This is the first set of photographs I took with my new camera, a Canon Rebel 2ti. Most of them are from my trip to California and some in my old house in Saint Louis, MO.

July Photos

This set is the photos I took in Nantucket and at my family friends, the Rechters, 25th Wedding Anniversary party.

stl photos

These are the photos I took in Saint Louis, MO before I moved at the beginning of this August.

lolla & the windy city.

road trip to lollapalooza 2010 in Chicago, IL
Saw the following live: lady gaga, arcade fire, the strokes, phoenix, mgmt, hot chip, the national, spoon, cut copy, grizzly bear, chromeo, yeasayer, mutemath, metric, matt & kim, the xx, blues traveler, B.o.B, rebelution, wavves, freelance whales, the ettes, tiga, & chiddy bang

Haven’t posted in awhile…

Site to be updated soon and many posts to come.

Doing this now to make sure it happens.

How To Make It In America
Music: I Need A Dollar By Aloe Blacc

And here is the show trailer:

Passion. Creativity. Social Media. Entrepreneurship. Video Production. Conversations. Lots of friends. Connections. Marketing. Big ideas. Fun.

If any or all of these words apply to you, and if you are looking to be involved in a start-up project in which you will: work with fun people, be encouraged and expected to think outside the box, reach out to Hoyas across time zones and generations, gain unique leadership/startup experience, use technology to connect, and give back to the Georgetown community, then we want YOU to be a part of the Georgetown Blog Hub (cool name under construction) Team.

Hopefully we’ve pulled you in, so now let us describe our project:

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT:

Friends and marketing buds Laura Sortwell and Jessica Lioon are currently in the process of starting a blog hub for the Georgetown community. Basically, we envision a website that rolls in blogs from various students and alumni and organizes them into different categories based on their content. We hope to create a place where current and graduated Hoyas can share their interests with the greater Georgetown community, connect and reconnect with each other, and have the intellectual-but-fun conversations that might normally occur over a coffee in Midnight Mug or a pitcher at the Tombs.

The site will be extremely user-friendly and will include various forms of content. So, for example, you could roll in your blog teaching English in Japan or about personal development, your photos of NYC that you take every week as a hobby, the blog for your salad/yogurt restaurant business that you started, your commentary on the Republican party, the pictures from your last Hoya soccer game, your monthly video interviews with people in the entertainment industry, news and information about a club or group fundraiser/event, your fashion picks of the week etc, etc. This blog hub is a great way for us to promote ourselves and one another as Hoyas, and to see the various interesting activities, thoughts, and talents of the Georgetown family all in one place.

Our main goal is to build a strong network of Georgetown Hoyas. Networking is about making connections and building enduring relationships, and we believe that this blog is the best place to start building this community, online and eventually offline as well. We want to create a forum in which Hoyas can share their ideas, show their expertise on trends and topics in various industries, facilitate discussion, seek new career opportunities, establish business contacts, develop knowledge resources, showcase their work, seek advice, and meet other alumni/students with similar interests.

We are looking for people to roll in their blogs if they already have them, and we are also planning to get Hoyas who don’t have blogs to be inspired to start blogging and roll them into our site. Anyone can write/podcast/post video or photo on any topic as long as it has a consistent focus and corresponds to our mission (which will be very broad, and which we will develop once we have a solid team put together). Blogging is really easy to do, a small time commitment and the media of the future, and we believe that connecting Hoyas through this medium will be the start of a closer, more inspired and vibrant Hoya family.

BUILDING A TEAM – DETAILS:

In building a team, we are looking for people who want to be fully committed to this project. (Obviously, we all have a lot of stuff to do, but we would hope that if you join our team, you would consider this to be in your top 2 extracurricular activities as far as commitment and dedication goes.)

We are seeking three leaders to be in charge of the different aspects of the project. We are seeking especially committed and organized people who would like to carryout this project in years to come;

• Technology Leader
• Outreach Leader
• Lead Editor/Editing Coordinator

Beyond the leaders:

Technology – We need at least one other technology person (HTML and Flash capabilities would be great, programming abilities would be awesome, also a good troubleshooter to help bloggers with technical problems)

Outreach - We need 3-5 additional outreach people to help us find people that are blogging and also encourage new people to blog and help them get started. Outreach members should LOVE people and be very outgoing, patient but persistent, and not afraid to talk to people and make connections. This is essentially the sales force of our idea and the team that will make our project get off the ground.

Editors - We need 2-3 additional editors to monitor content and to possibly help bloggers come up with content if they are having trouble.

All team members will be help us get the project off the ground, helping us in our next big tasks of:

• coming up with a cool name
• defining our vision and detailed mission/values for the site
• getting the actual site up and running
• more solidly defining team members’ roles and responsibilities

If you are interested please email us at georgetownbloghub@gmail.com with a photograph of yourself and your resume and fill out the application below.

Thanks!

Jessica Lioon and Laura Sortwell

For my Stop Action Animation project in my Video & Animation Class, my too very artistically talented friends (Natasha Frank and Claire Callagy) put Natasha’s shoe on the wall and took pictures of it…. so I mixed an audio track and used final cut pro to make this. Enjoy.

Greetings Hoya friends!

My friend Jessica Lioon and I are currently in the process of starting
a blog hub for the Georgetown community. Basically, we are envisioning
a website that rolls in blogs from various students and alumni and
organizes them into different categories based on their content. We
hope to create a place where current and graduated Hoyas can share
their interests with the greater Georgetown community, connect and
reconnect with each other, and have the intellectual-but-fun
conversations that might normally occur over a coffee in Midnight Mug
or a pitcher at the Tombs (yes…we are all nerds whether we admit it
or not).

The site will be extremely user-friendly and will include various
forms of content. So, for example, you could roll in your blog about
personal development, your photos of NYC that you take every week as a
hobby, the blog for your salad/yogurt restaurant business that you
started, your commentary on the democratic party, the pictures from
your last game, your monthly video interviews with people in the
entertainment industry, news and information about a club or group
fundraiser/event, your fashion picks of the week etc, etc. This blog
hub is a great way for us to promote ourselves as well as one another.

Our main goal is to build a strong network of Georgetown Hoyas.
Networking is about making connections and building enduring, mutually
beneficial relationships, and we believe that this blog is the best
place to start building this community, online and eventually offline
as well. We want to create a forum in which Hoyas can share their
ideas, show their expertise on trends and topics in the industry,
facilitate discussion, seek new career opportunities, establish
business contacts, develop knowledge resources, showcase their work,
seek advice, and meet other alumni/students with similar interests.

Currently, we are looking for people to roll in their blogs if they
already have them, and we are also hoping to get Hoyas who don’t have
blogs to be inspired to start blogging and roll them into our site.
We were wondering if you have a blog or know of any alumni who are
blogging, and if not, whether you would be interested in starting a
blog that could be rolled into our site. You would be able to
write/podcast/post video or photo on any topic as long as it has a
consistent focus.

We want to get as many Hoyas involved as possible and are really
looking to connect with alumni and current students for feedback and
more ideas. We would greatly appreciate your help, questions,
criticisms, and creativity! Blogging is really easy to do, a small
time commitment and the media of the future.

Please contact me at georgetownbloghub@gmail.com if you are interested. I look forward to hearing from you!

Best,
Laura

I’m extremely excited about this independent study and with working with Natasha. She is extremely creative and I think is going to be a blast to work with.

I want to start getting a good idea of what people think are good videos….What are your favorite music videos? Please comment.

I wanted to share a few thoughts with you on the video production process and my own personal reflections on the video, A Capital Greening, that I made for my Marketing Research class on the Green movement. I didn’t make this video alone, but I convinced three of my other classmates and friends, Margaux Harrold, Marina Lvova (@lvovy), and Frank Martinez, to do the project with me. It was a long and hard project, but a rewarding one in which I got to work with three other amazingly smart and talented individuals to make something that I’m really proud of. They are all people who make my ideas better and make ideas happen and I can’t thank them enough for that.

Marina has an amazing gift of words and a critical eye that kept us focused, on task, articulate, polished and professional. She’s someone who always smiling and makes those around her smarter and their ideas stronger. Check out her blog here. It’s awesome and one of my favorites reads.

If you can be turned on (a camera, computer, guitar or whatever), Frank can master it. He is a true AV pro. His cool head and quick ability to learn kept me sane in the editing room and the creative ways he finds to use anything electronic to express ideas boggles my mind at times.

Margaux is a true jack of all trades and I truly believe that there is no task this girl could not do or an idea that she could not make better. Her straightforward approach to her work, as well as her life, is refreshing and allows others to feel supported and therefore take on tasks they would otherwise felt to be impossible. She is one of the most productive and extremely dynamic people I know.

Now back to the video. Our task was to do a video ethnography exploring people’s attitudes on sustainability. The people we interviewed did not need to be “green” at all to participate – we just wanted to have a conversation to gauge how people think about “green”. We needed to interview people of all different viewpoints.  We planned  to understand the attitudes and behaviors of the different segments to better market green products.

Specifically, the purpose of the proposed research project was to present the views of consumers in each of the following pre-defined segments regarding their attitudes towards the green movement:

We started out in early November, with Frank and I sprinting to catch the GUTS bus while carrying black suitcases of rented camera equipment to our first interview at an office in McPherson Square.  Little did we know that those suitcases would become permanent fixtures in our hands (especially. Frank – our official camera man) and we would become pros at setting up a camera, tripod, and lapel mic in under five minutes.

In the course of approximately three weeks, we completed 21 interviews with people from all over DC.  I love asking questions and love talking to people, so I normally did the interviews but we all took out turn. We investigated many different consumer attitudes towards the Green Movement, the highlights of which are in “A Capital Greening.”  Some of our most interesting insights include the need for government involvement for the movement to have a true impact and how cost-conscious respondents from every segment proved to be.  Indeed, in the end, we felt a bit limited by the predefined segments, and noted significant commonalities amongst segments.

We also recognize the limitations this project has due to the nature of our sampling process and the time and cost restriction.  Our respondents were well-educated, almost exclusively at least at the college level.  They were also fairly well-off for the most part, and several knew each other or associated with each other prior to meeting us.

Still, we learned a great deal from this project.  We all spent many hours in Editing Room 7 at Gelardin, and were able to become well-acquainted with Final Cut Pro, Garage Band, Motion, Photoshop and iDVD, under my careful guidance.  We wrote scripts, searched for audio tracks, took extra footage, and talked to a lot of people.

I can wholeheartedly say that we have gained an immense amount of valuable experience from this entire process.

I hope you enjoy the film

Kind Regards,

Laura Sortwell (the producer)

Google barely advertises but when they do they do it right. This ad is just so true that I couldn’t imagine something more effective. I love it. What do you think of this ad?

Thanks Alex Muckerman for the shout out to LauraSortwell.com!

I saw this commercial, “I am RAM” last week at a guy friends house on ESPN during a hockey game and knew I wanted to write a post about it. It’s visually gorgeous, the copy is great, and I think its very well suited for the truck’s target market but the message is just a little disturbing. The line “my tank is full” is essentially saying ‘f-you’ to the Green movement.

As it becomes more and more apparent that our world needs to focus on sustainability, should American companies and marketers still be making these kind of commercials? These kind of cars? Why is it that the most “American” cars have to be the ones that are the worst for the environment?

Google Social Search will enhance the search experience and provide users with more personally relevant search results, by bringing the places where people make social connections and publicly post content closer to them.  Social Search taps into a user’s social network profiles (twitter, Facebook, blogs, Google Reader etc…) and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user’s own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. Social Search just went live last week in Google Labs.

To learn more about Social Search, I also recommend listening the podcast,

This Week In Google 13: This Is The Droid You’re Looking For

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land joins us to talk about Google’s social search, Jeff Jarvis invents Howard Stern 3.0, and Gina Trapani sorts by magic.

Here are some more videos on the Google’s Social Search as well…Enjoy!

, originally uploaded by TheVoiceThatSaid.

“More Perfect” great photo I grabbed off of Digital Kitchen’s blog @digitalkitchen http://bit.ly/2D0asf

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10 minutes later, I had requested an invite,

2 days later I received an invite and a new number,

and that same day I fell inlove with the product.

It’s essentially trying to make Voicemail more like E-mail (specifically GMail) and I think it will be very successful as soon as they can figure out a way to integrate it into the GMail interface (& I’m assuming that it will be embedeed in waves in the new Google Wave). So check out these videos, learn more about it and get your own account. Voicemail has never gotten so fun.