Last post on Blogger

After nearly 8 years of living in its Blogger home, my blog has now moved to its new home on Wordpress. The content is all there, but under the hood, I am happy to have a better engine powering it.

To get to it, point your browser to: http://askmanny.com
(the next few hours, while the change of name servers propagates, you may or may not be taken to the right place... but give it enough time and AskManny.com will soon be in Wordpress.)

Thanks to my friend Danilo Campos (who is also now a Bay area neighbor) who gave me a hand setting it up!

Cambio y fuera, Blogger!

My Favorite Kind of Captcha

Know those semi-cryptic wavy characters that you need to type back in when trying to link to a web site on Facebook or sign up for some web services? They are known as captchas and, in case you are wondering, they are there to try to keep spammers at bay (though spammers are never shy of exploiting good people around the world and pay them to sit at terminals typing these in for pennies an hour...)

This morning (probably the result of not enough sleep or coffee... or both), I was wondering what my favorite kind of captcha was. There are, of course, the ones so cryptic that it takes a true calligrapher to tell what the heck they say! I am sure those keep spammers at bay, but they probably also keep REAL people at bay, because they are so hard to read! :(

So, I guess my favorite kind of captcha is the one I encounter in Facebook:

I can not only read the words, but it also provides a certain level of entertainment, because they are real words ("wagons" and "unfair" in this case) that leave me wondering sometimes what the connection may be between them... Are wagons unfair? Is it unfair to ride a wagon? What's a wagon? What's fair...?

See? Next time, I will get more sleep or get more coffee into my system before I blog! :)

NutShellMail Making Life Easier in Social Media Land

Last week I learned about NutShellMail. They dub themselves as the "DVR for your social networks" and the more I think of it, the more I agree with the name... and the more I am liking the service. So much, that we rolled out NutShellMail on TuDiabetes this week.

What do I like about it? I am constantly on top of 3-4 sites that I monitor for content and conversations, among them TuDiabetes and EsTuDiabetes (of course) but also, Twitter and Facebook, where I spend most of my social media time these days.

NutShellMail precisely hits the sweet spot, by allowing me to configure the combination of updates (from the combination of sites -my network on Ning + Facebook or not + Twitter if I want to), and sends me an update via email up to 3 times per day.

"Email?!!" you may say. Yes. I find it convenient, b/c it combines updates in a single place that happens to be another space I spend quite a bit of time on (my inbox). So, while it may not be for everyone, I find it to suit my needs and I highly recommend it!

Do Facebook, Twitter and Ning compete? They do... for our time

This weekend, I was reading the interview of Techcrunch with Gina Bianchini (CEO of Ning) in Davos. In it, Gina argues that that she doesn't see Nign as a competitor of Facebook or Twitter.



I agree with Gina's statement to a certain extent. Quote:

"Facebook... is actually going more in the direction of connecting you with the people you have strong relationships with your real identity, with status messages, and with photo sharing... Twitter’s about news and real time events."

Ning instead is about building (strong) relationships with people you may not know in real life. So they overlap nicely to a certain degree, in terms of what they allow you as an individual or as a business to do.

But I still feel they are in direct competition, not only against each other but with all other things that pull us in different directions in our lives. We each may belong to dozens of social networks (online), be a part of multiple networks (offline -think your children's PTA, homehowner's associations, trade groups, etc.) and each of these expect a chunk of our time. No matter how effective we are, days are still 24 hours long and we have a few hours we need to sleep every day. So in the end Ning, Facebook, Twitter and all manifestations of social media in our lives are in direct competition for our most valuable asset: time.

How do you manage your time in social media?

People who NEED Healthcare reform NOW!

Impeccable words from Ed Schultz after his visit to a Free Clinic in Connecticut. 

So embarrassing that the country that rightly prides itself to make so many things possible for so many people lets so many live in these conditions!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

First Massive Attack album in 7 Years

Social Media for Nonprofits

Last Friday, I had the great opportunity to deliver a morning and an afternoon session of a workshop titled Social Media for Nonprofits to approximately 20 projects under the fiscal sponsorship of Community Initiatives.

These are the slides from the presentation (with a few enhancements I made to them thanks to the feedback I got from participants). Feel free to contact me, if you have any questions or if you feel I can be of assistance to your group. You can download the presentation if you prefer watching it offline.

Social Media For Nonprofits

View my other presentations about the use of social media.


References:

• What the  f**k is social media (one year later)
• Web Communications Strategy 

Photo credits:

•  Conversation, NYC, 1970
• Who’s The Dick Writing Comments On My Blog
• Getting facetime with Facebook’s CEO
• Twitter bird logo icon illustration
  

Who moved my healthcare reform?

This week has brought several pieces of political news that have left me wondering about the future of life in the US.

One of them has to do with the election of the GOP candidate in Massachusetts, which resulted in the disappearance of the filibuster-proof majority the Democrats had in the Senate. While having a balance in power is good, one big concern I now have is what will this do to health care reform.

I can't think of better words to express this concern than the ones written by this gentleman in his letter to the editor of his local newspaper:

... the results of the special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat threatens to undermine the health care reform process in our country. It is ironic that Massachusetts has led the nation in providing for the health care of 99 percent of state residents but the majority of people in our commonwealth reject health care coverage to 30 million of our fellow citizens.

This is the situation as the Senate awaits for a merged bill to come from the House. However, even the prospects for a combined version to pass through the House are bleak as indicated by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Quoting from the Financial Times report:

In its present form, I don't think it's possible to pass the Senate bill in the House," Ms Pelosi told reporters yesterday, after struggling to persuade liberal Democrats in the House to support the Senate's healthcare plan, which is not as expansive as their own. "I don't see the votes for it at this time."

The second piece of news that concerns me this week is last Thursday's ruling by the US Supreme Court. This is even more concerning because, unlike elections, decisions by the Supreme Court have a very long term impact on the country and the direction things take as a whole over a long time, as opposed to during a shorter period.

In short, as the New York Times explains:

Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

If you want to read the 183-page long decision document, look for Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm'n in the Supreme Court 2009 Decisions page.

The decision is largely based on free-speech principles, under the assumption that corporations are like individuals. There's something fundamentally wrong about this conception, because it gives corporations benefits like those of an individual (free-speech, for instance) while not giving the same more obligations (tax obligations, for example).

It'd be naive to argue that this benefits for-profit corporations on an equal basis as not-for-profit corporations for simple mathematical reasons: for-profit companies, by definition (in order to have money left at the end of the day to distribute among shareholders) will have deeper pockets from which to draw to spend supporting political campaigns. Period!

So, I agree with the President's criticism of the decision (quoting from Huffington Post):

"This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy," the president said in his weekly radio and Internet message. "It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way -- or to punish those who don't."

Don't believe this? Read this article... this article... and go to the Money Trail page on OpenCongress, and see for yourself the volume of pre-2009 campaign contributions pouring from special interest groups into congress (ironically, two of the top recipients of contributions in 2008 were John McCain and Hillary Clinton). Do you honestly think this will improve with this week's court decision? I personally doubt it.

So will healthcare reform take a backseat? Absolutely. But when it's picked up a few weeks from now, what will come out of the debate? I have lost the few hopes I had for something meaningful to result from healthcare reform. Even more so, I am fundamentally saddened by our future prospects as individuals and as patients (insured or not) in the United States.

So, who moved my healthcare reform? I don't know... perhaps it wasn't there in the first place.