The Last Lecture
Sad to read on landing in San Francisco that Randy Pausch died today. If you only had a matter of months to live, this would be the way to live it. He made a difference.
The Message Men
Good read in the WSJ on the “Message Men” surrounding McCain:
Some of Mr. Schmidt’s campaign changes are easily visible: Sen. McCain now speaks in the round, surrounded by voters, not staid backdrops like in the June 3 event, when an ugly green banner got unwanted attention. But most critical has been shaping a clear, concise message to hammer each day.
Above all, Mr. Schmidt argues that a campaign needs one positive message about its own candidate, and one negative message about the opponent. Sen. Obama has that: He’s for change, while Sen. McCain represents more of the same. Sen. McCain long didn’t have a strong, simple message of his own.
Intriguing that they are the Message Men – a frame imposed by the WSJ and not a label applied by McCain. But just the same, speaks the the diversity of the inner circle.
Either way, he’s got some pretty solid views on messaging.
I Believe In Open
And standards. And the ability of both to fuel communities and commerce. Which is precisely why I don’t own an iPhone – and won’t. TechCrunch gets at this…
Geeks and enthusiasts wearing WordPress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.
I am referring to the new iPhone – and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build ‘native’ applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad – and it wasn’t even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.
Wordle Fun
Kind of fun way of visualizing a feed. Here is the feed from Ideastorm visualized – you can seem big themes and words coming through. Not sure what the source of the words was to generate prominence.
