The back story: Long ago, when Rick Santorum was campaigning and working on several extremely socially conservative agendas in Pennsylvania, advice columnist Dan Savage launched a (pretty fun) campaign to change the search results for Santorum’s name. Go over to Spreading Santorum for the full story, but for a long time, that was the #1 result when you searched for Santorum.

Now that Santorum is a candidate, the site has gotten more attention again, but it’s fallen in the ranking of search results. Already people are claiming that Santorum successfully pressured Google to change its results and drop the Spreading site. I doubt this is true for a variety of reasons.

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Quick hit: I lost my phone in a cab last night, and while the sweetest kid EVER found it and got it back to me, it made me think twice about my mobile contingency plan. I realized I had a few holes, so I wanted to share what I’ve already done, and how I’m patching the holes. All of these are Android-specific; I haven’t investigated iOS options for my iPad yet.

• Contacts. All of my contacts are through my Google Apps account for deannazandt.com, so we’re good there.Apps. I’ve rooted my phone, so I use Titanium Backup Pro to create regularly scheduled backups of the application and application data on my phone. The free version sends the backups to your SD card; I bought the Pro version so I could have those apps backed up to Dropbox, too.SMS & MMS. I use Backup to Gmail for this. It automatically sends your SMS, MMS and Call Log to your Google account, and files them in the Archive with appropriate labels.

  Photos. This was the big one for me: I have a lot of photos on my phone that aren’t shared on my social networks. I was mourning the potential loss of some precious Christmas photos, for example. I’m now trying out SugarSync to back these up to SugarSync’s cloud, and then to my laptop; I chose this one because many services wanted to use public social networks for the backup. That was too risky for me. Plus, it seems that SugarSync has good reviews on managing battery and scheduling, and you get 5GB of free space.

  Locator. Tara Hunt turned me on to Prey, which is a full suite of services for a lost phone. You can locate the lost device, send messages to it for the finder to tell them how to get in touch with you, and if they don’t comply, you can brick the device.

  Those were the biggies for me. What else am I missing?

I made this list over on Foursquare to help folks who are visiting and want to have an easy-to-follow plan. This is inspired by the number of times friends and family from my hometown upstate have done one of the day-trip-to-the-city packages, and I’ve taken them around. There’s a million other things to add (taking suggestions in the comments!), but this generally works for the timeframe allotted.

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First, let’s just say it: roaming outside the US with a US-carrier smartphone and SIM card, no matter what you do, is highway robbery. There, now that that’s out of the way…

I have a global phone from Verizon (shoutout: Droid Incredible 2, w00t w00t), and I’d planned on purchasing a German SIM card to use on my trip, since it’s too expensive to use Verizon’s global services. To do so, I called ahead and got the unlock code for my phone (this is not “jailbreaking” or “rooting” as some have asked in forums online— this is just unlocking your phone to be able to use with another carrier).

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There’s a new social networking service in town. It’s called Google+/Google Plus. The beta isn’t fully open to the public yet.

There’s a lot of nerdy/media-y navel-gazing going on there right now.

There will be advantages to businesses, political organizations and non-profits down the road.

There are some features “stolen” from other social networks; others are brand new. Users will like some things and hate others.

The end.

I need to get a global phone from Verizon before I go to Berlin this summer, and found out last night that they approved an early upgrade for me.  I’m likely going to purchase it today, so that I can get going with setting it up and unlocking the SIM, but I need to decide which one to get.

It’s between the HTC Incredible 2, and the Motorola Droid 2 Global.

Help me decide!   Here are my thoughts:

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I’ve got a full work plate this morning, and my own set of feelings to process about the news of Osama bin Laden’s death (more on that will likely appear on my Tumblr later tonight), but wanted to get down a couple noteworthy bullets. If I have time, I’ll return and flesh these out into a coherent piece.

We all know that social media get the word out at lightning speed–but what struck me most about this news was not the speed of information, but the immediacy of community development. People are using Twitter and Facebook to work out what are, for many, complicated emotions. Relief, joy, anger, sadness are all appearing at once. This is in stark contrast to what we often see in traditional media soundbites (particularly video media), where broad strokes are painted when it comes to emotional content–i.e., those people are cheering, those people over there are not. Social media is creating a space where it’s acceptable, and useful, to express multiple feelings. This is also very different than, for example, the days following 9/11–when the war on Afghanistan was announced, it was largely extremely taboo in American public squares (online or off) to express concern, or disagreement. Part of that was the political climate, but part of that was that there weren’t necessary effective public spaces for people to be nuanced human beings.

I’m also struck by the speed with humor was employed as a tactic to process the news. Again, in contrast to 9/11, when we waited two weeks for the new issue of The Onion to come out–no one made any jokes before then. Not only was it taboo, but there just wasn’t a way to deal. (By the way, that issue of The Onion might be the best one ever–headlines like, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule, “Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves in Hell,” and many more gems.) Last night, some of the immediate jokes, some in good taste, some not, clearly paved a way for people to express all kinds of reactions to this global news phenomenon. My personal favorites were @marcfaletti‘s “It was that f***ing iPad location history, wasn’t it?” and the newly created @OsamaInHell account tweeting, “Wait, what?”

More as time allows today…

Like many of my friends with lives as semi-public figures (writers, activists, actors, etc.), I’ve decided that I need a more delineated approach to how my life on Facebook is managed. As many of you know, I’ve advocated (especially in my book) for a more-the-merrier approach to what you share with whom, since I feel like the cross-pollination of our lives across multiple spheres (work, family, friends) can really go a long way towards digital consciousness raising.

I still believe that deeply, but I’m having some difficulty managing my Facebook relationships with people that I don’t know at all. One of the main challenges I’ve run up against is how Facebook is now much more of a web platform/identity manager than it was previously. It connects with a multitude other services and tools now that don’t let me distinguish how I know people. I manage my information on Facebook itself with lists and assigning privileges to them, but it’s just not working for other services. I’m not able to take advantage of some new tools, because I can’t manage the flow of info, and I feel like I’m missing out on those new services. (And I’m not able to do the R&D I need to on behalf of my clients).

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I’ve just gotten back from my first ever digital vacation—I spent five days in the Caribbean offline. Well, I’ll admit—I didn’t go completely offline. What I did was commit to 5 days of zero digital communication, and I didn’t answer or use anything on my phone. (It helped that I was abroad, so I didn’t want to pay insane roaming fees associated with both voice & data service.) The place where I stayed had free wifi, and I had my laptop with me so that I could write. My Kindle also has 3G and wifi. Ultimately, it was a matter of choice and then self-discipline to be out of touch. Some observations:

1. I wrote in my journal a lot more. All the things I might have tweeted or posted to Facebook went into a personal journal. It made me realize that since I don’t share deeply intimate details online, I have a lot of thoughts & experiences that don’t get documented in any way anymore. I have been, at most times of my life, an extreme self-documentarian (it’s probably what makes sharing random bits of it not that big of a deal for me), and even though I download Twitter backups, I’m wondering what I’ll be missing from this chunk of my life when I look back and see only the public bits. I still carry a paper journal with me everywhere; it just never gets used.
2. The only real urge to get onto Twitter and Facebook I had was when Mubarak was rumored to be leaving, and then actually resigned the next day. Social networks have become my lifeline for news & analysis, and though I had CNN International, Al Jazeera English and MSNBC at my disposal, I missed jumping into the breaking-news frenzy with my friends and colleagues.
3. Email, on the other hand, was a daily challenge not to think about checking. I didn’t necessarily want to know what was going on with work, but I had the nagging feeling of, “Does anyone need me?” It’s a big part of my identity, both professionally and personally, to be useful. I had to know that I was needed or missed. (Something I’d learned earlier in my online life, by the way, is that you cannot rely on social networks for this. Once you drop out, it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”) I need to work on this being such a big part of my identity, I think. A friend of mine says, “Truth is, you’re not needed. You’re completely replaceable,” at least in the professional sense. Accepting that is an exercise in a zen kind of freedom.
4. I was irritated by the feeling of not knowing what was going on in the world when I woke up every morning. I compromised by continuing to abandon the immediate picking up of my phone to check my social networks for news, but instead picking up my Kindle and going to the New York Times’ mobile site.
5. Sometimes my desire to get online really did feel like addiction. It reminded me of when I quit smoking, and my brain would try to make these little deals with me to have a cigarette. Luckily, I read a really good book to quit smoking that also helped me with answering those deals (except for the above news deal, I caved on that one). There’s a study that shows that stuff that happens online releases oxytocin in our brains, the same chemical that’s released in cuddling and affection. I suspect I was feeling a real lack of that experience and my “addiction” was trying to make it happen. “Just a little bit,” my brain would whimper.
6. I also fought urges to get just a little bit of work done. I would imagine for a second that I could just do that one writeup that was waiting to finished, and then I’d walk away. But just as I’m not a casual smoker, I know I’m not a casual worker. Just one and I’d be hooked, and back in the deep end. I chose to stay away and it worked for me.
7. Ultimately, all those urges were about self-discipline, something that’s lacking from the bigger discussions of, “Are we spending too much time online?” We worry that Facebook is going to suck us in and eat up all our time. It’s not Facebook (or Twitter), it’s you. You are choosing to go there and spend time, and you need to choose how long you’re going to be there. You do it with TV, you do it with going out with your friends, you do it with reading books. These tools are no different, except that you’re getting different chemicals into your brain that you are with some of your other free-time activities. Self-discipline is needs to be a part of our daily digital diet. (And if you have a problem with it, as I do sometimes, download a helper like Self-Control for Mac.)

PS—Things I did do on my vacation: ran a lot, did yoga, ate relatively well (no peanut butter M&Ms all week!), watched a few Oscar contenders, read Girlbomb’s amazing memoir, drew comics, napped, drank margaritas. Other random analog things, too. It was utterly fantastic.