I just received a note from Squidoo Editor in Chief Megan Casey with the news that my Living With War lens is in the running for Lens of the Year! As I write this, the lens is currently 108 of 215 nominees.

Your vote will help the Living With War lens win the first Squidoo Lens of the Year competition.


Seth's Blog: Happy Squidoo Day celebrated several landmarks in the evolution of Squidoo, including the continual growth in traffic and adoption for this Web 2.0 success story on March 14.

Also, on March 15, I was honored to find that my New Authors Resources and Reviews lens was selected as lens of the day! (Its lens rank shot to #47 out of more than 100,000 lenses after the Lens of the Day honor!)

Labels: Lens.of.the.Year, Living.with.War, Neil.Young, social.media, Squidoo. SethGodin, SusanFHeywood

Marjabelle Y. Stewart, 82, White-Gloved Author, Dies - New York Times

Back in 1988, I had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Stewart when I was president of the MBA Senate at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa.

One of the most popular events the group organized was a unique seminar on proper dining etiquette for business people presented by Mrs. Stewart to a group of MBA students and professors. It was an interactive dining experience, presented using the multiple courses of a gourmet dinner as the backdrop, held in the elegant atmosphere of the old Davenport Club atop the Blackhawk Hotel.

During the multiple course dinner, Mrs. Stewart visited with the people at each table, gently coaching us on how to avoid blunders at the dining table, eliciting laughter with comments that kept the material from being too stuffy. A true lady, Mrs. Stewart diplomatically advised when she noticed small gaffes and complimented when she noticed examples of good manners.

Her passion for preserving civility and for helping others learn to navigate the "social minefield" of the universe with grace and charm will be missed.

Book Meme #1

From [-★-]i have my own ways that i stride[-★-] - book thing

"1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same."


I'm not tagging to others, but if you post answers on your blog, leave a comment, OK?

Here's mine (of course, the book I picked had to have three hugely long sentences as the sixth, seventh and eighth ones on page 23. It truly was the closest:

"May never Zeus, the all-wielder,
Against my feeble will
Set his strength; nor ever may I
By the staunchless flood of my father,
By the shores of Oceanus, cease
With hallowed offering of oxen
to worship the gods. May never
My tongue give offence, but always
This purpose abide in my soul.

Ah, sweet to prolong our days
In the courage of hope, and sweet
with ever dawning delights
To nourish the heart.

(Anyone want to guess the book, leave a comment...)

Book Meme #2

Here's another Book meme I found on the Smart Cookie Blog:

"...discovered this book meme on Jen’s site whilst blog reading this afternoon. It’s a list AND its about books, so I pretty much have to do it, too.

Instructions: In the list of books below, bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of. In the comments, let me know if you’re up for it. I left some books in just regular old font, these are the ones I am not sure I want to read or not."

Here's mine:

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)

2. +Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

3. +To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

4. +Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)

5. +The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)

6. +The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)

7. +The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)

8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)

9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

11. +Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)

12. * Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)

13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)

14. +A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)

15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)

16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)

17. *Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)

18. +The Stand (Stephen King)

19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)

20. +Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

21. +The Hobbit (Tolkien)

22. +The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

23. +Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)

24. +The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)

29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)

30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)

31. *Dune (Frank Herbert)

32. +The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)

33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

34. +1984 (Orwell)

35. *The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

36. *The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)

38. +I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)

39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)

40. +The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)

42. *The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)

44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)

45. +Bible

46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)

48. +Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)

49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

50. + She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)

51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

52. +A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

54. +Great Expectations (Dickens)

55. +The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)

57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)

58. +The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)

59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)

60. *The Time Traveller's Wifc (Audrew Niffenegger)

61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)

64. +Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)

65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)

66. *One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)

68. +Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) -

69. +Les Miserables (Hugo) Saw the play, does that count?

70. +The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

71. +Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)

72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)

73. +Shogun (James Clavell)

74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)

75. +The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)

77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)

78. +The World According To Garp (John Irving)

79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)

80. +Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)

81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)

82. +Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)

83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)

84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)

85. +Emma (Jane Austen)

86. +Watership Down (Richard Adams)

87. +Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)

89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)

90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)

91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)

92. +Lord of the Flies (Golding)

93. +The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)

94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

95. +The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)

96. +The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)

97. +White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

98. +A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)

99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)

100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Interested in more book memes? Search Technorati using the link below.

book meme

Labels: book meme, books

Although attended by fewer people than previous meetings, the March, 2007 meeting of the Phoenix Social Media Club featured an interesting presentation by Malcolm Atherton of BusinessWire covering BusinessWire's new EON service.

The presentation sparked conversation about the role of "old" and "new" media and how the two fit with emerging social media services like Twitter.

Had the pleasure of meeting Kasha Sanel of Tiromed and Chase Granberry of prismagraphic. (Sorry, the picture didn't come out.)

Some debate on the usefulness / viability of Twitter at the meeting. Very interesting to think about the possibilities and limitations of the real-time conversations represented by Twitter.

There are a couple more pictures from the meeting on Flickr. (Sorry about the quality--Shot them with my phone...)

Labels: media events phoenix March07, Phoenix.Social.Media.Club social

Trying this service linked from FeedBurner - copyright is Fox Interactive. Hmmm.

Labels: social.media, tagging feeds, web2.0

At 11:02 PM Sunday night, Arizona time (just past midnight Monday in Iowa,) I received my regular Monday Midnight Madness e-mail message from Sam at Pendemonium. This format is a great example of how a regular online promotion to e-mail subscribers can help niche sellers create sales, brand recognition and customer conversations by including non-sales focused content that is relevant and engaging.

Sam and Frank Fiorella, serious collectors and purveyors of vintage writing instruments, run both the Pendemonium, a "full time writing equipment shop" and companion Web site. Pendemonium, described as "one of just a handful" of such shops worldwide, deals with the oldest type of social media tools.

This week, along with the Midnight Madness sale items, the e-mail message (delivered two minutes past Iowa Midnight with Woot-like precision,) included a link to the 2007 Travelogue, the account of Sam's road trip down Route 66 to the 2007 LA Pen Show last month.

(Just to let you know, I'm not being paid to write about Pendemonium and have never met Sam. My only connection to the site is my opt-in subscription to Inky Greetings the Pendemonium e-mail updates. I've been "just looking," a former Iowan who appreciates Pendemonium's vintage writing instruments.)

The Travelogue was an engaging account of the leisurely road trip from Iowa to LA down Route 66 that I've always wished I could make, but couldn't those the times I've driven parts of the route traveling between Iowa and Phoenix. Sam has posted pictures and descriptions of her visits to spots along the route I'd not seen, and of some I've noticed but never visited on the way. (I wish I had noticed Sam's offer to mail a real postcard from a stop along the route in time to send him my address--Social media in action using paper and pen!)

On a site about writing instruments that are hundreds of years old, Sam is connecting in a way that represents the best uses of social media, using a mix of Web 1.0 and offline communication to carry on the conversation. Even though the tools used are not the social media sharing and social network sites those of us writing and talking about "social media" might consider the infrastructure of Web 2.0. Sam's conversation with customers and e-mail subscribers is a particularly vivid representation of ways that social media already exists and works.

Pendemonium's the kind of store I would love to shop at or even run if I still lived in Iowa. It's situated in downtown Fort Madison, in a historic district overlooking the Mississippi River (which incidentally is a great place to spot bald eagles,) a scenic hour-long drive down river from where I grew up.

People trust people with whom they perceive they share characteristics, experiences and opinions. One of the things I found interesting in the Travelogue was the way the conversations described in it touched on common themes. In Albuquerque, for instance, Sam shopped at a store similar to hers in that it serves a niche market by specializing in books about the local area rather than competing against big chains.

Describing this bit of face to face social networking, Sam wrote:

"We still spent a couple of hours wandering the shops and an especially enjoyable time talking to the owner of the local book shop - not just about books but about how interesting it is to be in a niche market these days. He carries 99% local books instead of trying to compete against the big chains. Easy for us to relate to the niche market!"

By the way, Sam chronicles her pen seeking quests regularly. I pictured her painstakingly editing the HTML flat files and uploading the photos each day as she shared her road trip adventures and arriving home in time to send out the Midnight Madness message after days on the road.

I couldn't help but think that Sam would be delighted to discover how easy the process could become using Blogger, Twitter and Flickr. I'd sure love to subscribe to her Travelogue by RSS.

Labels: branding, community, content.management zeitgeist, conversations, e-mail.marketing, entrepreneur, events, niche.marketing, Pendemonium, pens shopping, Route66, small.business, social.media, travel

In his blog post on Friday, raving lunacy: Social Media as Conversational Marketing Alan Herrell, aka the Head Lemur, posted a super synopsis, complete with photos and links, of yesterday's Revolution in Marketing Conference, hosted by the Phoenix Social Media Club.

Organized by Francine Hardaway and held at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, the conference featured keynote sessions from Social Media Club founder Chris Heuer and alpha blogger and social media guru Robert Scoble, as well as panels featuring a variety of perspectives on the use of social media.

In addition to having the opportunity to talk with Chris and Robert during lunch after the event, I especially enjoyed meeting and talking with Diva of Details, Kristie Wells of the Social Media Club (and fiancee' of Chris,) Pamela Slim of EscapeFromCubicleNation.com, who spoke about her experiences in launching her blog during the first panel session, Joshua Manley of UStrive.com and Jon Ford of St. Luke's Health Initiatives.

Asked about the next big thing in social media, Chris Heuer mentioned Twitter, a cool site that provides a way to keep up with what's up with friends using quick updates that can be delivered by RSS or text messages to mobile phones. (You may have noticed the Twitter info on this page--I'm a little intimidated by the adventures of other Twitter users versus my comparably boring schedule, but, what the heck, I signed up, anyway!)

All, in all, the Revolution in Marketing Conference was an inspiring and educational experience!

Labels: Alan Herrell, Chris.Heuer, Francine.Hardaway, Jon.Ford, Joshua.Manley, Kristie.Wells, Pamela.Slim, Raving.Lunacy, Robert.Scoble, social.media, Twitter, UStrive