My own personal ramblings

Did you ever want to find a free pdf about a certain topic but didn’t know where to start looking? I mean sure you could go to google, but then you would have to scroll through thousands of results of people trying to sell you something or get you to sign up for their email list. What if you don’t want to sign up for their email list? What if you need the information yesterday and you just need to know where to find what you are looking for quickly? If you are looking for digital reports, you can find them here: Useful PDF ebooks -PDFGeni. Here’s how the site works: You go to http://www.pdfgeni.org and then you’ll see a search bar. You type in what you’re looking for and it will come up with a list of sites with ebooks related to what you typed in. I did a search on making soap and you can see my results by clicking on the words making soap. I also did a search on crochet and you can see those results by clicking on the word crochet. You can find digital reports on any topic using this site. Check it out when you get a chance.

So I could only come up with 5. If you have anymore, feel free to put them in the comments section.

(going in backwards order)
The fifth thing at Christmas my mommy gave to me
5 teething rings
4 wipes warmers
3 fresh bottles
2 talking dollies
and a baby bag to put it all in!

I’m sure by now that you know you can outsource to get things done that you either don’t have the skills or time to do. Now you can do this for the princely sum of $5. Here’s an example of some of the types of tasks you can have done for $5

Try a few different providers to get a feel for how things go. Heck you may even want to list a few things yourself that you wouldn’t mind doing for $5. Enjoy.

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you’ll know that I am a huge John Grisham fan. So naturally when I got the chance to get a copy of his latest book from a book club, I jumped on the opportunity. This book is just like the rest of John Grisham’s books. I can’t put it down. Basically it’s about a killer and a rapist who tries to convince the legal system that they are about to kill an innocent man. I highly recommend this if you are looking for something non business related to read.

Hi. I am writing an article for a client about students who have earned a degree online. If you have written a blog post about your experiences with an online school, or can write a blog post by Friday at 1:00 PM EST, I want to hear from you. It would help if the blog had a Page Rank between 2 and 5. Just email the link to your post and your email address to deanna.troupe(at)gmail.com
Thanks for your help!

I have a new favorite TV show…Unsung. It comes on TVOne.  It is a biography of  Black singers from various eras.  I just love it. I can’t turn it off.  I guess it’s because I am a music lover.

I had a very busy summer. Please forgive me for the long gap in posts on this blog.  I guess I just needed a break.  I am going to try to get back to posting at least weekly in this blog.  I’ll post more if time permits.  Stay tuned…

Sorry for the two posts in one day, but this is something else that is important for me to blog about.  Enjoy.

This post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one “eat nothing—or almost nothing—but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home.” Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there’s a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer’s markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer’s market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama’s 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we’ll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this “stationary web” experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We’ve had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we’ve become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it’s fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what’s happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you’ve made contact through the app, it’s a lot easier to say “Hello” in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States.” And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for “largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever.” In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were…before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what’s happening around us—right now—can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of “geospatial awareness” is possible through today’s smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information—a moment—is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises…real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information…based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It’s important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author’s note: We’ll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell‘s #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

Today is the day I post about human rights violations.  I decided to expand that to general inequalities.  Today I’m posting about the gender gap.  I don’t think it’s right that women STILL get paid less than men.

Consider this blog post – Have We Really Come A Long Way Baby? The author points out some gloomy stats when it comes to women in the workforce.  I don’t know how this can be changed, but it needs to be changed quickly.

I found out about this “Am I Not Human” blogging campaign from Facebook.  I felt compelled to write something about this important issues.  Now instead of focusing on human rights violations happening across the sea, I decided to focus on human rights violations happening right here in the USA.  This leads me to the case of the Scott Sisters in Mississippi.  These women got two life sentences for supposedly robbing a man of $11.00

This makes absolutely no sense to me.  Also, according to the facts of the case, they didn’t even rob the people.  There’s more information on this case on the following sites:

http://www.blogher.com/social-media-takes-freeing-scott-sisters-mississippi

http://www.victimsofthestate.org/MS/Scott.htm

http://freethescottsisters.blogspot.com/

This is just wrong.  I don’t care if they had been male, white, or purple.  It just isn’t right for anyone to be convicted for a crime they didn’t commit.  Even if they were guilty of the robbery, the sentence was much too harsh for the crime.  I am hoping that my small little blog post helps to bring attention to this case and contributes to their freedom.  One even is suffering kidney failure and they are still treating her horribly.  Retweet this post, share it on facebook.  Or even better write a post about this on your own blog.  Write a congressmen.  Attend some of the rallies if you live near one that’s happening.  Writing about this problem and tweeting about it is a start, but those of us that can do something more should!

That’s my post for this month.  Thanks for reading!