When it comes to “being green” and living a lifestyle that is kind to the earth, I admit that I am still just learning. But I came across a great site that I am finding very helpful. It’s called the GoodGuide.

GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.

With GoodGuide, you can:

• Find safe, healthy and green products that protect you and your family
• Search or browse over 70,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to see what’s really beneath the label
• Use expert advice and recommendations on products to quickly learn the impacts of what you buy
• Find better products and make purchasing decisions based on what’s important to you
• Create a personalized favorites list with the products that are right for you and your family

They even have an iPhone app to help you make better choices when shopping. With this app, simply scan the barcode of the product and immediately see detailed ratings for health, environment and social responsibility for more than 50,000 products and companies. GoodGuide provides this information about personal care, household chemical, toy and food products for free on your iPhone / iPod Touch and is adding thousands of products every month. By making information about consumer products transparent, GoodGuide’s goal is to help people shop smarter and motivate companies to offer even better products.

But what really blew me away is their SMS application! It makes this type of “on the go learning” accessible to anyone with a SMS enabled phone! Simply send a text message to 41411. Every text message must begin with the word “gguide” in the body of the message. Then, add whatever it is you are searching for after “gguide”. You can search by Product Type, Product Name, or UPC code.

This post is going to be a variation of the review I wrote on Lunch.com’s SXSW community (client) of a panel called Community Management: Future Skills You’ll Need to Know, and the panelists were @saulcolt @glusman @thorpus @seamuscondron @ambercadabra @sarahprevette. The review I wrote was titled “You already have a community”.

My favorite points from that session were:

• You can teach anybody social media, but for community management to succeed, it needs to be a senior role.
• We are in danger of slinging around “community” as this big buzzword, but you ALREADY HAVE COMMUNITY, it’s called your CUSTOMERS!
• Your community tells you when you have a community
• If no one is saying your brand sucks on twitter, you’re doing it wrong. You want that opportunity to start that conversation.
• You can’t tell your community what to do, you can only advise them. You don’t own your community, it’s their community.

Please read my review for more specific notes on that panel. But my big take away from that session was, You already have a community, it doesn’t matter what kind of business you are, or whatever kind of brand you are! This made me realize that even I have a community around my personal brand, and I need to actively manage my community.

I have been thinking about community a lot this last week, and I realized that I often find myself only talking about community as it refers to tech, or tech companies. But EVERYTHING is a community. Both in the physical location sense, and in the sense that you are probably a part of more communities then you realize. I realized that I am a part of the social media community, but I am also a part of the cancer community, the online video community, the vegan community, the health community and the New York City community.

I am interacting with all of these people, across all of these different communities, without even trying! Just my being myself, and that is awesome!

So I wanted everyone to reply in the comments with what communities they feel they interact with every day?

I’m starting a new post series called “Things Twitter helped me discover” to highlight all of the great sites and other things that I find out about on twitter.

The first is Smarty Pig. Smarty Pig is a savings account with social aspects. This all started when I asked twitter if there was a way for me to save for specific goals and let other people also donate money towards those goals. Sure there were things like ChipIn, but that was only to show progress in collecting money, I wanted to also show my own savings progress. So someone suggested I check out Smarty Pig.

When you create a Smarty Pig account, you are actually opening a real FDIC insured savings account that has a 2.01% APY. Then within that account, you set up specific savings goals. That can be a family vacation, college savings for your children, or maybe just something you want to splurge on.

You set up these savings goals and choose how often you want to contribute to that goal, and how much. This was perfect for me because it allowed me to take out an amount from my check each week to save for rent, and then at the end of the month, I had my rent money without even thinking about it.

Next you can choose if you want to make the goal public or private. Certain goals like my rent, I kept private. But for other things, like my trip to SXSW, I can keep it public so that my friends and family can help me save too.

Once you reach your savings goal you have a few options. You can have the money deposited back into your checking account, Smarty Pig can send you a debt card with your savings, or you can choose to receive up to a 12% cash boost on your savings by placing it on a retail card like Amazon.com, Best Buy, Travelocity or Macy’s. You can even spilt your savings among the three, to find the best option for you.

You can add widgets for your facebook or blog so that all of your friends can help you save. I put one in my blog footer.

But I know I have to write it.

Over the past 4 months I have been living in Philadelphia, and working for Comcast Interactive Media. I worked on a project producing a series of tutorial videos. It was a very different job for me. There was a lot of managing. Managing people, managing expectations, managing outside agencies… it was a very big project. But my contract is ending on Jan. 15th so it’s on to hopefully better things.

So I had to make a decision, stay in Philly and look for another job, or move back to NYC? After talking with my family and close friends I have decided to do something that I didn’t want to do, but I know I have to do. Go back to school.

When I first started blogging there were 2 things that I worked very hard to keep under wraps.

#1 – that I was still in school

#2 – how young I was

I don’t really remember why I decided to do that, but from my point of view at the time, they were both negative things. I had a number of friends my age who were still in school and also in the social media/ blogging podcasting space, but for some reason whenever they were mentioned, they were always “student bloggers” and in my head that sounded like it was something less than everyone else. I didn’t think that they deserved less credit because they were young, or still in school. I also feel like the “student blogger” was being put in a box. It became a specific category that I didn’t want to be a part of. The age thing I always wanted to keep under wraps because I wanted my work to speak for itself.

I have very strong opinions about higher education. I don’t like it, I didn’t think I needed it, and I think the whole system in general is broken. I’ve written a little about education before. Once I had finished 4 years of school, I was done. I didn’t graduate, I just couldn’t take it anymore, I didn’t see the point. But while I still feel this way somewhat, I have decided to go back to school and finish my degree in Media Studies.

I can only hope that this doesn’t set me back career wise.

So…now that I got that off my chest, I’m moving back to NYC and I’m looking for a job. Not an internship people, I might be going back to school, but I don’t think that takes away from my level of experience. Ideally I would like to find some work in community management, social media consulting (I know I hate that term, but there is not other way to put it) Something that doesn’t require me to be in an office all of the time (since I will have classes, etc)

If you hear of anything, please let me know.

I wanted to thank all of my friends and mentors for being so great and supportive to me with this decision.

A great video from the Economist. It focuses on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology.

Many people have been talking about twitter’s new RT beta feature and it may seem like most people don’t like it. But I thought I would throw my 2 cents in the ring about what I think of the feature.

In case you are unaware, Twitter is rolling out an official retweet feature that is in beta right now. It allows users to RT with just one click (no more copying and pasting tweets), and it provides a way for people to easily see how much their tweets are being retweeted.

Now there are some obvious drawbacks to this. The new feature only lets you RT the tweet as it was originally written, you can’t modify it or add your comments. For some people this is a drawback, but for others it’s a plus.

It’s a drawback if you frequently like adding comments to the things you RT, and it could be positive because tweets no longer need to be short enough to add your username to be “re-tweet-able”. A tweet that is exactly 140 characters can easily be retweeted now, where in the past it would have needed to be shortened to allow space for RT @that persons username.

One reason that I like the new RT feature is that it helps to regulate fake RT’s and is a great way to discover new people to follow.

A few things I would change:

1. Avatar correction. I would want the avatar to be the person that I am following who is choosing to share this information with me. After all, the people I follow are people that I trust. So seeing what they retweeted to their followers should be reflected by showing their avatar in my timeline.

2. RT alerts. Similar to the way that Tumblr shows users alerts when someone else has liked or reblogged your post. If a simple one line alert showed up in my timeline letting me know that my tweet had been retweeted it would make the whole process easier and more encouraging for users.

3. 3rd party support! Currently desktop and iphone apps are not taking advantage of the RT feature because it is so new. There is no place in tweetdeck or tweetie for me to see my retweets the same way I would see @replies. In fact, if someone retweets a tweet that has my username in it using the official RT function, that tweet won’t show up in my @replies of a 3rd party client at all.

The fact is that it will be very hard for twitter to rope in a feature that was created by the users and standerdize it. That can’t force you to stop retweeting the old way, so they new way will be hard for people to adopt.

What are your thoughts on the new feature?

Let me know in the comments.

Twitter lists opened up to a somewhat wider release yesterday. I’m still not sure if everyone has it. But once twitter lists launched I couldn’t help but notice one thing.

There are all the times people have put me on their list, right next to my followers. I couldn’t help but think, will being “listed” become the new benchmark people measure twitter success/popularity against?

Suddenly I wanted to see how many times other people had been “listed” and what lists they were on. It wasn’t about what lists they made anymore.

Then I saw this tweet from Alex Hillman,

Twitter lists illustrate the most important shift in the internet: your bio is now written by others, and what they say about you.

Take a look at some of the lists I’m on:

It’s true, I’m a blogger, I live in Philly, I’m noisy, I’m in “techmedia”

When you look at it that way, lists say a lot about you!

How do you think lists will change twitter?

What has it changed for you already?

Over the past year I have been an avid Yelp user. Originally I started using it so that I could remember places I ate out in the city. Yelp was good to be, I found some great places that I can now call some of my favorites because of Yelp.

And when I moved to Philadelphia there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to need Yelp more than ever now.

That being said I have noticed some things that I really wish Yelp did that would be especially helpful when visiting, or moving to a new city.

Recommendations!

There are a lot of places that I love in NYC but I have not been able to easily find their “Philly counterparts”. If Yelp had a way to show you places you might like in a new city based on places you have reviewed and liked before, I think it would be very helpful.

Also if there was a Yelp feature similar to Urban Spoon for the iPhone, but using the data that Yelp already knows about me and places I like to eat. For example if I could select a radius on a map, and just press a button that would give me some suggestions, that would be awesome.

But unlike Urban Spoon, these suggestions would not merely be random, but would be tailored to me.

As many of you know, I am moving to Philadelphia this weekend for a new job. When most people move they have to empty out where they are moving from, organize all their things, pack clothes, ship larger items, but that’s basically it.

Yesterday I started to think about what moving means for all of my profiles all over the web. Most of the sites and communities that I am active on have a location, or a city in the profile. I will have to go through and change my current city on all of these sites. I know this doesn’t seem like that hard of a thing to do, but it can become very time consuming.

Even harder then physically changing your current city, is keeping everyone up to date with your location. People perceive you to be living somewhere, but that might not be where you actually are.

Sites like foursquare help with this. Letting you know where your friends are in your city, or when your out of town friends are in town. But one of the big problems with foursquare is that you can’t see where your friends in other cities are. You are only shown who is in your current city.

I have found that checking in on foursquare had helped my friends to be more aware when I am traveling, or in a new city.

Yesterday I tweeted “Are there any social media sites for moving to a new city”

One person responded and said “Does craigslist count?” Craigslist is great when you are moving and need to sell large pieces or when you need to find and apartment.

But sites like Yelp! can also be very helpful when you are living in a new city. Yelp can help you find everything from good places to eat, to a great place to get a haircut. Yelp has been great for me in NYC, but I am hoping that the Yelp Community in Philadelphia is as active.

Do you know of any other sites that have been helpful for you during a move? Or sites that have helped you settle into a new city? I would love to check them out, so please let me know in the comments.

Of course I have my own personal tour guide to Philadelphia, Drew Olanoff (@drew) <3

But if you know me, you know I am always looking for new sites and communities to check out.

About a year ago I posted a presentation by Marta Kagan called What the F**k is Social Media?. This morning I came across this slideshare presentation that is her follow up, one year later. It explains “social media”, which is a term that I am trying to use less and less, in a very simple and straight forward way.

I would encourage you to read through the whole thing and then send it to whomever you think needs to see it. (Which in my opinion is everyone)