What is a host? Whether at a party, in the grocery aisle, or at a Conversation Cafe, a host is the person who creates and holds the space for dialogue, who asks probing questions, and listens intently for the answers. In this 12-minute podcast Vicki Robin discusses the all-important role of the host.
I’m helping the Conversation Cafes promote Conversation Week, an annual global dialogapalooza. This year’s Conversation Week takes place March 24-30. Check out this video I produced for the cause. And take a second to submit up to 3 questions you think should be included in this year’s list of the ‘Ten Most Important Questions In the World Right Now.’
This parody of the popular pro-Obama ‘Yes We Can’ video is so brilliant, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Enjoy!
Dang! There are a crapload of car-free blogs out there. Hanging out with my friend Kurt the other day, who is six weeks into chronicling his just-begin year sans automobile, got me wondering just how many car-free blogs there might be. A quick Google search on “car-free blogs” turned up 181,000 hits, including a few particularly interesting ones:
Car-Free USA blog is the first hit on the list. Self-described as “A blog promoting the joys of car free life in the USA.” The blogger behind it is Brian Smith, a communications guy at the Oakland-based environmental group EarthJustice, who I met last year at a meetup for
WorldChanging.com’s team of Bay-Area contributors.
There’s Carfree Family, by Paul Cooley, a 41 year-old father in Santa Fe.
There are a slew of blogs about World Car-Free Day, including some of its local iterations.
There’s even a link to an index of all blogs on WordPress.com that contain the tag car-free. (This post will no doubt turn up there once I hit Publish.)
One of the best is the Year of Living Car-lessly, an experiment undertaken by Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank. After his teenage son totaled the family car, they decided to simply not replace it.
And in a bit of cruel irony, the sponsored link that turned up above that Google search was an ad for MotorAddicts.com.
On Thursday, I spent a couple hours coaching my friend Kurt Hoelting, a newbie to the blogosphere, on blogging techniques and particularly on podcasting and vlogging. His blog, Inside Passages, is a chronicle of the year-long commitment he has made to avoid the internal combustion engine as much as possible.
The audio player below was posted here automatically via my Hipcast account by calling a number from my cell phone, entering my account’s PIN, and following the instructions. The sound quality is pretty low, but the ease of posting audio content remotely that the system allows is really slick.
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Yours Truly will be the featured guest on this evening’s Heartland VisionHolder TeleConversation Call. Please join this free call to learn more about how QuantumShift TV is using the power of online video to inspire solution-oriented storytelling and offline action — and especially spurring youth in schools across North America to make a difference. Register now (free!) Here are the details from the Heartland Circle website:
Witness the Future: YouTube with a Conscience
Tuesday, January 22, 7-8 PM CT
Leif Utne, VP Sales and Marketing, Quantum Shift TV
An innovative new Web broadcaster is using the power of the Internet to inspire children and youth in schools across North America to make a difference. Quantum Shift TV is a 21st Century storyteller renewing the cultural values of community, care and interconnectedness through the use of leading edge technology and citizen journalism. They have been inspired by research from the Max Plank Institute in Germany confirming the belief that people are more likely to take positive action when they are seen to be doing so. Ultimately they want to shift this culture from ‘me’ to ‘we’ through a socially responsible media business that shares the stories of those who positively impact social and environmental change on our planet.
First, I will be interviewed by Craig Neal, the co-founder of Heartland Circle, followed by an optional community conversation which all are invited to join in.Hope to see (well, hear) you there tonight!
After nearly two years as host of the UtneCast podcast, I posted my final episode last week, at least for the time being. Check out UtneCast 40: Gaining Ground: From Green Building to Sustainable Cities, featuring excerpts from my interviews with observers and practitioners of green building — including Paul Hawken, John Knott, Pamela Mang and Bill Reed — on the growing “green cities” movement.
The UtneCast will continue, though not necessarily in the same format or frequency as before. And I’ll still be an occasional contributor.
Meanwhile, Dean Landsman (who edited my UtneCast episodes for the past year) and I are cooking up some exciting new projects. So stay tuned…
/Leif
A historic first! I’ve never worn glasses in my life. My eyesight is still quite good. But as time and years of working with words on screens and pages would have it, my eyes don’t focus quite as well as they once did, and I sometimes have to strain a little too much for comfort to see clearly. (Hey mom, how about a lesson in some of those Bates Method exercises you used to teach?) That, and Antigua is known for having excellent eye doctors who’ll sell you designer glasses for about a third of what you’d pay in the US. These frames are from Spain and ran me about $130, lenses and all.
So I decided it was time.
I’m still not used to wearing them. (I’m not wearing them right now, frgzmpl.) They definitely work, making everything a little clearer. But it feels a bit like snorkeling.
Well, what do you think? Do they suit me?
/Leif
This is just a little taste of one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. More to come…
Okay, a little more info for you… Last night, Wednesday, August 8, 2007, Volcán de Fuego (Volcano of Fire) spilled its guts in a spectacular eruption, sending a plume of lava hundreds of feet in the air. We could see it clearly from our bedroom window in Antigua, some 40km away. To get a better view, we took a cab to the town of Dueñas, 20 minutes down the road and about 10km from the volcano. This short clip is just a snippet of about 45 minutes of footage. We’ll post more later.
FYI, Fuego is so-called because it smokes almost constantly and erupts frequently. But locals told us they had never seen it erupt with such force. It’s one of only 3 active volcanoes in Guatemala.
-Leif
