OK, I admit it. Tumblr has killed my blog. Well, not really killed it, but it certainly has decreased the time I spend blogging on Random Sarah and looking for new content to blog about.

Last week was Internet Week here in NYC, and in the few days since I have had a lot of time to reflect on this past year of me being a part of this amazing community. I have been spending the majority of my time lately looking for a full time job, and that has put a lot of my passion projects on hold.

I got into this “new media” space because I was passionate about online video and I stumbled upon Social Media by accident. I was perfectly happy going on facebook and reading apple rumor sites. I had almost no desire to be on twitter, to be a blogger or a podcast creator. Then I started watching video podcasts and I realized that I wanted to create content as well.

As much as it seams like I’m busy, I know that it is not an excuse for letting my passion for online video fall off. What’s it All About has hit a few bumps in the road, and I feel as if I am back to square one with the project. However, instead of being discouraged I have decided to modify what I was doing.

Very often people will ask me questions, either on twitter, or via email. For example, the other day someone asked my about #followfriday best practices. I get asked questions about social media all the time. So, I am just going to start answering them on video, here in my room. For right now I am thinking that I will just put these videos up here on Random Sarah because I am not really sure that they are part of the What’s it All About brand, and I’m not really sure what that brand is anymore.

You can ask me questions on twitter or shoot me and email

I would love your feedback since you have all been an amazing part of this journey.

p.s. I am still working on the user generated “I am a geek” video, but so far I only have 5 submissions so keep them coming!

The other night I attended a tweetup. What’s a tweetup?

A “tweetup” is a local meeting of Twitter users, usually announced ahead of time. Tweetups can take place any time or any place, and usually everyone in the area is invited. It helps give social networking a more palpable environment and allows local Twitter users to meet each other in person.

So why would you do this? Why would you want to publicly announce on twitter that you were going to be somewhere and that you wanted complete strangers to come meet you there?

A tweetup usually starts as a desire for twitter users to meet IRL (in real life). Sometimes it’s a group of friends, sometimes it’s just a random group of people.

The tweetup I attended the other night started out simply because my friend Tim (@tspatz) wanted to see his friend @newscred, who was in NYC from out of town, and Tim wanted some of his friends to meet him.

So Tim DM’d some of his friends on twitter with the time and place. This quickly turned into a tweetup when the conversation went public on twitter.

Everyone that had been invited was tweeting about the tweetup and the result was really interesting.

Just like anything else on twitter, tweetups spread in an interesting way. I like to call it the re-tweet effect. (it’s kind of like a game of telephone)

If I tweet something it has the potential to reach the 1,800 people that are following me. However, my friend can re-tweet it and then all of his followers will see it as well.

So at this tweetup we had a few different groups of people that had formed organically based on how the tweets about the tweetup went out.

The tweet I sent out looked like this:

sarahcooley: RT @WaltRibeiro: TONIGHT Lunasa NY 1st ave b/t 7th and 8th St. @ 7pm! Let’s do it! #tweetup #nyc I’m on my way there now!

But some re-tweets looked like this:

jerrylore: RT @newscred: Entrepreneur/hacker #tweetup tonight atLunasa in the East Village #nyc , 6pm. Free beers on NewsCred if you come early!

Today I saw a post from Mike Arauz, he is putting up his favorite links, photos, and videos from his Tumblr blog. Many of you know that tumblr is an obsession of mine, and it has taken away a lot of the random content that used to be on random sarah. So I decided to adopt his idea so that those of you who read random sarah, but may not keep up with my tumblog can still get a taste of the content that I put up there.

So here are my favorite links, photos, and videos from my Tumblr blog this week:

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Preparing for Chaos – the Life of a Startup

“Startups are inherently chaos. As a founder you need to prepare yourself to think creatively and independently, because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant. If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die. Therefore the best way to keep your company alive is to instill in every employee a decisive mindset that can quickly separate the crucial from the irrelevant, synthesize the output, and use this intelligence to create islands of order in the all-out chaos of a startup.”

Real Life Twitter

Screen-shot from the NFL Draft (this was done by me)