Ben Casnocha Over the past year, Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote a masterful five-part series on the economics of content online. Worth reading for anyone interested in the topic. I link to each part below and excerpt my favorite paragraphs (all Salmon’s words, but emphases are my own). Part 1: Advertising Do advertising dollars ultimately end up where people spend their time, he asked, echoing Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker says, or, pace Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger, is that a “fallacy”? I’m with Juenger on this one. Moreover, if you’re running a news site, you’ll be even more sobered to learn that just 2.7% of the time that people spend on the internet is spent on news sites. According to Meeker, some 67% of all ad dollars are spent either on TV or in print. When people like Meeker look at ad spend, they’re looking mainly at brand advertising. So if the internet is not going to displace TV as a medium for mass-market brand advertising, might it at least be good at direct marketing? Part 3: Costs
incompetech | Custom Production Music and also Graph Paper Remarkable Communication :zenhabits Sharing Happiness Project Data | Lana Yarosh [Excel Data Spreadsheet] My daily sums (between 0 and 7) for my Happiness project dailies, as well as a 7-day trend line. Click for bigger image. I recently ran into a coworker who keeps a blog with all of his data collected over a period of one year (Chris Volinsky and his “My Year of Data” blog). I’ve been tracking myself as I do a variation of the Happiness Project, which is a book/blog that suggests for one to explicitly identify the aspects of life that are important to happiness and track them daily. Here are the few bits of insight that I got from this exercise: One of my goals was to prevent “screw it” days where something went wrong so I didn’t do anything. I really just plopped my data in Excel, which limited my insights, but here is what I would like to be able to do easily with this kind of data (*cough* make this for me, please *cough*): See how different tracked values interrelate and how each behavior affects the overall score.
Lifework Heirloom Apparent Fifty years after it was purchased, an Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman begins its third chapter with a new generation of the... Read More Live from New York A major market for our furniture, and the headquarters of some of our most important designers, Manhattan has long been... Read More Getting to Comfortable In creating a more casual design for today’s work environments, Jehs + Laub sought a technical solution to balance structure... The Great Debate: Not Even A Question Decades after the first open office launched a thousand workplace conversations, Herman Miller dives into the... The Sylvia Beach Hotel This winter I finally made it somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for a long time: The Sylvia Beach Hotel. You might be excused for thinking Sylvia Beach is a place—the hotel does overlook a long and wide swath of damp sand with crashing waves. But Sylvia Beach is not a beach, Sylvia Beach is a person. She was the founder of Shakespeare & Company, the legendary English language bookstore in Paris. Knowing this will set the stage for all you might experience if you ever drive along the Oregon Coast and stop in the town of Newport to stay at the Sylvia Beach Hotel. This is a place for book lovers. The building itself is an old hotel that had run down on its luck when it was purchased, twenty-five years ago, by two childhood friends who decided to revive the building as a different sort of hotel. When Goody Cable and Sally Ford bought the now 100 year-old building, they asked friends to help decorate the rooms in the style of their favorite authors. The rooms are an utter highpoint of the stay.
Sparring Mind: Psychology + Content Marketing One Simple Way to Be Happier and More At Peace A few months ago, I noticed myself criticizing a lot of people around me. For example, I would go to work and think – “This Mr X next to me, this co-worker, he talks too much and is always interested in gossip.” I also thought that this other co-worker Ms Y had her own set of rigid beliefs she was not willing to change at all. She wouldn’t even listen to others’ beliefs if they contradicted her’s. Then I thought of another acquaintance (a neighbor) and thought – “The level at which she thinks is so low – she is always thinking of living a mundane daily existence that is socially conditioned and she can’t think originally at all!” All these thoughts were there in my head even though I was not actively criticizing these people. Then, one day something struck me. According to me, so many of my acquaintances, friends, and co-workers had some major flaws and I kept thinking of those flaws sub-consciously for a good part of my day. But did they not have something nice about them too? Wow again.
Visual Storytelling with Data Sally Hogshead Are you a visual person? If so, you like to learn ideas in a graphic way. When I spoke to 500 trainers recently, a graphic facilitator captured my Fascinate keynote in real time, drawing while I was giving the presentation. Presenting concepts visually helps people “see” the ideas. This outline describes how to reach your personality’s highest value, and communicate in 9 seconds or less. (Check out the little “hogshead” drawn on the board next to me.) The moment I walked on stage for a recent speech, my microphone died. How can you over-deliver for your client if audience can’t hear the speech you flew 5,000 miles to deliver? Always have Plan B ready, to keep them engaged, so you don’t get flustered and they don’t get bored. “Don’t worry, I’ve been trained in MIME… and I’ll be delivering the entire speech in interpretive dance.” By the time the laughter died down, my new mic was ready to go, and the speech went on to a standing ovation!
Chapters: PREFACE,Twilight online reading,by Stephenie Meyer | Free Vampire Books Meyer, Stephanie, 1973- Twilight : a novel / by Stephanie Meyer. - 1st ed. Summary: Grade 9 Up - Headstrong, sun-loving, 17-year-old Bella declines her mom's invitation to move to Florida, and instead reluctantly opts to move to her dad's cabin in the dreary, rainy town of Forks, WA. She becomes intrigued with Edward Cullen, a distant, stylish, and disarmingly handsome senior, who is also a vampire. For my big sister, Emily, without whose enthusiasm this story might still be unfinished. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Genesis 2:17 I'd never given much thought to how I would die - though I'd had reason enough in the last few months - but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this. I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me. Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved.
13 Ways to De-Stress, Lighten the Load and Feel Like Yourself Again If any demands are placed on you, does it all feel like too much, and do you just end up snapping at someone? Most likely, what’s happening is you’re emotionally blocked and full of energetic toxins, but with a few easy exercises you can feel like your best self once more and get back to being able to cope with life. The body’s emotional energetic system works in exactly the same way as the digestive system; digesting and absorbing what’s good and needed and then letting go of the waste. Feelings such as worry, fear, guilt, shame, sadness, anger and frustration can become toxic and like negative waste to the body. If they are not let go of, they build up, causing emotional constipation. We end up lugging around the equivalent of a bag of crap strapped to our backs,which weighs us down and can easily end up spilling on to other people (by blaming, lashing out and projecting), because there becomes too much for us to manage. To free yourself, you must choose to put down the bag of crap.
Behavior change is belief change Every behavior change fanatic out there loves this quote. Probably has it on their bathroom mirror. The formula is so simple. You = what you do every day And therefore: if (what you do every day == excellent) Then: You = excellent And also, if you’re trying to solve for excellence… You + X = Excellence You now know that X = do excellent things every day And… You + (do excellent things every day) = Excellence I know what you’re thinking. And more importantly, just be excellent. And here, it becomes clear. The quote by Aristotle is actually not helpful at all. Last night I had a great conversation with @e_ramirez, @cwhogg, and @aarondcoleman over a few beers. Despite all of us having fairly different ideas about to build RIGHT NOW, given the current state of the market, what we know about behavior change, and what works and doesn’t work, there was a moment of clarity when we all agreed on the fact that: Behavior change is belief change. You can’t change what you do without first changing who you are. Kudos