Here’s a link for the newest Trendwatching article on “Brand Butlers,” it’s good.  It touches on what a lot of marketers are looking at today, being more than a product or a sales pitch, but integrating valuable information and services tailored to a customer’s core use of their brand.
It’s time that people within companies really [...]

Can’t help but pass this on:

I’ve written about this before.  Someone very close to me is a teacher and it never really ceases to amaze me how much work the vocation is and how little it pays.  Of course that also renders me biased, but then who isn’t biased about teaching?  Near all of us [...]

A lot of people have aversion to new tasks (well, any kind of change, but especially change with new responsibility.)  That aversion becomes infective around groups.  So when someone asks if “does anyone want to fill the water cooler quick?”  or “Would you mind taking a trip to Raleigh for two days to work with [...]

For what it’s worth, I’m not a huge country fan.  I do enjoy bluegrass and people like Alison Krauss; their are some slower bluegrass groups and alt-country groups that are really nice to listen to.
Gillian Welch has that sound.  Her new album is really good and I’d suggest it for chilling out at home. She [...]

When you consider writers, there are some very distinct types.  There are fiction writers, who openly acknowledge that what they say is falsehood and imagination.  They embrace that and let people know.  When you consider nonfiction writers, it opens up a lot of different avenues for interpretation.  ”Nonfiction” as a genre is supposed to be [...]

I love this time of year.  March Madness is the best tournament in the world and there is nothing close to it in terms of excitement and parity.  Very few times will a college team demolish everyone in its path.  It’s great basketball and I can’t wait to get home and watch!  It is also [...]

Via Doc Searls, a great piece answering ten very good questions about how the tubes will evolve.
Seriously, read it.  It’s an impressive account.

A few days ago, I finished Liquidated:  An Ethnography of Wallstreet.  For those people unfamiliar, an ethnography is a tool used by anthropologists to understand a certain group of people or culture.  It has become far more prevalent in the last decade in that larger corporations will often use it.  A gal from General Mills [...]

Twitter just added geolocation to it’s growing list of services to tweets.  That’s a really big deal as 4square has been making so many waves in the last few months.  I tested it and it works really, really well.
We’re seeing a lot of overlap from the big guys in social networking (or whatever you want [...]

Today was certainly one of those.

Stress is so easy to find, I think it would be a good idea to learn how to lose it just as quickly.  Exercise is usually my way of getting everything out of my system, coupled with writing and reading.
Then a good dash of fun on the weekends with friends. [...]