Shadow & Substance

Keyboard Key Rubik’s Cube

2011-04-01T11:34:00.001-07:00

You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Keyboard Key Rubik’s Cube

2011-04-01T11:33:00.001-07:00

via inspire.2ia.pl

You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Thorn Dice, The Most Brutal Tabletop Dice In All The Land

2011-04-01T11:28:00.001-07:00

via kotaku.com

You've never used them before.

[photo]

2011-04-01T11:18:00.001-07:00

via thisisnthappiness.com

"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." -Morpheus

via YIMMY'S YAYO™

2011-04-01T11:17:00.001-07:00

via blog.yimmyayo.com

"Everybody falls the first time." -Cypher

X-Men family tree

2011-04-01T10:56:00.001-07:00

via flowingdata.com

Crossing

2011-04-01T10:26:00.001-07:00

via neatorama.com

Saatchi Online : Portfolio

2011-03-30T11:16:00.001-07:00

via saatchionline.com

The work of an amazing artist. Click through to see more of her incredible art.

[object HTMLImageElement]

2011-03-30T11:15:00.001-07:00

via honeymoonred.tumblr.com

Olly Moss : Pokémon

2011-03-30T11:14:00.001-07:00

via geek-art.net

fuck yeah superheroes • (by Robert_Ball)

2011-03-30T11:12:00.001-07:00

via fyeahsuperheroes.tumblr.com

B.F.F. - Starring RoboCop, Batman, and a chicken sandwich

2011-03-30T08:48:00.001-07:00

via kcgreendotcom.com

One of my favorite K.C. Green comics. In case you didn't notice, I love absurdity.

Peanuts Comic Strip, August 09, 1976 on GoComics.com

2011-03-29T22:39:00.001-07:00

via gocomics.com

Suck It, Banksy: The Geeky Street Art of OakOak

2011-03-29T15:54:00.001-07:00

via comicsalliance.com

Quercus Neurox Necklace

2011-03-28T18:03:00.001-07:00

via etsy.com

Quercus Neurox Necklace in Sterling and Copper by ClockworkCrow

Biblio Tech: Curation Nation — Fall of the Machines | Epicenter

2011-03-27T11:32:00.001-07:00

“People are going to be the new keepers of the flame,” proclaims Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, a book that celebrates humans as “essential software” in today’s technology.

His Big Idea: We need quality filters for the daily data deluge that overflows from our inboxes, Twitter feeds, blog posts, Google alerts and Facebook notifications.

His Big Solution: A human-filtered web.

In the curation nation, Rosenbaum says, computerization is on its way out, and people are marching in.

“Journalists are already curators. Or at least the good ones are,” says Rosenbaum, during a chat in a noisy Times Square cafe.

The good news is that we’re curating all the time, whether we realize it or not. Every time we post a video, like a link or comment on a blog post, we are making editorial decisions and curating, says Rosenbaum. In the coming years, the major change in curation will be in how the skill is packaged and sold. And any of us can sell it.

‘Social search has replaced automated feeds. I sort of think Google will be out.’

Rosenbaum spends what might be a little too much time defining curation: We can all agree that it is humans who select and gather valuable information, based on their qualitative judgment, to organize content that is being aggregated arbitrarily.

This concept is rehashed and reinforced until I could pick out an example of curation in my sleep. A great way to get to the Everyman, but a bit gratuitous after the first five times.

But early on one gets a taste of Rosenbaum the storyteller. Each chapte is a self-contained pocket of narrative, filled with people-centric anecdotes. Stories of familiar media brands and their makers pepper the book — NBA video archives, the Huffington Post, Myspace.

The history of curation is an especially colorful chapter: The story of Reader’s Digest, the origins of Time magazine and the birth of cable TV speak to a vast, nostalgic audience. The “success story” element inspires both optimism and curiosity about the coming changes in the new world.

The lively narrative is held together by a cast of characters: author and NYU professor Clay Shirky, überblogger Robert Scoble, larger-than-life entrepreneur Jeff Pulver and researcher Andrew Blau — who Rosenbaum says is “prescient as hell.”

These voices share thoughts, advice and opinions throughout, be it about marketing consumer brands, making money from curation or shouting down the cynics. The most surprising character Rosenbaum says he encountered was digital entrepreneur and journalist Esther Dyson. “I expected her to be more on the fence, but she jumped right in,” he says.

Continue reading …

Pages: 1 2 View All

via wired.com

AKA "A Million Little Scobles."

10 Reasons to Eat ROI for Breakfast in Social Media | Social Media Today

2011-03-27T11:30:00.001-07:00

Social media is free, right? Simply sign up for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Enter some data for your profile, add a photo for your avatar, dump your email contacts and find connections and you’re set. All you have to do now is tweet, Facebook and you’ll be popular online and increase revenue 1000% because you’re “doing social media.”

Sorry folks, social media isn’t free. Yes, you can setup your social network profiles with no explicit charge. However, even with that you’re spending time doing such. Time is of our greatest asset and we all know it’s not free.

I see many business leaders frustrated they aren’t seeing any return on their investment on social media. Usually when you do the “double click” to find out why the majority of them aren’t seeing results you find they lack goals, objectives, a plan, or forecasted return on investment (ROI) of any kind.

Question: How can you expect to have results with anything in business without goals, objectives, a plan and measurements?

The only way you are going to see real results in social media is with the development of an integrated plan, objectives and goals.

For those of us who work in marketing and social media it’s time we start eating ROI for breakfast. It’s time we teach our clients, colleagues and business partners to do the same.

10 Reasons You Should be Eating ROI For Breakfast:

1. The social currency of online marketing is action. If your audience is not taking action in social media what is it all for? How do you know what action you want them to take? What will that action do for your business? If we focus on the action then we are required to have a supporting plan, goals, objectives and measurement. Ever since I first heard Brian Solis mention his thoughts around the social currency of online marketing being action, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

2. Without ROI you will not be in business or may not have a job in one or two years. If you are not producing a return on your investment including financial, time, people and any resource you are unlikely to be around in a year or two from now. We all know the state of the economy. Every dollar, hour and resource matters. Why not make it work for you and measure the result so you can improve or repeat if it’s producing a positive return?

3. Hope is not a strategy. Sorry, sending inspirational tweets to your followers or chatting about your Saturday night parties constantly and hoping your audience will eventually buy something from you isn’t going to get you there. We have received several leads the past few weeks as a result of our competitors doing such. Our new clients told us they were turned off by the lack of focus of several other agencies. They liked that we practiced what we preach and that we eat, teach and live ROI in all we do.

4. Eating ROI for breakfast means you have your pulse on the action your audience is taking. You’re working within a plan and constantly evaluating your performance against goals and objectives you have set. Social media is constantly evolving. Keeping a focus on ROI and your audience helps you keep the pulse on the ever changing ecosystem of people, technology and conversation.

5. You need to be a good ROI teacher. Your audience, business partners, colleagues, and clients should have a focus on measurable results too. Why not be a leader and teach them that hard work pays off and out beats the lazy random tweet my day away social strategy. If you’re a social media agency or consultant doing such will help you attract the clients who also want to focus on business results.

6. Tweets are cheap and easy! Because social media has the perception of being “cheap and easy” it is even more important you help your clients, partners and stakeholders understand the importance of a plan, goals, objectives and ROI! How many nights have you logged on to Facebook or Twitter to do “one small thing?” Yet you wind up spending an hour or two surfing, fixing up your Facebook business landing tab that didn’t need fixing, chatting with friends and doing a million things that are not bringing the highest ROI? Even those of us in the business fall to this. It’s even more tough for those new to social media. It’s easy to feel that you’re making progress in social media when in reality you’re not.

7. ROI requires you to look at more than number of Twitter followers and Facebook likes. It’s what happens after the Facebook like that matters. Does your new Facebook liker ever come back to visit your page? Or were they a one night, one time liker that you’ll never see again? As mentioned in #1, unless your audience is taking action you are unlikely to obtain a positive return on investment with social media. Quality of audience and engagement matters. Yes, we want to have a large following, a page full of Facebook likers. However, I’d much rather have fewer likers and followers that are engaged, having a conversation with me, interested in my content and taking action that moves my business forward. A focus on followers and “likers” only will give you a false sense of success. As a result when it comes time to balance the checkbook at month, quarter and year end you will realize those supposed friends didn’t do much for your business.

8. Hang out with 9 “brokes” and you’ll be the 10′th broke. It’s important you not fall prey to those around you who believe ROI only requires retweets, late night twitter conversations and sharing of your favorite party videos and photos on Facebook. By eating ROI for breakfast you’re going to attract those who do the same. Focus on building relationships with those who also know how to more than spell ROI. Join or start a mastermind, meetup or other group to connect with like minds if you’re currently finding fellow ROI lovers few and far between.

9. ROI eats Random Acts of Marketing (RAMs) for lunch! Eliminate the randomness from your marketing and business efforts. By focusing on ROI, an integrated plan and goals you are better able to make data driven decisions. ROI better empowers you to make the hard decisions. If you are truthful in your measurement of goals and objectives with social media it will be easier to make the tough decisions. It takes the emotion out of letting the intern go who decreased your brand equity with the late night Saturday tweet mistakenly sent from your business Twitter account. It becomes easier to cancel a campaign that isn’t delivering return. RAMs are bad, ROI is good!

10. ROI tastes good! To me there is nothing better than seeing and tasting success from the careful execution of a well laid out plan. Yes, we must be dynamic but that’s what makes it taste so good in the end. Once you taste it you’ll want more and more. As you start to see results from investing more time up front in planning and setting goals you’ll become addicted if you’re not already. You’ll wonder how you survived for so long without ROI.

Your Turn

So what are you eating for breakfast? Are you already eating ROI and seeing results? Are you ready to make ROI a main course meal? What are your clients, partners and colleagues doing? What are the tactics you have implemented to bring the highest ROI in social media and business?

via socialmediatoday.com

Biblio Tech: Curation Nation — Fall of the Machines | Epicenter

2011-03-27T11:29:00.001-07:00

“People are going to be the new keepers of the flame,” proclaims Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, a book that celebrates humans as “essential software” in today’s technology.

His Big Idea: We need quality filters for the daily data deluge that overflows from our inboxes, Twitter feeds, blog posts, Google alerts and Facebook notifications.

His Big Solution: A human-filtered web.

In the curation nation, Rosenbaum says, computerization is on its way out, and people are marching in.

“Journalists are already curators. Or at least the good ones are,” says Rosenbaum, during a chat in a noisy Times Square cafe.

The good news is that we’re curating all the time, whether we realize it or not. Every time we post a video, like a link or comment on a blog post, we are making editorial decisions and curating, says Rosenbaum. In the coming years, the major change in curation will be in how the skill is packaged and sold. And any of us can sell it.

‘Social search has replaced automated feeds. I sort of think Google will be out.’

Rosenbaum spends what might be a little too much time defining curation: We can all agree that it is humans who select and gather valuable information, based on their qualitative judgment, to organize content that is being aggregated arbitrarily.

This concept is rehashed and reinforced until I could pick out an example of curation in my sleep. A great way to get to the Everyman, but a bit gratuitous after the first five times.

But early on one gets a taste of Rosenbaum the storyteller. Each chapte is a self-contained pocket of narrative, filled with people-centric anecdotes. Stories of familiar media brands and their makers pepper the book — NBA video archives, the Huffington Post, Myspace.

The history of curation is an especially colorful chapter: The story of Reader’s Digest, the origins of Time magazine and the birth of cable TV speak to a vast, nostalgic audience. The “success story” element inspires both optimism and curiosity about the coming changes in the new world.

The lively narrative is held together by a cast of characters: author and NYU professor Clay Shirky, überblogger Robert Scoble, larger-than-life entrepreneur Jeff Pulver and researcher Andrew Blau — who Rosenbaum says is “prescient as hell.”

These voices share thoughts, advice and opinions throughout, be it about marketing consumer brands, making money from curation or shouting down the cynics. The most surprising character Rosenbaum says he encountered was digital entrepreneur and journalist Esther Dyson. “I expected her to be more on the fence, but she jumped right in,” he says.

Continue reading …

Pages: 1 2 View All

via wired.com

AKA "A Million Little Scobles."

Was the Early Universe 2 Dimensional Spacetime?

2011-03-27T11:20:00.001-07:00

An interesting hypothesis on the origin of the cosmos.

via rss.slashdot.org

goatkcd - Beauty [sfw]

2011-03-25T20:54:00.001-07:00

xkcd + goatse

A caution to those unfamiliar with goatse: Do not click through unless you want to see a gaping chasm of man butt stare at you from before your eyes. The results would be irreversible. Even though this is the "safe for work" version... it still may be too much for most viewers. Especially the elderly ones.

I had to post this today because I found it interesting from a critical perspective. This work reflects the unfolding collective ideology of the early 21st century; the mash-up culture, the slow embracing of the idea that a work of art flourishing in a post-scarcity economy would not be threatened by the free reworking and modifying of it. More on that later.

Zelda Texture Pack Minecraft Texture Pack

2011-03-25T19:24:00.001-07:00

via planetminecraft.com

Eulogy

2011-03-25T13:33:00.001-07:00

A Brief Cartoon History of Social Networking

2011-03-23T09:54:00.001-07:00

PeopleBrowsr Presents A Brief Cartoon History of Social Networking 1930-2011

View more presentations from PeopleBrowsr.

Alain de Botton - On Pessimism on Vimeo

2011-03-21T16:31:00.001-07:00

via vimeo.com

The most honest and oddly uplifting lecture I've heard in a while.

The Super Dictionary

2011-03-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

via strangevisitations.blogspot.com

via Strange Visitation