Design Out Of The Box: UED Design Expo 2006

Yahoo invited me to this lovely travelling show of cool artists doing cool things ... so hard to describe them all. Here's the link from the San Jose Mercury News.

Like the bug lady -- she's built a geodesic dome where you crawl in and you experience what it feels like to be an insect and hell it's noisy and big stuff like leaves and branches litter your little world. Being a bug sucks and it's very noisy.

And the BABY RACE -- the baby race is 4 remote control babies race hooked up with sensor which makes your baby move when you lick on a lollipop. Peter Merholz and I had a lollipop licking show-down. I won.

Fun to see the Spit Ball Lady too, who gave me a list of the 7 Deadly Sins in Latin and did this amazing installation of spitballs as decorative arts around the sins.

And ... and ... and, other amazing stuff hard to even describe.

The point is that Yahoo corporate is so uncorporate and so cool to bring these artists in for their designers and UI guys to hang out with. Amazing place.

Bad Girl No Bloggy

Okay, I'm in the Yahoo Cafeteria in Santa Something I forget, and I have been so bad about blogging lately, so here comes some stuff.

BlogHer 2006: About Mena Trott

At Blogher, Mena was one of the four keynote speakers who ended the conference, along with Arianna Huffington, Grace Davis and Caroline Little.

Interestingly she told of her travails at Catholic school as a kid, where the nuns found her all too social, all too networky, too talky, and considered her a trouble maker since all she wanted to do was chat and talk and make friends.

She most decidedly got the last laugh on the nuns by growing up, starting a company based on being social, building networks and doing nothing but chatting, talking, making friends and BLOGGING of course.

Loved the window pane fishnet stockings Mena.

Grillin' N Chillin'

I like Brian Kellner's cool blog Grillin' In The Storm: Thoughts on Agile Software Product Management so don't miss it.

But this reminds me of that grilling story I meant to blog about. It's not a happy tale. It's an ouchy tale, or should I say, an ouchy tail.

I Love Keegan's Mommy Blog

Check it out -- Mamacentric -- just love this Mommy blog.

Drink Me
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Braff Blogger
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Eh, bien, racontez-moi!
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Splish, splash
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Because you're mine ...
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ipurple ipod
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Just Some Pictures

Thought I'd publish some pictures this morning. Here they come.

Why We Write

I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague about why people blog ... why we write ... even more broadly why bloggers share personal thoughts.

He's a lawyer. Those are people trained to only see the down side, the liability, the approaching storm, the imminent danger, the darkness lurking, the "god-damned disaster" heading one's way.

Nothing against lawyers, mind you. They're just so damned careful. They would probably counsel against ... anything that is potentially dangerous. Like driving, eating, ... breathing ... definately against breathing ... surely there's not one human activity that's not perilous, if you let a lawyer think about it long enough.

And god knows, WRITING is. Having an opinion is ... dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

So maybe we blog to say, "we're alive" knowing we won't always be. And maybe we blog to say, "I've been through this pain and that joy and another boring day JUST LIKE YOU and here's how I dealt with it." Yes, that's why we write.

And we write to tell you funny stories because we know that's the only way to get through this life, to share our stories, to share ourselves.

I love lawyers ... what's not to love?!? So many of my blog readers are lawyers and paralegals. But I just wish they could be a little more alive. Lively like artists who are creative and take chances. Yes, they should take a chance to show us they are alive. But sometimes I fear they are more comfortable dealing in death, I think. Death of the spirit, death of the new idea that might be a little dangerous, death of a deal.

So Lucky To Be A Mom

Wonderful day with my son today, just feel so lucky to have such a great kid. He actually talked me into grilling burgers on the bbq tonight, and I don't much like grilling (I have a good reason) but he and I pulled it off and had a great dinner.

More Details On Dabble

And here is some stuff from the Dabble Blog by CEO Mary Hodder:

After a year of work, and both an Alpha and invited Beta period, Dabble launches!

We invite you to come check out our site, which is now fully open for people to search, browse and view media or requests. For people who were part of the invited Beta, we have a few changes. First and most obvious at a glance is the site looks a little different. Emily Chang and Max Kiesler of Ideacodes helped with the new design. We’ve added a bit of color that brightens things up.

The new Dabble has more sophisticated searching. Dabble now uses the many different social gestures people make to express how they feel about media, to find better matches in our search results. If people play with media in playlists or by sharing their collections with others, and tell us how it’s useful to them, we can take that kind of information and show better lists of media. These results change over time, because value changes as people shift their attention.

Popular media and recent media both help people serendipitously discover things that are bubbling up, or the very latest things added to Dabble. Tagging allows people to both describe media in ways that matter to them, as well as find media with tags that others have described it.

You will need to login to Dabble to “write” anything to the site. This includes being able to collect media, make subcollections or playlists, tag media or request something (if you are trying to find a clip or music, some help on editing or to find a listing of video festivals). Check out my Star Trek Mashups playlist for an example of one.We expect that our first public launch will mean lots of folks will want to give us feedback and we’d like to hear everything you have to say about the service and what we can improve. We plan to spend a lot of time integrating feedback and suggestions, so please share with us!

Thanks for checking out Dabble!

Dabble Launches!

Better check it out. Here's Dabble and here's their blog.

Alan, I Know You're Reading This!

A colleague read my weblog yesterday, and completely coincidentally after not chatting with him for months, I emailed him late yesterday.

Email back this morning from him asks ... "How did you know I was reading your blog?!" Wish the technology were that hot, but not to worry, it isn't.

We don't rely on RSS around here, we use ESP.

Chris Anderson's Long Tail At The Harvard Coop

Fun to walk through the Coop on my way to work and see Chris's new book on the "NEW RELEASES" rack.

Only got a minute to peruse it, but did read the acknowledgements and glad to see him thank his wife profusely.

I'm putting it on my Stylefeeder.

Til Death Do Us Part Partners Parting

Just when you start believing in love and marriage, someone comes along to dash all your expectations.

Yes, Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro of "Til Death Do Us Part" are splitting. So will their next reality TV show be "Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow" or some other inspiring junk?

Amazon: My New Grocery Store!

Wow! Is there anything Amazon doesn't sell? Now they have a grocery store. Hard to imagine how to use if for FRESH food, but easy to imagine using it for diapers, canned goods, just about anything that doesn't spoil.

I already use www.peapod.com to shop for groceries ... will want to try Amazon now.

Stylefeeder: "For Web Surfers Who Wear Prada"

Great piece in The Boston Globe by Hiawatha Bray this morning about Stylefeeder.

Okay, the word is out, I'm a girl who likes to shop ... for shoes and clothes and other cool stuff, like new companies:

You can't buy friendship. But Philip Jacob of Watertown thinks you can shop for it.

That's why Jacob started StyleFeeder, a new website that lets people create a new kind of online community, by bookmarking items from their favorite online shopping sites.

Jacob and others are hoping to repeat the success of social networking websites like MySpace by launching a social bookmarking site. At these sites, users sign up free of charge. Then they post links to their favorite sites, and share those links with friends, family members, or total strangers with similar tastes.

...

One of StyleFeeder's big fans was Halley Suitt, cofounder of Top Ten Media Inc., a Cambridge company whose TopTenSources.com site helps readers find high-quality information published on blogs. ``It does a few things wonderfully well," said Suitt. ``It's really fun."

Suitt liked it so much, she bought the company for an undisclosed sum. Jacob will stay on as Top Ten's vice president of technology.

ClubMom: You're Not The Boss Of Me!

When ClubMom offered me the chance to start a new blog about being a CEO and a single mom ... I couldn't resist.

So it's up and rolling and it's called ... of course ... my kid's favorite retort when I ask him to clean his room, "You're Not The Boss Of Me!"

Check it out.

Hey Steve Jobs! I Love My MacBook

Happy girl, eh? Someone nice took this picture of me at Gnomedex. My MacBook looks even prettier than me, doesn't she? I love her!

I can't believe how much I've fallen for her. I really do find the fact that you flip open her lid and she's ready to go SO FAST, compared to my Windows laptop taking forever to get booted up, a big deal. It means I use her much more often -- all day -- even nights -- a quick late night check of email in bed is easy now, not some big production.

There's a hundred other features of the MacBook I love. I'll be writing about them. [Disclosure: I didn't get any $$$ or favors or free equipment, not even an ice cream cone from Apple to write nice things about their machine. I just happen to honestly love the MacBook.]

How Things Are Made

Without a doubt, Discovery Channel's "How It's Made" is the kind of thing my 11-year-old future-engineer-of-America can't get enough of. His gift is all about mechanical engineering, spacial relations, making things.

This is hilarious to me, since I can't even figure out how to use a nail with that thing ... what's it called ... oh, yeah, ... a hammer.

My kid knows more about how to make things (Army Jeeps, Blue Jeans, Peking Duck, the Bay Bridge) than anyone I know.

Who the hell was in charge when they sent him to me to mother?!? Well, maybe it was perfectly paradoxical, since I am continuously amazed at his miraculous ability to understand how things work.

Zidane: Red Card Carte Rouge Incroyable!

Zidane headbutts the Italian?!? Did we see that? Holy crap?!

I'm talking to my 11-year-old about it -- poor sportsmanship NEVER WINS!

Stylefeeder Rocks

Boston Herald report on our pal Phil Jacob and Stylefeeder. Written by Jesse Noyes. Check it out.

And here's a quote from the piece:

StyleFeeder’s an e-shopper sounding board: Site’s hip to hottest products

Watertown resident Philip Jacob is giving online shopping a new look.

The e-commerce entrepreneur created the Web site StyleFeeder.com, which combines the feel of blogs and social networking sites like MySpace.com, into a shopping soundboard.
The site allows registered users to download images of products they see while shopping online into their account and then solicit feedback from other users. StyleFeeder was bought by Cambridge-based Top Ten Media Inc., which runs the blog aggregator TopTenSources.com, last week.


While online shoppers could always describe products and get friend’s opinions through instant messaging, blogs and social networking sites, the visual element of StyleFeeder makes it easier to get a sense of what’s hot and what’s not, Jacob said.
“In all the little bits and pieces that I’ve seen online the whole visual bookmark is something very important,” he said. “I think it feels good to get an idea of what your friends are seeing and finding.”

And in case you wondered, Stylefeeder is really fun to play with. Go try it!

Amanda Congdon UnBoomed!?!

Can it be possible?!? Holy Heck! Amanda's Left Rocketboom. Of course the reality is, Rocketboom has left Amanda which means Rocketboom is so OVER and Amanda can do any number of wonderful things.

Stylefeeder Party 7:00PM Thursday

If you're in Harvard Square tomorrow night, don't miss our cool party. We're celebrating the ULTRA COOL Stylefeeder.

Independence Day For Sure: Devil Wore Prada

Great fun to see The Devil Wore Prada last night when everyone else was busy setting off fireworks. It's a perfect Girl's Independence Day Celebration. Independent of men, the girls wallow in a movie about fashion, style and office politics.

With all our excitement around the acquisition of Stylefeeder, it's insanely fun to see the non-stop style in this fun film.

I guess I better wear the Chanel thigh-high boots to work today ... on second thought, something even more fashionable, the delightful and exceedingly rare TOP TEN SOURCES TEE SHIRT.

Here's Scoble all dressed up in it, with his cute son, Patrick.

Gnomedex: Suitt Discussion: "The Creative Leader"

I want to lead a discussion today at Gnomedex on The Creative Leader.

How do you identify and manage The Creative Leader in a category? How do you invest in it, counsel it and make it grow?

How do you manage a creative leader -- the person?

How do you manage a creative team?

Are we having FUN yet?

Links:

Dan Pink: A Whole New Mind

---> "The MFA is the new MBA"

Richard Florida The Flight Of The Creative Class

---->"Creativity is organic ... you can't plan for it, you can only allow it room and freedom to grow." -- Fast Company interview
--->"The World is Spiky." link to article and Florida's site, www.creativeclass.org

Gardiner Morse, Harvard Business Review, Sparking Creativity at Ferrari, April 2006 Issue

--->"Ferrari depends on a creative workforce to build its gorgeous cars. Companies can take a lesson from its unique approach to inspiring employees."

Gnomedex: Suitt -- Intro Top Ten Sources, Stylefeeder

I'll be speaking today at Gnomedex, but by way of introduction, just wanted to be sure you all got a chance to look at Top Ten Sources here.

Also, please check out Stylefeeder, a cool company we acquired this week. The founder Phil Jacob, has created a great way to keep track of stuff that shows off your personal style.

You have to have it on your blog. See mine?

<-------My Stylefeeder widget is here.