Blogging

Evolution of The Rebel Twog

I find myself conflicted: To Blog or To Twitter, that is the question.

I love the social medium of Twitter, which is as much of a surprise to me as our recent enthusiasm for NASCAR, or the new dependence on Granny Goggles (magnifiers – although oh-so-stylish!) since my 40th birthday…so go figure, old dogs & new tricks notwithstanding.

Twitter is instant interaction with like-minded people (and a few scantily-clad, big-bosomed women and some get-rich-quick-scammer types amongst the followers as well – I block em when I see em, but for the most part they lurk quietly on the followers list, I don’t know why). Communication coming or going anytime, day or night, limited to 140-character snippets. There is no way to get carried away with myself or digress wildly off-topic (which I am known to do, on occasion). I love the limitation, the challenge of saying what I want to say in 140 keystrokes or less (or 280 characters at the max, if you use a double-tweet format, like @11AliveNews in Atlanta).

At the same time, I love my blogs, The Random Rebel Coffee Blog and Rebel Reviews, and I have loyal readers there who can’t/won’t/don’t want to do the Twitter, which is perfectly fine — I’m not quittin’ you!

Over the summer, with Camp Mommy, I experimented and developed The Rebel Twog — a hybrid of daily Twitters (Tweets, for those of you in the lingo) and then a weekly Twitter summary re-cap on the blog, a digest version, if you will, for the non-Twittering. It has worked for me, to some extent, although I am appalled to later read the crazy Twitter-speak of abbreviations and Twitter-grammar to fit in 140 characters or less. It’s not nearly as Twitter-cool, transferred to the professional writer blog, so I’m working on that.

Rebel Housewife Readers have responded positively to the Twog concept — thank you! Twitter is ephemeral — there and gone an hour later for all practical purposes — and that’s fine, for the most part, since a research firm recently determined “40% of Tweets are Pointless Babble,” but there is some stuff I’d like to keep, particularly book reviews, suggestions and info, funny anecdotes or philosophical musings — which, okay, might be pointless babble to some, and they are free to un-follow or un-subscribe at any time.

I will try to clean it up a bit in the digest summaries. Some readers have encouraged me to go to Facebook, but there’s no going there for me — TMI, too much information and an even bigger time-suck (new word!) than the time-suck that is Twitter. We expressives have to find balance somewhere!

Rebel Housewife on Twitter!

I mentioned Twitter back in November…

I’m on Twitter!! (Again, why I don’t exactly know, but it has something to do with keeping in touch on the iPhone and not having to TEXT.) Friend me and I will respond, but I’m not exactly sure how to make it work, or why, but they tell me it is going to be a great way to keep in touch (hubby, kids)…

Since then, Twitter has become a primary means of communication within our always-busy, five-different-directions-at-once immediate family: Mom, Dad & 3 kids. It’s like a carry-around bulletin board with post-it messages of 140 characters max (this limitation is a good thing, especially for me) – a great way to know who is doing what, where, when, etc., and when/where he/she needs to be picked up. Very convenient.

I’m also following several Twitters of personal interest:
NASCARONFOX
piedmontpark
couponmom

As much as I love Private Family Twitter, I could not imagine anybody outside the immediate nuclear transportation unit being interested in my 140-character comings and goings. I have been surprised at the number of Follower Requests to the private account and I always feel bad to decline, but seriously – ya’ll don’t want to know if I’m in a bad mood or what we’re having for dinner!

However…interpersonal and professional communication is changing rapidly in the modern technology-addicted age. Even I have noticed. In the past couple of months, it seems everybody, every organization, every company, large and small, is on Twitter and/or one of the other big social networking sites. I am happy to Twitter, and have fairly successfully acclimated to it, but I’m not going to be MySpace-ing or FaceBook-ing any time soon. The biggest reason not: TMI!

In general, I’ve discovered my preference for receiving 140-character updates over longer emails, articles, newsletters, etc. – just the facts, please! I also discovered I like the limitation of 140 character messages when sending – Too Much Information, people. I am trying to simplify my life and suppress my own natural tendencies toward verbal spew…

So this summer, for Camp Mommy V, I’ve set up a Twitter account for RebelHousewife.com, for quick, succinct updates and information…140 character message to follow:

Follow me: twitter ‘follow rebelupdate’ if you are already on or sign up for a free account if you’re not! Watch the video on twitter.com!

Geek Speak


ROFL – Rolling On the Floor Laughing
LMAO – Laughing My A** Off




Mom Blogging, CHEESE & Chicken Cutlets!

Mom Blogger, definition:
A mother who writes and maintains an online blog, or interactive, dynamically-updated website journal on the World Wide Web. See http://www.RebelHousewife.com.

ABC News Story: Mom Blogger: Thousands of Mothers Blog About Their Lives

It’s good to be a Mom Blogger! Big corporations and advertising agencies are catching on:

  1. Women control the purse-strings of the average American household;
  2. Women talk, honey, and have incredible word of mouth marketing power;
  3. Increasingly, women are enjoying the power of online communication through the rapid-growth phenomenon of social networking and blogs.
  4. We call these online women, the Work At Home Moms (WAHMS) and the Stay At Home Moms (SAHMS), with the gift of online gab via blogs Mom Bloggers.

As I said, big corporations and advertising agencies are beginning to take notice and court the Mom Bloggers to assist in their marketing efforts. It’s good to be a Mom Blogger!

Case in point: I’ve mentioned a New Media Event I attended by invitation in October: The National Dairy Council’s 3aDay.com VIP Night Out at Super Suppers of Decatur. It was fabulous, as I will let my new friend and fellow Mom Blogger, Michelle at www.abeytacreative.com tell you (with permission, from her blog):

Ok, next free food. Hoo Boy! Are you people ready for this? Cause I still don’t quite believe I have a freezer full of awesome and amazing meals that will last the rest of the month as each meal is six HUGE servings!! FOR FREE. How, you wonder, did I do that? What magical powers have I wielded to get this? Well, as it turns out, writing this here blog for the past five years has paid off in cheese and chicken cutlets!

See, the National Dairy Council is promoting their 3 A Day Program (www.3aDay.org), in which they encourage you to each cheese and milk and yogurt and well ALL YUMMY DAIRY PRODUCTS. Cause ain’t nothing better than DAIRY in my book! But most important to me is CHEESE. Let me tell you, girlfriend can say no to cookies and chocolate all day long, but you put a block of smoked mozzarella in front of me, and well, let’s just say take it away at your own risk. I loves me some cheese. I love me dairy. I love milk, yogurt, sour cream, and did I mention CHEESE? So when they said, come out to
Super Suppers in Decatur and sample dairy-based meals and drink wine and meet and talk with other Mom Bloggers, I was all “Sure!” When they said, and you will make a week’s worth of delicious meals to take home for free? I was all, “Please. You had me at cheese.”

Super Suppers in Decatur is one of these places that you make a week or two weeks’ worth of food in about two hours and take it all home. They provide all the ingredients, easy to follow menus and everything all on hand to bring it home and put in your freezer. Along with the instructions how to cook it later. Now, I don’t know if they do this all the time, but they also gave us WINE while we made the meals. BONUS! So there I am in this wonderful little shop meeting Mom Bloggers from all over and talking and laughing and connecting. I particularly was fond of Sherri, who writes The Rebel Housewife and we swore we would get together again as we only live about 10 minutes apart. She even took a stack of my cards to hand out at the dog park! So after two-and-a-half hours we were done. With Sherri and I closing out the place because um, well, we apparently talk. A lot. So there I am with six huge meals for my family, plus a bag of goodies from 3aDay.org/The National Dairy Council.

I whole-heartedly agree with Michelle’s assessment of the situation, and the pleasure of meeting her, especially, and the other Mom Bloggers and
Nat’l Dairy Council women, and the wonderful people at Super Suppers in Decatur. Be sure to check out the 3aDay.org website for all kinds of helpful information, including great recipes & snack information. Join the
3-a-Day Network for their informative email newsletter with recipes and special offers.

In the six weeks since the event, we’ve enjoyed the meals I brought home that night. I will share with you our favorite recipe in a separate entry, BRUSCHETTA CHICKEN BAKE, which is as close-to-orgasmic a dish you’ll find with the simple combination of chicken cutlets, CHEESE and bread crumbs…yum.

Be it hereby known: I am a proud Mom Blogger! I blog, therefore, I am, since 2003!




Journaling Through The Grief Journey

Sudden grief, such as the death of a family member or a good friend, can be overwhelming and disorienting, hard to manage, difficult to recover and carry on.

(It doesn’t help when your computer dies, too, just days after your friend dies — maybe it was my friend, telling me I spend WAY too much time on the computer?!)

Here is a very helpful article I found on http://FetchRex.com:

Journaling Through The Grief Journey

Google AdSense on The Rebel Housewife


Please bear with me, as we test some modifications to Google AdSense on The Random Rebel Coffee Blog and Rebel Reviews — there are some strange ads, indeed, appearing in the links below each post, and we are attempting to resolve this issue, to bring you more relevant, interesting information and additional resources. I will give this a week, and if we don’t see an improvement, they will be removed. Thanks, Sherri.




FetchRex.com – Digg for Non-Techies

Tomorrow (Friday, May 25) is the last day of school here in Atlanta…(I can’t decide whether to type YAY!! or God help us all…)

Anyway, before we go into the long Memorial Day Weekend and kick off a new season of CAMP MOMMY next week, with a new Book Giveaway Contest for THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS, I wanted to share one of my NEW Favorite Places on the Internet.

My new source of daily news, coffee break conversation, and online community:

FetchRex.com


FetchRex.com is kind of like Digg for non-techies. It’s addictive, interesting, and a lot of fun: Fetching local recommendations (REX) and useful bits of information out of the overwhelm that is now online; commenting on features; rating other people’s recommendations; and submitting your own. (There’s also a really cool daily Sudoku puzzle that times you as you work the puzzle, so you know exactly how much time you’re wasting — always good to know.)

I’ve been spending time over on FetchRex as “slcatlanta.” I’ve been recommending all kinds of great articles, websites and blogs that I come across in my daily surfing — wasting time, so you don’t have to! (It’s not a waste of time — all part of my little contribution to the world:)

Check out FetchRex.com when you have a minute, and be sure to REX all those slcatlanta articles — feel free to submit any articles from RebelHousewife.com for REX consideration (Thank You!!). Happy REXing…

An Entire Day Off-Track – ProBlogger Group Writing Project

I have been a bad, bad writer today…the day I intended to publish a new Rebel Review for Anita Shreve’s phenomenal new novel BODY SURFING, along with a Rebel Blog, spilling secrets I have learned about this reclusive bestselling author (one of my all-time favorites, did you know?!), AND launching a new BOOK GIVEAWAY in time for Mother’s Day…bad, bad, bad!

(I didn’t even take Mocha to the Dog Park to play today.)

What happened? I went totally obsessive on the ProBlogger.net Group Writing Project, reading thru the 132 submissions listed today (many of them, anyway) — I’m all googly-eyed from so much surfing, so many terrific blogs, so much information: helpful, intriguing, reassuring, laugh-out-loud funny and otherwise. I also enjoyed a boost in traffic on www.RebelHousewife.com from my entry: Top 5: Mid-Life Myths along with Comments and References on other blogs that I try to keep up with. It’s been a busy day!

I will, however, try to make up for it tomorrow. For tomorrow is, indeed, another day…

Meanwhile, do you want to know my Top 5 Group Writing Project posts — the ones I most enjoyed — out of the 132 submitted on Day 1?
Here they are:

I’m now off to fold about ten loads of laundry — at least I got that far!! 😉

ProBlogger – Group Writing Project

In a happy coincidence that will help me get my s*** stuff together this morning and follow-thru on my promise last week, to explore Mid-Life Myths, my online friend and mentor-hero Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net has introduced a contest this week on his excellent blog: Top 5 – Group Writing Project.

ProBlogger is my most-favorite blogging resource. Whether you are a newbie blogger, an intermediate non-techie (like myself), or Supreme Blogmaster of The Universe, there’s something to learn, and a wonderful, diverse community of online writers and entrepreneurs at ProBlogger.

I will post my (hopefully!) winning entry separately here in the next hour, but I wanted to give my regular readers a heads-up on what’s going on, without putting all of this butt-kissing about ProBlogger into the entry post! 😉

Random Rebel Blog Basics — Updated!

From my time away on WordPress.com:

My intent here, with The Rebel Blog: Daily Update!, is to post daily, at about the same time everyday, for Mom’s Coffee Break. We all need to take one everyday, whether we are working outside the home or at home (like me).

I invite anyone and everyone to join me anytime to take a few minutes, to chat about whatever is on our minds. I encourage Comments and interaction!!

Today’s post, since I have been distracted cleaning bathrooms and what-not:

Random Rebel Blog Basics:

#1 – Posts should be short (100 – 200 words), interesting, not completely self-absorbed or self-serving.

#2 – Ideally, there should be more tips, quick lists, pictures and images than long, rambling paragraphs. (I have to work on pics & images — the technical mechanics of that.)

#3 – Content is Queen, and advertising should be subtle, but provide revenue to support the Community (which is good). Any advertising should be directly relevant to the content, useful to the Reader if he/she is looking for more information on the topic.

#4 – The Blog should be INTERACTIVE — coffee break/water cooler interaction. Please join in with your comments and links!

#5 – There will be NO SPAM or verbal abuse — Zero Tolerance, at my discretion. Because I am The Queen, dammit! (Profanity, on occasion, may be acceptable, perhaps even necessary for emphasis or effect. As I tell my kids when they catch me spicing it up once in a while: Those are 18-year-old words, never to be used in the presence of your Mother. So, as long as you are over the age of 18, and you are not in the presence on your Mother…I will not bitch about it.)