Publications
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Social capital for beginners
The Encyclopedia of Informal Information has a very nice overview of social capital. For anyone who wants a quick intellectual history of social capital as an idea, and a quick peek at some of the key findings to date, this is a great place to start.
The morning after the night before
Less than twelve hours since victory seemed uncertain, and the Bush camp is already spinning the heck out of its big victory. What I don't understand is why the media is swallowing the line about this being an historic victory. I just caught a CBC-Radio teaser,...
Blogging as an engagement tool
As posted to Cairns: The UK's Hansard Society has produced terrific research on e-democracy under the leadership of Prof. Stephen Coleman (also of the Oxford Internet Institute). This summer they released a paper that looks at how blogs can be a tool for democratic...
The Harvard Business Review
Social capital for beginners
The Encyclopedia of Informal Information has a very nice overview of social capital. For anyone who wants a quick intellectual history of social capital as an idea, and a quick peek at some of the key findings to date, this is a great place to start.
The morning after the night before
Less than twelve hours since victory seemed uncertain, and the Bush camp is already spinning the heck out of its big victory. What I don't understand is why the media is swallowing the line about this being an historic victory. I just caught a CBC-Radio teaser,...
Blogging as an engagement tool
As posted to Cairns: The UK's Hansard Society has produced terrific research on e-democracy under the leadership of Prof. Stephen Coleman (also of the Oxford Internet Institute). This summer they released a paper that looks at how blogs can be a tool for democratic...
OneZero
Does Big Brother use a Treo?
I just had an inquiry from a new Treo owner who is looking his gift horse in the mouth: My employer recently gave each of the salespeople a new Treo 650. None of us requested it, in fact, a year ago we told management we didn't want them. Now we have them and...
Play up the economic advantages of equal marriage
I'm amazed we don't hear more about the economic arguments in favour of equal marriage rights. It's a huge source of competitive advantage that Canada offers gay couples the same legal rights as straight couples — just think about how much easier it makes it for Canadian companies to recruit and retain talented gay employees.
Shambhala centre classes?
Some friends have recommended classes at the Shambhala Centre, which apparently offers both religious and secular versions of an intro to Buddhism program. Has anyone else taken them? What's the review?
MacBook with tag cloud
This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.
Here's how I did it:
- I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
- I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
- We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
- We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.
Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve.
ChangeEverything is TechCrunched
We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:
I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.
Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:
Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not – perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.
These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon – so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)
Tagging for world domination
Tags can help you drive traffic to your website and build engagement in your online community. Here are my secrets to tagging success.
Learning about warranties from London Drugs
London Drugs wins my customer service prize of the month for its speedy resolution of my camera dilemma. I heard right away from their warranty department. It turns out they were about as happy with VAC's warranty progam as I was: they've since brought their warranty...
Hola, Hola Churro!
We just discovered a new favorite spot: Hola Churro on Broadway east of Balaclava. Their Mexican food is delicious, reasonably priced, and offers great options for our special needs team of wheat-free/dairy-free eaters (yum, tamales!) and vegans (yum, mystery vegetarian dish!) Best of all, we discovered that they have free wifi, so we've added them to this list of Vancouver cafes with free wifi.
But there just aren't enough cafes offering that crucial combination of good food, vegan options, cheap convenient parking, clean bathrooms, power outlets and most crucially, free wifi. So if you have a favourite spot that has everything except the free wifi, encourage them to add wifi.
Hey…should we start something that would let us all collectively lobby for free wifi? Maybe we could make print-em-yourself business cards that us would-be-wifi-ers can leave (along wtih a generous tip) to let a restaurant know we want them to go wifi?
JSTOR DAILY
Does Big Brother use a Treo?
I just had an inquiry from a new Treo owner who is looking his gift horse in the mouth: My employer recently gave each of the salespeople a new Treo 650. None of us requested it, in fact, a year ago we told management we didn't want them. Now we have them and...
Play up the economic advantages of equal marriage
I'm amazed we don't hear more about the economic arguments in favour of equal marriage rights. It's a huge source of competitive advantage that Canada offers gay couples the same legal rights as straight couples — just think about how much easier it makes it for Canadian companies to recruit and retain talented gay employees.
Shambhala centre classes?
Some friends have recommended classes at the Shambhala Centre, which apparently offers both religious and secular versions of an intro to Buddhism program. Has anyone else taken them? What's the review?
MacBook with tag cloud
This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.
Here's how I did it:
- I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
- I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
- We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
- We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.
Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve.
ChangeEverything is TechCrunched
We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:
I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.
Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:
Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not – perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.
These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon – so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)
Tagging for world domination
Tags can help you drive traffic to your website and build engagement in your online community. Here are my secrets to tagging success.
Learning about warranties from London Drugs
London Drugs wins my customer service prize of the month for its speedy resolution of my camera dilemma. I heard right away from their warranty department. It turns out they were about as happy with VAC's warranty progam as I was: they've since brought their warranty...
Hola, Hola Churro!
We just discovered a new favorite spot: Hola Churro on Broadway east of Balaclava. Their Mexican food is delicious, reasonably priced, and offers great options for our special needs team of wheat-free/dairy-free eaters (yum, tamales!) and vegans (yum, mystery vegetarian dish!) Best of all, we discovered that they have free wifi, so we've added them to this list of Vancouver cafes with free wifi.
But there just aren't enough cafes offering that crucial combination of good food, vegan options, cheap convenient parking, clean bathrooms, power outlets and most crucially, free wifi. So if you have a favourite spot that has everything except the free wifi, encourage them to add wifi.
Hey…should we start something that would let us all collectively lobby for free wifi? Maybe we could make print-em-yourself business cards that us would-be-wifi-ers can leave (along wtih a generous tip) to let a restaurant know we want them to go wifi?
THE VERGE
Create a category-specific series box with WordPress, Thesis and Organize Series
I use the terrific Organize Series Plugin for Wordpress, which I highly recommend for anyone who regularly posts multi-part blog series. You can see it in action on series all over this site, such as my recent series on 7 days to inbox zero. It lets you easily add...
How Twitter filters can help you cope with your fear of missing out
UPDATE: Seesmic is now part of Hootsuite, which doesn't support filtering based on excluding keywords. So during SXSW, I use Tweetdeck, which lets you filter a stream to exclude any tweet that includes a specific term. If you've been using Facebook, Twitter,...
11 surprising insights into the future of mobile & BlackBerry from Tyler Lessard, VP of RIM
Tonight I attended presentation by Tyler Lessard VP of Developer Relations for RIM. There are 3 million downloads daily from BlackBerry store even though they have a fraction of the number of apps available on the Android and iPhone stores. ESPN reports more traffic...
Using your e-mail signature to fight inbox overload
It's day 5 of my vendetta on mandatory e-mail replies and I'm feeling the pain. On the one hand, I'm as committed as ever to changing the attitude that every e-mail needs a response -- an attitude that is totally out-of-step with every other channel of online...