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A truly fascinating, different view of Thomas Jefferson than typically available. Being the revisionist (and wine lover) that I am, I am getting real enjoyment out of reading about Jefferson as an epicure and bon vivant.
Simple roasted duck recipe with a lot of fantastic tips for a neophyte to cooking wild duck. I plan to use this recipe again and again.
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Incredibly interesting article on the future of e-mail within social networking.
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Just finished speaking last week at the Internet Strategy Forum’s conference in Portland. Saw some amazing speakers as well including Rob Scoble, Yahoo’s CMO Cammie Dunaway, and Rey Ramsey who is CEO of OneEconomy, a non-profit dedicated to bringing broadband access and other internet services to those living in challenged conditions. While I don’t think it was among my ‘best’ presentations, I was really excited to talk about the hype cycle I think Web 2.0 is currently in, and what I thought marketers and technologists in the audience really needed to take away from the conference: namely, that we should be looking beyond viral marketing and social technology, and putting our energy instead into using blogs, social networks, and other social media to invite users & customers to become integral partners in the product development process. Not a lot has been written about this phenomenon to-date, except for a great article I just heard about by Dion Hinchcliffe on what he calls ‘Product Development 2.0‘. Also, feel free to ping me for a copy of the presentation.
As reported by the MIT Technology Review, if only this had been around sooner, my efforts to learn Italian would have been more successful by now. Languagelab.com is setting up shop in SL, using the virtual world to recreate settings from the ‘real world’ - providing a fully immersive experience to exercise language skills. I can say from experience that I’ve only gotten better in Italian by using the language in social situations, and in a simulated social environmennt (in a virtual restaurant for example), I’m guessing the same perceived ‘risk’ is there, without it really being present — I can try to order my virtual latte, and whether I screw up or not, it’s still not really a latte. Guess I need to get myself a SL account. I wish these guys had tried this with There.com, where I actually do have an account. :p
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So beautiful I almost can’t stand watching this. I wonder how soon these kinds of applications will be commercially available. It makes me wonder about the popularity of the Wii, the excitement over the iPhone, and the possibility that there is a large addressable market ready for these kinds of user interfaces.
More multi-touch info goodness here: http://multi-touchscreen.com/
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Media Life reports on a survey conducted by Global Market Insite, which states: “60 percent of the 1000 Americans polled said that recommendations from friends will influence their buying decisions, well ahead of the 14 percent who will buy based on regular advertising and the 13 percent who will make last-minute decisions based on in-store ad displays.” So how are the ‘friends’ formulating their opinions? Surely there will be some who already own the product, but many others won’t. Those ‘friends’ may rely on their ‘friends’, but surely a certain percentage of these individuals are formulating their opinion based on having done their own research prior to having bought, and the word of mouth being spread is based on the research they have conducted. I just wonder about the % breakdown of those post-purchase vs. pre-purchase friends who have been asked for their opinion.
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Brilliant (as in wonderful) site that lets you research famous people (for now anyway), and do some fun, light social network analysis, like degrees of separation. My guess is that this site could have real potential as ‘reputation’ and ‘identity’ portal, as it extends to include more than just famous people and personalities. Can’t wait to see how it evolves.
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Fantastic piece on how to take friction out of user interfaces, especially those that involve transactions of monetary or personal information. Stuff we deal argue over all the time at work, and it’s nice to see additional data being shared to help make better informed decisions.
A List Apart: Articles: Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction
