Nothing says "I care" like taking off your clothes

Image via Wikipedia

Funny story how I ended up as July in the Naked for a Cause 2010 charity calendar. I know you've heard me yap about it before, but here's a recap anyway: its purpose is to monetarily benefit a few very worthwhile local organization and features twelve months of some of my favorite tech-heads in Portland. Plus me. I'm in it, too.

Some would (and have) argued that technically I am wearing something: a half-apron (handmade by me and super cute) with a teeny white laptop, held in front of me. Be that as it may, I assure you I am plenty naked. Believe me, you don't know naked until at the exact moment it's time to take off your clothes so Aaron Hockley can take a bajillion photos of your bare-ass-ness, your dear (since high school for frick's sake) girlfriend blasts cheesey stripper music.

Now that's naked, my friends. Naked, and so very alone.

But if you're not convinced I'm naked enough, you should go buy a calendar and see for yourself. Better yet, you should buy one this Sunday at the Get Naked for a Cause Champagne Autograph party! (It's at the Muddy Waters Coffeehouse on SE Belmont, and runs 6-8pm.)

Even at the risk of brain damage from Sharpie fumes, I've been practicing both my In Real Life name and Twitter handle all week. Trying to find that balance between flourish and class isn't easy, you know.

Go RSVP now on upcoming.org.

But back to the funny story of how I ended up as July. About a year before I was persuaded by calendar proprietresses and fellow raven-haired lasses @colemangirl and @wonderwendy77 to pose, I was in a major emotional funk. (I didn't exactly make it easy on them, either.) As I lay on my cool leather couch, second-guessing every single decision I've made in my life, I happened to catch Calendar Girls on television. I clearly remember thinking to myself, "$&^# me! Now there's something I'd never do. Psshaw!"

It's funny, because in the last year my perception of who I am and what I am capable of has actually changed me into the kind of person who'd would do that. That's freaking hilarious to me, this beautiful simplicity in the enrichment of point of view you gain as a result of embracing life and moving forward, of believing and following your bliss.

It might as well be The Secret to Life: Nothing's impossible.

Let's go steady!

Clearly I need to work on the mediaChick brand (or do I?)

Like all self-respecting social media consulting professionals, I often vanity search. This is, of course, because a person's self-worth is directly tied to how many times their links appear on the first page of search results. (As I'm pretty sure I saw that fact stated on a slide in one of the bajillion SEO presentations I've seen on Slideshare, it must be true.)

So, here is what comes up when I search "i heart media" in The Googles:

First page, second link, there I am. Got myself tagged "journalism" you see. That's like, NEWS and stuff. Me likes it. When you think about "i heart media" you should be thinking about writing and information (with a healthy dollop of me-me-me thrown in for prosperity.) Veeery Goooood.

Now, here's what we get when The Googles search "mediaChick":

Yeah, that's right. P0rn. I know who's responsible for this tag (cough@lollyraecough) and it looks like it's been that way for a while. But does it hurt the "mediaChick brand"?

My personal digital identity is decidedly far-flung, ranging from straight talk to jive talk. I write in many places online and off about about love, technology, life, music, relationships and baking (among other things) using both good words and naughty words. And, more than once, I have been caught in delicious moments of both utmost professionalism and omgyoudidNOTjustsaythat. Sometimes at the same time.

In my Social Media in Real Life class yesterday I talked about having a "digital self" online, which is the whole of the little pieces of you found around the Internet that together represent an online version of your "real" self. For instance, on the Long Lunch PDX blog I try to write in an approachable way that puts readers with technology anxiety at ease. That's my digital persona there, as a social media teacher. You won't ever see me using the kinds of photos I've used here on this blog. You've seen worse, I think.

It's all there on the Internet, bits and bytes of my digital self, sprinkled amongst the pages. Just waiting for some jokester (watch your back @lollyrae) to tag mediaChick as xxx-rated.

Although, you know? Kind of feels like a challenge.

Let's go steady!

The 5 Most Awesomest Firefox Add-ons

Firefox is my browser of choice. With the exception of my little affair with Chrome (we all went a little wild when it came out, didn't we?) I have been using it for more than three years.

And truly, if it left me I might die.

Like any good lover or Web productivity tool, Firefox has submerged itself into my everyday Internet experience. Certainly, it has changed the way I live my life.

The best thing about Firefox, which is one of the most successful open source programs out there, are the browser add-ons. The ability to customize my online environment using tools made by people who do the same kinds of things I do every day means I get useful tools. YAY!

Add-ons save me time and that makes me look awesome in the eyes of my clients. They give me the geek cred I crave when my colleagues erupt with gleeful schoolgirl giggling when I share newly discovered Firefox add-on nuggets of productivity deliciousness. From the boys even.

(Passionate love for a community-coded productivity app isn't weird, right? You know what? I don't care. True love needs no explanation.)

I've poured over my very long extensions list and culled it down to the 5 Firefox add-ons that I find absolutely invaluable. That have changed the way I do things on the Web. (Okay, there are actually many more, but for the sake of the average Internet reading attention span, let's stick to 5.)

The 5 Most Awesomest Firefox Add-ons

Apture Editor
[video]

With one line of code I can make interactive, multimedia infused, non-intrusive panels on any of my blogs thanks to Apture. The links in this very post -- which activate panels of related information upon click or mouseover to show videos, Web pages, even widgets -- were created in very little time.

Apture not only creates custom panels of content that popup quietly, these panels show any related content you may find and lists them as thumbnails along the bottom of the panel. You can use any of the numerous available types of searches for content to link to in any panel. Anything you want, from numerous sources. You can also point to any custom url or embed a widget in a panel.

Try it out (click the Edit this Page button)

Zotero
[video]

This amazing Firefox extension was developed by the Center of New Media and History to help students collect, manage, and cite research sources for their papers in 2006. But its amazing capacity as a reference maintenance software is only the beginning.

It automagically stores whole Web pages and anything on a Web page (PDFs, files, media, links) for labeling, tagging, and categorizing. The export function allows one-click bibilographies, indexes and project data that is already formatted and code-clean. The customizable user interface makes it very easy to work with while collecting data, and it plays nice with other Web tools and and word processing applications.

I use Zotero to manage my bajillion different projects, which runs the gamut between creative to technical, so it's not just for scholars needing to export a thesis bibliography. Even if you're not quite sure how this powerful Firefox extension might be useful to you, you should probably watch the video just to be sure.

Zemanta
[video]

It was love at first sight with Zemanta. Not only does this extention help me build multimedia-rich blog posts and email with nary a hitch, it saves me content development and research time. I don't know about you, but time I manage to save is time I deserve to gain.

Zemanta integrates into your blog post (all the major platforms are supported) and email (just gmail and yahoo at the time of publishing) and provides you with one-click media, hyperlink and tagging capability right inside your blog posting interface. In a single bound, people! It provides instant "share this" type code at the end of each blog posts without needing to type a key. It also tries real hard to only provide content that's not copyright wink-wink questionable.

Get thee on the Zemanta tour to find out more. Once you install it you'll soon be like me, spending all the time you save by figuring out how to spend all the time you save. ;)

Ubiquity
[video]

"...connecting the world with words." This easy to use, keyboard shortcut enabled, community-based mashup experiment changes everything for me.

Ubiquity runs on an open API. To invoke and use it, you execute commands. You select things on a Web page or type in a command. Then it figures out what you are asking of it and allows you to then use whatever it brings back to you in a variety of ways, all without leaving the page you are on. You can ask it to translate, search, map, email content to anybody, check your google calendar/email/to do list/documents, check the news. Yes, you can even Twitter from it.

Ubiquity is beta, it's semantic webby, and it does far more than I've explained here. If you haven't tried it yet, you're missing out. It is a taste of the future of the Web. For seriously.

Web Developer
[video]

At publishing time, there have been 9,958,956 downloads of this add-on, making this FireFox extension one of the most popular out there for those of us who work in Web development. The goodies in its menus will turn you into a productivity messiah in the eyes of clients and free you up to spend that time saved making your projects work juuuuuust right.

The Web Developer browser extension is a toolbar that provides easier ways to do a lot of the usual time intensive subjects. Edit any page's CSS and see your changes live (and locally), displays the page information for pretty much anything you'd want to know on any page on the Internet, disabling cookies and images, code validation, browser resizing...the list goes on and on.

Rmember it's popular for a reason, and that's because it is most awesome,

And so my love affair with Firefox burns on.

But what are YOUR favorites? I wanna know!

Let's go steady!

Miss Me? Monday 3/2/09

Because I wouldn't want you to miss anything, for your convenience I'm rounding up the links to what I've been up to around the Web:

OurPDX
My friend Angel owns Ladybug cafe in my neighborhood, St. Johns. I may have mentioned it a few bajillion times on twitter, you know, if you keep track of those sort of things. (Is that creepy? I'm not sure. Probably.)

Angel has hung her incredible coffee-centric photos on her cafe's walls (see her Flickr set) and her reception Encrusted was on Sunday. I wrote about it here, on OurPDX, a blog I love dearly. And I'm not just saying that because of lack-of-post guilt, either. Nuh-uh, no ma'am.

Beer and Blog
As you all know I take my Portland Chapter Beer and Blog Provost duties quite seriously, so naturally when I wrote about the cool stuff we're going to do this month I managed to misspell a word in the title of the calagator.org event listing and write "peak" instead of "pique". I am a moron.

Thanks to @pdxflaneur for keeping my heinous crimes against literature on the down-low by pointing this out to me in a private message on Twitter, and well now GOSH here I am, revealing to unknown numbers of grammar finger-shakers on the Internet.

Oh, screw it.

Long Lunch PDX
Over on the Long Lunch PDX blog I wrote 1,000 + "let me lay it out for you people" words about Twitter. I've written about Twitter before (on this blog) but this time I worked in a letter from my favorite coffee people: Wes and Chris of espressoarts.com, a coffee catering company. Chris sent me an email about the same time I was toiling away on my post. It was related, so in it went. It feels a bit long by Internet-attention-span standards, but clear about the purpose of Twitter. Please go check it out and tell me what you think.

By the way, this is a new thing I'm trying on the Long Lunch PDX blog: Quick Question About. The segment title? Meh. Not exactly in love. But I do want to answer some questions about using social media in real life, so send them my way via a comment on this blog. (Really, any of the blogs. Why do I have so many damned blogs??)

I Heart Media - Vox
Check out Röyksopp in "Happy Up Here" which is from their newest album. It's all Space Invaders and electronic pop goodness, if you're in the mood for such giddiness. You may know these boys from Norway as "that band that does that song, with the video of the dog, um, in space."

Oh, Röyksopp. Sigh. I have such a thing for Scandinavian bands. (What am I, 12?)

This has been a Miss Me? Monday.

Miss me? Subscribe to my feeds, and never miss a thing.

Let's go steady!