DISQUS

Wow, Robert!

What a mag group to work with!

When Wired started getting tired, I found Fast Company to be a more compelling read. Was disappointed when it went through some sort of recession. Glad to hear that it's getting better again.

You'll probably turn me into a Fast Company fan again. Yay!

Thanks for being the pioneer you are.

And thanks for introducing me to all the new tech you've been playing with.

If you ever need illustrations, please think of me. (And I'll be more than happy to come and do live visual facilitations of your chats as a sidebar live-cast.)

Blue skies
love
Roy

Dude...

I've just watched the 5 minute version of this. And I don't give a damn HOW MUCH it costs me in extra bandwidth...

I'm downloading the full version. This is an honest to goodness mindduck!!!! Wild!

Great work.

Thanks.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Hiya Robert...

My 'hassle' with the long format ISN'T actually the time it takes! It's the amount of bandwidth consumed.

I live in South Africa, where we have monopolistic bandwidth pricing policies. And things come in various packages.

A typical one is the 3G wireless 1gig package. This costs a certain amount a month. Then you hit your cap. And then you pay through your eyeballs for every meg over that gig.

So I'm pretty conservative about the amount of downloading I do. Simply cos it costs a fortune.

Many of the Scoble Show vids weigh in at around 200 megs. That's five Scoble Show vids to eat up an entire 1gig bundle for the entire month.

I wanna watch MUCH more of your vids. But the bandwidth precludes that. So I end up only watching small bits of some, and the odd full-length one here and there if I have bandwidth left over at the end of the month.

I would appeal to you to make a much lower resolution file available. That would make it easier for 'emerging world' surfers to get the benefit of the interviews.

Thanks for your incredibly rich sharing, Robert. You cook. Deluxe.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Hey Judie...

I have to report that my experience with SNAP is that it's EXTREEEEEEEEEEMELY annoying. The VERY worst thing about it is that it doesn't have a kill-button. So when you're just reading a page, and this little irritation pops up, there's no way to gt rid of it. Ugh!!!!

And I don't really get the idea behind it. Why on earth do I want to see a miniature preview of a web page? I KNOW what web pages look like. They all look the same! With minor changes. If I'm interested in what you've written, I'm going to click the link regardless of whether or not I've seen a chihuahua version of it.

My vote? Send it to Angola or Mozambique to hunt for landmines.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Wow! What a cool contest!

I hope I don't disqualify myself by having a film AND a book. Heeehheeehee. I'll take my chances.

FILM:

Without a shadow of a doubt, BLADERUNNER, the director's cut. The world Ridley Scott created is just so plausible, so possible. Those little android toys that that mutant toymaker created. Yeowww!!!!! Eeeeerie! Awesome!

(TOTAL RECALL comes a distant second, simply cos it was realllllly amazingly tongue-in-cheek. Arnie taking the piss out of himself in the best way possible.)

BOOK:

Ooooooooooooo! I think William Gibson's NEUROMANCER trilogy just just just beats Neal Stephenson's KRYPTONOMICON and BAROCK CYCLE to the post. Simply cos Gibson was the first science fiction writer in my experience who crossed over into literature. His ideas don't lay waste to his characterisation or storytelling. That trilogy made me WANT a little slot in the back of my neck where I plug in!!!! Sheesh. I can't wait!!! Stephenson is equally worthy, cos his world is AS plausible and literary. And KRYPTONOMICON is about as good as they get!

Thanks for a mighty contest! And I hope you have terrific fun revieing that li'l keyboard. I'm jealous.

Blue skies
love
Roy

That URL should not have a dot on the end of it. The correct address is: http://thetechnologycircle.blogspot.com/2006/06/use-your-gmail-account-as-external.html

That URL should not have a dot on the end of it. The correct address is: http://thetechnologycircle.blogspot.com/2006/06/use-your-gmail-account-as-external.html

Yo Paul...

Here's an interesting application that you can use to add muscle to your Gmail useage: http://thetechnologycircle.blogspot.com/2006/06/use-your-gmail-account-as-external.html. It's a hack that lets you use your Gmail account as an external harddrive for backup or data-portability.

I haven't actually tried it yet, but I will at some point. Wouldn't mind a 3G data limit that exceeds 1 gig though.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Yo Paul...

Here's an interesting application that you can use to add muscle to your Gmail useage: http://thetechnologycircle.blogspot.com/2006/06/use-your-gmail-account-as-external.html. It's a hack that lets you use your Gmail account as an external harddrive for backup or data-portability.

I haven't actually tried it yet, but I will at some point. Wouldn't mind a 3G data limit that exceeds 1 gig though.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Aaaaah, Warner...

Thanks very much for your praise! And yeah... Robert Scoble's talking about tablet pcs definitely turned me onto them.

Blue skies
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Roy

Hiya Robert...

I'd like to add my half a cent...

There isn't any bandwidth information next to the podcasts. This makes it very nasty for people who live in countries where bandwidth is NOT free.

I live in South Africa. I operate off a package that allows me one gigabyte of bandwidth traffic. Once I go over that limit, I pay through the eyeballs!

So... how about an ultra-low resolution option for non-Americans?

Blue skies
love
Roy

Hiya Robert...

Thought I'd do another drawing of you. Hopefully this one looks a little more like you than the first one did.

It's on my Flickr Gallery at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/royblumenthal/1683...



Blue skies
love
Roy

------------------------------------------------
ROY BLUMENTHAL
Corporate Facilitator, Coach, Creative Thinking Specialist, & Artist-at-Large

Mobile: +27 82 659 3165
Email: royblumenthal@gmail.com
Home: http://royblumenthal.com
Blog: http://schmucknews.blogspot.com
Sketches: http://www.flickr.com/photos/royblumenthal/
Voice: http://www.voicebank.co.za/artistlink/artistid9...
Voice: http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/rb000004/voi...
------------------------------------------------

Hiya Robert...

Thanks mightily for the candid clarity with which you're doing this.

You turned Microsoft around for me. In my past, MS WAS 'the evil empire'. Now it's a company that great people work for, and great people sometimes leave.

I'll continue following your blog. It was never the MS content of the blog that got me reading. It was the humanity of Scoble. And the example you set for others.

Thanks, dude.

May your new position (and deeper partnership with Maryam) bring you abundance, joy, and loving.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Hiya Jeremy…

Got your link off kathy Sierra’s blog. I’m in the process of co-creating South Africa’s first opne source industrial theatre company.

I’ve posted a draft business structure for it on OPEN BUSINESS. My piece is at: http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/05/28/exploring...>

I’d love it if you could take a look and offer your insights.

I used to work in advertising, and I remember reading David Ogilvy’s instructions about trade secrets. He had this thing that if you threw an idea away in the rubbish, you would be fired if it was found, cos that’s the same as giving away trade secrets. Blah.

Blue skies
love

Roy

Hiya Paul...

In my experience as a freelancer, the only time to charge lower fees than the competition is if you want to get bruised and hurt and abused by your client.

This is not a function of the clients WANTING to abuse you. It's a function of perceived and actual value.

In my business (I'm an industrial theatre practitioner and facilitator) the client generally wants to know that he or she is in safe hands. There are huge repurcussions to getting an intervention wrong. I find that they will happily pay a premium price to get a brilliant intervention.

I'm more expensive than the other people around doing what I do. But I generally get called first for gigs. I believe this is for three reasons: (1) I know my stuff. (2) I deliver. (3) I'm more expensive, and am partly perceived to be higher value.

(Being more expensive is a pre-screening tool to ensure that I don't attract loser-clients. Those who can afford to pay my price are people who have the necessary resources to successfully implement what I come up with. The reverse doesn't ALWAYS hold. For instance, there are NGOs who have limited resources, who are NOT losers in the slightest. However, with paying clients who are in the business of making money, price should be a non-issue. Value should be the determining factor. (And value is NOT a price issue. It's about measuring the deliverables and the outcome of achieving those deliverables.)

Blue skies
love
Roy

Hiya Paul...

In my experience as a freelancer, the only time to charge lower fees than the competition is if you want to get bruised and hurt and abused by your client.

This is not a function of the clients WANTING to abuse you. It's a function of perceived and actual value.

In my business (I'm an industrial theatre practitioner and facilitator) the client generally wants to know that he or she is in safe hands. There are huge repurcussions to getting an intervention wrong. I find that they will happily pay a premium price to get a brilliant intervention.

I'm more expensive than the other people around doing what I do. But I generally get called first for gigs. I believe this is for three reasons: (1) I know my stuff. (2) I deliver. (3) I'm more expensive, and am partly perceived to be higher value.

(Being more expensive is a pre-screening tool to ensure that I don't attract loser-clients. Those who can afford to pay my price are people who have the necessary resources to successfully implement what I come up with. The reverse doesn't ALWAYS hold. For instance, there are NGOs who have limited resources, who are NOT losers in the slightest. However, with paying clients who are in the business of making money, price should be a non-issue. Value should be the determining factor. (And value is NOT a price issue. It's about measuring the deliverables and the outcome of achieving those deliverables.)

Blue skies
love
Roy

Yo Paul...

You've dropped the 'd' in 'wiredgecko' in the url both here and on Neuvo.

Happy Pesach.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Yo Paul...

You've dropped the 'd' in 'wiredgecko' in the url both here and on Neuvo.

Happy Pesach.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Ah! Thank you so very much for this piece of software. I've just made three different handwriting fonts for myself, and I'm really happy with them.

Thanks hugely!

(Two pieces of feedback -- I'd really like to see smart quotes in the font set, and the space allocated for the signature is WAYYYYY too small.)

Blue skies
love
Roy

Robert...

Thanks for asking this question. Got me hunting the web for how to tag on BLOGGER. Found a load of information. The most useful of which is a little standalone program created by Rhys Wynne in Wales. You simply type the tags into the program, and it generates the relevant html code to clip into your blog post. Here's the URL: http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/2006/01/technorati-....

I'll be tagging from now on. Thanks again.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Hmmm. I don't tag cos I truly don't know how to do it. I'm on blogspot. Don't even know if it LETS me tag! (My delicious entries are mostly tagged, when I remember to send my bookmarks there.)

Hiya Paul...

I'm not entirely sure how to get my podcasts ON to the iTUNES store.

Looking at my stats, I see that more than one person seems to have subscribed to my podcast feed from iTUNES, so it must be searchable through that system somehow.

I truly can't seem to figure out iTUNES myself. It SHOULD be simple. It should be a matter of using my feed URL in iTUNES, but I don't know how to do that.

The feed URL is http://schmucknews.libsyn.com/rss.

As far as I know, that's what you need. Will you let me know if you get it to work? And also what you did to get it to work?

(I haven't recorded any new podcasts since the radio show, but I'll be resuming my podcasting activities pretty soon. It's SUCH a cool activity!)

Blue skies
love
Roy

Hiya Paul...

I'm not entirely sure how to get my podcasts ON to the iTUNES store.

Looking at my stats, I see that more than one person seems to have subscribed to my podcast feed from iTUNES, so it must be searchable through that system somehow.

I truly can't seem to figure out iTUNES myself. It SHOULD be simple. It should be a matter of using my feed URL in iTUNES, but I don't know how to do that.

The feed URL is http://schmucknews.libsyn.com/rss.

As far as I know, that's what you need. Will you let me know if you get it to work? And also what you did to get it to work?

(I haven't recorded any new podcasts since the radio show, but I'll be resuming my podcasting activities pretty soon. It's SUCH a cool activity!)

Blue skies
love
Roy

Yo Paul...

I'm busy sinking my teeth into delicious at the moment, and it seems pretty potent.

The way I'm starting to use it is....

1. An online repository of my bookmarks.

2. A taggable set of bookmarks. In the traditional bookmarking style or things, you have A folder that you put a bookmark into. And that's where it lives. But say a bookmark lives in several catgories? You'd have to make that bookmark in several different folders. Here, you just add as many tags as you think are relevant.

3. A sharing tool. People can go to my delicious page and see what I'm bookmarking. http://del.icio.us/schmucknews.

4. More than that... I can tag things for the attention of people I know. So, for instance, if I find a story that you might want to read, I tag it as such. (I haven't figured out what happens to the story that's been tagged like that. But hey. All in the fullness of time.)

5. It's a research and brainstorming tool. Thanks to the tagging system, you can cluster things for specific projects. When those projects end, you can just shift tags around or delete things.

6. It's a communal tool. Some of the sites I've bookmarked have been bookmarked by other people. I can go and see what ELSE they've bookmarked.

7. I can see who is bookmarking MY pages.

I'm sure there's more. And I suspect the flexibility is what makes it so potent.

I'm likening it to the revolution that gmail represents to email. Gmail is a paradigm shift. So is delicious. Very cool.

Blue skies
love
Roy

Yo Paul...

I'm busy sinking my teeth into delicious at the moment, and it seems pretty potent.

The way I'm starting to use it is....

1. An online repository of my bookmarks.

2. A taggable set of bookmarks. In the traditional bookmarking style or things, you have A folder that you put a bookmark into. And that's where it lives. But say a bookmark lives in several catgories? You'd have to make that bookmark in several different folders. Here, you just add as many tags as you think are relevant.

3. A sharing tool. People can go to my delicious page and see what I'm bookmarking. http://del.icio.us/schmucknews.

4. More than that... I can tag things for the attention of people I know. So, for instance, if I find a story that you might want to read, I tag it as such. (I haven't figured out what happens to the story that's been tagged like that. But hey. All in the fullness of time.)

5. It's a research and brainstorming tool. Thanks to the tagging system, you can cluster things for specific projects. When those projects end, you can just shift tags around or delete things.

6. It's a communal tool. Some of the sites I've bookmarked have been bookmarked by other people. I can go and see what ELSE they've bookmarked.

7. I can see who is bookmarking MY pages.

I'm sure there's more. And I suspect the flexibility is what makes it so potent.

I'm likening it to the revolution that gmail represents to email. Gmail is a paradigm shift. So is delicious. Very cool.

Blue skies
love
Roy