Burnin’

Thwenty-three year old entrepreneur, Darren Johnson, recently got to spend some quality time in Omaha with the world’s second richest man, Warren Buffett.

On his blog, Johnson outlines five key areas Buffett addressed.

No. 1 – Be Grateful
Warren spent about an hour talking about how grateful we should all be for the circumstances we were born into and for the generous ticket we’ve been offered in life. He said that we should not take it for granted or think that it is the product of something we did – we just drew a lucky ticket. (He also pointed out that his skill of “allocating capital” would be useless if he would have been born in poverty in Bangladesh.)

No. 2 – Be ethical & fair
No. 3 – Be trustworthy
No. 4 – Invest in your circle of competence
No. 5 – Do what you love

Thanks to Seth Godin for the pointer.

“A big part of what sold us on strawbale building was the feel of the rooms in the SB houses we visited. Rounded corners, both outside and in, irregular surfaces, mottled colors. And of course the play of light around thick-walled windows. I’m sure we’d have been just as impressed by earthships or adobes, as long as they were hand-plastered too. We’d also both lived in old houses, with a variety of smooth but troweled surfaces that we loved.” -Burbophobia

a Burbophobe’s paradise

Since I have a loved one who suffers from Burbophobia, straw bale homes are of particular interest as a long term housing solution. Energy efficient and built to last, these homes can reflect a lot of personality as well, as they’re mostly hand-made, often by the owner’s own hands.

Author and blogger, Rebecca Blood, is puzzling over some words that David Weinberger uttered.

Blogging is more like a conversation, and “you can’t develop a code of ethics for conversations,” said David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “A conversation with your best friend would become stilted and alienating.”

I think David doesn’t want to see conversations stifled on any level, so he’s afraid of regulations of any sort. Yet, Rebecca is right to point out that human communications always rely on ethics, to one degree or another. She writes:

First of all, publishing a weblog is not at all like a conversation between two people, it’s more like speaking in front of a room full of people–some of them trusted, some of them strangers–and having every word you say recorded and catalogued for future random retrieval. So that analogy doesn’t work.

It got a kick out of seeing The Trib’s Lifestyle feature on squash. Notice the paper did not place it in the Sports section. That area’s reserved for men of the gridiron, and such.

“Squash, the racquet sport, not the rustic vegetable, has built an impressive resume since graduating in the mid-1800s from Harrow boarding school in Britain, whose alumni include Winston Churchill. Advancing across the British Empire, it also secured positions in the Ivy League, Wall Street, the Pentagon and enclaves beyond.

Some prep schools and elite universities have been known to prize varsity squash the way others do football. As a high school student at Francis W. Parker in Chicago, Beau River, 27, who now plays on the pro squash tour worldwide, was probably “85 to 90 percent of the academic package that Ivy League schools are looking for,” he said. “But suddenly, when they found out I played squash, I was a lot more desirable.” River, who is competing in the Windy City Open, chose to attend Dartmouth.”

Action from the Windy City Open

As it happens, I went to school at a squash powerhouse. I recall a particularly satisfying win over the Princeton Tigers, on the road in ‘84. F&M is currently ranked 16th in the nation. Since this will most likely be the one and only chance to ever make mention of it, I’m taking the opportunity to do so.

Participants in last Saturday’s Blog Walk 6.0 have been posting their summaries of the event. Here are some of my favorite comments:

“More than anything else, what blogs and social software do is make it drop dead simple to make the conduct of knowledge work visible.” -Jim McGee

“If I like what you write, it stands to reason that I might like what you read. This is the ’social’ piece that I was thinking about it. Through things like blogrolls, subscriber lists and listings of who else bookmarked a specific page, I am able to be connected with other like minded people.” -Steve Dembo

“One concept that really crystallized for me is that bloggers are the the new starving artists — we allow our passion for producing our product (the information in our blogs) to adversely impact our ability to rationally place a value upon it.” -Matt Homann

“At the end of the day, Mark Bernstein (Tinderbox!!!) said something to the effect that blogs should be changing the world.” -Dennis Kennedy

“There’s a sense in this crew that the real action is Somewhere Else, that they’re at the margins.” -Mark Bernstein

“BlogWalk 6 was a fantastic event for conversation and idea exchange. It was not a place for decisions or conclusions.” -Tom Sherman

On a snowy, windy (but nice) day in Chicago, 16 bloggers from all parts of the country and Europe gathered for the first Blog Walk held in the United States. The first five were conducted in Europe. Today’s took place in Room 22 at the Seabury Theological Seminary in Evanston.

The bloggers present represented a variety of industries–education, law, advertising, publishing and high tech to name a few–and thus individual concerns were also varied. I wanted to talk about blogs and wikis as external marketing tools. But other topics took the day. Still, it was highly informative and a pleasure to meet 15 other bloggers on a face-to-face basis.

For a more thorough examination of the event, see Tom’s detailed summary.

Rosie greets visitors to BFG Communications

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Hilton Head Island area, also known as South Carolina’s Treasured Coast or Low Country. I flew in from Chicago to participate in a “working interview” with BFG Communications, a marketing services firm with spirits giant, Diageo, as an anchoring client.

BFG is located in Bluffton, SC just before the bridge to Hilton Head Island. This entire region is rich with history, and Bluffton is no exception.

According to Our Coast, Bluffton is “a state of mind,” as the town’s slogan goes, and has been since its inception. “It’s a community that really was started historically as a second-home community before the Civil War, where people would come in the summer to get away from the cities,” notes Roberts Vaux, a local attorney and entrepreneur. Because of the heat and bugs that accompanied the summer months, residents of the area saw Bluffton with its breezy bluffs as a perfect respite.

It’s also here, under what’s known as the Secession Oak, that the fires for the South to secede from the North got a little stoking. The tree may already have been two centuries old in 1844 when as many as 500 people met beneath its canopy. According to the Bluffton Historical Preservation Society, those people had come to hear their congressman, Robert Barnwell Rhett, “who had been so vociferously agitating since the 1820s for Secession.” And so began “The Bluffton Movement,” which led to South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union on Dec. 20, 1860-the first state to secede. The oak is on the left-hand side of Verdier Cove Road at Highway 46, just outside the town limits on the Pritchardville side.

Years ago, I was rejected by a handful of the country’s top writing programs–Iowa, Oregon, Montana and Arizona. So it’s interesting to hear this recent Iowa grad’s commentary on the degree.

from Cup of Chicha: “Lately, several aspiring writers have asked me my thoughts on MFA programs and whether they should enroll in one. I don’t know, I don’t know. At Iowa, I was a depressive, unproductive recluse — not a good representative for the average workshop experience. Also, I came to Iowa from Brown, where I wrote and studied experimental fiction (with people like Carole Maso and Robert Coover); even a two year program couldn’t mitigate the culture shock. (In a NY Times piece on Frank Conroy’s retirement, Conroy depicts Iowa as a place where writing is priviliged over theory. But that, too, is a theoretical position — and the one most popular among traditionalists.)

If Iowa was useful for me, it was useful as a series of checks on my writing instincts. It made writing even more slow and painful, because I suddenly was able to acknowledge the difference between myself and my readers (i.e., the associations I take for granted almost always have to be explained, or cut). But, I think I need to wait a couple more years — watching where my writing (and “career” – ha) goes — before I can make an informed assessment of my time at Iowa.”

Reykjavik: Iceland’s geothermal riches have made it a leader in alternative energy for years, but now, by tapping deeper into that free energy source, Iceland aims to be completely oil free by 2050. Actually that’s a pretty long way off, but major changes have already taken place – 70% of the countries energy needs are already met by geothermal and hyrdoelectic power. And many busses are already running on hydrogen power.

Source: Beyond Brilliance

Clay Shirky makes some interesting points about web publishing…

Mass amateurization is the web’s normal pattern. Travelocity doesn’t make everyone a travel agent. It undermines the value of being travel agent at all, by fixing the inefficiencies travel agents are paid to overcome one booking at a time. Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for.

But the vast majority of weblogs are amateur and will stay amateur, because a medium where someone can publish globally for no cost is ideal for those who do it for the love of the thing. Rather than spawning a million micro-publishing empires, weblogs are becoming a vast and diffuse cocktail party, where most address not “the masses” but a small circle of readers, usually friends and colleagues. This is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward.

“Virginia Madsen’s character (Maya) has a radiant paean to wine: she leans forward in her chair, has a soft light on her face and proceeds to share her passion for wine, how it is expressive of the place from which it came, how the tastes move her, and how it changes over time in the glass and in the bottle. Honestly, any wine marketing budget for TV should just clip this soliloquy since it will intrigue and possibly convert the most stubborn of beer drinkers.” -Dr. Vino

My homeboy, Alexander Payne, has a new movie out. Sideways is his first feature that ventures beyond Omaha for a setting. About Schmidt takes place partly in Denver, while Election and Citizen Ruth are solidly set in eastern Nebraska. Place is still critical to Payne’s cinematic style, however. The place in this new film is wine country. The lead character, Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a wine snob and didactic talk about wine dominates several scenes in the film.

How guys relate to women is the other territory this film explores. And it ain’t pretty. One of the more riveting scenes in the film is when Stephanie (Sandra Oh) savagely beats Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) with her motorcycle helmet for his infidelity and lying, while Miles looks helplessly on.

The ebcb is faultless – look at the aesthetics, nicely reduced beans, those modern crunchy chips which really absorb the bean juice, and a beautiful pale egg. And the bacon is hugely flavourful – it tastes fresh off the pig. -Russell Davies, account planner and cafe lover

For those considering a venture into the blogosphere, may I point out the value in blogging a niche. The tighter the niche the better. You can be the expert on something meaningful, or something quirky. Either way, there may well be an interested audience waiting. Take Egg Bacon Chips and Beans, Russell Davies’ blog about a dish served in London’s diners. I don’t live anywhere near London and I’m interested in it. If I did live nearby, you can be assured I would enjoy eating said dish at the recommended cafes. Minus the eggs. I don’t like eggs.

from Wired: After Chris Allbritton returned to New York from Iraqi Kurdistan, he raised $15,000 and headed back to Iraq in 2003 as the first independent journalist-blogger sponsored by his readers. There he risked life and limb covering the war and its messy aftermath, detailing his experiences on his blog, Back-to-Iraq 3.0.

With 25,000 readers a day checking out his dispatches, Allbritton was able to build on this success by securing a plum assignment as Time magazine’s Baghdad correspondent. As a result, Allbritton has had to change his approach to blogging.

“I’m just very, very careful,” Allbritton said. “I never scoop Time, for instance. And I’ve become much more miserly in parceling out my opinions. I place a whole lot more emphasis on the reporting on the blog, rather than taking a stance. This has alienated a significant number of my readers, who have accused me of selling out, going corporate, whatever. But, I came to Iraq to become a full-time foreign correspondent, so them’s the breaks.”

He also doesn’t post as often on his blog anymore, and says he is thinking of shutting it down.