Hey folks– as you may have noticed, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus recently. That’s primarily the result of not staying in the same state for more than a few days over the past two weeks…my travel schedule continues to be hectic, but with Jarred pursuing his manifest destiny out West, I’ll try to keep the blog fresh this week.
I’m way behind the blogosphere, but here are a few links to kick things off on Monday morning…nothing about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac because, let’s be honest, we don’t actually know what those entities are supposed to do:
- For those who are interested, here’s the Harvard Business Review post-mortem on Starbucks’ troubles. Hint: it’s exactly what you think, namely too many stores and trying to sell too much crap that had nothing to do with coffee (like John Mayer).
eBay disintermediated shopping. Napster initially did the same for music and Wikipedia for information [...] What paradigm shifting changes has the Internet brought to the slowest sector of them all, the philanthropic sector? The answer might be online giving markets.
These organizations can be loosely defined as web-based, informational and transactional platforms that help donors and volunteers more easily identify and then contribute to or volunteer at high performing nonprofits, social projects or needy individuals. They empower pre-vetted organizations to access a wide and diverse base of primarily individual contributors and volunteers.
[...] The fact that it is taking the philanthropic sector a decade longer than the private sector to identify and support this inevitable and emergent trend is quite disheartening and one of the main reasons why the smartest and brightest young professionals leave the sector (let’s not only blame salaries) [...]
[Y]ou knew it, but…in case you needed more proof: “A direct comparison of drinking water from the tap with unrefrigerated bottled water shows an environmental impact of tap water which is less than one percent of that of bottled water. Even when refrigerated and carbonated, the environmental impact of tap water is approximately only one fourth of that of bottled water.
- Did anyone get a new iPhone? If so, did you also get a date?
- Finally, I told you all that I decided to give Jarred a Something from the Something Store for his birthday. Knowing Jarred as well as the magic elves at the Something Store do, they sent him skeet shooting glasses (true story: a sticker on the lenses says “great for night driving!”). As my gift to you, here’s photo evidence:
I’m not so sure I’ll live up to the standard set by Taylor with the Monday Links, but here’s my best shot. My feeds are a little tech (and Google) heavy, so this will help us appreciate just how great a job he does at providing variety.
- There’s a privacy stir going on in some recent rulings in the Viacom v. YouTube litigation. I wouldn’t be too worried, there’s no way that all that information is getting handed over.
- In other Google news, check out the first international implementation of Street View by scoping out this year’s Tour de France route.
- People are already lining up a week in advance of the iPhone 3G launch. Yikes.
- Engadget reports that a future version of the Prius will have solar-powered air conditioning. I’m looking to buy a Prius with my forthcoming Google hybrid subsidy… too bad this version hasn’t even been prototyped yet.
- This makes me sad. Some dude was trying to sell his vote on Ebay? Come on, bro. Don’t whore out your rights for money.
- The NYT has an interesting piece on how a Facebook co-founder revolutionized the way campaigns are organized online through his creative leadership with the Obama campaign’s social network, MyBo.
- Ponoko (which we covered here) is holding a 10-day design challenge July 1-10. $1,000 cash and free production and product advertisement are at stake. Go get it.
- “Is e-mail in danger?”, Alex at ReadWriteWeb asks, in the face of competition posed by Twitter and the like. I don’t think so.
Be on the lookout for more from Eric this week, as well as the first installment in my series chronicling the personal changes I’m facing with my move to California.
Before I launch into this week’s links, I have the pleasure to announce a new contributor to our site! Eric will be joining our ranks this week with what we hope will be the first of regular contributions. Eric spends his workday in the venture finance world, but his passions run the gamut from obscure pop culture trivia to Czech food and beer. We’re really pleased to welcome Eric to Tropophilia, and we know you’ll enjoy his posts. Here are your links:
A reporter covering, say, baseball doesn’t have to define a home run in every article, but a reporter covering climate almost always has to remind readers what greenhouse gases are [...]
Buzzwords like “inconvenient truth”, “green”, “clean coal”, and “tipping point” can be misapplied and abused, rendering readers cynical and numb to actual news.
It’s a good piece and worth thinking about.
- The Democratic National Convention in Denver this August will feature an incredible blogger palace called The Big Tent, thanks to help from Google, Digg, and YouTube. Sounds awesome [emphasis on drunken bloggers is mine]:
We’re creating a 9,000 square foot, two-story structure that will house the work space for journalists, bloggers and new media, a Digg Stage with prominent national leaders, as well as a Google Retreat with a YouTube kiosk where you can make your own YouTube videos. [...]
In the New Media Lounge, your pass will be a ticket to to enjoy all the benefits of the blogger / new media lounge, including free WiFi, work space, television-coverage, as well as free food and drinks. [...]
The Big Tent will host sponsored happy hours each day from 4 to 5, followed by live coverage of every minute of the Democratic National Convention until 9 p.m. each night. When the Convention ends each day, the Big Tent will still be going with late-night entertainment, including concerts and films.
- Here’s a brilliant ad campaign: wrap a sample of laundry detergent in a plain white t-shirt; let the postal service stamp directly onto the shirt, and let it absorb dirt along the mail route; then, instruct the mail recipient to simply wash the shirt with the detergent to remove all the stains from the journey. Final step [unconfirmed]: sell an enormous amount of detergent.
- I saw WALL-E on Friday night, and I’m obsessed. What a great movie. It received a stunning 93% on metacritic…need I say more? As you might expect, a movie about a solar-powered robot received a great deal of praise in the blogosphere.
I’ve been traveling since early last week (hence the lack of posts), so I’m a bit behind on my reading. In any case, here are a few things that have caught my eye:
- LifeHacker highlights a program for which, as a 5-13 year-old, I would have happily sacrificed my entire GI Joe collection: Lego Digital Designer, “a virtual Lego kit for your Windows or Mac desktop [...] Once you’ve built the perfect prototype, you can upload the results to the Lego web site to order a custom kit with every brick you’ll need included!” Just a decade too late…
- I found this story from TreeHugger fascinating: the recent foreclosure crisis has left a number of pools on foreclosed properties in California and elsewhere untended and…well…perfect for mosquitos. In an effort to combat disease-spreading mosquitos, the state of California is spotting green pools from the air and filling them with tiny fish that have been nicknamed the “foreclosure fish.” This would seem like a reasonable solution, except…
[T]hese fish (Gambusia species) are native to streams around the Gulf of Mexico. Outside their ancestral waters, they wreak havoc with local wildlife.
[According to one scientist,] “In California they have decimated native species - yet civic authorities will give you a bag of them free if you have a mosquito problem. It may not seem risky putting them in a plastic and concrete pool, but the fish are champion escape artists, and can travel in as little as three millimeters of water.”
Sounds like another cane toad situation…
- Wordle is a cool new tool that creates a visual representation of frequently-repeated words in huge chunks of text. I decided to try it out using the longest document I could immediately access: my senior thesis, “From Blogs to the Ballot Box: Online Campaigning in 2006 U.S. Senate Races.” Check it out:
- If you’re a creative type and you’re looking for a little bit (emphasis on little) of money on the side, check out NameThis. It’s a crowd-sourced platform where people with business ideas, websites, blogs, etc ask for suggestions to name their creation, and winning suggestions get cash money. Given my awful track record with band names (I kid you not, I was in bands called Poultry in Motion, Jamaican Lemonade, and Icebreaker…these were all my ideas) and the struggle Jarred and I went through to name this site (word to the wise: inventing words is a good strategy), I don’t think this is my cup of tea. but best of luck!
- The next item has been floating around the web for a while, but if you haven’t checked out this mock-up of what Google News might look like on a day of miraculously good news, it’s a nice reality check.
- I made my own variation on these Southwestern Turkey Burgers tonight and they were del.icio.us. The internet is the greatest cookbook I know.
That’s all for now. We really will be posting this week. I hope.
Holy Moly, it must be Jarred’s birthday.
Be sure to check out the latest entries in our Bomomo contest. We’ve gotten some great submissions; maybe later this week we’ll fire up a poll to determine a winner. How about a few links to start the week off right:
- I’ve started casually following an oceans and fisheries conservation blog called blogfish. Recently, the blogfish bloggers pointed out this fascinating account of the New England Aquarium’s latest collection trip to the Bahamas. I now know how aquariums get their fish, and you can too. Random, but fascinating stuff. Come on, check it out (lots of gorgeous tropical fish!).
- Not to get too political, but being the “change lovers” that we are, I think we’re entitled to post an Obama speech every once in a while. From his Father’s Day remarks at a church in Chicago (via Ezra Klein):
Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more afterschool programs for our children. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities.
But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child – it’s the courage to raise one.
- Sam points out an important pending case related to internet privacy. You may remember hearing this tragic and twisted story a few months ago; this is the case where a 14 year old commits suicide after receiving devastating messages from a “boy” on MySpace who turns out to be one of her classmates’ mother. This piece helps emphasizes why, despite the horrible circumstances, precedent in this case could (negatively) impact life on the web:
How many of you have lied about who you are online? How many have fudged the numbers on how old you are? Be honest, your MySpace profile says your 103 years-old, doesn’t it? How about creating fake email addresses so you have a place to direct annoying SPAM emails you’d be otherwise inundated with should you be forced to cough up your genuine email domain? Imagine that each time you lied to a computer, you committed a felony
- I haven’t written about algae in a while (don’t worry, I’m still an algae fanboy), but one company (Solazyme) leading the way on algae biodiesel recently met US standards for auto-ready fuel. Exciting stuff, although a commercial roll-out is still distant.
- I couldn’t figure out what to give Jarred for his birthday (read: I am a lame friend), so I opted for a little somethin’ somethin’ from…The Something Store. I even decided to give it a shot myself. We’ll report back this week with what our respective “somethings” turned out to be (fingers crossed for a Kindle; realistic expectation is a flash drive).
That’s all for now–more stuff later this week, including “50 things Jarred looks forward to doing after the LSAT.”
Recent Comments