All articles by Sue Rostvold

Austin’s 2009 Kick Ass Award Winners

the-kick-ass-awardHow about this for a surprise birthday party idea? On your birthday, ask all your friends over and then give out awards to the ones you think really “kicked ass” in the last year! So it’s the guests that get surprised, not the birthday boy or girl. Well, that’s exactly what my friend Spike Gillespie started doing about a decade ago and now it’s an Austin tradition called the “Kick Ass Awards“.

Continue reading Austin’s 2009 Kick Ass Award Winners

Every Dot Connects gave me my twitter wings

Go tweet young one!Most people know that networking, i.e. relationship building, is not so much about what you can get, but what you can give to someone else. What value can you add to their life, business, cause, goal, etc…? Every Dot Connects obviously knows networking, not only do they give various workshops in social media but they also share what they have learned in the process. Check out Sheila Scarborough‘s latest post here: Teaching the teachers: what we’ve learned from our social media workshops.

I attended the first Every Dot Connects workshop Continue reading Every Dot Connects gave me my twitter wings

The First Viral Video?

It’s common knowledge that the Numa Numa video was the first real viral video that found it’s way onto YouTube, and took on a life of it’s own. But I remember watching and sharing The 405 Movie back in  2001, and it seemed to have a pretty viral quality too. Continue reading The First Viral Video?

I got a gold star from Jason Alba!

Jason Alba's tweetLast year I started following Jason Alba on twitter. We tweeted back and forth a couple times and sometime later, I asked for him for a consultation. I always go for quality when I can afford it. I was about to give my first Linkedin consultation in a few days and thought it would be smart to get one myself before giving one. He is a networking master after all. Jason wrote the book “I’m on Linkedin, Now What?“, “I’m on Facebook, Now What?“, and is the founder of JibberJobber.com, a powerful online tool that lets you really manage your career.

Jason and I spoke on the phone a little over an hour and he gave me some excellent feedback. Continue reading I got a gold star from Jason Alba!

Digital Ethnography, What The – ?

If you are a cultural anthropologist you’re probably quite familiar with the term ethnography, it’s a genre of writing that uses fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies.

Michael Wesch is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He’s really a media ecologist, and perhaps the first cultural anthropologist to study and teach Digital Ethnography, He gave an excellent presentation to the  Library of Congress last summer called “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube”. If you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you take the time to watch it in it’s entirety. Especially if you think YouTube is only for funny animal videos and silly home movies. Trust me, it’s so much more.

I promise, after watching the video below you’ll never look at YouTube the same way again.

Continue reading Digital Ethnography, What The – ?

99¢ Therapy, iFart

ifart-for-the-iphoneWe all know that laughter is therapeutic, reduces stress, strengthens your immune system, makes you live longer, increases your intelligence, etc. So I guess that makes the 99 cent iFart application an amazing value, therapeutically speaking of course.

Yesterday they came out with an update, version 1.1, which includes new features like Record-A-Fart and Fart-A-Friend! What an exciting age we live in.

I’m not a twelve year old boy, but I bought and I love iFart. I was talking on the phone with a friend about it, and I could just tell she was rolling her eyes when she said, “Uh, I don’t think I’ll be getting that.”

I just did a little sneak attack on my next door neighbor, a sweet old lady in her late eighties, and she seemed to get a kick out of it. That alone was worth the price.

Continue reading 99¢ Therapy, iFart

Social Media, it’s really nothing new

Social media, it’s really nothing new. Thirty-two thousand years ago people were being social, sharing stories and communicating experiences with pictures using the only media they had at the time; cave paintings. Social media is simply the tools you use to communicate your message; plant dyes on a cave wall or a Flickr widget on a WordPress blog.

Lascaux cave painting

The tools will continue to change, that’s why I think it’s so important none of us get hung up on learning this application or that application exclusively. The key is to learn concepts and be fearless in trying new tools, as you’ll find that new ones pop up daily.

I have friends that get SO upset when ever they hear about something new, “Oh great, something else I have to learn.” That won’t cut it in the social media world. You need to get excited about new things, and come on, how hard is that? We are living in an amazing era with technology changing daily and social networking groups connecting us in brand new ways. Who knows what will happen in the coming year? I mean, how can you NOT be excited?

Continue reading Social Media, it’s really nothing new

An Enthusiastic “Hello World!”

This is the first entry in my new blog; my therapeutic social media journal if you will.  In case you didn’t know, I am pro therapy, both giving and getting. To me therapy means being reflective, figuring things out by talking or writing, viewing situations in a totally new way, and having the luxury of getting a different and/or unbiased perspective whenever possible.

Regarding social media, I’m no expert, but I am an enthusiast. Enthusiast, hmmm…  isn’t that really a positive way of admitting my obsessive-compulsive tendencies? But wait, if you think about it, obsessive-compulsive is just a negative way of describing someone who is very focused. And since I am not my mother, i.e. I try to see the glass half full, I choose to describe myself as a very focused New Media Enthusiast!

sue-and-momc. 1965
Wayzata, Minnesota
Mom and Me

Looking back on this photo I can’t help buy wonder why I was so bundled up,  but my mother was dressed as if it were a warm spring afternoon. I didn’t know it at the time, but I now understand that my mother showed her love in cryptic ways, like how tight the scarf  was tied around my head. She was obsessed with my ears being covered so that I wouldn’t catch cold.

When I look at this photo I think of four things;  I never liked scarves, that jacket was from a garage sale, I had just gotten in trouble for something, and I wanted to hold the kitty.

Pikes Peak Freewheeling

This is the only post that survived my previous blog. I couldn’t resist. It was an experience of a lifetime and I just had to include it.

Pikes Peak had been closed the previous three days due to heavy snowfall and ice. We were at 14,110 ft elevation, it was 25 degrees, and the winds were gusting to 30 mph.

It was three weeks ago, but I still start hyperventilating when I talk about it. My sister Nancy and I took a cross country road trip together in August and we had a blast. The highlight was definitely when we road mountain bikes down from the top of Pikes Peak to the bottom. We went from 14,000 to 6,000 elevation in just twenty miles. The guides told us at the end that we were one of the fastest groups of the summer, and were traveling at 35 miles per hour at times! Yikes!

sue-and-nancy-pikes-peak-august-2008

I happened to pick up this brochure, “Pikes Peak By Bike – The Ultimate Ride”, as we were getting ready to head out of Manitou Springs, Colorado. My sister is 56 and I’m 48, and after looking at the brochure Nancy said, “Let’s do this! Come on, we won’t want to do this in 5 or 10 years, and we’re right here. So let’s go for it!”

Continue reading Pikes Peak Freewheeling