I bought my first pair of Keens last year, in early September. They were adorable little mary janes (okay, not that little, cuz my feet are size 10), blue, nubuck, and I loved them. I wore them *a lot* for most of the next year, except maybe in the wettest and coldest winter weeks.

Why did I love them so much? Well, besides making my feet feel adorable, they are phenomenally comfortable. And besides that... Keen is a good company, as far as I can tell. They have a "commitment to working with non-profit, social and environmental organizations" and they give a lot of money back to the community. (I'd love to see more of a commitment to environmentally friendly practices in their shoe-making, but I guess you can't win them all.)

So there's me, in love with my Keens. And one day, when they were about 8 months old, I walked into a shoe store that sold Keens, to admire the new ones. And I saw a pair of my particular mary janes, in blue, on the shelf, and realized that mine were almost not recognizable, they had faded so dramatically. See here:

So I took the above picture, and I emailed Keen. And I got a prompt response, assuring me that they had never seen such a thing, and asking what size I needed, cuz they'd like to send me a new pair. Sweet!

My new pair arrived last week, and sweet they are. So now I love Keen even more, for their commitment to customer service, and for keeping this (apparently easily wooed) blogger very happy. :) Thanks, Keen.

It's official!

The new Web of Change site has been launched.

I've been eagerly waiting to be able to blog about this for weeks, because I love Web of Change so much and I want to link it with love all over the land, but wanted so badly for it to have a site that did it justice. And now it does!

It was designed by Communicopia's talented Natasha, themed and built by Jordan Lewin (who, IMHO, wins a Rookie or the Year Award for his first Drupal themeing effort), project managed by moi, and built on the Bryght platform. I love it and am (in case you can't tell), a very proud parent.

Thank goodness it's done, because now I can get down to the work of actually making this conference happen, rather than fine-tuning the words to talk about it. So check out the new site, and send it to all the social change web-voluntionaries you know. Hooray!

This just in (in case you care): Writely has been acquired by Google. See here: http://writely.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-yep-google.html.

Recalling my mission to make valuable new web tools understandable to the less-webby masses, allow me to explain why *I* care. Writely is an online word processor - kind of like Word for the web. I've been using it for a couple of months, and I've grown rather fond of it. To me, it epitomizes many of the reasons why I get excited about web technology, at its best. Why? Because Writely has great potential for fostering collaboration.

The main thing that makes it different from Word is that multiple people can work on a document simultaneously (just not on the same sentence at the same time. Anything else goes.) Writely tracks all revisions as previous versions that you can refer back to, and eliminates forever the horrible experience of passing around multiple versions of the same document, clogged up with endless "tracked" changes.

So, for example, earlier this week I was asked to help some friends write copy for a software product that they're launching soon. I plugged the bare-bones I was given into Writely, and did my best to come up with clear, engaging text. Then I added the project lead to the document as a "collaborator", and together we worked, talking out loud sometimes and working independently at others. Once we were feeling pretty good about what we'd come up with, we added in another project member to look it over. He made a bunch of changes that I thought were terrific, and preserved the good in what had already been done.

Together the three of us fine-tuned our document, live on the internet, until we were satisfied. What emerged felt like a truly collaborative effort. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy, and it was very clear to me that what we had created using Writely was better than what any of us would have come up with alone. I'm also quite certain that it was better than what would have resulted had we passed around a Word document and all added our two cents at different times.

I think there's something about giving over to the flow, trusting the process, watching your words be changed by another... and letting the wisdom of the group emerge. That's what social software can facilitate, at its best. That's why I get excited about this stuff! Maybe if we build the right technology, it really will contribute to the emergence of new capacities in human consciousness. Then our challenge will be to learn wise use of our tools, and discernment about when the tech is helpful, and when it is actually distancing us from the presence and awareness required to move towards the evolution of our consciousness.

(Big words for a blogger, eh? Oh, and if I've sold you on Writely, get yourself on the new waitlist quick.)

All right.

I am here to shamelessly promote the Litebook. If you are one of the many people who suffers in the wintertime from low energy, depression, or a whole host of other symptoms that can accompany the season of low light, then you should seriously consider investing in one of these.

I've been using mine for just over a week now, and I don't think it's an overstatement to say that the improvement was dramatic and pretty immediate. My days of sleeping nine+ hours and then wanting to crawl into bed for a nap all day seem to be over. Since i started using my Litebook, I sleep like a normal person again (between 7 and 8.5 hours, ish) and I don't feel tired all day. I feel... normal, I guess, again. I feel how I am accustomed to feeling, when I'm not in the midst of SAD season. My mood is also quite a bit better - and I'm not the only person to notice the improvement in me.

It's been quite the relief. I mean, obviously thirty minutes of light in the morning can't change the circumstances of your life, but it certainly seems to do something to improve my day-to-day perception of those circumstances. Kind of like anti-depressants for some people, I suppose. And I would personally rather sit in front of a funny little box of LED lights than start adding chemicals to the mix.

They don't come cheap - mine was $300, and I got a super-good deal. But I really can't say enough about mine so far. My only regret is that I didn't get one a long time ago.