The Suffern Music & Arts Festival is all about community in the 21st century. Music and the arts is our world’s universal language. So when this village, located in the heart of New York’s Ramapo mountain region of Rockland county chose “THRIVING” over “SURVIVING” this economy, they looked to that “one voice” to speak out.

I know this will also be reposted on the MetroNorth bloggers site, and I hope my friends in the Northern Suburbs will come out and support our Jazz, Blues and Grooves stages as well as the local crafts and artists.

I got frustrated with the way it was working and tried the following, as it seemed logical:

1. Exported (saved) all my google contacts, and all my apple address book contacts before starting.
2. Deleted all google contacts
3. Uploaded the apple address book contacts to Google
4. Tried to sync them.

Apple Sync services tells me I have 2350 new contacs to add and 324 that will be modified. WHAT? I uploaded the contacts. they should be 100% the same.

Anyone?

UPDATE: Yes, I did read http://google.com/sync and a bunch of the discussions on the help board.

thanks to Jolie O’Dell of ReadWriteWeb for taping this piece from my discussion on Personal Branding at Social Media Camp. In this segment, I discuss the evolution of worrying about having embarrassing pictures on Facebook.

I mentioned this at a conference, and I’m not sure I ever codified it properly. So, who is a friend?

According to Wikipedia, “Friendship is co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis.”

In Social Networks, a friend is someone who is willing to click “add this person” in a dialog box. We have very few ways of distinguishing other people’s true friends – the ones who share mutual affection or who would give service in a crisis – from their long time college acquaintances, neighborhood well wishers, elementary school reminiscences, and stalker ex-girlfriends. One early social network, Orkut from Google, actually allowed you to indicate how close you were to a person from “never met” to “best friend.” Today’s Facebook allows you to put friends into lists so you can ignore the ones you connected with but don’t really know, but that’s not the same thing.

The network that is most lacking in a way to distinguish levels of connection is LinkedIn. Since much of the intention behind the network is business networking and creating connections between friends, people often ask for referals to others. When you look for a way to make a connection to Bill, you may see that you’re connected by “John, Jane and 12 others.” Wouldn’t it be best if you were able to request the connection through John, who you know as well as 8 on a scale of 1-10 and who knows Bill as a 9 on the same scale? Instead you may ask Jane, who you also know as an 8, but who only knows Bill as a 2 – yet you may have no way of knowing this. This could lead to Jane awkwardly declining to make the connection, or having her request ignored.

I believe that as social networking services evolve, we’ll have more choices in how we distinguish our degrees of relationships, and how we expose that data to others. A project like the “Friend of a Friend Project” is doing so, and others such as Yahoo are attempting to start to use that data. Let’s hope we can somehow come up with words as descriptive as icy, powdery, slushy and packed to let us distinguish between our BFFs and our FOAFs.

CHARITY SMACKDOWN:: Celebrities Compete, Charities Win www.charitysmackdown.com

Congratulations to the Smackdown Teams! Our big winner is Team Corbin! PayPal will donate an additional $5,000 to Stand Up To Cancer. Watch this space for more exciting Charity Smackdown action!

I am truly grateful to all my Facebook and Twitter friends, blog readers and everyone who pitched in an passed along the messages we sent out about Team Corbin and Stand Up to Cancer. I know I asked people for money, and bothered them with messages over the 10 days of the project. But as I wrote in my Charity Smackdown Update, and my Why I Stand Up To Cancer – Abby articles, I take the fight against Cancer personally and I hope you do too.

In total the project raised over $30,000 for 9 causes, all of which are real dollars and will help real people in need. So, Smack Talk aside, we all won something for our causes – awareness, dollars and new friends.

Some information – my use of Bit.ly URL in several of my tweets and Facebook posts lead to over 1137 clicks to the Team Corbin page, most directly from the URL being clicked via someone’s browser or email, but some via Twitter, Facebook, Twitter search and clients, and some smaller number from my own website. While I can’t draw any scientific conclusions regarding where people most participated from without data from the Charity Smackdown site owners, I did learn more about activating a network and getting people interested in a cause.

smack09, su2c, stand up to cancer

Update:: PayPal will donate an additional $5,000 to the winning team!

So, it is even more important that you take a few minutes, go to the Call to Action page, and Donate. 

Again, why do I Stand Up to Cancer? In May 1992, my step-mother Carol had a lump on the side of her face. They thought it was some sort of ‘nerve bundle’ problem. I will never forget the moment the surgeon told us it was some sort of cancer he had never seen before, hugely aggressive. The specimen was sent to NIH or some other famous place to be analyzed.  By September, Carol was dead. Cancer was a terrible killer. 

There’s another Carol, this one in my neighborhood. She’s currently fighting Lung Cancer, and has gone through huge amounts of chemotherapy. She’s lost her hair, but not her dignity. I never see her complain and she always seems to have time for her grandchildren, who are friends with my kids.

For the first Carol it is too late, but for Carol, please donate $5 or what you can afford to Stand Up To Cancer. What if your $5 bought the test tube that was used in the research that cured some form of cancer? It could happen. Donate today, please. 

I’ve stated that anyone who donates more than $100 in the next hour, I’ll give social media lessons. Ok, I totally stole that from @christinelu. But hey, all is fair in the Smackdown.

Over on the Stand Up To Cancer blog, they tell great stories of people who are inspiring. One of my stories and reasons for Standing Up To Cancer is about my cousin, Abby. At age 12, when many of her friends were more interested in boys, haircuts and bat mitzvahs, Abby had some symptoms that no one could figure out.

She took it upon herself to go online and do her own research, and her conclusion was unfortunately correct: she had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. And if you quote her the Larry David quote about “the good kind” she’ll look at you with fierce anger, then tell you there is no good kind of Hodgkins.

Abby went through hell, lost her hair, was sick all the time from chemo and radiation, and basically lost a year of her childhood. All while managing to complete school work and come back the next year as President of her class.

I look at her now, a grown woman, at an Ivy League school, working for a prominent government office as an intern and probably in line for a serious job there, and I marvel at how she has continued her life.

But I also know she and her family always have be on the look out for the Big C.

So, as part of this Smackdown, I Stand Up for Abby, and I’ve made a donation today to Stand Up To Cancer, in hopes that my amount will make a difference for the girls like Abby in the future.

Click and donate, please. The Dropdown menu lets you donate more than $5, by the way.

Kutiman-Thru-you – 01 – Mother of All Funk Chords

The fact that this kind of thing is likely completely illegal makes me wonder what it is going to take to get them to change the law. This is art. It moved me.

I’ve been asked to participate in Charity Smackdown 09 – a cause marketing event contest between teams lead by Celebrities with Social Media ‘notables’ on each team. Each of the Smackdown Teams has from March 16th at 11pm EST to March 26th to raise as much money as possible for the causes.
My cause, as it has been since last year, is Stand Up To Cancer. Cancer has touched my life in terrible ways through family and neighbors over the past few years, and this is my way to give back. (More stories as the week goes on).
My team is “Team Corbin” led by musician (and High School Musical star) Corbin Bleu, and including Natali Del Conte (@NataliDelConte), Tech Reporter for CNET and CBS’ the Early Show, and Jared Eng of celeb blog JustJared.com (@jaredEng). My team is up against some stiff competition, from celeb power like Alec Baldwin and 2 of the stars of Heroes, and also from some top social media celebs like Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, WalMart’s 11 Moms, MCHammer and Chris Brogan.
Will You lend me your friends and your network to help promote this cause?

*****Call To Action******

Please help me to at least place respectfully in this competition by taking one or more of the following actions:

1.    Look for the donation widget below and Please link to it.(A simple way to do this is to copy the Web Address of this page, and make it a link via your Facebook Status message – see below). (UPDATE:)

2.    Make your own post in support of my team and link to or embed our donation widget.
3.    Donate. If you can spare the $5-10 you’d usually spend on Starbucks for the week or something, that’s great. It all helps. If I could get 100 friends to send $5 or $10 I’d be absolutely ecstatic. If Cancer has touched your life, consider doubling what you’re giving.
4.    Add my team’s donation Widget to your blog,  MySpace, or webpage. There’s going to be a separate thing for Facebook.
5.    I’ll be Tweeting about #Smack09 – please follow me and my teammates on twitter (@howargr) and ReTweet my posts – or “like” them on FriendFeed. The hashtag is #smack09. Also, follow @smack_talk on Twitter.
6.    Change your social network status or IM status to “Support Team Corbin and help @HowardGr to Stand Up To Cancer”  http://tr.im/smackdown #smack09 please RT”
7.    Send an email to friends: “Hi, my friend/colleague/this guy I know Howard Greenstein is part of an online event to raise money for Stand Up To Cancer. Please see URL for more details and to support his cause, donate at URL.”
8.    Suggest something that I should do here that I haven’t thought of yet. Comments are open.
Anything you do (even donating to one of the other causes) is helpful to this event, and to me. This event goes for 9 days –  if I’m bugging you let me know, or just delete the mail.
Finally, this event is called a “smackdown” because some of the fun is talking smack to the other teams. It is all in good fun, and no one (including me) should take offense.
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You for helping me and for helping my team in this cause.