links for 2008-10-12
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by way of Tom Mighell
St. Louis County Putting Kids First: Please Vote Yes
With the presidential election just a few weeks away and the candidates continuing to make their cases that the other guy is bad (or worse) versus telling us why we should feel good about voting for them, it is good to know that there is something on the ballot in St. Louis County that one can feel good about voting for: Proposition 1.
Proposition 1 calls for a 1/4 cent sales tax to be used for providing necessary mental health services and substance abuse prevention to children in St. Louis County, Mo. It is on the ballot this November due to a bi-partisan collaborative campaign initiated by non-profits serving children and families in St. Louis County.
An assessment done in Spring 2007 ( 2007-st-louis-county-needs-assessment-1) revealed the extent of the unmet needs resulting from the decline in services resulting from continuing budget cuts for mental health and prevention services such as:
- More than 12,000 St. Louis County children and youth in need of services were going without help!
- Over 151,000 children and youth were not receiving beneficial school-based prevention programs.
- Nearly half a million lives are negatively impacted by the unmet mental health and substance abuse needs in the St Louis County area.
It will appear on the ballot as: “St. Louis County shall, solely for the purpose of establishing a community children’s services fund for the purpose of providing services to protect the well-being and safety of children and youth nineteen years of age or less and to strengthen families, be authorized to levy a sales tax of one-quarter of a cent in the County of St. Louis.”
When you see it on your ballot, St. Louis County, vote YES!
Thanks to Kathleen Buescher, President and CEO of Provident, Inc for making me aware of this.
links for 2008-10-11
links for 2008-10-07
BlogWell, DoGood
WOM pal Michael Rubin asked me to pass along a really cool thing that he and Andy Sernovitz are doing in support of their upcoming conference BlogWell, How Big Companies Use Social Media. They are auctioning off tickets to BlogWell on Ebay and 100% of the proceeds go to charity, a different charity each week.
This week the National MS Society will be the beneficiary of the auction proceeds. And if you win, you will be the beneficiary of wisdom from a 4 star line up of corporations such as Home Depot, Wells Fargo, Intel, Cisco, Graco, UPS, Kaiser Permanente, and WalMart. Check out the first auction now.
So learn to blog well and do good all at the same time.
| Starts | Charity | Bidding | Ends |
| 10/1 | National Multiple Sclerosis Society | See this auction! | 10/8 |
| 10/5 | Heifer international | Auction Coming Soon | 10/12 |
| 10/9 | AmeriCares | Auction Coming Soon | 10/16 |
| 10/13 | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Jimmy Fund | Auction Coming Soon | 10/20 |
| 10/17 | MusiCares | Auction Coming Soon | 10/24 |
The Bailout & the Bluebird
When my kids were young and one of those things happened that no one could exactly remember doing… a bike was left in the driveway, a baseball went through a window, there was a large grape juice colored spot on the carpet…their nanny would smile and say, “the bluebird did it.” That bluebird became a constant visitor and to this day when no one will fess up to a transgression we blame the bluebird.
I have been thinking that the bluebird has been pretty busy lately because to listen to all of our elective representatives including Senators Biden, McCain and Obama, someone else made this happen. I guess the only good thing about that is that at least the finger pointing is over something substantive now versus such previous topics as who is more like Brittany Speers or who wears lipstick and who is the pig.
So, if the make believe bluebird led us in, will the make believe bluebird lead us out?
This has been what seems like the longest political campaign in modern history and it is now hard to imagine that in a little over 30 days we will actually elect one of these two guys to be our President. OK, if you are one of those who hold the opinion that George Bush is the sorriest excuse for a president that you can think of, well then based on this alone, all is not lost.
However, the sheer impact of this economic crisis that almost instantly rearranged the US financial landscape just as 9/11 rearranged the New York City skyline, seems to have diminished both candidates and made them seem too small for such big problems. They both talk about the need for change but we woke up one morning to find Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers no longer existed and that the US government had “rescued” Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac who were supposed to be there to rescue the $5.3 trillion US home loans that they guarantee. Maybe we have had too much change already?
Does it seem like either candidate really has a firm grasp on how we got to this unhappy confluence of acronyms and euphemisms : FOMC, GSEs, Community Reinvestment Act, AMT Patch and now the unfortunately acronymed Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP,as in tarp.
Could any of the candidates give a quest lecture or better yet, pass a qualifying exam, on say Keynesian economics. We know that Joe Biden thinks that FDR addressed the nation on TV after the stock market crash in 1929 so we won’t even bother to ask him. Peggy Noonan, who more often that not, calls it as I see it asks, “Do you worry that neither of them is up to it? Up to the job in general? Is either Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama actually up to getting us through this and other challenges?”
Well, it certainly doesn’t feel like it. In fact, it feels scary. Rex Hammock who has been writing blog post nuggets of brilliance, one after another, about this mess pointed in a blog post titled Who’s to Blame? to an op-ed piece by David Brooks in which Brooks writes that none of the political leaders has been able to instill confidence in the American people that they get the situation and can and will take charge and lead us out.
We have a problem. A big prolem. A crisis in fact. Point a finger at someone else. Oh, we can blame the bluebird. The bluebird did it. That’s settled. Now, how do we get out of here? The bluebird? No, he got us into this mess. We can’t trust him. We will just stay here.
Steve Pearlstein writes, “But it is a measure of how little trust remains in both Washington and Wall Street that voters are willing to risk a serious hit to their wealth and income rather than follow their lead.
OK, so we are staying but that makes us……angry?
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad, everybody knows things are bad: It’s a depression! Everybody’s out of work, or scared of losing their job; the dollar buys a nickel’s worth; banks are going bust; shop-keepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street; nobody anywhere seems to know what to do and there’s no end to it! We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat…. We know things are bad, worse than bad: they’re crazy! It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore! We sit in the house and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller…. I want you to get mad! You’ve got to say “I’m a human being goddammit! My life has value!” I want you to…yell “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Yes, we need to get angry. Junk bonds, Savings & Loans, Enron, We have been here before. We are about to send the same people back to Washington that got us here; that we laugh at every Daily Show, Colbert and SNL that we watch.
My son asked me earlier tonight who I thought was more popular Sarah Palin or Tina Fey. John Stewart IS funny; but should he be the most trusted man in America? Let’s get mad and make some change ourselves. Then we can believe it.
links for 2008-09-26
State of the Blogosphere ‘08 Released: Who Cares? {About the Report}
You know you have been blogging for a long time if you can remember when Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere meant something and influential bloggers announced its release and listed the results with few questions asked.
A new State of the Blogosphere was released today and things are a little different in the land of Technorati….missing is Dave Sifry, although he did write about the report. Also missing is matter….as in, does it matter?
Technorati is just not reliable enough to be relevant. Tish Grier expounded on this back in July. Mack Collier switched to Feesburner to tally his weekly Top 25 Marketing Blogs. In years past, Techmeme would feature the story and dozens upon dozens of bloggers would be listed as past of the discussions and/or related.
This year, Techmeme has aggregated 5 posts about the report and Marshall Kirkpatrick, who states that the report is a great service and that he appreciates the data, also questions the Technorati conclusion that blogging is “mainstream.” Both Marshall and Mark Hopkins writing at Mashable! use the word “interesting” to describe the data. Interesting.
Duncan Riley, also using the word “interesting” espouses the opinion that Technorati is actually more reliable today than it has been for awhile. Now that I find interesting!
Duncan makes another interesting point, an important point that is a huge flaw in the Technorati data now and in the past; blogging in the classic sense may have “slowed”….He calls it “stand alone” blogging; but participation on social media has not slowed. Technorati does not track social network content sharing…they don’t even track social network blogs.
Technorati says there are 133 blogs. There are approximately the same number of people who visit MySpace or Facebook every day.and share content…..and some of them write a blog, on MySpace, a MySpace blog. Do they know they are not part of the blogosphere? As tracked by Technorati.
There are an additional myriad of niched social networks from Dogster to Saavy Auntie. some with blogs some without but all social. To not track these people in a so called “state of the blogosphere” simply does not track.
Micro-blogging such as Twitter is also not tracked by Technorati. I would float the theory that for those of us who blog and Twitter, the more we Twitter, the less we blog but yet we still “identify” as bloggers. Further, I would say that starting a blog right now almost requires Twitter, if not also a presence on several social networking sites.
So, yes it is interesting to know some stats about blogging in 2008. Stats, not state.
OK, the “State” was always lots of hype and the “number of new blogs” stat never quite made sense; but now more even than in prior years, there just isn’t enough there there to make it important. Interesting maybe….
And I don’t even have to write about method and accuracy of links and pings to know that even if they were completely accurate, that data only about blogs is infinitely limited.
Inter:PLAY 2008
It was lots of fun. Thanks to Dave Gray, Bill Streeter and Melody Meiners for making the panel, Branding Yourself On-Line, work so well. And Dana, Melody you two did an amazing job making it happen!
If you missed it, you can still catch a part of it here.
links for 2008-09-20
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