Marketing and Strategy Consulting
MSNBC has a unique “sliding scale” to rate how the Democrat Presidential candidates performed this evening…
Head over to MSNBC and try it out based on how you thought the Democrat candidates did at tonight’s debate in Orangeburg, SC.
Just got through watching and digesting the first Democrat debate in Orangeburg, SC at SC State University.
Barack was on his A Game, Hillary seemed flustered and Edwards was great until the very last question.
When asked “Who Is Your Moral Leader?,” Edwards paused for an awkward ten seconds before stumbling out something about his personal lord.
Come on, John. I’m a huge fan. I supported you in ’04 and I’m supporting you in ’08, but that was embarrasing. Why not something like…
“Well, there are many. My dad was my first moral example who showed me that money isn’t everything but character is. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to college because of my dad’s hard work, I came into contact with the works of Gandhi and MLK, Jr who opened my eyes to the importance of morality in politics and public service.”
That would have won you the presidency… no contest.
We’re behind you and Elizabeth, John… now get on your A-Game and be the candidate that we know you can be.
(Photo from Freder1k on Flickr)
Andrew Wee has tagged me on the latest meme sweeping the interwebs…
Write a post on your best productivity tips. Challenge yourself by picking your single best productivity tip (although this isn’t a requirement; you can give us more if you want!)
Wow. I am probably the most disorganized person in the world, yet find some way to manage all that I have on my plate. Distilling my crazy practice of aggregating note taking, Blackberry checking, feed reading, project work and communications into a few tips is nearly impossible.
Running a full time blog, teaching two college courses, working on finishing my PhD in ancient near eastern history, being a husband (soon to be father), putting together PlanetBeta and actively managing four affiliate programs is downright crazy and not to be attempted. However, I manage to do it all and still have time to sort through the 700 plus feeds I subscribe to everyday, watch my beloved Chicago Cubs on MLB.tv and have an active social life… and a clean inbox.
The secret is to play more.
My Productivity Tip: Only “work” 30 minutes out of every hour. “Play” the other 30 minutes. No matter what.
I have a countdown clock that I keep on my desktop that is set to 30 minute intervals. Whatever I’m doing, at the end of those 30 minutes, I stop, stand up, breathe deep, make paper airplanes, play with my dogs, take a walk, browse YouTube, call my mom, eat, check in on the Cubs, attempt to hack up my blogs and Ubuntu boxes, go play basketball, or something “fun.” Then, 30 minutes later I’m back to “work.”
This is not for everyone. You certainly can’t do this in an office setting (unless you work for Dunder Mifflin). However, I “work” from home and love what I do and I have worked myself into a situation where I have complete flexibility of how I want to live my life.
However, if you know me, you know that I only sleep about 4 or 5 hours a night and am usually in possession of a laptop within a wifi hotspot during my waking hours. So, in those 20 or so hours that I’m awake, I easily get a “full day’s” work done and then some. Working in an office 9-5 is not for me and not for most humans. It’s unnatural! It’s not worth it…quit your “job.”
Oddly enough, I get more “work” done than anyone I know (including my physician wife). I’m certainly not to this level of productivity, delegation, automation and efficiency yet, but I’m working my way there!
So, there you have it… embrace your natural animal curiosities and don’t chain yourself to some desk with some plastic chair. Life is short and time is long!
So now I have to tag five others.
Hmm… I tag:
Jeff Doak
Shawn Collins (guessing it will involve Diet Dr Pepper and a picture of Ronald Reagan)
Jonathan (Trust)
Yep, it’s true.
I’ve gotten my mom on GMail. I think it will change her life and improve our communication as she is already taking advantage of GTalk within GMail.
Congrats, mom!
Via Gia Trapani’s Scribbling.net
My first semester of teaching Intro to the Old Testament (Religion 101) at Gardner-Webb University is almost over.
Wow.
What an experience. I can’t tell you how quickly the semester has flown by and how much we still have left to do. There’s one week of full classes yet and I’m just getting to Hezekiah and Josiah! Yikes!
So, I’ve got to squeeze in the Exile and the post-Exilic periods in the span of a week. Double YIKES!
I wish we didn’t have schedules and class meeting times, especially in a college environment. It would make much more sense (in my Asperger’s clouded mind) to allow students to select their own schedules in a given week and select certain teachers or subjects they wanted to pursue in a much more fluid and non-constrained manner as our current rigid class system. Pipe dreams.
After teaching 8th grade for two years, this has been a semester of wonder, enjoyment, frustration, bewilderment and learning. I just hope my students have learned as much as I have and have grown to find a little bit of interest, or at least appreciation, for the Hebrew Bible.
I am a complete Lost geek.
I can’t believe I just read through this entire thread with the same excitement as I have when reading a great book…
http://www.thetailsection.com/lost-news/lost-the-great-jacob-debate.php
Anna and I are more than proud, happy and excited to announce that we’ve got a baby on the way!
The due date (which you can follow by the awesome widget above) is around October 10, 2007. My dad’s birthday is October 5 and Schaefer (my beloved firstborn son and dog in the pic over on your right) has his birthday on October 12, so it looks like the baby will fall somewhere between those two.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to be a father. I can’t wait to toss the baseball, watch the Cubs, discuss Star Wars, camp out, cook breakfast, get ready for the prom, paddle a canoe, talk about justice and Gandhi, laugh, cry, hug, smile, and dream with this child.
My whole life has been a build up to this point.
I’m so excited.
Here are some pics…
Whoever you are and who ever you’ll be, I love you so much.
Whatever you do with your life and whoever you end up being, just please remember this…
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
Be good, my baby. Change the world, and always (ALWAYS!) serve others. You are special, you are incredible and you are my life. Thank you for being you.
Say what you want about social media and social networks, but I think this is just one small example of how organic and non-induced marketing can seriously improve a brand, campaign or even offer.
This week, General Motors unveiled the new concept for the Buick Riviera model at the Shanghai Auto Show. Designed at the GM Pan Asia Technical Center, the car is yet another stylish Buick designed by GM’s China design team. The Riveria is an older brand, and as the son of a car dealer, I’ve seen my share of ugly Riveria’s.
So, I was excited to see the new concept.
However, I found out about it on Digg. The story (with hi-res pics) about the new concept for the Riveria was dugg yesterday and is now pushing 300 diggs and is on the front page. While not signficant in terms of Detroit budget numbers, having that many diggs and being on the front page for an extended amount of time causes a ripple in the pond of influence. Soon, these young tech geeks (like myself) who watch Digg will tell their young friends about the car and so on and so on. It’s effective and you can’t buy or induce that sort of beneficial marketing.
The problem is that many large (and small) companies think they can find ways to game Digg or StumbleUpon. Sure, you can get an offer on the front page, but the traffic is going to be junk.
Make your marketing human and stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes!
I downloaded and quickly installed Ubuntu’s new version, Feisty Fawn, last night.
I even skinned it to look like OSX…
I’ve used 6.06 and 6.10 since last summer, but Feisty (7.04) is by far and away the best Linux distro out there for my needs. Comparing Feisty to my Windows Vista laptop and my Mac OSX machine, it is my favorite because of cost, ease of use and customability. Plus, it’s darn fast and seems to be very stable no matter what I throw at it.
Here’s a few of the nice things I’ve noticed about 7.04 compared to 6.10…
1. My “Motion Eye” built-in webcam works flawlessly on a Sony Vaio VGN-FE770G laptop with Feisty. I’ve never had great success in getting it (or any webcam) to work with either 6.06 or 6.10. So, this was a nice suprise and a HUGE bonus.
2. The boot time for Feisty seems to be quicker than 6.10. Maybe it’s just me or my machine, but it seems faster on the load.
3. NVidia support!
4. Sound seems to be much better in Feisty than in 6.10. After heavy use in 6.10, I would start to get a lag or echo in sound. Not the case with Feisty so far.
5. My Logitech VXRevolution mouse worked right away with no fuss in Feisty.
6. Skype works wonderfully in Feisty. It took a little manipulation to get it right in 6.10.
7. My Logitech laptop USB headphones work right when I plug them in. No fooling with the command line… which is fun, but can be tedious when I’m trying to do something quickly.
So, my first impressions are all very good ones. I use this Ubuntu laptop as my main machine for both personal and work related items. SO, I’m hoping this is the Ubuntu release that finally convinces me that I don’t need a Vista or OSX box to communicate properly with the outside world…
Suck.
The older I get, the more I realize that humor (“good” sarcastic humor) shows more of an understanding of a subject than just recitation or memorization of facts. If I had time, I’d love to do some research into the human humor response and see what the evolutionary treadmill has to say about the development in the human animal.
Now I’m trying to think of a way to tie-in humor to the classes that I teach… hmmm…
Working and studying in a college environment everyday, I can’t tell you how profoundly shocked and sad I am at today’s shootings at Virginia Tech.
Colleges and universities, of all places, should be places where young and old people alike can study, learn, walk, live and inquire without feeling the least bit threatened.
My thoughts and prayers are with the students, staff, faculty, families and loved ones who suffered so much today and will continue to do so for a long time.
The gap between the digerati and the corporate world continues to grow, and both sides are to blame. Both sides will eventually suffer as a result, although it is the web2.0 digerati that will suffer more than the capital backed corporate world.
According to a March 22 McKinsey Global Survey, “How Businesses are Using Web 2.0,” the number of high level corporate adopters that see the value in platforms such as blogs, wikis and RSS are hovering around one-third. Steve Rubel offers some insight here from his unique perspective of working for Edelman and being considered a web2.0 expert and advocate.
During January, 2007, 2,847 executives from global companies, 44% of whom were C-level or above, were asked to provide insight into which of nine Web 2.0 technologies they were currently investing in—and how their use of these technologies has evolved over the past five years.
Web services, including software that enables systems to communicate with each other, attracted the largest investments, with 80% of executives reporting that they use or plan to use them. Collective intelligence, which attempts to tap the wisdom of crowds to make decisions, was the second-largest draw, with 48% of executives reporting investments. Peer-to-peer networking, a technique for efficiently sharing music, video, or text files, also attracted attention, with 47% of executives reporting investments.
That doesn’t sound pessimistic, but we must realize that such platforms and technologies are very “1.0” in their scalability and usage in corporate environments. Although the web2.0 trend has been to open these platforms up to new users by easibility, they are not indicative or representative of the type of “exciting” new technologies that we normally point towards when describing web2.0.
BusinessWeek continues their coverage of the story with…
Meanwhile, companies have been reluctant to invest in some of the more mainstream Web 2.0 technologies. Just 37% of executives were using or planned to use social networking, best known for commercial applications like MySpace and Facebook. RSS and podcasts each had just 35% of executives reporting investments. And wikis, the publishing systems that allow many authors to contribute, captured the investments of just 33% of executives. Just 32% of executives reported sinking dollars into blogs, while mash-ups, the aggregation of online content to create new services, brought up the rear, with just 21% of executives reporting investments.
I was shocked to see that wikis outrated blogs. However, it makes sense. Blogs are inherently subversive technologies because they are so easy to create, design, personalize and publish. In a structured corporate environment, such qualities are not welcomed or encouraged on a normal basis.
The fact that RSS, wikis blogs and podcasts still are deemed worthy of investment by only 30-35% of top level corporate execs says that these platforms have hit the glass ceiling. They are not going to gain too many more percentage points of adoption in such an enviroment.
As a result, development and advancement of these platforms will continue, but there will be an ever growing gap between their adoption and usage between the digerati and the corporate world. This will have an obvious affect on the “average” user of the web who will continue to be much more influenced by the corporate world than the web2.0’ers.
The web2.0 advocates and evangelists have blood in their hands and are primarily responsible for this growing divide. I consider myself one of these, so I’ll make use of the personal pronoun “we” when I assert that we have been too smug, too impractical and too sure of our steady progress of Manifest Destiny. We haven’t adequately engaged the “average” (gross generalization) web user when promoting or developing or discussing new programs and platforms and services that are still popping up everyday in the web2.0 world.
Instead, we have become a tribal amphictony which circles around our own campfire of places such as Techmeme or TechCrunch to discuss, grade, and make pronouncements about the usefulness of a web2.0 site, program or platform. In our rush to define what blogging, RSS, wikis and podcasting can do for the web and the world, we have failed to proactively act to go out and demonstrate these promises.
Perhaps web3.0 will cure this and bring some practicality and interaction from outside corporate and average web users into the conversation. However, I think we’ve reached the point of no return in our web2.0 exuberance and we’ve wandered too far away from shore to sail this ship back home.
One of my favorite sites on the web, Bad Astronomy, has news of an interesting event happening tomorrow night in Georgia and Florida…
If you live in southwest Georgia or northeast Florida, on Tuesday evening April 17th at 8:56 p.m. local time, you might see the star Iota Cancri blink out as an asteroid named Xanthe passes in front of it.
As Phil points out, this is called an occultation.
What a rare and unique event!
I can’t believe it’s snowing in April!
I’ve had my blog on Tumblr, but decided to move it back to WordPress for email reasons.
You can still get to my Tumblr page (and you should) at sam.tumblr.com.
More changes coming here very soon!
30Boxes is officially my favorite app on the web