Awesome compendium of images for Songbird. Designer Jonathan Koshi rocks.

The Little Prince encounters a fox and asks the fox to play with him. The fox replies that he can’t play with the Little Prince because he isn’t tamed. He explains that “taming” means to “establish ties”. If they establish those ties, then they will need each other. They will each be unique to the other. And, this great quote: “One only understands the things that one tames.” Taming takes time. It takes repeated simple encounters. It takes simple “rites” that make certain times special. The Little Prince “tames” the fox by visiting each day, first sitting at a distance, and then moving closer. The closing thought: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

But what would it mean to virtual teams if members could tap into popular social networking tools to deepen relationships, form meaningful connections, and relate on a whole new level? In fact, could social networking help create so much of the social capital we know is fundamental to building trust, which is so hard to do working from a distance? Faced with such a dizzying array of choices, what are some of the social networking tools most suited to virtual teams that need to collaborate to achieve real business outcomes?

Gambling revenues on the Strip are up this year — way up in recent weeks. Despite higher energy prices, a volatile stock market, a slumping housing market and fears the economy may be heading into a recession, some of the city’s largest casinos are on pace for a record-setting year. In October alone, gambling revenues on the Las Vegas Strip were up 19.8 percent over the same month last year.

When I arrived at Citizen Space one morning around 10, ready to get to work, the place was nearly dead. Slowly, my colleagues for the day began to trickle in. Between quietly typing on their laptops, they spoke about the annoyances of working alone. “If you have clients at home, your cat might sit on their laps every five minutes,” one told me. Occasionally, there’d be a moment of accelerated serendipity, such as when someone said he needed a web designer and Citizen Space cofounder Chris Messina said he knew just the right person for the job.

But sometimes we could use a little bit of self-consciousness. We learned that lesson from the Halloween fairy. Call it crowd theory, or Wikipedia theory, or whatever you want to: If you live your life on the Web, the Web will find out when you’re faking it. It didn’t work for “Bree,” the Lonelygirl15 video blogger who captivated millions with her stark honesty on camera, only to be outed as a scripted actress. And it won’t work for Delaney. When the first photos surface of the self-styled slacker out of character, he’s toast. Actually, he’s toast already. We’re all sick of him.

“Being earnest, I think it’s going to make a comeback soon,” Van Veen told me. “You can only pile on so much irony until you’ve lost what you were talking about.”

Nice: My colleague Lindsay has referenced Tara Hunt’s great blog HorsePigCow on Webnames Blog before. We like the way she thinks about things like customers, marketing and the Web. Tara specializes in ‘community marketing’ which she describes as not “community building, but rather, delighting and enchanting those people already part of your community - through product, communication and experience.”

Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas

My SXSW 2007 presentation (6mb pdf). People seemed to like it.

After my enthusiastic support for the open-source Songbird media browser, I recently got the chance to sit down (virtually) with Stephen Lau, Songbird’s developer evangelist. Stephen was full of thorough, informative answers about Songbird’s technical underpinnings, business model, development methodology and roadmap to version 1.0.

Human beings make a terrible fuss about a lot of things but none more than romance. Eating and drinking are just as important for keeping the species going–more so actually, since a celibate person can at least continue living but a starving person can’t. Yet while we may build whole institutions around the simple ritual of eating, it never turns us flat-out nuts. Romance does.

We believe that measurement of social capital is important for
3 reasons:
a) Measurement make the concept of social capital more tangiblet;
b) It increases our investment in social capital: in a performance-driven era, social capital will be relegated to second-tier status in the allocation of resources, unless organizations can show that their community-building efforts are showing results; and
c) Measurement helps funders and community organizations build more social capital. Everything that involves any human interaction can be asserted to create social capital, but the real question is does it build a significant amount of social capital, and if so, how much? Is a specific part of an organization’s effort worth continuing or should it be scrapped and revamped? Do mentoring programs, playgrounds, or sponsoring block parties lead more typically to greater social capital creation?

Gambling revenues on the Strip are up this year — way up in recent weeks. Despite higher energy prices, a volatile stock market, a slumping housing market and fears the economy may be heading into a recession, some of the city’s largest casinos are on pace for a record-setting year. In October alone, gambling revenues on the Las Vegas Strip were up 19.8 percent over the same month last year.

In true BarCamp fashion, everybody (from guru to enthusiast to transit user to activist to everything in between) could pitch their session and we collaborated on the TransitCamp Vancouver schedule together.

Fun. People have been posting flipped messages…this is where you can make your own, copy it and paste it into your twitteriffic

A few months ago NOLA’s (New Orleans, LA) young urban rebuilding professionals (YURP) established a social network for the purpose of building a sustainable New Orleans, now at 1688 members.

Study Finds Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness and Self-Esteem at Top of List of Psychological Needs