Today Conan decided to finally follow someone on Twitter. His choice was random (so he says), but the lucky Sarah Killen has no doubt felt the power of his action. And it’s an interesting case study in the power of celebrity in the new digital participatory culture.

When Conan O’Brien first created a Twitter account we students of social media had a fun new game to play: Guess how many followers Conan will have after each refresh. When I got into the game, he had around 71,500 followers and jumped up to over 72k in less than a minute. And kept climbing. That was eight days ago.

What’s really interesting is Conan’s foreshadowing:

Today, Conan has 535,275 followers as of this writing (and climbing, no doubt). Sarah, the one person he decided to follow, gained over 2000 followers in a matter of minutes. And, as in Conan’s case, that number is still climbing.

Behold the power of celebrity in participatory culture. This makes me wonder if Conan and his crew realize the amount of influence they have on the web. I’m sure they do. Now, Sarah Killen’s life probably isn’t changing all that much. But she has been brought up alongside Conan’s image and, holding onto his coattails, so to speak. Pretty fascinating. I wonder if NBC is noticing this and realizing how incredibly bad their move to get rid of him was…

Jessica’s coffee cup cozies are being featured on the Free People blog today! Free People is a clothing company that is also the brains behind Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie.

Makes sure you go over to the Free People post and comment about how cool her cozies are. And (shameless plug) check out her shop on Etsy to pick a couple up!

Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz. Read the rest of this entry »

The movers are here, packing up our stuff. We’re supposed to finalize a lease tonight or tomorrow. The first place we wanted fell through. We are hoping beyond hope and praying hard that this one will work out. We need it to.

Puppy is going to stay with Audra for a few days while we take care of things. I can’t wait to be in our warm hotel room in Bannockburn tonight. Watching LOST. And relaxing a little. There have been a few hitches with this moving process, but I’m trying not to worry about stuff too much.

Tomorrow we’re doing stuff at Trinity; Thursday we’ll be moving in (as long as things go well); Friday we’ll be driving to Champaign to pick up Cors; Saturday we’ll have Jessica’s parents visiting.

It’s been a long couple of weeks.

This week is the week. Well, I hope it’s the week. We’ve run into a few snags in this moving process. We did find a place that we’re okay with living in for the next year. It’s only a 15 minute commute to school, pretty up-to-date, has a fireplace and a garage.

The only problem is that we are still waiting to hear if the lease has gone through. We are supposed to have the movers here on Tuesday, but without a confirmation from the landlords, we don’t know if there’s a place to have our things delivered to. Hopefully we will hear tomorrow.

I’ve got a few things to take care of beyond the normal changing of address. For one, we’re in a Dish Network contract and I need to know if we’ll be able to have a dish installed at our new place. We’ll have to see what Dish will do for us if we have to terminate early. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.

Sounds like Jessica’s parents may come up on Saturday to help us unpack. I’m thinking IKEA for bookcases and Giordano’s for some pizza (they’ve never experienced Chicago-style stuffed pizza). In any case, there is a lot to do this week with finishing up work, meeting movers, moving, going to an inauguration, and getting all settled. I start my new job at Trinity a week from Monday.

Well, my friends. Something I have vaguely alluded to on several different occasions has finally come to pass. As of yesterday I have accepted a position at Trinity International University starting later this month. The official title is Web Marketing Manager, and the work is much more along the lines of what I want to do than my current job.

Jess and I have been praying hard for things to work out (as many of our friends and family members have been) and it has been pretty incredible to see how God’s timing has played out. In about two weeks we will be moving our things from the St Louis Metro-East to the North Chicago area — assuming everything goes to plan.

As you can imagine there is a lot to be done before that move, so things might be a bit quiet around here, though I am going to try and keep up with the writing so I have a record of this move.

It’s a little bit sad to be leaving so many great people here in Greenville, but Jessica and I have, for a long time actually, felt stagnant here. This move is something that is invigorating and hopeful for us. Expect great things! We both are.

Those of you that knew about this, thank you for your prayers, thoughts and support while we were going through this. It means the world to us.

Where can we dock this marine monster when she reaches the port of New York? (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress has the absolute coolest Flickr photostream. They routinely archive old newspapers and photos. I saw this today and it got the history geek in me excited. It’s the New York Tribune with an article exploring where the city is going to store the Titanic when it docks…

So cool.

I am traveling. Big day coming up and hopefully some news to come in a few days.

I registered for classes last night. And it feeeeeeels good.

I’m taking two required seminar courses and a design course that I am excited about. Color theory, typography, layout… it’s going to be great.

Can’t wait to start! Apparently orientation videos will be online on Monday and the processes to add me to Blackboard will also run. And allegedly I have no textbooks? That can’t be right.

I’ll have to check that out again later…