Aqueduct

Posted by amy at October 9th, 2007

I love when a comment spurs a real post.

Dear Dr. Dennum,

Thanks for the arm chair psychoanalysis, the check is in the mail.

Actually, I think what you may be picking up on is a general shift in the direction of the blog. I’ve tried since the beginning not to be one of those bloggers who writes about all the minutia of daily lives - in the beginning, it was clearly a knitting blog, then a parent who knits blog, then an academic technology blog, and now, now it is just my blog. And as such, I use it as a space to work out ideas that I’m recognizing and or working through in real life.

I don’t deny much of what you wrote - I am an achiever, I have been focused on goals through most of my life - most of them were external (degrees, publishing dates, childbirth) and the ones I’m facing now are far more personal and far more satisfying. I feel like I’ve gotten to a point in my life where the scaffolding has come off and I’m able to fully support myself (and a family of four!) and I’m glad to realize that I still have more to discover. What you see as panic, I see as exhiliration. I love my life, I love the path I’ve carved out for myself and I am eager to explore what is in front of me.

That doesn’t mean I’m not able to enjoy the here and now - I just don’t tend to write about the small stuff - like how my eyes watered with pride that my 4 year old son figured out how to hold his pencil right after a week of crying that it was too hard, or the smile that came over me when my daughter informed that another child was not showing respect to his host at an outing at Whitney’s farm. I get the small stuff, I savor the small stuff, but I also know myself well enough to know that I need the big things as well, because, well, because that is who I am and I’m ok with that.

Posted by amy at September 20th, 2007

Chris Brogan writes a lot. Almost every day he has a post that catches my eye, about two or three times a week there is a post that I drop what I’m doing to read, and then there are days like today, where I spent some time in his archives getting ready for a presentation I’m doing on Tuesday*

As I was researching, I kept coming back to his top post on “100 blog topics I hope you’ll write”. I could probably write a post about 40% of them, but the one that interested me the most was “How Women Use Social Media.”

Do we really use it all that differently then men? Why isn’t one of the 100 topics, How Men Use Social Media? That started me thinking about some of the social media evangelists that I follow - who all tend to men - and the women who use social media to strengthen their community.

Knitters took to the blogging world early, I remember reading knitting blogs on 9/11, and knitters immediately finding ways to connect and care for each other. The first podcast I listened to was KnitCast, the first place I looked for in Second Life was a hangout for knitters. And it isn’t just about the yarn or the patterns, but it is an assumed community that provides intimate and immediate access. In contrast to the men’s communities I follow, there is little talk of reaching a new audience, turning people on to what is hip or happening. We seek each other out, pass the word along and network among ourselves, and celebrate when a new member wanders in and joins the tribe. And there is now a huge economic component as well, Etsy - like Ebay for crafters, lists 14,036 different hand dyed or hand spun yarns for sale from individual sellers, who work the social media like seasoned pros, send a skein of yarn to top blogger or podcaster and if she likes it, you’ll find yourself with a backlog of orders, your credit card processing company may even shut you down because they doubt anyone could actually be selling that much yarn.

Right now, I’m on a wait list to get into a group called “Ravelry” - a facebook type site for knitters. Raverly is a closed social network, and to control their growth they are slowly adding knitters from a wait list. Ready for this? They are now inviting 500-600 users a day. I just went and looked myself up on the wait list and this is what they said:

Photo by squirrel cottage

• You signed up on August 22, 2007
• You are #27,685 on the list.
• 12454 people are ahead of you in line.
• 6732 people are behind you in line.
• 43% of the list has been invited so far

Do you think this is just about yarn? I don’t — I think this is about community, and so when I see the question “How do women use social media”, my answer is, how don’t we? Maybe we spend less time talking about and and more time just doing it.

—
*Berkshire Cultural Resource Center’s Nonprofit Management Series - 9/25 Online Marketing: Getting Real Results in the Virtual World

Panelists: Joshua Field, Graphic Designer & Owner, Orbit Visual Communications; Bill Reichblum, Founder and President, KadmusArts.com; Amy Stevens Webmaster, MCLA

Posted by amy at April 12th, 2007

Bitch, Ph.D. wrote an open letter to Markos of the Daily Kos, on his recent comments about the proposed blogger code of conduct. And while Bitch agreed with Kos that they were in fact asinine, she called him out on his failure to recognize the fact that women face a different kind of harassment online.

I clicked over to her site just moments after calming myself down after a reading a series of comments in a thread I’d been participating in. A regular, well known, pain in the ass, responded to my benign post about time stamping a document, with a several very personal, very sexist & homophobic remarks that made me feel threatened.

I can’t respond, I did once and rather than silencing him, he came back with more venom, and I know that responding to him again makes it worse. I know that people who read his comments will know that he is the asshole.

And yet, I still want some man to come in and defend my honor. I feel like I need someone with more “authority” to call him on it. That desire pisses me off just as much as his comments did.

Posted by amy at April 9th, 2007

Last week, Wes posted about housing prices in Williamstown, which generated into a rather long conversation in his comments. At one point I felt like Southview and I were just commenting back and forth so I proposed we continue the conversation at my blog. Jack took me up on that offer and left a couple of comments and my husband even chimed in.

I’ve had varying forms of this conversation online for years, and I know I’m in the minority on this. I’m opposed to rent controlled apartments, generally against government subsidized housing for all but the elderly and infirm, and am against a town tax policy that artificially caps property taxes for retired people on fixed incomes. I think it is bad for towns and cities in generally, because it discourages growth and renewal, and undercuts its tax system. Schools are hot topics, but isn’t just schools that need to be competitive and have sufficient funding. We need firefighters who can drive working trucks, and ambulance drivers and EMTs who are competent and professional. We need police who won’t be trying to make up for low salaries by taking bribes and streets that aren’t filled with potholes. It seems to me that we need all property owners to pay their share in today’s dollars, not 1966 dollars or 1980 dollars or whatever they paid for their home when they bought it.

But the bottom line, for me anyway, is that it seems incredibly un-democratic, to write a tax code that favors one group of home owners over another.

Posted by amy at March 27th, 2007

I’m just claiming myself on bloglines.

Do you use a feed aggragtor? Do you like it?