WWDrudgeD?
Drudge is great.
re: my 50 reasons...
9. Because it's not fun enough
10. Because it doesn't make them smile
15. Because it's not as exciting as vegas
41. Because us-weekly is more interesting
Nate Westheimer:
* This is the future
* That's the future
* They are the future
* This is the future
* ... is most definitely the future!
"'We're going to kind of bounce around like pinballs with the people we meet'... they weren't sure what sorts of things they would do to help people, but he guessed they would be doing such tasks as mowing lawns, washing cars, and other physical labor."
Seth Godin: "Four words: Make big promises; overdeliver. If you can define great marketing in fewer words than that, you win... promises that are too small to get our attention. Boring promises are hardly worth making."
Morrissey via Brendan: "I know it's over/And it never really began/But in my heart it was so real"
Obama: "how we’ve always changed this country – not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up... I love this country too much to see it divided and distracted at this moment in history."
inspired by the best movie of the past few years, Idiocracy
"According to [Paul] Farmer, the efforts of most social entrepreneurs are falling short – despite the best of intentions... He thinks that the problems of global poverty... are so large and so intractable that they can only be solved by a broad-based social movement... The bus needs experts, entrepreneurs and governments. And the movement needs to resonate and build among large and growing groups of people..."
LA Times: "Meetup.com: Just don't call it dating"
K. West: "Your job forces you to not have fun anymore... You can't rate this... What's a B+ mean? I'm an extremist. It's either pass or fail! A+ or F-... party bitch!!" (via Lodwick)
Tom Peters: "I have met the future, and it is me!... Boomers. Geezers... the most profoundly important commercial market in the history of the world"
Jeff Bezos: "I realize my tone here tends toward the missionary, and I can assure you it’s heartfelt. It’s also not unique to me but is shared by a large group of folks here. I’m glad about that because missionaries build better products. I’ll also point out that, while I’m convinced books are on the verge of being improved upon, Amazon has no sinecure as that agent. It will happen, but if we don’t execute well, it will be done by others. Your team of missionaries here is fervent about driving free cash flow per share and returns on capital. We know we can do that by putting customers first. I guarantee you there is more innovation ahead of us than behind us, and we do not expect the road to be an easy one."
Schmidt (via SAI): "Google believes that advertising itself has value. The ads literally are valuable to consumers. Not just to the advertisers, but the consumers."
It CAN. Usually doesn't. But CAN.
Kara Swisher: "the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0 ... the intense obsession... the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, and how no one else cares yet."
Making a householdword is the great challenge. Not only does the word need to be universally known, but it has to be universally known for something that people need. eBay, Amazon, Google, and Craigslist are universally known, and people need what those words mean: People need to buy & sell & search in their everyday lives. SecondLife is known, but people don't need it; Flickr could be the word that means photography -- the Kodak of the 21st century -- but it's wide value prop is fuzzy, and my non-tech friends still send me their crappy Shutterfly links. I'm highly suspicious of most startups' potential to reach sustainable householdword status because they're not really serving real people's needs. As for Facebook, people need to stay in touch with people they know, so they're on-track, but I suspect their word is too muddied with pokes & kid stuff.
Someone needs to write the "Crossing the Chasm" for this era.
NYT: "This is a generation that is much more attuned to teamwork, collaboration and sharing information. Everything they do is a kind of group event... I wanted to be open, like a union. We would get more if we were together."
Jeff Gordinier: "Paul McCartney is dead... I am Steve Jobs, boomer soothsayer (4:45-5:30)...Who's we? I'm not a joiner."
NYT: "Business heroes in the movies are rare, and often problematical."
Business & entrepreneurship as a force for good
Jeff Jarvis: "Social insurance?"
Paul Miller: "friend’s bicycle had been stolen... wasn’t insured conventionally... asked us all to message back if we would be willing to put in £20 for a new bike which would then be presented as a surprise... there might be something in ’social insurance’."
Ivan Pope: "privatised the management of it... we need some imagination, some ambition and some skill to build these back again as social communities"
Historically, when people are free to assemble & associate, they self-organize insurance, cooperatively. Later it became the centralized, professionalized industry we know today. I predict there'll be some kind of massive craigslistification of insurance by April 27, 2018. It's about de-institutionalization -- not from the government borg (social security), not from the corporate borg (AIG). The New Social [graph] Security. Decentralized, self-organized. Not just DIY, but DIO (Do It Ourselves). That the big theme for everything now.
Godin: "would you mind sharing your copy? Take it off the shelf and loan it to someone"
I love experiments like this
Barack Obama: "I also think that my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers." (via Lodwick)
To understand the people, walk around the Apple Store and see they're doing on the free macs. Look at their faces.
Right now at 5th Ave NYC: ebay.co.uk, yahoo mail, youtube music, facebook, aim mail, craigslist, youtube, myspace, yahoo mail, a chess game, craigslist, mixtapekings.com, gmail, yahoo mail
When someone says "the process couldn’t be easier", don't believe them. Especially when it's followed by a process that barely 1% of the people could possibly comprehend.
Frank Rich: "the overreaction to this latest gaffe backfired on the media... the Beltway has gotten so much wrong this year is that it believes that 2008 is still 1988. It sees the country in its own image — static — instead of as a dynamic society whose culture and demographics are changing by the day. In this one-size-fits-all analysis, Mr. Obama must be the new Dukakis, sure to be rejected by white guys... But some voters who lived through 1988 have changed, and quite a few others are dead... However out of touch Mr. Obama is with 'ordinary Americans,' many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible 'YouTube young people' are even more condescending and out of touch."
James Carville: "[Bill Clinton] taught me a lesson... 'every time that we make it about us, it hurts us. Every time we make it about them, it helps us.'"
Bruce Springsteen: "a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where '...nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.'"
Baracky
Anyone know a good cd-rom about tag-clouding?
Sadly, no time to really get into Twitter. For me, to stay healthy AND lead a needed meme (meetup to go from 5M to 500M people, ~$10M to $100M+ rev, and 20K to 200K successful meetup groups), can't get sucked in.
Umair Haque: "true, durable radical innovation, backed up by... a deeply felt sense of purpose; the courage, hunger, and commitment to stay the course... Why aren't there more Googles? The answer's very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically. Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them... that new DNA - radically more open, transparent, democraticindustries, value chains, and organizations... you can't revolutionize something if you're too busy selling out."
via Caterina: "In 1900 the state of Iowa had 1300 local opera houses. 'Thousands of tenors earned adequate, if modest, livings performing before live audiences.'... All primates live in groups and 'an isolated individual will repeatedly pull a lever with no reward other than the glimpse of another monkey.'" - Deep Economy
Ryan Nelson: "I am totally going to have a pie shake in Iowa city tomorrow.
Greetings from Iowa City
Adam Werbach: "Our battle is not between the organic carrot and the regular carrot, the battle is between the carrot and the Twinkie... Engaging people as consumers, as people who shop, allows us the possibility of building a billion-person movement. People don't need to join a listserv or pay a membership fee to join. They won't get a newsletter or a membership card"
We do need membership cards.
Rudy Grahn: "To be a good Murikan, you need to hate Communism and the Chinese Government, but you also must love WalMart... those without The WalMart GoodLife just aren't trying hard enough!... freedom has been reduced to a Pavlovian smirk-inducer"
Rudy's voice is a awesome, fascinating, complicated one. On our lefty college campus, nobody laughed harder than Rudy & I when the "Free Mumia" graffiti was appended with "...with any purchase". 15 years later, with this writing & pictures, he's really developing something unique & uniquely him.
Rudy Grahn: "The internet is now just getting good... The kids are alright. I will try resisting the temptation to turn my humble weblog into a doddering old man's music weblog, but..."
Fred Wilson : "But who am I to complain? We got paid right? So sit down and shut up. Except I am also a user of these services. I see what happens when a company gets purchased. The service languishes. The team leaves. It stops getting better. And often gets worse. And so even though I am happy to take the money, I am left wondering, frankly wishing, if there is a better way."
New York hasn't made a huge internet company yet because New York hates people on the internet. Case in point, Time.com's Top 50 Blogs feature: As Drew Curtis puts it, Time.com "SPREAD THE FUCKING THING OVER 50 PAGES WITH NO INDEX"... for the extra page-views.
Want to be much more profitable than Time Inc? Be like Google or eBay, and serve the people.
Finally, New York is coming around... strong. Stay tuned. Etsy, Meetup, Tumblr, and many more.
"when i was a boy growing up, my church, my school, my parents said do the best you can. all i'm doing is following orders." - Ted Turner to Charlie Rose
"He Profits Most Who Serves Best" - Ted Turner via Rotary
"Give my regards to Broadway" @ 11:30
OK, I'll be the first to say the obvious & disrespectful: Can we pry it away from you now, Charlton?
There was probably a lot of good about the guy.
"I'm bored already" - Stephen Colbert to Clay Shirky
..."Sometimes the order just shows up" - Clay
"Hi, we made a really successful thing on the internet, and we'd like to collect our money." - Stan, South Park (first 20 seconds of the video)
"Monster getting desperate?"Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist
My Fotolog, last month: "The USPS using your tax-subsidized dollars on ads that don't work..."
"People make fun of Google’s righteous vow not to be evil. It’s practically a self-parody. And it’s a shame that any institution should think that it needs to make such a promise; shouldn’t it be presumed? But imagine if Google took over Wal-Mart and made that one change" - Jeff Jarvis
"we're not solving real problems anymore. The economy has massive structural flaws. 2.0 can fix them. But focusing on ad nets and minigames sure won't... a huge part of the problem is entrepreneurs. The current crop of entrepreneurs just isn't thinking big enough. There are no shortage of massive problems next-gen media plays can help solve. Global hunger? Check. Healthcare? Check. Moral hazard across the financial system? Check. The loss of social cohesion? Check. The massive shift of global labour from town to megaslum? Check. Exploding demand for energy? Check." - Umair
People not in the internet industry still say "Mapquest"
Save Your Drama for Obama!
Phrase pops in head + Domain name + Mockup... in about 20 mins. No time to execute, so I'll just leave it here.
Mockup #1 could be interpreted as making fun of Obama, and that's not the point...
Mockup #2 is simpler. There really is no message/point to this. It's just funny.
http://saveyourdramaforobama.com
Who wants it?
"IT'S BETTER TO BE NAIVE THAN JADED" - Jenny Holzer
"Political parties are dinosaurs... Young people are loyal to people and relationships not institutions, particularly if those institutions are opaque and old-fashioned... we're thankfully living in the Connected Age, where we don't need any one person to tell us what to do. We know what to do, and we have the tools to do it. There's no heading back to the back rooms. Millions of people are already self-organizing meetings..." - Allison Fine in The Huffington Post
I'm interested in non-opaque, new-fashioned institutions.
