Alpha Mind Blog

Chris Carfi would have gotten a write-up here on The Alpha Mind in December except that my blog was so badly beaten up by hackers it took me well into the new year to get it cleaned up.

If I’d written about Chris, it would have been because he was in a tie for Best Conversationalist at a geek dinner in San Francisco. (No mean distinction, considering the tie was with Shel Israel.)

But the man doesn’t need me to help make him a star… cuz Chris Carfi was featured in some footage on CNN yesterday.

Congrats, Chris. Alas, the clip says nothing about Cerado and what it does. But hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?

And yet… and yet…

if you had just acted psychotic, you could have gotten a million views on YouTube, where that seems to be what passes for funny.

Mike Masnick asks: Is Copyright Law Killing The Documentary? The answer is in this video on YouTube. Titled “Eyes On the Fair Use of the Prize,” it tells how an outstanding documentary from the 1980s has been effectively disappeared by copyright burdens:

So, to stay with the same topic for a while:

Bryan Person  blogs about Comcast’s efforts to use Twitter to improve customer service.

He makes the point that Comcast is paying attention to everyone, not only to A-list bloggers.

Apparently that is a real, rather hot issue. Note the number of comments on Scoble’s post suggesting that, because he’s an A-list blogger, Robert is trying to bully Facebook.

I’m pretty sure companies take a blogger’s Technorati influence score into consideration when they think about how to respond to a blogger. It’s good to know other are treating the social media more democratically.

And I salute Bryan for pointing it out. Companies that behave this way deserve as much love as we little people can send them.

A bit more about Rodrigo Sepulveda’s little problem with Facebook:

Last week, through PRobecast, I learned about the 2-word pitch. Very simply, it’s a pitch consisting of “‘Google’ + [one other word]“. Of course, you can only use it if you ensure that the second word is a search term which, when entered into Google, will bring up your site.

It may be a solution for over-zealous scanning algorithms on over-yenta social media sites that don’t want you ever to send one of their users out to another domain. Rodrigo is probably right that Facebook, like YouTube, scans messages and disallows URLs (although YouTube practices prior restraint–it scans as soon as you hit the “post” button, and disallows the comment if it contains a URL).

The solution, of course, is not to use the URL, but to tell your friends what to Google. And of course, it doesn’t have to be a single word. If your site contains a unique combination of terms (remember GoogleWhacking?), Google will bring folks to your site. And YT and FB will probably let you do it without whinging.

Scoble says Facebook still sucks. His evidence: The eviction of Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda from the social site’s hallowed halls.

Herewith a continuation of what will surely be a series about how and why technology doesn’t work. Why so SO SO much of technology doesn’t work.

Soon, I hope, I’ll start writing about why everything’s busted. For this post, though, in addition to the above links, I’ll only note that after Lee Hopkins asked his readers how to manage personal information, and the comments ran 3 to 0 in favor of low-tech, he has gone with the new flow and shopped for the proper configuration of pen and paper. 

Seth’s Blog asks: Would you do me a favor? What he wants is for me to lend out my copy of his wonderful book, The Dip.

Oh, Seth, my friend, I’ll happily recommend your book, but I just don’t seem to get the books I lend out returned to me. I’ve already bought at least 3 copies of Gerald Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting, and I still can’t seem to find one on my own shelves. Why? Because I’m so enthusiastic about the book that I keep lending it to people.

Seth, I’ll lend out the book if you’ll make me a promise: If it isn’t back in 6 months, you’ll sell me a new, autographed copy.

Deal?

Technorati Tags: Gerald Weinberg,Seth Godin,The Dip,Secrets of Consulting,consulting,books,lending

B.L. Ochman has a nice post about a memorable business card. Prompts me to trot out the pre-release version of my newest card. It’s a whole newspaper, with four articles about me. They say long copy sells… I sure hope so.

The picture is from the lead article, about some business owners protesting my arrival in Sacramento County. The business card is in these 2 files (warning: they’re large, but you only need to download one of them to know what the card will look like):

• Side 1
• Side 2

If you print sides 1 and 2 on the 2 sides of a sheet of decent paper, using a good phot0-quality inkjet (I use the HP C6180), then cut along the cutlines on side 2, you have 2 identical copies of the business card. Fold a copy in 2, and the massive newspaper is down to the size of a standard business card.

If you want a hard copy, send me a buck and a SASE to

Max Hansen
11251 Coloma Rd.
Suite E.
Rancho Cordova, CA, 95670.

If you’d like the Word 2000 files, which will serve as a template for your own newspaper-style memorable business card, email me at

max (at) alum (dot) mit.edu and ask. The files will come back in a reply email.

If you want to discuss it, phone me: 510 541 7971.

Enjoy!

Update 8:19 pm: I meant fold a copy twice, not fold a copy in two. It takes 2 folds to tame this beast.

Well, I have a category on this blog called Brain Care, but I don’t post to it very often. Here, though, is a wonderful, straightforward article about how to keep the new neurons that grow in our brains.

Results showed that lasting increase was restricted to new neurons that appeared between one and three weeks before living in an enriched environment. This corresponds to the time when new neurons are extending their neurons in search of targets and their dendrites are developing synaptic contacts to the neurotransmitters normally used in the hippocampus. The new neurons that developed during this time window survived up to the four months of monitoring, even when removed the enriched environment. It would seem that the learning experiences encountered in a rich environment provide the stimulus needed to help new neurons get established into memory-forming circuits, but there is a limited critical time when this effect occurs.

Read the rest:

» New Neurons: Good News, Bad News   « Brain Fitness Revolution at SharpBrains

Winer asks why the world is so quiet after Bill Moyers’ interview with Rev Jeremiah Wright.

A while back I said I’d like to see Dave do some longer, DaveNet-style posts. Today’s piece is what I had in mind. Kinda mellow, it’s the side of DW that really cares about what happens to the world, and says so with a minimum of snark.

Just after posting my last post, about how thoroughly up-to-here I’ve had it with stuff that doesn’t work, Google Reader brought me Lee’s feed, with this post.

Lee, my friend, it happens that I do have some advice:

Admit that Mrs. BetterComms is right. For technology that really works, is really mobile, is really supported, you’ll need to pay enterprise prices. I’m afraid that’s just all there is to it.

Full disclosure: I gave up on all of it while I was still on a paltry pastor’s salary, and I suppose I could now pay a bit more and might get some cocktail of ingredients that works. But, for now, here’s what I’ve settled on:

I keep my contacts (a quite large number) in a very old version of ACT!

I keep my calendar and my to-do lists on my Palm, using Palm’s basic, native applications. I don’t use Palm’s to-do list app, because I need too many different lists (they’re context-specific, a la David Allen). So they’re simply in Palm Memos.

I write notes on whatever I find, and I clear all the notes out of my wallet fairly often so they’ll get into the software.

I have to keep using:

• a linux laptop (for video editing)…
• a Vista laptop (which is my basic business machine now)…
• a Win XP laptop (because elements of my podcast rig won’t work with Vista)…
• and a Palm Z22 because I don’t need anything fancier in a PDA, and even if I bought something snazzy I know full well I’d never get its apps to work across the other platforms.

And I will absolutely not attempt to get my do-lists, contacts, and calendar all working across all these machines until I have at least US$4K and a full week to throw at the problem. And I won’t put my data online until I find Internet service that’s truly ubiquitous and fully trustworthy (I believe this is a long way off.)

I’ll be curious to see how others advise you. For now I’m happy with a non-integrated, somewhat low-tech solution.

BTW, Lee, I think you meant U3, not E3.

P.S. New additions to my list of stuff that doesn’t work:

• Enidicia electronic postage (U.S. only) doesn’t work with Vista.
• Twitter
• Jaiku (gave up on that piece of trash a month ago, should have been 5 months)
• URLtea, which went down for days last week, after I’ve sent out a lot of URLS using the service. None of those URLs worked, of course, because the whole URLtea server was MIA.