Clippings

Seth Godin's blog added to our links

Mornings don't feel quite right to me unless I check in with Seth Godin. He provides regular, insightful blog posts that always get me thinking and usually find me agreeing. I think he was right on the mark this morning and entertaining as well with this post about Powerpoint and bullets.

The US Army reports that misuse of Powerpoint (in other words, using Powerpoint the way most people use it, the way it was designed to be used) is a huge issue.

I first wrote a popular short free ebook about this seven years ago and the problem hasn't gone away. So much for the power of the idea.

Here's the problem:

  • Bullets appear to be precise
    • They define the scope of the issue, even if they are wrong
    • They are definitive, even if they aren't
  • Bullets that are read from the screen go in one ear and out the other
  • Bullets are used as a defensive measure
    • see, I told you this in the meeting on 12.3.08
  • Bullets are unemotional and sterile
  • The lizard brain causes us to make presentations that are too long so that nothing in particular gets commented on or remembered or criticized
  • It is harder to interrupt and have a conversation with someone who has a clicker

See what I mean?

If there was any other tool as widely misused in your organization, you'd ban it. The cost is enormous in lost opportunity and lost time. Guns don't kill people, bullets do.

via sethgodin.typepad.com
And not long after I had seen the post I got a message from District Governor Lesko saying that this would be a pretty good post for the whole District to see. It wasn't the first time John had made his appreciation of Seth's writing known to me. In fact he wrote about yesterday's post, titled The Paralysis of Unlimited Opportunity

There aren't just a few options open to you, there are thousands (or more).

You can spend your marketing money in more ways than ever, live in more places while still working electronically, contact different people, launch different initiatives, hire different freelancers... You can post your ideas in dozens of ways, interact with millions of people, launch any sort of product or service without a permit or factory.

Too many choices.

If it's thrilling to imagine the wide open spaces, go for it.

If it's slowing you down and keeping you up at night, consider artificially limiting your choices. Don't get on planes. Don't do spec work. Don't work for jerks. Work on paper, not on film. Work on film, not on video. Don't work weekends.

Whatever rule you want...

But no matter what, don't do nothing.

John added "I'm always amazed and overjoyed when people do what they say they'll do. I'm down right tickled when folks accomplish 50-percent of their club DCP goals (that makes them distinguished if there's a net gain of 5 members over the club's base)."

So, I've added a link to Seth's posts in the blogroll here so you can check his blog on your own. But don't be surprised if you see him mentioned here again.

Spammers Paying Others to Solve Captchas

MUMBAI, India — Faced with stricter Internet security measures, some spammers have begun borrowing a page from corporate America’s playbook: they are outsourcing.

Sophisticated spammers are paying people in India, Bangladesh, China and other developing countries to tackle the simple tests known as captchas, which ask Web users to type in a string of semiobscured characters to prove they are human beings and not spam-generating robots.

The going rate for the work ranges from 80 cents to $1.20 for each 1,000 deciphered boxes, according to online exchanges like Freelancer.com, where dozens of such projects are bid on every week.

via nytimes.com

It figures.

How Twitter is Different from Facebook: One user's take

Now, I was also an early adopter of Facebook, and that has its uses, but to my mind what it’s missing is that nonlinear experience that Twitter encourages. I have 220 “Friends” on Facebook and they are 99% people I’ve actually met in real life. Family, classmates, former and current colleagues, etc. And I can share my pictures of my kids and I already know them, and they already know me, and where do you go with that? Even outside of family, I’ve known some of them for 35 years – and no offense – but as nice as they are and as much as they may have in common with me, they’re not that likely to surprise me or introduce me to new things or ideas. Often times, I may only have shared an experience with them – same school, same job, etc.

Whereas on Twitter I currently have almost 200 followers and am following around 300 people and only about 5% of them are people I’ve actually met and generally I’ve got no shared common experiences. However, the people I interact with there have introduced me to new things, new viewpoints, and other people that I share things in common with.Part of that is that while we may not have shared common experiences, I’ve found that there are experiences we have in common, e.g. Star Wars being a pivotal film, eating bacon being a transcendental experience, being confused by the latest episode of Lost, etc. and when we talk about them, it becomes a shared experience in a way.

I’m not saying one approach is better than another, but what I can say is that as my tweeting has increased, my time on Facebook has greatly diminshed. When I go back to Facebook now, it seems somehow dated and AOL-ish (not exactly surprising considering how my mother is on it *waves* Hi Mom!) . We used to call AOL “the Internet with training wheels” and to me at least, Facebook is “Social Networking with training wheels.” Even after hiding Farmville and Mafia Wars and what ever other app is clogging my feed at the moment, it doesn’t feel quite real.

Twitter, in comparison, feels more sincere in some way. Perhaps its the distillation of people’s thoughts in 140 characters, perhaps it’s a different style of user – whatever the case, there’s an immediacy and authenticity to what I read on Twitter that seems to be lacking from many other online interactions.

via jasonbyrne.wordpress.com

And I agree...