I might have internet access and will try to post some stuff while I'm there but I can't imagine it will be much faster than dial-up. Picture uploads will be tough. I'm leaving July 1st and will be there for a month.

I'm getting some cool gear sponsored for my trip so there will be some posts reviewing that and of course thanks to Clark University for making this all possible with a fellowship :)

Can't wait!

Come on, do you really think he is the first Olympic athlete to smoke pot? Probably not. We have to take into account that others have done it in the past and that the only difference here is that he got caught on camera. People make mistakes. It is now harder to cover them up, so lets be a little bit more tolerant.

More and more mistakes made by public figures will surface in the future. We HAVE to be more tolerant and not single out negative details about a person to form our opinions.

Michael Phelps is a freaking legend, don't judge him based on one mistake he made.

I felt awkward walking around in a Digg jacket but I feel like it says more about who I am than if I had conformed. One argument in favor of dressing up to the max is that it is more respectful to the recruiter/boss. To some degree I agree with that argument because there definitely are disrespectful outfits, but recruiters have to be aware there might be talent they are missing if they only consider the conformers. Especially with today's economy in mind are you looking for people who look around and do what everyone else is doing, or people who stand out and do things differently?

Convention makes a lot of things easier (measurement units, keyboard layouts, language, etc.) but when you are looking to hire talent it does not seem to make sense. Many standards will change as Generation Y moves into the workplace and employers need to realize that. Working in a suit has become less prestigious than it was for our parents. Nowadays we look up to companies like Google, Revision3, or Digg, which got away with these standards.

Let me know what you think.

A couple of months ago I had an idea for a cool project that would help me to "major in everything". The liberal arts education we enjoy here in the U.S. is special and can't be found in many other countries around the world. In Germany the education system is very strict and focused. If you want to become a lawyer, you study law, and that's it. What, you find law boring after 2 years and want to become an economist? Too bad, now you have to start all over again. What this means is that you have to know by the time you leave high school what you want to do for the rest of your life. There is no peeking into other professions by taking all kinds of intro classes. Well, I didn't like that idea, which is why I am now studying in the U.S.

Back to the project I was talking about. I want to create a curriculum for people like me who love to learn anything and everything. To do that I am emailing at least two professors from every academic field here at Clark University and will ask them to send me the names of 5 books from their field that they think someone should have read in order to be considered an educated person. When the study is done I will post the results here with some reflections from either the professors or me. If it is popular I am planning to extend the sample sizes and ask academic professionals from other universities.

I am pretty excited about this and will keep you updated :)

A couple of months ago I went shopping at Trader Joe's for the first time. Somehow one of the employees there noticed that I was new to the store and started helping me pick things and gave me all kinds of free stuff (shopping bag, flowers, a balloon). I was so surprised by the nice treatment that I took a picture of the shopping cart with the gifts and put it on twitter.

100 people who chose to read my updates could have potentially seen that picture and my comment about my great experience there.

Twitter is so much more powerful that most people think. It is revolutionizing the way we recommend and endorse brands/products. Businesses cannot afford to upset us anymore otherwise they risk that we turn around and let our 100 followers know how bad our experience with that business was. There now is more pressure on businesses to hire the right customer service people and make sure that all their employees who interact with customers are as competent as possible.

I am convinced that this revolution offers enough benefits to businesses that more than outweigh the added costs of finding good caring employees and keeping them happy. Twitter lets you interact with your customers more than you ever could before. Use this opportunity and interact with your customers. Make sure they see you the way you want to be seen and if they don't, use their feedback to make corrections.

Take PleaseDressMe as an example. The site aggregates information from different t-shirt designers and helps good unknown designers to be discovered. What PleaseDressMe does is filter information and present it in an attractive easy-to-use interface.

There are many online industries like the t-shirt industry that have become extremely crowded and are in need of an application to organize all that information. Otherwise they just end up with customers overwhelmed by the options. Make it less costly for the consumers to find what they want.

How about tea? Chocolate? Coffee? Where are the search engines that help me find just the chocolate I want? Hooking up consumers with retailers/producers makes everyone happy, so there won't be much teeth-pulling when you are trying to get started. All you need is an attractive infrastructure and some promotion. If your app is useful people will come back.

I really see a bright future for filters and the good thing is that we will all benefit.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

7. When Is Good (free)

6. Evernote (free)

Evernote is a great tool to organize information. If you come across something on a website that you want to save for later without bookmarking the whole page or making a pdf of it, you can open the evernote desktop client and "cut" the part of the page out and save it in your evernote account. You can also save pictures, audio files, or just plain text. These notes can be shared and emailed to other people. There is an Iphone app as well that allows you to take pictures, record voice, send in pictures, or plain text. All these information are saved online and you have access to them anywhere. I use evernote to keep track of the wines I have tried by taking pictures of the labels and posting them to evernote. Now here is the coolest feature: You can search your evernote notes and it recognizes text in pictures as well. So when I'm at the liquor store deciding what new wine to buy I search my digital labels to make sure I haven't tried the wine before. Evernote is also a great way to digitize business cards. Give it a try, it's free!

5. FuseCal (free)

I wrote a post on FuseCal a while ago and am still a frequent consumer of the data FuseCal gives me. FuseCal helpes you get dates off a website and into the calendar program of your choice. The cool thing is that FuseCal sends you an email if anything changes on that website. Let's say you use FuseCal to subscribe to your school's academic calendar and the administration decides to move your graduation. You will know almost immediately. Very convenient. No one wants to open a website and plug dates into a calendar manually. FuseCal will save you A TON of time and it works for you in the background to make sure you stay up-to-date on everything.

  4. Social News Sites (free)

Examples: Digg.com, Reddit, Hacker News

These sites are examples of a new time. If you want to figure out the latest trends or the Zeitgeist of your generation, where do you look? Social news sites give you a window into the interests and opinions of hundreds of thousands of people. This is how most of these sites work: Links to articles, pictures, or videos are posted on these sites and people vote on them. A vote means that you deem that piece of information important and want more people to see it. Stories that have received votes from a diverse group of users get onto the front page of that social news site for a day. At this point there are complicated algorithms involved that take into consideration what kind of articles you have voted on in the past and many other factors. Of course all these sites have different groups of people that like to hang out there, comment on stories or submit them. You can either find a site where people like you hang out or use Digg.com, the ultimate social news site, that gives you many different categories to select from. Now you can use your Google Reader and subscribe to the homepage of the category you want to follow and get the most popular stories in that category pushed to you. These sites are a great way to discover new stuff and see what other people care about. I have learned a ton of stuff from articles I have found through Digg.com or Hacker News.

Again, another application I already covered here but it definitely deserves another mention in this list. RTM is the ultimate web-based to-do application. You can create different lists for different kind of tasks and even share lists with other people. I am using the sharing feature excessively to keep groups I am involved with up-to-date on what needs to get done. My boss at work uses it to tell me to do things and I share lists with co-workers. You can attach different levels of priority to your tasks, set due dates, add notes, add tags (i.e. web-based-task, errand, bill), add a location, and add a time estimate. RTM also has versions optimized for Blackberries and Iphones to keep track and add tasks on the go. I consider RTM a freemium web application because the basic version is free but if you want to use it on your mobile device you need to become a pro user and pay $25/year (totally worth it to me). The free version should be enough for most people though.

2. Twitter (free)

For some of you this might sound like a no-brainer but there are way too many people who haven't hear of twitter or don't realize the incredible potential this application has. Twitter asks you "What are you doing?" and gives you 140 characters to answer the question. You can follow your friends to see what they are up to and they can follow you. This is where twitter loses most potential users. Just another app to stalk people? NO! Twitter is revolutionizing the way we consume information and is in itself a great information filter. You can for example search twitter for your name and subscribe to the RSS feed of that search result. This way you get notified in your RSS reader every time someone mentions your name. Imagine the possibilities for companies. Personal example: I complained in one of my tweets (twitter updates) that viddler.com wasn't working for me. Within 2 minutes I had a direct message from the the CEO asking me what browser and operating system I was using. The possibilities to interact with other people through twitter are endless. Just look at how Obama is running his twitter campaign. He has more twitter followers than anyone and interacts with them in many ways. For you personally twitter is a great way to digest the information you want. Follow CNN and you will get the latest breaking news right on your twitter homepage. Just like Remember the Milk you can get mobile clients for Blackberries and Iphones or just send twitter a text message with your update. You can share your 140 character wisdom with people wherever you are. There are also tons of desktop applications that make it easier to access and update twitter. Tweetdeck is my personal favorite. It aggregates all of the cool applications that use twitter data.

Follow some smart people and get information other people will get a lot later, if at all. Apart from all the smart people you can also follow some regular folks like me

1. Blogs + Google Reader

GR is on of those applications that you have to have. If you don't have one go set one up right now. If you already have a gmail account you won't have to re-register. Google Reader is an RSS reader. If you don't know what an RSS reader is please watch this video. Ever wanted a newspaper that writes about all the things you are interested in? Google Reader lets you build your own. It lets you discover blogs you might be interested in and subscribe to them. I subscribe to about 40 blogs and am able to keep up with pretty much all of them. In your left sidebar you have all your blogs and other feeds (like twitter search feeds) that you've subscribed to. I have them in different folders. Entrepreneurship, Marketing, News, Technology, Green, and General. The numbers next to the blog's name in the sidebar is the amount of unread posts you have from that particular blog. I usually read the headline and browse every blog posts to see if it seems worth spending a couple of minutes to read the article. Even if you don't read the whole post, just by reading a headline like Getting The UnParty Started: Seesmic Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff you sometimes get all the information you need without having to read the entire article.

Here are some other neat Google Reader features:

- starring items saves them as favorites in your GR

- you can share articles (w/ or w/o a personal note) and your Google friends see them in their GR

- you see the articles your friends shared

- you can email posts to people directly through GR

- you can add tags to certain posts and search by them later

Using Google Reader will seriously put you a mile ahead of people who stick to traditional media or read blogs the old fashioned way. Stuff becomes old-fashioned quickly these days but GR will help you stay on top of things.

Let me know in the comments what you think helps you to stay ahead of the curve.

I thought of this post the other day when I updated my IM client, Adium, and realized that this has been bugging me for a while.

The average user of your application does not care about minor bug fixes. Most of the time the bug does not even appear to them. Nonetheless the user is prompted to update your application. I am not trying to split hairs here but updating an application does take time that the user could have spent on other things. 

I like updating applications because I like new features but it's disappointing to find out that the update, I just spent time downloading, did not really change anything for me personally. It might have helped someone who was running xp with sp 1 on Arabic, but not me.

I know updates are necessary and help to show your users that you care about them, but don't forget about the other users, when you're trying to fix a problem for a small group. There is a way to fix the problem and make your updaters feel special even when the update does not do anything for them.

Try this: Add or change a design feature every time you update your app. It can be as small as adding a little symbol somewhere, change a color, or add a simple feature. Your early adopters will appreciate the added bonus as well.

This relates to what Seth said in his post about the mistakes Apple made during the launch of the Iphone 3G. They made it painful for the early adopters to purchase an Iphone instead of rewarding their loyalty. Why not sell 2000 red Iphones as long as supplies last? Early adopters want to be different and want to be proud of it. They don't want to be laughed at for standing in line for days for exactly the same thing they could just buy 2 days later.

With application updates it's the same thing. Make your updaters feel special and they will thank you. It really shouldn't take much time and will send a powerful message to your users.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

by barryneil

When most professors are teaching a class they try to get as much knowledge across as possible. Nothing wrong with that you might say. Try to remember some of your intro courses in college. Yeah, see, you probably don't remember a whole lot. The key is to get students excited about the subject. Not a whole lot of professors are doing that successfully. They know they won't be able to teach us everything we need to know, and even if they do, we won't be able to remember it all. Too few professors really get it.

The best way to add value to a student's education is to create passion and excitement.

Assuming that professors are passionate about their subjects (if you are not, don't teach) they should be able to bring it across (if you are not, don't teach).

In the example of the German class the students are overwhelmed with work and are therefore not liking the class. During the TA sessions I try to counterbalance the amount of work by helping with the homework and showing some German stand-up comedy. I still bet that only 20% of them will take another German class. It's sad because some of them really used to like the language.

It is the German professor's job to turn the students into better German speakers. Most of the language-learning will be done outside of class and probably in Germany. By trying too hard to deliver knowledge in class, the professor's teaching style is causing the opposite. The students might get better at grammar or learn some more vocab words but are not enjoying the language and most likely will not try and learn the language outside of class. It is a common mistake that many professors make.

Creating a relationship between the students and the subject is worth way more than at least half of the stuff on the syllabus.

Think about your customers in the same way. Having a good product and customers should not be your ultimate goal. Creating lasting relationships with your customers is what will pay your salary two years from now.

Wrong

The following week I came across the same statement at an Autozone in New Hampshire. "Sorry the system won't let me process this return." The Autozone employee told me that I was in fact eligible for a refund but he couldn't do anything about it. He ended up calling the help line for employees and 20 minutes later they showed him a workaround. A help line for helpers? If that's how complicated your system is you should consider revising it.

Systems are useful to streamline transactions but they need to be flexible enough to allow for personal interactions with customers. If you are sticking with your complicated system make sure you give your employees a way to override it.