Life Goals and other Random Nonsense

So Many Service Events in September

2009-09-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, September is a busy month for community service events!

Here are a few of the big ones nationally/internationally that are planned for this month:

September 11, 2009

On April 21, 2009, President Barack Obama signed legislation that for the first time officially established September 11 as a federally recognized National Day of Service and Remembrance.

September 14 - 21, 2009

Mozilla Service Week

"We believe the Internet should make life better. Join us a week in September as we take action to make a difference in our communities, our world, our Web." This will be the first year of this event, but it looks like they are really rallying some great partners.

September 19, 2009

International Coastal Cleanup Day

This year is the 24th annual. Nearly 400k volunteers collected more than 6.8 million pounds of trash in 104 countries and 42 U.S. states during the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup - the world's largest volunteer effort of its kind. Official registration opens on August 3, 2009.

September 19 -27 2009

Play Day

It's a block party, a backyard BBQ, and a day of service all rolled into one.

September 22, 2009

One Web Day

It's like "Earth Day for the Internet" - For the last three years, OneWebDay has attracted a global network of partner organizations and individual activists committed to broadening the public’s awareness of Internet and Web issues while deepening a culture of participation in building a Web that works for everyone. In 2008, OneWebDay organizers documented volunteer-driven events 34 different cities across the world.

And many United Way chapters hold Day/Week of Caring events during September also e.g. United Way Bay Area's Week of Caring.

Get out there and paint some murals, plant some trees, build some playgrounds and clean the beach, or serve from the comfort of your own computer with virtual volunteering!

Review of 6 "Social Media Status Widgets"

2009-08-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

Want to show off the buzz about your favorite topic and contribute to the virtuous circle of tweeting, re-tweeting, feeding and re-feeding? Well then you need to add a 'social media status widget' to your site to let your readers know what the tweeters are tweeting about what your readers are reading about! Below I review three Twitter search widgets and three newfangled 'social media status widgets' that show the buzz across a variety of sites. It's interesting to note that while they all have similar purposes they show pretty different results.

Twitter Search Widget

Pros: Easy to set up and customize (color, size, etc.). Nice Animation. And you can also loop old Twitter search results - which helps the gadget look less lame if your chosen query has low traffic.

Cons: Obviously, this only shows results from Twitter, but what's less obvious at first is that unlike normal Twitter search, it doesn't show retweets (anything with 'RT' in the message) so you could be missing some good chatter if people are retweeting and adding on commentary. Also, although this is easy to set up, integrating this widget into your site could be challenging (e.g. this one doesn't play nice with Blogger - which seems to have something to do with referencing the external CSS style sheets and line breaks in the JavaScript code) so you might have to play with it to get it to work properly. Also, it doesn't show tweets older than about 2 weeks.