I’ve noticed a trend in my inbox lately. More and more people are sending me stuff about exclusive things. Exclusive invitation to this seminar. Exclusive invitation to participate in that focus group. Exclusive deal on this or that product. And these are opt-in messages, never mind the spam. To anyone marketing to me: if you…
When you hear the word Symposium, what do you think? A conference, probably. A dry, boring conference where people discuss academic topics that, unless you’re passionate about the field, you might not enjoy. Symposium brings images of people standing at a lecturn with 300 slide PowerPoint decks and 90 minutes to speak, followed by 30…
See that RSS link at the bottom of your Twitter page? Copy it. Head over to Yahoo Pipes. Start a new pipe. Paste in the URL of your RSS as a Fetch pipe. Add a filter pipe. Put the real names of the people you need to follow most as part of the title, or…
This is just stupid. Here’s a bag of bread I bought at the store. Inside this bag of bread is not bread, but bread that has been shrink-wrapped, ostensibly “for freshness”. Look, if your bag is so deficient that you need to shrink wrap the bread inside the bag, maybe you should design a better…
C.C. Chapman talks on his blog about Twittering beyond the box – uses of Twitter beyond your personal community, and suggests applications like politics, storytelling, celebrities, erotica, news, and sports, and wants to know our thoughts on what else Twitter can be used for. What is Twitter? Ultimately, Twitter is length limited asynchronous multicast IM.…
Chris Brogan has a thing he calls Friend-Sourcing; others have called it collaboration, the wisdom of the crowd, etc. Regardless of what you call it, here’s the situation at PodCamp NYC. The event is moving along smoothly except for one thing. Due to liability and regulations which they have little control over, the New School…
First things first. StumbleUpon amazes me. I left the office today around 4 PM and Stumbled the blog. In the 6 hours that have elapsed, StumbleUpon has added nearly 150 new visitors to my little blog, and 99.3% of those visitors are new. It’s amazing how powerful StumbleUpon is – it’s truly a Digg-killer in…
{border=”0″ align=”right”} I was reading in Essence of Ninjutsu by Headmaster Masaaki Hatsumi about a period of time in Japan called the Sengoku Jidai – the Warring States period – when a translation caught my eye. Hatsumi sensei had translated noren as goodwill. This simple translation opened up a fascinating exploration of how traditional Japanese…
In a conversation with Bryan Person last night, we were discussing why I was even setting up this web site, since I already devote a large amount of time to the Financial Aid Podcast. The essence of discussion was simply this: Your show is you. You are not your show. Your show is you. Unless…
I had an interesting thought today while attending Coffee with Crayon. If you haven’t gotten it already, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander. It’s a fantastic book, nearly legendary in some circles. It is to architecture what Gavin de Becker’s Gift of Fear is to…
