Internal Measures of Success

My sons, 12 and 14 years old, will be the last of their friends to get a cell phone. The 12 year old’s friends use their cell phones to make crank calls to pizza places and girls they know. (While the technology changes, the concept doesn’t.) Our house is one of the few on our…

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Facebook, YouTube, and the New Media

I’ve been trying to figure out how the new media is changing our world–what gets noticed, how ideas break through the clutter, how we behave differently. There’s alot to get my arms around. According to The Center for Media Research, more than 9 billion videos were accessed on the Internet in July 2007. Like television,…

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Multi-tasking

A friend emailed me about a disturbing commercial promoting multi-tasking as a good thing. The ad showed a professional ballet dancer, touting the fact that she could take photos and post them to a blog, all while being on stage during a performance. In my friend’s words: "It was the equivalent of air brushing models’…

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Signs of the Long Tail

I have not read Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail. As editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Anderson is exposed to new ideas all the time and his own thinking influences a lot of people. From what I’ve heard about the book, his message is that specialized niches will continue to proliferate based on our technology to…

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Circus vs. Art

A great quote from George Lucas, when asked at the D: All Things Digital conference what he thought about Internet video: "There are two forms of entertaining. Circus is random. And voyeuristic. It’s basically what you see on YouTube now. I call it feeding Christians to the lions. The movie term is throwing puppies on…

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