The world mourns Natasha. The entire world is mourning Natasha Richardson tonight. Maybe it seems like the entire world because in Twitter everyone is emoting at the same time. I opened the “Natasha Richardson” Twitter Trend while on the Nordic Track today, went to another tab, and within 1 minute there were 638 updates. Another stunning loss this week (who received far fewer tweets) was Ron Silver, best known to me as Bruno, the savvy political consultant on the West Wing. Age 62 of cancer. If you Google him on images you’d never recognize him in recent photos (particularly this one.) Goddamned cancer. You’re still too cool for school, Bruno.
Social Networks are not a back channel. This was everywhere today, and if you haven’t seen it, the click-through is worth the 30 seconds it takes to read the post. “How to Tweet your way out of a job.”
Choice Seth bits for a Wednesday. Choice bits from Seth Godin tonight, 1) on anonymous agents: Anonymous Agents are a human approximation of Google, interchangeable and virtually worthless. 2) On responding to Kevin Kelly’s New Rules, “Kevin wrote his book ten years ago. If you had known then what you know now, what would you have done differently? What do you do when you read stuff like this? Do something?” Coincidentally I just finished re-reading "New Rules"
last week. Review forthcoming. The book is still as original and fresh now as it was 10 years ago when it was written.
Garbage doesn’t lie. Tomorrow is garbage day in our Vermont ‘burb. Two large containers go to the street, one with garbage and the other with recycled materials. The recycled container we were recently provided with is huge, bigger than our garbage container and always 3 times more full on garbage day. My wife would say that this is because I put certain materials in recycling that she argues are not recyclable. My response is, “they SHOULD be! That’s the recycler’s deficiency, not mine.” My motto is, when in doubt, recycle. Anyway, here’s an interesting summary of a recent garbage study. I like the quote “People can lie to pollsters — or, more to the point, lie to themselves. The upshot is rubbish.”
A-list relative exclusivity. I was struck by a recent Kent Newsome Evening News entry, “This breaking news just in: Steve Gillmor has never responded to a single one of my @replies…I just wish if these cats weren't interested in conversing with anyone other than each other, they'd take it offline.” I wouldn’t worry about it, Kent. You’re Mr. A-list in my book.
Obama’s Bracket. An MSNBC opinion piece today read “NCAA tourney simply ‘greatest time of the year.’” He may be right. Seems President Obama is picking my Heels to take it all. Personally I don’t think it’s going to happen. If Dean Smith was still coaching, maybe, but confidence isn’t high. You have to love a President who knows so much about College Hoops and is so articulate about it. Here’s something I’ve never seen before, the NCAA Tournament Bracket picks of the President of the United States. From www.whitehouse.gov no less.
12+ open source projects for .NET you probably didn’t know about. Great list here.
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25 Random Newsomes. I seem to be on a Kent Newsome kick tonight, but there’s something here in Kent’s 25 Random Things post. This is apparently a meme, but the only place I saw it was on Kent’s blog. When I say “there’s something here,” I mean in the possibilities for connecting with other people through shared experiences when data like this was aggregated intelligently.