Unspeakable Sadness

Steven Curtis Chapman is one of my favorite musicians, and has been probably for the better part of two decades. I love his upbeat songs and how they display the infectious enthusiasm of his faith, and yet he also  writes poignant pieces that plumb the depths of human experience and the Christian life.

I also have admired not just how he writes and performs songs that capture deep truth, but how he lives his life. He’s a dedicated dad, which you’ll see on his YouTube channel, and whereas Lisa and I got our six children the old-fashioned way (and one at a time), Steven and Mary Beth filled out their half-dozen by adopting three girls from China, illustrating the redeeming love of God that crosses oceans (and more) to bring people into his family.

Last Wednesday their family was struck by tragedy, as their youngest daughter, Maria was killed in their driveway when she was hit by vehicle driven by an older son. Here’s a tribute to Maria, set to a song Steven wrote about the importance of cherishing each moment with children. In the best of circumstances they grow up before you realize it. And you can’t take any day with them for granted.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay1vgulzR8I]

Here’s a Facebook group you can join to express condolences to and solidarity with the Chapman family.

One of the benefits of the large family Lisa and I have (with kids from 9 to 22, and one of them married), is that we still have some young ones when the older two have moved out of the house. We realize how quickly they grow, so we can cherish them as we should.

On this Memorial Day, which was rightly established to honor those who gave their lives for our freedom, I hope you will also remember the Chapman family, and that you will give your loved ones an extra hug.

Life is a Vapor.

Chancellor in Computerworld

A couple of weeks ago I got a request from Julie Sartain, who writes for Computerworld, to summarize what I’ve been saying about the business benefits of Facebook. I was delighted to contribute toward her article, which is available on-line today.

Here’s an excerpt:

But some companies just don’t get it. Aase compared these new opportunities for businesses to the adoption of early fax technology around 1990. Companies could suddenly receive customer purchase orders by fax instead of FedEx, a huge savings in time and dollars, and well worth the cost of the machine and the monthly charges for the additional phone lines.

If AT&T had offered all this for free, would anyone have declined? he asked. “Social networking sites like Facebook are a much more advanced communications phenomenon than the fax, but not only are many businesses failing to take advantage of these free communication services; some actively block employees from using social networks,” Aase said.

The full article is recommended reading for all SMUG students, and for anyone else looking for an overview of some of the practical business benefits of Facebook and MySpace. My Facebook friend Jeremiah Owyang also is quoted extensively…a lot more extensively than I am, but then he should since he’s a Forrester analyst.

If you’re new to Social Media University, Global, you can visit our Student Union in Facebook, or audit some classes that are part of the core curriculum. Here’s a Message from the Chancellor that gives you an overview and introduction to our educational philosophy, and you can read all of my posts related to Facebook here.

High-Speed Blogging (In a Sense)

This is a REALLY cool new benefit of my daily commute on Rochester City Lines. We now have WiFi on the bus!

I took a little video of one of my bus buddies, Dave, asking him what he thinks about this new service, and tried uploading to YouTube while we were traveling. I will likely be posting that video likely when I get home, because with the speed of the connection I have my doubts as to whether it will be done by the time I get off the bus.

This is a combination that show both how cool the Flip video camera is, and what you can do with bus WiFi.

I will say that the speed of the WiFi is slow (at least today.) So when I call this high-speed blogging, it’s referring to my velocity through space (about 60 mph), not the bandwidth. I’m just going to publish now, and will embed the video from home.

Video blogging may not be the best commuting application, but I’m thinking Twittering would be great.

Thanks to Rochester City Lines for providing this new service!

Updated: Here’s the video referenced above. Not likely to become a viral sensation, but an example of what you can do really quickly with the Flip (and with mobile WiFi on the bus.) Considering that I started this post about 90 minutes ago, it’s not too bad. You get to see what this bus-WiFi unit looks like, and I get to embarrass my buddy Dave.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xSejq54bRk]

Blogging Platforms Compared

Note: This post is Blogging 105, part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global.

In developing the curriculum for Social Media University, Global I had originally planned to have Blogging 105 be about the pros and cons of WordPress.com and WordPress, with Blogging 106 and 107 providing the same analysis for Blogger and Typepad/Movable Type, respectively.

If someone wants to write those posts (106 and 107), I would be glad to have you join the SMUG faculty as a visiting professor. But given limited time (and my increasing satisfaction with WordPress.com and WordPress), I will focus on why this platform is both a great way to get started with blogging, and also why it provides flexibility for growth as you become more serious about it.

I have limited experience with both Blogger and Typepad. They’re both fine, and their major advantages from my perspective is that you can embed flash-based widgets, which is something you can’t do, for security reasons, on WordPress.com. That lets you put all those sharing icons like this:

…at the bottom of your posts. I had a friend describe WordPress.com as “Digg-proof,” which is a limitation, I suppose. You can overcome it by moving to a WordPress installation on a rented server, however, so it’s not a crucial deficiency in WordPress.com, from my perspective. And I guess it helps with security, so some malicious Flash application can’t bring down thousands of WordPress.com blogs

WordPress.com Benefits

  • It’s free, and comes with 3 gigs of storage for photos and documents. No credit card needed to get going. No 14-day free trial. You can start now in about 30 seconds, and could quite possibly blog long-term without spending a penny.
  • If you’re nervous about starting, you can make your blog private and get hands-on experience without anyone seeing. (Or if you want to get experience in a blogging playground, check out the Training Wheels blog, where I would be happy to make you an Author.)
  • It’s Open Source, so lots of unpaid programmers are adding cool features really rapidly.
  • You can embed YouTube or Google videos (and some other types), as well as Slideshare.net slide shows.
  • If you want to use WordPress.com as a podcast server, you can pay another $20 a year to upgrade your storage to 8 gigs, and to enable you to upload mp3 or video files. (More on this soon.)
  • Bandwidth is unlimited and free. If you can upload it to WordPress.com, your blog visitors can download it. It doesn’t matter how many of them visit.
  • You can create workflows for an editorial process. You have a hierarchy that runs from Contributor (can write posts but can’t publish) to Author (can publish and edit own posts) to Editor (can edit anyone’s posts) to Administrator (can do all of the above plus add or delete users and change blog design.) So if you want people to be able to write posts but want a quality check before they go live, you can have that process built into your publishing tool.
  • URLs are in plain English, and you can edit them for search engine benefits. For example, I have given this post a URL that ends …global/blogging-platforms-compared/. Google looks at that URL and deduces that this post might just be about comparing blogging platforms. So if anyone searches on those terms, I’ll be likely to come up higher in the rankings than if I had a Typepad URL like …/blogging-platfo.html
  • Upgrade costs are minimal. For $15 a year you can customize the look and feel of your blog, as we did here and here and here. For $10 a year you can map your blog to another domain or subdomain (see the same examples, as well as the domain name you see in your browser right now), although it may cost you another $10 to register a domain name (like social-media-university-global.org). I already mentioned the $20 a year fee for 5 gigs of extra storage, and for $30 you can have an unlimited number of private users. Add it all up and you’d have a hard time finding a way to spend over $100 a year on a fully featured WordPress.com blog. A comparably equipped TypePad blog would be at least $300 a year, and more likely $900.
  • If your blog becomes wildly successful and you want to start offering Google Adwords or Flash-based applications, you can transfer your blog from wordpress.com to a server you control (and that you can rent for maybe $10 a month.) Just update your server’s IP address with your registrar, and you can make the move without losing any links.

As I said earlier, I would welcome as a visiting professor anyone who would want to explore the pros and cons of either Blogger or Typepad in a guest post. Or if you have experiences with any of these platforms that you would like to share in the comments, please do!

Otherwise, what are you waiting for? Get started with WordPress.com now.

Stephen Covey’s Mayo Clinic Lecture

The Donald C. Ozmun and Donald B. Ozmun and Family Lecture brings prominent academic and business leaders to Mayo Clinic to discuss management issues of interest to employees. This afternoon, Stephen Covey, Ph.D., presented “The Eighth Habit: from Effectiveness to Greatness.”

Dr. Covey (here is his blog) gave the address live from our Arizona campus, with videoconferencing to Jacksonville, Fla. and Rochester, Minn. Here are some of the highlights:

Covey says empowering shared mission statements are produced when:

  • There are enough people
  • who are fully informed
  • and are interacting freely and synergistically
  • in an environment of high trust

Covey says this Principle-Centered DNA is gradually overlaid by Cultural DNA (that is individualistic and comparison-based) in most people and organizations. He says the strength of Mayo Clinic is that it is peeling back the Cultural DNA to get at the underlying Principle-Centered roots.

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