Click through or listen here:

Radio’s funny. I sit on the aisle and she sat next to me on the steps for the whole game. I ended up with the one sound bite in which I cop a cheesy Minnesotan accent in a weird voice!

It was a neat experience, though. I enjoyed chatting with her. Basketball’s not usually her beat (because who goes to MPR for sports?), but she was having fun at the Target Center. I told her having her there kept me the calmest I’ve been through a Lynx game all season.

MinnPost’s Young Professionals Network (YPN) is made up of Minnesota groups and organizations serving young professionals in their 20s, 30s and early 40s, as well as individuals in the same age group. Membership is free and open to all young professionals.

Answering the questions helped me really crystallize the things I’ve been thinking about and working on this year. I sound like such a grown up. When did that happen?!

1. What is your current state of mind?
It’s a heightened mix of hope and hopelessness.

On the positive side, I’m winding down one career and planning the next. That transition is thrilling in both good and bad ways. Change is exciting! Change is scary!

The opportunity to go back to school and craft a course of study that is interesting and unique to me is more compelling than I expected (as opposed to my highly-structured undergraduate engineering experience).

On the other end of the spectrum, the news of the world is, well, you know. There’s a lot going on and it’s not possible for me to fix it all.

I’m trying to flip this into a positive experience by exploring what I can actually do that will effect tangible change and be fulfilling.

2. Where would like see yourself in five years?
My medium-term goals are more focused on how I’m living than what exactly I’m doing.

I’d like to live a more mindful existence. I want to look back on what I’ve done and see a pattern of thoughtful choices that reflect my values.

I’ve spent a good chunk of this year creating space for this thought process and digging into what those values are, what those choices look like, what that choice-making feels like.

I’m still hopeful that becoming a more authentic me will translate into meaningful work and a means of supporting myself and my family.

That said, I’m angling towards graduate study in some flavor of organizational leadership. I’m eager to see what emerges on the other side of that.

3. What actions, strategies, or professional networks have been most helpful to you in building your career?
First I’ll cop to the fact that I have no interest in climbing a corporate ladder.

I’m not sure if my dream job is at a small company, a nonprofit, self-employment, or what. I do know that I’ve gained a lot simply by showing up for things that interest me.

I’ve had a blogging habit since 2002, so I’ve taken myself to a number of local and national tech conferences and presented at a few.

My primary fun time is spent singing with the Twin Cities Women’s Choir. That has evolved into volunteer opportunities, my first board service opportunity (which has catapulted me on to others) and some incredible networking.

Along the way, I’ve learned things, met people and been inspired.

All these activities are entirely outside my primary career, but they’ve set me up with knowledge, skills, and a network of people to help me move on to the next one.

4. What is always on your to-do list that never gets done?
I have a perpetual list of things I want to try on my websites. They’re either a bit too tech-y for me to do quickly, require a bit of strategy that I haven’t put thought into, or are things I don’t actually have a reason to use but look cool anyway.

There’s also a pile of stuff in our back room that my wife would really like me to clean up.

5. What do you order at a coffee shop?
Dirty chai. That’s a chai latte with an espresso shot.

Blogging is an art form that is attempted by many and perfected by very few. Twin Cities Spark exists for only one reason: to Spotlight local Bloggers who have mastered their trade.

My profile appeared in February. I talk about how I got started in cityblogging, a little about my process, what other local blogs I like, what’s great about the Twin Cities, and a tidbit of advice for new bloggers.

Twin Cities Spark is the local arm of a national effort, and it’s staffed by freelance writer and editor Sara Duane. (Sara, by the way, is everywhere on the Twin Cities web. You’ve probably read her and you don’t even know it.) My thanks to Sara for reaching out.

“Points and badges are an incentive to get out to more and more places,” says Erica Mauter, a Minneapolis urban-culture expert at cinna.mn and fresh.mn. “It’s like putting new patches on your backpack or earning merit badges.”

Unfortunately, the link to this article at twincities.com is already dead and you have to pay for the text-only archive, but you may be able to access the Google cache of the article. Kaeti Hinck, the star of the photo in the article, snagged this photo of the print edition.

Many thanks to PiPress tech writer Julio Ojeda-Zapata for including me in his story.

UPDATE: A copy of the print article has been archived online at scribd.

Ten Money Questions for Erica Mauter

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, in his latest Maynard Institute column, broke down the behind-the-scenes-in-plain-view goings on at the MPR Ethics in Online Journalism forum that Greg and I liveblogged for Ye Olde Metblog.

“Because you can have that constant stream of input I feel compelled to constantly consume it,” said Mauter, who follows 200 Twitterers. “It’s terrible if you have an attention deficit problem.”

I do have more, more nuanced opinions on Twitter, but that’s certainly one of them.

Keeping it short and tweet

By TONY GONZALEZ, Star Tribune
June 22, 2008

Minneapolis travel writer Leif Pettersen admits that his 2,000-word blog posts are “long-winded,” though that’s not necessarily a bad thing in a genre known for luscious detail about exotic places. But on a dare from a fellow writer, Pettersen joined Twitter, the micro- blogging website that limits writers to 140-character entries.

“I didn’t get it,” said Pettersen, 38, of his first reaction to the ultra-short posts. “It was like hearing bits of conversation from a room full of schizophrenics.”

Nevertheless, here was his “tweet” from Romania on May 28: “Made it to Cluj today. Roads awful (et tu Timisoara?) and heat making my brain mush. There’s a sushi place here. Dare I try?”

Twitter users write about what they are doing, as they do it, from wherever they are. And now, nearly two years after Twitter’s launch, an increasingly varied group of users is finding new ways to answer the site’s prompt: “What are you doing?”

Besides citizen journalists and some mainstream media twitterers, such as MPR’s Bob Collins and WCCO’s Jason DeRusha, the local Twitter community now includes updates from a Mayor R.T. Rybak stream, the Meet Minneapolis visitors bureau and users keen on the service for unique reasons — such as posting job openings, administering customer service and, in the case of one local playwright, creative-writing exercises.

“One of the great things about Twitter is also one of its biggest faults — that it’s so open-ended,” said local Minneapolis blogger Aaron Landry, 29. He laments users who post too many links, hold too many one-on-one conversations, or ceaselessly pump out self-promotions.

“I love Twitter and I hate Twitter. Twitter is really annoying,” Landry said. “Most of what I receive on Twitter is noise, but every now and then, the valuable bits that I get from other people’s lives is worth the price for me.”

Erica Mauter, 30, of Eden Prairie agrees. “Because you can have that constant stream of input I feel compelled to constantly consume it,” said Mauter, who follows 200 Twitterers. “It’s terrible if you have an attention deficit problem.”

Although Kristina Halvorson doesn’t think people will read frequent updates about what she feeds her two children (not uncommon on Twitter), she has used the site since April for her Web content agency, Brain Traffic.

“It’s almost 100 percent professional contacts for me right now,” Halvorson said. And she made her employees sign up, too. “For the people who live in the Web and digital trends, you have to be on Twitter,” she said. “I want [employees] using it.”

That’s in part because Twitter can work as a referral service. Halvorson’s agency caught a wave of applicants after she posted on Twitter. And that’s just the beginning of business use. Comcast Corp., for example, uses a program that searches for mentions about its services, then follows up to find solutions to any complaints.

Employee use of Twitter could raise questions about appropriate personal expression, Halvorson said, but she hasn’t had any problems. In fact, she follows her employees’ accounts because “they’re really funny.”

The public nature of Twitter didn’t faze Shoreview resident Paul Saarinen, 30, who tweeted frequently to a small following while his wife was in labor last summer.

But how much detail is too much?

Each tweet by Greg Swan, 27, of Eden Prairie goes out to more than 800 other Twitterers who follow his posts.

“Anytime I tweet I’m letting down three-quarters of my followers,” Swan said, explaining his diverse audience of friends, industry peers, and fans of his Perfect Porridge entertainment site. “When I’m talking about my son, most of those people don’t care.”

Swan maintains some privacy by not posting his photograph and by never discussing work clients. Otherwise, he’s in the Twitter mix and claims the site has made him more real friends (the kind where you meet face to face) than all other online networking sites combined.

Then there’s Sailor Martin. The crude sailor puppet is the creation of Max Sparber, 40, of Minneapolis, and he populates his Twitter account with fabrications about long nights (and days) of drinking and sexual escapades. “I have never used Twitter as it was intended,” reads one post from the puppet.

Sparber said he didn’t understand the point of Twitter at first, so he followed his impulse to tweet in character.

“I just try to be funny,” he said.

A much cleaner but equally novel account belongs to Aric McKeown, 28, of New Hope, who uses one stream to host a monthly game called “The Least Dangerous Game.” McKeown writes real-time clues as to his whereabouts and the first to find him wins a prize.

As for Pettersen, he said travel writing trumps most professions for providing the “sensory overload experiences” that make for good writing and reading. And while he’s still not a “short, punchy humor sort of guy,” he has learned to be extremely brief on Twitter.

Now, while home compiling his research, Pettersen tweets about writer’s block instead.