Compelling

Social Media: Your Peripheral Nervous System

March 8, 2011
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Remember when you were in school and sat there confused while the teacher continued teaching something you didn’t quite grasp? Then, after the first student raised their hand and said, “I don’t get it,” a number of other students raised their hand and said, “We don’t get it, either.” Remember how much better you felt [...]

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Our Bad Choices: Similar But Not Equal

March 4, 2011
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I’m re-reading Dan Ariely‘s Predictably Irrational right now. It’s still amazing to me how completely manipulable we are. I just finished the first chapter, which deals with the phenomenon of how our decision-making processes are so predictably skewed by changes to the choice pool.
The example Dan brings up in the book is an experiment where [...]

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Recalling Total Recall

February 13, 2011

It’s been 2 years since I was poring over footage from a trip made to San Francisco to interview Gordon Bell about his book, Total Recall, and to discuss how computers were quickly taking their place as our surrogate memory. I recently went back and looked at the finished product and find the content more [...]

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What Chefs Can Teach Us About Social Media

January 21, 2011
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It’s easy to begin using Social Media and the cost of entry is very, very low.  As a result, many organizations feel compelled to begin using social channels without thinking through exactly how they will use them.  Even though it’s easy to begin using social media, using it effectively can be difficult at best.
At the [...]

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Melting Rock with RockMelt

December 3, 2010
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I’ve been using RockMelt for a week or so now.  For those of you unfamiliar with RockMelt, it is a new browser that functions as a social desktop.  If you’re wondering what that looks like, consider a browser with social functions built right into the chrome of the application.  The far left border displays the [...]

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The Shape of a Social Enterprise

November 11, 2010
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Much has been made of the idea of a Social Enterprise. The idea of increased transparency both within and without the organization. Internally, tacit knowledge is given a new degree of latitude. Externally, the line between inside and outside the organization begins to blur. I think we’ve done a lot of thinking about how social media [...]

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The Age of the Nano-Demographic: P2P Marketing

October 7, 2010
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In college, I learned about new music from my friends.  Like it or not, I picked up tips about personal style from them, too.  You can blame them for some of the looks I’ve sported through time.  The important point here is that my market-facing tendencies are not defined by my age, race, or socio-economic [...]

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Google Instant Search: Backing into semantics

September 30, 2010
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What It Is
Google recently released its Google Instant search product. It is basically a recommendation engine on steroids. The way it works is that, as you type, search terms are recommended; starting with the first letter.  For instance, typing “W” will present you with the weather forecast based on your geographic location.  That’s [...]

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I Had a Dream (Update)

September 16, 2010
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Back in June of 2008, I wrote a post detailing a vision I had for Apple tech working with television for enhanced viewing.  Well, ABC Television just released the My Generation Sync app for iPad which behaves pretty much how I imagined it.  The video does a better job of explaining it than I can:

Of [...]

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Toward a More Usable City

August 6, 2010
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A B-Cycle kiosk was just installed in front of the John Hancock Center in Chicago.  It’s good to see bike sharing make its way to this side of the Atlantic.  I’ve already seen bikes being rented from the kiosk.  I think the fact that the bike can be grabbed from a kiosk is critical to [...]

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