iGens and Nobody's Happy

I was listening to the Net @ Night podcast with Leo Laporte and Sarah Lane (standing in for Amber MacArthur) the other night. Somehow the subject they started talking about was a portion of the Conan O'Brien show from earlier in the week. This was an interesting, because Scot McKnight, a theologian and blogger that I regularly read just got done with a series about the book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Both of these hit on the unique subject that with everything we have, people are more miserable. I see this with the youth group kids and the some people in church. Listening to the podcast Money Life with Chuck Bentley, he has been hammering the fact that we have put ourselves into debt to buy things that end up making us miserable. So we keep trying to earn money to buy our happiness, only to be unfulfilled. I won't go into details, but there are people that I am close to that they haven't figured that out yet. In fact, they once told me that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I think that in the coming years, that America will realize that we need to change...

My news consumption

I admit it. I'm a news junkie. I sometimes drive Mary crazy with the news things that I listen to. I have never lost the thought on how, I would sit with Dad and watch the news. In a way, it is part of who I am because some of my early conversations with my dad was sitting down to watch the news. However, as my life as changed over the years, my news consumption hasn't, but it has changed forms.

My main news was through the TV when I was younger, but as podcasting and blogs caught on (i.e. RSS). I began to gravitate to news sources that had good feeds of information. Well, I realize now that with the advent of Twitter, another piece of the puzzle has filled in. So here is my daily news consumption:

I get up and load my iPod Nano with the podcasts that have come in overnight. Two of the podcasts are the ABC News webcast and the NBC Nightly news. I listen to these on my way into work as well as the first part of my day in the office. Then there are various niche news and media critic podcasts that I listent to as well. Next, I go back over my Twitter timeline to scan for the news and people that I follow back to about when I last saw them day before (I have a few news sources, MLive.com, CNN breaking, NPR top stories, NBC news, and Breaking News On).Then comes the RSS feeds, with local news papers and various blogs and an alt news website (Pajamas Media).

I filter through all of these sites and more through the day. Being an analyst, it is then fun to poke through and distill this information into usable things. Most of which goes into my youth ministry.

I don't read everything, but I read what I think I can. Otherwise, I would get overloaded. Eventually some these stories bubbles up into a though that ends up on my blog. You are reading some of the end results of this process.

Oops!

I forgot to validate the loudtwitter feed to put my tweets into the posts. So the testing continues. I now have to wait until late tonight before the tweets show up.

Something new!

I have seen some the people with Word Press can bundle their Twitter Tweats together and send them out as a post. Well, I found a site that will do that for Blogger as well. Why don't I change? I'm lazy. I don't like change. Okay, I'm not that bad, but it is a pain. I like blogger's functionality and I'm comfortable with how to use it. I might change in the future, to Word Press especially with my wife starting a Virtual Assistant business, where she is pretty much installing blogs and getting domain names for people.