dan collier

7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Old but good.

Jaxon, Naomi and I got to play Whiffle ball in Eastham yesterday on one of the first really nice spring days. Taken Sunday, March 25, 2007 at 2:39 PM.

The Art of the Start Video – Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist and author, gave this good talk on business and entrepreneurship. It is 40 minutes long but it is an interesting look at the VC-backed tech company phenomenon.

Doc Searls had some interesting thoughts on an ongoing discussion of how to save newspapers. Berkman Center for Internet and Society blogs>

George Orwell’s 6 rules for written English in “Politics and the English Language”.

i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Kind of following up the previous post about pretty graphs, it is being reported that Google is buying the technology behind Trendalyzer. My brother first sent me their link last year with a sentence about it being the best website ever.

Gapminder is the organization behind the tool. Their Human Development Trends, 2005 presentation for the UNDP is a great example of a compelling online presentation. I’d like to hear the lecture that went with it.

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On a different topic, I enjoyed Tyler Cowen’s post about our next President. He picks Guiliani, and his reasoning seems sound.

Many Eyes is a site by the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research. They are hosting visualizations of user submitted data and allowing the online community to comment. I read about it first on another cool site, Read/Write Web.

There are many different topics and datasets. Certainly some seem more reliable than others. The Proto-/Indo-European Language Tree visualization seems to imply less relation between Danish and Swedish than British English and New World English. I think they should recheck their calculations. Snoop Dogg and Queen Elizabeth are not speaking the same language, citizens of Göteberg and Køpenhavn pretty much are.

Lots to look at there, here are a few I liked:

• Graph of Spoken Languages
• Who pays the most for advertizing and who’s expanding advertising fastest
• A Reason to Avoid Alaska

On a Mac, I had to use Safari to get the site to work.

For more graphing smiles: graphs of the not so obvious

This was taken out at the tip of Peterborg, the peninsula that really makes Magen’s Bay. You can drive out to the very tip and watch the waves crash. There are no signs or indication (except the road) that you can drive out there, so you may even get a moment of solitude. We were lucky enough to have it to ourselves for a couple hours.
Taken March 07, 2007, 3:32:09 PM