Code Monkey Mode Extreme. I’ve been in Code Monkey Mode Extreme this week. It’s been a while since I spent my latenight geek sessions coding instead of assimilating info and blogging. I figure whenever we do for pleasure at night what we do during the day for money it has to be good for the soul, so I’ll take it. This Week with Dave Burke’s Code should be available for syndication by the weekend.
Rubel on Kindle. Steve Rubel reminds us why he’s an A-Lister with “The Amazon Kindle is the Great White Hope for Monetizing Print Media.” I particularly liked the quote, “The Kindle, like the iPod, is an emerging critical mass device that actually encourages people to pay for content rather than get it for free. When Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, people were skeptical that people would shell out cash for music they could snag for free from file sharing networks. They did.”
What are YOU doing with Slack Time? Another A-List blogger, Seth Godin offers two suggestions on how to take advantage of down economy slack time. This is especially applicable, as Seth points out, for freelancers. He suggests 1) Becoming and expert, and 2) Earn a following and reputation through social networking tools.
The Economics of Free and the Grand Argument. Mike Masnick of Techdirt wrote an extensive article on “free” using a musician for his examples. Essential points include 1) Redefine the market based on the benefits, 2) Determine scarce and infinite benefits, 3) Set the infinite resources free, all to increase the value of the scare resources, and 4) charge for the scare resources. What was fascinating here was an actual musician chimed in on Comment #2 which is where the conversation got lively. Very intelligent debate on the economics of free.
10 Things. The Internet. Better. Kent Newsome with 10 things that would make the internet a better place, some with tongue-in-cheek, but a fun read. I can agree with “If Facebook would die,” but disagreed that Scoble should “be the brand instead of promiting the brand.” I get “Scoble being the brand,” but I stopped reading him when he left Microsoft, which was my brand of interest. Scoble was the honest face of that brand and his perspective meant a lot. Not so much any more.
Personal Branding sans Scoble. Chris Brogan with an insightful post titled “Platform Thinking in Personal Branding,” starting with being damned good at something, then diversifying with a unified story…a damned good unified story, I’m thinkin’.
The good old days when people blogged. I loved this Murketing “Nostalgia for blogs” post title. Here Rob Walker writes how a blog he read regularly announced its own demise because the author preferred Twitter. I’ve read bloggers elsewhere—and in some cases by long time cyber-buds—describing their abandon of blogging for twitter. I just don’t get that. Twitter is great, but since we’re talking a lot about personal branding tonight, it’s the blog that builds the brand and the relationships. No one is going to read my tweets and think, “Wow, that guy knows his stuff. I want to pay him thousands of dollars to manage an important project for me.”
Sending back DVDs for fun. We subscribe to the 4-at-a-time DVD subscription plan with Netflix. Great execution. Great value. Yet I’m finding myself sending back DVDs unplayed. It’s not irresponsible queue management, just a lack of desire to spend precious time watching movies. I could be writing Everyman Links posts, after all! For some reason a quote from Rosie O’Donnell to Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle seems to describe my unplayed DVD situation, “That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” For me it would be “You don’t want to watch a movie. You want to be in love with the idea of watching a movie.” Nostalgia for movies, I guess.