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As some of you know, my daughter Evie was born with a heart defect. We spent the first few weeks of her life in the hospital at UCSF where the specialists there performed open heart surgery on her when she was less than two weeks old. The excellent neonatal cardio team at UCSF saved her life, but if she hadn't been in an area where we had specialists readily available it might have been a different story. This is a fund-raising event for a charity that helps families less fortunate than mine. If you live in the San Francisco area, come down and support this organization, it ought to be a great time! -Colby Palmer

The Hope Flight Foundation is a an organization that flies terminally ill children and their families to hospitals and treatment centers around the country so they are able to get the best care, even if it is far from home. The organization also does "make a wish" flights so sick children are able to go to Disneyland, etc... This is a wonderful cause!

Sunday, November 11 from 6pm-12am

111 Minna Gallery (San Francisco)

• Admission: Donations at the door
• 100% of...

Today's post for Blog Action Day is both global and local (well, local for me anyway). This comes both from me and from my fiancee, Michelle Kantor. The BBC (one of our favorite news agencies, fuhgeddabout the bulk of American news) does this great show, "World Have Your Say". They call it "The daily interactive show where you set the agenda" and I think that sums it up nicely. The listeners set a topic that day (like the BarCamp of the BBC!); their team discusses it and - this is the best part - listeners can send in questions and comments via telephone, SMS or email. And they really DO let you speak your piece, it's pretty sweet. They make it easy - if you email in they read it aloud, or you can even email them your telephone number and they will call YOU when they are ready for you. Wow! Usually this show is broadcast Monday through Friday. But this Saturday, November 3 at 11 am PST, they are doing a special Saturday edition of "World Have Your Say" right here in my hometown of San Francisco. How exciting! Also unique to this special Saturday...

Twitter just introduced a new method of "tracking" keywords - enter "track keyword" in SMS or IM and you will receive notifications whenever someone uses that keyword in a tweet. Right now it's only available via IM or SMS notifications, but they say it will eventually come to the API etc. I've been using it for a couple days and I think it's a very cool addition. I've also been very interested in Chris Messina's suggestions for using #hashmark tag channels similar to what you can find in Jaiku (and IRC I think). The "tracking" feature provides a similar service but they are slightly different and I can see a great reason for both to exist. Here is my take on the difference between the two:

Twitter Tracking:

• involuntary
• results are broader and less contextual
• great for customer service, marketing, vanity
• automatically removes anonymity (can't opt out of tracking searches)
• no "on-board" archiving
• present tense only (cannot track past tweets)

#Hashtags:

• voluntary
• items are intentionally tagged so results are higher quality
• great for networking, community, research
• anonymity is removed by knowing participation
• creates public archive
• can search Twitterstream into the past

While Twitter's new tracking feature is very cool...

As some of you know, my daughter Evie was born with a heart defect. We spent the first few weeks of her life in the hospital at UCSF where the specialists there performed open heart surgery on her when she was less than two weeks old. The excellent neonatal cardio team at UCSF saved her life, but if she hadn't been in an area where we had specialists readily available it might have been a different story. This is a fund-raising event for a charity that helps families less fortunate than mine. If you live in the San Francisco area, come down and support this organization, it ought to be a great time! -Colby Palmer

The Hope Flight Foundation is a an organization that flies terminally ill children and their families to hospitals and treatment centers around the country so they are able to get the best care, even if it is far from home. The organization also does "make a wish" flights so sick children are able to go to Disneyland, etc... This is a wonderful cause!

Sunday, November 11 from 6pm-12am

111 Minna Gallery (San Francisco)

• Admission: Donations at the door
• 100% of...

My use of Twitter has changed over time, as has my enjoyment of it. I had idly been making some notes about it, inspired by a thoughtful post from A Bite Of Sanity, and then today a Twitter question from Chris Brogan made me decide to post it. Examples here are real tweets from my timeline: 1. Newbie - figuring out if it's OK to jump in and follow people I don't know. Will they yell at me? 2. Stalker - You mean I can hear what John Gruber and Eric Meyer are saying? And I don't have to come up with something intelligent to say back? Sweet! In this stage I didn't make many tweets, just followed a ton of people and watched the tweets roll by. 3. Shy Kid At The Party - making awkward observational statements, hoping someone will start a conversation. It didn't work, as I wasn't really offering much of real value. Example: "Going to see Spiderman 3" 4. Self-Promoter - talking endlessly about the projects I'm working on, attempt at self-marketing I guess ... But this doesn't invite 2-way communication, and it didn't improve my Twitter experience at all. Example: "Back to...