Stuff you should know, stuff I should remember.

Easter evening nerdscape has turned to installing a Ruby on Rails environment onto the WinXP laptop. What is Ruby on Rails? Ruby on Rails (history) is a software language and environment built for fast and easy programming. Sites like Twitter, Basecamp and others use RoR to quickly rollout web applications in a methodology called ‘agile […]

Something I talk about frequently in my seminars is the concept of ubicomp – or ubiquitous computing. The best way to describe it is: the internet isn’t something you go to or sit down to access, it is a layer over reality. That is why I get my socks knocked off with services like Twitter […]

I was checking out clothes online and went to the Banana Republic website which is temporarily closed. What? A global retailer closing the entire website? I think that is crazy. What they really screwed up on is not having a ‘enter your email address and we’ll tell you when we relaunch’ box. Or an RSS […]

Seth nails it (as always): A Google search finds more than 200,000 matches for the word ‘ideavirus’, which I made up. Some will ask, “how much money did you make?” And I think a better question is, “how much did it cost you?” How much did it cost you to write the most popular ebook […]

(via Winer) Think of the initial appeal of Blogger: you type into some little text field, and it appears on the web, and everyone can read it. Easy and delightful. But blogging didn’t stop there, because people quite reasonably wanted to have titles. Sure, titles, of course, we need titles, I agree. And then, of […]

From Brown University: In the first scholarly research examining the role of black bloggers in the blogosphere, Brown University researcher Antoinette Pole assessed how bloggers of color use their medium for purposes related to politics. She found that black bloggers are, in fact, mobilizing readers to engage in political participation. Additionally, Pole found that black […]

Dan writes about building backlinks – getting other sites to link to you to increase your search engine ranking – he’s got some great tactics and then ends with the old standard: Create Quality Content: Nothing will get you more backlinks than quality content. Quality content gets noticed. Quality content gets linked to. If you […]

Dave is up with a new set of stats from Technorati: 120,000 new weblogs created every day. Posting volume is 1.5 million new posts a day. Blogs increasingly represented in the top 100 sites. Japanese edging out English – each represents roughly 1/3 of all blogs – the remaining 1/3 is dozens of languages. Use […]

GigaOM points to it: To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtualHomegrown car dealership automotive showroom into […]

Andrea tagged me for this post about the impact of Thomas Leonard – the guy that really helped bring the world of life coaching to the mainstream (or at least help it happen a bit faster). I never met him in person but have been deeply acquainted with many of the people he’s had a […]