Random thoughts about NDF 2010

I'm attending the National Digital Forum for the third year and I still continue to feel inspired by this diverse group of professionals whose aim seems to be serving society. The thoughts captured via twitter at #NDF2010 is just a snapshot of the discussions being covered. Most of the sessions seem to delve into this sector in a positive way.

Trying to find a balance between professional, creative and personal I always worry that one will take over the other - no more - time to accept that what I am professionally impacts upon my creative processes. Sometimes that is to the detriment of my creative life, yet what I achieve professionally often stimulates me in similar ways.

NDF is a gathering that leaves me wanting to achieve such great and wondrous things. I know that I will come back down to earth soon, but I will try my best to enjoy this inspirational ride.



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Meeting my goals as a Poet through Toastmasters

I have posted before about Toastmasters - Finding poetry in Toastmasters and tonight I had the opportunity to do a reading. The idea of getting up in front of my club and reading my poetry is becoming easier. So I am continuing to meet my personal goal of working towards reading my poetry out to a room full of strangers :-)

Toastmasters is changing me because it is teaching me skills and it makes me feel much more confident about myself. This is not just with my speaking but also my ability to be a leader. I was 'tapped' on the shoulder to become the Vice President of Education for our club. Like my decision to join Toastmasters this is also a decision I am happy I made.

Toastmasters is helping me to find my voice. I am learning how to be much clearer and concise in what I want to say. Through Toastmasters and other things I have become involved in, I am beginning to truly value how important poetry is in order to express 'my voice'. This does not always show in both of my blogs. As I realise that time is rushing by and my posts are not growing enough. What I now understand is that my blogs were never about being discovered. My blogs and my poetry are like Toastmasters - they are all a way to voice and most importantly grow.



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ANZAC Day

Today is ANZAC day, April 25th. This day is for Australians and New Zealanders to remember those who have died in war. ANZAC day is acknowledging that sometimes war occurs in order to protect something worth dying for. This day is not about glorifying war.

I feel that this day is not just about those who did not return from war, for those who did return were forever changed. When I was a child it was my Great-Grandfather Da who took me fishing and gave me one of my first jobs sweeping floors. Da was in the British Navy and survived World War II. Yet even towards the end of his life the impact of war still lingered. Often I remember him and think about the impact war had on him and many of our family. In trying to understand my thoughts drifted across the fields of the many battles that have occurred in the last 100 years.
From this the poem Red Tears came into being.

On this day I remember Da and those like him who survived, but have had to learn to live with all that they faced in war.





Da is the one of
the far right of
this picture.

Anzac Day by Allison Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License.
Based on a work at allisonbrown.blogspot.com.

Finding poetry in Toastmasters

I became involved in Toastmasters over a year ago for a variety of reasons. If you have no idea what Toastmasters is then go and read about Toastmasters NZ. It has only been in recent weeks that I admitted to someone aloud that one of my main motivations for going to Toastmasters is to build towards going to a poetry reading so I can read one of my poems out. I feel that I still have a way to go before I am ready to this meet goal even though I have already read out some of my poems to other members of my club. Also, by posting this goal here I am documenting what I am working towards as a poet.

I do not fear of public speaking and speaking my mind in front of a group of people has never been a major problem. Yet I have found that I have gained so much from being a toastmaster, which was not what I expected.

• Running a meeting;
  
• Providing constructive feedback that allows someone else to know where they are doing well and where they still can grow;
  
• Being asked something on the spot and having the skills to respond in a structured and confident way
• Sounding more confident when I speak because I'm now aware what can make you sound less assured. Such as saying "Ums and Ahs" rather than pausing and taking a deep breath before continuing.
  

Last night at Toastmasters (13 April 2010) I was the Toastmaster for the evening and the theme I selected for the session was "Thinking outside the book". I selected this theme because I wanted to share with the rest of my club what working as a Librarian is like when your job is far from traditional. When I created the program adding my poem The Idealised Librarian seemed to make perfect sense, because after 10 years this poem still helps explain why I am a Librarian. What was fascinating about adding this poem was the reaction by someone else there - "Did you write this?" and the expression on their face :-). Being able to blend my poetry into the different roles in Toastmasters makes what I do there unique. The opportunity to express myself through my poetry in such a warm and friendly environment has helped me feel that my main goal is achievable.



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Feedburner and twitter working together

At the beginning of 2009 I added FeedBurner to my blogs. Since it was taken over by Google it has simply become another way to monitor access to my blogs via the RSS feeds in the same way I use Google Analytics.

Last night when I was checking FeedBurner I noticed a post titled: "Socializing your feed with Twitter" - http://adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com/2009/12/socializing-your-feed-with-twitter.html. If you use FeedBurner and twitter this is worth checking out.

I noticed this post because I was looking for an easy way to have blog posts from the Hocken Collections blog tweeted via the Otago Library twitter account - @OtagoLibrary. I will post about how it goes :-)

Update 1: It worked for this post :-D -- Cool thing is that I can add hashtags to all these tweets or even use the tags I add to a post...

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Goals for now

I started both of my blogs so I would have a way to focus my writing. The big goal was to be published, which goes towards the overall goal of being recognised as a poet. I feel I am starting to see all of this a bit more realistically. Not matter what happens I will always write poetry. It is how I express myself. Anyone who knows me will tell you expressing myself seems to come easily to me - well to a certain degree yes it does. Yet there are some things where there is not quick explanation, but somehow even in my darker moments the words I do find seem to give the appearance of poetry.

The point of this post - just in case it is not very clear yet. I now accept that yes it is nice to be published, but this should never be the reason one writes. I love the fact that 2 of my poems Winters Sonnet 2.0 and Red Tears were published in the first issue of the Teesside Artists' Journal. Yet writing each of those poems had nothing to do with whether I would be able to find a place to have them published.

Also, whether anyone cares to read this post is up to them. This post and this moment is about accepting why I write and why I bother to share what I write. There will also be moments that my life doesn't allow for much time to write poetry, but this does not mean this is far from my thoughts.

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Creative Commons - how not to use CC

I now know first hand the most annoying thing someone who has used a Creative Commons license can do is to think they can change the type of license they have already applied.

Over 6 months ago I wrote a poem for a friend. At first I was just playing around with adding it to a photo to see how it could enhance the poem. The first image I picked looked great, even though I was not supposed to remix it due to the CC that had been applied. I therefore found a second image that I could remix and it actually turned out quite lovely. In the last week I decided to post that poem to my blog. However, when I looked up the photograph on flickr it seemed that photographer had changed their CC licence for all their photos to all rights reserved - WTF...

Maybe the most constructive thing would have been to message them and find out why they had made the change. I might have even been able to explain to them that such changes make life difficult for others and come to an agreement. Instead I searched and found a new image with the most open CC license available - Attribution only. To celebrate finding an image that is along the lines of the poem I have also applied the same license, even though I am not required to.

Check out the remix of the poem and photo here. However, I am not sure if this is exactly how I want it - so I may remix this again...

Lesson is - if you apply a CC license that lets others remix your work, it is not only rude to change that license, it also goes against the idea of CC. Once you have applied a license you cannot change it, so pick a license carefully!

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Connecting Flickr with my blogs

Leaf1
Originally uploaded by behind.dreaming

I wanted to start posting more of what I have called 'poetry in pictures' to my blog and have only just discovered that I can connect my Flickr account to my blog.

Wow - the things that can happen when you hit the 'blog this' option in Flickr :-)