You can listen to samples of the new Hammock album here, order the CD through their store OR wait a few more days until it becomes available through the "regular" digital stores.
I am DYING for the days to pass (I hardly buy a CD any more these days, so I will wait): the samples I heard simply blow all their past works out of the water!
As if reaching critical mass were not something imminent for Twitter now, I stumbled upon this CNN article (via Twitter, of course):
James Karl Buck sent a message using Twitter which helped get him out of an Egyptian jail... On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. The message only had one word. "Arrested."Regardless of how you feel about new technologies, the fact that someone was saved from jail by twittering about it... from a remote place, deserves to be recognized as a turning point that will probably make Twitter a more ubiquitous and heavily used tool from here on out.
As most of you know, Monday was my last day @ Ning. Starting Tuesday, I began to head the Diabetes Hands Foundation full-time, running TuDiabetes.com, EsTuDiabetes.com and other diabetes outreach programs.
Here you can see some photos of the last day, including one with Gina Bianchini (above): not every day does one get the opportunity to get a pic (or work) with a CEO that has Silicon Valley buzzing.
It was an honor to serve in the Ning team. I will now continue to be a Network Creator devoted to the development of our social networks for people touched by diabetes.
Thanks to this blog post, I was able to figure out how to add my Facebook status automatically into Twitter? Why is this useful? Because I update my Facebook status conveniently from my cell phone without going to a browser, using Facebook mobile.
The only part that took a bit of figuring out (because I had changed my privacy settings) was where could I find my mini-feed:
http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?status&id=83500262
(replace the number after ID for your profile ID number)
The RSS feed for that page should look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=83500262&viewer=83500262&key=3947f7aa3a&format=rss20
You can either use that RSS feed directly in Twitterfeed to automatically push your Facebook updates into Twitter, or clone this Yahoo! Pipe (which I in turn I learned about here) using the RSS feed URL from above, so you don't have to show on Twitter:
"Manny is in Boston" but rather the more elegant Twitter post "is in Boston. (from Facebook status)".
Hope this helps!
Read the details about our new partnership with OneTouch through the Word In Your Hand project.
We are thrilled about this news and wanted to share it with everyone!
Almost a year ago I wrote about Twitter and the niche it fills.
I thought it was funny to read this blog post today. Just yesterday I was chatting with Kyle how Twitter seemed to be picking up steam and I was seeing more people starting to follow me on Twitter (as a reference, "following" in Twitter is like "friending" someone in a social network like TuDiabetes.com).
On a side note, the blog also mentions the Ning's half-billion dollar valuation, which was announced in a Techcrunch post yesterday.
My friend Gustavo, whom I had the honor to meet and work with at Full Sail, recently worked on a project called kickstartmyday.com that he shared with me.
The site offers daily videos designed to get people fired up and thinking about success at the start of each day!
Their goal is to inspire 1 million people to start their day INTENTIONALLY.
This is today's video: Sometimes success requires more than persistence.
A little after a year of sporting the same look, TuDiabetes.com underwent a radical facelift overnight.
Check it out and read about the rationale behind the decisions for the new design.
Andreina is to be praised for her work on this!
Today is Type 1 Diabetes Awareness Day, a day that was conceived by Kerri Morrone (blogger, editor at dLife and someone with type 1 diabetes herself). I am joining millions of fellow type 1 diabetics in raising awareness about this condition, which has similar symptoms to the more prevalent type 2 diabetes, yet happens to be an altogether different disease.
Since there have been many fellow bloggers who have done a phenomenal job at explaining what type 1 diabetes is about and the current state of research in trying to find a cure for the disease, I thought of focusing my awareness effort on a "close cousin" of type 1 diabetes called Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA).
Also known as type 1.5 diabetes, LADA is a applies to those of us who are diagnosed with diabetes as adults, but who do not immediately require insulin for treatment, are often not overweight, and have little or no resistance to insulin. This was my case, back in 2002: I was given oral medication (the way type 2 cases are normally treated) to help me cope with my body's inability to regulate blood sugars by itself.
Over the course of a few months, I was told by my endocrinologist I had type 1 diabetes: what I actually had developed was LADA and, as a result, I became insulin dependent to this day.
You can read more about Latent autoimmune diabetes in this wikipedia article. As it explains, over time "LADA more closely resembles type 1 diabetes and shares common physiological characteristics of type 1 for metabolic dysfunction, genetics, and autoimmune features."
So at the end of the day, those of us with LADA are on the "same boat" as people with type 1 diabetes, which is why I chose Type 1 Diabetes Awareness Day as an occasion to raise awareness about LADA.
If you have type 1 diabetes, LADA (or type 2, obviously), believe me: you are not alone! If you still think you are, just join a community for people touched by diabetes such as TuDiabetes.com, DiabetesDaily or ChildrenWithDiabetes so you can see for yourself.
If you don't have any type of diabetes, please help us spread the word today. Take a few minutes and raise awareness about type 1 diabetes.
Since I discovered Ning in March '07 it changed my life and it has helped to change the lives of thousands of other people touched by diabetes who are member of TuDiabetes.com and EsTuDiabetes.com, two social networks that run on Ning.
Please vote for Ning for the Webby Awards, in the Social Networking category.
While you are at it, make sure to also vote for dLife in the Health category. I write a monthly column there and it's a great reference for people with diabetes.
Today, I realized Allison had published this interview with me on the JDRF web site.
I am very excited and honored to be featured there. Thanks!!!!
Los Compadres just left. Henkel y Mariana estuvieron con nosotros casi dos semanas (excepto unos dias que bajaron a L.A.) y la pasamos genial: pudimos ir a Napa, Sonoma, el Golden Gate, Monterey, Berkeley y cubrimos las fotos de rigor delante de las empresas mas importantes de Silicon Valley. :)
¡Los extrañaremos muchisimo Compadres! La pasamos genial. Se les quiere cantidad.
Camila, my sister-in-law, is graduating from Full Sail University this week.
As if seeing her work through days and nights to refine her textures and models wasn't enough, today I was blown away when I saw Camila's work come to life as a mature artist ready to take over the world of computer animation! :)
See what I mean by clicking on the image so you can see Camila's demo reel. She is looking for a job as a Texture Artist, so if you know anyone hiring for this position, please send them this link: www.camiladavila.com.
We are VERY proud of you, Cami!
Here is the demo reel of Reilly, Camila's boyfriend and another VERY talented artist.
Next Tuesday (April 15, 2008), the new M83 album is coming out. Don't miss it... While you wait, here is the video for the single "Graveyard Girl":
U tell me. Bloggers are falling like flies:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/technology/06sweat.html
Those who aren't dying are moving to Twitter.
I recently posted on the Ning Blog a series of SEO tips for social network creators on how to make the most of Search Engine Optimization in their networks.
Today, I wrote a new post on choosing the best name for your social network. Check it out: you may find it handy!
I was just reading a great article from Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge newsletter, titled "Putting Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector" and thought how much what we're doing in TuDiabetes.com is indeed social entrepreneurship:
One of the authors of the book Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector defines:
"... social entrepreneurship as innovative, social value-creating activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit, government, or business sectors."We took the tools to create a social network for anything that Ning offered and put them to the service of people touched diabetes, resulting in a social network that continues to grow virally at about 5% per week.
Reputation Management is a very broad topic. So much so that there are companies such as Reputation Defender and International Reputation Management entirely devoted to it. Online reputation management exists at the crossroads between Internet Marketing, PR and good old Strategic Thinking.
While dealing with attacks on your reputation may be limited to nasty comments on your YouTube videos or your blog posts, they could go further, resulting in blog posts that tarnish your name or edits to a Wikipedia page about you or your company (if you have one).
This is a situation that is not simple to correct. Bloggers will understandably be hard pressed to take down a post they wrote and removing a reference from Wikipedia will take more work than reading Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
The thoughts on these pages should come in handy when considering how to proceed if faced with a frontal online attack on your reputation:
My friend Henkel keeps insisting that I get a GPS and I keep postponing the decision.
Today, I read that you can finally "Send To GPS" your Google Maps. This is becoming hard to resist.
Any GPS'ers out there? Any recommendations for a model? Do I hear Garmin?
