Publications
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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?
How about bylaws that are geared to specific decibel levels?
Because I'm guessing not all motorcycles are as loud as the vintage bike our neighbour restored and used to warm up outside our window at 6 am.
The dirty truth about extended warranties
See my update on how London Drugs resolved this situation. I know, I know...extended warranties are a scam, a way for electronics stores to up the profit margin on consumer electronics sales. But when our Olympus camera blew a pixel after less than two years, we...
5 ways blogging can change the world
By making it possible for just about anyone with a web connection to create their own online content, blogging has radically democratized content creation and personal publishing. More people can now communicate a message to the world than at at any time in human history. But how can that make the world a better place? This post shows 5 ways.
Home owners against the bubble
Miraculously enough, we bought a duplex in Vancouver back when housing prices were merely high (as opposed to their present level, which is absurd). But that doesn't mean we have a stake in keeping housing prices high; if anything, our interest lies in seeing the bubble burst, too.
But wait, you think: don't all us home owners have a stake in keeping prices high? Only if we're planning to get out of the market all together. Speaking personally, when we sell our house it will be so that we can buy another house in Vancouver, so it doesn't matter to us whether we're buying and selling for thousands or millions — we'll end up with the same size mortgage either way.
That's not to say that we're unaffected by the market bubble. On the contrary, high housing prices hurt home owners too. They push our friends into neighbourhoods that are far away, so we see friends less often. They encourage people to move out into the 'burbs, which means more cars on the road and more smog. They push talented people doing crucial comunity service jobs into jobs with higher incomes, so they can afford crazy mortgages.
But the most crucial way that high housing prices hurt home owners is by hurting non-home owners. When our community becomes too expensive for an ever-larger number of people to buy into and put down roots, it pushes many groups of people right out of the Lower Mainland and makes our community ever more homogeneous and boring. Do we really want to live in a community where you have to be a millionaire to have a home? No way.
The Harvard Business Review
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?
How about bylaws that are geared to specific decibel levels?
Because I'm guessing not all motorcycles are as loud as the vintage bike our neighbour restored and used to warm up outside our window at 6 am.
The dirty truth about extended warranties
See my update on how London Drugs resolved this situation. I know, I know...extended warranties are a scam, a way for electronics stores to up the profit margin on consumer electronics sales. But when our Olympus camera blew a pixel after less than two years, we...
5 ways blogging can change the world
By making it possible for just about anyone with a web connection to create their own online content, blogging has radically democratized content creation and personal publishing. More people can now communicate a message to the world than at at any time in human history. But how can that make the world a better place? This post shows 5 ways.
Home owners against the bubble
Miraculously enough, we bought a duplex in Vancouver back when housing prices were merely high (as opposed to their present level, which is absurd). But that doesn't mean we have a stake in keeping housing prices high; if anything, our interest lies in seeing the bubble burst, too.
But wait, you think: don't all us home owners have a stake in keeping prices high? Only if we're planning to get out of the market all together. Speaking personally, when we sell our house it will be so that we can buy another house in Vancouver, so it doesn't matter to us whether we're buying and selling for thousands or millions — we'll end up with the same size mortgage either way.
That's not to say that we're unaffected by the market bubble. On the contrary, high housing prices hurt home owners too. They push our friends into neighbourhoods that are far away, so we see friends less often. They encourage people to move out into the 'burbs, which means more cars on the road and more smog. They push talented people doing crucial comunity service jobs into jobs with higher incomes, so they can afford crazy mortgages.
But the most crucial way that high housing prices hurt home owners is by hurting non-home owners. When our community becomes too expensive for an ever-larger number of people to buy into and put down roots, it pushes many groups of people right out of the Lower Mainland and makes our community ever more homogeneous and boring. Do we really want to live in a community where you have to be a millionaire to have a home? No way.
OneZero
Making a Mac netbook, part 1: Why I Mac-ified
Why I turned my HP Mini 1000 netbook into a Mac — after months running it in Ubuntu and Windows.
7 innovations that make travel easier
After seven years in which out-of-town travel was a relatively infrequent (and rushed) experience, I’m struck by how much easier air travel is now compared to my pre-parent days. Here are a few of the non-social-media innovations that make travel much better than it was in 2002.
Social media and the health sector: an introduction with case studies
Social capital, understood as the density of relationships and trust within a community, is a key determinant of health. Individuals are happier and healthier in communities with high levels of social capital, and high social capital communities have stronger economies and more stable political systems. This post provides an introduction to the role of social media in building social capital, illustrated with examples of how health care organizations are using social media for storytelling, connecting and knowledge management.
Scoring with Social Media: 6 Tips for Using Analytics
This blog post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review site. Want to know your social media score? Fill in the following equation: (Twitter followers + Facebook friends + LinkedIn contacts) x (Total tweets + Twitterers you follow + Months on Facebook)...
How to monitor your blog’s comments using Twitter
Unlike my Twitter conversations, blog comments often take a day or two to hit my radar. Since Tweetdeck (my Twitter client) is my de facto engagement hub — the place where I engage in online conversation — it makes sense for me to track other conversations in that context. To that end, I’ve figured out a setup that pulls comments on my blog posts, plus blog posts about my writing or speaking, into Tweetdeck.
BC Children’s Hospital – Be A Superhero!
Are you a superhero? Do you know someone who might be? E-mail them to ask them to support the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation with a personalized video from Global TV.
The biggest story you won’t read in a Canadian paper
If you love the Iraq war, global warming and free trade, gosh, have I got great news for you. This week the US Supreme Court heard additional arguments in a case concerning Hillary: The Movie, a notorious anti-Clinton documentary that was set for release during last year’s Presidential race.
Seven ways to break the habit of compulsive e-mail and Twitter check-ins
I’ve lost too much of the present to my constant need to check the iPhone. Here are seven practices that are helping me break free of my compulsion.
JSTOR DAILY
Making a Mac netbook, part 1: Why I Mac-ified
Why I turned my HP Mini 1000 netbook into a Mac — after months running it in Ubuntu and Windows.
7 innovations that make travel easier
After seven years in which out-of-town travel was a relatively infrequent (and rushed) experience, I’m struck by how much easier air travel is now compared to my pre-parent days. Here are a few of the non-social-media innovations that make travel much better than it was in 2002.
Social media and the health sector: an introduction with case studies
Social capital, understood as the density of relationships and trust within a community, is a key determinant of health. Individuals are happier and healthier in communities with high levels of social capital, and high social capital communities have stronger economies and more stable political systems. This post provides an introduction to the role of social media in building social capital, illustrated with examples of how health care organizations are using social media for storytelling, connecting and knowledge management.
Scoring with Social Media: 6 Tips for Using Analytics
This blog post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review site. Want to know your social media score? Fill in the following equation: (Twitter followers + Facebook friends + LinkedIn contacts) x (Total tweets + Twitterers you follow + Months on Facebook)...
How to monitor your blog’s comments using Twitter
Unlike my Twitter conversations, blog comments often take a day or two to hit my radar. Since Tweetdeck (my Twitter client) is my de facto engagement hub — the place where I engage in online conversation — it makes sense for me to track other conversations in that context. To that end, I’ve figured out a setup that pulls comments on my blog posts, plus blog posts about my writing or speaking, into Tweetdeck.
BC Children’s Hospital – Be A Superhero!
Are you a superhero? Do you know someone who might be? E-mail them to ask them to support the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation with a personalized video from Global TV.
The biggest story you won’t read in a Canadian paper
If you love the Iraq war, global warming and free trade, gosh, have I got great news for you. This week the US Supreme Court heard additional arguments in a case concerning Hillary: The Movie, a notorious anti-Clinton documentary that was set for release during last year’s Presidential race.
Seven ways to break the habit of compulsive e-mail and Twitter check-ins
I’ve lost too much of the present to my constant need to check the iPhone. Here are seven practices that are helping me break free of my compulsion.
THE VERGE
5 questions that will make the most of your social media vacation
Do you suspect that taking a brief or extended break from the Internet would make you happier, smarter or taller? Tackle these 5 questions to get the most from your social media vacation.
10 challenging perspectives on social media & the Vancouver riots
The past week has been a laboratory in the power and limitations of online dialogue. While I have been troubled by the number of simplistic, hostile or unconsidered posts and comments about crowdsourcing the identification of rioters, I have more often been astounded...
Riot vigilantes speak for themselves
In the past couple of days I've heard from people who were initially enthusiastic about the crowdsourcing of rioter identification, but now see the concern with this kind of vigilantism. I'd love to take credit, but I'm not the most convincing voice in this argument....
Crowdsourced repression: Could it happen here?
The debate that is unfolding online about crowdsourced surveillance -- what Christopher Parson referred to as Vancouver's Human Flesh Search Engine -- rests on two implicit assumptions. It's time to get clear about what they are, so that people can talk more...