Play Pumps attach a merry go round to water pumps to put the energy of kids to great use in the developing world where clean water is a top priority. Brilliant.
TourPro got me thinking about New York’s Adirondack Mountain country where I grew up. His site is an excellent guide to that region. Then my old pal Tom, who really should write more often in his blog because he’s a great wordsmith, reminds me that Maple collection is in the spring, not fall. Funny because I’d blended the memories together, maybe simply under the category of “maple tree stuff”?
I actually remember (at least I *think* I remember) picture perfect scenes like this from the woods a short drive out of Plattsburgh, NY. Image is from Dale’s Ponies Gallery:
The more newfangled approach lacks the romance, but probably pulls a lot more sap out of the trees.Maple trees with the bucket system seem to use the difference between the pressure in and out of the tree via the tree’s transpiration system. Hey, DOW makes the filters for this gadget. Why don’t the put THAT fact in their ad campaign with a few horses and maple sap buckets and sugar shacks and I wouldn’t be reminding people of their sordid chemical past.
The DOW Chemical TV and internet ad campaign about “The Human Element” always strikes me as odd, though I think in some ways fits with my Dad’s excellent notion that advertising often talks about a company’s weaknesses as if they were strengths. Using people and faces in an attempt to get across the point that DOW is about people, not chemicals and technology, backfires for me and gets me wondering “what are they trying to hide here?”.
Maybe it’s a generational thing as I always make the Vietnam era “Dow = napalm” reference which in turn leads to the world famous photo of a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm.
DOW can hardly lay much claim to moral, people focused “high ground” but I also don’t buy into the narrow vision of corporations as heartless. Somewhat like people, a corporation is a curious blend of innovation, competition, selfishness, profiteering, good will and more. I believe corporations are as much a reflection of the forces that built that particular company (the “corporate culture”) than subject to standard rule sets. This suggests that DOW may be a bit off with their version of the old Coca Cola campaign about the world singing together. In fact it kinds of creeps me out like the people in invasion of the body snatchers – is anybody even SMILING in those commercials?
Generally, spinach is a great food choice. So far I think 2 have died and about 140 become sick from the e-coli bagged spinach. Based on news coverage you’d think it had killed 2000 people. Assuming that the exaggeration of the spinach risk leads to less consumption and a health *cost* associate with that, I bet the spinach scare will kill more people than tainted spinach when you factor in the (very slight) increase in illness associated with eating less vegetables.
What’s for dinner?
TripAdvisor’s top ten fall destinations are:
1.Munich, Germany
2. Napa Valley, Calif.
3. Montreal, Quebec
4. Asheville, N.C.
5. Woodstock, Vt.
6. Vancouver, Canada
7. Lake Placid, N.Y.
8. Camden, Maine
9. Mystic, Conn.
10. Aberdeen, Scotland
It seems like a funny list to me. The Fall color of USA is well represented at Woodstock, Lake Placid, and Camden and a trip to the Northeast USA in fall is impossible to beat for spectacular foliage IF your timing is lucky. Mystic and Napa are charming and Montreal and Vancouver are very cool places. Haven’t been to Asheville but I’m sure it’s nice. Munich an obvious choice for Octoberfest. Not sure about Aberdeen.
But as long as they’ve decided to include the entire world it seems like a reasonable person is going to pick London, Paris, Rome, Prague, a city in China or Japan, etc, etc over, say Asheville or Mystic or Lake Placid.
I think these silly lists tell you more about the person composing them than travel.
I think it’ll take a few years for regular folks to figure out ways to measure the value of their content and for many to even understand the value of what they give away to many sites for free.
User content contributions to Facebook, travel sites, myspace, Google, Yahoo, and many many more make up what I think is an increasing share of the total value of all web info. When people understand this it may – it certainly should – change the internet landscape and hopefully shift more control from big companies to regular users. It also may increasingly commercialize the landscape, which is probably not a good thing though the world has never seen a very democratic and global commercialized landscape controlled by any old mom or pop who sticks up a site. It’ll be interesting to say the least.
To one extent this has already begun with Google adsense allowing publishers to share in revenues, but note that Google itself is built on the backbone of billions of web pages they didn’t have to create.
Most of their money comes from people using Google to search *other peoples stuff*. When will Yahoo or Microsoft wake up to the fact that people will abandon Google search quickly for a variety of reasons including inferior quality, change in habit, inconvenience (Vista Search!?), or payment to use alternatives (cha-ching!). Seems to me that Ask is doing a better job of changing habits than Yahoo or MSN though I haven’t checked the market share numbers to see if ASK’s massive ad campaign is working.
The current thinking by most Web 2.0 sites is that if you create a high traffic community site you’ve got it made, and that has certainly been true with Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many more. However users may soon start to realize that the content is more valuable than the consolidation of that content.
You might suggest that Adsense recognizes this since it a pays publishers about 70% of the ad click revenue from their sites. However this does not factor in that the collective site content around the world, indexed by Google et al, is the big money ticket. Google shares none of the revenue they get when somebody clicks on ads presented after a search at Google even though they’d have nothing to show if, say, the collective internet world did what the news agencies are starting to do – challenge Google’s right to present their content.
John Battelle’s Federated Media understands this and is providing mechanisms to better monetize high value content.
However it’s the low brow stuff that brings the big money and I wonder how long before banners above sites will read “Webbers of the World Unite!”
I just sent this off to Senator Smith. Here in Oregon we have excellent representation from Senators Smith (R) and Wyden (D). Both are bright, ethical guys with a global vision. This letter is about the reckless spending and the ill-concieved idea that terrorists should be treated with techniques that most of the world views as torture. Maybe they should, but both our current terror spending and terrorist interrogation practices appear to be counterproductive.
Dear Senator Smith,
First, thank you for your excellent efforts on behalf of our wonderful state. I want to express my opinion on two items related to the war on terror:
* The President is wrong about treatment of terrorists. They *deserve* death in most cases and he’s right we may have a right to harsh interrogations, but world opinion and the opinions of Sen. McCain and Powell should be respected by the President as we face even more global condemnation. We are not an imperial power but we are seen as such because the President has such poor sense of marketing and presentation. He’s leaving a legacy of mistrust and global condemnation we’ll feel for an entire generation, and you must stop this at the Senate level and stop it now.
* ROI is far too low and spending should decrease immediately and dramatically. All scenarios involve risk and we need to absorb more risk to save trillions over the next decade, trillions that can save millions of lives using high ROI means.
You (we) are spending at levels that cannot be sustained, and this “war”‘ will go on for decades. It’s not even clear the current spending has a positive ROI. I think the neoconservative mindset is “stuck” on the idea that the potential threat of a major attack justifies virtually all available resources. This is not true. The EPA and DOT make this type of decision all the time, and appropriately place monetary values on human lives of approximately 5 million per life saved, to justify spending on safety measures. This type of equation should also be used to determine spending on terrorism threats but I get the idea it is not.
Laurie David, Global warming crusader, is very right to challenge professors that take corporate contributions. Her Huffington Post post entitled A Conflict of Interest in the Halls of Academia suggests that taking money from companies that benefit from weaker environmental regulations may bias the science. Good point, and worth follow up.
But she fails to point out a similar problem, but also one that should be of great concern to the clear minded. This is the fact that grant funding from the US Government may also have political strings attached. They are not as direct but funding does relate to the emphasis, direction, and scale of research.
It’s obvious (and appropriate) that big money grants for research on potentially catastrophic things is far more likely to go through, than, say, a grant to fund research into the basket weaving habits of pliocene hominids.
This is hugely important because bias can easily creep into this equation in the form of exaggerating the peril of the topic under scrutiny – not so much in the peer reviewed studies which are subjected to close methodological scrutiny – but in the quotes of scientists and the lack of concern by scientists when the popular press spouts alarmist nonsense about their research often interpreting anecdotal observations associated with the science or reviews of the science by non-scientists as part of the research.
I’m actually looking for a way to test this hypothesis scientifically. Something along the lines of “scientists describe their own research topics as more life threatening than their own research suggests.”
Common sense suggests it is going on around us all the time, especially now with the dramatic difference between the actual science aboout Global Warming that suggests it’s a bad thing but unlikely to be catastrophic versus the popular alarmist concerns that suggest the tipping point is here and planetary peril is paramount.
If planetary health is at the top of your agenda the answer to the clear minded is obvious:
* Invest our tax money and time heavily in current catastrophic things like Malaria, AIDs, and Poverty. This type of work clearly has the highest ROI by any reasonable human measure.
* Decrease massive military spending in favor of infrastructure spending here and in developing nations and invest heavily in marketing the USA as helping and not crusading.
* Invest in Global warming remediation schemes that have a high ROI but don’t buy into all the catastrophe mongering going on. It’s deflecting attention from actual catastrophic conditions we affluent type first world people tend to simply … ignore.
I’m slowly working on creating some travel related mashups and Yahoo keeps coming up with better and better mapping tools and tools to add travel information to any website. Even restaurants with reviews. Flickr makes it a snap to add pictures to blogs or websites as well as manipulate your own photos. I pointed out how great the Flickr features were to some Picasa developers at Google last month and asked about Picasa integration with websites. They sheepishly replied they were working on it, but I wish my pal Jeremy could have heard that conversation and gloated a bit, because Yahoo’s still not getting anything like the credit they deserve for fully embracing the new web and easily beating Google by most measures in API development.
Google employees do embrace the principles of the new web, but I’m increasingly skeptical that Google can fully promote the openness of the new web and maintain the huge profits they now enjoy. Increasingly profit protection will collide head-on with the old spirit of openness and innovation, and compromises will be made.
The Yahoo 2.0 enabling tools are great stuff and unless I’m really missing comparable things going on at Google, MSN, ASK, and other big players out there it is clearly Yahoo where the really good enabling development has been going on for some time. Yahoo Hack Day is coming soon and they are inviting developers to hang out and camp out down there for hacking and mashing. Open, fun, and free. Neat.
I just hope all this good stuff translates into better press and success. Go Yahoo go.
Biological evolution is a complex process with simple underyling truths. Perhaps the most profound of those evolutionary truths is that evolution works AWAY from failure rather than towards success.
Thus you don’t have ‘pinnacles’ of evolutionary success represented by super great creatures , rather you have change branching out in many directions, with success best defined in terms of how well a creature manages to adapt to an environmental niche. For every successful creature there are many who died, failing to adapt successfully to the conditions of a niche, or failing to adapt *as well* as a competing creature who then scarfed up the niche’s available resources leaving the less well adapted ones out to dry, and often to die.
What if we apply this notion of succcess and adaptation to the rapidly evolving Web 2.0 business community? In that realm of business innovation millions of ideas become thousands of “good” ideas and then hundreds of ‘great ideas’ that do a great job of exploiting circumstances.
In this business evolution “survival of fittest” becomes survival of the the profit-est, though it may still be too early to define “success” in terms of profits since many highly innovative companies have not shown anybody the money, rather it’s assumed that their huge traffic and community support will eventually yield high profits. (A risky but reasonable assumption).
More importantly if evolutionary principles are applicable to business processes it means that we’ll see a LOT more failures than successes, and we may have trouble predicting the winners until the game is over and they’ve already won.
Rather than a product of elaborate, complex planning and innovative think tank thinking we may see that success crops up in unusual and unpredictable spaces where it is not careful plans and execution that work, rather trial and error and failure and adaptation that rule the day and lead to the survival of the profit-est companies.
Joe Duck 