Screen fluency with Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly is one of the top thinkers of our time. He's been posting more frequently on his Technium blog, which is bonus in bad times. His "Screen Fluency" post was good food for thought on how we "people of the screen" must be able to reference any media element with the same specificity we reference book excerpts as text literates. "For example, if I wanted to visually compare the recent spate of bank failures with similar events by referring you to the bank run in the classic movie 'It’s a Wonderful Life,' there is no easy way to point to that scene with precision. (Which of several sequences did I mean, and which part of them?)" I'd love to have better referencing capability to that film, too. Mostly to zero in on any scene with Donna Reed, but still...
Scott Mitchell today. Enterprise-DBVT.COM is a big fan of Scott Mitchell. I just searched for the first reference to Scott and arrived at a SQL copy-n-paste tip from 12/13/2004. Scott's latest DBVT.COM appearance is courtesy his Visual Studio navigation tip of using Ctrl+- to navigate to the previous cursor location of any file in your solution. I have since been using it along with Ctrl+Shift+- to move back and forward in Visual Studio with great joy and alacrity. We all write code differently, but to keep productivity high I personally need to remember to stay in Keyboard Mind with minimal mousian intrusion.
Twitter as a Twool. Cwever title for this Guy Kawasaki post. Good information on using Twitter as a business tool, particularly on searching.
I still don't get Alltop. I gain a lot from reading Chris Brogan, who recently said he was "in love with [Guy Kawasaki's] Alltop." If Chris said he loved Alltop, I figured I had to re-visit the site after initially being unimpressed. I'll have to say that Alltop is much more info-rich than when I first investigated it, with very good topic-specific information coverage. This Alltop page on top SEO news, for instance, has a number of useful articles. My problem with Alltop is that I would rather receive my Alltop channels via an RSS feed, and Alltop (which is comprised entirely of feeds) doesn't provide aggregated or otherwise intelligent filtered feed capabilities.
Two Ten Best Book Lists. Here are two 2008 Ten Best Book Lists for you. I like best book lists, and hopefully there will be more before 2008 plays out. Of the two I have to give the nod to Chris Spagnuolo who begins his list with my man Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat, and Crowded."
I just finished Godin's "Tribes"
and would put it in my year's Top Ten list as did Chris. I'm intrigued with "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," and need to read "The Last Lecture." The second Top Ten list is from Fast Company. Of these I'm reminded of my initial interest in "Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming,"
as I had forgotten the commercial aspect of the book. "The author takes us on a survey of the innovators trying to solve our energy crisis and make a boatload of money in the process." Everyman note on the Fast Company list: server-side slideshow apps are a pain in the butt given the alternative client-side options now available.
ScottGu on new .NET 3.5 Chart Controls. I thought Scott was talking about the Silverlight Toolkit chart controls, but these are .NET 3.5 server chart controls! Pie charts for everybody!
New Database Publish function in Visual Studio. I didn't know you could create a SQL Database script for both schema and data in Visual Studio. Great post from Nannette Thacker with screenshots to explain.
Walking While Working. TIME writer Belinda Luscombe demonstrates the Steelcase Walkstation, a combo treadmill-desk in this video. The financial crisis in the US-of-A and indeed our moral malaise would be quickly resolved if workers spent time on a treadmill while they worked as demonstrated by this interesting woman. She shares a number of points that I find true during my daily 60 minutes on the Nordic Track with a laptop on my reading rack. I'd agree with Luscombe that productivity on a machine while working is about 70%. I don't code on my laptop while on my office ski machine, but I can read my feeds, respond to most emails, and generally absorb a lot of information. And before my machine's calorie counter busted, I was burning around 400 calories a day, consistent with Luscombe's figure of 2000 calories she burns a week with her work-walking routine. As we say good-bye for this episode, I wish for each of you happy work-walking experiences until Everyman returns.