Ring The Bell This Holiday Season

By Tami Casey
A volunteer ringing a bell for charity is as much a part of the American Christmas experience as cookies and lights. But this year, the fear is that people are tapped out, worn down and will be giving less.

Charities and the holiday season seem to go hand-in-hand. While nearly 20 Christmases have passed, I still recall my first Christmas as an adult volunteer at a charity in a small community. My first child was barely a month old and I had signed up to help out at the community holiday drive, which offered assistance to those who had fallen on hard times.

I vividly remember a forlorn young mother shyly approaching the table to receive groceries for a holiday dinner. She was nervous, as this was her first time receiving assistance and she wasn’t sure what to expect. As I handed her the bag of food she smiled graciously, but when I handed her the gifts for her children, the tears started to roll down her face. It had been a hard year for her, she said. She’d lost her job and was struggling to pay rent and keep the family fed and didn’t think there would be any gifts that year. To her, this was a miracle made possible by a charity (and the efforts of strangers) in her time of need.  

For me, the best part of that day was finding my own joy in hers. Although its been 20 years, the “gift” I received from that experience will last a lifetime, and since then I’ve found many opportunities to volunteer and help others.

2009 has been a hard year all around, but I hope we’ll all dig a little deeper into our pockets this holiday season and add another name to the gift list—maybe a teen in a shelter or a family in need. Also consider another gift – give a bit of yourself and consider signing up as a volunteer. To find volunteer opportunities near you, call or visit www.1-800-volunteer.org

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Another Sign of the Times—Get Ready to Pay Up for Online News

By Cathy Wright
In addition to paying rent or a mortgage, paying for groceries, health insurance, school and gas, we’re getting closer and closer to having to also shell out for access to online news. The reason: newspapers around the world are declining in revenues or worse, folding altogether. The Internet is partly at fault for the decline, but the slumping economy and sharp dip in advertising is sure to blame as well.
 
Media moguls such as News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch and others are getting noisy about this issue and ready to shut it down and start collecting for what they view as missed revenue. In August, Mr. Murdoch told the world he plans to eventually charge for online access to content for all News Corp. publications, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times in London, and the Daily Telegraph. The charge would either be levied direct to readers via access subscriptions or to companies distributing News Corp. content on their Websites.
 
And to stir the pot even more, Mr. Murdoch also revealed News Corp was considering blocking Google from being able to search its newspaper websites. Executives from the likes of Twitter and Yahoo are now weighing in. After enjoying free access to news all these years, it’s going to be painful to suddenly pay up for something that we’ve come to expect for free. It’s like suddenly being charged a toll to walk down the street or charged to hang out with friends. Stay tuned!
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Top 5 Tips to a Successful Office Holiday Party

By Kelly Indrieri

The countdown to the holiday season has begun and that can mean only one thing, the office holiday party. Okay, maybe it means more than one thing, but for those of you who anticipate your company party as much as we do here at Kulesa Faul, I've compiled a list of the Top 5 Tips to a Successful Office Holiday Party. I’m hoping this can serve as a public service.

Number 5. Avoid red lipstick (I offer this one based on experience)

Number 4. Be careful of overzealous dancing (people will talk about it the next day, I promise)

Number 3. Don’t drink and drive (hail a cab, call a friend, just stay safe)

Number 2. Avoid using this event as an opportunity to tell a colleague how you really feel (a party should be about love people, remember that)

And the Number 1 Tip to a Successful Office Holiday Party: Remembering that what happens at the office party DOESN’T stay at the office party (so keep it clean folks)

So take the evening to celebrate your colleagues, clients and the year’s success. Just try not to be the butt of the joke the next day. Believe me, you’ll thank me for it.
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The WINDOWS 7 Pepsi Challenge

By Kristina Molfino
It recently occurred to me that the Mac vs. PC debate is similar to that of Coke vs. Pepsi. There are few products competing head to head that illicit such a stark division among consumers of the two. Coca-Cola drinkers turn their nose up at Pepsi, similar to how Mac users glare at PCs. Is there really a difference, or is this just branding at its finest?

Unfortunately, I have yet to come up with a “blind taste test” for the operating system, but I highly doubt that the release of Windows 7 will cause Mac users to return to a PC. You know the expression: once you go Mac you never go back.

I think that Mac vs. PC and Coke vs. Pepsi are ways of life and, aside from all of the hype, they are rarely affected by product upgrades. After the buzz has silenced, it will be interesting to see if consumer preferences really have changed. But for now, I will sit back in front of my Mac and enjoy my Diet Coke!
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A Wild Week on the Web & the SideKick Debacle Hits Home

By Tami Casey
I heard a scream from my daughter’s room, “it’s gone, it’s all gone.“ As I poked my head in the door I saw her standing holding her most prized possession—a slightly battered, well used Sidekick phone.

My husband (the techie) tried restarting the phone and resetting the battery, but nothing worked. As tears welled in her eyes, my husband called T-Mobile and learned the servers had a technical glitch that caused “widespread data loss.” A few days later we learned that a large number of the 1 million+ Sidekick users were also affected.

My daughter fell into in a state of shock. How could it all be gone? She had lost 500+ contacts, 200 pictures, 300 mp3s and 20 songs she spent countless hours writing. She’s been a “Sidekick Girl” essentially her whole life, and all 13 years of accumulated information on the phone was gone in an instant. Fortunately the word on the street is she may get her data back.

Being a communicator in the tech industry I found the whole episode interesting. Why did it take Microsoft four days to provide any kind of a response? While on Thursday they said they would be able to recover the data, they were way too quiet for the first few days. Any good communicator understands that lack of comment causes a void which leads to speculation, which is exactly what happened as the blogosphere went wild developing theories of what could have gone wrong along with fantastic stories of internal sabotage.

Will Microsoft recover from this misstep or will the incident provide fodder for those that love to hate Microsoft? I have my own theory—I think Microsoft paid Balloon Boy to pull Thursday’s stunt to draw the blogosphere’s attention in another direction. What’s your theory?
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How do you define ‘Cloud Computing?’—Seeking video submissions

By Julie Tangen
There is so much hype and confusion around "the cloud." People are talking about it everywhere, but what exactly does cloud computing mean? Our client, Appirio, is seeking the best viral video that explains cloud computing to the masses. The winning videos will be screened on the floor of Dreamforce—the premiere cloud computing event which draws about 12,000 people—and promoted on Appirio's Dreamforce Central site. Oh, and the company is also giving away $5,000 to the winning submissions.

To enter, first create your original "cloud computing" video (no more than 2 minutes in length). Somewhere in the video, you must include "submitted for the Appirio Cloud Computing Video Contest." Second, upload your video to the YouTube group called "Appirio Cloud Computing Video Contest." You need to be a member of YouTube and to sign up for the group to submit it. If you're not already a YouTube member, don't worry, it only takes a second to sign up.

Entries are due November 3rd and finalists will be announced starting November 9. The final prize winners will be announced on Appirio's Dreamforce Central site (dreamforce.appirio.com) on November 18.

For more information please click here.
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Happy National ! ; : ( ) ? . “ - … Day

By Danielle Salvato
Yes, you read it right. Last Thursday, September 24, marked the “6th annual National Punctuation Day.” Each year this day celebrates “the lowly comma, correctly used quotes and other proper uses of periods, semicolons and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.” The goal is to get people to pay attention to not only their p’s and q’s, but also their commas, semicolons and ellipses, parenthesis, apostrophes, exclamation points, dashes and hyphens.

Former newspaperman and copy editor, Jeff Rubin, founded the annual day and successfully bid for September 24 to be listed as a holiday in Chase’s Calendar of Events in 2004. Since then, the Web site has received worldwide coverage. Although the day came and went without a lot of notice this year, even among those working in the journalistic field. It is no wonder given the casual approach to punctuation these days. With Twitter, text messaging, Facebook and other forms of social media, people have taken liberties in forming their own casual dialogue and language, aka slang.

We can all do our part to keep the English language grammatically correct by taking the following vows:

“I will use the apostrophe to show possession, not to pluralize a word.”

“I will promise not to use the apostrophe to show possession in the word its.”

“I will not abuse the use of the exclamation point.”

“I will promise to always put periods inside of quotation marks.”

“I will promise to spell out numbers one through nine, and use figures for 10 and above.”

For questions, please refer to the Grammarians’ bible, “The AP Stylebook,” or test your punctuation skills by taking a quiz. If you are serious about changing your habits and keeping yourself grammatically correct, you can receive newsletters from the Grammar Girl, a friendly way to improve writing skills, every day with her “Quick and Dirty Tips.”

We will revisit this again next year and all take the vows together. Period.
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