The nytimes.com has an excellent article on how Barack Obama uses the Internet and specifically social computing to be a highly effective candidate for the position of President of the United States. This article has many good examples of how he is going about things differently (i.e. in a Web 2.0 way) than his Web 1.0-based opponents. To me, this is a key quote:

‘ Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks” is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen,” Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.” ‘

Enterprises could learn alot from his team’s approach, regardless of which candidate they support. See the article here:The Nation – The Wiki-Way to the Nomination – NYTimes.com

Obama everywhere, indeed.

I talked before about how twitter is using tumblr to report on the status of twitter.com. It turns out another one of my favourite new sites, Muxtape, is also using tumblr for reporting. Cool!

Professionally speaking, I am interested in how companies are using new
technologies to define and support their products and services, because it’s likely our clients will be interested in this too. Gotta walk the talk. 🙂 So, fwiw

here’s my tumblelog site: berniemichalik.tumblr.com
And here’s my muxtape site: berniemichalik.muxtape.com

I need to get more original with my naming standards. 🙂

This is the second time this week I have seen some incredible photos on boston.com. You must check these out, including this one:

The Sky, From Above – The Big Picture – Boston.com

The VANITY FAIR Blogopticon has an accurate chart showing where various blogs sit in terms of earnestness and opinion. If you don’t know some of these blogs, here’s your chance to catch up.

GraphJam has some hilarious graphs, like this one

The next time you have a presentation to make at work, try slipping one in.

Glassdoor.com is a new web site that allows people to rate the company they work for with regards to salaries and other matters.

For example, this thing-y:

You don’t even want to know. But if you can bear it, see The 10 Worst Products For Men Ever Created at The Art of Manliness.

This article’s title is misleading, for as the article goes on to say:

.”.. the 30-minute procedure represented the key to a new life: the illusion of virginity.”

Why this is done, and whether or not this is a good idea, can be better understood by checking out the article.

Kevin Kelly has a short and eloquent blog posting on failure here: Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

The best presentations, the best speeches, the best advice are usually about what people learned from their failures. Steve Jobs’ legendary Stanford commencement address lifted so many hearts because he talked about his failures. A few days ago J.K. Rowling gave a commencement speech at Harvard that also emphasized the power of failure. It is a good read (watch or listen).

While I largely agree with this, what it doesn’t address is the mental and sometimes physical damage failure can bring. Failure is like fire: if used properly, it’s power is very beneficial. But like fire, the power of failure can be highly destructive, too.

Failure has not (visibly) damaged Jobs and Rowling. The same is not true of everyone.

I think Madame Curie would not want to be associated with this, but alas, she is. I thought it was funny. Educational? Kinda….funny? Definitely!

For those interested in eating locally to help environmentally, you should consider this article: Do food miles matter?

Consider this quote:

“But it’s how food is produced, not how far it is transported, that matters most for global warming, according to new research published in ES&T (DOI: 10.1021/es702969f). In fact, eating less red meat and dairy can be a more effective way to lower an average U.S. household’s food-related climate footprint than buying local food, says lead author Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University.”

It comes down to eating better and eating local are good for you and good for the planet too. But read the article: there are lots of good details in it.

I have been a fall of twitter for sometime now, but they are having serious problems due to their architecture .
(See here Twitter Technology Blog: Twittering About Architecture). I hope they get it resolved soon, before it is too late.

I have also been a fan of tumblr for some time too. So I thought it was interesting that twitter is updating their
Twitter Status using tumblr. Perhaps more people will start using tumblr as a result. Tumblr is great and worth considering.

2013 update: note, this may no longer work. I am keeping the post, but you may want to look for a more current blog posting on this topic.

You might not be able to tell from this title, Silicon Valley Users Guide: How to avoid being a Facebook shill like VC David Sze but this article tells you how to modify your facebook settings to turn off annoying ads.

Don’t worry, most people won’t. And even if they did, well don’t worry: coming up with new ways to direct advertisements to you keeps marketing folks in work.

The excellent blog datamining.typepad.com has lots of cool information on data and data visualization, including some of these very cool representations of the blogosphere.

I wish I had more detail on the data, but the images are cool. 🙂

brand tags has a very web 2.0 way of analyzing brands using tag clouds. I checked out Nike, Starbucks and of course, IBM, and I was not surprised by what I found.

Over at Boing Boing is this so wacky it is funny, 1939 marital rating scale for wives
I like how there are demerit points for when she “puts her cold feet on husband at night to warm them”. Actually, I thought that was kinda sweet. 🙂

Great article!

David Byrne has a good review of Errol Morris’s new film, Standard Operating Procedure. (David Byrne Journal: 05.03.2008: Objective Truth)

I initially was disappointed by the film, since I thought it was going to be shattering in what it revealed. I hoped it would be like Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line”. As it was, the story it told through the voices of those involved didn’t appear new or interesting. However, as I thought about it afterwards, and I considered some of the ideas that Morris has been writing about, I began to think that that wasn’t the only point of the documentary. For the documentary is also a study of the question: what does photography signify? It is a question that Morris doesn’t answer so much as explore. It’s the study of this question that makes the film interesting, more so than the (hi)story of American involvement in Abu Ghraib.

It reminded me of the reviews I read about W.G. Sebald’s book, “On the Natural History of Destruction”. Many of the harshest critics of the book appeared to take it to task solely as a work of history. But Sebald is first and foremost an artist, and in this work, as in his fiction, he is exploring ideas and themes almost independent to the (hi)story at hand. To criticize him solely on his historical qualities is to miss much of the point of the writing. Likewise, to watch Morris’s film and criticize him as if he is Seymour Hersh is to also miss much of the point of his filmmaking.

Ok, The wiggles may not fit in with your idea of “artists”, but regardless of your tastes, this is a cool idea. See:

iGoogle Artist Themes

P.S. Of course, some folks may not be too crazy about Jeff Koons either, but hey, there is something for everyone!

Have you sometimes received an email and it seems to come from XXX@donotreply.com? Want to know what happens to the email if you DO reply? Simple. Check out:Do Not Reply

(Thanks Jean-Francois for the tip!)

If you paste a long URL into twitter.com AND you don’t exceed 140
characters, twitter will automatically turn the URL into a tinyurl.

More good stuff from twitter!

The globeandmail.com: has a list of what they think are the Top 10 BlackBerry apps

I think it is a good list, although not all apps will run on all BlackBerries (as I have discovered, having an older one)

Kevin Kelly , in his blog, The Technium talks about how spammers are using artificial intelligence to defeat captcha, the hard-to-read letters you are sometimes asked to fill in when doing an online transaction.

Harder captchas could be devised, but then people may not be able to solve them, either. You could show three pictures of flowers and have someone type in “Flowers”, but eventually computers will recognize this. Even subtler forms of recognition will eventually be defeated.

We may end up with the V-K machines in Blade Runner after all.

Not if I read this article properly. If Bernanke is still urging such big measures, he must believe it is going to get worse. But read it and decide for yourself: Bernanke: Foreclosure woes require action – May. 5, 2008

I could tell you what twistori is, but it is quick and best if you just go check it out. (Especially you twitter fans).

It’s fascinating, and one more example of why twitter rocks!

Over at (kottke.org) is a really good review on Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article on vengeance. What struck me was this quote from Vengeance:

“Diamond argues that the New Guineans’ everyday open embrace of such a strong emotion is not necessarily a bad thing and that modern society can circumvent people’s need for vengeance, resulting in feelings of dissatisfaction that can create unbalanced emotional lives.”

At first I read that and for a moment thought: yes, vengeance could be good. Then the moment passed. I thought of Shakespeare instead. I thought of Romeo and Juliet and how much unhappiness and suffering come about as a result of vengeance. Vengeance appears to be seeking justice, but its partiality prevents it from being seen that way. What is necessary is for justice to occur, not vengeance. Vengeance is the justice of the gutter. Our culture and civilization is about getting above that, for everyone’s sake. Even the sake of those who, like the relative of Jared Diamond, lost so much.

There’s a great story on cnn.com today about the effects and use of Twitter. From the lede:

“James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10.

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held.”

It’s a great story, and a great come back to those who think Twitter is about nothing more than endless versions of “whazzup”.

I found this out from the Vespa Canada this is a good thing all around.

I’ve been reading a number of recent news stories about recent problems with food –and especially, rice –shortages. This lead me to this fascinating article in the New York Times that gave a new (to me) perspective on the problem. I didn’t realize how much rice that Australia produces. To give you an idea, there is a story about:

“The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.”

And drought is only one factor in the loss of rice. See this article for much more: A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice

Well worth reading.

A rather scathing article on Slate regarding Microsoft’s positioning on XP and Vista. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it IS funny. See:

http://www.slate.com/id/2189162/#suicidemarketing

Sadly, it still exists. From the globeandmail.com:

“Former slave Adidjatou Mani Koraou, 24, poses with her baby Friday outside a court in Niamey. In a historic first, she is suing the government of Niger for failing to implement its anti-slavery laws, rekindling a row between the authorities, who deny the practice still exists, and activists, who say that Niger is home to some 800,000 slaves. Ms. Koraou was sold to a Tuareg slave trader when she was 12 for the equivalent of $543 Canadian and then sold to be the fifth wife of a traditional healer in central Niger, said Ilguilas Weila, who heads Timidria, Niger’s only local anti-slavery group.”

Over at the Health blog of the New York Times is a write up of an “art exhibit” in London showing Faces of Life and Death.

It is both remarkable and common. While the faces and the comments of the people are not unexpected, the overall effect of the photographs and the quotations are. You have to see it.

The photo is from Walter Schels/Wellcome Collection and shows one woman just before and just after she dies.