faboo mama

I’ve discovered a whole new world on the internet through this whole social media thing. Even though there is a large amount of wankerism there, I’ve discovered people via social media sites that I would have never have learned about before. Tech people for example. I’m not interested in the tech world online, despite my love of gadgets and technology. Why? So much dick-swinging and not enough meat. Like the liberal blogosphere, there’s a lot of internal drama that everyone gets wrapped up in, but doesn’t ever come close to affecting the other 5 billion people in the world. So, I’d search out gadgets, but ignore names. As I’ve learned over the past few days, I was right to do so. You think Matt Stoller is an insufferable buffoon? Some of these tech guys make Stoller look humble.

Naturally, there’s the B-Z list bloggers who hate the A-list bloggers and all that crap and like so many in the liberal blogosphere, they suck at the writing and analyzing but prevail at the link-making. Every once in awhile, you find gems like Eric Rice, Wayne Sutton and Louis Gray. I’ve “met” these 3 guys in the last month and they all seem to be doing their own thing, having fun, utilizing the tools available without feeling the need to crap on everyone else.

Which brings me to FriendFeed. I “met” Eric Rice via Seesmic. When I found out about FriendFeed, I found him there and subscribed to him. That was when I learned that he was much more than just a tech-geek and fellow Metblogger. FriendFeed has a feature that I found annoying at first; it’ll list random items from friend of friends. It was that feature that I learned of Louis Gray. He was a friend of a friend of two people I subscribed too. I like his writing style, but more importantly I loved the tech-focused articles he’d share on FF. I quickly subscribed. Through Louis Gray, I learned of a guy I had just noticed popping up every once in a while on seesmic: Wayne Sutton. I found out that Sutton is like a tech-god, especially across the country in the east coast version of Silicon Valley.

I was unable to attend the recent (and successful) Blogging While Brown Conference. I saw on FriendFeed that Sutton had a post on Seesmic. So, I popped onto Seesmic and asked if he knew anyone who wanted to go. He contacted me, and suggested Corvida Raven. I was able to get in contact with her and see if she could use my ticket. Without these contacts, it’s quite possible that my ticket would have gone to waste.

It was also through FriendFeed, I learned of a new toy: Wordle.

So, this is a really long way of saying I take back almost all of what I said about social networking sites before, though I’m still not getting a Facebook profile.

That’s right, I won the Easy Green Living book by Renée Loux that was being given away on Seesmic. Want to watch the whole thing? Below is the video of the when Ms. Loux took our questions on what we viewed as important in living “green”:

Yes, that’s not Renée, but if you click on it, you’ll see here (yes, I’m laughing at a pretty frantic email I received).

About a week and some days later, the winner was announced:

I laughed. I cried. I want to thank the Academy…

Then today…the book arrived:

I’m kinda busy with work, but I’ve had a chance to flip through the book and it’s pretty interesting. There are a lot of items in the book that I already own/buy not because of any greenness on my part, but because of price, locality and prettiness/smells. The book is more a shopping guide than a lifestyle guide, IMO, but even flipping through it, it was struck by how many items in the book are things you don’t really need in life. Or the lack of actual greenness of them, i.e. paper towels/napkins. It’s much more green to use cloth towels, and thankfully, the author does point that out. Which brings me to the second cool thing about the book.

Everything is pretty accessible to anyone who can read and shows that you don’t have to drop big $$$ to be green which is stunning to me considering Loux hosts a show on Fine Living. The best part is that Loux does explain why certain things are better than others. Unlike other “green” books, there doesn’t seem to be those not-so-unsubtle judgment calls on your purchases. Take the section on cookware. It’s extremely detailed explaining why Teflon or non-stick cookware isn’t in your best interest vs. stainless steel or cast iron cookware.

Check out the book at your local library or you can find at Powell’s.

Seesmic on my blog 

This is what happens when you mix lack of coffee and lack of sleep.

You’re probably wondering what happened to me.  Well, I had to take a break…I’m bored with the campaign, annoyed with bloggers and I found a new distraction.  Y’all know I’m not big on social networking.  I can barely keep up with my meatfriends, so the idea of digitalfriends is daunting.

Then along came seesmic.

Now, I’m vlogging…sort of.  It’s a pretty neat forum and I’ve met some supercool people from around the world.  It’s such a breath of fresh air from the liberal blogosphere and afrosphere that I kind of got hooked.  To make matters worse, most of the people on seesmic are very active in the techworld, so I’m learnning a lot f new stuff and hear about a lot of new stuff.

So, now I’ve got a twitter account and signed up this morning for plurk.  You can add me on either of them and of course, you can also find me in the communities listed over there ——>.

See ya ’round the interwebs!

So, I’m testing this seesmic thing. We got it over at LA Metblogs, so people can leave a comment in video. You can twitter it, but I don’t twitter, so…