Michel Fortin Blogged this The Lines That Divide Us

The Lines That Divide US

This is moving stuff Get your tissues out. People have to learn to be nicer.
All of us need to FEEL more, and perhaps talk less.

We have all been judged at one point. But if you have ever judged others, particularly if you feel your judgments — no matter how small — were inconsequential or meaningless, you have to watch this video.





Get Your Name On!

Mike

$100 laptop' nonprofit now teamed with Microsoft

I've written on this before the genius of Nick Negroponte, and the breadth of this initiative, touch me deeply. I urge everyone to support this in any way you can.

Mike

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN – 9 hours ago

BOSTON (AP) — The One Laptop Per Child project is about to find out whether Microsoft Corp., a rival the nonprofit group once derided, is the solution to its problems in spreading inexpensive portable computers to schoolchildren.

Microsoft and the laptop organization announced Thursday that the nonprofit's green-and-white "XO" computers now can run Windows in addition to their homegrown interface, which is built on the open Linux operating system. That had been anticipated for months, but it amounts to a major shift.

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the laptop project — which aims to produce $100 computers but now sells them at $188 — acknowledged that having Windows as an option....Continue

Jack Humphrey - Falling in love with blogging again

May 11, 2008

I feel like a relationship expert this weekend. It seems that we’ve reunited hundreds of people and their blogs in the last week since we launched TrackBoost and Utility Poster.

I had a feeling this might happen. Bloggers often have a love/hate relationship with blogging because of the demands a blog makes on us as writers and “filters” of information.

We love the traffic and having no restrictions to what can be achieved with a popular site. But we hate having to be responsible for putting up great posts day after day. Sometimes you’re into it and sometimes you’re not.

Problem is, people are searching right now to find you on new keywords and through buzz generated about your latest and future posts. Having a blog is like caring for a Great Dane. It must be fed, a lot, to really see growth and to establish authority.

Money for Something

The good part is, unlike a Great Dane, a blog will make you money the more you feed it.

As the web settles into a pure dynamic landscape, where information truly flows, changes, and syndicates itself, we are all collectively realizing that content development and publishing has to be done regularly and done well to compete with others who “seem” to have no trouble at all feeding the beast.

The new users of TrackBoost and Utility Poster are finding that they too can “seem” to be at their computers day and night producing great content. While actually not spending as much time at it as before.

And the beauty of these two tools is that they will only produce bad results if users are bad editors or filters of the information they collect to post. Because we left the human element in the process and didn’t try to make anything close to a spammy information scraper or outdated RSS poster to create great posts, your personal touch and style is left in the process.

A Boy and His Blog: Reunited

This post would normally have taken me at least an hour+ to put together by hand. Going back and forth to all those sites getting the title, URL, snippet, and trackback URL for each and every story is a nightmarish scenario we all know too well.

Of course the research to find all that content is a whole other matter, taking a considerable amount of time the old way. Add another 30 minutes to the task for a reasonable search and review, sifting through many poor or average posts to come up with the gems.

I made the post above in about 25 minutes last night.

One new TrackBoost and Utility Poster owner had this to say:

“Been playing with these tools for a couple of days. They are addictive. Nice work.”

Dean’s last blog post..Make Your Relationships Stronger In The Midst Of Conflict

Addictive? I thought about that for a moment and realized he’s right. I too play with both apps frequently and, consequently, post more often here and on remote blogs because I enjoy it so much.

Enjoy blog posting?

That’s new! But having the right tools makes the job easier as well as making research fun again because all the hurdles to finding and posting good content have been removed, leaving us to focus on the fun parts of blogging: posting great content fast and seeing immediate results as readers comment and submit your posts to social news and other social media sites.

A reader submitted the post above to StumbleUpon last night right after I posted it. I logged on this morning to a nice bump in traffic from that one source (above what I normally get on a Saturday night)!

So much fun, that I even enjoyed putting this post together, word for word, a little more than usual.

Buy TrackBoost and/or Utility Poster Here

All of Inflation’s Little Parts (The New York Times)

Below is an INTERACTIVE FLASH IMAGE, Click to follow link and see how we really spend our Money.

May 3, 2008

All of Inflation’s Little Parts

Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
gathers 84,000 prices in about 200 categories — like gasoline, bananas,
dresses and garbage collection — to form the Consumer Price Index, one
measure of inflation.

It’s among the statistics that the Federal
Reserve considered when it cut interest rates on Wednesday. The
categories are weighted according to an estimate of what the average
American spends, as shown below.

An Average Consumer's Spending

Each shape below represents how much the average American spends in different categories.
Larger shapes make up a larger part of spending.

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Michael Balzer, University of Konstanz (Germany)

Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox/The New York Times

Neil Young chronicles music career

JavaOne '08: Neil Young chronicles music career

Rocker demos multimedia project using Java

Legendary musician Neil Young shows off a new multimedia project spanning his music career. Joining Young onstage at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco to demo the project--which uses Java and Blu-ray technology--is Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, Sun executive vice president of software.

Length: 10:43

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Jack Humphrey's Trackboost and Utility Poster

Trackboost and Utility Poster Answers

from Link Building and Blog Marketing by Jack Humphrey

In this video I answer some of the common questions that have come up in the fantastic feedback we’ve been getting for Trackboost and Utility Poster.
I also let everyone know when to expect the release of both titles and
expose a brand new feature added to Trackboost in the last 24 hours.

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Tags: blogging software, trackboost, utility poster

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