Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 385

Social Media Can Change The Corporate Culture

Most corporate cultures are what they are. Some have been around for decades. Others have had the same corporate culture for a century (or longer). Change is never easy, but change does happen.

There's this old trucker saying that goes: "if you can't change people, you change people." The truth is that not every competent individual is right for every company, and there are also some serious nincompoops who manage to stick with a company longer than anyone can fathom. Beneath the many...

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Rednod, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, Bite-Sized Edits, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for each other (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

Ten Rules For Writing Fiction - Guardian UK . "Well, it's back to the mainstream media this week. For Hugh, check out Rules for Writing Fiction . Many of these are good for nonfiction types, too. With killer advice like, 'Never open a book with the weather,' 'Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.' and perhaps Pullman's contribution to the list, 'My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.; It's a compendium of advice from great writers on writing, well, great." (Alistair for Hugh).

Infographic Of The Day - Fast Company . "I'm a big believer that informational discourse in the twenty-first century will be about giving semi-data-literate audiences access to rich data they can grasp quickly. As my co-chair Edd Dumbill and I get ready to lay out the first O'Reilly Strata conference , we have to season the masses of Big Data nerdmanship with a decent amount of interaction and visualization so that all rich content lurking in the world's data sets can be made relevant to the masses. I particularly liked the Chilean Miner example , probably the best visualization I've seen all year." (Alistair for Mitch).

50 Posts About Cyborgs . "Toronto game designer Tim Maly is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the coining of the word 'cyborg' by making 50 posts about cyborgs." (Hugh for Alistair).

Falling - Radiolab . "There is some great radio being made these days, and so much of it is available as podcasts on the Web. I am always excited when Radiolab has a new episode - it's the best of the best. This episode has eight stories on the theme of falling, each one wonderful. I teared up at the second story, about the couple falling in love again and again. It's extraordinary (and pay attention to the richness of those voices, especially at the end of that second story)." (Hugh for Mitch).

Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs - The New York Times . "In congratulating Alistair on his new venture - Year One Labs - where he will help entrepreneurs go from ideation to implementation, I thought this article on the psychotic states of what it take to be an entrepreneur would both make him laugh and cry (at the same time). Being an entrepreneur in his own right, there's probably nothing in this article that doesn't represent any other regular day when wakes up and look in the mirror ;)." (Mitch for Alistair).

The Future Of The Book - Ideo . "As Hugh preps another BookCamp   unconference and while his radical rethinking of the book publishing industry still heats up the O'Reilly Radar blog (more on that here: The line between book and Internet will disappear ), here's an incredible video demo of how design firm, Ideo , is attempting to rethink not only the concept of a book, but what the relationship we - as human beings - have with this printed (or already-digital) experience." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now, it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Tags:

alistair croll

big data

bitcurrent

bite-sized edits

book publishing

bookcamp

complete web monitoring

cyborg

edd dumbill

entrepreneur

fast company

gigaom

great links

guardian uk

hugh mcguire

human 20

ideo

infographic

librivox

link

linkbait

mainstream media

managing bandwidth

media hacks

oreilly radar

oreilly strata conference

podcast

radio

radiolab

rednod

rich data

the book oven

the future of the book

tim maly

unconference

video demo

visualization

year one labs

The Spirit Of The Times

That's what the word " zeitgeist " means... the spirit of the times. What is happening now and how does it all come together?

Every year, Google puts together a year-end zeitgeist to show the words, searches, etc... that have shaped our year. What many don't know is that Google also holds a private and very exclusive event called, Google Zeitgeist, that brings together a couple hundred business executives with some of the leading minds in media, entertainment, business, technology and science ...

You Do This More Than Sleeping And Working

People spend more than half of their day consuming media.

Making a statement like that should make you look at this Blog post with your head titled sideways and your eyebrows raised - the way a dog looks when you talk to it. I can't make this stuff up. "Citing a new Ipsos OTX study of 7,000 online consumers ages 13 to 74, Friend said that thanks to smartphones and laptops, people are now spending one-half of their waking days interacting with media, and have increased their media...

Big Talk. Small Acts

If you're going to do anything in Marketing, is it more important to focus on "how many?" people you put your message in front of or "who?" you put your message in front of?

You can see this as the classic "quantity over quality" debate or you can look at it as "big vs. small," however you slice it, it's hard to argue that brands can now get major results through many small (and sometimes minimal) acts. There are winning business cases (in fact, more than you may think) around every corner. ...

Early Morning

When are you most inspired to create, tinker and experiment?

I have memories of being a very young child and not being able to sleep. I would stumble downstairs in the dark and sit in front of the television waiting for something decent to come on (it felt like hours until something finally did come on... it probably was). I remember my parents always encouraging me to try to sleep in a little bit longer. At worst, to just lay in bed instead of wandering around the house. I used to think...

Digital Storytelling, Transmedia And Participatory Culture With Gunther Sonnenfeld

Episode #220 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

On my last trip to Europe, I had the pleasure of speaking in Oslo, Norway at The Golden Tag (Gulltaggen) conference, which featured Richard Branson, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuk and many more. Speaking right before me was Gunther Sonnenfeld (SVP, Director of Experience & Applied Technology at RAPP) on the topics of Transmedia, participatory culture and Digital Storytelling...

Viral Videos, Internet Memes And The Value Of Online Anonymity

How do ideas spread? Why do people come together online to make things go viral? The answer might surprise you.

At last year's TED conference, I had the pleasure of seeing (founder of the infamous and awesome 4Chan platform) discuss why people do things online (from getting ideas to spread to LOlCats). A large portion of his discussion focuses on the notion of anonymity (more on that here: The Next Big Thing Online Could Well Be Anonymity). In a world where every...

Digital Marketing Inside Out

Is there one way to get your entire organization behind Digital Marketing and Social Media?

Obviously, it depends on the culture of the company and the desire to engage and connect more, but one of the more obvious ways to make this happen (that so few people talk about) is in creating something that has a social bent and use it only internally for the first little while. Too many pundits will tell you to step into the pubic realm and start small (yes, I'm one of those pundits), but there...

Seth Godin, Avinash Kaushik, Jeffrey Gitomer And More (Oh My!)

If you live in and around the Montreal area, you should check out The Art of Marketing event on September 30th, 2010.

Imagine this: one full-day of learning from some of the best and brightest in Marketing (and then, there's me ;). Join Seth Godin (Purple Cow, Tribes, Linchpin, etc...), Avinash Kaushik (Analytics Evangelist at Google and the author of Web Analytics - An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0), Jeffrey Gitomer (The Sales Bible and the entire Little Book Of... business series), Max...