Enjoy!

This is the first collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne in over 20 years and I’m very excited to hear what they come up with.  Byrne’s been outstanding lately, but any new shock to his system is a good thing for the music that he produces.

I’m also pleased to see Byrne’s acting on the new distribution opportunities for artists that he discussed with Thom Yorke of Radiohead.  Check out the variety of delivery options, formats and that the $70 option gets you additional songs, a cool box, etc. delivering more value from the same creation at a higher price point.  Oh and he’s in Boston on Halloween.  Hope that I can be there.

• Collection: Digital changes everything - Flickr collections with the theme of how the world / daily life is changing, thanks to the spread of digital technologies (among other factors).
• On Language - Namaste - Definitions, roots and sources of terms in Yoga.
• Fwix | Local - Local online activity stream from YouTube, Twitter, Craigslist, Technorati, etc.
• The Smart-Phone Attitude - Watching the passers-by holding their smart phones in front of them as they walked was like watching a parade of monks with heads bowed over their breviaries. As night settled in, I could see the glow of the screens shining upward on the faces of their owners, who were being guided down the street by peripheral vision and the feel of the sidewalk under their feet.
• Postalicious - Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that automatically posts your delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes bookmarks to your blog. The exact details of how your bookmarks are posted is very customizable and is designed to meet your specific needs.

Butin  Korea Phelps was certainly not the most discussed olympian, he was just the famous American who edged out Park Tae-Hwan in the 200m freestyle.  Park Tae-Hwan who won the first swimming medal for South Korea when he got the gold in the 400m freestyle was everywhere in Korea last week and promises to be for quite awhile. If I’ve seen his winning race once I’ve seen it 1,000 times because it was everywhere.  In restaurants, department stores, convenience stores, in cabs, on the subway, on cell phones.  Koreans love their TV and were so proud of Park Tae-Hwan that he was everywhere.

The olympic experience in general was very different in Korea than here in the states.  While the USA feasted on Phelps I saw none of that (except the 200m where he was the background to Park’s effort). But I did see lots of sports that I rarely do such as judo, handball, women’s archery (the bronze medal match between Yun Ok-Hee of South Korean and Kwon Un Sil of North Korea made for a riviting cab ride one afternoon), men’s archery, handball and badminton.

Whether Koreans are just as nationalistic in their Olympic coverage as Americans is not my point.  Koreans are just interested in different aspects of the Olympics than Americans are and were I not there to witness it I probably wouldn’t have known about it.  And that has to be kept in mind for all marketing.  Patients are interested in different aspects of a new therapy than doctors are.  Parents have different concerns about a disease state than their affected children.  Consumers want different informations about a product than the company selling it.  Different audiences have different interests and it is harder than you think to know what those interests are until you have spent some time getting to know each audience through research.  It’s critical.  Without it you are broadcasting the modern pentathlon in Korea and they really just don’t care….

Except for all of us who were at the Seoul Olympic Parktel last week when the Canadian’s, Portuguese, Brazilians, and Germans were staying there and training.  Best of luck to you all!

1. Input your Twitter feed, username and password into FreeMyFeed and get your new feed
2. Subscribe to that feed in Google Reader
3. Remove your old Twitter Feed from your Google Reader Lifestream folder and add the new FreeMyFeed feed to that folder
4. Sit back and watch your tweets update in your Lifestream again

It’s working for me.  Enjoy.

Enhancements/ Changes:

My version of the SimpleLife plugin is based on Db0’s, which means that all of his enhancements from Kieran Delaney’s version are included. The key changes that I’ve made are:

• Addition of 6 extra feeds for a total of 9
• Addition of built in support for feeds from Yelp, YouTube Favorites, Google Reader Shared Items, Pandora Favorite Artists and Songs, Plaxo Pulse, 2 Amazon Wishlists, Tumblr and StumbleUpon
• Implementation of Db0’s Google Reader Lifestream Archive and a modified version of his Google Reader Comment Tracking concept that supports and formats feeds from Twitter, Del.icio.us, Netflix, coComment, Disqus and Intense Debate
• Implementation of Db0’s concept for showing the number of items and length of time in the lifestream
• Commented out the charts of recent activity - they just didn’t seem useful to me, but it’s there if you want to use them and my additions should show up in them
• Addition of tons of additional favicons for streaming services so you don’t need to add them yourself, whatever you want is probably now included

Notes

Just a few things that you’ll probably want to know if you use the plugin.

• Just like Db0’s version you’ll need to install the SimplePie plugin to get it to work and must be running PHP5
• To get formatting of Del.icio.us and Twitter items to work through the Google Reader Lifestream feed, you’ll have to use a dummy feed url or user name in the standard input fields and then add the formatting that you want. This will make sense from the SimpleLife Options page in the Settings tab
• Amazon Wishlist tracking only works in the US, you’ll need to modify it for use in the UK
• In order to get your Google Reader Shared Items to show up formatted properly you’ll need to edit the plugin and enter your Google Reader ID in line 1219, this is where he plugin is checking each item for conditions, you’ll see the spot

That’s about it. Enjoy!

• I’m beta testing Viigo’s Tango release and am very happy with it so far. There are a few key parts of the program that are missing, both functionality that isn’t live yet and some old features that seem to have been left out, but overall this is a great upgrade. More details later.
• There’s a generation gap of sorts when it comes to social networking and web 2.0. While over 50% of adults regularly use text messaging, blogging or social networking to stay in touch, boomers are sticking with email to communicate with friends and family.
  
• It looks like travel is going to be a big part of my summer, but I forgot my BlackBerry charger when I was in San Francisco earlier this week. At the airport I picked up a PowerUp EarHugger which was a godsend. It will charge my BlackBerry from a standard outlet, a car’s lighter, USB, and a 9 volt battery. Damn, that’s some kind of useful!
• Thank you San Francisco International Airport for your little work pods by the United gates. In about an hour before my flight I cranked out a serious amount of email and dealt with client issues thanks to a real chair a little desk place space, an outlet and T-mobile access making my travel home more relaxed and less of a burden on my co-workers.
• Being on the first Google Search Engine Results Page is more important than ever. Jupiter Research is showing that the number of users who only view the top 3 results is now up over 25% and about 41% only look at the first page. To put that in context in 2002 only about 32% stopped at the first page of results. Are we getting better at searching with longer, more defined queries? Are we more likely to blame ourselves when the results are not what we expect and do a second search? Whatever the reason clearly SEO is critical as is a wide variety of media in order to capture a greater amount of SERP shelf space with universal search.
• Google’s has a 61% share of mobile search, which is roughly the same as their share online too. That despite the hordes of traffic from the iPhone and a nice set of utilities for the BlackBerry. Frankly it makes you wonder why it isn’t higher.
• Then again the hype about the iPhone seems over done considering that it’s market share is dropping while BlackBerry’s is rising. That BlackBerry users continue to increase is no surprise with IT departments scooping them up by the barrelfull for corporate employees, but Palm’s share is rising too? Hmmmm.
• I know that Comcast is supposedly running a bandwidth throttling test in Warrenton, VA, Chambersburg, PA and possibly Colorado Springs, CO, but I swear that I see it at home when FTPing 20MB+files at home. Come on Comcast do you really want me to switch over to Verizon that badly?
• I’m one of the 16% of the working world who is hyper-connected, but then again all online marketing professionals either are or should be. If yours isn’t, wonder to yourself why they aren’t trying new things and looking in new directions. If they are ask them how they stay grounded with your audience who isn’t.

There’s more of this to come, but in the interest of actually posting something for a change I’ll save that for later this week.

Play live chess with people from all over the world and get your learn on.

But in all seriousness with them donating “a large part of revenue” to the Hip-Hop Chess Federation, which seems like a pretty cool organization. Sounds cool.