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I saw two videos today that made me think we’re only beginning to see the raw potential that lies in the iPhone. When Apple decided to open the platform up to developers, it was such a brilliant idea! Building a platform and letting others take it and run is a very compelling business model.

This first video shows the Brushes app, and how it was used to create cover art for a recent issue of the New Yorker. Are you kidding me?! A $5 application being used in design for a major publication. That’s just unbelievable. You can read more about this here.

This second video shows a new iPhone game called “Seek n’ Spell”. Players of the game have to run all over a specific geographic area to collect letters, helping them make words to win the game. What really amazes me is how this game involves the physical world and software. The future will be very very interesting.

Here’s a great video I found that really speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit. I highly recommend it.

Even if you don’t work for yourself, you can think and act like an entrepreneur. How are you changing your company, your community, your world for the better?

Friends and Family,

I’d like to bring to your attention a fantastic charity opportunity that is being organized by two of my close friends, Allen Burt and Ryan Graves.  This week (beginning April 27, 2009) marks the beginning of their $5K in 5 Days campaign.  The goal is to raise money to buy books for school children in Laos by leveraging the power of the social web.  The goal and how you can help are described below.  If you’re able, please consider a donation.  I couldn’t speak more highly than I do of these two gentlemen.

The Goal
My good friend Allen Burt has been traveling through Southeast Asia over the last few months and has hooked up with an awesome organization called ‘Big Brother Mouse ‘. Their goal, and now ours, is to provide literacy opportunities for the children of Laos. Allen and I have organized a world wide campaign to raise funds for this organization!
Through LibraryForLaos.org & The $5K in 5 Days campaign, books will be purchased through the non-profit Big Brother Mouse, at an average cost of only $1.80 per book. With your help, we can provide thousands of books and fund reading programs for schools in rural Laos. Simply, contribute your lunch money or inspire 10 of your friends to contribute and share with 10 of their friends. This will take you only 3 minutes and YOU can help change the landscape of literacy in Laos!

When
During the final week in April we are going to launch a web wide effort to raise $5,000 US towards the children of Laos. Mark your calendars for this coming Monday, April 27 - Friday, May 1, 2009. We’ll be accepting donation starting that Monday at 12:00am and going until Friday at midnight.

How can I help?
Easy…just go to LibraryforLaos.org and either go to the donate page to contribute monetarily. Or, use these links to share LibraryforLaos.org with all your friends, listservs, Twitter followers, or even stalkers on the web! Again, this sharing will only take you a minute so please help us spread the awareness of this cause!

Email - Email Library for Laos to friends!
Twitter - Share Libary for Laos with Twitter followers!
Facebook - Update your status on Facebook to recruit friends to help!

Why Laos?
The country of Laos is in a devastating state of poverty and the children of rural villages are suffering. Of a population of roughly 6 million, over half are under the age of 21. Increasing opportunities for literacy NOW, will have a substantial impact on the Laos’ future. Just as China and India have experienced a boom in education and thus impact on the world, Southeast Asia is next in line. With such a large number of children the potential impact is enormous.
Thank you so much for helping us raise funds for LibraryforLaos.org and Big Brother Mouse! On Sunday May 3rd we’ll send out an email letting you all know what dollar amount we reached! Your help and support is very much appreciated!

Over the weekend, Erica and I visited the Yerkes Obervatory, near Lake Geneva, WI.

Yerkes Observatory, which calls itself “the birthplace of modern astrophysics,”[1], is an astronomical observatory operated by the University of Chicago in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. It was created in 1897 by George Ellery Hale and financed by Charles T. Yerkes. The observatory represented a shift in the thinking of observatories, from mere housing for a telescope and observer, to the modern concept of observation equipment integrated with laboratory space for physics and chemistry. A 102 cm (40 inch) refracting telescope built by the master optician Alvan Clark is located inside. It is the largest refracting telescope used for scientific research (a larger demonstration refractor, the Great Paris Exhibition Telescope of 1900, was exhibited at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900). ~Wikipedia

I pieced a few shots together to make this panographic photo (click it to see it bigger):

File this one away with my series of posts focused on Information Overload…

One major gripe I’ve had with Twitter for some time now (and I know I’m not alone here) is the inability to group the people you follow into certain categories. Let me explain.  Currently I’m following (receiving updates from) upwards of 600 people on Twitter.   It can be assumed that they are all worth listening to from time to time - otherwise I wouldn’t have clicked “follow” in the first place.  But the experience of watching a big newsfeed tick by with the updates from all these people is a little daunting, and clearly inefficient.  How can I focus with all this noise?

Right now, some of my main interests are startups, photography, Milwaukee (”represent”), and business intelligence.  Sometimes (almost all the time actually) I’d prefer to read about only one of these subjects, not all of them at a time.  For example, if I’m in a creative mood, I could be eager to see what people are saying about photography or design.  Now, I could do a twitter search for “photography”.  While this might return some decent results, it just shows me a list of recent tweets mentioning “photography”.  This completely negates the time I’ve put into finding people who actually know what they’re talking about.  I’d much rather just see the recent updates from all the people who I consider experts.  And now I can - using the Tweetie iPhone app, with the process described below. [note: This works just as well with Twhirl for the desktop if you don't have an iPhone]

Tweetie is like many iPhone Twitter applications that allow you to see the recent updates from the people you follow.  What sets it apart is that Tweetie allows you to use many different Twitter accounts.

Here’s how it works:
1. Download Tweetie (it’s $3, but worth it)

2. Make a list of topics you’re into.
Maybe include on the list some people on Twitter who clearly know what they’re talking about when it comes to that topic.

3.  Create a new Twitter account for each topic
(in this example, i’ve appended “a_” to the name.  It will help my list of accounts sort nicely alphabetically later)

4. Log into the account created for a topic, and follow the people who say interesting things about that topic. For example, with the account I created for Photography, I followed @simonmcconico, @jakedavidrohde, @RachelK, @photocampmke as a good start.

5. Add your real account, and your “topic accounts” to Tweetie

Now you’re all set!  In my example, I can pop into the Photography account to see what the photography tweeps are talking about…

Or if I want to see what’s going on in Milwaukee, it’s as easy as checking the Milwaukee account…

One critical feature of Tweetie is the ability to reply with any of your accounts.  So If I’m viewing all the Milwaukee updates, I can still reply as @blakesamic.

Just another battle won in the war against Information overload.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

How’s this for a pop-culture, sign of the times item? A coffee mug with all the people you’re following on Twitter. You can pick one up for $12.95, at sxoop.com.

Panography using 100+ photos.

Click on the image to view it BIG.

Do it at YourFonts.com

“Subject: ‘______’ is now following you on Twitter!”

Are you sick of the Twitter follow back process?  You know, the one where you get a dozen emails from Twitter and you have to go into each one to figure out if all these people are worth following?  The process is pretty inefficient if you think about it.

What if there was an app that could show all your recent followers, and give you relevant info about each one?  You’d be in and out, and you would make more informed decisions.

I think an app like this should have the following features:
* show a list of all recent followers you haven’t reviewed yet
* give bio info for the selected person
* show the last 5-10 tweets from person
* show which of your friends are following that person

All of these give a quick idea about the credibility of the person.  Having it all on one page would be MUCH better than the current process.

The app could pull all the info in by receiving those Twitter emails (you would reroute them).  It could even send you a weekly digest email, showing you all the followers for the week [instead of one email per person].

Of course, what would be EVEN better, would be to have an existing app like TweetDeck do this.  That would be ideal.

Over the weekend, I joined a few friends at Bucketworks to model T-shirts for Teecycle.org.  Teecycle sells used shirts and gives a portion of the proceeds to charity.

Simon and Jake from Valo photography shot the whole thing, and they are extremely talented as you can see below.  Well a good model doesn’t hurt of course ;-)

Here I am doing my best praying mantis attack

And then I made it rain…

And here’s genuine smirk for ya

If you’d like to know more about Teecycle, check out the video from when I interviewed Tim, the founder, for ActionsTalk

In this day in age, those of us that have chosen to dive head first into the social web are bombarded with communication from every angle. Information overload is a very real thing, and I believe the need for software to help us filter and prioritize this information will grow exponentially in the coming years.

So I have an idea, or the early stages of an idea, and I wanted to get it out there for discussion. Let’s start at the beginning, where all solutions should start - with the problem.

The Problem:
* Most people are now a part of one or more social networks and the communication we recieve daily is no longer limited to email and phone calls. To build networks that help us professionally, many of us are ‘loosely’ connected to people that we hardly know (especially on Twitter). There is a hope that these relationships will grow into more meaningful, personal contacts.  Due to all of these relationships, there is a proliferation of communication channels. It can be easy to let the connections that are truly the most important (your core network) fall by the wayside when we’re preoccupied with everything else.

The Solution:
To simplify our lives, I believe there is a need for an application that aggregates all of the communication from the people that matter most in one spot - while excluding the rest. Let me explain.

If you consider all of your digital communication channels, only a subset of them are actually directed at you. For example, if you follow a friend on Twitter (or follow their Facebook status updates, etc.) you are getting lots of information that may be interesting, but isn’t directed at you. Out of all the messages directed at you, only a portion of them are from people in your core network.

So the first problem this application should solve is to filter out everything that A. isn’t directed at you, and B. isn’t from someone in your core network.

When I think about all of the messages that meet these criteria, it makes sense to categorize them into two buckets:
1. Active Communication - These are messages that reasonably expect a prompt response. Instant messages (Google Chat, AIM, Skype IM, Facebook chat, etc.), text messages, and voice calls (Skype, phone) fall into this category.
2. Latent Communication - These are messages that don’t typically require a response right away. Most people aren’t offended if you wait a day or two to answer an email or a Facebook message for example.

I’m thinking the user interface for this would look similar to TweetDeck, with one column for the ‘active’ channels, and one for the ‘latent’ channels.  You should be able to sort by contact (showing all messages from them in one spot, no matter how they were sent) or by chronological order.

This app shouldn’t require anyone in your core network to join. It’s a tool for you. The fact that you’re using it, should be transparent. That brings me to the next feature. When you respond to messages in this tool, the responses should go out through the same channel the initial messages came in. For example, if you’re replying to a text message using this app, your friend will receive a text message. If you’re replying to an email using the app, your friend will receive an email. So it shouldn’t matter how the messages are coming in.

For any of this to work, the user will be required to define their ‘core network’ (most likely family and very close friends). I think this ‘core network’ should be limited to about 20 people. Why you ask? Because the value of the app will never be realized if the user just dumps all their contacts in there. Remember, the idea is seperate out the conversations that matter most - to prevent other things from taking up more of your time than they should. This area is a little fuzzy, however, since people generally get uncomfortable (understandably) when they are asked to ‘rank’ their friends. So maybe the user will only be required to specify the top 20 contacts, without ranking them 1-20.  And maybe the user wouldn’t have to define the list at all.  It could possibly be suggested to them based on who they interact with most in email (think Xobni).  That could at least get them started with a list they could modify.

A few other features that I think would fit well here:
* Birthday reminders for the core network
* Reports showing you how long it’s been since you’ve connected with each person in the network

You might be saying to yourself, this sounds like FriendFeed.  Although FriendFeed is a great idea, I don’t think it solves this problem.  With FriendFeed you get to see all of your friends’ activities across social networks in one place - but you’re still getting all that noise and it’s not focused on the communication directed at you.  And this isn’t Xobni either.  Althought Xobni is another great service, it doesn’t take into account all the communication happening outside of email.

Well that’s the start of the idea.  I wanted to get it out there.  If anyone would like to discuss this in greater detail and throw some more ideas up on the wall, leave a comment here.  Or, of course, you could contact me via one of my many social networks ;-)

Check out the wallpaper I just made on Flickr:

Tonight I’m trying some cross processing techniques that I first saw in a tutorial from Layers Magazine.

“Cross processing (sometimes abbreviated to xpro) is the procedure of deliberately processing photographic film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film” - Wikipedia

It’s a fairly simple process in Photoshop, achieved with a new curves adjustment layer.  The three steps were as follows:

1. Alter the red curve: raise it in the highlights and lower it in the darker portions of the photo

2. Alter the green curve: raise it in the highlights and lower it in the darker portions of the photo

3. Alter the blue curve: lower it in the highlights and raise it in the darker portions of the photo

You can tweak the curves until you get the desired effect…

If you know of any particularly good Photoshop tutorials, let me know.  I’m trying to pick it up after working with Macromedia Fireworks for years.

I saw an interesting graphic this morning, depicting the popularity of various social networks all over the world.  Some items of interest:

* Myspace still looks to be the world leader with Facebook close behind.  I’d expect this gap to grow with the announcement of the Myspace Music platform.

* Google owned “Orkut” is the leader in two major developing countries: Brazil and India.

After doing my six month stint in Europe, I came home to a mess.  I’ve been systematically checking off different areas of my place to get everything de-cluttered and organized.

Some of these before pictures are down-right embarrassing, but I think they really illustrate how far some zip ties and a shelf can go for your sanity!

A few things I’ve come to understand:

• * Clutter breeds more clutter.  Cleanliness/organization breeds more cleanliness/organization.  Think about it — you’re more likely to do the one dish when the rest of your kitchen is spotless than to do that dish if you’ve already got a stack of others piling up.
• * When you do a project like this, it’s best to focus on one area at a time.  Make a checklist of problem areas and attack them on different nights.  You’ll just get frustrated if you try to do it all
• * It’s best to gather everything from the problem area (drawer, closet, whatever) in one spot, get rid of what you’re not using, and put what’s left back in a logical, organized way.

Enough talking, here are the pictures:

Closet Declutter

After installing two shelves:

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Entertainment Center Declutter

After managing all the cords with some zip ties:

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Desk Declutter

After insalling a cork board under the desk and fastening all that clutter to it:

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And “Voila!”.  There you have it.  Let me know what you think in the comments.  If you’ve got similar projects like this, link to the pics.