – and then immediately comes crashing down. It turns out that it takes just a little bit of mixing for the social distance to decrease by an enormous amount, but a lot of mixing to kill communities. Although surprising, the pattern was familiar. Similar “instantaneous phase transitions” have been long known in Physics.

Moreover, he found that in almost all cases, the same result appeared, it was only a matter of time for a network under fairly normal conditions to reach the optimal state. Globally connected networks with strong local cohesion are not only possible, they are the equilibrium case – you just needed a relatively small number of Granovetter’s “weak ties” mixed in to make the whole thing work.

He called the result a “Small World Network” after Milgram’s famous experiment.

Hey! Networks Grow, Don’t They?

Watts published a paper on his findings with Strogatz and it became an immediate success, widely read and cited throughout the scientific community. At Notre Dame University, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his student, Réka Albert, noticed an oversight – networks grow over time and large communities within networks drive the growth. They quickly published their own paper.

What they found was that networks follow a very specific mathematical rule called a “power law” that described well known phenomena such as the “80/20 rule” and Chris Andersen’s now famous long tail. Their findings suggested that even very large networks were driven by relatively few “hubs” around which everything else was organized.

The two teams continued to trade papers back and forth and in a very short time Network Theory had arrived!

Implications of Network Theory for Social Media

Through understanding the forces that drive social networks, we can take some practical steps to improve Social Media performance.

Communities are primary: A network is only as strong as the communities that it contains. A big mistake that many Social Media efforts make is to pursue broad coverage early on. Building enthusiastic, devoted communities requires a local approach (either geographically or in social space). Those local communities have “weak ties” to other communities in other places, even faraway places. So you really can think globally by acting locally.

People want to connect: Connections between communities naturally grow over time for the same reasons that information wants to be free and dictatorships are expensive to maintain. Any opportunity to implement open architecture (while maintaining security protocols for the site core) should be seized upon. Walling off a social network is choosing the path to obscurity (although hardly the one less traveled).

Large clusters drive the network: A small number of extremely active members drive network growth. Mostly, they are driven by reputation and attention so it is crucial to give users every opportunity to be recognized by their peers.

Social Media isn’t successful… until it is: A network doesn’t grow in a linear fashion and it doesn’t grow in just one direction, but two: outward and inward. Watts described a network maturing as an “instantaneous phase transition” similar to a crystal forming. The process moves relatively slowly and then, suddenly, a new global state is achieved. Once a “Small World Network” has formed, the growth becomes exponential.

Social Networks on the web can be extremely powerful. Once you understand the forces that drive them, you can make their horsepower work with you and not against you.

Greg’s Note: For those of you who are interested in learning more, Watts and Barabasi have both published highly readable and informative accounts of their Network Theory adventure and the friendly rivalry. It’s a lot of fun to read both sides and learn both about their triumphs and their frustration when the other one uncovered something which seemed fairly obvious in retrospect. Besides being brilliant both write well and in friendly and engaging styles. In fact, the books are much more accessible than journalist accounts of the same events.

The titles are “Six Degrees” (Watts) and “Linked” (Barabasi). Steven Strogatz has also published a great book called “Sync” that covers pre-cursor work to Network Theory. All are refreshing counterpoints to “guru books” and offer true insight and wisdom.

This whole social media thing is kinda crazy. I did it before I knew what it was. Years ago, I was at an open mic event in downtown Fort Myers in a hookah bar with cushions all over the floor. The emcee, now a good friend of mine, made an announcement asking for participants’ email addresses and MySpace usernames. It was the first time I heard about MySpace. I went home and tried it out. I spent far too much time. It was silly. But the most important thing is I was turned on to this easy and dynamic way to get in touch with people.

Driven to distraction

Later, I became amazed at how many people came out of the woodwork through social media platforms. Friends I had written off “friended” me on Facebook, and kind of brought me home to a place I had run away from. Suddenly, people I thought had moved in and out of my life showed they were there all along.

So at this point, I’m starting to see the power in all this stuff. I used it with some good success to build name recognition for my husband’s business. We showed up for TweetUps, where we built a great new community of friends and business contacts around us. We got involved with Social Media Club Southwest Florida and an awesome fundraiser called Twestival, which raised a couple thousand for Pace Center for Girls. I dabbled in affiliate marketing. I got an important job offer…

I got results. However, “getting out there” has also been a bit of a distraction – I suffered a traumatic life event about five years ago that turned into a sustained process that still hasn’t been resolved. A psychologist even told me, “You’re like a soldier who’s returned from war.” My online life has been a chance to show a brave face. But now I’ve found another way that “getting out there” can bring me back to myself.

A breadcrumb trail

The first friend I made in Fort Myers more than eight years ago (at one of those open mic events) is a brilliant poet and a beautiful person. Today I found out about this thing he’s doing at EditRed. He calls himself the Suicide Kid and he uses a mug shot for his profile photo, but it’s a front (sorry, Ryun, but you know it’s true).

It made me realize – I’ve been doing this social media thing, and to a great extent, leaving my passions out of it. So I followed my friend’s lead, and signed up for an account at that writer’s networking site. I did a search for others of that type and came across Read Write Poem And I felt a weight lifting.

I’ve had a few poems published in a few different places. Two can be found online at Nthposition, an online literary magazine out of the UK. But that was between 2005 and 2007 and I haven’t done much with my work since then. Now that I know I can read Ryun’s work whenever I want to, I’m also inspired to post some of my work, get it “out there.”

Inertia can be a real presence in my life. The community and accountability offered by these writer’s sites offer me an opportunity to convert that inertia into the “in motion” kind, instead of the alternative.

Have you found an online network that serves as a channel for your passions? Has “getting out there” provided a way to bring you back to yourself?

By the way, Ryun’s got this book he’d like to publish. If you know anyone in the biz…well, you know how to find me.