Guide to Social Networking Sites

I have been trying to get immersed in social networking sites as a way of letting people know about freshare or my blogs and maybe even a little bit about me. I have accounts now on most of the major sites – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn – and I started trying to figure out how each one works and what they attempt to provide to the user. So here is my very brief explanation of what you need to know about each of these social sites.

MySpace, of course, was one of the first big social networking hot spots on the web and its age is starting to show, not unlike the older part of a city where houses’ paint begins to peel and the shrubs need trimming. MySpace has a bit of a seedy feel to it. Page layouts are often gaudy and unkempt and led by flashy ads placed by Tom and the boys at the home office. When I am on MySpace, my adware/spyware software treads pages on high alert like a soldier weaving through a minefield. Ads, videos, even layout tricking sites often seem to have dangerous junk attached. Like I said, it’s a seedy place. From what I can tell, the object of MySpace is to make the foulest, coarsest comments, to be vulgar and to let your avatar project that same sense of style. I think the game is to collect as many “adds” as possible in an effort to spread this party atmosphere across the globe. To that end, MySpace is very successful.

Facebook has a cleaner, fresher look to it although there are still lots of nooks and crannies where you can sport a bit of jocularity and some shock value but not at the same level as on MySpace. There are still the profile questions about why you are there (friendship, dating) and your relationship status (single, married, it’s complicated) but you can choose not to fill out any of that and Facebook doesn’t mind. Facebook is to the suburbs what MySpace is to the red light district. But unlike MySpace, profiles are mostly set to private so it is much more difficult to try and befriend anyone you do not already know. Unlike the free-wheeling MySpace where anybody can see you and ask to cavort, Facebook is meant for people who want to stay in touch with friends they already have. But a word of caution: those suffering from low self-esteem are not likely to gain much on this site. If you do not already have a gaggle of friends in tow all with their own Facebook accounts, you are not likely to feel much better about yourself. With barriers firmly in place, Facebook seems to frown on making new friends. The object of the game is to keep in touch with existing friends online and to do so in front of all your other friends. This as opposed to such archaic communications means as texting, emails or (yuk!) phone calls. If you do not mind operating in a fishbowl, Facebook is for you.

LinkedIn is kind of the Facebook for professionals but without so much interaction, after all these are busy managers, executives and others who don’t have much time to offer meaningful dialogue so the makers of LinkedIn wisely left off that module. LinkedIn is a place to display your resume, a little important information about your skills and abilities and to, by your presence there, announce availability to potential employers. From what I can tell, the object is much like collecting coins on Mario Brothers except the term “coins” is dropped in favor of “Connections.” LikedIn is a great way to up others by showing just how plugged in you are, which is of high value to competitive business people.

Twitter is much different from any of the other major social networking sites. Twitter is like texting, but to a larger audience, or so one hopes. People talk about all kinds of things on Twitter from what they had for breakfast to breaking news stories. To keep things lively, Twitter imposes a limit of just 140 characters in your “tweets” which is the term used to describe your communiqué. That’s kind of an interesting challenge and, if nothing else, teaches us to tear out all the fluff and get directly to the point. The object of the Twitter game is to collect as many followers as possible who are willing to check in on what you have to say. To be perfectly honest, most probably don’t really care what you have to say they are simply adding you to the rest of the people they follow in hopes that you will return the favor and follow them. The more followers they have, the more they look like interesting people to follow. You follow?

There are other networking sites with broad appeal and some that simply serve niches but I am not familiar enough with any of them to offer any advice. What all these social sites do have in common is that hardly any existed until just a few years ago, people flock to them in droves, none of them seem to make any money, large companies are salivating to buy one.

In a world where phones are more useful as web browsers than for talking and we wonder how the postal service even stays in business, the future of how people connect and stay in touch will at minimum be fascinating to observe.

Gusto

Last Saturday I went to the hootenanny in Mountain View, Arkansas with my oldest daughter. For those who have never been to the hootenanny, it's an open air bluegrass concert held on the town square in Mountain View on Saturday nights. But I'll tell you this: the best music is not on center stage, it's along the side streets in gazebos and under shade trees or beneath shop overhangs.

We attended on a warm, early summer evening and stopped at a few different spots, sampling the music at each. These are local musicians and bands which makes the quality of the bluegrass singing and playing all that much more impressive. Fiddle players, guitar strummers, bass players and banjo pickers weave in and out of impromptu ensembles, find the key, pick up the beat and join in seamlessly.

We stopped to listen to one group comprised of about nine members - a lead guitar, bass, banjo, rhythm guitar, a mandolin, three fiddlers and one young boy of about ten or eleven who played a pretty mean guitar, sang several tunes and whooped, hollered and had about a fine a time as anyone there.

That's a pretty tough age to be so bold when peer pressure begins to emphasize conformity to whatever the group's standards are at the time. Picking bluegrass tunes is usually not one of those norms even in Mountain View. But watching that young man stomp his foot, shout, challenge the adult musicians and play his guitar with reckless abandon, I doubt he really cared what his classmates would think. We spent most of the evening watching that boy and his orchestra, and it was like witnessing a metamorphosis. The young man had found his passion in life and I truly hoped he would stay with it no matter what, even if he taught school, managed a business or changed tires for a living, I hoped he would stick with his passion.

And that is what is so attractive to me about a hootenanny. People walking around with their instruments looking for a venue to make music. Young people, old people, men, women, children, all pursuing their passion for music any way they can. I like bluegrass music all right, I have pretty eclectic taste in music and listen to lots of different kinds from classical to rock, country to jazz, but I can't say I choose bluegrass if offered up alongside other styles. It's more the being amazed at someone's fingers picking guitar strings so quickly the hand seems a blur or watching them close their eyes as they pull a bow across the neck of a fiddle.

For me, attending hootenannies is like watching American Hot Rod or Orange County Choppers on TV. I'm not much into custom rods or bikes but I enjoy watching for the sake of finding builders who will give anything to follow their dreams. They have discovered their passion, and they are living that passion in whatever shape it takes.

Any of us lucky enough to find our true passions in life, those things that make us so joyful our souls whoop and we sing no matter who is listening, are the ones truly blessed. Anything could be waiting out there for us to discover about ourselves and what we find as our passion, our way to express our creative energy - bluegrass music, building hot rods, teaching, taking care of a family, writing, photography - the discovery is well worth the pursuit.

The Scent of a Memory

I like the way a familiar scent in just the right context can evoke a long forgotten memory and transport me back to another time.

Last weekend, I was in the Wal-Mart parking lot headed toward the store to start the weekly grocery shopping. It was cool but sunny, very mild weather. A two-ton Ford dually motored slowly past, the driver in search of a parking space wide enough to accommodate his rig. As the truck passed by, the oil-laden scent of diesel exhaust was left behind like a boat’s wake.

Immediately, I was reminded of a bus exhaust, which took me back to my youth, to grade-school and a class trip. We went to Chicago that day to see Midway Airport and take a boat ride on the Chicago River.

Midway, I recall, was kind of boring. It was a long drive through heavy traffic on city streets and all of us sitting near the back of the bus, which afforded the least comfortable ride and the one we sought, speculated that our driver was lost and we were only going to Midway because he happened to see it and thought it was ideally suited for a bunch of sixth graders. Midway was the second airport and still is. Low fare airlines serve the field and I remember the terminal at that time being rather run down and few people milled about the ramps, fewer than one would expect for such a large city. It was no O’Hare that was certain.

Why exactly we were at Midway is fuzzy to me. We watched planes come and go and stared at people incessantly and maybe that’s why I don’t remember the reason for our visit. I wasn’t listening. Or maybe our bus banter was correct and we were only there because we were lost. Whatever the reason, we were not there very long before heading deeper into the heart of the city to catch our boat ride.

We were propelled through Chicago on a wide and pristine excursion craft and my first thought was why the city dyed the river green every St. Patrick’s Day. The river’s natural color, it was quite apparent to me, was already green although a sort of dark, thick green that did not match the festive coats and hats worn by St. Patrick’s Day revelers. I wasn’t sure the dye they dumped in during March would cover up the dingy green of that river and make it festive, too.

The cruise wandered its way along waters that flowed between the tall buildings of downtown Chicago like a river cut through a canyon. I remember seeing Marina Towers, fairly new at that time, and was both fascinated and frightened to see cars parked several stories high and right at the edge of the building. I recognized the Tribune Tower and the Mercantile Exchange from photos I had seen but the rest were nameless structures of cold steel and glittering glass, breathtaking yet sterile.

The air temperature dropped quickly as we approached Lake Michigan and the clean scent of cool, fresh water was on the breeze. But before the lake, another first for me as our boat entered a lock that had been put in place years earlier to reverse the flow of the river and keep Chicago’s trash and sewage from contaminating its water supply.

Not a comfortable situation for someone who might be claustrophobic, the boat entered the lock, stopped and we found ourselves several feet below ground level. The gate behind us closed slowly and we were locked in place. The gate in front of us began to open, even more slowly than the one behind us had closed, and our craft started to rise as we watched Lake Michigan pouring into the opening that grew bigger by the second.

At last we were at lake level and our tour boat made way into a wide open expanse of water with Navy Pier to our left and Meigs Field and the museums to our right. Sailboats and pleasure craft scurried about the lake and it was as if we were savoring the sweet taste of freedom after being encased in steel.

But our excursion ended soon enough and we returned to the lock, the canyon of buildings and finally our port. The boat trip lasted about an hour and a half but the memories are still with me all these years. And they were all brought back to mind by the scent of diesel exhaust.

Trout Fishing Camp

Last weekend I got to go trout fishing on the river. Well, that is to say I expected to go trout fishing but the river was up big and the trout refused to bite so I ended up hunting instead - for morel mushrooms. That's the subject of another post in another blog which you can read here if you'd like: The Morel of the Story.

Being out there on the river is one of my favorite places and my weekend trip reminded me of another time when the water was lower and the fish more cooperative.

It was a camping trip that weekend and cool water flowing down the valley provided relief to a warm summer day. We pitched the tent and set out to catch a few rainbow before supper. A lack of rain that year made the river run low and clear, crystal enough to see the bottom with ease and spy the trout we hoped to catch.

I really can't recall how many fish we caught that day, just that it was calm, relaxed and enjoyable. That night was a contrast as we awoke to the sound of something rustling the trash only to discover a couple of hungry skunks poking around just a few feet from the tent. Being at eye level to an animal known to present a pungent liquid defense when provoked was unsettling to say the least.

But we awoke the next morning unscathed and with no more odor than your typical camping trip so we were ready to head out and catch breakfast.

Cold water released from upstream dams was reacting with the warm air and a dense fog had settled across the top of the river completely obscuring it. Only the sound of water flowing by, licking downed limbs and old tree roots somewhere underneath that blanket of fog let us know the river was still out there somewhere.

We were hungry and not about to let a lack of vision keep us from our appointed rounds so we launched the boat and headed out in search of rainbow. While seeing straight ahead, or for that matter left, right, behind or above us, proved nearly impossible, we did find out that the river was as gin clear as it had been the day before.

We motored upstream slowly and carefully as it was hard to get our bearings and just as difficult to determine whether we had joined any other fishermen who may be anchored or, worse, headed downstream toward us. Fog has a way of playing with the senses, not only blinding us but also making sounds project differently. Any noise we made in the boat seemed amplified as it bounced off the thick air while that same heavy fog made it tough to figure out where sounds away from us were located.

It made little sense to progress much further as it was not really possible to tell where we were going anyway, so we stopped, threw out the anchor and tossed in the lines. In a matter of seconds the first fish was on and it was followed closely by the second, third and fourth. In no time at all, we had caught our limit of nice sized rainbow trout which made a perfect compliment to fresh eggs, fried potatoes and campfire biscuits.

Sunny Days

Last night’s snow looked like spray-on flock, the kind you can buy at Christmas to add a wintry touch to decorations. But it had little time to celebrate as the morning sun melted it away, giving a long drink to tulips and redbuds.

What a great day for a walk so I laced on my sneakers and headed outside. This time of year, everything looks brighter, more detailed than in winter. In winter, everything looks smudged, devoid of color except for the usual earthy browns, cold grays, stark blacks. Maybe it’s the angle of the sun, maybe it’s just that color is returning to the world again, but everything looked clearer, more vivid than it did just a few weeks ago.

The wind harbored a hint of winter chill but the sun was warm on my face. It reminded me of growing up in Indiana this time of year. Actually, this time of year in Indiana comes a few weeks later than it does here in the Ozarks so it really reminded me of Indiana in mid-April. That’s when it felt as though the long stretch of short days and overcast skies had finally passed, that it was time to oil baseball gloves, shove winter coats to the back of the closet and reacquaint ourselves with t-shirts and shorts. School days would pass soon enough though never soon enough for a student and we would find ourselves at the uphill end of another warm summer full of play, adventure, bike rides, swings and completely void of the stress, the strain of learning.

Early spring was a period of time-lapse photography because the world seemed to have suddenly picked up steam. We saw it happen then as we do now. Trees that were nothing more than sticks arranged to look like branches overnight grew buds that blossomed then produced leaves in no more time than they did in the documentaries we watched in class. Bare earth one morning gave way to jonquils then hyacinths then tulips all in a matter of seconds, or so it seemed in the early part of spring. Lawns greened and people started coming out of their houses again to look at them, and to soak in the color that had been so lacking in their winter solitude.

And finally, a day like today, a day so full of promise that winter had passed and spring was with us at last.

This is the best time of year, and a time of year we are blessed to see in all the seasons of our own lives, a time when we bear witness to the rebirth of nature.

Hidden Brook

Water had furrowed the rocks the way time etches an old man's face. The flow was steady, patient, and the water had clearly expended much of its efforts either carving pathways to follow or sanding smooth the stone beneath it in a time honored journey to the sea.

Ignoring rocks it had befriended eons earlier, the brook disappeared below the surface only to find its path again a few yards later, a trickle then a stream and finally, a shallow pool which refused to impede progress as water softly fell like streams of spring rain over a terrace of stone built with the loving, artistic hands of someone far more patient and with far more time than man.

Beware the Ides

March, cruelest of months
Teases with warmth, buds, blooms
Scorns with sleet, snow, wind.
Jonquils, maples, forsythia smile
When the days reach sixty or seventy
Only to be slapped with an icy fury
When the days struggle even for twenty.
Used to bitter betrayals
The blossoms have learned
Do not trust this month
Do not plan to flourish
Just be there to sentinel
For the ones in April.

March, cruelest of months
Forever making promises
It never intends to keep.