Some stuff I’m reading this week…

hahahahahahahaha - Kind of an ‘in’ joke with me and my gals, but the basic premise is that we call white people who tweet Navajo proverbs and other similarly non-reflective stuff ‘Navajo Dolphins’. Kind of like BoBos (Bourgeoisie Bohemians), but younger and less affluent.

Interesting is that of those 20 women, at least 10 still need to submit their bio (10 days before the actual conference), while of the male speakers about 99% have their bio submitted. Come on women, write down your achievements, or if you are to shy, hire a personal branding agency.

Many organisers of technical conferences, meetups, and dinners want to have more gender-balance in their lineups, but they don’t know where to find technical women speakers.
Enter geekspeakr.com, a simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers and event organisers to find each other.

I totally heart this concept. It’s very early in it’s evolution, but inspired, I’m told, by ‘wefeelfine.org’ (another amazing site). Basically, when you feel something, you just type it in, associate a photo, video or quote with it and post it. I like that it could track your moods over time and I can see great potential for that.

Inspired by Dr. Z’s ‘Creating Better Barrels’, the Hero Workshop is a cool approach to helping kids finding the hero inside themselves.

Way cool. The amazing web team at Zappos.com is having a load of fun with Twitter and are using my account as an experiment to set up tracking for businesses. Nice idea!

Wow. Cool. Vanina Delobelle got a Ph.D. after doing her thesis on Pinko Marketing! For those of you who don’t know, I nailed a thesis down in 2005 and coined the ‘new marketing’ Pinko Marketing (because the new marketer was a Community Sympathizer…get it? heh): http://www.pinkomarketing.com

Humans are social creatures. While freelancers seldom miss the constraints of office life — the unnecessary meetings, the petty politics, the wretched busywork — they often long for the companionship that traditional offices provide. When you’re all alone in a home office day after day, you can spend whole afternoons staring into refrigerators or examining suspicious skin discolorations. Isolation breeds inertia, and some freelancers experience a sudden loss of creativity or productivity, as if their abilities were somehow tied to the social expectations of working with a team. By joining forces with several like-minded independent professionals to get a shared office space, you can create a sense of camaraderie without compromising the goals or vision of your own work. It’s actually much simpler to do than you might think.

The LaunchPad team met Tara ‘missrogue’ Hunt, at the SXSWi meetups and core conversations. Tara, Co-founder of Citizen Space in San Francisco, had a lot to say about coworking at the meetings. I caught up with her via email recently to ask her to share some more of her thoughts on coworking.

is it good news that less than one in five feel it was worth $5? I’m not sure what I was expecting but that percentage - primarily from fans - seems disheartening.

Awesome. Had this idea for BART in the Bay Area. Forwarded this to Lynton J to see what he says. Hopefully we can do this around TransitCampBayArea2?

Blog It is a free Facebook application which focuses on making it easier for you to create content no matter the blogging platform you use.

If nothing else, the social web has made it easier than ever before to change how you work. For businesses and people seeking a more personal work flow, they can find it via Web 2.0 tools and other unique ideas born out of the Internet melting pot. From Google Docs, online document sharing and virtual assistants to telecommuting, mobile offices and coworking, there are hundreds of ways to customize your productivity.

Socializing with fellow workers and conducting business in a professional environment are just some of the things office employees take for granted until they’re lost. That’s why Hunt, Chang and many others are creating co-working spaces, an emerging trend that gives solo-preneurs a professional and social environment in which to work.

Awesome new developer site for Flickr.

Location-based social networking
Discover who visits your favorite places. Join the community in real time.
Yay! More tools for stalking!

From my chapter on Embracing the Chaos. The fan wiki for The Washington Post’s first blogger, Joel Achenbach.
Achenblog Boodlefacts - Achenblog FAQ

Covered in Chapter 6: Finding Your Higher Purpose
Come Play it Forward @ Akoha

So first of all, what is Twitter? The best analogy I can think of is that it’s like CB radio, but for text messaging. You basically answer the question “What are you doing right now?” at different times throughout the day, and the messages that you send have to be short — 140 characters or less.

In the past year many non-profits have latched onto online social networking as the hip new tool to magically promote their campaigns, recruit new supporters and raise loads of money online without costing a dime. Yes, Web 2.0 can be a powerful organizing tool for non-profits but there is no magic involved and it’s not free. It takes organizational commitment, creativity and significant staff resources to see a healthy return on investment over time.

A good overview of Twitter apps to give a whirl.

Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse

Given the years of declining revenues at the major labels and the constant stream of stories in the mainstream press about music’s decline, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the music industry’s pallbearers are already lined up and waiting in the hallway. But music isn’t on its deathbed yet; in fact, people are listening to more artists than ever before, on more white earbuds than ever before, in more places than ever before. They’re just not paying as much.

This project, called New Work City, aims to open its doors by June and is still looking for interested coworkers. The space is offering four membership types, ranging from full-time, where $500 gets a coworker a private desk with high speed internet and other benefits, to $20 daily drop-ins. As of the latest count, 55 people have filled out membership applications.

Someone is going to have to sit down with me on how to jailbreak my phone so that I can get this. Yay! Video for my iPhone!

For Mr Newmark, the thing to understand is really quite simple. He is a nerd, he is proud to say, and thus exhibits “the same dysfunction as my nerd brethren”. Ultimately, this comes down to steadfastly following “nerd values: once you make enough money, it’s time to improve the world”. His home town loves and honours him for it.

…once the value of all (wealth) are added up, the economists found something big was still missing: the vast majority of world’s wealth! If one simply adds up the current value of a country’s natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there’s no way that can account for that country’s level of income.
The rest is the result of “intangible” factors — such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, “Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries.”
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