Day One! I have decided to do my first post with 5 historical facts about Christmas to tie in with goal 88 of my mission 101. Also I thought it would be nice to try and teach Boo a bit more about Christmas rather than just ‘you get presents’

Fact One : Celebrating Christmas :

The middle of Winter has been celebrating since long before the birth of Jesus. Winter Solstice on 21st December was celebrated as the most of the dark winter days were gone and it was the start of longer days of light. In Scandenavia they celebrated ‘Yule’ from the 21st December through to January, in recognition for the return of the sun the father and sons bought home a large log which was set on fire and the family would feast until it burnt out.  It is thought that Jesus was born on 25th but no one was sure of what month it is likely the catholic church adopted December as it was a time of many other celebrations in 350AD. The name Christmas comes from the old english phrase ‘Cristes maesse’ meaning ’Mass of Christ’ 

Fact Two : Santa Claus

Santa Claus originated in the 4th Century with Saint Nicholas, a genourous man devoted to children. This gave rise to claims he could perform miracles.

He became the Patron Saint of Russia, in Greece he was the patron saint of sailors, in France the patron saint of lawyers and in Belgium the patron saint of children and travellers. In the 12th century an official church holiday was created in his honour which was celebrated on 6th December. Followers in Europe dwindled after the reformation, although Dutch celebrated and kept his legend alive by leaving out their woden shoes to be filled with treats if they had been good. Dutch colonists took this tradition to America and ’santa Claus’ emerged.

Fact Three: Christmas Tree

The Christmas tree originates from 16th Century Germany. They used to decorate fir trees with candles, apples and coloured paper. The Christmas Tree was bought to England by Prince Albert (Queen Victorias husband) and became popular in both England and America by the late 19th century.

Fact Four : Christmas Cards

Christmas cards originated in England in 1843. Sir Henry Cole is credited as creating the first real christmas card when he was too busy to compose individual greeting for his friends so he commissioned an artist Johan Calcott Horsely to design the card and then sent it to his friends inscribed with the message ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy new year to you’.

Fact Five : Snacks for Santa

Mince Pies, biscuits, cookies, milk, whiskey are all left by millions of children on Christmas Eve for Santa, not forgetting carrots for rudolph! There is no exact date for when this tradition was said to start, but it is thought it originated in the 1930s as a way for Good Children to thank Santa on Christmas Eve (or for naughty children to ‘please’ him in a last attempt to get presents!!!)

Se c’è stata una cosa da subito poco chiara nella bagarre degli e-book, è stata la fumosa questione del risparmio delle famiglie nella scuola primaria, dove notoriamente i libri sono gratuiti.

Italiaoggi (via rassegna Flc) ci svela l’arcano: la legge di Bilancio del 2010 non prevede nessun trasferimento di fondi agli enti locali per questo scopo.

Eppure l’obbligo della gratuità rimane, perché la legge che lo ha previsto, nel lontano nel 1964, non è stata cancellata. Con la conseguenza che, se non ci saranno modifiche, dovrebbero essere i comuni, con altre entrate [leggi: nuove tasse], a dover comunque far fronte a questa spesa. [...]  Ma lo stesso ministro dell’istruzione, Mariastella Gelmini [...] in una intervista di un anno fa aveva avuto modo di dire: è giusto che non paghino i libri solo coloro che hanno alle spalle una famiglia a reddito basso. Chi ha un reddito alto, invece, deve pensarci da solo, anche alle elementari. In questo modo, si recuperano risorse, circa 65 milioni di euro era la stima, che possono essere spesi per venire incontro agli studenti in difficoltà di tutta la scuola dell’obbligo.

Il caro Giulio, però, è più furbo di lei e

l’operazione, fatta come è fatta nella legge di Bilancio, non conviene neanche alla Gelmini, perché perderebbe del tutto lo stanziamento

e l’unico a guadagnarci sarebbe lui.

Dunque, staremo a vedere se spunterà un emendamento riparatore ma, se l’aria che tira è questa, sarà solo questione di tempo. Che scempio…

Soo…9 days without Facebook. What have I been doing with myself? Mowing the lawn, taking long walks outside, working on projects for work and school; I’ve also been revisiting the various social networks and micro-networks I’ve joined over the last several years…and I’ve joined a coupla more. Presented here, for my benefit and yours, are the places I’m connected to online – and why I’m on a particular network. This doesn’t count email discussion groups I’m part of; I suppose that’d be a whole ‘nother post!

General/Meta

Twitter – @zoecarnate

FriendFeed – FriendFeed is awesome; let’s hope Facebook buying them doesn’t screw it up.

LinkedIn – my business, my biz-nass.

Myspace – because sometimes I’m nostalgic for 2003.

Plaxo – does anyone remember what Plaxo is for?

YouTube – my vids, vids, vids.

Futurist

ShapingTomorrow – a large global community; primarily devoted to environmental scanning and trend analysis

The New Futurists – a younger crop of futurists, centered primarily in the northeast United States.

Faith

TransFORM – there’s more than meets the eye here.

Christiarchy! – Christian anarchists and Anabaptists (is there a difference?)

Christian Mysticism & Contemplative Spirituality – what it says. Contemplate that.

Missional Tribe – this one had a strong start but I think WordPress infrastructure, while great for blogs, isn’t great for supporting social networks.

Recovering Evangelical – hee-hee.

Metro Atlanta Emergent Cohort – my once and future cohort.

The Hyphenateds:

Anglimergent – I’m not Episcopalian, but I’m inspired by ‘em…especially St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco.

Baptimergent – I’m not Baptist, but I used to be! And I’m inspired by New Community Church in Raleigh.

Emerging Leaders Network – aka Luthermergent. I’m not Lutheran, but…you see where this is going? Mad props to House For All in Denver.

The Common Root – formerly Submergent; an awesome group of Anabaptist-minded peeps.

QuakerQuaker – aka Convergent Friends.

House Church Homies

Simple Church

Organic Church Today

Healing Communities

Bleeding-Edge Creatives

Love Is Concrete – you can actually draw stuff in this network.

Wisefire – a great group of people.

iEvolve: Global Practice Community – Integral peeps.

Geoff’s World.

Hi there world!

now you can see “more”

This is  a link to the Ning presentation that I did at the CCP Teaching Center in October.

Ning!

If you’re an Experiencer like myself and you’re looking for a community of like minded individuals or you have an alternative view to the so called Abduction Phenomenon, join me on my Ning site here :  http://experiencers.ning.com/ .

I’m keen to find people who are open minded and open hearted about their experiences.

May all beings be free of suffering,

Bright.

I’m quickly developing some sort of “love affair” with RSS feeds and here is why. There is just so many darn things you can use them for and there are a couple of tools out there that help me to accomplish three of my major goals: my education; sharing great content with other folks through social media outlets like Twitter and FaceBook; and they are now allowing me the capability to further promote our groups, our members, and their companies. Sweet!

My Education: Whenever I encounter a site or a blog that I find interesting, I’m always looking for the “RSS Icon” as shown above. Click on that and I am immediately taken to a screen that allows me to automatically load this feed to my Google Reader. If you don’t see the icon, look for something that says “Subscribe” or words to that effect. Failing that, you can still try to manually feed the URL to your reader and see if it can find the feed from that address. I’d guess that this last-ditch method will work better than 50% of the time. Now that the feed is in your reader, you can peruse articles at your leisure and read the ones you find to be of interest. There are probably well over 500 such articles that go to my reader each day, perhaps closer to 1,000, and it takes me maybe 1/2 hour per day to sift through those. I also use a tool called ReadTwit that takes the links from Tweets of those that I follow and converts and loads them into my reader. In other words, that obscure shortened URL actually converts to something you can read and understand.

Share Content With Followers: From my Google Reader, once I have selected an article to read, I can also choose to send that article out via Twitter or post it to FaceBook. There are other sites that you can share it to as well. If this article was generated by a Tweet, I will typically follow that back to the person who sent the link and then RT (retweet) their update. The only shortcoming with using the reader interface is that it needs to be a separate action for each site you wish to share to. No biggie.

Now, let’s say that I find a site that consistently puts out quality articles. A site that I trust implicitly to be both professional and interesting. Enter Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed allows me to take any RSS feed and set up a system whereby the app will automatically scan each feed on a set schedule to look for new content. When it finds said new content, a tweet is automatically generated along with a content header and a link to that article. It’s a win-win. I am credited with generating and sharing good content and the person who wrote the article is promoted at the same time and it generates hits to his or her site. You can also add standard prefix and suffix language to the tweet not to exceed 20 characters per each. Got to love that!

Promote NetWorks! Boise, Our Members, and Their Companies: I used to have Twitterfeed scan this blog for new articles however, a few months ago WordPress.com added a “publish to Twitter” option that sends the article out immediately. And, I’m an “immediate” kind of guy so I took this off that service. However, I did create a new Twitterfeed account for NetWorks! Boise and added it to that. Follow me as I try to make sense of all of this for both you and me (smile).

NetWorks! Boise is committed to showcasing our members and their companies via any legitimate avenue that we can either find or create. This site, as well as our individual group sites, are examples of this commitment. Social Media is another tool that we have used on a limited basis to accomplish this goal. The goal being … push member information out. So, here are the steps being taken:

1. I have created a new Twitter account, @NetWorks_Boise, for this purpose. At least for now, this account is pretty much going to be fully automated.
2. I have encouraged the members to provide me with links to their, and their company’s, blogs and have been loading those into the new Twitterfeed account along with the feed for this blog.
3. At the same time, I have been also loading these feeds into my existing Twitterfeed account and the reason for that is .. right now @NetWorks_Boise has about a grand total of 5 followers (smile). Once the follower count rises to a reasonable level, I will likely remove these feeds from my main Twitterfeed account.
4. Each of the feeds is prefaced with the member company name or member name and has a suffix reading “NetWorks Boise Mbr”. Remember, a 20 character limitation for both the prefix and the suffix. We promote both the member and the group.
5. Guess what? Our dedicated group pages also have those cute little RSS icons on them. And even in multiple places (smile). I am testing these out now for one group and using two of the separate feeds available: events and group activity. Actually, I learned this trick from Jamie Morgan who runs NetworkInCDA up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho who is also the individual who introduced me to the Ning platform that we are using. Thanks, Jamie! Follow her @jamiemorgancda. Very smart gal! The result of this will be that whenever new member activity is created on the site, a tweet goes out. Should a member post an event on the site, you guessed it, a tweet goes out.

I’m pretty pumped about all of this and can’t wait to monitor the results. I do know that our member blogs are already getting hits as a result of  this and that’s the goal that we hoped to achieve.

Hey, it’s a Saturday! Don’t say I never gave you anything! (smile). Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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A blog dedicated to taking a closer look at what we throw away: Everyday Trash Blog.

Ok, here’s my issue with Twitter. Why?

Do we really need this ‘new’ concept of communication? Am I in the minority here or is this a service that, though possibly exciting to some, seem somewhat spare and even frustrating? In fact to be honest I find it similar to spam, as irritating, and terminated my overeager original registration made in those first months after their launch when we all acted like Twits and signed up.

I get status reports of similar frequency and length from networks like Ning, Linkedin and of course Facebook. Possibly for these reasons I have not yet missed being a Twit. Anyone else feel the same way?

Part 1

One of the most incredible ways to learn and share, without ever attending another boring (or even interesting!) PD session, is to develop an online PLN, personal learning network.

Over the past few months I have explored all sorts of possibilities ‘out there’ and am now at a point where it has all come together for me! I have joined some useful nings, subscribe to many informative blogs, have started to write my own blog (!) and am gradually discovering how powerful twitter can be for learning about resources, sharing ideas, seeking help and developing a PLN.

This presentation by Mark Wooley might be too much or too little, depending on where you are in your own journey, but it will make you aware of what’s possible!

CNN.com The Solutions

Nine selections from November 20th, 2009

• Wheat music: Sustainable products made from grain
• What to do with millions of tossed plastic bottles made from petroleum
• ‘Jackpot’ discovery could feed 30 million hungry people
• Solar-powered cars: How far off is the technology?
• Volunteers show how saving oysters = cleaner oceans
• See how one man’s invention re-thinks the idea of garbage
• A Tennessee professor creates re-useable bags to help the environment
• Scientists develop fake wood to help overburdened landfills
• New concrete filters rainwater in dirty alleys

A bit overdue (I’ve been talking about doing this for a couple of months), but at last there’s now a Ning app for OpenlyLocal local data so anyone who has a UK Ning hyperlocal site (well, anyone in the 90+ councils we’ve opened up data for) can now have information about their council right there in their site.

Like the OpenlyLocal Google gadget (see OpenlyLocal info on your website, Part 1: Google Gadgets), it’s fairly straightforward to use. You need to be the owner of the Ning community to add it, and then it’s automatically available to users as just another tab (like Forums, Videos, Photos, etc). Once you’ve done it you (and the other members of the community) can see the council’s key data, upcoming meetings, members and committees. More features and functionality will be added, but it’s already a very useful addition to any hyperlocal site.

This is what it looks like in action:

So how do you add the OpenlyLocal application to your Ning community (NB Ning Apps need to be added by the network creator). It’s a breeze, and should take no more than a couple of minutes (probably a lot less):

1. Go to the ‘Manage’ Tab on your network:
2. Click on Ning Apps and you’ll be shown the Ning App directory. Quickest thing is just to search for the OpenlyLocal app:
3. Choose the OpenlyLocal application:
4. You’ll then be redirected to the Tab management screeen, where you can change the name of the Tab for the app . By default it’s “Council info :: OpenlyLocal”, but might be better to be just “Our Council” or “Council watch” if space is tight. *Important*: If you do change the name, you must click the Save Tab Settings button, otherwise just click on the link:
   
5. You should now be shown the OpenlyLocal page (if not, just click on the tab), and you should click on the ‘edit settings’ link (in the top RIGHT of the info area, not the ’settings’ link just above it and to the left).
6. Select your local authority, and then “Save Changes”
   
7. The app will then get the data from OpenlyLocal (but some may be hidden – if so so just reload the page).
8. That’s it.

There’s more features coming, but I hope you’ll agree it’s an essential addition to any Ning hyperlocal community. Comments as ever welcome, and the code behind the application will be shortly uploaded to the OpenlyLocal github tools page.

p.s. To remove the app, just go back to the tab management page and click on the ‘x’ beside the tab.

Ning has something new for those who own sites, a way of suspending users without banning them to give them a second chance.

However they are indicating you can leave their content up with the suspension. I have to say that is not a good move. People suspended or banned do not want their materials left on the site, and could land you in some hot water, maybe even copyright infringement or something along those lines.

I strongly suggest that when you suspend a user, remove the content as well, and let them repost it at their will if you let them back in.

I did read some great info on Ning recently, that they are one of the top social media sites for business use as well as personal use.

On that note, I do Ning themes, let me know if you need some tips on themes in Ning.

Another online tool geared at business users.

6 Ways to Use Ning for Business

There is an almost overwhelming number of options on the social web for businesses to create and participate in communities. You hear a lot about Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter (Twitter) communities, and even LinkedIn Groups; but businesses have another option when looking to build a community online that’s often overlooked despite having nearly 40 million users: Ning. Ning allows businesses to create their own off-site social network for their brand’s community, and participate in existing conversations with the communities they are looking to engage. Here are 6 ways businesses can put Ning to work.

Somebody want to tell me what this is? What is this blog? What is Twitter? What is Facebook, Ning, Friendfeed, etc.?

Are all these things fake? Non-existent?

No, they’re real. Real things. Real people. Real ideas. Real interaction. Real friends. Real relationships.

It’s real life.

Allow me to break a golden rule of blogging as I write an obituary…

R.I.P. “IRL”

You were there for us when we needed you. You were a crutch that we leaned on you when we weren’t sure what the hell was going on. The whole “social Internet” thing was new, and we didn’t know how to tell other people we had these all great friends and met all these smart people… online.

Alas, it was your time. You see, IRL, this, -this blog, Twitter, Facebook, Ning- is real life. We can no longer pretend like what we’re doing online is some sort of “second life” or “surreality”.

I’ve made real friends, learned real things, got real ideas- all from real interaction and real people on the Internet.

I’m glad you passed away when you did. This needn’t draw on any longer. I will not have to say “Oh, I know this marketing genius in Timbuktu, but I’ve never met him IRL”, anymore.

I hope you understand, IRL, that it has to be this way in order for the social Internet to continue to thrive. How are people I talk with, who don’t know the social web, supposed to believe what I’m doing is legitimate, or real, if I continue to infer that it isn’t real life?

It’s going to be tough to bury you. I know that there are going to be moments when I want you by my side. But I know that I just need to let you go. I need to move on with everything in my life being real.

We’ve had a good run buddy, but it’s time to let you go.

For real.