help save me from the Nellies

One of my business relationships uses Yahoo groups for a collaboration/connectivity space, and here is one of the unwelcome and unintended consequences, random notes from the Nellies of the world. Help me help Nellie, whatever way you see fit. Thanks.

-----Original Message-----
From: Yahoo! [mailto:profiles@yahoo-inc.com]
Sent:
Thursday, November 13, 2008 8:03 AM
To: TIMOTHY ALLAN FERRIS
Subject:
NellieD sent you a message

This is NellieD's message:

hot damn Tim u look fine! i luved ur profile, i will visit Cleveland, Ohio this weekend, wanna go out? i got some pics at: http://eqmzc.tk/, i even got videos, hit me up and get my number from http://eqmzc.tk/ , for real hit me up on http://eqmzc.tk/ on screen name tightp! p.s. im online for couple more hours! :) xwsjzygf

To view NellieD's profile, click here: http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/S4XBHPMJZS3J3H35PTFIAORTN4

To reply to NellieD's message, click here: http://profiles.yahoo.com/msg.php?guid=S4XBHPMJZS3J3H35PTFIAORTN4

Thanks,

The Yahoo! Team

__

To block NellieD, click here:
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/S4XBHPMJZS3J3H35PTFIAORTN4?foot-block-btn=1&crum
b=lkqOilmTYsG

friendly riders of The Silk Road

The Travels of Dan Moore, III -- Local businessman Dan Moore has entered the blogosphere from the Orient; all May he has been recounting his adventure motorcycle trip as he and an international bike gang of clean-cut, friendly riders with computers and SAT phones tool from Istanbul to Xian, China. This latest post has Dan wiping out and wrecking his computer and then giving laundry tips that are more Erma Bombeck than Heloise, something about composting your drawers. There's some really good stuff here, far better than the typical travelogue. It's not really in a blog format, so I don't know if RSS feeds will keep us updated, but you need to spend some time with Dan and his gang of middle-class, middle-aged marauders. We're now breathlessly waiting for Marge and the cavalry to arrive with new equipment. Stay tuned.

Perhaps Dan can MeetTheBloggers when he comes back intact.

here's another reason for the SB117 full frontal assault

DirecTV May Test Broadband over Powerline - News and Analysis by PC Magazine -- It seems that AT&T may be outflanked here, by just about everybody--the cable companies, the VoIP providers, the cellphone companies, the satellite providers, and now, to add insult to injury, our friend the electric company, and that more than likely accounts for AT&T's haste and desperation in ramming through the bad-for-everybody-but-them legislation known here in Ohio as SB117, sponsored by Lance Mason and Bob Spada.

If we can get broadband over our electrical power lines or through the air or over cable, and we can get VoIP over broadband, we don't really need all that legacy POTS that AT&T has held onto for years without improving, all the while charging premium prices for it. It seems that this is reckoning day for AT&T, and they're trying to dodge their demise by cozying up to our state legislators and trying to put their signature tin boxes on every treelawn between here and Cincinnati.

In the process, they're making us a technological laughingstock and pointing up our technological illiteracy and innumeracy as a community.

Remember, we don't owe AT&T anything. Let the market forces prevail. Let them fail. Do not let AT&T prove the sad old theorem we last heard from the open-source man, Bruce Perens: "If you can't innovate, legislate."

Timothy Leary, '42: Flashbacks from Mount Saint James

College of the Holy Cross Holy Cross Magazine -- This Timothy Leary retrospective piece just appeared in our alumni magazine; I guess I had more of a heritage than I knew when I matriculated at HC in 1964. Had I known what a tough act I had to follow, I would have tried harder, or at least been more irrationally exuberant. Hoya!

inaugural launch of The Real Deal: Now is the accepted time

The Real Deal--I got an email this morning announcing this new NEO blog by our friend Richard Andrews, whom we know through the Meet.The.Bloggers sessions at I-Open's Mid-Town Brews at WebTego and through Mid-Town Mornings at Nead Brand Partners. Are you beginning to see how the networks work, and what the names are and the brands imply? Attribution is hard because there's so much collaboration and overlap, but I hope everybody's beginning to get the picture.

But, back to The Real Deal. Richard is a writer with a track record that goes back a good while. The Real Deal shows promise of being just that. Go there now. I'll meet you.

new blog by Don Iannone

Conscious Communities: Welcome to Conscious Communities©--be sure to click through to a very promising, thoughtful new blog from Don Iannone. Here's the kickoff--

This new blog explores the complex and essential nature of community in our lives. We live and we die in communities; from the tiniest crossroad towns to the largest megapolitan areas. Conscious Communities looks at community from various vantage points, and it offers a new way to conceive of communities, as we move forward into the future.
This new view encourages us to see communities as having the potential to rise and grow as places or centers of heightened awareness and expression. By heightened awareness and expression, there is an intention to point to the effect of community, in its many dimensions, on our consciousness, or our deepest sense of ourselves. It is in this vein that this blog is given its name: Conscious Communities. Communities should inspire and exhort their citizens' consciousness, and citizens should in return use that inspiration and exhortation to lift up and sustain their communities.
On one level, each of us is conscious, that is perceptually aware, of the communities we know and have experience with. There is more. Have we considered the possibility that communities are powerful agents co-creating our most basic consciousness? Have we considered the possibility that our most intimate and personal interiority is in part supported and shaped by what we take to be community?
Have we considered the possibility that we owe, in part, our capacity for heightened awareness and expression to those communities in which we live, work and play? So too, our communities, when beset by social, economic, political and ecological problems, diminish our capacity for heightened awareness and expression. For our communities to support and sustain us, we must support and sustain them. (more)

Hunter Morrison unchained

Meet the Bloggers » Midtown Brews: Hunter Morrison--I first became acquainted with Hunter back in the late 1970s; I was recently arrived back in town from Atlanta, a newly minted Realtor with a focus on older properties, hanging out with all the young visionaries promoting Ohio City, downtown living at The Park & The Chesterfield, the reintegration of Hough, Clevelanders for 1,000 Families (Garrett Brodhead), adaptive reuse, and all the other cool things that were happening in Boston and Baltimore. Then, Hunter fell silent for a while, but now he's back, and he's speaking the truth, embellished only by a happy turn of phrase every now and then. This podcast of our February 1st sit over at Webtego's conference room is something we all must listen to, and then listen to again. There's history, hubris, and a glimpse of the future of the region.

Mentioned are his directorship at the Center for Regional Studies, David Sweet, Youngstown State, George McKelvey, the Hough Development Corporation and Kucinich, the planning award garnered by Youngstown 2010, "co-convening," the condition of Youngstown prior (peeling paint, bad attitude, and no place to go but up), Urban Strategies out of Toronto, and the vision statement of Youngstown, which entails the extraordinarily liberating effect of accepting that they're a shrunken, small city. There's also the I Will Shout Youngstown blog, the European experiences from Newcastle and from Dresden, and the idea of dying and reviving cities aligned with the idea of dying and reviving gods in our culture, along the lines of Sir James George Frazier's Golden Bough. I think that somewhere around here comes mention of the old Cleveland networks and David Hoag, Alton Whitehouse, and Joseph Gorman, and a distinction made between the old hierarchical and the new networked structures. Then come Jay Williams, Tim Ryan, Alvin Toffler, and phrases like "a buzz going on," "anomaly of the comeback city," "take the dreams and boil them down to the deals," "you've got to celebrate your successes," "megapolitan areas," "the commutership," and what happens when "the 'me' gets replaced by the 'we.'" He also talks of Jim Rouse and Faneuil Hall, Hope 6, the exploitative history of milltowns and the steel industry, black boxes, identity, Volney Rogers and the first metroparks, intrinsic value, the concept that "retail follows rooftops," values, authenticity, being very siloed and very parochial, and Tim Ryan's basic question of "Who are we collectively?"

There's incredible value in this podcast. There's also passion, concern, and a bit of outrage. This is one of the more significant offerings of the MTB "portfolio"--make sure you listen to it soon.

Jack Lail in Knoxville: citizen journalism, good stuff

Random Mumblings: After the fire, everything's changed--Great recounting here of the big fire in Knoxville a few days ago and how citizen journalism worked into the mix. Here's an excerpt, and it turns out that the input/output came together as "good stuff"--

People living in the nearby downtown condos on North Gay captured the late-night-into-day fire with digital still cameras and video cameras. The results are just a search away on Flickr and YouTube and personal Web sites. Bloggers here and yonder logged in with personal tales, links and tidbits.

The city's Web site posted a slide show. The sheriff's department shot aerial video.

All the traditional media used their Web sites for as-it-happens news. At the News Sentinel, where I hang out, we had quite a bit of video, audio, tons of photos, stories that seemed living they changed so much. You can see a lot of the multimedia and sidebars attached to this story.

Email news alerts flew out. Cell phone alerts buzzed in. Page views and visits ratcheted up.The adrenaline high was palpable even in the print version, but definitely in the Web version.Journalism professor Bob Stepno rounds up some of the varied coverage. He notes:

"By afternoon, people were online writing about the fire from West Virginia to New York to the other side of the Atlantic. "

Jump the Shark, a blog about Knoxville media mostly, put it this way:

"Technology has reached the point that just about anyone, anywhere, can capture a news event as it's happening, snap a few photos or shoot home video, and have it on the local or national news within minutes."

I've believed that in the abstract as a concept, but now I've seen it in action in my town. And it's good stuff.

Linked In: from the NYT Dealbook

LinkedIn: Press Releases: LinkedIn Names New CEO--LinkedIn, a Web site that allows users to create online networks of business contacts, said Monday that it hired a new chief executive to replace Reid Hoffman, one of Silicon Valley's most active angel investors.
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