elkit in wonderland

Give It Away, Give It Away Now

My blogger friend Beth Kanter had the best birthday ever last week, and I am proud to say I was part of it. We've been online friends since we met at BlogHer or WoolfCamp or SXSW, I forget which, and we are connected on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and any channel that we find each other on. I follow her loosely (we're not close friends by any stretch of the imagination), but when she asked for a very special birthday gift a couple of weeks ago, I was happy to chip in.

A week later, on her actual birthday, she thanked us all:

Today is my birthday and this year, as I have done for the past 8 years, I asked friends and family to donate to the Sharing Foundation in my honor. (If you want to know more about why my family and I care about the children of Cambodia and this charity, take a minute to watch this video my son, Harry made.) Last year, I got 51 people to donate $10 for my 51st birthday using my blog, Twitter, and other social media outposts. This year, I experimented with Facebook Causes birthday application.

We raised $6,255 from 162 donors! That's enough to cover the cost of school uniforms for 615 Cambodian youngsters. Many children in Cambodia do not go to school because their families lack the $10 for a uniform, required for school attendance. Last year, the Sharing Foundation's sewing school, a vocational training program, made over 1250 uniform sets and donated them to needy children in Roteang Village, to the Street Children's Assistance NGO, and to a poor government orphanage. The sewing girls, who are employed by the Sharing Foundation's vocational training program, earn from the first day of their training, so this is a win-win situation.

See her blog entry, "Thank you for the best birthday ever! We raised $6,255 for the Sharing Foundation to send 625 Cambodian youngsters to school!" for all the details and linkage.

I'm going to appropriate her idea for my own birthday this summer. And maybe you like it too?

Tell Me Something Good

David Pogue says:

I’ll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, “I’m now having lunch”? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?

Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, “Hasn’t this project been tried before?”

Everyone looked blankly at each other.

Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.

The fellow judge had just harnessed the wisdom of his followers in real time. No e-mail, chat, Web page, phone call or FedEx package could have achieved the same thing.

I was impressed.

So I’ve been Twittering for a couple of months, and I’ve learned a lot. I’m still dubious about Twitter’s prospects for becoming a tool for ordinary people (rather than early-adopter techie types).

But one thing’s for sure: The whole thing would be a lot more palatable if somebody would explain the basics. Something like this:

And The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Have I told you I've been using tumblr for a couple of weeks now? No? I really like it. It does one thing really well: it lets you grab a snippet - a quote, a link, a photo, a video - from another web site or your own computer, and lets you republish it on your own online "scrapbook". Pretty nifty. But don't take my word for it. Check it out: tumblr.com

I Am Mine

JP is musing about the customer perspective:

2009 is going to be about big changes in this space. I guarantee it. Put whatever’s left of your house and your savings on it.

People will not come to “my” blog. They will go to “their” feed aggregator, where they can read all the people they’re interested in reading. If they see something of interest, they will dig deeper and come to my blog.

People will not come to read “my” tweets. They will go to “their” tweet aggregator, where they can read all the tweets of all the people they’re interested in following. If they see something of interest, they will follow the links provided.

People will not come to see “my” pictures in Flickr. People will not come to hear “my” music wherever.

“My” time is over.

It’s a different perspective.

Readers want everything and everyone they read aggregated; they select what to read, when to read it, how to read it. How to read it, where to read it, what device to use.

Similarly, listeners want everything they listen to and everyone they listen to aggregated for them; watchers want everything they see and everyone they see aggregated for them.

Welcome, My Son, Welcome To The Machine

Tim O'Reilly explains what Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common in Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com: The Power of the Real Time Enterprise:

If Google's key innovation with PageRank was to recognize that a link was a vote, which could be counted and measured to get better search results, so too, WalMart recognized early on that a purchase was a vote. Each company built real-time information systems to capture and respond to that vote. WalMart built a supply chain in which goods are automatically re-ordered as they go out the door, with algorithms based on rate of sale controlling the reorders. Google built a better search engine, in which pages that were "better linked" were given priority over the ones produced by pure keyword matches. They went on to build real-time systems to measure what John Battelle called the database of intentions, as expressed by people's queries and subsequent clickstream data, as well as an ad auction system that prices ads in real-time based on the predicted likelihood of the ad being clicked on.

Makes sense to me, but my favorite part is this:

Now put these three examples, Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama together, and ask yourself what they tell you about the future of business, military operations, or any large organization.

Sensing, processing, and responding (based on pre-built models of what matters, "the database of expectations," so to speak) is arguably the hallmark of living things. We're now starting to build computers that work the same way. And we're building enterprises around this new kind of sense-and-respond computing infrastructure. In this sense, you can argue that Microsoft's term "Live Software" is the best name yet for the kind of software-infused enterprise we're building.

It's essential to recognize that each of these systems is a hybrid human-machine system, in which human actions are part of the computational loop.

Simply Irresistable

http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com and its code viewed. Comments cracked me up. :-)

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
 <title>Should I use tables for layout?</title>
 <style type="text/css">
 html,body{
 background:#999;color:#ccc;
 }
 h1{
 font-family:"Georgia",Helvetica,Arial,Sans-Serif;
 font-size:10em;
 padding:.1em 0;
 text-align:center;
 color:#333;
 margin:.5em auto;
 }
 </style>
</head>
<body>
 <h1>No.</h1>
 <!-- Honestly, no. -->

 <!--
 <table border="0" width="100%">
 <tr>
 <td align="center">No.</td>
 </tr>
 </table>
 -->
 <!-- Fact: Chuck Norris hates layout tables! -->
</body>
</html>

And ... And ... And ... You Put The Load, You Put The Load Right On Me

... there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure ...

Clay Shirky in an interview with Russ Juskalian from the Columbia Journalism Review

I'll Sit At The Table When Company Comes

Your Seat at the Table | Change.gov: The Obama-Biden Transition Team.

In a memo released today, Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-chair John D. Podesta announced that all policy documents from official meetings with outside organizations will be publicly available for review and discussion on Change.gov.

This means we're inviting the American public to take a seat at the table and engage in a dialogue about these important issues and ideas -- at the same time members of our team review these documents themselves.

That's great news. And it's exactly what I meant when I was talking about Obama being Web 2.0.

Kissin' And a-Huggin' In The Back Row Of The Movies

The fantastic folk at Criterion, purveyors of the finest film DVDs, have redone and expanded their web site. Instead of me telling you about all the great new features, why don't you head on over there and check out this fine explanatory video? If you're a film lover, I think you'll be back there in no time.

OBAMA

President Obama
Originally uploaded by elkit

The front page of the New York Times at 8:15 pm Pacific.