“thought leaders: leading with thoughts.”

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/28376117

merlin mann is a presentation genius and all around excellent guy to learn from. it amazes me that his pitch in this video is the same one i’ve seen (but in earnest) dozens of times at conferences.

i need to get better at my own presentation style. following matt webb and merlin recently has really prodded me to develop a more eclectic style that allows what i’m trying to communicate to get out there while also being a little different from the pack.

or something like that. 

Wayne Porter Convo Podcast

Wayne Porter and I did a podcast last night where we discussed exactly what "next-gen" marketing means with practical examples, ideas and implementations.

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=P5fe993d40c264698169764f74736cf03Yl9wRVREYmR3&buffer=5&shape=6&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap21

MP3 File

The podcast runs about 90 minutes and we discuss Wayne’s conception of Next Gen marketing and possible futures of online and affiliate marketing.

It’s not a podcast for everyone, but if you’re willing to think a little deeper, there’s a ton of value in here.

Dunbar’s number has been popularized as the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number 150 also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.[2]

Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

having complete deja vu. i wonder, if lost is correct, and we are all time shifting back and forth in search of “constants” that will keep us anchored in one time frame or another.

given that our small human brain has no real conception of the grand scale of time/space and the other three dimensions, it’s possible that we’ve got this whole timeline thing wrong.

i hope so.

Untitled

Dunbar’s number has been popularized as the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number 150 also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.[2]

Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Light Cone RSS

Light Cone RSS

“From the moment of my birth, light [that I could have influenced] has been expanding around the Earth and light [which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin] reaching it – this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone. Today… My light cone contains 46 stars. HR4523 will be reached in in 4 weeks.

(Data taken from the utterly excellent An Atlas of the Universe, which has maps from the solar system out to the the Local Group and beyond. There’s a lovely 3d map of stars within 50 light years, the data from which is used here. If you have data for beyond 50 light years, please let me know and I’ll add it – until then it’ll only work for people born after 1954.)”

Untitled

having complete deja vu. i wonder, if lost is correct, and we are all time shifting back and forth in search of “constants” that will keep us anchored in one time frame or another.

given that our small human brain has no real conception of the grand scale of time/space and the other three dimensions, it’s possible that we’ve got this whole timeline thing wrong.

i hope so.

“This is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s short story Mercurial, which isn’t really about the city at all although it plays a large part. It’s a detective story about an art collector on Mercury. With this city, resistance to the motive force is used to generate large amounts of electricity. The city slides round the entire planet, slowly, again and again. They sell the electricity to other planets.”

Slide 4 of 50 (Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths)

Dell Looks to the Clouds

I live my online life in the cloud, so it’s great to see a major hardware manufacturer start to heavily ponder the shifting trade winds away from desktop based applications towards web based apps…

More Conversations: Dell Launches Cloud Computing Blog – Direct2Dell – The official Dell blog: “Starting today, members from our Data Center Solutions (DCS) team will support a group blog called In the Clouds. It will focus on cloud computing and the backend server, storage and architecture required to make it work. If you’re not familiar with the concept of cloud computing, think using web-based e-mail from Yahoo, Google or AOL (see link for their slick integration with Silverlight), or uploading videos to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, or microblogging with Twitter. When you do those kinds of things you aren’t storing them on your local device.. you’re storing them ‘in the clouds,’ or to a remote location in the Internet.

So, why start with Cloud Computing? The short answer is there’s a lot happening in this space right now. Take a look at what Adobe’s doing with their AIR product (go Twhirl!) that they recently brought to market. Google continues to surge forward with their Google document apps (Spreadsheet Forms and Google Calendar synch are two recent enhancements that rock), and this week at MIX08, Microsoft is rolling out some cool stuff with Silverlight 2.0 and Internet Explorer 8.

What this all means is that we’re at the beginning stages of a shift from the model of the past where applications and all the content created for them were stored locally. This shift has the potential to increase the types of Internet-connected devices we use to consume and create content (check out the good discussion Scoble has going about the battle for web-based content on mobile phones).”

Are you in the cloud or are you sticking with your desktop?

Light Cone RSS

http://interconnected.org/home/more/lightcone/

“From the moment of my birth, light [that I could have influenced] has been expanding around the Earth and light [which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin] reaching it — this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone. Today… My light cone contains 46 stars. HR4523 will be reached in in 4 weeks.

(Data taken from the utterly excellent An Atlas of the Universe, which has maps from the solar system out to the the Local Group and beyond. There’s a lovely 3d map of stars within 50 light years, the data from which is used here. If you have data for beyond 50 light years, please let me know and I’ll add it — until then it’ll only work for people born after 1954.)”

Untitled

“This is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s short story Mercurial, which isn’t really about the city at all although it plays a large part. It’s a detective story about an art collector on Mercury. With this city, resistance to the motive force is used to generate large amounts of electricity. The city slides round the entire planet, slowly, again and again. They sell the electricity to other planets.”

Slide 4 of 50 (Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths)

Year of the Cheap Laptops?

I have to wonder how close we are to a “cheap computer” revolution when linux based laptops start eating into the non-Apple laptop market.

I know personally that the Asus eee is a fantastic little piece of tech. I’ve said more than once that it is my favorite laptop ever (even more than the high end Dell I had for a few years and my new MacBook Pro).

So, the thought of Windows moving into this territory and squishing some of the linux momentum scares me…

Asus and Microsoft working an Eee-targeted version of Windows 7? – Engadget: “Given the Eee’s ‘other requirements,’ Asus and Microsoft ‘couldn’t go the Vista route,’ presumably because the Eee doesn’t really have the horsepower for it. Sure, but what caught our interest was that Microsoft is ‘in close discussions with Asus [regarding] how to take that forward… in regards to the Windows 7 Europe timeframe.’ Windows 7, you’ll recall, has that lean new kernel, which would presumably make building a stripped-down version specifically for Eee-class machines easier — but the last we heard, Windows 7 wasn’t due until at least mid-2009 (and possibly not until 2011), so either Microsoft is planning to continue shipping XP after June or Windows 7 is coming much earlier than we thought. Our money is on XP continuing to soldier on, but here’s hoping.”

What does this have to do with online marketing? A great deal, I believe since the machine that people use to access the web or get things done has a great deal of influence on how they view online products or services. The more people that wise up to linux and open source products, the more people become web and savings savvy.

Affiliate or CPA Spam?

Looks like the “affiliate spammers” are starting early at Penn State University.

Although, this is more of a CPA network offer (email/lead based) than an affiliate offer, but few people in online marketing can actually cite the difference between affiliate and cpa, let alone innocent bystanders who get creamed with this sort of unsolicited garbage.

Penn State Affiliate Marketer Spamming Fellow Students: “I can’t believe someone on the PSU domain is spamming me with an affiliate offer. I received this email from the President of ‘PSU Free Student Offers.’ This character named Samantha Volley is obviously fake, and I confirmed it because the name is not in the Penn State Directory or even Facebook.”

Again, this raises the Calacanis Keynote question of how to “clean up” the affiliate industry but also brings in the interesting component of how affiliates should kick their often less-than-honorable lead based cousins to the curb…

New Bible Discussion List: The Biblicalist

I came across a great new email discussion list that I promptly joined this morning called The Biblicalist.

If you’re a student of the Hebrew or Christian Bible, it looks like a fantastic resource. This isn’t for everyone, but could grow to become something very valuable…

biblicalist : The Biblicalist: “Welcome to The Biblicalist, a biblical studies list of academic emphasis open to all who wish to approach the Bible in its wider context, past and present. All viewpoints and perspectives which draw on the work of scholars in biblical studies and cognate disciplines are welcome.

Topics of discussion include the interpretation of particular texts of the Bible and related literature, the background of ancient Near Eastern and Classical cultures, theological and philosophical reflections on relevant issues, and the Bible in art and literature, including the reception of the Bible from ancient times to the present. “

Do We Really Know How to Teach Ancient Languages?

In order to make sure that future generations appreciate and understand our historical legacy, we have to ensure that we are teaching ancient languages in the most appropriate manner possible.

Here’s a thought provoking piece from the SBL site…

Society of Biblical Literature: “Even if not as ‘useful,’ and proportionally much less popular than modern languages, in absolute numbers there is still a considerable interest in learning ancient languages. The demand is answered with a plethora of popular as well as academic textbooks, programs, and courses, some of them attempting to exploit the latest information technologies.[1] This recent supply of IT based programs should not, however, mislead, us into assuming that the emergence of real new approaches in imparting ancient languages has occurred. Students’ achievements, their facility in accessing the classical texts, and their overall satisfaction have not necessarily improved.[2] Moreover, there is hardly any research to be found dedicated specifically to ancient language pedagogy.[3] In spite of this apparently thin layer of modern technology, the teaching of ancient languages is usually characterized by conservative pedagogical notions and methods in need of reexamination and much change.”

I remember initially hating Attic Greek due to the insistence of memorization and vocabulary. Hopefully, new paradigms from other disciplines will inform how ancient languages are being taught in colleges and universities so that students will continue to be intrigued by the lure of the past.

Is the Lizard Man Back?

The Lizard Man sightings first popped up in my native Pee Dee region of South Carolina around 1988 when I was 10 years old. I remember buying a “Lizard Man” t-shirt at the I-95 Speedway outside of Florence, SC and wore it almost daily with pride. Perhaps that’s when my love of all things cryptid began.

Anyway, there are new Lizard Man sightings in the Pee Dee according to WIS tv out of Columbia…

WIStv.com Columbia, SC: “Lizard Man” returns?: “Dixie Rawson of Bishopville sent WIS News 10 an e-mail about a big surprise she got at her home Thursday morning. ‘The whole front half of our van is chewed up. There are bite marks right through the front grill. Both sides of the van above the wheel wells were bitten and the metal is bent like a piece of paper.’

It reminded Dixie of the local legend of the ‘Lizard Man’ that stretches back for decades. Now some are wondering if the Lizard Man is back.”

You can read more about the Lizard Man of SC here at Wikipedia:

The Lizard Man is described as being seven feet tall, bipedal, and well built, with green scaly skin and glowing red eyes. It is said to have three toes on each foot and three fingers on each hand which end in long black claw-like nails.

Thanks to Jon for sending over!

Sharing is Caring

I use Google Reader to plow through about 500 or so RSS feeds everyday. If you’d like to subscribe to a feed where I share things that I feel are interesting or useful, feel free to bookmark or grab the feed of my Shared Items page:

Sam Harrelson’s Google Reader Shared Items

At the behest of Tris Hussey, I’m strongly considering switching to NetNewsWire full time. Here’s the shared items feed for that:

Sam’s NetNewsWire Shared Items