I just picked up a book by Carmine Gallo, “The Presentation of Steve Jobs” . Nancy Duarte recommended it in her blog. I love the opening quote:

“A person can have the greatest idea in the world — completely different and novel — but if that person can’t convince enough other people, it doesn’t matter” —Gregory Berns

I can relate to that quote. The older I get the more I realize, ideas “are cheap”. Execution is everything.

In order to execute great ideas, we need to be able to effectively communicate them to people. We need to be able to rally our employees and team. We need to get them passionate about what we want to do. We need to communicate our vision to our customers, clients and all stakeholders.

Easy to say, hard to do.

The subtitle of the book is “How to be insanely great in front of any audience”. That would sure help. Review of the book to follow once  finished.

Any time we reach a year ending in ‘9′, many (mistakingly) think the decade is coming to an end and we need to list top 10s.  What do you think of this list?  Do you think there’s a big event on the Internet in the last 10 years not listed?  What would you replace?

The Internet altered presidential politicking in 2008 much as television had forty years earlier during the Kennedy/Nixon race. From videos like “Obama Girl” and the Reverend Wright clip shaping the debate, to social media mobilizing voters, to record-breaking online fundraising from small donors, every facet of the way campaigns are run was permanently transformed.

via Welcome to the Webby Awards.

You can download this tool to make these visualizations. Processing.org

BC Budget Visualization Tool from blprnt on Vimeo.

And… Tweets where one "just landed" based on where their Twitter account is registered.

Just Landed – 61 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

For those of you who don’t know, this allows for characters other than those on a QWERTY keyboard to appear in a domain name.  This is especially important in the Arabic and Chinese languages.  What do you think about this change?  Do you think it will affect the Latin character domain space?

IDNs will allow domain names to be to be written in native character sets, such as Chinese, Arabic, and Greek. In charge of managing domain names, ICANN has argued that IDNs are necessary to expand use of the Web in regions where people don’t understand English. Since its inception, the Internet has been limited to the Latin character set used by the U.S. and many other nations.

via ICANN approves non-Latin domain names | Digital Media – CNET News.

In the U.S., we treat rights a bit differently than other countries.  Finland last week declared 1Mbps broadband a right for it’s citizens.  What do you think of this?  Do you think the U.S. is falling behind in broadband technology because of this?

“We think it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection,”

via Fast Internet access becomes a legal right in Finland – CNN.com.

With the movement of media from being an organizational based element to an individual based element, many things are changing.  For years, journalists received free items for them to review.  With the move to an individual based media, some have abused this giving positive reviews to products to keep getting more.  Do you think this FTC oversight is possible and worth it?

If you receive a free copy of the latest video game and post a positive review of that game on your personal blog without revealing that you got the game free of charge, you could be guilty of ad fraud, according to new guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2353749,00.asp

This one has been proposed for years.  Because most of the telecommunications companies that invested in the initial growth of the Internet are US companies, ICANN protected their interests.  Now, it looks like the move is to a more global view.  What are your thoughts on this?

Icann – the official body that ultimately controls the development of the internet thanks to its oversight of web addresses such as .com, .net and .org – said today that it was ending its agreement with the US government.

The deal, part of a contract negotiated with the US department of commerce, effectively pushes California-based Icann towards a new status as an international body with greater representation from companies and governments around the globe.

via US relinquishes control of the internet | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

So, do you think cloud computing is a good idea?  If so, where would it be best used?

Zittrain covered the usual concerns about data ownership, privacy, and the access that data placed in the cloud gives governments all over the world–a concern I certainly share. He went on to point out that these problems are solvable “with a little effort and political will,” a view that I also adhere to.

via Does cloud computing affect innovation? | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News.

I got a good walk down memory lane reading this article.  What technology of the past do you miss?  What technology of today would you like to see go away?

With technology evolving at breakneck speed, no one can say for sure what’s around the next corner — to say nothing of the one after that. The circle of life, however, remains constant: When a new high-tech creation is born, something else may die as a result. Sometimes, the loss is a good thing — who wants busy signals or staticky TV? — but at other times, the departure stirs bittersweet feelings (remember saying farewell to your trusty old C: prompt?).

via Obsolete Technology: 40 Big Losers – Page1 -  MSN Tech & Gadgets – Products.

A lot of my friends and colleagues ask me why I'm experimenting/using Twitter. They think it's a waste of time. They wonder where I find the time to 'tweet' and why I tweet. 

This 3D rendering generates where someone is tweeting from and where they have "just landed"……

In life we have ups, downs, left and rights but also have periods where nothing really happens. I am right now in one of those plateaus, after almost five years of running around, traveling, moving, changing from university, studying like crazy – for once I have time just for me. Time that I can just waste and not really care about. Time to rest. Its time for me to get bored, to experiment new things, to sleep but most importantly to plan the next five years (which are very likely to be as or more hectic as the last five). It is time for me to look back at the bunch of random things that I have engaged on and join the points to make something sense-full out of my life process.

As shown in my about page, I happen to have many different interests: I like learning languages (specially Chinese), Mathematics, Politics, International Relations, Economics, Anthropology, Linguistics, etc. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – these things are not obviously related to each other.  The whole point is that I, for once, need to decide what I want to do with my life. I need to find my passion so I have something to focus on. Probably I am not alone, I can imagine tons of other young people like me that are not sure on what they want to do. I mean, dedicating your life to only one topic is a very serious commitment, specially in an ever changing world as the one we live today. Somewhat luckily I found a short video that has some very interesting points regarding this topic and has helped me clear my mind a bit. I hope it will be helpful for many others like me. I leave you with a video from Randy Komisar from Stanford and his video titled “How Do You Find Your Passion and How Do You Pursue It?”. Enjoy.

The Global Economy By Paul Krugman http://bit.ly/19HyNK
A Study of Global Economy http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=12146

Not sure how or when it began but I am noticing so many changes in my life and the life around me. I am different, my life is different, the news is different – everything is different.

I have noticed that I am gentler and softer than I used to be. I do not know if it was because of hard it was to be hard or if I just resigned myself to not having all the answers.

People around me are talking about things in a way that I have never heard about before. All the ideas around me are different.

My social time is different and involving new and exciting things.

My health care is different and I am more in charge of it. But is that a difference of age or a difference in the world?

Yesterday I went to a health care provider who worked on my pain with a computer. I saw the computer working and could not feel anything but today I do not hurt, where yesterday everything hurt.

I woke up the other day with these words in my head – Let Go. Let Love.

I think that is what I am doing. I am letting go of everything and just loving it all.

Life is very different now and I like it.

Deconstructionist philosopher Avital Ronell teaches that a few generations ago European travelers in the Swiss Alps found the sight of the mountain peaks so overwhelming that they equipped their carriages with special screens to block their view. They looked through tinted glasses to mediate the experience of raw nature. Today, standing in the Alps or outside our home, we no longer rely on colored glasses. Instead, we use digital cameras, cell phones and movie players to filter our experience. And we have become so accustomed to the view that we prefer pixels to sublime reality … we are addicted to the screens we use to dampen the rawness of life.

We are a society in the grips of a widespread screen addiction. Many of us spend upwards of eight hours a day staring at a screen. We carry video capable iPods, Internet savvy BlackBerrys and graphically stunning portable game machines. We steal glances at these little screens throughout the day and then tuck them back into our pockets and return our gaze to the big screens sitting on our desks. In order to relax, we plop ourselves in front of a widescreen TV. We spend more time making eye contact with our screens than with our neighbors.

The screen is, by design, the ultimate distraction. Even when we try to avoid looking at screens, our eyes are naturally drawn to their flickering lights. The dazzling special effects of our iPhones and our video games stimulate our brains more powerfully than reality. Given the option of looking at the slow pace of nature unfold or the frenetic speed of a big budget movie playing on a tiny screen, we often choose the screen. But training our brains to expect constant visual stimulation has troubling consequences.

Neuroscientists are beginning to address the long-term consequences of visual addiction. Books such as iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind argue that the increase in screen use has rewired our brains and led to a decrease in our empathy and our ability to read facial language. The authors of iBrain ultimately propose a policy of moderating screen time, I wonder if this goes far enough. As visual technologies advance and a greater proportion of our working lives are spent online, there isn’t one, individual-based, solution.

Society is addicted to screens. What we need, therefore, is not a policy of personal moderation but a cultural revolution. Our visual addiction is masking our fear of feeling existence to its fullest. Our task is to build a movement to unwire our social relationships, to unlink our workplace communications and to accept the slow pace of life in order to directly confront the existential dilemmas that we face.

Micah White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and an independent activist. He is writing a book on anti-screen activism. www.micahmwhite.com or micah (at) adbusters.org

Source: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot_blog/screen_addiction.html

See also http://www.screentime.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Screen addiction ‘bad for kids’ health’

]]> http://jimsreflections.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/kill-your-website/ Sat, 23 May 2009 23:15:12 +0000 Jim Pearson http://jimsreflections.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/kill-your-website/

Interesting post by David Armano…makes a good case for a blog VS traditional website. 

When I fell asleep it was 76 degrees this morning. When I woke up after noon, it’s cold and rainy…58 and dropping fast. The most astounding thing is the weekly forecasts also changed while I was asleep!!! We are expecting 20 degrees. Geezum crow! I will need to bring the oniony seedlings back in again. One more example of how the world can change in the blink of an eye. Seems to be happening a lot lately….

I first heard about twitter about June of 2008. My initial reaction was…why? Why on earth would anyone 'mass text message' a bunch of (mostly) strangers? Perhaps there are a lot of celebrities and dotcom millionaires with waaay too much time on their hands. What else could the attraction be? really? Who has the time? 

First what is twitter? It's basically a micro blog. 140 characters, no more, but less is fine. You can follow anyone, and other twitter's may choose to follow you, without permission. 

To discover the value, I can retrace my steps of how I got on the bandwagon. February of 2009, I was in California following the Tour of California  bike race for a few days with some friends. Lance armstrong tweets. My friend Dave, who is far too enamored with Sir Lance tried to convince me that Lance was actually updating from his blackberry all sorts of great insider images and information about the race. There's no way I said. "It's his publiscist Dave! – you're a sucker!

Well, it turns out I'm the sucker. Dave was right. Lance definitely tweets, and it's not his 'peeps'…the real guy. Lance, at the time of this post was the 12th most followed person on Twitter (646,925 followers) and had tweeted 1473 times in the last 6 months, since he started on twitter. That's an average of over 8 tweets a day. Like I said, there's a reason celebrities are the power users.

But where's the real value? For me, it's been a few things. Its like facebook, but not as social and more random. I think Twitter is here for the long term. It's more business and value, less entertainment. The main reason I use it, and barely use facebook is time. 140 Characters is attractive to me. 

As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a 1000 words. Image courtesy of www.applicant.com Click on the image to enlarge.

Oh ya. Follow my innane tweets on @ http://twitter.com/jim_pearson

This was quite something. The guy (Joel) is was driving down the road and doing a live streaming video cast, from his iPhone. It won't appear live now, but there are probably other "Ustream" feeds to take a look at.