I know … SO MANY SOCIAL NETWORKS … SO LITTLE TIME!  Isn’t FaceBook more than enough already!  Who has time to keep up with it all?  Plaxo keeps us all connected while also helping us save some time while doing so.

Here is a description of what Plaxo offers (from the website itself):

Plaxo keeps you in touch with people you care about.

When fellow Plaxo members you’re connected with move to a new home, change their cell phone number or change jobs, you’ll know… and your address book will be updated automatically.

So, if everyone gets on Plaxo, it can actually save time by keeping us all up-to-date on each other’s contact information.  We all know 100s even 1000s of people within our own networks, and most of those 100s and 1000s also know each other (this is the “plexus”).  How many times do we all get emails from somebody saying, “I just changed my phone number, please update your records”.  So then you might feel obligated to take a moment out of your busy day to open your address book, copy the new number over, etc.  Or how many times do you get an email from someone asking for your mailing address or fax number because they “lost it”, or even more–they ask if you just happen to have the information for someone you both may know.  This is not sustainable information management.  

As an alternative: what if everybody’s contact information updated itself everywhere automatically?  Plaxo aims to provide this for us with a service called “Pulse”.  Plaxo will also automatically make recommendations to you of people who you are already interacting with in email and/or other social networks … so, over time, it’s fairly straight forward to build up our shared social plexus.  I actually don’t use Plaxo much for general social interaction (I save that mostly for FaceBook).  Yet, it is good to be on Plaxo so that my social contact information is updated regularly.

It’s the 21st century.  We have the technology to move beyond the aggradation of trivial inconveniences that come with greater social connectivity–and get down to better uses of our time, energy, and attention!  Let’s focus less on establishing and maintaining connections, and more on the processes and qualities of being in connection!

Join the Plaxo plexus!

I also recommend that you download an extension toolbar that will keep your computer’s address book in sync with your Plaxo Pulse account.

See you on the Plaxo Pulse people plexus!

A slideshow with great information on superfoods, the Elements for Life company, and a financial opportunity:

[slideshare id=1045786&doc=elements-for-life-ppt1212-1235040841384395-1]

See the slideshow here.

You can find out more about all of these superfoods from SuperFood Life – Elements for Living (a distributor of Elements for Life products).

The full listing is available here, and as a compact Super Food Widget that can easily be embedded into any social network, blog, or web page. 

Enjoy!

You can find out more about all of these superfoods from SuperFood Life – Elements for Living. (a distributor of Elements for Life products).

I also appreciate the insertion of ideas around a necessary and fundamental shift in consciousness.  For a shift in consciousness is preeminent to establishing a funamental change in economy, and correspondingly, in society. I can see how the selection of Krishnamurti’s words is a good choice in articulating this point (at the beggining and end of the film), as he generally proposes that it is the responsibility of each individual to catalyze a shift in consciousness within themselves.

Here is an opportunity to actually make the fundamental change of converting the economy to debt-free money.  You can vote for ideas such as these at Change.org, and the most popular ideas will be presented to Obama just as he enters office in January, 20th 2009:

Regarding the Zeitgeist movie, it was synchronistic and significant for me to have had someone remind me to watch this film last night–as yesterday, the planet Pluto had moved from Saggitarius into Capricorn (where it will transit for the next 16 years). A general interpretation of this transit is: that the mode of global transformation we have been in while Pluto was in Sagitarius was collective visioning, philosophies, and theories of global transformation. With Pluto in Capricorn, the mode of transformation is more down-to-earth, manifest, and structural.  For sixteen years, Pluto will engage in a process of breaking down and then rebuilding the structures on which we depend for a successful experience in the material world.  We can expect the transformation of all things ruled by that sign: such as our religious institutions, halls of government and political structures, construction techniques and buildings, and how we handle ownership of property. The point is: this day marks the point when we can say that we have the over-arching vision and theory we need, and it’s time to get down to actually manifesting the transitions.

There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of CMSs available out there.  Some of the more popular CMSs over the last several years have been: Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, and WordPress.  Ruby on Rails has also been gaining popularity with web developers, and though it has CMS capabilities, it is really gaining attention for other good reasons, such as it’s exquisite ease of use to programming developers.  Django is also a newly emerging web framework that includes CMS built with Perl (a more advanced programming language).  All of these above mentioned frameworks are open source and free.  Then there are also proprietary CMS frameworks available, such as Water and Contribute.

As a web enthusiast, I’ve been conducting on-going research in CMS options for a few years now.  I’ve tried Drupal, and found that it was very difficult to integrate good design into.  I’m using WordPress for a few different blogs (such as this blog), and it is a really good CMS for blogging, and I can see how it can even be extended as a framework for more general web site publication.  I’ve also successfully used Water for a few client projects because of it’s rapid development, and ease of use for the client.  Joomla is an off-shoot from Mambo (there was some contention with the founders of the Mambo open source project), and so Joomla is considered better than Mambo all around.  Yet I had not really considered Joomla too much until now.

I recently came across an article that represented the popularity of a few of these CMSs using Google Trends, and so I decided to do my own trends research:

It’s apparent how Mambo dropped off after Joomla emerged from Mambo.  WordPress has had a steady climb being used widely in the blogging community.  Perhaps Joomla has surpassed WordPress simply because Joomla is a more encompassing framework for websites in general (where WordPress is specialized for blogs).  In any case, both WordPress and Joomla are great open-source frameworks with huge communities behind them, providing a wide range of plug-ins, components, template themes, and other options for custom development and support.

Which to choose: WordPress or Joomla?  After discussing it a bit further with a developer friend, I’ve decided It really depends on what you want to accomplish.  Joomla is a bit grander in scope, includes community building components (for a community or social website), and may end up having more options as far as overall component-enabled functionality.  WordPress is geared mainly for blogs, and so is more streamlined and perhaps simpler to use, has loads of functional plug-ins, and yet can also be re-geared to represent a something beyond a blog, more like a typical website.