A couple of weeks ago, appreciative of her awesomeness and mentorship (Millennials love mentors), Avi Kaplan wrote a note of appreciation about Stacey Monk:

I want to introduce and thank Stacey Monk who has been a real inspiration and mentor to me.

I was just revisiting some conversations I had with Robin Parker, blog master / communications specialist at the Oregon Trail Chapter of the American Red Cross, while I was in Portland, Oregon. I flipped through her blog and found one of the most sticky posts I have read in a long, long while. It's an interview with Portland Rain. That's right - an interview with weather. But first, some background:

While sitting down to copious piles of stuffing yesterday, I actually did take some time and thought about the things for which I am thankful (my girlfriend’s endless patience, the music of Will Oldham, wine and family holidays). To be honest, I feel a little 1.0, if you wiil, for not yet having made that public.

I have returned from the Millennials Changing America Tour and aside from being a bit tired from it all and the suffering of a minor bronchial infection, I am feeling good about the whole ordeal. When planning the trip, which took me to over 30 cities across the country, I thought that it would be interesting to set up the majority of my housing in each city by way of Couchsurfing so that I could save money and spend time meeting people in my downtime as well as when talking with people on the road.

In somewhere around 100 different ways on this blog, I've tried to stress the importance of showing over telling. Very recently I was happy to speak with Bryan Tighe of Collective Lens, a beautiful and comprehensive web-based photozine that helps small nonprofits and causes show their stories and impact in powerful and touching ways. The site does a wonderful job of realizing and putting to work the impact of the visual, especially with regard to telling the story of an initiative, a people, and/or a country, and shows a lot of potential for helping organizations find support by sharing their impact visually.

I almost got suckered into believing all of the naysaying about Twitter "just being a waste of time."

In order to doublecheck my insecurities, I flipped through the past 24 hours of tweets so that I could audit whether or not I am actually learning anything from the time I spend there.

I was fortunate to spend the past week on a guest-couch belonging to Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org. At present, Change is trying to figure out what to do with all of that "now what?" energy that is surrounding post-election excitement. Also - you might have heard of this little site called Change.gov, right?

Show them.

Yesterday morning I checked out the Huffington Post's celebrations from around the world pictures (re: Obama's win) and I immediately began crying.

Allow me to contextualize (beyond the fact that I'm just a big crier):

This election has been emotionally exhausting and there is a strong chance that I was under-unrested, if not a little drunk when I woke up yesterday morning.

Briefly, a poetic Tweet-of-truth brought to us by NetSquared family member Joe Solomon:

"Everybody's a social media strategist; the web needs social media soldiers too."

Now! Onto the meat.

A few brief notes to start (or "old business" for all of you Robert's Rules fetishists):