Trust

Him: I need something to organize my spending and show where all the money goes.

Me: I use Mint. It's magic!

Him: What is that, a website?

Me: Yes! The interface is beautiful, it links to all your accounts and credit cards, everything is updated automatically and organized by expense type...

Him: You gave a WEBSITE all your financial account details?

Me: Well ... yeah. When you think about it, public sites are more incentivized than private persons to maintain security--

Him: I'm not like you. I can't just trust the internet.

Image credit: kloniwotski.

AdVerve on Pause (Just This Week)

I'm in Ibiza for an innovation conference and internet here is just the spottiest. My boss and I changed hotels three times in 24 hours because there wasn't any wifi available in our rooms.

At present we're at the ATZARO, where the conference is taking place. The 'net pretty much works when it wants to, and less so on Macs: a member of the staff told me they typically shut off access to Macs because the variety of Apple products - iPhones, iPads, laptops - wreaks havoc on the local connection. He kind of made a big show of saying he'd bend this rule just for us, but no, not really.

Our first day here, the mayor of Ibiza came up and said he wants people to think of Ibiza as a place for business, not just fun. Well, mayor, looks like there's a wide-open opportunity in paradise for a few business hotels.

I really shouldn't complain though. It is beautiful here. And to prove it to you, here is a picture of sun-drenched dry grass.

AdVerve will be back to its regularly scheduled programming, complete with Extra-Special Guest™, next weekerly.

Space: The Commercial Frontier

I recently got the chance to contribute to The3Six5 Project, a daily online diary written by 365 different people. May 26 was my day. This is what I wrote. (The original is here; support the project by perusing other entries, sharing and Liking items. You can also become an author.)

Humans are constantly constructing stories out of random data: seeing faces in electrical outlets, or omens in dark animals. It's in our nature to stab at the context of the universe, even if we lack details. This quest for deeper meaning makes it hard to justify getting up in the morning for something so much smaller than profundity. At least it's that way for me, sometimes.

Today I met Stephen Attenborough of Virgin Galactic. My pupils must've dilated to twice the size of my head because he asked if I'm one of those people who dreamt about space as kids. (He's not.)

I think about space a lot.

Humor me ››

SPEAK OUT AMERICA

On a spiffy new America Speaking Out site (complete with gritty pop-rock template!), inquiring political minds ask: How can we make Americans work again?

"let's make a video game staring Glen Beck on a journey to stop communism, but instead of riding on a horse, he rides on sarah palin and sarah palin eats grass to regain stamina."

"Instead of making lots of little guns and cannons for the war we should use the funds to make one really really big cannon that shoots nukes that shoot out smaller nukes. It should be shaped like a |>3ni$ and called 'the big shot [sic]"

The site dies a lot and gets hacked about every 2 seconds, but when it's actually working, responses are priceless™.

Our First Synthetically-Created Living Organism...

...a wee bacteria, "written" into being by using a sequence of four DNA nucleotides like programming code.

"We can write anything we want," said [Frances Arnold, a synthetic biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena]. "The problem is that we don't know what to write."

AdVerve Episode 32: Steve Jobs' Civil War

Play the show now.

It would’ve felt right to also call this the A.D.D. edition because it’s all over the map topicwise. BUT WE MAKE IT WORK WITH COMMON THREADS. Who else can bridge Steven Jobs’ control freak with the Civil War and choosing sides? Not many. Not that many would try either.

Humor me ››

...So I Take it No Sponsored Ice Cream Cones This Week?

These are the virtual gifts Facebook suggests I offer my friends.* I suppose they don't have to feel relevant or remotely desirable; it's not like Facebook has the fastest-growing user data trove in the world or anything.

Humor me ››

Demystifying Social Media

Demystifying Social Media: Navigating All that Noise

View more presentations from luckthelady.

Here's the presentation I gave for the PDMA on Thursday on behalf of hypios. It's essentially a stab at changing social technology perception, with emphasis on:

• Following your DNA when choosing a social technology
• Trusting users and letting your degree of openness develop over time, like it would in any real relationship
• Prepping beforehand: both for failure and for success
• The idea that brands are stewards of a product or service, and that it's users who have true ownership over what they're representing

Lots of examples in thar. Hopefully you find it useful. Catch you guys back on the other side of the Atlantic!

Also, photos here.

How Americans See Europe

My friend Bertrand is totally obsessed with infographics right now. For a little mid-conference comic relief, he sent me the nifty one above.

LOL at Iceland and Romania. Also, what is Moldova all about? I only know it because I had to guess where it was on Geo-Master.

Just So's You Know

Will be tweeting/liveblogging for Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies. Follow me @luckthelady and watch blog updates on http://community20.blogspot.com/.

Also, if you want, you can see me talk about demystifying social media in Hoboken on Thursdee.