OK. So I was quick to dismiss Twitter as another fad, another waste of my precious time.

But tonight, I had an epiphany. I’ve decided it’s worth at least trying before I dismiss it. That’s my philosophy on life. Why shouldn’t it apply not just to foods or hobbies, but to social networking as well? Though, I’ll have to recruit other friends to do the same or its pretty much pointless, and none of my friends is on it now. (This is an open invite to all your readers out there to add me as your friend.)

What brought about this realization? Facebook.

See, a friend commented on my wall about my status. For those not in the know (i.e. the few not on facebook — which you should be, I’ve been over this), on your Facebook wall there is a spot for your status. It says… “Meranda is…” and then whatever it is I’m doing, thinking, whatever.

Usually mine is filled with random updates: “Meranda is wondering when someone’s gonna come visit her in Lafayette.” “Meranda is __not__ on spring break.” “Meranda is enjoying a beautiful day off.”

Sometimes I get slightly more detailed, “Meranda is seriously not happy about working an 8 a.m. Sunday shift. And incredibly creeped out by the idea of being alone at the J&C and in charge of updating jconline.” or “Meranda is feeling like crap and not feeling like going to work tonight. :(.” There is a character limit, though I don’t know exactly what it is.

Often it’s pretty vague. Sometimes, it’s pretty funny: “Meranda is learning whether finding the bones of Jesus Christ would be a good thing… Gotta love the Discovery Channel.” or “Meranda is surfing facebook and myspace… for work purposes. seriously.” or my personal favorite Meranda is laughing at the use of the phrase “tricked out” on the scanner.”

All of these are actual status updates culled from my own Facebook account in the past month. Yeah, I usually update once or twice a week. (For those who care and aren’t privvy to my facebook account, my current status is: “Meranda is got a hair cut. uh oh.” So much for the grammar, but you can’t change the first two words.)

As you can see, I update it pretty regularly. And people respond to it. Personally, I read my other friends status updates like it’s my job, especially now that I don’t see half of them 10 hours a day like I used to. Then, there are the compulsive AIM away message checkers. The people who keep a running commentary on their life through AIM away messages. Come now, you know you’re one of them. I used to be. But it’s been so long since I logged on to iChat anyway. I should dust off my screen name. Anyway, it dawned on me tonight, Oh… that’s what Twitter is good for. So, I’m going to give it a try. I’ll keep you all posted.

If you haven’t the slightest idea what Twitter is, other than go to the Web site, I’m going to recommend this video (as stolen from Mindy McAdams who found it somewhere else… you get the idea.)

I’m still not seeing the “point” except that it’s a fun little tool I can see myself becoming addicted to if I can get enough people to join. Other than that, this post did lay some pretty good ideas of the potential. My favorite was “friendsourcing” — think phone a friend on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, only you phone your whole friends list instead of having to pick.

My URL for anyone interested is http://twitter.com/meranduh. Find out what I’m up to now. Chances are it’s work or sleep or perhaps trying to fall alseep but worrying about work or trying to work but thinking about sleep. Those are the two dominant forces in my life right now. And I’m about to succumb to one of them extremely early tonight.

I love quotes, and I own a number of quote books. One of the books I’ve received is called “What Now?” and it’s basically advice for after graduation.

I was skimming this book tonight when I came across a graduation speech made by Guy Kwasaki. I don’t know who he is or where or when this speech was given. (A bit of Googling turned this up: “Hindsight” Commencement Speech, Palo Alto High School, California, June 11, 1995.) But there was something in it worth sharing. He presents his speech in a top 10 list of things he realizes now but didn’t when he was a new graduate.

This is item eight: “Challenge the known and embrace the unknown.”

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is to accept the known and resist the unknown. You should, in fact, do exactly the opposite: challenge the known and embrace the unknown.

Let me tell you a short story about ice. In the late 1800s there was a thriving ice industry in the Northeast. Companies would cut blocks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds and sell them around the world. The largest single shipment was 200 tons that was shipped to India. 100 tons got there unmelted, but this was enough to make a profit.

These ice harvesters, however, were put out of business by companies that invented mechanical ice makers. It was no longer necessary to cut and ship ice because companies could make it in any city during any season.

These ice makers, however, were put out of business by refrigerator companies. If it was convenient to make ice at a manufacturing plant, imagine how much better it was to make ice and create cold storage in everyone’s home.

You would think that the ice harvesters would see the advantages of ice making and adopt this technology. However, all they could think about was the known: better saws, better storage, better transportation.

Then you would think that the ice makers would see the advantages of refrigerators and adopt this technology. The truth is that the ice harvesters couldn’t embrace the unknown and jump their curve to the next curve.

Challenge the known and embrace the unknown, or you’ll be like the ice harvester and ice makers.

All right, so what’s the point?

Well, I want to be ahead of the curve. So many journalists are stuck in the ice harvesting phase. I find stories, report them and ship the finished story off to you to consume.

A lot of papers are in the ice maker phase. Ok, well, how about if we utilize you guys. We’re looking at property taxes or towing fines or whatever the topic of the day is. What’s your experience? Why don’t you leave a comment on our story? Enter our forum?

But that’s not going to last forever. We’re moving into the refrigerator stage pretty quickly: People can make their own ice. And just as they learned to do that, they’ll learn to produce their own news. They already are, on sites like YouTube, NowPublic, hell, even Blogger. And they’re learning to organize it and disseminate it in news feeds.

So, uh, my point is don’t think about what the best method is today, or what’s the quickest or coolest way to achieve your result. Don’t think about Soundslides or Story Chats or databases as the future. Don’t even think about the future, what’s the saying, “The future is now.” What’s the craziest idea you have for a story or a video or a package or anything? What do you want to do or seen done? What type of innovative new way to the tell story hasn’t even been created let alone adopted yet? Go do that.

I was thinking yesterday about typical. Most people don’t know that MerandaWrites is not my first foray into Web site ownership. Hardly. I actually bought my first domain when I was 14. Yeah, 14. It’s still around at typical.net. But I haven’t redesigned it or really updated much since freshman year of college. It looks way off on Macs, but the quote splash pages look pretty great on PC’s using IE. (This was before Firefox existed as a serious contender on either.)

I have, every year, paid to renew the domain out of a sense of obligation. See, typical.net has history. It’s a big part of my adolescence. I’ve tried to think of what I can do with it. My main objective, honestly, is to avoid it being snapped up by a domain reseller who will turn it into a page of links. In the meantime, it sits there, a relic of my past.

But that’s not why I was thinking about typical. I was thinking about how lucky I am to have grown up using the Web as my playground.

There was a time before MySpace and Facebook were the go-to places for young people. There was a time before Flickr hosted your photos and your bookmarks were anyone’s business but your own. Back in the days when AngelFire, Tripod and Geocities hosted the Web. There was a time when Yahoo was how you searched, and nobody’d ever heard of Google. Hotmail was a fledgling idea, and AOL was the cool ISP to have. And back then, everyone had ICQ, and you could still get a meaningful AIM username. There was a time before Blogger, Xanga and LiveJournal gave everyone license to be a writer. Believe it or not, there was even a time when Amazon only sold books and when eBay was just a place to look for rare beanie babies.

I know this because I watched each of those technologies develop in the past decade of my lifetime. And that my friends is why new media excites me.

I don’t care about SoundSlides. I don’t care about the benefits of QuickTime versus Windows Media Player and how Flash is really what you should use anyway. I don’t care about message boards or story chats. I don’t care about blogs or wikis. Sure, all of these things are fun to play with and make for some compelling packages and discussions… today. But what excites me is knowing that next month or next year something I never even saw coming is going to become commonplace.

Typical is an example of this. It is who I was, and it was a necessary step in becoming who I am today. It taught me about the importance of community, about keeping content fresh and writing for an audience. It let me hone my photoshop skills and gave me an outlet for my photography and creative writing to be seen. But I was one of many doing that.

There was this almost underground “teen domain scene,” we even had a homebase. You’ll notice the last time the “Today’s Domain Online” site was updated was June 2003. That’s about right, because that’s when I graduated from high school and kind of stepped away from the “scene.” There were hundreds, who knows when you count the hostees probaby thousands, of us. We hailed from Tokyo and London from San Diego to Alaska to NYC to Akron. It was in many ways an elite club. You had to prove yourself to get noticed, to get hosted. You had to participate and put yourself out their for critique. But that interaction made it fun.

We didn’t just use these communities like kids today use MySpace. We CREATED them.

Today’s teens wallow on MySpace, but we had message boards on domains with names like “snuggles.net” and “bluemorning.nu.” When I first bought typical, I put up a message board. One of those UBB’s, which seemed ubiquitous among the higher profile “teen domains” of my era. I even grew a community of probably 50 very active users. We even had a mascot, Fred, who graced the top of my very orange message board. We talked about school and relationships. We talked about parents, about careers and college. Last year, one of the girls who had frequented the message board contacted me at my kent.edu e-mail address. She was enrolling at my university and wanted me to show her around campus. It was an interesting meeting, and it reminded me of the real world implications of the connections we make online. I learned how to moderate and generate discussion on those boards. I also learned how to collaborate and create a community on the domain.

Those are skills that, at 14 or 15, I just thought meant making it more fun. But then yesterday, when I was thinking about some of the awesome things available today and their predecessors, I realized it has all been just one big precursor to today’s Internet. I guess that’s the theory behind calling it Web 2.0. It excites me to think how quickly we’ve gotten here today. I can’t wait to see what the next generation holds and what new tools it will bring for communicating in, collaborating on and most importantly creating our world.

Although I agree people should pay attention when they’re crossing the street, I’m not sure how effective an all-out ban on using electronic devices while doing so would be. But apparently, NY is considering just such a thing. From CNN:

New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone could soon face a $100 fine.

New York State Sen. Carl Kruger says three pedestrians in his Brooklyn district have been killed since September upon stepping into traffic while distracted by an electronic device. In one case bystanders screamed “watch out” to no avail.

Kruger says he will introduce legislation on Wednesday to ban the use of gadgets such as Blackberry devices and video games while crossing the street.

I know personally from having driven and walked across campus with throngs of people on their phones, text messaging or listening to iPods, this is a problem. Even I’m guilty of paying less attention than I should when I’m on the phone and late for class or a meeting.

However, I don’t really see people holding a conversation on the phone walking a block, hanging up, calling back, coming to another intersection, hanging up, and so on. Likewise, I can’t imagine most iPod users would be up for mandatory pausing while they crossed the street.

But for that matter, let’s ban all forms of communication or distraction while crossing the street. Silence while you’re between sidewalks, people. Single file lines. You, put down that newspaper! And over there, stop reviewing those notecards. I don’t care if you have a test in five minutes. It’s for your own good.

I don’t have a solution for making people pay attention to their surroundings. Other than having parents reinforce to their children the importance of looking both ways before stepping off the curb. But that solution is so low-tech, it would never work.

I suspect this proposal would be nearly impossible to implement because it’s something nearly everyone does (including I suspect many of the legislators who’d be voting on it). I think it would be pretty much ignored by people too busy to care. Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.

The ME of the Modesto Bee makes a great point (via Romenesko). And it’s worth telling to all those nay-sayers who believe newspapers will completely die and citizen media will completely rule. The thing is, you can’t really have one without the other. Well, at least neither would be very good without the other.

But I pose this question: If every newspaper in America stopped publishing tomorrow, what would the bloggers have to write about?

Virulent political opinions with no basis in fact, and the riotous antics of their cats. That’s about it.

Where would the informed social dialogue come from?

If you look at what’s posted in the blogosphere, much of it is reaction to the news of the day. Bloggers link to newspaper columns and stories all the time (and we thank them for it).

That news just doesn’t fall from the sky. Reporters and editors work hard to pursue the news all over the world. Many endure hardship and danger.

It’s an interesting question, and it would sure make for an interesting experiment. If you could get every paper (and their Web sites) to go on a one-day hiatus, what would the bloggers or the TV pundits talk about?

It reminds me kind of the concept behind the Grey Day movement, which if you haven’t heard of was basically that for one day the Internet goes back to basics with no images, color, pretty fonts, HTML or CSS. (The site has disappeared it seems, but here’s a brief description of what it was.) The idea behind it was basically to raise awareness of the importance of respecting intellectual property and how if you steal art, words, music, etc. you might wake up one day and find the Internet doesn’t have any of those things.

So imagine how silent the blogosphere would be if suddenly the news media stopped producing news for it to discuss and pontificate upon.

And on a related note as to why bloggers won’t replace reporters, at least for local matters. When was the last time a blogger spent several hours standing in sub-zero temperatures with freezing water droplets raining down on her as she covered a fire? I don’t know of any who have, but I know the last time a reporter did… And it wasn’t for the glory or linkage. It was to get the story to the people who were impacted and those who wanted to know. (And it was pretty freaking cold!)

“Where do you find the time?” That was the question one of my fellow reporters posed to me after I briefly explained how to use Facebook to him and a few of the editors. That’s right. I had to explain how to use Facebook.

But why should they, or anyone over the age of about 25, care? Well, it’s an invaluable tool in trying to understand the interests and interactions of my generation. And by my generation I mean anyone under the age of about 25.

Recently a student at Purdue, which is in West Lafayette, disappeared from a fraternity party. Since then, we’ve been following the story down all its different paths.

One of those paths I discovered the first day after he was reported missing. When I got home from work, I sat down to check my e-mail and see the latest happenings with my friends on Facebook. Out of curiousity, I plugged the missing student’s name in to see if he had a facebook profile. He did, but because I’m not in the network I couldn’t see it. BUT, I could see that his roommate had created a group asking to HELP FIND WADE STEFFEY.

When I first noticed it, the group had fewer than 1,000 members. By about 7 p.m. that night it had shot up to 1,200. I sent a note to my editors saying this was something I’d never seen before and worth checking into for sources, tips, etc. Currently, the group hovers around 6,000 members. All for one missing student.

Those 6,000 members have been actively posting everything from photos taken the night he disappeared, to missing person fliers to hang up and hand out, to the latest news and speculation. Students that first weekend even organized a huge group to travel from his hometown to the university to hold a prayer vigil and aid in a mass search. The university’s police and spokeswoman have even joined in, mining the group for tips, ideas and volunteers. Today, we ran a story about how Facebook has helped in the search.

My point isn’t so much about this one situation. I only use it to illustrate the point most college journalists already know: Facebook is an invaluable source. Millions of kids willingly post information about themselves, their friends and their interests. Too often we hear about Facebook getting people in trouble, as with the recent racist parties which drew attention after pictures ended up on the site. But trust me, it isn’t all bad.

At the Stater, whenever we had a student injured, killed or missing, Facebook was always the first place we went. It was second nature for us to look there, and it should be for anyone writing about students. It gave us a quick glimpse of who that student was. In one instance, I remember finding the MySpace page of a girl killed by a drunk driver through her Facebook profile. The last post she’d made on that blog was a list of things to achieve in life. It broke my heart and humanized her in a way we never could have. Without sites like Facebook and MySpace, we never could have known about her dreams or found her best friend.

Facebook used to be the exclusive playground of college students lucky enough to have the free time and the .edu e-mail address. Not any longer. You, too, Mr. Anonymous journalist can (and should) join the fun. If you don’t know how, there’s a quick tutorial I had to write to accompany the original story about the Steffey Facebook group. When my editor suggested I write it I laughed. (I may have offended him?) But I wasn’t laughing at him. I was laughing because although I hadn’t been there a week, I was teaching the “old dogs” new tricks.

It’s interesting to watch the visitor statistics on this site. You know the standard stuff: how many people come, where they come from and what they look at. And although I don’t get a lot of traffic, I do get some interesting traffic.

I turn up in the most random Google searches, such as “cute Akron cab driver.” Also, the technorati searches that lead to MerandaWrites are oftentimes pretty puzzling. Either way both offer a snapshot of what’s on people’s minds: Obama, Harry Potter, the iPhone, O’Rielly and Colbert, Sadam, etc.

But what fascinates me most isn’t what people are looking at (though I do find it interesting which pages garner the most attention) or what string of words landed them here. Nope, I’m most intrigued by where the people who happen upon my blip on the Web come from.

You see, I noticed today when I looked at that map (part of the stats at W3Counter) that I have had visitors from all over the world. In fact, at least one orange dot representing a visitor is positioned on every continent. Wow. A decade ago, who’d have thought that a 21-year-old fresh-faced, wide-eyed recent college graduate could throw words out there that would be read by people on every corner of the earth? Certainly not me. And that’s why it enthralls me.

12 and a half rules to be a good journalist
(nod to Howard Owens where I saw it linked)

They are all good rules. Some more obvious than others. But it’s a list worth keeping in mind each morning as you wake up.

My favorites: Be a thriver, not a survivor (No. 7); Keep learning every day (No. 4); and Never be embarassed to ask stupid questions (No. 2).

I also like rule 11, although it may have the most clichés in a single paragraph I’ve ever seen:

11. WAKE UP ANGRY, AMBITIOUS: Get the fire in your belly to do something, set things right. Respond to injustice, inhumanity, corruption. Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. Don’t think it is somebody else’s job. Be the change you want to see.

And of course, rule 12 is just what the short bio about me on the side of this blog says: I love what I do. As I often advised some of the younger students at Kent when they asked me for advice about whether to stick with it or change majors. If you don’t love it, get out. You’re not going to be paid enough to hate your job. But if you do, even 12-hour days and enough stress to crack most people isn’t going to deter you from rule 1, chase your dreams.

Last week I received a Facebook message from a reporter I worked with at the Stater a few years back. He said he was glad to hear about my job, and that he’d visited my blog and learned I had been interested in science and math. He was surprised I’d made the choice to be a journalist and is “still surprised you chose not to do science/math.” For him journalism was the back-up career path, but he figured, in his words “journalism’s my only true talent,” which is why he didn’t pursue something else.

I doubt this is true, as I know him to have other skills he could easily have lobbied into a career. But it made me realize something I hadn’t thought of since I was in high school.

I chose journalism. This might seem like an obvious statement — Yeah no crap you chose journalism, you just spent three and a half years and 60 grand getting a degree in it. — but bear with me.

I chose it. As in, I had the choice between journalism and something else. Not just something, lots of somethings. In fact, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life this was my biggest hindrance. I was good at math and science. I was also good at English and history. I was also a varsity athlete, a peer mentor, a member of the drama club, a library assistant, a budding photographer, a freelance Web designer and much much more.

It wasn’t just the propaganda they spit at you as a kid to build your self-esteem. I truly felt that I could do and be anything I wanted to be… except maybe a reporter.

As I have often told people, I chose journalism expecting to fail. I used to be afraid to walk up to an associate at the store and ask where something was. I used to cry when my mom made me order pizza over the phone. I wasn’t shy so much as I had serious anxiety about looking or sounding dumb.

Journalism helped me get over this. It helped me become a better person. Besides being able to carry a conversation with just about anyone, I now see connections in the world where previously I never would have.

I always felt a little bad that journalism wasn’t a “calling” as it appears to be for many of my friends. I do think anyone brave enough (or dumb enough) to go into this field has to have some of the “save the world” mentality. The comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable mindset, however that saying goes.

As I say in the about me page on this site, what I learned as I began to develop as a journalist is that I can take all those skills and talents I once saw as a hindrance to deciding my career fate and apply them to my job as a reporter. I can’t think of any other path that I could say that about.

So, I’m not surprised I didn’t go into science/math or worried that I settled for my back-up plan. I’m 21. It’s too early to be on my back-up plan.

So, I happened across this list of 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know.

I’ll be honest. It made me feel stupid.

I knew just more than half of the words meanings on first glance. From taking the words apart and working out the potential meanings, I probably could make an educated guess on maybe 15 of the remaining words. But that still leaves about 30 of the 100 words I “should know” as a complete, “huh, wha?” for me.

I didn’t take the SAT. I took the ACT once and, happy enough with my score, went about junior and senior year stressing about other things. So, unlike many peers, I never worried about memorizing seemingly random word lists and meanings. I’m presuming that is where my peers would learn such words as bowdlerize, orthography and quotidian. Because I can’t imagine short of doing a lot of crossword puzzles or memorizing the dictionary, those are words that have ever come up in conversation.

You know, maybe I am better off not knowing these words.

My sister Brandiann is constantly on my case about my use of what she calls “Republican” words. Most of the time these words are not uncommon; they just have multiple syllables, and that frustrates her. I don’t try to impress people with my vocabulary. In fact, as a newspaper reporter, I don’t get that chance very often. Though, I admit, I’d love to see my editor’s face if I tried to squeeze in the word “incontrovertible” instead of undeniable.

But, it makes me wonder. If my college-educated vocabulary, which is hardly lacking in my opinion, is barely a passing grade on this list of 100, then where the heck does the average high school graduate fall.

And who the heck compiled this list? I can think of a few more practical terms that should be there, such as “APR” and “Interest Rate.”

But eh, that’s just me. And hasn’t this post proved that I apparently don’t know as much as I should.