Emily Landsman

Facebook has announced that it is starting a trial service that allows personal posts to be more visible…by paying $7.Read the full article here on the Wall Street Journal online. (Also see within the article a link to the Facebook release.)This service has been available for pages for a few months now, but it’s new to personal accounts. I’m…[Read more]

Feeling suffocated by 24/7 productivity expectations? Hungry for a technological edge to make your life easier and your community better? Code for America Commons is a great resource for discovering community-driven civic applications for open government. Think of it as a resource to discover who is using what, how it works, how successful it is,…[Read more]

A colleague who knows of my love of properly used QR codes just sent me this article about the city of Gibraltar. They will be placing QR codes at tourist attractions around the city that link to Wikipedia pages about that location. Volunteers will be writing articles in several languages about important locations around the city, and officials…[Read more]

A few weeks ago I noticed that Twitter kicked up their e-mail notifications. Because I have my “professional” Twitter account (@RedBootMedia….follow me and I’ll follow you back!), a personal account and an account I share with friends in a social group, I didn’t want to receive and e-mail each time I received a mention or direct message. That…[Read more]

Labor Day is next Monday, September 3. I’ve often felt that Labor Day is kind of overshadowed by other seasonal events and holidays. Labor Day unofficially signifies…

• Back to school
• End of summer (is the pool closed yet?)
• Sales (mattress/automotive/furniture…in the same vein as July 4, of course)

I hope folks know that Labor Day is really a…[Read more]

Some people seem to think so. I’m pretty sure articles such as this one in Thursday’s DC Examiner, one of the free area papers handed out at Metro stations, don’t do much to encourage qualified individuals to pursue careers in public service by criticizing pay. The piece discusses the salaries of staffers of several members of the DC City…[Read more]

Last weekend I received my personal property tax bill from my friendly county treasurer. (Argh. Car tax!) A day later I received an e-mail reminder about it, with a link to pay online at the Arlington Customer Assistance Payment Portal (CAPP) here https://capp.arlingtonva.us/From the site:
Sign up now! With your own CAPP profile you can:

• Receive…

[Read more]

This morning a friend of mine saw a car on fire across from his office in Alexandria, Virginia. He was so excited to call for help that he posted about it on Facebook. (He’s a big fan of local government services.)Late last summer I was driving on a major road immediately behind a car that was T-boned as it made a turn at a traffic light. I called…[Read more]

When I was about 12 years old, I convinced my parents that we needed to receive both Newsday and the New York Times. The Times covered the world, but Newsday had our local Long Island news. I loved reading both, noting the quality of the written pieces in each paper. As we’ve all heard for several years now, local papers are disappearing.…[Read more]

I’m in Winchester, Kentucky now, visiting my friend Commissioner Rick Smith and his lovely wife Suzy. Rick has been an elected official in Clark County for more than twenty years. They are lifelong residents; Rick is a cattle farmer, Suzy is a former speech pathologist and they are involved in the community. We had a nice chat last night over…[Read more]