Browsing Category

Misc (and Just for Fun)

Community Gardening

Well I’ve already been able to harvest my first onions of the year and I was very excited about International Environment Day on June 5, 2005 – which is actually my anniversary. I started this piece a while back, but got stuck traveling and doing my day job. While I don’t have a big plot of land which I work, I do get some mean tomatoes, cucumbers, squash variants and a BUNCH of peppers. I like me some vegetables and am now two weeks into a local farmer’s market where I can supplement with other organic goods.

The main reason I like gardening and the farmer’s market on Saturdays, outside of getting a REAL hobby, is that it is organic, a social event and encourages biodiversity. Here are 3 main benefits of buying organic or growing your own, instead of wholesale support of traditional/high volume commercial agri-business:

  • Diversified growing of plant types aids in the recycling of soil nutrients
  • Organic gardening doesn’t eradicate insects wholesale and improves all food chain levels
  • Monoculture or only growing 1 thing consistently creates an environment that is conducive to disease pathogens.

Don’t have space of your own? There has to be a community garden you can participate in. Pretty straight forward concept. Each gardener is assigned a specific plot. It isn’t just a gardening experience you can also actually make it somewhat of a social event, I haven’t done one in like 10 years, but could be something you might enjoy.

Remember, the first part of community gardening is COMMUNITY! There’s the topical link. It also encourages shared responsibility which is a good thing. Gardeners are required to jointly maintain all common areas, paths, and borders of their garden. In addition, gardeners are expected to participate in group workdays, including their garden’s opening in spring.

June 7, 2008 by
(2)

Goofy Gadget Delivers an Uplifting Message

The mid-may announcement from Triumph International’s “Photovoltaic-Powered Bra” provides increased visibility to the importance of alternative energy. They have made other message bra’s such as one focusing on No-Plastic bags. Each of these efforts were done in hopes of increasing awareness around the issue of reducing the impact on the environment by using the right materials, conservation and leveraging alternative energy. While it may be able to power an iPod or other small device, it won’t make it to the shelves at a retailer.

While you won’t see it in a retail store they have triumphed by making their point – not only do we have to conserve energy, we need to find other ways to generate it.

May 27, 2008 by
(0)

Dozens, Hundrends and Thousands OH MY!

I was talking to some friends of mine the other day and pondering what I should do here on this blog, mainly for input, since I can’t seem to figure it out myself.   Ultimately I find myself continuously in search of an original idea – not a whole lot of those out there these days, if any. It’s not so much the amount of available content, as it is the amount of non-original content centered on the modest number of content opportunities which exist. So I’ve been on this particular task for a couple of weeks since I realized that I want to participate online differently – specifically on a more personal level.

The main reason for the discussion in general, was my current ability to scale. I’m personally finding it difficult to scale with quality. In general, I think social media has a scale issue, not just from a technology framework perspective, but also as you focus on it as a topic theme. I think in general most topics/areas of focus have content scale issues, but the issue in social media is more acute.

A quick content analysis of key folks appears to validate that there are just a good deal on non-events and events which are leveraged to go back to the bag of tricks and highlight a key concept. Not a bad thing, in fact upon review some of the best writers in the social media space are effectively recycling content every 3-6 months in context of the latest Twitter outage or which new platform is where the cool kids should hang out at.

Back to the task…

Fundamentally how to scale a set of activities is always an interesting thought experiment and made for an interesting afternoon for the group. We circled the topic for a while and I paused to check twitter – glad I did. Wouldn’t ya know – the Gods of the Twitterverse presented a series of tweets by Amanda Chapel in the stream which addressed the scale issue. I have to paraphrase the tweet in question with over 140 characters, since the back function is disabled due to Twitter “stressing out”/service issues.

The cost of obtaining a customer/the profitability of the initial transaction is greatly diluted by the cost of service delivery over time. The delivery of customer service doesn’t scale.

True Enough! Sales transactions are the easy things for the most part of any initiative. We actually discussed this tweet for a while in and out of the context of blogging. A very productive exchange – each had their personal insights on the topic with a mix of varying industry experiences, company sizes and diverse set of current roles: operational, strategic and creative. So this one cat offers up the following:

Technology businesses are aren’t about the transactions, but the repeatable transactions and supportability of the revenue. Anyone can sell something to dozens, some folks can sell to hundreds, but the market leaders can sell AND support 1000’s.

So I’ve realized I’ve encountered a scale issue with how I’m participating online and I’ve seen a great number of businesses which have the same issues. Great ideas, great product, crazy transactional revenues, but no ability to scale the business. With the general realization/acceptance that blogging is no different, I’ll contiue my gedankenexperiment on focusing my content, but at least I have 3 questions I’m going to work:

  1. What content do I consume and where do I participate online? Quick quick scan indicates technology, people & the environment.
  2. What passions do I have? Family, politics, education and science.
  3. Where are there 1000’s? Where are there 1000’s of things to track? 1000’s of interested people?

Ideas?

May 27, 2008 by
(0)

Ruby on Scales?

Ok I guess not. Perhaps Alex is wrong and I understand why Lee Mighdoll isn’t there anymore or Blaine Cook, I wonder if it’s a re-write or port, maybe friendfeed is the way to go, gosh I really don’t like agreeing with Scoble, but I guess he is a smart guy.

May 23, 2008 by
(4)