The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget

Via Zen Moments, and Dooce, a great story from the author of Letters To My Son, Kent Nerburn. A great read to remind you about the little moments and deeds that make all the difference:

For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl. Sometimes she’d ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.

The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget | Zen Moments

If you’re a dad and you haven’t read Letters to My Son, you should check it out.

MIMA Blog Carnival: Q & A

A link to the MIMA “Blog Carnival” was forwarded to me by a friend of mine, and there are some really interesting questions being posed there (link in image below). Here’s my take on one of the issues raised in the Carnival Q&A:

2) Will Facebook, MySpace, and SMS marginalize the role of email in communication between friends, family, and peers?

For those of us who use the above tools (and particularly the techno-savvy generation enjoying the majority of their user base), it’s hard to imagine that Facebook and other social networking sites won’t have some impact on email communication. It’s very simple to login to your page, see what your friends and family are up to, and chat back and forth to each other (or “write on their walls,” “tweet,” etc.). Likewise it’s really nice to have the ability to share photos online and play interactive games, or even get a text when someone you’ve subscribed to makes a post.

However, I don’t think that email will be “marginalized” in any real way until the devices we use can more fully support and interact with these tools in a seamless way. The closest we’ve come thus far is the iPhone, which has applications for Facebook, Twitter, Loopt, etc. built in, all in a compact device that also takes calls, shoots photos and handles SMS. And now with the 3g iPhone, the additional layer of location-awareness (GPS) and context has been layered onto existing networks and interactions. It’s even possible (although not really practicable yet) to connect with friends based on where they are.

The key point to remember is that devices like the iPhone are nowhere near ubiquitous yet. To reach critical mass on any technology that would usurp email, we need prices to drop on enabling technology, and there needs to be a massive rush on new hardware. Email remains the consistent/constant technology that everyone from your boss to your grandmother has access to. Messages via email are easy, quick, and allow you to check messages on your schedule. And there’s nothing that will move the status quo on the horizon just yet — not until you can keep everything with you, and until these technologies can convice the mass population that being “always on” is a good thing.

So, will social networking tools marginalize the role of email? Not anytime soon — but we’re moving in that direction.

Social media searching? spy searches Twitter, Friendfeed, Blogs and more.

This is interesting:

spy :: visualizes the conversations on Twitter, Friendfeed, Blogs and more.

Very handy to get a “right NOW” view of what the “twitterati” et al are thinking and saying about any topic.

On becoming an official Entrepreneur

Today is my first day as an official entrepreneur. Yesterday I packed up my PC, VPN, access cards and office supplies from my “day job” for nearly the past nine years. Within 20 minutes I was officially done — and on my own for real.

Until now BizzyWeb has been a “hobby,” but I’ve got entrepreneurism in my blood. I always wanted to have my own business, and growing up seeing my father work for himself certainly left an impression. When I got my MBA in 2003, it was in “venture management,” which is a fancy term for entrepreneurship. So it’s all been working up to this point.

I have tons of ideas of what I want to do with BizzyWeb now that it’s official, but right now I’m going to focus on the basics — finding new clients that need help building websites. I know from conversations I’ve had with friends, colleagues, clients and relatives that there are many small business owners who don’t have a web presence because it seems too complicated. Now, however, the technology has caught up so well over the past few years that it’s possible for even a small business owner with very little computer savvy to easily maintain their own site. My clients can login to their own pages via a web browser and add or edit pages just as easily as if they were editing a Word document.

I’ll be “tweeting” the experience of starting my company — and of course I’ll be blogging here with more lengthy discussions and posts. For now, it’s all about networking and getting some new clients to help. If you know anyone, send them my way!