Check out causes.com: facebook & elsewhere...

I just discovered the www.causes.com resource and became a fan on facebook. Here is the blog to follow: http://exchange.causes.com/

They do lots of webinars on for example, Creating a Birthday Wish page on facebook to raise money for your favorite cause.

Here is there resources site: http://exchange.causes.com/resources/

More to follow...

Music I've Been Listening To....

Well, I'm addicted now to www.Pandora.com of course. Here are some of my favorite songs/artists as of late:

TO ADD: Seven Nations "King of Oblivion" and explore others...

Dylan Platt

Josh Kelley especially Beautiful Goodbye

Jason Miraz

I'm Yours (youtube) - live version. Also Life is Wonderful (live) and Beautiful Mess (live at the Nobel Peace Prize concert)

Jason Myles Goss

as of 9/12/09 via Pandora: Twilight Serenade plus other links to follow!

Luke Brindley

Local now from Vienna VA of Jammin' Java coffeehouse fame. Saw him and spoke with him in July at a house concert at Elyse Krachman's in Falls Church. Recent favorites include: Hold On to the Mystery (live studio recording) and Lose You Now (official video, with amazing harmonies by Jess Bennett). Plus his version of Bob Dylan's Love Minus Zero/No Limit and Wrecking Ball (Feb.09 at Jammin' Java) and Queen of My Heart (steel guitar is kool). He reminds me of Marc Cohen and John Gorka and Bruce Cockburn combo! Check out his website and progress on recording the new album (fan-funded). And recent interview at Washingtonian magazine. And additional songs to listen to at http://www.myspace.com/lukebrindley.

Crayola Doesn't Make a Color For Your Eyes- Kristin Andreassen & Megan Downes who I discovered on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion.

College accapella groups and competitions (which Sue Lagon introduced me to!) - especially James Madison U. Exit 245 - their amazing version of Fix You is even better than original Coldplay!

Matt Nathanson

Discovered him on Pandora, can't remember who/how. I love love this beautiful one All We Are We Are, from the collection Mad Hope. And here is his acoustic version of it at his home, which also shows his humorous personality. This is the official music video of his "hit" Matt's Come on Get Higher, from his 2007 album Some Mad Hope. "Faith and desire, and the swing of your hips....I can taste the sparks on your tongue..."

Here are the groovy lyrics (which for some reason I can't get to paste in correctly here...).

Other Singer Songwriters I've Recently Discovered...

• Jack Johnson - Here is footage of a live Tower Records concert in 2005, when his CD Better Dreams was released. On and On (2003), Never Know (with lyrics), If I Had Eyes, Good People (with lyrics), Better Together and Breakdown. He collaborated on the music for Curious George 2006 movie soundtrack, which is great for grown-ups too including my favorite Supposed to Be. And the fun Three R Song: Reduce Reuse Recycle (acoustic version with some school kids) and live concert version here with Dave Mathews. And Upside Down, his music video with Curious George. Love Girl I Wanna Lay You Down too, by Zach his accordionist. Also cute cartoon video of Bubble Toes.
• Mat Kearney - Runaway Car from the 2009 cd City of Black and White.
• Colin Linden - Candadian.
• WHO ELSE

Glen Phillips

From Todd the Wet Sproket fame, who my sister Kristen turned me on to: xxx and xxx. http://www.glenphilips.com/ Glen was the main singer-songwriter in the band Toad The Wet Sprocket. He currently records and tours as a solo artist as well as being central to three new bands: Works Progress Administration - WPA - with Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek and Luke Bulla from the Jerry Douglas Band. WPA is an expandable collective also featuring Sara Watkins, Benmont Tench of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Greg Liesz, Pete Thomas of Elvis Costello and the Impostors, and Davey Faragher of Cracker and the Impostors
2.RemoteTreeChildren, with John Askew (Tracker) - music from a parallel universe
3.Plover, with Neilson Hubbard and Garrison Starr

John Gorka

Of course! And who I haven't kept up with in recent years, but I used to be such a groupie at NJ coffee houses back in late 80s/early 90s with Tom Starr! Love love xxxx and xxxx. And his version of The Water is Wide (live for Pete Seeger's 90th bday) just simply makes me cry every time. Gotta love his red shoe laces! People My Age (which I've seen live) shows John's personality at his best: humor, wit, great guitar, amazing voice. One of my all-time favorites of his: Where the Bottles Break, which is even more poignant now than when it was written. And one of the most sweet and lovely: If I Should Forget to Breathe (live). And not to foget the one that always makes me cry: Love is Our Cross to Bear. Great interview with him on youtube in May 2009 in The Hague: here for Part 1, also Part 2 (these include some songs too, like Gypsy Life). New CD planned for Sept. 2009.

Luka Bloom

Acoustic Motorbike and others... links coming soon!

Is Social Media a Fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

Wow, just discovered and watched the Socialnomics video by Eric Qualman with a new book entitled Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. Very compelling short video with stats and demographics, along with a list of factoids and sources.

Here's Eric's definition of Socialnomics:

• Following a recent speech I gave, an audience member had a great question. “If Socialnomics was in Webster’s Dictionary, what would it say?" Depending on if it were user generated content or not it would most likely state: The ability of social media to generate exponential returns for individuals and businesses. A subset of this is that in the future we will no longer search for products and services, rather they will find us via social media.
  
• Those returns could vary for business from leads, sales, brand awareness, customer service. For people the returns can be that more of your friends know you are in New York, staying connected with friends, getting product & service info from friends, promoting your new song, engaging in two-way dialogues with companies, keeping abreast of the latest trends, etc.

So: is social media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Take a view and then decide... more of my thoughts later. He's worth following at http://socialnomics.net/

What I'm Reading Just Now...

One of my favorite (non-fiction) writers is Richard Leider, author of Repacking Your Bags and founding partner of The Inventure Group. His book that I continuously go back to is The Power of Purpose: Creating Meaning in Your Life and Work, which I first discovered in Fall 2001. I'm re-reading it now, as food for thought and positive affirmations for my job search. I've given this book as gifts to many friends. My personal hardcover copy is dog-eared, scribbled about with marginalia, and Post-It flagged throughout....

Some of my favorite take-aways and life lessons from Dick Leider:

• Many of us are questioning life, rather than letting it question us. (p. 13)
• Discovering our unique talents is the power that drives purpose. (115)
• Quoting Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (Flow): We can transform our whole life into a unified flow experience by approaching our activities in a certain way, by pursuing what he calls a "life theme." Any goal or passion can give meaning to a person's life. (122)
• Purpose means using our gifts on what deeply moves us....My new belief became :We have a natural hunger for and deep need for joy in our work." Not the false belief -- that "work is work and not to be enjoyed." (35-37)

Eureka! Or as Oprah would describe it, Leider helped me to uncover this "Aha! moment" -- this deep belief, so deep inside me that I had never before realized it. Because I used to believe that work was not supposed to be something one enjoyed, it was just work. It was what you did from 9 - 5 (or usually longer) each day, and thought about even on weekends, especially deadlines and falling behind on what "had" to get done. (Dan Pink refers to this somewhat in his description of the history of work in his seminal work, Free Agent Nation - love love that book too!)

Well, that all changed when I transitioned to start working in the social sector. And doing work resource development and community outreach work that I did (and do) enjoy... It was then that I discovered that work doesn't "feel like" work, when it is time spent using your natural talents on something that you believe in and are passionate about.

Get inspired and motivated with The Power of Purpose!

Books about Sierra Leone

I'm going to use this blog to collect and save items and websites/blogs that interest me, for whatever reason. I just came across this blog entry with books (both nonfiction and fiction) about life in the west African country of Sierra Leone. Click Take Me Away to Sierra Leone for a list of books from a blog. I especially want to read A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (2007). Here is a summary:

This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces.

Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. (Beah graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.)

Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide. Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Genre: Memoir; Politics; War

I just checked my Fairfax County library online catalog. Amazingly, all 20+ copies system-wide are all checked out! So I just placed a hold, for both the book and also the audio recording. Let's see how long it takes to get to me!

Musings from Diane... initial post

Well, I've finally taken my friends' and colleagues' advice. And created a blog to store and share my musings... about just about anything (and everything) that interests me or that I'm passionate about. Let's see what happens!