Best article title ever!

No one can be uncheered with a balloon – or an offhand Pooh reference. This awesome title greeted me in my Feedly aggregator. I don’t know who creates the titles for an RSS feed but whoever did that deserves and award.

 

If you’d like to read the whole BBC News article, complete with a picture of Pooh, here is the direct link:  Winnie the Pooh teddy among objects found in Scottish sewers

How Facebook reveals your friends list even when it’s set to private

Please don’t let this stop you from maintaining your privacy settings. If this is a bug, they should fix it.

Interactive: This Is How Much Money Twitter Owes You

$2,251 for @TheRedElm

FEMA Twitter Chat on Campus Preparedness

September is National Preparedness Month and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is hosting a live Twitter chat on campus readiness to discuss how colleges and universities throughout the nation can prepare for disasters, alert students and faculty during emergencies and share best practices.

FEMA, in partnership with DePaul University in Chicago, Boston College, Florida State University, and Virginia Tech, will facilitate the discussion, highlighting innovative ways that campuses can prepare for disasters.

Experts from these schools will answer questions regarding their emergency preparedness methods, best practices and lessons learned. Colleges, universities, students, faculty and staff are encouraged to participate in the online chat, and all are welcomed to follow the conversation and contribute using the #EDUprepChat hashtag on Twitter.

What: Live Twitter Chat on Emergency Preparedness for Colleges and Universities
Date: Wednesday, September 18th
Time: 1-2pm EDT
FEMA Twitter Handle: @FEMAlive
Conversation Hashtag: #EDUprepchat
Panel Institutions Handles: @BC_OEM, @FSUalerts, @DePaulU @behokieready

Social Media and E-Mail

I have found myself in this position on nearly a daily basis. Emoticons are creeping into my e-mail, as well as the occasional LOL. I’ve see it happen to others that spend time on social media nowadays. The situation is made even worse by the expectation that we use Jabber at work.

Do you think it’s wrong to use microstyle when composing e-mail? Are your rules different, depending on who the recipient is? I consciously remove any SM-isms that I may have included, if the recipient is someone I know is unwired but I do find it rather painful to have to do.

FEMA: More Ways to Socialize

From FEMA:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has advanced the way it keeps you informed using social media.

Stay connected with the latest social media conversations about preparedness, safety and emergency management as they happen in the Social Hub, FEMA’s new one stop shop for social engagement. The Social Hub features information on popular topics and updates from the National Weather Service and other trusted sources.

For those looking for career information and company-focused messages, the FEMA LinkedIn page will now feature job postings, safety tips, workforce news and more!

New FEMA Tools for Disaster Preparedness

From FEMA:

FEMA has released several new tools you can use for disaster preparedness.

The FEMA smartphone app has been updated with a new feature called Disaster Reporter available for Android users. The Disaster Reporter lets users share disaster-related information for events occurring within the United States, allowing citizens, first responders and others to view and contribute information on a publicly accessible map.

Don’t have the FEMA App? Download it for Android, iPhone or Blackberry today!

The 2013 National Preparedness Month toolkit is also now available. It includes suggestions for events and tools and resources to support outreach efforts on a community level.

VOST Workbook Template Quickfix for Total Effort Hours

NOTE: This post is now obsolete, as I have released Version 4.0 of the Workbook and the formula has been corrected in that version.

Jeff Phillips noticed on a recent deployment that, somehow, the hours were not calculating properly in the total FTE box. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way anymore but I managed to fix it on the fly.

I will be releasing a new version this week, as I have added a staff availability calendar to the template. In the meantime, though, Caz Milligan used the workbook template for EQNZ last night and had the same problem, so here is the updated formula for the Check In/Out sheet, cell H3. Copy this formula, paste into cell H3, and hit Enter/Return on your keyboard and that should fix it. If not, please leave a comment and I’ll see what’s going on:

=(sum(E6:E199))*24

Local encounters 7/20/2013

I have mentioned Hillside Market and its cafe in one of my Stuff in the News posts and hadn’t gotten around to blogging about it. Yesterday, I was catching up on some social media stuff in what I refer to as “my office” there.

Alcove at Hillside Market

Regina Ress happened in for her shift as barista in the café, when I was in yesterday.

Regina Ress at Oasis Café

If you haven’t met Regina, you ought to (all the ladies over there are wonderful, though). She is a storyteller from Lower Manhattan and here in Santa Fe. She does storytelling events at Hillside and has a CD of stories available there (or online), as well. She was also kind enough to mention me in a blog post the other day, and came over to tell me about it. Fun to see VOSTing mentioned in a totally out of the ordinary context:

Our “children’s corner” has morphed into a comfortable table-for-two semi-private space. As I write this, a woman who volunteers coordinating information for firefighters is bent over her laptop in there, working with teams dealing with the many wild fires in the region.  She said to me that the café is a real “refuge.”

It is true – the café is a refuge. It’s pretty quiet, with an indoor fountain and a lovely courtyard outside.

Courtyard at Hillside Market

If you live in the Santa Fe area or are passing through for a visit, it’s a great place to stop and have a cup of coffee (regular or snobby available) and do some shopping for items by local artists. Pretty much all the stuff you see in the pictures is for sale. There’s also a greenhouse, where they are going to grow local food and Oasis Café is soon to be Vista Café with restaurant food.

Also be sure to check out the events calendar, that has yoga classes, writing workshops, and other happenings. And they don’t mind if you just hang out and have coffee. This place actually WANTS to be a community hub. This is what the 285 corridor needs. I’m rooting for them. I hope you will, too!

How To: Create a Facebook Interest List

Note: This is not just for SMEM. A journalist friend was about to “friend” a lot of politicians or Like their Facebook pages because it’s coming close to some elections. She apologized to those of us who are friends and I suggested to her that this might be a better route, so she doesn’t have the discomfort of “Liking” being interpreted as support.

An interest list is a list of Facebook pages that you compile, using your Facebook profile, to maintain awareness of a particular topic. Note that you cannot currently create an interest list with a Facebook page. So, if you’re planning on creating a list for monitoring a topic or for networking with similar groups to your own, you must create the list from your profile and make it publicly available, if others will be using it to monitor/network.

Why would I want to create an interest list? Can’t I just “like” all the pages I want? Well, of course you can! The disadvantage of that approach, however, is that your topic-related pages will be mixed in with all your personal friends’ updates and you may miss something important. If you create a list, you can click on the topic header and read through only the posts for the emergency at hand.

How do I create one of my very own (or two or three)?

• Log in to your Facebook account.

• Look at the left-hand side of the Home page (where your newsfeed is) and scroll down until you see a menu header that says Interests. It will look something like this:

• Click on the menu item that says Add Interests
• Once you click there, you have the opportunity to look for existing lists. You do that by typing into the “Search for lists” box
• Then click the Follow button if you find one you like. Of course, you can follow as many as you want.

You can (and should) also create new lists.

• First click the + Create List button (see previous image)
• You will be shown a set of pages that you can add to this new list

• To add one or more items, click on the image (s) and a check mark  will show (you can toggle it back off to deselect)

Hat tip ^ to my friends at 30Days, 30Ways, who are about to start their annual preparedness game. Do give them a follow and play along too or be a sponsor!

• You can also add friends or profiles of people you follow
• Once you’ve selected some things to add, click Next and it will ask you for a name for the list and whether you want to make it available publicly, to your friends, or private.

• Once you have created a list, you can add pages as you find them. You don’t even have to Like the pages. If you add a page to your interest list, it will show up in the list but not individually.
• Your list will always be available in the left-hand menu, where you started building it and you’ll get a consolidated post daily, with a couple of highlighted items. As, you can imagine, if you’ve liked 50 accounts, this is a much better way to go.

I hope you’ll make your lists public and if you have some already or make a few after reading this, feel free to share the link(s) in the comments.