I've Been to the Mountaintop

Forty years ago tonight, Martin Luther King gave his last speech (tomorrow is the anniversary of his assassination. It's an incredibly moving speech that was truly prophetic with chillingly immediate fulfillment, as well as intermediate and long-term fulfillment.

Watch here and remember...then act.

Part 1 of 2



Part 2 of 2



And here's the last minute showing actual color footage...

Kevin Kelly says Creation needed as well as Evolution

Really? Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine, author of "Out of Control" which popularized the power of the "hive mind" to the general public says you need God, too? Well, no, not really.

But those contemplating the merits of theistic evolution will find his recent blog entry The Bottom is Not Enough quite thought provoking. I'm going to ponder it further myself before writing more.

But I will say I think he brilliantly elucidates one of the core drivers of the Web 2.0 business craze:

What's new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much 'hive' in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
...ad infinitum.

The exhilarating frontier today is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-of-control creation with various levels of top-down control.

Timeless quotes from the man who altered our view of time

Max Kalehoff has gathered a collection of quotes for Albert Einstein he thinks would make great chapter titles for a book on marketing. You can read his commentary on them here: Online Spin: Blog Archive: Move Over, Seth Godin, Einstein’s Here.

Here are the quotes themselves:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

“A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.”

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

“Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.”

The Web 2.0 Bubble...tell me it isn't so

Here's a funny spoof on the latest build up of Web 2.0 valuations....

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard

I've always enjoyed the material from the folks at Free Range Studios. Funny, edgy, in your face stuff that really makes you think. The "Story of Stuff" is their most ambitious effort yet and doesn't disappoint. I question a few of Annie's facts, but the basic message is hard to ignore: We have developed a completely unsustainable way of life here in America, one that drives us, more and more I'm afraid, towards political and ethical positions any fair-minded person should seriously question.

I particular like her point that the way we live our lives is not inevitable. Our society was engineered this way intentionally by the drivers of industry...and we not only acquiesced, we cheered it along. After all, it truly is great to be an American and we amde sure the rest of the world knew it through our primary export—media and entertainment.

It's no surprise, then, that everyone else in the world would like to live as well as we do. The only problem is they can't. There's simply not enough "stuff" to go around. I could go on, but the movie does a much better job.

Here's the description from the website:

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard: "From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever."

It's Always Harder than it Looks

Car-pooling has always been virtuous thing to do. It's always harder than it looks. It's really hard to find a compatible group that synchs up on the basics like starting location, time to go, destination location, and time to return, much less the finer, but just as important issues like what radio station to listen to.

Travel Convergence thinks they have the answer with their patented system (in New Zealand for sure and pending elsewhere). Apparently their pitching the system as a solution to New York's traffic problems at Less Cars In NY. They whole system seems quite well thought out. Ann Arbor is probably too small to implement a system like this, but you never know.

Location. Location. Location

The LA Times reports (free registration required) how Google maps are finding their way to gas pumps in a deal with Gilbarco Veeder-Root. It's only one small deal in among many in the emerging local search space, but it reminded me of something I learned as an eCommerce consultant in the late '90's.

When I worked at AppNet, I had the honor of working with John Cross, former CIO of then British Petroleum (now just BP). He was such a fine gentleman to work with. He pointed out that one of BP's biggest assets was its real-estate. If I recall correctly, at the time (around 1997), both BP and Shell each had more locations than MacDonalds, something like 20,000 to 30,000 stores each. As they began to see themselves as more than an oil company, they took advantage of their real estate to add retail outlets where you could buy high-margin "stuff" like pop, candy and other little necessities of life. If handled well, they could make more profit on the retail than at the pump.

Now they're equally in a position to leverage local search to their advantage. This assumes people figure out how to monetize local search adequately, mind you.