Slides from Karen’s #EDW13 Get Started Blogging Session

I was really happy to see such a great turnout for today’s session on how to get started blogging at Enterprise Data World (#EDW13).  I wasn’t just happy to have a full room, but that I got so many great, insightful questions and comments.

My Get Blogging slides are available for download now.

Some of the resources I mentioned during the talk:

• WordPress.com This is my blogging platform of choice.  You can set up a blog in 10 seconds, for free. 
• WordPress.org Same platform, but if you want to host it someplace yourself.  You can also find a third party host and they typically will have this ready to install from their catalog of approved applications.  It’s free.
• Windows Live Writer http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/essentials-other-programs  This is what I use to compose most of my blog posts
• TechSmith.com Home of Camtasia (video editor of my choice) and SnagIt (my screen capture tool).  You want these.
• ERwin.com Go To page for all things ERwin, including their blogs (under the community page)
• Embarcadero.com Where to find ER/Studio blogs
• Dataversity.net Home of numerous blogs and articles

Remember, if you start blogging, I want to hear about it so that I can share, comment, and help you promote your writing.

Get Blogging!

Friday Fun Contest: How Many TLAs Can You Fit In a Sentence?

It’s Friday again (we should have more of these) and I’m in the mood for a contest.  I have some mystery prizes, more than just swag, to give away.  But I’m not saying what it is until the contest is over. Let’s just say it will have data stuff, space stuff, and for certain one of those secret Canadian keychain bottler openers.  The value of the prize will be approximately $100… CANADIAN!!!!…which I think now is close to $100 million dollars USD.

How Many TLAs can you fit in a sentence?

Your challenge is to make a  grammatically-correct sentence that is dominated with TLAs.  What’s a TLA?  Why it’s a Three Letter Acronym, of course. But we’re going to be flexible.  You can use acronyms or initialisms and you aren’t limited to three letter ones.  You can also tack on verb endings and such. So things like RBARing, LOSed and SSDTed are fine.  We’ll have a group of prestigious fun judges to evaluate your submissions based on these guidelines:

• Length of sentence
• Length of TLAs
• Higher ratio of TLAs to “real” words – in fact, I want to see very few real words
• Higher weight given to non-product TLAs
• Originality is a real plus
• Higher weight given to a good mix of TLA “domains”.  If you can work in textspeak, space, tech, music, literature, arts and crafts, cycling and knitting, then you’re golden.
• The more snark the better.

Your TLAs should be commonly known or easily to lookup.   If we can’t figure out what it means, you’ll lose points.

Examples

I REd a CRM DB to get the DDL for the CASE tool, FTW.

OK, my C4ISTAR PM FUBBARed* my PLoA due to a SNAFU* with a SME's PEBCAK bug.

NASA SCUBA SMEs are NEEMO FTEs, AFAIK.

The Rules

Entries accepted from locations where these sorts of contests are legal.  Check with local authorities.  If you are unable to accept the prize for a corporate or government restriction, just let us know.  We’d still love to honour your work.  Canadian residents must solve a particularly silly mathematical question.  Study up on square roots and factorials. But they won’t be in the question.

Decisions of the judges are final.

You must be 13 years of age or older to enter.

You agree to let us publish your entries, but you get to keep ownership of them.  We are nice like that.

Your sentence must be an original creation, by you.

No explicit, illegal or shameful content.  Yes, I know some of you are disappointed.

Contest closes on 29 October 2012, 2 November 2012 at midnight my time, wherever I am at that time.

* UPDATE * I’ve just received some new swag from vendors, so I’m extending the deadline for this contest.  We will now have 3 prizes to give away. *

Taxes, customs, duties and any other silly mandated stuff that makes it less fun to win are the responsibility of the recipient.

*The TLA example above has alternate, family-friendly definitions.  I looked them up. Trust me.

How to Enter

Leave your entry here as a comment.   Yes, you can enter more than once…let’s say no more than 4 entries per person.  Yes, you’ll have to use a method to post that allows us to contact you to arrange for the major award.  You can submit anonymously, but no prize for you.

The Judges

Denny Cherry (@mrdenny | blog ) Unofficial SQL PASS Party Planner and Trouble Maker

Joey D’Antoni (@jdanton | blog ) Biker, but not that kind, who architects on the side

Marco Frissen (@mfrissen | blog ) Opinionated space and tech geek. Token foreigner on this panel

Thomas LaRock (@sqlrockstar |blog ) DBA, Happymaker, and bacon lover

Shannon Moore (@ageekmom | blog )  SpaceTweep Wrangler and cyclist extraordinaire

Karen Lopez (@datachick) Loves Space and Data.  Almost the same. But Space Data is best. Another foreigner, sort of.

Join the #SQLPASS Global Growth Tweet Chat 20-21 June #SQLPASSGG

I recently joined the SQLPASS Global Growth committee to help PASS look at changes to governance and organizational structures in order to better meet the needs of non-North American* members.

PASS has been highly successful in locations outside the US, but they want to take more steps to ensure that they aren’t just a US-based organization that allows non-US members to join. I belong to many such IT associations and as a Canadian-based member, my needs are often not met or even valued.  Except for member membership dues.  That’s why I wanted to help out.

I’ve been involved in a few similar societal transitions over the years and I hope to bring that experience to the team.  Some of those organizations have been working for more than a decade to make such a transition. Others managed the transition well and are growing internationally.  That’s what I want for PASS.

Even though I have close ties to the US, I hope that I can bring a more global point of view to all the discussions.  In fact, we all can do that via the feedback mechanisms offered.

Background

PASS has set up a site with background materials and a preliminary plan for moving forward:

http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/GlobalGrowth.aspx

You will find background documents, a discussion forum, and an email address for sending your comments.  Check it out and then join us on Thursday and Friday to chat about it on Twitter.

Tweet Chats

A Tweet Chat is a focused set of discussions on Twitter that allow Twitter users to ask questions or provide comments and feedback on the Global Growth Initiative.  There are currently six sessions scheduled:

You don’t have to be on Twitter to watch the Tweet Chat, but you do if you’d like to post questions or give comments during the chat.  The hashtag we’ll be using is #SQLPASSGG .  You can use the Twitter search function by following that hashtag link to follow along. 

I’ll be staffing the 20 June 1700 GMT (1 PM ET) Tweet Chat and I hope to attend most of them as my schedule allows.

I’m excited about the path that PASS is taking and I hope you are, too. In my opinion, it’s important that SQL Server professionals have a common foundation for discussing SQL Server, methods, membership perks, and the direction of the association.  In order to this, we need a common umbrella organization (that’s even free to join!) to pull us together.

So stop by Twitter during one of the times (or even later) to give us your feedback.  I may even retweet you.

* North American here really means US and Canada in this context.  But as I always say: "one should not get their geography lessons from mobile phone companies".

A New Era for #NASATweetup: The NASA Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Briefing

I was invited to attend a NASA Budget Briefing as part of a recent NASATweetup held at NASA Headquarters on 13 February 2012.  I’ve been to other NASA Tweetups, but this was a new type of event for both attendees and NASA.  First, the topic was more administrative than any others.  No fire or sound waves. No Florida hair.  Heck, one of the people I hadn’t seen for a while said "You look different".  My response: "You’ve never seen me in work clothes". 

The first two NASATweetups I attended were launches (STS-134 and Juno).  Both of these had 150 attendees with a two-day program of speakers and presentations, then a launch.  This meeting was part of an existing event, a media briefing about the 2013 Fiscal Year Budget.  Yes, this was PowerPoint and spreadsheets, for the most part.  However, the content of those presentation materials was going to show us which programs were moving forward and which ones were going to have to change or be dropped completely.  Being a data professional, this was my type of event.  I wanted the data and the budget wasn’t going to be released until one hour before the event.  That’s a fast read of a set of slides and some large documents.  I went for the slides.

The second thing that was different: this tweetup was much smaller. The original registration limited attendees to 20 and I think we had just under that.  The most important difference was that we were going to be part of the media, able to ask questions along with the traditional media.  This is a first for NASATweetups and I’m not sure how many other US Federal media briefings have involved a mix of traditional and social media. I was excited that I could be part of this new approach to media, especially because it brought together two of my passions: space and social media. More on that mixing later.

The NASATweetup

The first thing that was different from other NASATweeups: We received no badges or swag bags…because traditional media don’t get those, either.  If I do one of these again, I’ll bring my own badge or credentials.

In the opening statements, Bob Jacobs announced this new era and took our photo, which was posted to Twitter.

You can see him pause to take the photo in the video below.   I think that was our second sign that this press briefing was going to be different. 

This year, we are trying something a little different. As well as traditional media representatives, for the first time we have invited members of the social media community to be a part of today’s presentation, and we will be taking questions via Twitter using the #AskNASA. So we thank everyone for joining us for today’s presentation.

We will go over some of the ground rules first, but well, wait a second. I want to make sure I capture this. If we are going to be social media, I need to do it from here too.

[Laughter.]

MR. JACOBS: Okay. Got a Photo.

The briefing was done by Major General Charles Bolden, NASA Chief Administrator and Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Robinson.  It started with a video about NASA’s plans.

I’ve listed some links in the related section below of the analyses of the impact of the new budget, but the ones that were of note to me:

• STEM education and outreach was cut from $138 million dollars in 2012 to $100 million.  That’s a significant cutback to this program, but only a tiny portion of a tiny portion of the overall US Federal budget.  This is going to make it more difficult to find and retain qualified people in the future.  I’m also guessing that other organizations are having their STEM budgets cut as well.
• ExoMars program will need to be re-programmed, meaning that we will not be collaborating with the European agencies for these Mars exploration programs . This has left ESA scrambling to find other countries to help with these programs, most likely Roscosmos.

DataChick’s Question on Open Government and Open Data

I was fortunate to be called upon to ask a question:

Let’s take one more question over here, and then we will take a couple from Twitter, and then we will go to the field centers.

QUESTIONER (Karen Lopez): Hi. I am Karen Lopez. I am Datachick on Twitter.

One of the ways that the public, the rest of us, can benefit from all these NASA missions is via access to open government transparency and open data initiatives, like at data.NASA.gov. Have budget pressures made any changes to those programs? Will they continue to expand?

ADMINISTRATOR BOLDEN: Do you want to take that?

DR. ROBINSON: Okay. So NASA couple things. One is you know the administration has a very vigorous Open Government Initiative, and NASA is a participant in that. And it recently went international, and we have an international event coming up in April April, thank you April, where we will be gathering together folks from around the world, virtually, of course, to work on things. So we have very vigorous programs.

And a large part of what we do in Open Government is, as you said, we leverage off of things that the programs do already, make their data available, make it accessible, Open Government a little bit more just to point them in the right direction. So it’s really Open Government is really a philosophy at NASA that we try to put as much as we can out into the public in the most understandable way possible, and so we are doing that.

The Open Government Initiative has taken us in a few different directions, and we will continue that. We plan to keep going forward, but it is always when you talk about Open Government, it is really it is hard to predict, because we are going to do so much, right? We are going to have so much data coming in and all of that. NASA is a very exciting place to work, because now we have apps on our iPhones from NASA and a whole bunch of things, so we are already out there in terms of Open Government

QUESTIONER (Karen Lopez): [Speaking off mic.]

[Here I followed up with "So no immediate changes?" ]

DR. ROBINSON: Well, not in the near future. We’re going to assess I am looking at my partner here. I am the senior accountable official for Open Government, and then our CIO over there

ADMINISTRATOR BOLDEN: We are both looking at the CIO.

DR. ROBINSON: Yeah, we are both looking at the CIO, and it is her folks mainly who do it. And so I think we are really going to assess up to this international event, how to keep those kind of things going or not.

And with that question I was able to add my third passion: Data.  As in, Love Your Data.  The terms data or information was mentioned 21 times during the briefing, twice in NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s opening remarks.

This budget supports more than 80 science missions, 56 currently in operation and 28 now under development, that cover the vital data we need to understand our own planet, diverse missions reaching farther into our solar system, and the next generation of observatories peering beyond the reaches of our neighborhood to other galaxies and their solar systems and undiscovered phenomena

The missions currently at Mars the Mars Science Laboratory, on its way, and MAVEN, well into development will provide many years of data to help us understand the Red Planet and our needs in future years to meet the President’s challenge to send humans to Mars in the mid 2030s.

Citizen Journalists?

No, we weren’t. In some of the descriptions of the event, including the announcement of the Tweetup, we were described as "Twitter Fans" of NASA.  One of the issues I can see with trying to mix fans and journalism is that…they shouldn’t mix.  Sure, it’s not unheard of for a journalist to be excited about interviewing someone, but in theory they aren’t supposed to be fans.  I don’t think my role there was as a citizen journalist.  However, I think we Tweetup attendees did a good job not gushing all over Bolden and Robinson in our questions.  In fact, I was impressed by the lack of fanboi attitude in any of our questions.

You can really tell the difference when you see this still taken from This Week at NASA coverage:

Three laptops, all running Tweetdeck in that photo.  That’s me tweeting in the upper center of the frame. Most of the traditional media attendees brought digital recorders and paper.  So while they were taking notes, we were sharing live.  That’s not necessarily better.  It’s different.  Mixing social media and traditional media can work.  They don’t have to compete.

Some of the traditional media people from major media organizations even retweeted my question and told me afterwards that our questions were good.  I think that means the new era of mixing traditional and social media may continue.  I look forward to future NASATweetups for these types of events.

Overall….

In talking to people after the event I think this experiment was a success.  The Tweetup crowd came up with some great questions, as did the Twitterverse via the #AskNASA hashtag.  I am happy that I was selected to be part of this new era of social media, NASA…and Data.

NASATweetup Video from C-SPAN

The entire event was just over an hour.  You can watch the whole thing via this C-SPAN feed.

Or if you prefer the shorter briefing of the briefing, you can watch the one minute version on TW@N at the very beginning of this video.

Related articles

[Updated] Karen, Can you Tweet only about ____? A: No. But You *Can* Help Yourself

Updated with a new technique for filtering: the Global Filter.  See half way down.

I tweet a lot.  According to Twitter I’ve posted more than 50,000  60,000 tweets since I joined.  I happen to know that Twitter lost a few thousand more  last year, so yeah, I tweet a lot. I even use the phrase "avid Tweeter" in some of my bios.

Some people started following me and exchanging Tweets with me because I tweeted about NoSQL, big data, open data, open government, data modeling, normalization, databases, SQL Server, DB2, database design, data architecture, the Zachman Framework, or other data-centric topics.  And then there are those who followed me because I shared information about Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS-134, Atlantis, STS-135, Juno, Ariane rockets and my attendance at various NASATweetups and SpaceTweetups.  Others decided to follow me because I shared information about Technical Barbies, specifically @venusbarbie and @data_model.  These girls travel with me as I attend events and meet interesting people.  Others followed me as I covered live events about Toronto’s government failing local citizens.  Some people have followed me because I’ve worked with them in the past, attended school with them, or met them at a family event.  The point is that people follow others because they are interested in what the other person is sharing at some point in time.

Some Twitter users create many accounts and tweet only about a single subject from those accounts.  They mainly broadcast information from those accounts and rarely converse with others.  Think of these accounts specialized Twitter accounts.  To a degree, the Technical Barbie accounts are like that.  But that’s not how I use Twitter.  I use Twitter to build relationships with people, to share interesting things that I come across in my travels, and to share links to stories about things I think others would be interested in.   If I Tweeted only in only about one topic, I’d meet fewer interesting people and I’d discover fewer connections to a variety of people.

Someone today complained to me about the fact that I sometimes tweet or retweet posts that are not in English.  They want to be protected from having to see a foreign language in their Tweet stream.  Personally, I find that a bit sad, but I pointed out that they could use a feature of their Twitter client to translate foreign language Tweets into English, which I cover below.  Another person complained to me because I tweet on topics other than data.  I’m not sure what to do with those complaints because I’m not just an English Data Robot.  I think that sound incredibly boring, too. However, I have met a non-trivial number of data-space-government people who share an awful lot of similar interests as I do.  In fact, some of us are planning a NASASpaceSQLPASSTweetup in the near future.

Having said all that, I do recognize that not everyone is interested in all the things I’m interested.  I’m pretty sure my spacetweeps generally don’t care about normalizations and that my data friends don’t want to see more than one or two astronaut photos a year.  You do want to see at least that much, right?  That’s why the Twitterverse invented some nifty features and approaches to allow people to manage some of the overload of Tweets coming their way. 

Hashtags

Hashtags aren’t an official part of Twitter, but early on Twitter users realized that they need a way of tagging and filtering the fire hose of Tweets in their stream.  When I attend events, I try to use a hashtag to add some useful meta data to my Tweets.  This tagging allows follower to do a few things:

• Find Tweets from the event, even from people they don’t follow
• Filter out tweets they don’t want to even see
• Archive or repost Tweets someplace else about one topic.

Last week I was a-Twittering like crazy, as were 59 other Twitter users, at #SpaceTweetup, an invitation-only event hosted by the European Space Agency in Cologne Germany.  There was indeed a fire hose of information coming at us and we were making ourselves busy by posting photos, videos, and messages about all we were seeing and doing.  Most of use included the word #SpaceTweetup in our messages so that we could easily see what others were sharing on Twitter.  If you had an interest in space, this was a treasure trove of AWESOME stuff about ESA and their missions. Plus astronauts — lots and lots of astronauts.  If your attitude about space stops at Tang and space pens, then this hashtag could have been your friend as well.  Almost all Twitter clients have a way to filter out tweets from a specific person or with a specific word.  I primarily use Tweetdeck as my Twitter client, so the examples below are from there.  If your client doesn’t have a similar feature I suggest you find a client that does.

The button with the downward arrow is the column filter button in Tweetdeck.  It allows you to include or exclude Tweets within a column based on criteria you supply.  You can choose to filter on accounts, text, the source, or time of day. 

To filter in or out content, use the plus sign or the minus sign. For filtering out Tweets with certain hashtags, you’d want to choose TEXT from the first field, then the minus sign from the second, then fill in the hashtag in the third.  Let’s say for some crazy, crazy reason you didn’t want to see any Tweets about #spacetweetup:

The above is what your filter setup would look like: TEXT – spacetweetup.

From that point on, you just wouldn’t see any tweets that had that word, spelled exactly that way, in that column.   If someone is on a rant (Who, me?) and you just want to temporarily stop seeing all her Tweets, you could use the Name field plus her Twitter ID to filter out her rants for a while.  Once the coast is clear, you could just click on the X to remove the filter.

Of course, if you really, really need to see tweets only containing a certain phrase, you’d set up an inclusive filter and you’d see only Tweets containing that one phrase.

Our blog uses categories on posts.  You can use these similarly to hashtags to find posts on a single topic or to filter out posts on topics you don’t want to read about.  How you do this is dependent on your RSS feed reader.  I’ll try to put together a post with one example soon.

New: Global Filter

In addition to the column filters, you can add a global filter to Tweetdeck to stop all tweets meeting certain criteria.

Here you can put words like NASATweetup, or runmeter (my running application) and you’ll never see them again in any column. You can also hide users, but I’m not sure why you’d want to do that rather than just unfollow someone.  I guess perhaps if you wanted to give the appearance of following someone while not having to see their Tweets.  I still recommend you just unfollow them, though.

The From Sources criterion would let you block things like Tweets from Foursquare if you feel they are useless or silly.

Translate

For my friend who complained about my non-English Tweets I told him to use the Translate feature of his Twitter client to do the heavy lifting of participating in the conversations I was having and retweeting.  Unfortunately for him, he decided that this was too much work, so he still wanted me to stop my non-English Tweets.  I can’t help him.  But you have the magic right in front of you to be part of the global community.

Here’s a sample Tweet coming from ESA Italia and it’s in…wait for it…Italian. 

I could make a decent guess at what it says, but instead, I just go to the Translate feature of Tweetdeck to see what it does say:

And what do you know, it isn’t a Tweet about fat attractive alien pasta, but a Tweet about photos taken with 3D glasses:

My anti-multi-lingual friend feels that all of Twitter should be in English or stay the heck away from his Twitter stream.  And you know what?  He can work on doing that by not following people who share in multiple languages, which is what he chose to do.

Saying Sayonara When None of That Works

How do I know my two friends chose not to use these features?  Because they chose to tell me they thought my Tweets were not meeting their needs and they needed to let me know they were unfollowing me.  The great thing about Twitter is that it isn’t a friend model, like Facebook where both parties need to agree to be BFFs in order to see each other’s posts.  Twitter works on following model: you follow people and they may or may not follow back.  So you can unfollow people without affecting them at all.  It’s poor etiquette to announce your unfollows.  If you have good friends and you want to let them know you think their inadvertent crotch pics are starting to look intentional, then by all means contact them to ask if they need a new phone case or some intervention.  But announcing that you are leaving is not cool.  I keep using the cocktail party analogy to explain Twitter.  If you were at a gathering with several discussions going on, you wouldn’t turn to the others and say "your conversations are non-value-add.  I’m going to leave this conversation and go on to another one that caters to my needs only." Well, if you would do that, then good thing you are leaving. Normally you’d either try to steer the conversation in other direction or you’d wander off to another.  Only jerks would say "your conversation sucks, so I’m leaving" in front of everyone else.

So to summarize:

1. Use a Twitter client.  You’ll never "get" Twitter if you don’t.
2. Use the hashtag and filter features to tailor the tweets you see.  Adjust those filters as needed.
3. Follow people when they are interesting, filter them if they are doing something right now that isn’t, and unfollow them if it turns permanently uninteresting to you.
4. Don’t announce you are unfollowing.  Just do it.  Don’t feel guilty and don’t ask the other person to stop being complex humans.
5. If you need to read only single topic information, go with mailing lists, forums, or RSS feeds from curated sources.  Twitter isn’t any of those.
6. Use the features of your RSS reader to filter blog posts, too.

Career Success in Turbulent Times: Join Me Today 1PM ET for #PASSProfDev VC Webinar

This afternoon I’m presenting at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Professional Development virtual chapter.  My topic today is about how to ensure that you are doing the right things now to support job and project search efforts when you need them.  Join me at 1PM EDT

A workshop on issues and ideas that today’s data professionals can do to build their careers and networking skills with other data management professionals.

Workshop topics will include:
• Demonstrating your expertise
• Building a portfolio of your success stories
• Getting others to sell your skills and business value
• Building & extending your data management skill set
• 10 Steps to highlighting you and your work

Bring your thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

As a virtual presentation, I’ll be relying heavily on Q&A from the audience, as well as input from Twitter to ensure that this is the most interactive it can be.  Please join us as we talk about how we as a profession can best ensure that we are all working and our projects have the right resources to be successful.

The hashtag to use during this talk is #PASSProfDev

A recording of the presentation should be available on 24 Sept 2011 at http://prof-dev.sqlpass.org/ .

We had great interaction for a Live Meeting. Great job, everyone.