The Immigrant Song

New Project Idea + All my projects are in Friendfeed

I had an idea today for something called the Semantic News Heatmap. I'm going to try to build it.

I am now thinking I should take stock of current projects:

• The Stuff, my sketch comedy group and our ongoing video effort
• my own video effort to record and post more video online
• my new Tumblr project, Make1Up, in which I will take a photo every day of a 1up mushroom I have on my desk.
• Re-design bsbnyc.net: an undertaking I'm not sure I'm ready for, but it includes re-thinking my approach to widgets, thinking about making a SITE as opposed to just a blog.
• Learn about, contribute to expertise in, and teach others about Twitter.  [Example: by my estimate it will be 192 days until someone posts the 1 billionth twitter update.  I want to collect more data to model this accurately.]
• Use Friendfeed

What I notice is that these things all are going to find their way into friendfeed.  So, use friendfeed.  Find me on Friendfeed.

NYT Roundup: Southwest Airlines, Silly String, Subway Cell Phones

While it's not going to assigned seats, Southwest Airlines is keeping the highly annoying incentive to stay up until just after midnight the day of your flight to get a low boarding number.   Southwest Alters Boarding Process - New York Times.

I LOOOOVE silly string.  That it could help our GIs find trip wires is a bonus.  Get our GI's some silly string!!!!!!! Toy Goo Might Save Some Soldiers’ Lives, but It’s Stuck Here - New York Times.

It had to happen eventually-our favorite gadget will work in MTA stations.  M.T.A. Makes Deal for Cellphones in Stations - New York Times.

Lies, Damn Lies, and eMarketer Graphs

Can you spot the lie?  Hint: 38%?

Learning new stuff at GoogleNY

Last night I had the pleasure of going to Google's New York offices, as part of NextNY .  This event was productive for me in several ways.

• Insight into sales/marketing and product management organizations and functions.  Now I know they need industry vertical researchers.  They might need me!
• Added no fewer than three books to the e-bookshelf to be purchased: Influence, Wisdom of Crowds, Tipping Point (currently reading Blink.)
• Found new cool thing and discovered yet another example of Execute to the best of your ability and then sell style entrepreneurship, dodgeball.com.  Also, a 5-digit SMS code costs $10k.  Apparently the genesis of the idea was a thesis project of Dennis Crowley, of NYU's ITP program, otherwise famous for Pac Manhattan (Dennis was Pac Man).
• While writing this entry, a fellow NextNY attendee sent another link to Influence - the spirit of collaboration is really catching.
• Solidified some thinking about Pitch Camp, which I am helping to organize.  Helping people to solidify their message should be fun. 
• Now more than ever, I think Google is in a pretty decent place to help non-dominant content players distribute their content.  Props to uGather.com in this space also.  Apparently uGather's Jason Baptiste is going to be star of the next reality show.  If anyone hasn't seen the UK's The IT crowd yet, you should (head to a good bit Torrent site and pick it up)

And last, Why isn't Google evil?  In many media and otherwise corporate cases, the trend is either big->evil or big=evil or big != good.  I think Google is too concerned with making their products work and have users who are happy with the product.  If this is your big priority, and not "owning the desktop" or "getting a piece of the action" or "killing Linux"  I believe you end up with different messages- and very different results.  I bet lots of people also hate Google for merely delivering.  Sore losers?