The Information Overload Misconception
This is a quote from ‘Spiritual Disciplines For The Christian Life‘ (which I haven’t read) by Donald S. Whitney: …the amount of information contained in just one weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a man like Jonathan Edwards would have encountered in his entire life. This quote, and many variations on it, is being used often during presentations about information technology. I recently heard it in San Francisco at Techcrunch40 and again last week during Web2.0 Expo Berlin. It implies...
read moreAm I, or Am I Not, Your Friend?
Remember back in school when someone would come up to you and ask ‘Do you want to be my friend’ Didn’t that feel awkward? Friendship is something that grows between people. It is not a black and white thing. With real friends you don’t have to declare your friendship. You feel there is a bond between you and someone and maybe one day you will describe this person as ‘my friend’ and suddenly realize that you have become friends! These days I receive several ‘Friend requests’ every day. From Hyves,...
read moreCatching Cats VS Catching Mice
My cat is pretty quick but I am smarter so I can catch it if I want. My cat can also catch mice. I’m not sure if mice are dumber or smarter than cats but they CAN be caught by cats. But I can’t catch a mouse with my bare hands. They are simply too fast for me. I can catch my cat and my cat can catch a mouse but I can’t catch mice. Are you following me? This makes sense, right? But it doesn’t make sense to big companies. They figure: ‘We have enough money to buy this little start-up that offers this solution to...
read moreThe Ultimate Diet Formula
I love diets. They are the ultimate self fulfilling prophecy. Once you start following a diet to lose weight, you actually start losing weight! How incredible? Not really! It is just the Hawthorne Effect doing its magic: An attempt was made to measure the difference between two methods of management during the 1930s at the Hawthorne plant. The attempt failed because the workers impoved their efforts immensely for both methods. This was because they knew they were being watched carefuly. Since then, the term Hawthorne effect has been used to...
read moreThe Power of Repetition
Yesterday I told a story about innovation during Sprout ChallengerDay. It wasn’t a new story. Normally I try to come up with a few new stories for each presentation. But this time I relied on an old anecdote I thought was appropriate for the occasion. The story I told is a story I blogged about before on this blog and a perfect example of how big companies THINK they work and how they actually work in reality. Check it out if you want to know what I talked...
read moreOpenIdea: Give Spammers What They Want….
You have no idea how much I hate spam and spammers. I’m generally a friendly guy but spam makes me aggressive. And with 85% of ALL my mail being spam (19.648 Good Messages, 111.961 Spam Messages (85%) on 405 Spam Messages Per Day) I spent a lot of time thinking about how to prevent any more from coming in. Since January 2007 I have been using a fairly good Spam filter. It is 99.1% correct which means I have to wade my way through hundreds of spam messages every day to make sure I don’t miss stuff. So far I have rescued 869 messages...
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