When I first heard about it I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea. I’m a pretty heavy Twitter user and though I believe in “Putting a little Twitter in everything” (Biz Stone), the noise level on LinkedIn has increased dramatically since the addition of groups and apps and although I may want to share some of my updates with my connections there I don’t want to drown them in information.

Fortunately they thought of that too. When you set your Twitter account to share with your LinkedIn connections you’ll be able to filter them a bit by choosing to only send the updates that have the tag #in attached to them. Very smart. At least if people use it that is!

This will be rolled out to accounts over the next couple of days, so keep an eye out to see when yours is enabled. I’d love to hear back from you how you think it’s working and if you’ll use this new feature.

Here’s a quick video to show you how it’s all going to work with Reid Hoffman and Biz Stone.

Sure, you might want to do some advanced tweaking using hooks or bring in some custom PHP code or widgets and I can help you do that, but with Thesis we can set up a spiffy custom design for a whole lot less than we could before. Take a look at the video below and I think you’ll see why I just love the new Thesis.

I’ll be moving this site over to Thesis shortly (finally!) so stay tuned for a new look and feel, If you want to see what we can do with Thesis, start with these: Social Media Coaching Center and the  Dining Room at the Langham recent launches.

There has been huge discussion over segmenting, and even “curation” of lists as a way to manage the flow of information and create channels. Chris Brogan talks about marginalization as one of the possible results, Scoble points out the sheer silliness of even giving a rats butt about whether you’re on lists or not, but others have adopted lists whole-heartedly and it’s the newest meme of memes.

It’s been fun to see what people have done with lists, get an idea of how they see their Twitterverse and how they group people. I’ve spent quite a lot of time on Listorious checking out the lists there, and some are pretty interesting. There’s even a list of the top 140 lists.

I found some lists I liked and scanned them for people I didn’t know, looked at their profile and followed them. I even contacted some directly (imagine that) and I hope that’s one way people will be using these lists. As a way to find new and interesting people to talk to. One might think the lists feature would increase the followers of those interesting individuals but on second thought I’m thinking people may follow lists rather than the individuals and then those people have lost an opportunity to connect. There’s a big difference for me between connecting with a person and scanning a list, especially if it’s a long list where the listees only show a few tweets before they are drowned out by the rest of the list!

Poynter wrote: “Their ease of use and additional features could shake up the way Twitter is used altogether, adding new elements of customization, discovery and curation. This makes Twitter Lists something for every journalist, editor and news organization to keep a keen eye on.” in his post on lists, and it got me to thinking about how one of the things I like about Twitter is it’s whimsical nature. I find the most interesting and unexpected information from random posts. If everybody is in a neat little line what will I miss? Sure, I appreciate the ability to pull together a list of news sources so I can quickly scan them, but I do that already in Seesmic.

I made a short attempt at creating lists on my account but as I sorted through my friends and followers I couldn’t help but feel I was missing some important people and going through my small following became a chore I just didn’t want to deal with. Maybe if I could add to lists in the Twitter clients instead I’d use it more but for now I’m not really into list building. I’m into communicating and finding new people to do that with. If their on a list cool, but I want to connect with people not lists.

All that listening can be time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be if you get organized about it. On Thursday N0v 12, 2009 I’ll be keynoting   Silicon Valley Business Development Week at Outside the Cube. If you’d like to learn more about setting up the tools and strategies to listen effectively check out the event and get signed up!

Once you’ve got it activated and you’re signed in to your account you can do searches and see “Results from your social Circle”. So you’ll see Tweets, blogs, links from people you know on the bottom of your search results. You can filter down to just the social results by selecting “Social”.

Now this isn’t real-time search so you’re not going to see the latest (not yet) but it does add value if you’re looking to make a purchase and you would like to see what your connections thought of the product etc.

Facebook connections aren’t going to show up unless they’re in your Google network too.

Here’s a quick video with some highlights from Google’s Maureen Heymans.

I wonder if this is going to get more people using the Google Profiles than there has been to date? Currently it seems as if most people jumped on it to save their username and then never did much with it. I’m guilty here too, but beyond adding a teensy bit of SEO opportunity it hasn’t really been of much use so far. Maybe if I used it more?

In any case, I think this is an interesting direction for Google to take and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

It may seem mundane to some, scary for others, but for me this is a LOT of fun. It’s what gets me jazzed every day. As I’ve grown my social media coaching practice I’ve written a book (Social Media Success! ) spoken across the country at a number of events, led hands on workshops and boardroom training sessions and I’ve gathered a lot of information about networks, gadgets, tools and techniques that I share with my clients.

Now I’d like to share that information with you. I talked to some of the coaches and consultants I really respect and asked them to add their considerable knowledge to the Social Media Coaching Center. This site offers a way for you to learn step by step how to use the tools and networks that make social media useful as well as fun.

No matter what your learning style is there will be something there for you. We have videos, step by step tutorials, podcasts and webinars on everything from email marketing and SEO to social media strategy and how-tos. There is a weekly social media Q&A class every Monday where you can ask your questions and have them answered by people who have established themselves in the field.

Take a look at the new site and give me your feedback. Tell me what you’d like to see us cover as the site grows and we’ll add it to our to-do list! The site will be free until November and then there will be a nominal monthly fee for access. Check it out now at SocialMediaCoachingCenter.com.

It was fun too to compare gadgets people were hauling around just to do all those videos and blogs. This video is from Jennifer Kushell and HuffingtonPost.com. (FYI I did almost everything on my iPhone but I still hauled around a Flip Video camera, a laptop and my handy-dandy  charger for the iPhone!).

I was in the WebGrrls booth on Friday with New York Webgrrl Nellie Yusupova. It was a great place to meet  of interesting people and connect on a one on one level, hear about what they were doing, their impressions of the speakers and the event itself as well. I went to quite a few sessions too and overall I think there was a good range of interests and levels of expertise represented, and it was easy to switch channels from one area of interest to the other.

Tracks included sports, Non-profit, Moms, Medical, Real Estate and of course, social media, but there was a lot of crossover. In the Real Estate track I learned about a very nifty App called Sweetcron that I can’t wait to dig into. It’s a self-hosted life-stream aggregator and Reggie Nicolay from Cyberhomes walked us through installing, skinning and some good use cases. I know I can find a few uses for this!

Listening to Jeremiah Owyang’s keynote on what the future might hold didn’t really break any news to those of us deep in social media, but this crowd was pretty mixed. A lot of people have been blogging but not really gotten deep into social media and it was news to them. The #MotrinMoms saga–as hackneyed as it is–came up in at least 3 presentations and was heavily tweeted and blogged about. I did really like how he pointed out the Volkswagon Ad (cleverly disguised as a Facebook page) “Meet the Volkswagons” that “uses the power of your profile” to find you the perfect car. Apparently Max and Bus were pretty far off in their analysis and we won’t be seeing Jeremiah in a VW bug in the near future. He was spot on pointing out what a missed opportunity to tap into his friends list and have them do the recommending.

A general thread ran through the conference from keynotes to discussions in the hallways and parties and that was; it’s time to stop just talking about social media and DO something! As Chris Brogan said in his keynote “The salad days are over” and it’s time to really get to work.

If you need a hand to understand the tools or how to get started in a particular network, check out the Social Media Coaching Center. It’s a great place to learn how to use this stuff and get to work!

• Assignments and grades
• Storing and sharing files
• SMS notifications
• Polling
• Class calendars for assignments and deadlines
• Educators can create a group and set the privacy limits for each group

A nice feature of the site is when you join as a teacher you are immediately added to the edmodo support group so you have access to support info and connect with other users. Are you using edmodo? I’d love to hear what you think of it and how you’re using it.

There’s no question that Global Warming is a real thing. The question is : is there anything we can do to slow it down? What are the real impacts on the environment and on current and future world populations?

These two images of Glacier bay, taken just over 60 years apart, show the effects dramatically.
In 1941. William Field photographed the Muir and Riggs Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park.
riggs glacier
In 2004, USGS glaciologist Bruce Molnia photographed it from almost exactly the same place.

Going further back in history, in 1794, The glacier in Glacier Bay was more than 4000 ft. thick, up to 20 miles or more wide, and extended more than 100 miles to the St.Elias Range of mountains.

• If the current warming trend continues, all glaciers in Glacier National Park could be gone by 2030.
• Grinnell Glacier is already 90% gone.
• Bering Glacier-North America’s largest-has lost 7 miles of its length, while losing 20-25% of it’s volume.
• According to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report, average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average.

It’s not just the arctic glaciers that are melting either, and glaciers in mountain regions may have catastrophic impact on the population below them.
As the mountain glaciers melt huge lakes form in pockets of the glacier. These pocket expand until there is little more holding the water back than fragile ice dams.
When these dams finally give way, millions of tons of water cascade down the mountain, decimating everything in it’s path.

Himalayan glacier lakes are filling up with more and more melted ice and 24 of them are now poised to burst their banks in Bhutan, with a similar number at risk in Nepal.

It is estimated that by 2010 a glacial lake catastrophe will happen every year. The loss of life and property could be staggering.

The short-term danger is obvious, but the long term danger, that of having less and less runoff every year and the resulting water shortage could make living in these areas impossible in the fairly near future.

Micro-funding and social media for nonprofits from JD Lasica on Vimeo.