Posts

I have to admit to being a little bit jealous of people who are only working twenty hours a week and pulling down amazing salaries or writing productivity “work smarter, not harder” pr0n. I mean, it’s true. There is very little correlation between hours worked and what most people define as success. And that’s before you even get into the whole argument about what success is to some people versus others. I know I feel a lot more successful having taken a huge paycut and doing what I’m doing now than when I was being paid a lot more (I still remember the look on the face of the CFO when they said they’d counter-offer me leaving and I said I was taking a huge pay cut. ;-) )

Just in time to give me some more ammo on why I continue to travel, won’t “grow up and settle down”. and keep raving the planet and living and working in different places like some modern day Flying Dutchman, comes this great little essay on why we travel .

It’s giving me idears again.

And I hope it gives you some, especially if you haven’t done much traveling and have been looking for an excuse to take the plunge and go somewhere.

Way overdue for a nation as digitally savvy and connected as my own, but Canada has finally put Member of Parliament’s voting records online just like other less-developed and less advanced nations, such as the United Kingdom and United States.

The records are now available on the Parliamentary website . The cool thing would be them providing an API to access this data from the intertubes to lead the way to some interesting political mashups.

Slate has a really excellent map of vanishing jobs over time since January 2007 the in the US. The story starts off with blue net job growth and red losses and proceeds like one of those zombie outbreak movies where the red starts breaking out all over.

A bit scary ass for all my friends in the United States, but very interesting. I would have done this a bit more smoothly (and possibly in flash), but it’s a nice visualization of a very scary trend as well as letting you examine point in time data a bit better.

Leading on from the Gary V. post on doing great stuff and not being a simple “me too” social mediarati (and something I meant to blog a lot earlier), let’s face it, it’s not that it’s easy to do. A lot of organizations and companies are finding themselves in the position of building communities from scratch, or possibly harder, having to try and wrangle existing communities of users (some of them passionate, some of them aware but ambivalent, some of them pissed off) and engaging them. Tricky.

Great animation on the “we know that we don’t know” dangers of global warming. Really well done.

You can hear more about this campaign from Leo Murray on the site.

I like this. From mattf’s shinily resurfaced blog .

1. Go to google docs, click new spread sheet
2. Click form, create your form with title, description, severity (1 minor .. 5 epic fail), who’s responsible in a dropdown and reported by.
3. Save your form
4. Add conditional colouring in spreadsheet on severity
5. Add a completed/status column
6. Embed form onto a page/email form to bug hunters

Love the simplicity of this.

The only thing I’d add is that you should go into the resulting spreadsheet, go to Share | Set Notification rules and have it email you whenever anyone submits a form right away.

From Ethan Zuckerman’s My Heart’s in Accra blog from a talk he did at ETech :

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

It goes on to suggest that any sufficiently useful tool will be used by activists (and that that is an excellent gauge of how well your tool works for all you startup moguls out there). It’s also got some fantastic sorts of examples of people using tools in repressive regimes that I have to admit I wasn’t aware of (my favourite being Tunisia and airliners.net which is a site my father uses), so there are some great examples here if you want to see how activists are doing it for themselves when they don’t have a top 10 advertising (or now, “digital”) agency at their disposal.

Kutiman took a bunch of public domain YouTube videos and remixed them into something pretty damn spectacular (an album practically).

Most of the chatter on the web about this has mostly been about whether this sort of remixing is the future of entertainment and what precisely record execs may do about it (and even if they have any relevance as an industry any longer), but in the meantime, you can watch and wonder…

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Warren Buffet as a businessman (even though I’m not personally thrilled at a lot of the companies or industries he invests in). Besides coining my favourite quote about the entire sub-prime Wall Street fiasco, I think his shareholder letters are a study in clear, concise communication to people with honesty, integrity and directness.

His latest shareholder annual shareholder letter is a study in how to plainly deliver bad financial news and still find a silver lining (like the others they’ve been writing).