I’m spending more time offline in 2012 planning and executing events and building integrating marketing plans around those events. Many of these projects are exploding through client work, some as experiments via my volunteer time in cause-based organizations. I’m learning a ton from it though, and I’m putting a lot of the lessons learned to work in my other passion: MUSIC.

Last year, I started two rock bands. VA Stripper grew out of mine and guitarist Andy Petrick’s love for 1990s rock, a passion we both shared experiencing the music scene at SXSW 2011. For various reasons, VA Stripper never quite got off the ground explosively, so we started another act. This act – Brains of J – paid tribute to one of our favorite ’90s bands still rocking today, Pearl Jam. Both are very different projects, and both give us very different satisfaction in performing. Brains of J is a headlong dive into the music of Pearl Jam, while we plan on writing our own music as VA Stripper at some point in the very near future. However, both use similar methods of integrated event marketing to get fans to come see our shows.

Hence, the Must. Be. AWESOME!!! call to action:

Come see both bands Feb 2nd at Mad Rose Tavern

If you’re in the DC/North Virginia/Maryland region, consider coming to see both VA Stripper and Brains of J for our first full-on rock show. Joined by DC sensations The Vandelays, we’ll have a solid show of facemelting from 9pm till closing time. The Mad Rose Tavern sits within spitting distance of the Clarendon Metro station on the Orange Line. View a Map of Mad Rose and the surrounding area.

Be sure to grab one of us and tell us what you think of the show too!

What else can you do to support us?

Engage, baby. Here are a few things you can do to keep track of us:

• Like Brains of J on Facebook and, on our Wall, tell us your favorite Pearl Jam songs
• Follow Brains of J on Twitter
• Like VA Stripper on Facebook
• Follow VA Stripper on Twitter
• Post your photos and videos of our performances to our Facebook Walls
• Check in to Mad Rose (and future venues) with hashtags #brainsofj or #vastripper
• Sign up for our fans-only mailing list & newsletter using the form below

And in closing… some FACEMELTING!

Brains of J – “Hail, Hail” Live at The Front Page from Chris Dufour on Vimeo.

Decades after duty in the OSS and CIA, “spy girls” find each other in retirement

I kind of adore this story about two old ladies living in a retirement home who suddenly remember each other worked for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) in World War II. The video is hilarious. One of WaPo’s better pieces, I think. More of this, please.

Writers in Hollywood

As I learn more about the world of writing in Hollywood, I’m comforted by the observations of old guard prose scribblers like Raymond Chandler. In this 1945 Atlantic article, Chandler describes the differences between Hollywood scriptwriters and the novelists with whom he counted himself. Chandler’s AWESOME style is on display here, maintained from his fiction writing into this piece. It’s a notable historical portrait as well, rife with comparisons to the Hollywood film scene of today.

The Black Futurists

The World Futurist Society tipped me to this description of an AWESOME looking exhibit at the Sargent Johnson Gallery in The African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco. The exhibit features works of black futurists, from science fiction writers to bass players from outer space. People call it “Afrofuturism.”

Homefront and Propaganda In Video Games – What Are They Trying To Tell You?

G4 has a fun list of video games with brief queries about their inherent propaganda value. Most take the form of “war porn” games like Call of Duty, but there are some surprises. I had no idea, for example, that Teh Mad Christians had created a Left Behind video game adaptation where you apparently combat the forces of darkness with… prayer. Kinect that shit up, preacher!

Not Giving Up

Naltorian seer Jamais Cascio delivers a sanguine third option to the debate over how transformative future technologies like AI could either enslave humanity or set us free. Cascio argues that technology is already part of who we are; that Rejectionist and Posthumanist perspectives on bio-technical evolution ignore fungible interpretations of humanity. I enjoy Cascio’s commentary not just because of his unique perspective, but also because of his engaging writing style. This is a man who once briefed a social business crowd on how the future will be made of people, so I find it compellingly AWESOME that the guy’s writing just FEELS GOOD. He’s good people, and you should get there.

Is this the roster for DC’s new Justice League?

We can now confirm that this AWESOME Jim Lee is indeed a portrait of what’s being referred to as the “DCnU” Justice League. Set for debut in just a few short weeks, rumors circulated rampantly about DC Comics‘ relaunch of its entire line of comics. People were horrified, outraged, amazed, and excited for such a crazy turn of publishing events, all circling around the consolidated relaunch of every title to appeal to new readership. DC press releases since haven’t been as encouraging (there’s some good stuff but there’s also plenty of mediocrity) but this image is still something to get excited about.

The new cast of Geoff Johns' and Jim Lee's JUSTICE LEAGUE.

Disorienting Brand Conversions

My Modern Met logo designer Graham Smith makes your brain hurt with these weird brand swaps.

Image via My Modern Met

Anti-grav self portraits reveal the everyday life of a person who can levitate

AWESOME, AWESOME photoblog discovered by io9 of Tokyo photographer Natsumi Hayashi. Hayashi’s self portraits involve a degree of photography legerdemain where she sets up the shot then jumps to capture the effect that she’s actually levitating. It’s a supercool story of someone fudging reality to create abject beauty. The photos below are some of my favorites.

Image via yowayowacamera.com

Image via yowayowacamera.com

Related articles

• “Writers in Hollywood,” Raymond Chandler (gointothestory.com)
• Ahead of Comic-Con, DC readies readers for new 52 (ctv.ca)
• Warner Bros. Comic-Con Booth Will Be ‘On Fire’; Studio to Give Away Tweety-Bird Branded Car at Booth (tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com)

Pundits, researchers, textperts, and academics all love to talk about how they would fix the United States’ fragmented, crapped-out communication apparatus. The overarching web of demon seed spunked across drab refurbished halls in the Eisenhower Building on 17th Street NW barely covers the Sarlacc maw of offices, officials, and assholes manning the guns of This, Our National Communication Nightmare. All suggestions for reform mandate – nay, demand! – leadership in renovating this sad enterprise, this broken transistor, these crusted lips. Though none of these tremendous gasbags has deigned to ask the question most important to we lowly peasants of the pen: “Who shall lead us?” Submitted then, for no approval, is this list of AWESOME, kermodial badasses. Executives in 21st century organization and innovation. Preeminent princes of creativity. Visionaries of the better and the righteous.

Image via Wikipedia

Jack Dorsey – Creator & CEO, Twitter

Just interviewed The President using crowdsourced questions from Twitter. Twitter. A social media tool that has archived millions of impressions from people around the world and is on the way to becoming so ubiquitous that it’s considered a utility by some. Elegant simplicity and craftsmanship are his weapons. I think he knows a thing or two about designing a communication enterprise.

Image via The Guardian.

Andy Carvin – Senior Strategist, NPR

“The Crowdsorceror” who mounted a one-man content curation campaign in realtime around popular protests and demonstrations in the Middle East that later became known as the Arab Spring. Compelling, earnest believer in the power of people. His examples inspire legions of communicators to standing applause at his speaking engagements. To Carvin, community comes first. Imagine his style of realtime information gathering applied to intelligence or information operations problems.

Image via TVNewser

Jon Stewart - Host, The Daily Show

America’s funnyman turned mega-popular fake news host, consumed by millions of Americans as “real” news. Despite obvious satirical takes on journalism, staunchly defends That Which Is Right by attacking The Wrong, from Fox News insidiousness to Cramer’s role in puffing up the housing crisis. Genuinely loves America. Imagine his tenure leading government international broadcasting efforts.

Image via brosephstalin.com

Tim Hwang – Founder, Web Ecology Project, The Awesome Foundation, and The Institute for Higher Awesome Studies

A philosophical cog caught between the wheels of web analytics and netnography. Cultural researcher and student of human interaction offline, online, and elsewhere. Observer of society, real and imagined. Teamed with the right agencies, his timely insights about social communities could make AWESOMEthe work of thousands of government communication professionals.

Image via AV.com

Fred Wilson – Venture Capitalist and Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures

Social entrepreneur and investor in socially transformative technologies. Believes in the transcendant like Hashable, Etsy, Foursquare, GetGlue, Kickstarter, and more. Blogs regularly about the whys and wherefores, the how-to’s, and the aspirational dreams of his investments. Imagine a federal executive who apportions program funding according to the good of society versus short-term gains or even strategic objectives.

Image via Gawker.

Peter Thiel - Serial VC, Hedge Fund Manager

Avowed investor in the impossible, from artificial intelligence to social networks like Facebook to data analytics supergiants like Palantir. Believer in not just debating future technology and social innovation but making it happen. Convener of social creatives to discuss building an objective American future. Elusive yet visionary. Skates the edge of politics with controversial libertarian-esque views on economics and democracy, a modernist perspective badly required by an ever evolving communications ecosystem.

Image via bookgalaxo.com

Tony Hsieh – CEO, Zappos

The man who brought happiness to millions and made fun a core capability of his company. Committed to making the world a happier place, a mission sorely needed in the personnel departments of hundreds of government agencies.

John Lasseter - Chief Creative Officer, Pixar

The man who built an animated powerhouse out of a tiny studio no one believed would succeed. Since producing some of the most endearing animated films in the modern age, has merged his multibillion dollar studio with Disney to usher in a new era of Imagineering. Our communications enterprise, currently swarmed with ill-trained personnel that barely understand the social phenomena happening around them, requires creativity of this man’s magnitude.

Image via Screencrave.com

Image via Headshift.com

Lee Bryant – Co-founder & Director, Headshift

A social business maestro, he advocates for clients to change the way they do business instead of simply hanging shiny new social media toys on their websites. Understands the complex challenges of technology’s promises and shortcomings in solving organizational and communications problems. Also, very British.

Image via The Huffington Post

Baratunde Thurston – Vigilante Pundit, The Onion

Champion for The Right in all things Wrong. Outspoken advocate for diversity, a trait we see too rarely in government. His infectious influence could inspire legions of public diplomats, strategic communicators, and information operators at all levels. Laughter mandating shot caller of madness. Imagine his effect teaching communicators in institutions across government how to be AWESOME and not just govvies.

David Kilcullen – Counterinsurgency Guru

An early advocate of fighting ideologically against al-Qaeda versus hand-to-hand. Believer in people-focused counterinsurgency security. Sees war as competition managed by influence instead of shootouts and bombings. Widely regarded as the smartest man on the planet when it comes to strategically understanding the wars of the future. If the Defense Department continues playing in deployed communications – and it will – then it will need a shamanic leader like this man to responsibly pilot the interagency minefields such across-the-board coordination that will require.

Image via The Washingtonian

Image via Wikipedia

Robert Gates – Former Secretary of Defense; Former Director, CIA 

The ultimate honest broker in all things government. From his perch as SECDEF, fought interminable battles with service cultures and DOD dinosaurs, breaking down inflated budgets and streamlining operations. Put this same right-is-right tenacity to work reforming and leading the rehabilitation and redesign of America’s communication enterprise across agencies, and we will see magic.

Mae Ferguson. Kind of a badass.

Mae Ferguson – President & CEO, Fort Worth Sister Cities International

People forget citizen and cultural diplomacy are cornerstone elements of strategic influence, and because of that, they remain ill coordinated with the rest of our national communication apparatus. Mae has the terrier-like tenacity and management expertise to round up the various bit parts of cultural programs and get them working properly in alignment with national influence goals. A long time nonprofit leader, she has achieved a lot with strangled budgets and limited personnel. Disclosure: she’s also my Mom.

Who am I missing?

I know you’ve got some ideas about kermodial badasses we need to draft into service of our faltering national communication enterprise. Tell me who they are in the comments.

Not much to report this week due to a flurry of Du4licious activity in prep for this week’s Sister Cities International conference in Arlington. But a couple things did catch my eye.

Image via Wikipedia

Revealing the Man Behind @MayorEmanuel

Like many across the country, I fell in love with the raucous foulness of Rahm Emanuel‘s parody Twitter account, which started broadcasting shortly after Rahm left the White House to run for mayor of Chicago. As @MayorEmanuel’s popularity grew, so too did the mystery of who was really behind it. In this Atlantic article, @MayorEmanuel’s pilot is revealed: Dan Sinker, a Chicago punk rocker and new age digital storyteller. Sinker describes @MayorEmanuel as performance art, a new sort of digital political commentary that weaves in and out of fiction, celebrity, and current events. I’m massively intrigued by the potential of using Twitter in a manner like Sinker did. Anonymity is so easily protected on this network, there are huge opportunities for persona manipulation… which makes me wonder about the future of digital identity. Great read.

On Revolutions

Pretty interesting perspective on the Middle East protests from Chris Guillebeau at The Art of Non-Conformity. Guillebeau has made a name for himself as a “travel hacker” by finding inexpensive means of visiting all sorts of places around the world. He is, in my opinion, a true citizen diplomat (public diplomacy peeps: take note). His experiences flying into Afghanistan, Libya, and Iran (!), give him an interesting “average joe” insight to what’s really at the forefront of people’s minds in those countries. Highly recommended read, and be sure to subscribe to Guillebeau’s blog too. It’s a must for nonconformists, proto-world dominators, and doowutchyalikes.

Announcing: Open Foresight & The Future of Facebook Project

Venessa Miemis is at it again with what sounds like an AWESOME forecasting initiative via Kickstarter. She has already interviewed several notable social media and tech influencers and has opened up her research questions to the public on Quora. I highly recommend EVERYONE go and participate in this project. I’ve blogged about Venessa before, and I think her work as a modern digital/social futurist demonstrates a LOT of required skills we as humans need to adopt to adapt to the new digital lifestyles in which we find ourselves.

Related articles

• The Man Behind The Fake @MayorEmanuel Twitter Feed Is Revealed (mediaite.com)
• Dan Sinker Is @MayorEmanuel: Punk Planet Founder, Journalism Professor Behind Notorious Twitter Acccount (huffingtonpost.com)
• Fake Rahm Emanuel Twitter author revealed (thehill.com)
• Rahm To Meet Dan Sinker Today (huffingtonpost.com)
• MYSTERY SOLVED: Rahm’s Twitter imposter revealed (politico.com)

After enjoying JWT‘s roundup of radness from their 2011 predictive trendspotting BIZINT department, I inferred a couple of times that they my have missed some things to watch in the coming year. I struggled with whether or not I was going to do a 2011 predictions post of my own (especially with all of the other great [and TERRIBLE] ones out there). As I intimated in the JWT post though, it’s tough to maintain your street cred as an armchair futurist if you don’t make some play calls – good or bad. It’s not like I can go on TV and just fry motherfuckers with my brain like Jamais Cascio:

Image courtesy of orderofchaos.soup.io

Here then is the Must. Be. AWESOME!!! 2011 Predictive Tapdance:

The Elephant in the Room: Islam

For all the loveliness that “hope” and “change” brought us in 2009, 2010 saw a whole lot of retrenching when it came to comprehending and engaging Islam. Look for the debate about what constitutes Islam, Islamism, what various groups of modern Muslims want in today’s world, and popular revolutions in the Middle East to ratchet up. Also keep an eye on what the Muslim Brotherhood does in the wake of Mubarak’s resignation: they will telegraph a lot of the conflict about modern Islam.

More Mashups, More Memes

I don’t care what anybody says: mashups and memes will continue to provide ample entertainment to We People of the Internetz. Look for advertisers to begin capitalizing on meme-trending and mashup-producing. Performance indicators: the next acquisition/website startup from the I Can Has Cheezburger collective AND Wieden & Kennedy after hiring the creator of this AWESOME video–

Cloud Seeding

As gaming continues to seep into the popular consciousness through applications like competitive geolocation (i.e. Foursquare and Gowalla) and passive social gaming (i.e. Farmville), look for more creative approaches to “seeding” the cloud with various types of content. Be it for advertising or grassroots mobilization purposes, effective influence and content promotion campaigns of the future will unfold via a variety of platforms. StickyBits and other QR code scanning apps are good indicators of tactical implementations of a cloud seeding strategy.

Hacktivism Triumphant

If WikiLeaks has taught us anything, masses of anonymous hackers can make or break online footprints. With Anonymous’ mobilization against Amazon and other deniers of service against WikiLeaks, it is apparent that all-out online cyberwar can and will occur at a rate of minutes and hours. Government will continue to play catch-up to the independent entities playing havoc with cybersecurity. DDoS attacks will become typical tools of the trade, and countermeasures against such attacks will demonstrate a new “arms race” in evolving security and attack technology. We will also see cyberwars play out in days between entities if not hours and minutes, the extent of which will run the gamut from mere inconvenience to full-on revolution (there’s a reason why Mubarak shut off the Internet, yo). It is possible that a wild 4channer will crack U.S. cyber defenses in 2011 and perhaps provide a 9/11-like impetus for government to begin getting serious with policy and legislation to operate in the digital age.

Nobody Cares About Public Diplomacy

Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech demonstrated that the U.S. government will continue to centralize public diplomacy initiatives in the White House, leaving State Department assets twisting in the wind as hollow emperors in the field. U.S. legislators will increase the depths to which they could give a shit less in 2011 about PD because PD does not create jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, 20th century institutions of public diplomacy like Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and the Broadcasting Board of Governors will continue to wither and die in the digital age as on-the-minute social reporting and citizen journalism make them further irrelevant. Funding for PD initiatives will continue to stagnate while implementers will find more creative methods of achieving strategic PD goals, mostly via the private sector tech sector and citizen diplomacy organizations. China and some European countries will continue to lead with non-obvious but concerted national efforts in global influence, the effects of which will remain undiscovered by their targets (i.e., US) for years.

Passive Social Gaming EXPLODES

Related to my concept of “cloud seeding,” 2011 will see an explosion of social games in the vein of Farmville. Already, 2011 has seen Zynga publish a suster game to its masses-tranquilizing hit called Cityville. Transmedia, alternate reality gaming, and other episodic social gaming entities will experiment further with audience acquisition, retention, and profit conversion this year. Advertisers will cash in on these mechanisms en masse, driving ad-tired audiences from game to game and forcing ad strategists to begin thinking in different ways about social advertising. We will also see a continued harmonization of transmedia and ARGs cross-platform, online and offline, for social gaming experiences that will, for example, weave in and out of Facebook, Twitter, iPad and other mobile apps, and in-person performance art. More and more people will join longer term games socially as new genres are introduced on social networks. Performance indicator: keep your eyes peeled on LinkedIn for a business-based social game that trains executives in a number of administrivial and professional functions.

Location-based Services Get Profitable

Also related to “cloud seeding,” location-based app services such as Foursquare and Gowalla will rapidly get profitable this year. While many detractors continue to ridicule the small audience size these services carry, their growth will continue by orders of magnitude in 2011, so much so that advertisers and marketers for brick-and-mortar businesses will pay oodles of dough to access their users. Look for more unique rewards for users who check in to local places and events as well as the beginning of an actual value system based on fictional goods (i.e. Gowalla’s items).

People Begin To Realize All This Social Stuff Really IS Creating Socialism 2.0

Marx said it would take capitalism to run its course and fall out of favor before true socialism could take hold of the world. Macro-philosophers and economists will slowly begin to see that that is happening on a mass scale in 2011. Group buying services like Groupon and Living Social, crowdfunded charity programs, realtime crowdsourced news reporting, and near-realtime media curation will continue to prove that power really is all about the people. Democratization of content and price will, therefore, produce The New Socialism or Socialism 2.0. This will freak out conservatives and create performance indicators on conservative news networks that decry not only a socialist presidency but a socialist economy beginning to develop. Look for influencers that combat these conservative perceptions as the emerging leaders of the Socialist 2.0 movement (which in and of itself will never be referred to as an organized, network movement with a solid objective… it will just happen). Parallel to this, fortunes will begin to change hands as sales for various product areas crash: for example, the comics industry will continue to lose sales in print as consumers demand more digital, interactive content.

We Need a New Narrative

No more Harry Potter. No more Lord of the Rings. No more Star Wars. What’s the next big franchise? 2011 will see experimental repurposing of old ideas into new franchises. My money is on Thor and Captain America to be the starting point for a huge Avengers movie franchise in 2011 and 2012 (with reams of associated multimedia content) while Green Lantern and Transformers: Dark of the Moon tank.

What Do You Think?

Got some predictions of your own? Think I’m off-base about some of these things to watch? Let me know in the comments.

Based on discussions I’ve been having with people online and offline since my first “Posthuman” post, I’ve been struck with a braingasm full of thoughtbombs on the subject. What will follow are a series of posts under the Futurism category and the Posthuman tag that seek to collect and organize my thinking on the subject. These posts will not always make sense or be rationally organized because I’m finding that it helps to write about them in a hyper-creative, freeform stage at this point instead of something more formalized.

The Web, Social Media, and Meta-Persona

Will humans’ collective social interactions on the Web provide the foundational data and code to create a self-aware Internet?

The collective leavings of man on the Internet are becoming overwhelmingly social, left behind data on a mass of social media platforms and at-rest social technologies. If this data continues to reside on the Web, and if different sets within this data are permitted to interact (replicating conversations between humans in the form of data), then do these coding interactions actually mimic the neural activity of the human mind…thus creating the construct for an awareness?

Imagine all the information from all the social networks people use (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, etc). It’s not just being stored on the Internet (in the cloud), it’s being shared socially, which means it’s evolving past single purpose data into evolutionary ideas. Ideas are evidence of sentience. Is it then just a matter of time before the Internet “wakes up” and interacts with mankind on it’s own behalf?

Image courtesy of The Ampersand

Consider the virtual musical act Gorillaz: 4 fictional personas whose interactions and compositions are the creation of several individual humans. These personas even interact with humans via virtual social media, e.g. Murdoc’s Twitter account. This is a form of collective identity where the personas behind Gorillaz are sublimated by the perception of the characters’ realness in online space.

Now imagine if one day the Internet woke up and spoke to us through one of these virtual personas or created one of it’s own. If we perceive sentience from the collective organization of data in such a way that the data becomes self-aware….does this nexus of man-machine interface, philosophical solipsism, and posthuman creationism signify the turning point where Everything Changes? Is this the Singularity?

[NOTE: This post was drafted using WordPress's iPad app, which strips away much important functionality from posting (such as Zemanta's pic recommendations). Its a great way to capture thoughts on the fly before they slip away from y mind, but full-on publishing has to be done through the main WP CMS to make it prettiez fer yoo.]

Related articles

• Your genes may have very little to do with how you look [Evolution] (io9.com)
• Posthuman (mustbeawesome.com)
• Transhumanism (psychologytoday.com)

I discovered Goodreads a couple years ago and found it instantly addictive. It’s a social network for sharing, organizing, and commenting on books. You can create your own shelves on which to hang books you’ve read, are currently reading, or mark to read. You can also invite your friends to join the service and opt in to see what’s new in their streams. So if they write a review or rate a certain book, it will pop up in your stream, you can decide if you want to check it out or not, and add it to one of your own shelves.

I bring Goodreads up for a number of reasons. The first is that when I first started using it, I had to go back in my mind and think about ALL the books I’ve read. This was a hard job for and English major who’s forgotten more books than he cares to admit. I’m still woefully behind in adding things to my library. Still, this is a great mental exercise that forced me to organize my reading for the first time ever. I could now see how many non-fiction versus fiction books I had read, for example, or if I was missing a certain book in a series or family of writers. The task of cataloguing puts a lot of things in perspective for me, and I find that I am recognizing patterns in this volume of data that I once had not previously seen. This is a GREAT exercise that will help you measure your pattern recognition abilities, something which futurist Venessa Miemis calls an essential skill for 21st century thinking.

Courtesy of an-inkling.com

Secondly, as a social animal, I am finding all kinds of value in the connections I make on Goodreads. In many cases, these connections are very different from the ones I have on other social media. For example, I don’t have a relationship with the guy I buy comic books from, Don Alsafi of G-Mart Comics in Chicago. Well, at least our relationship has been defined simply by my buying comics from him. However, once we became connected on Goodreads, we’ve exchanged quite a few different ideas about books we’ve either read or want to read. Most of this happens without us having an actual conversation, or at least the conversation is marked simply by signifiers in one of our ratings or reviews of the books we read. But these signifiers are not directed at any one connections. They are free and open to the community. So I’m basically getting a free window into Don’s mind regarding the books he’s read. We skip the conversation and get right to the information: PLANETARY is fucking AWESOME. Got it. Moving on. I like the elegance of this network, which is not to say there’s not plenty of interactive conversation in Goodreads’ network of groups. Plus, you can always make a comment on someone’s review or rating.

Finally, the last reason I bring up Goodreads is that one of my AWESOME readers recently asked me why I don’t do more book reviews on Must. Be. AWESOME!!! The answer’s pretty simple: I review every book I read on Goodreads. The writeups can range from a paragraph to more detailed to only a rating, but I find that for books, it’s easier for me to put my thoughts into a single space that has already been catalogued, tagged and organized rather than creating new content for this space.

So if you’re looking for my thoughts on any number of books, feel free to follow me on Goodreads. I’m still working out how I can get a good Goodreads widget set up to flow my content there to my blog (most of the WordPress plugins are dismal), so if you have any good ideas on that, let me know. Otherwise, I do have my Goodreads feed connected to Twitter and Facebook too, so reviews and ratings will occasionally pop into those streams as well (sporadically, though, because of the unevenness of the interfaces).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Are You a Book Lover? You Need GoodReads (shankrila.com)
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• Goodreads.com Founder And Print Heir Says Reviews And Bookstores Dying (huffingtonpost.com)

And now, the final video from my MountainRunner Institute talk at the “Now Media Seminar.” Let me know what you thought!

You can also find the slides from this preso by following this link.

Here’s Part 4 of my MountainRunner Institute talk from the “Now Media Seminar.” HOWF!

Also, you can follow this link to see the actual slides from the event.

Here’s the second part of my MountainRunner Institute talk from July 6th’s “Now Media Seminar.” Enjoy!