This is my weekly roundup of the best links I’ve shared on the New Comm Biz Lite Tumblr site. All of those links show up on Facebook, Twitter and in the stream to the left hand side of the blog here. But they don’t show up in the RSS feed and with so many links, you may miss something of interest. So ever Sunday I’m posting my favorite 10 links. If you want to know more abouthow I’m now using Tumblr you can see this post.
1 - Pinterest as Free Market Research
Categories are interesting to anthropologists. They are the “buckets” into which we organize the world. More exactly, they are the buckets with which we read the world. We have a bucket called “bird.” Inside that is a bucket called “Robin.” As spring approaches, we see winged creatures on our lawn and the buckets leap to the ready. Robin! Bird! Spring! This is culture in action.
From this point of view, Pinterest is a treasure. It’s a chance to see American culture as if from a glass-bottom boat. Yes, some of it is a little reductive. But sometimes what people stuff into the categories is a chance for us to see exactly what they mean. Pinterest is a little Rosetta Stone, a table of equivalencies. Oh, so that’s what YOU mean by home. Here’s what I mean. In a culture that flowers with an increasingly diverse variety, this is useful.
2 - You don’t need a job. You need a gig, and a network.
When I was a fresh-faced young man, I went out into the world to find a job. Over the course of a couple years trying to break into advertising, I was a door-to-door salesman, then a bouncer, and eventually a bartender. Each of these was a job to pay the bills, en route to a career, which I hoped…
Wise words. I’ve made the most professional progress in my life when I quit trying to get ahead and instead focused on doing something really cool.
3 - How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google’s New Privacy Policy Takes Effect
I find it interesting that I’m wondering if I should do this or not. I believe there are benefits to Web services knowing more about me because (in theory) they can give me a better, more targeted experience, either through results or recommendations or even ads. But so far, the benefits of this have been questionable. I’m not sure I’m seeing much benefit from being open and free with my information. But, then again, I have nothing to hide so it doesn’t bother who knows what about me.
4 - Why This Nigerian Movie Mogul Ditched YouTube
This is a great example of why I’m so excited about African entrepreneurs and highlights the challenges they still have ahead being taken seriously and expanding globally. They’ll do it though.
A great read.
5 - Stop Email Overload
I have learned one simple rule: The more email you send, the more you receive.
I’m finally getting around to reading, my friend, William Herling’s book Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears and it’s uncanny how he moves from an email feature to artificial intelligence and how you keep wondering why the characters are so reliant on email, until you realize you’re just as bad.
6 - The challenges of Remote Workers: Reward Value, Not Face Time
I think you either need a team that’s setup for remote workers and has multiple members (if not most or all) that work remote. If not the few (or worse one) who works remote get’s left out. There’s too much office chatter that happens that people miss when they’re not there.
And sadly when it comes time to make cuts it’s easier to cut the person you don’t have to look at everyday. I’ve seen this one happen a few times, even when the remote worker was the better performer.
7 - How to Turn an Obstacle into an Asset
Great article. At work, our founders have driven into us that we don’t talk about challenges as problems, we talk about them as opportunities.
8 - Why They Almost Killed Angry Birds Before It Was Released.
Sometimes the only difference between genius and idiocy is luck.
9 - Thanks to consumerization, it’s IPO season in analytics
Data analytics, consumerization and visualization have been three of my favorite trends for the last two years. I’m excited to see great companies like Tableau doing so well.
10 - KLM offers seat assignments based on social profiles.
This is really cool. But how cool would it be if there was an algorithm that automatically matched passengers based on their interests.
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