MotherPie

Bloggers: Young and Heavy Online News Consumers...

According to the Pew Internet and American Life survey, while only 8% of adult internet users are bloggers, the majority of bloggers are under age 30 and are heavy consumers of online news.  Almost all bloggers--95 percent--reported reading news online, compared to 73 percent of Internet users at large.  The number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population (last year only 27% read blogs).

Why do bloggers blog and what are the key findings about bloggers?  Key findings  reveal interesting facts about this new medium and those who create blogs.

Ramble: New Realities...

Rambling today on the new realities of the brains of women (hormones and moods) and the digital/virtual world that can create new realities and realities for you to think: real or not.  New tech wows!

• The new altered reality of digital photos: My parents are coming to visit and Mother wants me to use graphic software to digitally alter the family photo that did not include my son.  My son participated in my parents' 50th wedding anniversary activities -- he just wasn't there for the family photo commemorating the event.  I'll just cut his image from another pic and cut it into the family photo and poof -- he'll be there in the physical memory of the event which she'll include in her holiday card.  No one will know he really wasn't there!!! Is this dog really smiling?

• Virtual weddings: The new  reality of  "being there" at a wedding event is the basis of a NYTimes article by Abby Ellin. If you can't be there physically, you can be there virtually with new online technologies that use webcams or services that send email invitations to watch the virtual wedding after-the-event. Had my brother known about this at his destination wedding in Kauai, he would have been able to share the event with others from Live Internet Weddings that provide webcasts from all the Hawaiian islands. Destination wedding hot spots are rapidly picking up on this new digital service.

• New female reality: female hormones and moods cause women to perceive the world differently neurologically. The female brain has been the subject of study by Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist educated at Yale and Harvard.  Her book, The Female Brain, will be released this week.  An article this week in Newsweek,  notes that her studies on "the complex interplay between women's mental health, hard-wiring and brain chemistry" show that women perceive the world differently than men. Gender-specific studies are a new area of study and she believes that female hormones affect emotions and this area has received little attention. Different levels of hormones cause women to become more stressed by emotional conflict because they have over 10% more neurons in the area of the brain devoted to emotions and memory.  It is real and it is in your head!!!

• Art improves literacy skills: a new study showing improvement in literacy and critical thinking skills by the Guggenheim museum in NYC might make schools think twice about dropping art from academic studies, according to an article in the NYTimes.

• New online realities: older people can't do new media, really! Here's MotherPie's help for the new media-challenged. According to Pew Internet and American Life 's internet use study, 71% of people 50 - 64 use the internet and only 32% of those over 65 do. According to the Pew survey, the number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population.   

• New Realities: Long-term marriages (thinking about my parents' 50th anniversary!) that last a lifetime have certain characteristics such as faithfulness, shared history and family ties although the reality of the second half of marriage is different (forgetting what you wanted to say, aging parents, empty nest...).  Even though having divorced parents makes one more susceptible to divorce, or if one is wanting to have a successful marriage after a failed marriage, learning from other couples how to survive the "for better or for worse" helps and tips for the challenges of mid-life marriage reveal that women most need (from their husband) to feel reassured they are loved and commitment is important all along.

• Real or Not? The Dead Dog-Story continues to be one of MotherPie's top searched articles. Urban legend or not?  Can dogs smile?  My dog does.

Really (or not) Cheers!

Mouse Potatos, Blogs and Linguistic Changes...

Mouse potato. That is slang for someone who uses the computer a lot. Soul patch? The name for the little spot of beard growth under the lower lip.  New words? New meanings?

Those two terms might be new ones to you, but sandwich generation and drama queen? Old hat.  All four words, though, are on the list of 100 new words added to the new edition of Merriam-Webster's dictionary, out this fall (they've just released a sampling of the new words).

The linguistic changes are happening so fast even dictionaries can't keep up. C'mon.  Sandwich generation?  That was so last decade-definition. Of course it is happening now and has been --but the word just now entering the formal dictionary???? And drama queen?  Really! 

What about blogaholic?  What about blogorreah?  What about blogosphere?  What about blogadacious? A-Blogger Wonkette, in an interview with the NYTimes about the ingredients for a successful blog called blog readers blogveyers. Blah, blah blog! 

Do you think the word blog even made it onto the new word list???  Nope.  Not even with 50 million of them now.  A just released study on the internet by Pew (pdf) stressed the changes to language, including acronyms and text lingo.  #:-0   (this last ditty means shocked.)

MotherPie on the lexpionage rampage and language... the terms are so new they are still being defined (think web 2.0, p2p, alpha to beta and the semantic web).  Lost?  Lots of us are.  Language is changing at warp speed. 

This period will one day have a name that represents the seismic cultural and social shift, similar to the way that the term Black Death was coined several centuries after "the pestilence" wiped out millions. 

Blogadacious cheers!

Kings and Queens and Royally Recycled Photos...

Kings are the sort of men one might want to marry.
Or not.

Queens are what you become - maybe - if you marry a king.

When I married, I became Queen.

Queen of the Kitchen.  Or not.

Queen of the Laundry.  Or not.

Queen of the King.  Or not.

My children all became little Royals.  In our castle, our home and our refuge and the schedule required reigning and ruling.

And at least I can say I am the Queen of Nothing. Or not. 

The artist:  Gabriella Travaline and her Flickr image: altered cab card: Kind King.  You can see her wonderful art on her Flickr page.  She does fun, whimsical drawings that have a lot of personality and collage art as well.  I love the colors she uses in her artworks.

Ode Addendum: I wrote yesterday's post on a whim and this post was planned way ahead and I'd rather you please, pay attention to the artist's work rather than my ode-y words. That is most important and my inspiration for today's post.  Artists are recycling old photographs into interesting collages and assemblages and this is a wonderful example by Gariella Travaline.  Collages have been an art form women have historically excelled at constructing.  Think: scrapbooking with a new creative twist. Recombined photos equal new modern works: a royal idea.

100 things about me...

Which is boring but a lot of bloggers do this (?????) so here are five things about me and if you want to know more, you can read them after the fold because there are 100 things and that is too many. If you read them all, you'll probably get a better feel about who writes this MotherPie blog...(or maybe not).

100 things about me...

1. Favorite flower: Lily-of-the-Valley
2. Second favorite flower: wild roses
3. Third favorite flower: hollyhocks
4. Fourth favorite flower: peonies
5. I love flowers and rings.

The Letters Kids Write...

A kid's letter to a soldier in Iraq: "I love you whoever you are and if you get this letter, please don't die. If you do, die with my letter so that the world will know that I care for each and every one of you."  A book of collected letters to deployed soldiers is available from Integrity Publishers, TN.

Camp Letters:

Dear Mom And Dad,

Our counselor told us to write to our parents in case you saw the flood on TV and are worried. We are okay. Only one of our tents and 2 sleeping bags got washed away. Luckily, none of us got drowned because we were all up on the mountain looking for Adam when it happened. Oh yes, please call Adam's mother and tell her he is okay. He can't write because of the cast.  I got to ride in one of the search and rescue jeeps.It was neat. We never would have found Adam in the dark if it hadn't been for the lightning. Counselor Ken got mad at Adam for going on a hike alone without telling anyone. Adam said he did tell him, but it was during the fire so he probably didn't hear him.

luv u...

its obvi, hilar and usu now.

Spelling is undergoing a huge shift.  Back when Benjamin Franklin was writing, the language was more fluid as we departed from the King's English.  Although formality is still required for school, the informal style is dynamic and in flux.

The new 2 cool hybrid slang.

Blog Ennui...

It happens.  Many bloggers are aggregators of information; some do original writing; some do a combination. 

There used to be a time, pre-airconditioning, when life slowed in the summertime.  Schedules were more relaxed.  Linen replaced wool.  Ceiling fans,  hand-held fans and breezes through the open windows brought the outside in.  Routines changed.

Is there a seasonal cycle to blogs?  Do postings drop off in the summer?  Blog readership does drop off on weekends.  Blog writers do take breaks. With now 49.2 million blogs, these things remain still in the realm of chaos. 

Original writing is hard to do day in and day out.  With information propogation instantaneous and virtually irreversible in the online world, the copyright infringement case that has just been filed, Los Angeles News Service vs. YouTube, will be interesting to watch. Online Journalism Review has a good article by Mack Reed on the economics of copyright enforcement and web 2.0.  It encompasses the new Digital Millenium Copyright Act and has important issues for bloggers and online use of copyrighted information.

Blog ennui.  ((((((yawn)))))) 

The MINI Club & the Culture of the Cars...

A Hundred Miles a Day Keeps the Doctor Away. That is what the MINI car ad in Wired magazine says. A MINI road trip across the country is underway.  If you are  one of the 150,000 U.S. MINI owners, you are clued in.  Your package came in the mail... a clandestine package with encryption decoding glasses and secret messages all hidden inside a secret compartment in a fake book.  You are part of the cool crowd (MINI owners are just silly about their cars and honk and wave to each other on the road) to be in on all this BIGGIE MINI (secret) fun.

If you see the ads in the New Yorker (Attention MINI OWNERS: (then jibberish), pull out your encryption glasses to play this clubby game. 

This new ad program is targeting first that passionate MINI owning group. It is a pretty savvy marketing strategy...all along the fun, playful and sophisticated tango that MINI owners have come to expect with the aura of ownership.  Perhaps it is because those cute Smart Cars are starting to roll into the country.  This cute red Smart Car one was on the floor in a Manhattan Park Avenue dealership.  Uh-Oh.  Cute competition in the little itty bitty car market.

According to the EPA, the 2006 model cars and light trucks are the fastest and heaviest since 1975 and the average fuel economy is 21 miles per gallon (as compared to 22.1 in '87/88), Peter Coy writes in Can't Stop Guzzling in the 7/31 issue of Business Week.  He notes that gas consumption at the pump is up even with prices increasing. Sales of compact cars were up 8% and sales of large cars and SUVs are down 15% in the first half of '06 compared to the a year earlier.

Cadillac has a new ad agency and is wanting to get a younger market (all younger drivers know about the brand is the SUV), according to an article in Ad Age.  They want to reignite a love affair with their owners (MINI strategy copycat!) and are going after "alphas, hot moms and move-ups".  (Someone needs to tell them that the mom moniker will get skuzzbos trolling online.) Cadillac spends about $226 million in media and the new print ads roll out in August, the 7/26 article says.

MINIs: a lot to love about 'em.

Ramble: Tests Begin at Birth & The Excitement of Learning...

Rambling today on learning under pressure and learning for fun....There's no way to hire tutors for babies in order to get a good Apgar score.  You either get a good one, or you don't.  It goes from the Apgar to the Geselle test for kindergarten readiness and it seems to have continued with no let up clear through the SATs, ACTs, GMATs... (and a zillion in between). 

Check out these brainy thinky links...

• The pressure of Extreme Parenting, the title of an article in this month's issue of the Atlantic Monthly, by Alissa Quart, talks about the marketing industry of the "baby genius edutainment complex" and how there are questions as to the efficacy of the strategy of trying to manipulate the potential einstein genes in little babies, tots and tykes.  The overstimulation of the American infant is surely underway and the pressures seem to begin in utero.  Geesh.

• Anthony Risser's Brain Blog has a good article on Virginia Apgar. Apgar, born in 1901, was an anesthesiologist concerned about the mortality rate of infants.  She came up with the score and her interest is considered foundational to the field of neonataology.  Her test was designed to give a physical appraisal of a baby's health immediately after birth.

• The tutoring business continues to grow and a recent article in the NYTimes Select wrote about how we are entering the Gilded Age of Home Schooling.  One of the newest trends is parents hiring tutors and teachers to school their kids.

• On the other hand, neuroscientists are exploring the area of how the kick of natural opioids in the brain might be behind the thrill of learning and discovering new knowledge.  Although American Scientist magazine had an article last monght on the theory, Mind Hacks blog has further information available from a neuroscientist.  Very interesting neuro theories.

Thinking Cheers.