Thoughts and Policy for Building a Better Pennsylvania

Great Chesterton Quote

Every time I dip into a book by G.K. Chesterton I wonder why I didn’t return sooner. Here is a quote that caught my attention while I was reading “The Everlasting Man”.

“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only a single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”

(emphasis mine)

True words, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, may we never relinquish the duty of the watch.

Canoeing through Lancaster

Yesterday my lovely wife and I had a grand adventure. Alas no pictures because I left the camera at home.

We hopped in a canoe and proceeded to paddle roughly 30 mile through the heart of Lancaster, right through the city, under 23, 462, 272, 741. It was fun, tiring and created quite the sunburn let me tell ya.

Probably the neatest thing was to see the places I have driven near hundreds of times, but this time I was seeing them from a different perspective. Who knew such elegant mansions and drab slums could share the same river and only be separated by a few tenths of a mile.

The more I get out and enjoy nature the more I become a environmentalist. Something about paddling past and through the various sewers emptying into the river will do that to you. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for good clean sewage, it helps things to grow, but what I’m not for is the white bubbling mass that covers sections of the river and hisses and steams as you paddle through it. We did get to see hundreds of ducks, kingfishers, herons, I saw a fawn, but none of these animals were anywhere near the sewer runoff. Coincidence?

Being Accessible and NPR

If I synthesized every bit of advice I’ve given to people on “how to use the internet effectively” it would look like this…

Be Real and Be Accessible

By being real and accessible you do two things.

First you aren’t full of hype, people like honesty and they don’t like fake stuff. Sure lying can work in the short term but long term it completely fails, and here is a secret, the internet is long term. If you put it up it can stay up 4-ev-er!

Second the internet is used for communicating, as will all other communicating audience participation is key, people want to feel involved, relevant and important. This is why we have talk radio instead of monologue radio, American Idol instead of “listen to a famous person sing” it’s by blogging is huge and why the wall on facebook is the thing you really care about.

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People don’t want to listen all the time, they want to talk back.

Here is a recent story that illustrates this perfectly

NPR has a new radio program called the Bryant Park Project (BPP) they interview regular people about unique things.

They also blog – they use Twitter – and facebook

I first started following them on Twitter then started listening to their show every now and then.

They tweeted about the California ruling (which I had just blogged about) and mentioned their blog

I went to the blog and commented [right over here]

They emailed me and asked if I would do an interview

I said yes

They called and we chatted for about 10-15 minutes

I hung up

They put a few seconds on the radio

[link – here it is]

Analyze:

NPR the BPP included me and made me feel relevant, I got chosen because I was real (a real live homeschool graduate) and I was accessible, I was on Twitter, I commented on their blog. Now I’m more likely to talk about the BPP and now I’m their friend on facebook. A win for them and a win for me, this is the internet done well.

That’s all.

Be Real and Be Accessible!

questions, comments, interviews, let’s talk 🙂
ethandemme@gmail.com 717-556-0333

Taking the Internet Local

Update:
Twitter now has a way to find other local tweeters with it’s new search feature, so I’ve created a new twitter account to connect with local tweeters, click here to follow Twitter.com/EthanD_Local

*warning major geek talk used in this post, if you don’t understand what the heck I’m talking about don’t worry 🙂

Hello my name is Ethan and I am a tech geek…. hi ethan

Twitter

I spend a lot of time on the internets and have “virtually” met tons of really cool people. I have actually met quite a few of these people in real life. First through Xanga I met some great people then met them for real when I traveled to California. I them met some more folks via twitter down in Washington DC both at the Heritage foundation’s modern media strategies workshop and at CPAC.

But there are a ton of cool people in the world and I can’t “follow” all of them.

So in my ruminations of this subject I have decided that the megatrend is for people worldwide to connect but the counter trend is for the Internet to get very local.

One tool that I’ve begun using to achieve the local nature of the internet is Twitter.com. I discovered @KnownHuman while using the Super tuesday Google Maps/Twitter mashup which would display election related tweets via their location on Google maps.

And when he tweets about local supermarkets I am much more interested than when @scobleizer tweets about a restaurant in Southern California. This local interest makes the internet much more engaging.

So I went on a quest to find all the people in Lancaster, PA on Twitter, I used google to search site:twitter.com location lancaster pa

hat tip to Radical Behavior

And I found several people whom I am now following.

Here is my local list for Tweeter’s in Lancaster, PA If you know of any more please leave a comment

Matthew Harrington
@penti

Lon Farenwald
@lfaren
http://ghostwheel.net/

P. Bradley Robb
@KnownHuman
http://www.bradleyrobb.net/

Ethan Demme (me)
@ethand
http://ethandemme.com

Paul Rothrock
@icelander
http://www.movetoiceland.com/

Josh Babetski
@quixado
http://www.quixoticbravado.com/

@tracibabe

Kristofer Harzinski
@kharzinski
http://www.krisharzinski.org/

Morgan Kochel
@Alkhemist
http://www.ziki.com/en/alkhemist
http://zodpa.blogspot.com/

Admittedly this works well in a small non techie town like Lancaster Pennsylvania but try it out and see who you can find.

Comments?

Blogging with disabilities

I ran across this interesting blog today [pwds.wordpress.com]

The blog is about “People With Disabilities in Cambodia” and is run by Heng Phan who described the blogs purpose as this, “My goal just want to share some reality of the Cambodian Poor People living with in the communities, especially about the disabled persons and children with disabilities.”

One of the posts was about a new training course to teach Cambodians with disabilities how to blog.

Throught this training course we hope that they will knew: What is the new free technology media: What is Blog? How is Blog working? How to create Blog? What is the advantage of the Blog? we hope Cambodian disabled people understand and will have abilities to create and use Blog and will knew cleary about the advantage of using the new free technology media system.

Their goal through all of this is to “Help Disabled People to Help Themselves”

Personally I think this is awesome! and I hope the training goes well. I’ve been sort of involved with Joni and Friends eastern PA and hopefully will be helping them get started in the blogging world. Blogging and other social media could have a great impact on the disabled community. Joni and friends has several family camps during the year and could easily use blogging and social networking to keep in touch during the year.

There is a lot of bad stuff in the world but I am constantly encouraged by hearing the good news of people reaching out and helping each other.