Slowly, the patterns of fall return. Today, Fiona took the bus to school. It was the first day, and is usually the case, the bus was a little late as everyone got back into the swing of waiting for the bus, saying their goodbyes and heading off to school. Last night Fiona was tired and not looking forward to school, but after a good night’s sleep she was excited to see her old friends, her new teacher and what the year will bring.

After a busy week, I’ve more or less caught back up with my emails. Sure there are a bunch of emails from earlier in the year that I’ve not gotten a chance to read, but I have read everything since we got back from vacation.

Many of the emails are in response to various things I’ve written and deserve some follow up here.

The Kindle

On my blog post about Progressive Blogs and Citizen Journalists on Kindle, Kate from After Cancer, now what let me know that her blog is now on Kindle. In addition, I told about Uppity Wisconsin on Kindle and RootsWire on Kindle

One person asked about online news sites on Kindle. The big players are there. The New York Times on Kindle costs $13.99 a month. I don’t know what percentage Amazon takes. Likewise The Washington Post on Kindle and the Boston Globe on Kindle both cost $9.99 a month. What is missing are smaller papers and online only news sites. I’m trying to find out more about what a local paper or online news site needs to do to get on Kindle. That will have to wait for a further update.

Twitterville

I continue to enjoy reading my way through Twitterville. I’ve read the section about how Twitter started as well as the part about Twitter at SXSW. I’m now getting closer to the meat of the story, in the section where Shel Israel about Ricardo Guerrero, @ggroovin, of Dell first exploring Twitter. Meanwhile, I continue to work with the efforts to save dogs from kill shelters in Connecticut.

CT Underhound Railroad

Recently Zsuzsa who sends the @LastChanceCT tweets joined theCT Underhound Railroad Mailing List. We talked about Twitter in terms of outreach and she had two great stories.

The Grant County Shelter, KY, @GrantCoShelter tweeted this message on Thursday August 27th: “Urgent need 4 fosters & rescues. Cnty ordered 30+ dogs euthanized 8/31 if not pulled from shelter. Grant Cnty KY-35 miles south of Cincy OH”

Twitter users were able to repost this message to help get the message out quickly & crosspost to Rescue sites. Here's last nights update from the Grant county Shelter: “Thanks to all of you, we adopted 22 dogs today and about 33 yesterday- 55 dogs in 2 days. All healthy adoptable dogs are safe!”

Another great example: Recently a rescue dog from TN, just placed in a home Freeport, ME ran away. The rescue tweeted the message, it was retweeted. I contacted LLBean PR in Freeport, thru Twitter & they sent out an Urgent email blast to employees to be on the lookout for this dog. We also found wonderful storeowners throughout Freeport (also on twitter) who reposted the message. It was highly publicized on Twitter. I read later the dog was found! We were all so grateful & happy for the support of the Twitter community.

One friend saw that I had Retweeted a recent message from LastChanceCT and asked how to Retweet. It depends on how you are getting your twitter messages. Mostly, I get them on the web and I just copy the message and past it into the box where they ask what I’m doing. Then, I stick in before the message RT and the userid of the person who originally sent it.

Other bloggers from the CT Working Families Annual Meeting

While I was at the CT Working Families Annual Meeting I ran into many old friends. Mary Geake mentioned that she now has a blog, The Politicians Wife. She also mentioned that her brother has a blog, Rookie Internet Entrepreneur. Also, I had a brief chat with @CouncilorCotto who is on Twitter but currently has his tweets protected.

The Underhill Decision

Last week, I wrote a little bit about The Decision by Judge Underhill concerning the Citizens’ Election Program. Lots of people put out press releases and I added my thoughts on Hopeless Candidates. Most recently, I’ve receive an email to the Attorney General’s press release saying that he will seek and immediate stay. My understanding is that there are plenty of talks going on today and I am still hoping for more updates soon.

AudioPal

Today, I received an email about AudioPal, “the first voice-enabled status update tool”. Well, I was thinking that Utterli probably fit that bill better. Nonetheless, I gave the AudioPal beta a try. You go to a website, call in with a number and pin provided, get an email with the link to your message which you can then paste into whatever website you choose:

Hmm. Too many steps. If they gave me a phone number and a pin, and allowed me to set preferences to where I wanted my audio status posted, that would be nice. Come to think of it, that is pretty much what Utterli already does.

Okay, there are probably a bunch of other random updates I should add, but I should also get some other work done.