RANT

I just finished my daily tech news ’round up’ and my eye was caught by an ariticle on Mashable about women’s top social networking sites.    I am not sure how they came up with the list, but it is awful.  Each one is about fashion, diet, makeup or mothering.  How about some serious stuff? 

Any of you who read my blog know that I love my kids and family BUT am also an entrepreneur, a thinker and that my interests as a woman may stretch beyond the colour of lipstick that I wear, or the time out method I use with my kids. 

There are so many great sites out their for those who are into social networking.  In fact, I am not entirely sure that breaking the list out into “sites for women” and “sites for men” is what we need to be doing.  How about sites for people who are interested in fluff?  or in fashion?  or in tech related things?

Maybe I am way off track… but let’s try some that are slightly more interesting to me like TED, or Webgrrls. 

 

Life Friends

I don’t have many, but they are dear to me and are always there when I need them.  Thank you.  I love you.

 

Our New Baby

Oops we did it again… a new boy at our house.  Murhpy arrived last weekend, and I’ve been busy teaching our 8 week old yellow lab house manners.  He’s adorable.  Let me know what you think. 

 

 

The beginning of monetization of social media

It’s not uncommon at my house for us to have our laptops out while we watch TV.  Sometimes we are working, or surfing, or IMing.  When there is a cool show on we can immediately get the back story.  We are using the internet with TV in ways that haven’t clearly been mapped out or capitalized on yet.  Is this the start of capitalization of the SN scene?

Traditional television is struggling to keep its audience, and the internet is maturing.  The two are converging on the us the consumer. Mashable featured an article today about Big Brother Australia.  It seems the producers of the show have begun how to realize the power of social networking in attracting audiences AND in engaging them. 

Producers of BBAU (as they call it) are setting up a Facebook page.  I’ll speculate that their intention is to make the members of that group to feel like they have ‘an edge’ over regular viewers of the show.  Being a part of the FB group will allow members to watch news feeds.  MySpace will be used for all of their video hosting needs.  BBAU is also expanding their own website to include viewer generated content, and to expand the blogging about the show. 

The future of television, interactive television and web based television is upon us.  I hope the opportunity to improve what we are watching isn’t wasted.

 

Inspirational Woman

Sometimes it’s hard to find the inspiration to write posts that aren’t entirely dribble.  Today it was easy. 

I read about Nayla Al-Khaja on Whitney Hess’ blog Pleasure and Pain this morning.  She is an incredibly brave award winning film producer and director from Dubai.  In fact she is the first producer and director in the United Arab Emirates.  In order to get the education she wanted she had to travel to Canada for school.  She could not travel alone as a woman so Nayla arranged her own marriage (and subsequent divorce) in order to travel to Canada to study film.  She became a professional woman.  As a result her brother and father have disowned her as a bad Muslim.

Ayla is telling stories about what she knows best, life as a Muslim in the UAE.  According to Whtiney Hess, “Ayla’s next film is about how Arab women go on their first date. Dating is a taboo, done in secret.  She’s (Ayla’s) 30 and has a 10:30 curfew. She can’t travel anywhere alone, basically she ran away to be here.”

Wow!  What a story.

 

WTF part 2

This a piece that I wrote for Respectance and feel strongly about….

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It is a saying that I often heard when I was growing up, in fact I am still hearing it from Madonna. 

I saw two articles in the news yesterday that made my skin crawl. There are two ‘performance’ art pieces that have grabbed the headlines.  One, is of a man named Guillermo Vargas Habacuc who as an ‘artist’  took a stray dog, chained it to the wall of a gallery and let it starve to death. He was even awarded a prize.  People came and went to the gallery, and watched it happen.  It was so successful that he has been asked to repeat the exhibit this year.

The other ‘exhibit’ is from some crazy art student at Yale - Aliza Shvarts. She is exhibiting a peice that he says features her intentionally inseminating herself repeatedly, and then aborting repeatedly.  Her exhibition “will feature video recordings of the forced miscarriages as well as preserved collection of the blood from the process“.  The ‘process’ took 9 months.  The university (Yale), under the immense public pressure has questioned her and Shvarts now recants her story and says that she made this all up.  The performance art exhibit will still go on though. 

You don’t need to be religious or spritual.  You don’t need to believe in heaven or hell to be a good person.  Within mainstream religions, and within human society there are certain beliefs that unite us.  An underlying one, regardless of how it is phrased, is that we should respect life.   Life of all living things.  Respect for life means treating life and death with dignity, and understanding that life is a finite resource - when it’s over it is over.  We are taught to be respectful of bringing life into the world, and of life leaving the world.  Cruelty to any life should not be tolerated.  Indeed, we see that one of the defining characteristics of truly psychopathic personalities is that those people enjoy being cruel to animals and people.

I do not presume to be anyone’s moral compass.  In fact, I must be VERY narrow minded, because I don’t see either of these ‘exhibits’ as art.  What scares me though is that there are those who would defend the ‘artists’ for expressing their art.  Didn’t some one named Mengele try to defend his actions as “science” once?

I think we can safely say that “the road to hell is paved with ignorance and moral degenerates…”

 

Congratulations

I’d like to send out congratulations to Todd Wilkinson and Richard Derks for a job well done.  They launched Respectance 2.0 and Picalily today.  One for lives lived, and the other for lives being lived.  I wish them the best of luck with this new adventure.  Keep up the good work guys.

 

Stretching myself more and more

Well the last time I wrote about stretching, it was in a career context.  This time it’s in personal one.  I ripped up the family room carpeting and laid flooring all by myself.  It looks awesome.  A lovely textured laminate, It looks like a pro did it.  The trim is perfect too.  Mitred corners and all.  I am proud of myself. 

 

Future of Social Networking…we’re on the right path here

I was reading a post on TechCrunch about the future of social networking and the direction warms my heart.  It’s all about relevance, portability and context.  What it boils down to is that you’ll be able to use your portable device (phone or whatever) to walk into a room and see profiles of everyone in there that subscribes to the service.

Imagine walking into a meeting/bar and knowing who everyone is, what their interests are whether they are working or socializing, single or not.  You can ping them, if they are interested they’ll ping back…

It’s going to take a while to catch on outside of large urban centres I suspect, BUT the potential for it is incredible.  Can you tell I am excited?

 

 

 

A Great Time

We were spring skiing in Vermont this last week and had an absolute blast together.  There wer the usual hiccups that a family has on any long car ride but all in all we couldn’t have asked for a better holiday.  The weather was decent, with one solid day of rain, but 3 solid days of sun so all in all I can’t complain. 

What struck me though was the number of families skiing together…or should I say NOT skiing together.  There seemed to be so many parents dropping their kids off to ‘lessons’ for the whole day while they skiied.  I wonder if that’s lessons or daycare.  We always insist the kids have at least 2 half day lesson sessions when we go for a five day trip.  It’s to continue to improve technique, and frankly to get them to the parts of the mountain that my knees no longer can handle.  My husband took the sport up as an adult, so the kids passed his abilities a few years back - I am holding on to the edge of superiority BARELY. 

So back to my story, skiing for us is the ultimate family time.  No distractions from being together, except lunch!  No tv, blackberry, phones or friends.  Just us.  The kids have come to cherish our together time as much as my husband and I have.  I wonder why other families don’t see the joy in skiing together.  Oh well, each to their own.

By the way, I met a couple on the mountain making their way down gently who were both in their 70’s.  I had to take up conversation with them.  They had skiied out west earlier this year but wanted to get a few more days under their belt for this year.  Wow, I hope I am still on my skiis when I’m 70.