From today’s On the Fastrack:

Riding the DC metro to my office in Alexandria, VA this morning, I was struck by an ad on the yellow line train to King Street:

It says “A lot could be happening while you’re sitting there reading this.” and it’s an ad for Capitalert.gov which sends emergency alert messages in the Washington, DC area via email or SMS.

According to their website, the service provides alerts for:

• Major emergencies, like terrorism or natural disasters
• Severe weather
• Severe traffic
• Amber alerts
• School and government closings

The ad seems to imply that if disaster strikes and you’re sitting on the Metro, you won’t know about it until it’s potentially too late.

All well & good, except one catch:

A lot of the DC Metro system is underground, and when it’s underground there’s no AT&T cell service (only Verizon works in the tunnels, to the relief of many a Blackberry-addicted Hill staffer).

Let’s cry for all those clueless iPhones.

Now that I’m blogging on judisohn.com as the domain, it’s time to tackle another problem.

If I listened to conventional blogging wisdom, I’d only be blogging about Weight Watchers (my most popular posts by page views) or Sphincter of Oddi Dysfunction (my most popular post by comments).

My blogging mojo has never been around page views. If it was, I’d still be blogging on WebWorkerDaily. Instead, I like to blog about whatever it is I’m passionate about at the time that it matters to me and then hope I say something that sparks a conversation.

Yet I am mindful that there are two distinct audiences that read my blog.

There are my nonprofit/Mac/techie geek friends who visit because of what I say about the latest gizmo, gadget or trend. Last November, I was incredibly honored to present at a session at Dreamforce. The moderator of the panel pointed out to the room that my blog could be found at momathome.com. I immediately flashed on the latest post I had on the site which just happened to be about getting Chewii, our mutt. I’m in front of hundreds of professional colleagues who are being directed to my site, and it’s currently featuring pictures of my puppy. Great.

And then there are the folks who find this site looking for info about SOD, or they’re my friends and relatives who aren’t into tech and just want to see what I’m up to beyond my Facebook updates. My mother will tell me she read my blog, and in the next sentence remind me that she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about in most of the posts. I want her to get something out of her visits here, too.

I’m going to try something new. I’m not quite forking my content, but I’m going to be classifying posts into just two categories: personal and geek/tech. I’ll use tagging more often than I did in the past to help in searches. There will still likely be a healthy dose of personal stuff in the tech posts (as they say, you can take the Mom out of the blog…), and visa versa. On balance, I imagine there will be more tech posts. If a post is clearly in one direction or the other you’ll know by the category.

I set up two new RSS feeds, so for folks who want the geekie stuff, you can get just those posts. For folks who want the personal stuff, I set up a feed for that. You can also click the appropriate tab at the top of every page to get to the appropriate category.

We’ll see how this works for a while. It’s all a process and learning experience. That’s what’s fun about blogging.

11 years ago, I registered MomAtHome.com to go with my freelance design side biz, Mom at Home Design. I’ve been working for C3 fulltime for four years, and it’s been a while since I made the decision to shed most of the “Mom” stuff from the site.

This morning I decided to make the official change to using judisohn.com as my primary domain. None of the content is changing or moving, it’s just about changing what shows in the address bar. It makes sense on many levels. I’ve been energized about blogging again recently, so the timing is good.

I have to admit that I was influenced by Steve Rubel’s switch from Micro Persuasion to SteveRubel.com. If someone with his audience can give up a blog brand that no longer worked for him and put it under another roof as his approach to tech evolved, what the heck was I afraid of? The “brand” I’m working on is me. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s time for the domain to match.

It was easier to do than I thought it would be. Visits to judisohn.com were landing here anywhere, I just didn’t advertise it. For my email address, I added judisohn.com as a domain in Google Apps, along with all the necessary MX entries on my MediaTemple hosted domain. Now any email address to my @momathome.com email will automatically work for @judisohn.com. In Gmail, I set the new domain as my default sending address. Over time, I’ll change the email everywhere it needs to be changed.

For the site, in WordPress I set the new domain as the blog’s address. Simple. My feeds are all on FeedBurner, so that was an easy switch. Folks subscribed to my complete feed shouldn’t see any difference.

Google Webmaster tools has a nice “change of address” feature that let’s you tell it that you’ve moved your site. That’s done, although I know it will take some time until searches return results at the new domain.

My last hurdle is to make sure that visits to momathome.com/whatever show as judisohn.com/whatever in the address bar. Right now, you can enter on a momathome.com link and it stays that way until you move around the site and then it converts to judisohn.com links. I’m pretty sure it’s a change to my .htaccess file, but I’m not entirely sure what to type. Anyone know?

P.S. If you have this site bookmarked or linked as momathome.com or “Mom at Home” I’d appreciate it if you could change the link to judisohn.com and call it either “A View from Judi Sohn” or even just “Judi Sohn’s Blog.” Thanks!

In December 1994, on our last night of vacation in Las Vegas, Eric and I had tickets to see Cirque Du Soleil at Treasure Island. We decided to skip dinner before the show, instead sharing a popcorn during the performance with the intent to grab something more substantial afterwards. As the show was ending, I started feeling uncomfortable. Bloated, queasy and I had a sharp pain under the right side of my ribcage. Within a few hours I was throwing up, running a fever and the pain was more than I could stand. Eric and I took a taxi to the emergency room. Just how you want to spend the last night of your vacation, right? The doctor there assumed I had gallstones, but nothing showed in the test so they doped me up with enough pain meds to survive the flight and sent me home.

Locally, my doctor said I had reflux. I didn’t buy it, but eventually the symptoms got better and I got back to my life. Until the next similar attack. More tests. More misdiagnosis. Finally, in 2003 a gastroenterologist did a HIDA scan which specifically tests how the gallbladder functions and the test showed that mine wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. Bingo! I had my gallbladder out and I thought all was well. Until the attacks started again.

In 2005, after drinking a bottle of Gatorade (for a colonoscopy prep) and having another attack, I was finally diagnosed with Type 3 Sphincter of Oddi Dysfunction by a gastroenterologist who knew enough about it to suspect I had it, but didn’t know what to do about it. Since then I’ve learned that Type 3 SOD is a condition that’s difficult to diagnose and treat. One common treatment involves a procedure where the side effects are often worse than the condition. In September 2005, I blogged about what I was dealing with.

Over the next 3.5 years that post has gotten 610 comments and counting. It’s usually on page 1 or 2 of Google search results. Frankly, I was happy when it fell to page 2. That meant that there was more credible information about SOD taking its place. When I was diagnosed, there was little information online aside from a few articles that esentially questioned whether or not the conditioned existed. Most of the comments here are from people just like me. They thought they were the only ones dealing with this, or were told that it was all in their head.

I haven’t done anything except approve comments as they come in. They, not me, have built a community here and the best thing I can do is not get in its way. I added threaded comments and comment pagination in an attempt to make the comments a little easier to read, but that’s about it. This is my personal website, not a support forum. If I tried to make it anything more than that, I was afraid I would ruin it.

I didn’t want anyone to think I was attempting to dispense medical advice, and I don’t censor any comments posted as long as they’re not flaming or spam. Over the years folks have started SOD-specific support sites, the most recent being thesphincterofoddi.com, but they’re still coming back here. I’ve taken a kind of “whatever” attitude about it. Folks want to keep commenting on a 4 year old post, more power to ‘em.

Then this morning, I saw a referrer in my logs from the Journal of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. John Affronti, MD wrote an editorial (95% of it over my head) in the May issue about doctors who are prescribing Levitra for SOD without any solid evidence to back it up. Dr. Affronti states:

The public’s perception of all this is also important to address. It is conceivable that individuals with SOD (or those who think that they have this problem) will come upon the information reported in the study by Cheon et al somewhere, somehow. “Googling” sphincter of Oddi dysfunction brings up some pretty interesting things, including blogs in which all sorts of remedies are discussed by people with various levels of medical knowledge. One of my favorites is at http://www.momathome.com. If you want a peek at what some of our patients with SOD are saying outside the examination room, check it out.

Wow.

It doesn’t even matter what I said in the original post anymore, but the fact that I’m still maintaining this site and blogging away on what matters to me does matter. It’s not about pageviews. It’s about the people who might relate to something I’ve posted, and even the chance that another post could organically evolve to something that has an impact again.

I was reading the Sunday paper this morning, and I came across an ad that made me chuckle so much I had to share it with you.

It’s your average Verizon Wireless newspaper ad, now touting their new LG enV phone.

My chuckle was when I noticed the phone on the far right.

It’s not about the phone. Frankly, I know absolutely nothing about the LG enV Touch. It could be the greatest thing for Verizon since the iPhone. Oh wait, Verizon doesn’t have the iPhone. It could be the greatest thing for Verizon since the Pre. Oh wait…

I chuckled at the screen shot they simulated on the “app-friendly” phone.

Step aside, iPhone…you can Twitter on this thing. How hip and our-app-store-can-eat-your-app-store is that?!? Many of the folks looking at the ad over their Sunday coffee aren’t sure what Twitter is exactly, but they’ve heard about it and know it has to mean the phone is cool.

But the agency that put this together didn’t take a legitimate screen shot and superimpose it on the phone, as I probably would have done. I would have followed Verizon-friendly coworkers who wouldn’t mind seeing their Twitter IDs in an ad. Maybe I’d just follow well-know accounts like CNN or Oprah. It seems that’s what Twitter is about these days to the mainstream. I would have waited until the screen shot looked interesting and clicked the shot. Done.

No, that would have been too obvious. Instead, Verizon fakes the m.twitter.com interface, and feeds it with made up tweets. They went through the trouble of darkening the type to make the shot legible, rather than a real screen shot that would have given the impression of a Twitter page without showing the details.

After all, I want to get me this phone if I can use it to find out that danmenezes is going to the tamale lady today, because that’s how people really use Twitter, right?

Thing is, danmenezes doesn’t exist. In the ad, Dan replies to his friend Shannon that he’s on the bus. Unlike Dan, she does exist, and from the 2 updates she’s sent to her 9 followers, it doesn’t look like she cares that Dan is stuck in traffic.

Our Verizon wireless friend is getting updates from Finance_Daily who tells him that the markets are due to rally, but Noel Fleming who actually uses that ID hasn’t said anything like that in his 23 updates to 7 followers except he did report on April 27th that Verizon stock beat. Close enough.

SportsZone with its 0 updates to 0 followers tells him game results that end in a dead bit.ly link. Yes, I tried to go to the link, thinking that the ad folks were at least clever enough to put in a URL that ends in a Verizon Wireless page. But no.

I know, I know. I’m too easily entertained.

Over the last few months, at my urging, C3 has been inching its way into social media. When I introduced Twitter to the staff a few months ago in a webinar, about halfway through there was silence on the line. Turns out my staff was too busy tweeting to listen to me talk about Twitter anymore.

Now we have an official Twitter account, a few Facebook causes, a Facebook application for our Cover Your Butt mobile integration and a Facebook fan page.

Keep in mind that our organization speaks to a smaller population than your average disease support/awareness group since we specifically focus on advocacy and patient education. And never mind the fact that the average age of the colon cancer patient tends to be well outside the typical Facebook target group.

C3 is making it up as we go like most. We’re challenged by the “ick” perception of our cause (no cute kids or puppies as our visual, that’s for sure). We’re pushed forward by the fact that colorectal cancer is still the #2 cause of cancer death in this country and it can be stopped with awareness and action. We are the organization that is all about action.

Yesterday, I heard that MindComet is holding a contest through the end of July (known as “CommuniCause”), asking folks to vote for a nonprofit that they can award $25,000 in consulting services. They’ll choose among the top 10 vote getters.

We sprung into action, using our small existing Twitter and Facebook networks to spread the word. We want this.

Here’s the thing: C3 is doing great work, with a tiny staff and budget, but we’re scaling slowly. We have less than 200 followers on Twitter, less than 100 fans on Facebook and less than 3500 members in our causes. Do we ever need a social media makeover!! We need to bring it all together. We need to make it viral and sticky (even though our message is icky). We need to dedicate more time to it than our resources allow.

3 of us on C3’s staff of 7 started promoting the contest yesterday through C3’s and our personal networks (@bennybas, @carleab and me).

As of right now we are ranked #12 #11 (so close!) #8!! (yah! top 10!) from a starting point in the high 300s! Hello!!

What excites me about this contest is not just the prize. It’s also a light bulb moment for our staffers who heard me screaming about social media for the past year, but didn’t see first-hand from the inside how effective it can really be. Our network may be small, but we’ve got incredible folks on our side.

So please…let’s show the world that social media isn’t just for the kids and it can benefit “icky” causes too:

1. Vote for C3. Just click this link which will auto-fill our org name. One vote per email address.
2. Use your networks to spread the word. Use the tools here to tweet and share the link. If colon cancer affected your life, think of all the butts we can cover and save with $25,000 worth of help to spread the word. This contest is going for another 6 weeks and even if we make the top 10 now, we have to stay there for a while and competition will be tough.
3. Let @CommuniCause know that C3 should be the organization selected should we make the top 10. We know that social media works wonders for causes around cute animals and precious children. I don’t mean to sell any other issue short. Every single cause in the top 10 deserves to be there. Social media can also make a difference in fighting a disgusting no-one-wants-to-talk-about-it disease that kills 50,000 Americans a year…most of them our parents and grandparents. Ask them to show us how it’s done.

Okay New Jersey Republicans, you have my attention.

I am a homeowner with 2 kids and I typically vote for Democrats. Your average New Jersey tax payer.

Fortunately, we’re a 2 income household and we don’t have a lot of debt besides our mortgage, but I have a child with a disability so it evens out. I don’t like how high our property and income taxes are, yet I have to wonder just how much of that can be blamed on our Governor in this economy.

I’m not a huge fan of Jon Corzine. I don’t think he’s done a terrible job (he’s no GWB) but I don’t think he’s done a great job either. I guess we should just be happy he wants to keep this job instead of buying another one.

I’m willing to consider change. I’m willing to vote on the other side of the booth for the right candidate.

Now it’s your turn. You are going to have to put some effort into selling me on Chris Christie.

For every attack ad you run against Corzine, it’s less chance that I’m going to vote in your direction. I’ll ignore the millions that Corzine is going to spend of his own money attacking Christie. Instead, I’ll pay attention to what Christie says to sell himself. You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong with Corzine, I already know. Please don’t make the same mistake John Kerry did and assume that public hate against the incumbent is enough to win an election. I would rather vote for Corzine’s re-election than vote in a new candidate I don’t believe in simply because he’s not Corzine.

I took a look at Christie’s website in order to get to know him better and see where he stood on the issues. First the good: I don’t have a problem with what he says about jobs, taxes and economy, and I guess he has a good a plan as any to lower NJ taxes and stop some of the corruption our state is known for. That section and the one on spending and government reform have the most content and depth, obviously because that’s the platform he’s running on. He’s got a great track record as a U.S. Attorney, and this is his strength.

Yes, the state (and the country) is in crisis and that demands immediate attention. But then what?

I care about education. There’s a lot going on in regard to how New Jersey funds its districts. Outside of the cities, what the state doesn’t provide has to be made up by the townships. Christie has 3 short, vague paragraphs about education. That’s it. No specifics or details. That concerns me. Exactly how will he bring about “increased accountability and greater parental involvement”? What about special education? I want to know before I cast my vote.

I have a lot of problems with his shared values. He doesn’t share his values with me, that’s for sure. I want a leader who is guided by his faith, but does not legislate by it. What he believes is right for him and his family should not be the law of the state.

He says:

While, I have no issue with same sex couples sharing contractual rights, I believe that marriage should remain the exclusive domain of one man and one woman. If a bill legalizing same sex marriage came to my desk as Governor, I would veto it. If the law were changed by judicial fiat, I would be in favor of a constitutional amendment on the ballot so that voters, not judges, would decide this important social question.

I find this wrong on so many levels, I hardly know where to begin. Enough for me not to vote for him no matter how bad Corzine is? Yeah, maybe.

Healthcare and insurance reform is another issue that matters to me. Let’s see what Christie’s site says about that. Zip. Zilch. Nadda. According to 2 year old data from Kaiser, 17.6% of New Jersey’s non-elderly population is uninsured, nearly a quarter of those are children. Over 1 million people. I’m sure the number is higher now. And this candidate thinks a constitutional amendment against gay marriage is more important?!?

A couple of days ago, the Chair of the NJ GOP followed me on Twitter. I had tweeted my frustration that Corzine had no real competition on the primary ticket, and I guess he picked up on that. We ended up having a little back and forth, and in response to the issue of healthcare insurance he tweeted back:

Excuse me? What “choice” does someone with a low paying job have? What “choice” does a small business that can’t afford to offer decent plans and rates have? And let’s not even go into the idea that we can solve the health insurance issue with the same approach and care as if it were car insurance. Consequences? Consequences?!?! Oh no he didn’t seriously use that word. Someone makes a poor choice on car insurance and they walk to work. A poor choice (which is often their only choice) on health insurance and they die.

And when I begged him to “Stop attacking Corzine as a campaign strategy and give us Dems a real reason to go red,” his response was:

A visual of Donald Trump probably wasn’t the right move at that moment, Tom.

Notice that in this post I didn’t compare Christie to Corzine. That is not what this about. I’m not criticizing Christie to make Corzine look better. I simply want to make an informed decision in November.

I’ll be watching over the next few months, and I will tune out the moment it goes attack, which by all accounts looks like I won’t be getting a lot more information out of the GOP or its candidate.

Shame. This is your chance to win over at least one Democrat. Convince me that Christie is the better Governor no matter who he’s running against. Yes, the new Governor, if elected, is going to have damage to undo. But then he still has to lead and move the state in a positive direction.

If Christie can’t convince me, then the phrase isn’t “You’re Fired!” it’s “The Devil You Know.”

If you’ve known me online for a while you know this is a huge pet peeve of mine…websites that make noise as soon as you visit them.

Drives me batty. Like movie sites, vacation planning sites want you to have the full multimedia experience. I get that. But often I’m listening to something in iTunes and it drives me nuts when a website wants to compete without asking me first.

Salesforce’s Dreamforce site used to load and immediately start with interviews of folks excited about the conference. First time, fine. When I was going back to the site regularly to look at the agenda or check a speaker bio, it was ridiculous and annoying. This year, so far, the site is blessedly quiet. What about people who were sitting in a cubicle, legitimately going to the conference for work?

Another offender is the Disney Vacation Club. At least the main DVC site has a little volume button you can click as soon as the page loads. But it’s not sticky…come back, get blasted again.

Once you login to the Members-only area, a new tune starts and there’s no little button to click to get it to shut up. I’m listening to something in iTunes, so I don’t want to mute my computer and I’m on this page because I need to do business with the site (we have a DVC trip coming up in August).

Over the years I’ve asked Disney to quiet the members-only page. You have our money already, just let me make a payment or see a point chart without being serenaded. Somehow, they’re not listening to me.

I know there are plug-ins I can install that will disable flash and scripting, but I’ve found those to penalize my surfing experience on other sites that know how to respect their visitors.

Is there anything that can selectively, on a site-by-site basis, only disable useless background audio?

I’ve long been a fan of digital magazines. No clutter, no waiting until the mailman decides to deliver the latest issue. Most of my personal subscriptions are through Zinio if it’s an available option.

The big downside to Zinio is their ridiculously draconian DRM. For example, if I download a magazine to my iMac, I can’t read the same file from my laptop. I have to re-download the issue, even if I used the same login/account from both computers.

Zinio recently improved the experience of reading magazines online to the point that I rarely download new issues anymore unless I’m somewhere that my internet connection is slow. I’m able to read my subscriptions in a browser window, using the same keyboard shortcuts as the downloaded version. If I want to revisit an old article, Zinio’s site has a copy of every digital magazine I’ve ever received, all 532 of them so far, going back to August 2003.

I recently discovered that MacUser UK has a digital subscription designed for those of us in the United States. A new issue every 2 weeks with no advertising (what’s the point of marketing UK-only retailers to us?) for less than $2 per issue. No offense to anyone reading this who either works for or is a fan of Macworld or Mac|Life, but I think MacUser UK is much better than any of “our” Mac publications. Maybe I like that they more thoroughly cover a wider range of Mac products, while being less fanboy about it. They give full page attention to products that would at best get a paragraph in a US publication.

I never understood why some international publications charged so much for digital subscriptions in US$, given the distance no longer matters. I think MacUser gets it right with this model. They have to be saving a fortune on printing and mailing expenses, while expanding to a new audience that their advertisers wouldn’t reach anyway. The only time when I know we’re not in Kansas anymore is when a price is listed in Euros.

Yes, you can get most if not all of the same content online or by reading blogs. For me, there’s still something about a magazine that blogs and random articles can’t replace, whether it’s on paper or not.