Audio: Douglas talks New Media on the Handbell Podcast

Douglas E. Welch talks New Media to the listeners of the Handbell Podcast, hosted by Dean Jensen and Paul Weller.

Listen (54 minutes)

Webinar: New Media: So many options to try for the eLearning Guild

This presentation was given as a webinar for the eLearning Guild as part of its E-Learning 2.0 and Beyond - Practical Real-World Solutions Using New Technology Approaches series. (Length: 1 hour 14 minutes))

New Media: So Many Options To Try 04

View more presentations from Douglas Welch.

Listen to the audio only

Pic: Rebecca and David Randle perform at LAPL NoHo

Pic: Rebecca and David Randle perform at LAPL NoHo

Marian Call

Web cam setup for live streaming

Benefit for Deb Flanagan

Benefit for Deb Flanagan

Benefit for Deb Flanagan

Gilli Moon and band.

Audio: The What, Why and How of Blogging

Douglas E. Welch presents a talk on the What, Why and How of Blogging, or Blogging 101.

Listen (54 minutes)

This talk was recorded April 17, 2009 in a presentation to the Institute of Management Consultants, Southern California Chapter.

Outline of this talk:

* Introduction
o Question - How many of you update your web site daily? weekly? monthly?
+ Most people find it too difficult
* What?
o A web site like all the others
o Blogging provides easy methods of updating your web site
+ Latest information
+ Automatic archives
+ Attractive to search engines
+ Concentrate on putting up new content, not fiddling with design
+ Can be easy and free or complicated and not free
* Why?
o Visibility
+ Telling people what you do and how well you do it
+ Getting your message to those who truly want to hear it
+ Traditional advertising less and less effect or wrong tool for some companies or professions.
+ Give people an opportunity to "stumble upon" your work
+ Provides "A Place for your stuff", as George Carlin said
# A place to refer people for more info
# An online brochure or business card
# A home base to direct people to when placing content on other sites
* YouTube, Facebook, etc
+ Easy release of all sorts of content - text, photos, audio, video and even live video streams
o NOT more work
+ Make it easier to capture and present information/content
# You are already creating it every day
# Just need to capture it
+ Should be part or whole of every web site
# In some cases, it IS the web site
* IslandFox.org
* How?
o Buy a domain name, if you don't already have one
o Free blogging services
+ Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Vox.com, and many more
+ Doesn't even require a web site, but you should probably have one anyway
+ Use re-direct to point from existing web site
o Free Self-hosted
+ Use in combination with your existing web site
* Questions?

IMC Socal Meeting

Event: Douglas speaks to Tuesdays with Transitioners, May 12, 2009

I will be speaking on The importance of Visibility to Tuesdays with Transitioners on May 12, 2009.

Complete information on the group, and their regular, weekly meeting follow.

Douglas

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Have you been laid-off or downsized?

Is the economic meltdown making you uneasy in your current position?

Are you looking to transition to a different career?

Then Tuesdays with Transitioners is the place for you!

We meet every Tuesday for lunch, support and encouragement, and to discuss ideas, share stories and resources, and garner tools that can lead us to new work, and unlock the potential for a hopeful future and career.

This week, we are going to talk about how to transition from one career to another, so come join us!

When: Every Tuesday, from 12:00 noon to 2:00 p.m.

Where: Congregational Church of Northridge, Fellowship Hall
9659 Balboa Blvd., Northridge
(818) 349-2400
www.northridgechurch.net

Contact: Jennifer O’Connell at joliveroconnell@gmail.com.

Event: Two Special Dates for the Island Fox

Two Special Dates for the Island Fox

from Friends of the Island Fox

April offers two special days to see island foxes. Both the Los Angeles Zoo and the Santa Barbara Zoo are celebrating special events for Earth Day that shine a spotlight on California’s endangered island fox.

Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens
Saturday and Sunday, April 18 & 19

“Celebrate Earth Day at the Zoo”

The L. A. Zoo will be highlighting California species during their Earth Day celebration. Friends of the Island Fox will be on hand to offer special activities both days.

• 11:30 Radio Tracking Demonstration
• 12:00 Island Fox Exhibit Talk
• 1:00 Radio Tracking Demonstration
• 1:30 Fox Health Check (See what the biologists do in the field and give a helping hand)
• 2:00 Island Fox Exhibit Talk in Spanish

We will be located near the island fox exhibit in the zoo. Come by, say ‘Hello’ and meet an island fox.

More on L.A. Zoo hours and directions: www.lazoo.org

Santa Barbara Zoo

Celebrate the opening of California Trails
Saturday, April 25, 2009

Come meet one of our favorite island foxes, Finnigan.

The Santa Barbara Zoo is opening their new California Trails exhibit complex. This $6 million construction project includes a renovation of the Channel Island fox exhibit and Condor Country - only the second zoo exhibit in America to display California condors.

Joining the island foxes and California condors are exhibits displaying desert tortoises, bald eagles and Rattlesnake Canyon. Rattlesnake canyon “showcases endangered reptiles and amphibians found in the Los Padres National Forest, including the red-legged frog. The [Santa Barbara] Zoo works in the field with the U. S. Forest Service to monitor this species, which has been decimated due to nonnative predators, such as bullfrogs, pollution, and habitat loss due to development. Western toads, now also facing habitat loss, are also displayed along with rattlesnakes, salamanders, newts, and other frogs.”

The renovated area also includes “the new Explore Store [which] demonstrates how buying "green" directly helps protect the habitats of these creatures, both around the world and in California.”

The new exhibits at the Santa Barbara Zoo offer an exciting opportunity to meet California’s native creatures. The special celebration on April 25th will also offer the chance to see Finnigan, the ambassador island fox. More about Finnigan.

For more information, hours and directions: www.santabarbarazoo.org

Come out and support these two zoos that have played an important role in aiding the island fox.

What I'm reading...All you need is a good idea

I recently picked up this book at the local library and I am working my way through it. It passes my basic criteria of a good book already, which is that it makes me stop and think. More later.

From Amazon.com...

Product Description
In All You Need Is a Good Idea, Jay Heyman shows you how to create powerful marketing and advertising ideas that will dramatically increase sales for your business. Perfect for entrepreneurs and small business owners?or operators of any size business, for that matter?this valuable marketing resource will help any business stand out in the marketplace, build bigger market share, gain publicity, and scare the pants off the competition. This book is the perfect guide to creating truly powerful marketing messages.

From the Inside Flap

If you're not in marketing at a big corporation, you probably don't have the luxury of hiring a big ad agency, or have the big budgets often required for successfully spreading your message far and wide. But how do you make your business grow without the resources of a bigger firm? Fortunately for you, all you really need is a good idea.

Jay H. Heyman's All You Need Is a Good Idea! shows you step by step how to create powerful marketing and advertising ideas that dramatically increase sales without having to invent new products, increase sales forces, find new distribution channels, or spend a ton of money you don't have. No matter how small your business is, this insightful resource will teach you how to stand out in the marketplace, build bigger market share, garner high-exposure publicity, appear larger than you really are, and make your competition extremely nervous.

Informal, conversational, and totally practical, All You Need Is a Good Idea! guides you with simple, easy-to-follow principles that stress fun and creativity. It takes the mystery out of building your business, providing unique, hands-on marketing guidance, from generating the first fuzzy notion to perfecting the final idea, and includes informative, relevant case studies of actual marketing campaigns.

If you're a marketer, business owner, or entrepreneur who wants real bang for the buck, All You Need Is a Good Idea! presents the ins and outs of creating truly effective, powerful marketing messages that will propel your business to the next level of growth and success.

Easter Dinner

Easter Dessert

Easter Day with family

Easter baskets

Career Opportunities: We must stop lying to ourselves

I think today's Career Opportunities column is about more than just careers, so I wanted to share it here, as well. -- Douglas


We must stop lying to ourselves
By Douglas E. Welch

Listen

Discuss this column and podcast
on the Career-Op Community Site

During the toughest times in our history, there always seems to be a contingent of people who want to believe that nothing is changing -- that everything is going to be just fine -- that all this turmoil is just going to pass and life will continue just as it always has. They don't want to hear what you have to say. They don't want to see the facts and figures and charts and graphs. What they are often saying is, "Please, lie to me!"

Too many people want to believe that this recent downturn is an oddity, an aberration, some short bit of madness that will quickly pass away. To believe that, though, they have to deny thousands of years of history -- thousands of years of rise and fall -- thousands of years of cyclical change ranging from one extreme to another. We have seen this all before, many times over, and denying it only makes it worse. It gives circumstance a power over us that it should never have. We are critically thinking animals with deep abilities to learn and reason. Surrendering ourselves to lies squanders our talents and makes us culpable in our failures. We have the intelligence to survive this downturn if we only remove the scales from our eyes and the fingers from our ears.

I always endeavor to speak the truth from these pages, even when it is unpopular. I will guess that nearly everyone reading or listening will find something to dislike here. The truth is sometimes hard to hear, but it is all important that we hear it, and more importantly, act on it. Power comes from a clear understanding of our circumstances and denial causes the waste of our time and talents. Let's seek to access the "better angels of our nature" and start our recovery today.

First, it is almost certain that certain jobs, certain careers and certain industries will, and by all rights should, be discarded. As a child in the 70's I witnessed the first death throes of the automotive industry where many family members, and families of my friends found work, careers and financial stability. For nearly 40 years we have propped up this ever weakening, ever stumbling, falling giant. Unable to see the future, we held on to the past until such a time when the future is being crammed down our throats. If you work in the automotive industry, or any manufacturing sector, you need to look elsewhere for succor. Like the last great herd of buffalo to roam the plains, the beasts of the automotive industry have fallen and will no longer provide us food, clothing and support. Will they return? One day. Maybe in time for our grandchildren or great grand-children to once again make manufacturing an important mainstay of America, but not in our lifetime. We must return to the days of the many and the small instead of the big and the few. Only then can we rebuild manufacturing in this country while, hopefully, remembering the lessons of this collapse.

Second, for years we have stretched the American Dream to ever more absurd limits. What began as a quest for home, land and family has been warped into greed, avarice and excess in almost every way. As a people, we have lost any concept of the difference between enough and all. Where a soldier returning from World War II wanted mainly a home for his family and a good, decent job in a safe community, today many of us want a huge house, ludicrous pay and power of life and death over those around us. Our love of prosperity left us without any understanding of the many levels of success. You were either a superstar or nothing, with no grey areas in between. This has led to many of the abuses we are seeing today, from Enron to the real estate crisis to our seeming inability to govern ourselves politically.

Today, I regularly talk with musicians and others in the entertainment industry who seem most infected by this superstar myth. Even they are beginning to see that being able to support your family, comfortably, while doing what you love is a far greater goal than any form of super stardom -- and far more likely. While we may never stop reaching for the brass ring, we need to recognize the simple success of a life well lived and the benefits it brings to us as individuals and society as a whole.

Third, we need to stop looking for some external force, some outside factor, some knight in shining armor to fix our problems. We are the source of our own solutions, our own changes, our own imaginative creations, not our government, our corporations, our political parties, our God. If change is to happen, it must happen down deep in the psychological soil of our own being. We have to decide to change. We have to recognize reality. We have to seek the truth even when it is difficult, despairing and ugly. We can no longer abdicate our lives to someone else or we risk the very basis of our humanness. We can no longer depend on government, corporations, and other entities to look out for our best interests. Current events should show us the fallacy of that. Large entities will do what is best for them, not what is best for the people. Sometimes our interests converge, but at others they diverge at the detriment to both.

Despite what you may see and feel today, the future is bright. With the future comes hope, and time, to accomplish great things if we stop lying to ourselves and start doing the work that needs to be done. We have the power in our own hands to shape our future, even if we have denied, forsworn or simply forgotten it. The power does not reside in some mythical "out there." It is held here, in our hands and only desires that we wield it. Like a new shovel in untouched soil, we simply need to take the tool, turn over the soil and create the future we desire.

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Join the new Career Opportunities Community site!

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Become a Facebook Fan of Career Opportunities

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Support Career Opportunities:

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Reader/Listener Line @ 818-804-5049

Event: BarCampLA-7 - May 2 & 3, 2009

Saturday and Sunday, May 2 & 3, 2009

OTX Research
10567 Jefferson Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232

BarCamp is an unconference, which means the conference attendees are also the presenters. You meet on Saturday, post your session on a wall chart schedule and away we go. Topics can be anything that you are passionate about.

I am planning on doing at least one New Media-related session, but I have several others I might do, if time permits. I would love to see all of you there, both learning and sharing your knowledge with others.

I am hoping to run a local webcast station live from BarCampLA interviewing interesting people and giving podcasters a chance to record their show live. If you are interested in a 30 minute or 1 hour time slot, please let me know. I will have a signup available as we get closer to the event.

Finally, I also plan on doing our 3rd BarCampLA Acoustic Music Jam on Saturday night, I get a big kick out of this and it was very popular last year.

For more info on BarCampLA, visit http://barcampla.org annd subscribe to the BarCampLA mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/BarcampLA and sign up for BarCampLA-7 on the wiki at http://barcamp.org/BarCampLA-7

See you at BarCampLA-7!

LA Friday Coffee

LA Friday Coffee

LA Friday Coffee

Event: Los Encinos Easter Egg Hunt - Saturday

Image via Wikipedia

Los Encinos Easter Egg Hunt

Join the Los Encinos Docents Association at Los Encinos State Historic Park, on Saturday, April 11th 2009, 1 to 3 PM, for our annual Easter Egg Hunt. This is our most popular event, and has been a tradition for decades. In addition to the Egg Hunts for ages from toddlers to 10, we will have traditional games, a blacksmith, old time music, tours of the historic adobe and performers in period costume.

Admission is free. Donations of any amount are welcome. Please bring your own baskets.

The Egg Hunts will be grouped as follows:
1:00-1-3 y ears old
1:30: 4-6 years old
2:00: 7 years and up

Los Encinos State Historic Park is located at 16756 Moorpark in Encino, East of the intersection of Balboa and Ventura Blvds.

Print a flier

For more information about Los Encinos State Historic Park go to the web at http://los-encinos.org

A Qik.com demo at LA Friday Coffee

I showed the LA Friday Coffee folks how they can use Qik.com to stream video from their iPhones.

Garden Classes at Green Arrow Nursery