GEOpdx

I was feeling kinda guilty that I hadn't responded to a mail message in Facebook so I decided to log into the service.  I navigated to the message page and clicked on the message I needed to open and... BLOCKED!

There are several third party clients that integrate Facebook updates but none of them re-imagine the service like this one built by Microsoft in Silverlight 4. I've known about it for a while but finally tried it for the first time today.  The client allows you to organize Facebook content into a grid or cascading photo mosaic and was very cool on my LCD tv.   Pretty slick.

One day I was sitting in my living room and my wife said "you should check out Facebook"

...and I did. And I found it to be deeply interesting. I immediately tried to find people in my local professional community (mostly government and GIS folks). I couldn't really get connected to those people through facebook and I was a bit dissatisfied.

So my wife came in and said, "Now you should check out Twitter."

...and I did that too. Except I said, "what the hell is this good for!" and went back to facebook for 2 months.

I was wasting time in the office one day and decided to check out a twitter web site called monitter.com. I searched for GIS and discovered a conference that was being live tweeted. I got involved in the confernce from my desk and figured out that twitter had a value.

In fact, twitter is "Fucking Awsome!" (swearing for emphasis and authenticity.)

So I dove into twitter and discovered real Social Media for the first time. It was fun for about a week until I realized that I had more to say. Some of my twitter friends (more like people I followed at this point) had blogs.

I said, "I know, I'll start a blog."

So the big question was "what the hell is this blog going to be about?"

After a very short period of thinking about it (5 mins) I decided I would blog about how my professional community could leverage social media to collaborate and connect. This sounds altruistic but wasn't. I really couldn't think of anything else. I'm more of a linear thinker than a creative type.

So here I am, Months later. Strangely the idea grew on me and I am, in fact, pretty stoked about the effort. Reaching out to people through my blog, twitter, and many other sites has helped me to find some great relationships. Somewhere along the road I also realized that engaging my family, coworkers, and local community was more important than I originally thought as well. I do more of that now too.