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Ruminations on Moss
Portland is a pretty mossy place. Moss needs three things to grow in abundance: Lots of water Little sunshine No movement As a city, and an ecology, Portland is filled with abundance. Things don’t just grow here; they proliferate here. With that abundant proliferation, there is little incentive to chase after life lustily, because it is everywhere. Looking back on my time in Portland, which will not be for much longer, I realize that I did not do nearly as [...]
Wounded flight
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” -Robert F Kennedy Parkour is a young man’s sport. It is fraught with danger, and inspires me to be more dangerous than it is prudent for me to be. Sometimes, I receive my just payment for participating in danger: an injury that lays me out for weeks. There are two forms of difficulty that I must contend with; first, the rest of my body is unable to exercise, to [...]
Online QR code Scavenger Hunt
For April Fools Day 2011, Lifehacker held an Online Scavenger Hunt using QR codes. A QR code (or Quick Response code) can launch any action inside a mobile phone; it can send you a text message, place a phone call, launch a video, direct you to a web page, or start an application. On Lifehacker's blog post (linked above) was a QR code that, when scanned, provided you with a clue. A riddle. The first step in a multimedia journey. [...]
Brilliant social media advertising. For dogs.
GranataPet recently launched a new interactive campaign that shows how clever marketing can get. As featured on Mashable, this campaign (running in Germany) introduced a new, Pomegranate-based dog food to their target market (dog walkers) at a plausible point of entry (while they are walking their dogs.) Check in on Foursquare. Your dog gets a snack. Or, as they put it, "Check in. Snack out." With the most highly coveted consumers holding smartphones, interacting with them on this level by [...]
Ankle: Broken or Sprained? Uninsured, either way.
Accidents happen. And in America, they bankrupt you. I had an accident on Sunday. Totally predictable, run of the mill accident. Running at top speed, in a padded gymnastics facility, I pulled off a long kong (diving jump with my feet behind me) over a 5-foot tall vault. The landing was not glamorous; I turned my ankle, whimpered in pain, and went into a 48 hour process of elevation and icing. Now I lay here trying to determine, in the [...]
Gary Vaynerchuk’s Thank You Economy
I had the great privilege to meet Gary Vaynerchuk last night at Powell's books. If you don't know who @garyvee is, get a Twitter account, already! Vaynerchuk is one of the most influential social media thought leaders online today. He has used social media as a business strategy, building relationships the way small-town economies had relationships in the 1920s. This is the theme for his latest book, the Thank You Economy. People sense inauthenticity, Vaynerchuk says. And nobody wants to [...]