Untethered in Lion Country. I’m in Red Lion, Pennsylvania for the next few days with family. While I write an Everyman on vacation I consider this Jonathan Fields post titled Working Vacations Rule? “I’m not tethered to work…I’m blessed to work. It’s what I love to do. It’s my funtime. My downtime. My playtime. Whether other people deem it work or not doesn’t really matter. I do it because it makes me come alive, not because I’m on someone else’s leash. And, that’s a massive distinction.”
RSS Rules. Valuable reminders this week of the importance of RSS in our lives, first from Kent Newsome with additional value from Steven Hodson. RSS isn’t sexy and unlike Facebook or Twitter, few people get it, but it’s easy to use, free, archivable, slice and diceable. I’ve been using GreatNews Reader for two years after trying every other reader on the market, including Google Reader. GreatNews is pretty much an abandoned app, but it’s fast, efficient, and gets out of the way so RSS can work its magic.
Blog Rules. On the flipside, let’s not forget about the importance of blogging according to a recent Hubspot study claiming companies that blog get 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages. Blogging lies, damn lies and statistics—with pictures—are available here.
Get your Singularity Summit Podcasts here! Singularity Summit video and audio offerings from 2006 available for download.
Pumped for a Zune HD Visual Studio project type. So, Zune HD applications have been confirmed. Sweet! As a .NET Developer by day, I would LOVE to be able to click on a Zune HD Application project type in Visual Studio and start typing in C#.
SEO SMO. We started thinking about Social Media Optimization a couple of Everymans ago. This SEO weds SMO post is a good place for another quick lesson.
Disrupting at the edges. Lots of good food for thought in What will be disrupted next? Like, “Individually we need methods to capture and manage our own proprietary content and protect it, share it and distribute it. There's a huge opportunity here, as we migrate away from large monolithic publishing houses like TV Networks or book publishers and each of us become our own publishers.” Perhaps the Hub and Spokes publishing model Steve Rubel describes may have a hand in that particular disruption.
Windows 7. Bring it. I updated my home office network a few months ago, from 4 Windows 2000/2003 Servers to 2 machines, 1 running Windows Server 2008 and the second Vista Home Premium. I wanted something as consumer-oriented as possible for my non-developer box. Maybe it’s because I used Server OS’s for years, but I love my Vista Home Premium machine. And from reading this list of 18 cool things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn’t, I’m going to be an even happier Microsoft fanboy with Windows 7.
A picture is worth 1000 augmented realities. No need to read any words in this Fast Company article, simply scroll down to the picture (you’ll know the one) of an augmented reality iPhone app to get the cerebral juices flowing.
Your Company is a Media Company. This idea that all companies are now media companies made me think. And agree. I guess it’s a good time to be in the online content and application business.
Coffee isn’t rocket science folks. Starbucks raising prices on specialty drinks 10 to 30 cents, eh? Sorry, but only saps will continue to spend that kind of money for coffee that can easily be made yourself. Seriously, coffee isn’t rocket science. Use real half-and-half, real sugar, good coffee ($13 for 3-pounds of Guatemalan at Costco, for instance), watch a screencast on making cappuccinos or lattes, and you’re golden. The worse thing you can do is get one of those Starbucks cards so that you never see the 4 bucks and change leave your pocket every time you order a cup of joe.
Sampson’s on Twitter. Julie Lerman’s new Newfie Sampson is now Tweeting. I enjoy all of Julie’s news about Sampson and can’t wait to meet him, but I can’t follow Sampson on Twitter as a matter of principle. It took Julie two days on Twitter to get more followers than me, and I don’t know what I would do if Sampson eclipsed me, too.