Dave Winer has an interesting early take on Apple’s new Ping.

Google quietly updated their popular web-based RSS app Reader with a new fullscreen mode that hides all the clutter and navigation so you can focus exclusively on what you’re reading.

Type “F” in Google Reader for more real estate.

Who: Lifehacker
Where: Google Reader Cuts the Clutter with Fullscreen Mode, New Shortcuts

Who: The Onion
Where: YouTube – Blockbuster Offers Glimpse Of Movie Renting Past

Typical newspaper story of a school district deciding to get serious (i.e. “ban”) “student use of personal electronic devices” in the classroom.  Funny thing though…I’ve worked closely with both administrators, their technology coordinator, and one of their board members over the years.  They all know better…and deep down inside they mean better.

Lizard brains.

As the amount of inputs go up, as the number of people and ideas that clamor for attention continue to increase, we do what people always do: we rely on the familiar, the trusted and the personal.

I’m working hard on less inputs, more interaction.

Godin, S. Seth’s Blog: The blizzard of noise (and the good news) [Post].

In Minnesota, being an extrovert means to look at your shoes when I’m talking to you.  I summoned up my inner extrovert and asked Seth Godin if I could snap a picture of his socks.

3 socks for $8 (on sale) at littlemissmatched.

(via Chris Sessums)

A public education that centers first around workforce development will put a high premium on following directions and doing what you’re told. A public education that centers first around citizenship development will still teach rules, but it will teach students to question the underlying ideas behind the rules. Workforce development will reinforce the hierarchies that we see in most corporate culture, while a citizenship-focus will teach students that their voice matters, regardless of station.

Holla.

Lehmann, C. The Big Lie (Thoughts on Why School Is Not Only About Workforce Development) – Practical Theory [Post]. Retrieved from http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1255-The-Big-Lie-Thoughts-on-Why-School-Is-Not-Only-About-Workforce-Development.html

The “drop the D” philosophy worked so well for a school in Kentucky, they ended up dropping the C grade too. Now students in 5th grade and higher get an A, B or F.

Have they never seen Spinal Tap?

NJ School District Drops the Ds – Local News – Philadelphia, PA – News – msnbc.com [Post]. Retrieved from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38428180?ocid=twitter

In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture.

Once you’ve mastered it, tinkered with it, and designed things around it, something calls you to lead it.  #community #games

I’m forever indebted to Kurt Squire for sharing a few emails with me me better understand the relationship between my World of Warcraft and Twitter experiences.

boyd, d. (2010, June 12).danah boyd | apophenia » “for the lolz”: 4chan is hacking the attention economy [Post]. Retrieved from http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/06/12/for-the-lolz-4chan-is-hacking-the-attention-economy.html

 

Awesome.

Taken in a Wisconsin State Park.  At a beach.

This wasn’t just your run-of the-mill social media experiment. Like Luke Sullivan says in I See Dead Ad Jobs “Creativity matters now more than ever. We can’t buy people’s attention anymore.” and this was very creative, but still based in the old-skool adskills of storytelling. People paid attention because it was actually talking to them, as ReadWriteWeb reported there was a team checking the internet comments about the campaign in realtime while they were making it.

I’m looking forward to what they do with YouTube to disrupt the Super Bowl next year.

Brand Flakes for Breakfast. brandflakesforbreakfast: Old Spice p0wns social media [Post]. Retrieved from http://www.brandflakesforbreakfast.com/2010/07/old-spice-p0wns-social-media.html

Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and ultimately, to mobilize.

I can’t get enough of this book.

Shirky, C. (2010). Amazon Kindle: Cognitive Surplus. Retrieved from http://kindle.amazon.com/work/cognitive-surplus-ebook/B0035EV8MC/B003NX75HC

I’m admire John Gruber’s Daring Fireball.  His style is tight.  I’ve redesigned a few things on my own blog in an attempt to mimc a few details that make the user experience on his site special.

First, I’ve ditched the traditional notion of a title field for each post.  I’ve hacked up WordPress to link directly to whatever source I’m quoting rather than link to a single (or permalink) version of the same post on my site.  (Details below.)  I added a little hyperlinked ★ alongside the restructured title that acts as the permalink.

The other change I made was in citing sources.  Most folks simply hyperlink, others may go as far as including “Via ____” to mark that they are sharing from another source.  I attempting full on APA styled citation.

Note:  I’m lazy.  Even too lazy to visit any number of web services to create the proper styled citation.  Here’s what I’m doing.

I use Mars Edit on the Mac.  There’s a little bookmarklet that goes into my Safari Bookmark bar called “Post to Mars Edit”.  This is a typical feature included on most blog platforms and standalone blog posting packages.  Mars Edit takes things a little further.  Inside the preferences is a customizable tab for attribution.

Note below a few simple HTML pieces.  The stuff between the #’s like #body# are pieces that Mars Edit pulls directly from whatever website I’m using the “Post to Mars Edit” bookmarklet from.

Say I find a cool quote.  I simply highlight the text, click the “Post to Mars Edit” bookmarklet.  Mars Edit magically creates a new post that includes the selected quote, in blockquotes, along with the title of the post, marked up with the HTML link and italicized. This is all formatted in APA style and gets me most of the way finished.  Copy the code below.

<blockquote>#body#</blockquote>

comment

cite <a href=”#url#”"a style=”text-decoration:none”><i>#title#</i></a> [Post Image Video Comment]. Retrieved from <a href=”#url#”"a style=”text-decoration:none”>#url#</a>

#url#

The next trick involves citing the author and date of the post, quote, article, video, image, etc.  I’ve tossed together a TextExpander snippet to walk me through this part of the process.  I’ve named this snippit “/cite” all I do is type /cite and up comes a simple dialog box asking me to fill in the necessary information.  (LastName, First Initial, Year, Month, and Date).  Boom.  Copy the code below.

%fill:lastname%, %fill:firstinitial%. (%fill:year published%, %fill:month% %fill:date%).

Finally, I cut the final #url# piece in Mars Edit and use another TextExpander snippet to generate the Title field of the blog post.  I type /title and another dialog box appears asking to past the url and provide a title.  This generates a bit of HTML for the title piece that links the title directly to the source

<a href=”%fill:url%”a style=”text-decoration:none”>%fill:title%</a>

Type A?  Yeah, that’s me.

I’m testing things out on the blog.  Please ignore.

Microsoft. (2010). Bing. Retrieved from http://www.bing.com/

The Old Spice guy simply replied to Facebook messages, Twitter messages, and YouTube comments yesterday.  About a hundred different 30 second videos that each received between 2,000 and 50,000 views.

oldspice. (2010, July 13). YouTube – oldspice’s Channel [Video]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/user/oldspice

Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity.

Theory applies to the world of Internet bandwidth as well.  We only know a world of scarcity because incumbent telecommunications providers are unsure of how they will make money in a world of abundance.

Shirky, C. (2010). Amazon Kindle: Cognitive Surplus. Retrieved from http://kindle.amazon.com/work/cognitive-surplus-ebook/B0035EV8MC/B003NX75HC

unknown. (2010, July 13). Donut Seeds [Image]. Retrieved from http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5g2osCybw1qzvy4do1_400.jpg