Vinyards, Scenic views, Fruit Loops – Oregon in 10 days (part I)

The first stop in our trip to cover Oregon was Portland – this city cought me by surprise and shook my heart. Laid back, relaxed, cool. Most people wore tattoos, some more than others,  there was an air of freedom and cool. Hippie rich areas of forests, gardens, parks, dotted with shops, restaurants, bars and pubs. Felt like I could stay there forever. But clock was ticking so we had to cover the basics: first thing we did was to stop by visitors center that is located at center of downtown at Pioneer Courthouse Sq.  We wanted to get to the jet boat ride but it was too late and was already booked up. the Jet leaves every day at 11.25 ans 4.25 so if you want a guaranteed seat, better book it in advance (it leaves from the OMSI, which is a cool place in itself to visit) we ended up relaxing at the Chinese garden and Japanese garden, but the greatest surprise and win of the day was Jake’s Famous Crawfish where we literally dined our hearts with some Maui Maui Shark, Lobster Ravioli and a nice bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.  To our luck, it was happy hour so we added some Spinach dip in $1.95 and Sweet Potato Fries in $3 which were both good quality pub food.

Next day we kicked off with a drive through Mt Hood and Hood River – one of the most amazing views was revealed to us when we drove along Columbia river, visiting the Vista House and climbing Multnomah Falls. Well, to be honest – I didn’t make it to the top. My fear of heights was reintroduced to me, and though the path to to top of the mountain is easy to walk on and as I was calming myself down from the fear I could see kids, pregnant women and grannies pass me by. The View is amazing regardless of where you make your stop.

Fruit Loop – on our way to Sisters we stopped at this delicious area where fruit stands and vyniards are dotted all over the area. This was apparently the cherries season as every stand we visited had fresh, delicious cherries for $1 per Ib. W stopped over at Wy’east vine yard where we tried some Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay and some Port. Steve,  The owner, was lovely and warm and told us many stories of wine making. With all the fruits we had in the car we had to stop over at a grocery place to buy some ice. Turned out this was one of the best places I had ever had a Reuben in: the balance between the bread, beef, cheese and saor crwet was perfect.

Sisters is definitley a town to stop by in Central Oregon. We accidentaly passed by it on the way to Black Butt Ranch and were amused and amazed by the ‘wild western’ design of the small town: painted wood in pastels, local diners and pubs with fresh colored wood and ‘cowboys’ atmosphere, this town has character. we ended up the next two days hanging around Black Butte, mostly a family resort with plenty of activities and stuff to do, with wide and beautiful views of Mountains, even mid summer we could see them covered in snow.  One thing that stuck us was that past 9pm there was no where to wine and dine everything around Sisters as well as the Ranch was shut. A nite in the cabin with some Rice Cakes and Wine?

Social Networking For Lawyers Webinar

Twitter Basics Webinar

Social Media for Business and Lawyers meetup This Thursday

Image via CrunchBase

This Thursday Social Media for Lawyers and Social Media for Business are uniting to one big meetup to explore Social Tools for Employee Engagement & Internal Communications. With the Social Media craze, and the realization everyone is using it, what are the best way to get employees engaged with the brand and employ social media tools for internal communication successfully.We all know we need to use social media – but how to do this is the first question always asked.

“The purpose of our group is to enable business professionals in NYC to learn more about leveraging social media and technology to excel in today’s business environment. Our format will be designed to encourage networking and information sharing.”

This meetup is focusing on actual case studies and real life examples. 2 presentations, given by Christoph Schmaltz from Headshift and Jason Breed, are lined up to exemplify how two organizations used social media to leverage collaborative communication among employees.  Prior to the presentations look forward hearing from the meetup’s organizer, Daniel Leslie, a little about the meetup, its purpose, and what does social media mean for business.

See you all there!

http://newmedia.meetup.com/83/calendar/10402561/

WordCamp Blogfest: Chris Pirillo on Community

Image byRandy Stewart

via CrunchBase

* I am live blogging from wordcamp, so please excuse typos and drafty nature of posts.*

Next session is about Community, presented by Chris Pirillo : despite being on the web for many years “it’s the connections that I make with people, amazes me to this d’ay. “Here are bit’s of his truly uplifting presentation:

* “All of us are a walking Venn diagram, we’re multi faceted.  that is community – it’s inside you.” we have different sides, elements, likes and dislikes that we share with others.

* “Community is becoming increasingly distributed: on different channels, applications, formats.

* Combination of the two bullets above mean that… “we’re venn diagrams, and as community is becoming increasingly distributed, hope is that the two will mesh together”

*  a really important point to highlight and where many people fail with blogging: “it kills me to hear “I set up a blog and nobody came” -  a blog is a tool, and if you think blog is community, you are too a tool”. community exists in one place – your heart, that’s your venn diagram. your blog is a means to share your community.

* There are a lot of tools out there, what differentiates you blogging about coffee than someone else who does that? it’s not the topic that differentiates you, that builds a community, it’s your passion talking about it that builds a community around you.

* community cannot be controlled, only guided

* Community grows its own leaders

* Community is the antithesis of ego – it’s inside you but not about you.

twitter, blogging are egocentric, community is not. and everywhere you go you bring community with you.

WordCamp Blogfest: Tim Ferriss on How to Blog without killing yourself

Image by shelisrael1 via Flickr

* 2 disclaimers before you are starting to read the post: first is that I am live blogging from wordcamp, so please excuse typos and drafty nature of posts. second is that this is an uber excited post on Tim, he won my heart, so this post may be a bit sticky, but has some great tips for blog optimization *

Opening session in WordCamp SF was Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week,  talking about how to blog without killing yourself. Charming, sweet and smooth, he just swept me off my feet. I am pretty easy to get excited in general – about ideas, people, etc – so I wouldn’t use me as an actual excitement barometer, BUT there was one element threaded through the presentation which is core to blogging and blog success: you have to talk about something you love.

Bringing with him an entire aura of ‘magic life made easy’ Ferriss sprayed his charm on the audience:  “why do I blog? to love, be loved and never stop learning”. Ferriss shared blogging optimization tips with the crowd:

* Always test to see what works for you and your blog: change wording, labels, links, structure and see what people respond to best.

* Personality counts over spelling:  the important thing about writing great blogs is not being a good writer, but having a strong voice, personality, that is what captures people’s attention and retention.

* Important to remember:  There will always be complaints and they are usually from a minority, don’t let this manage your decisions and behavior.

* Ferriss added ‘total reading time’ and ‘highlight reading time’ counts to his posts to help readers manage their time

* Recommends checking out www.evernote.com & www.slinkset.com

* Passion, Anger, Happiness – these are the ingredients of a good post. let them drive your writing, but! never ever get personal.

And the most important advice for successful blogging: People will ‘hear’ if you’re writing out of obligation vs writing passionately.

Wordcamp Blogfest: Matt Mullenweg state of the Word

Image by TechShowNetwork via Flickr

*Blogging Live from WordCamp – Please excuse any typos *

Matt, wearing jeans,  a light brown jacket and sneakers, giving his ‘annual speech’ taking the audience through WordPress‘ 6 years history, present and future. After taking us through the post evolution, and with help from Andy Peatling and Alex King, is presenting

WordPress Future:

* keep an eye on Themes this year. Current theme problems include spam, restrictions, etc.

* Strong theme of WordPress as CMS, stress on Carrington free GPL

* P2: powerful management of threaded comments on homepage

* BuddyPress: take facebook and put it in a box, create a social network on the fly.

* Plugins:  WPtouch – plugin to make your WP mobilized; comment API, desktop moderation of comments; videopress

* WP 2.8 is coming : improved screen option, ,multiple galleris per page, improved turbo access, password strength meter and new widgets, and most interesting: localized/internationalized themes (last year 27% of WP downloads were from outside of US, this year it’s 42%)

* Mobile: blackberry application coming out, iphone upgrades

* WPMU and WordPress.org merging codebase

* Robust Twitter integration management

WordPress Businesss Model by Alex King

* primary revenue stream is wordpress development and consulting

* 8 full time employees

* build plugins

* HelpCenter (oncall wordpress support center, troubleshooting, development and customization

Baby Boomers, Social Networking and Competitive Advantage

This year we have seen amazing growth in Internet use by adults, with 45+ category gaining more and more attention and pulling more weight with web advertising and investment overall. Last week Danah Boyd posted about Facebook being for Old people, and more and more stats show how internet, and especially social media is being used by Boomers, especially fo networking and community purposes.

Some key facts from Pew Internet show amazing growth:

• 2008 – today 36% of internet users are boomers (as oppose to 0% in 2000)
• 2008 – 35% of boomers are online several times a day
• 2008 – sharing videos and reading blogs seems like the strongest web 2.0 activity among boomers

All these show a great trend, and I was looking for some real inside info. 5 months ago I ran across the rare opportunity to meet an extraordinary man by the name of Carlos Hernandez, who made it his goal to educate, train and teach Social Media to the masses, especially to Baby Boomers. Following his presentation in CES09 (Social Media Jungle sessions) I asked Carlos about Boomers and Social Media. I was curious about why would Boomers find Social Media useful as well as what deters this group from using it; how does one explain the sudden surge and rise in Social Networking use with Boomers, one we have not witnessed in past years, and what are the main trends in it? Carlos and I exchanged a few emails a while back and now I finally have the opportunity to share them with you. there are some great pearls there:

“Suffice to say, the good news about being a Baby Boomer… is that we have the benefit of a built-up knowledge base and oodles of lessons learned. Alas, it can also be our down-fall, if we get so full of ourselves, i.e. hubris, that we ignore seeing our blind-spots and then wonder why we lose our jobs and less expensive, younger people seem to be our biggest competitors in the job search.”

“Social media, and in particular LInkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are potential game-changers for us, because they allow one to be less of a stuffed shirt, without dumping the experience of walking the corporate halls. How? I find these powerful tools to be just the communication mode that opens the door to be more human. The ability to post a picture, list groups where we participate  (volunteer and professional) plus encourage asking and answering questions which opens windows for one to be heard and seen.”

Carlos also shared this valuable link:  “Doctors, engineers, lawyers and any of many other classic professionals now have the avenue to sound less like a boiler-plate-laden resume. Liz Ryan, San Francisco Chronicle writer and 25-year HR veteran voiced the following in her recent article titled “The Savvy Networker: Eight Little Known Tricks for the Job Hunt”.  “Yank the boilerplate out of your resume and give it a human voice, replacing the “results-orientated professional” with “I’m happiest solving thorny problems that slow down product development” or whatever (human) statement describes you”. And that to me so accurately reflects the spirit of Social Media – the personality and personal connections that enhance and boost our personal and professional lives.

Together with Carlos, Barbara Rozgonyi has written a a great post that list great sources to show why social media is spreading like fire among baby boomers. Highly recommended for more reading on the subject.

Boomers are key participants for a fruitful web, and web is key for boomers. Despite and because of the above all numbers, links, quotes and proofs, I am still constantly thinking: how do you demonstrate the value, how to one converts offline behavior to online behavior, to break the wall that sometimes is to be found between boomers and social media.

Weekend break: West Virginia – great wine festival, kayaks, romantic cabins and really bad food

This weekend the hubby and I finally stopped playing coach potatoes, rolled out of the sofa and went for a roadtrip in West Virginia. Why there? it’s somewhere where we have never been, it’s close enough to drive from NJ, we heard about its green scenic views and decided to give it a go.

Our first stop was a really disappointing Diner somewhere in Pennsylvania. Just to give you the background, diners to me are the peak of each roadtrip – quality greasy food is hard to find, and there is nothing like a nice fat mushroom omlette and fresh brewed coffee to kick off the day with! The Diner we kicked off with had machine made coffee and plastic omlettes and pancakes! I was devestated.

We continued our drive to Martinsburg, where a wine festival was held. Took us 30 minutes and instructions from 2 different people to find the place (when the village itself is no larger than Soho, NY) but was absolutely worth it: a corridor of paintings drawn on a large palette welcomed us into a circle of wine and food booths, in front of which a small stage was set, where people sat with their wine of choice, enjoying ol’ country music. sweet! and sweet it was indeed. most wines were dessert wines of blackberry and Currant. Not so much my taste. I ended up with a Pinot Noir and a Chambourcin from Potomac Highland Winery.

We continued down to Mountain Lakes area, where we found a really beautiful cabin on the river in Smoke Hole.  Finally after 7 years of marriage (this week actually) I finally got my honeymoon Cabin. The girl at reception recommended O’Neills, a local restaurant, for a good steak – after the morning’s diner disappointment I was ready for my steak! I am usually refraining from red meat, but I do have a passion for a steak that is done properly.  We ordered a Prime Rib and a Rib Eye, both medium-well. Disappointment number 2 was heading our way. Dry and well-done Meat with Balsamic sauce that was not cooked enough.

The following morning started with a trip to Gorge Bridge, where the plan was to get there early for some kayaking and bike riding. Well, too bad we got there too late for all of the above and had to settle for a walk around the river, which was nice, but not as exciting as some rafting would have been. To avoid any other culinary surprises, we stuck to Burger King, Arby’s and Wendy’s. yep, no surprises there!

Last day of our trip was an excruciating, yet dazzling, 7 hour drive back to NJ, but not before stopping over at the Black Rocks – a beautiful waterfall about 20 miles north of Petersburg and Smoke Hole.

Next weekend break is Washington DC, stay tuned!

View on the way

The lovely cabin

… and Kayaks that were missed

Gorge Bridge

Thank you Zemanta!

Image via CrunchBase

In past few weeks I have been posting more frequently and with richer content (more links, more images) – this is largely thanks to Zemanta that I have installed on my Broweser and that automatically pulls relevant content into my posts: links, tags, photos – making the post richer, and saves me loads of time.  I discovered Zemanta when attending a Semnatic Web meetup last month. I did not expect to get that great benefit and am now not sure how I blogged before! thank you Zemanta!!