While most people are worried about getting paid for their work, I’m more concerned that journalists might be the digital-age equivalent of monks illuminating manuscripts, a group whose skills will soon disappear.

Sheelah Kolhatkar

Have Keyboard, Will Travel - NYTimes.com

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The view from my hotel room at the Marriott Marquis for the TOC conference.

The view from my hotel room at the Marriott Marquis for the TOC conference.

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Tomorrow, I’ll be in New York… In Neeew Yooork…

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One of the trick for a manager to learn is that you don’t need to be the first person to learn something. Don’t get upset. Get over it. It actually doesn’t matter.

This comes from Ed Catmull in this video taken at Stanford University, and it was a delight to hear.

Indeed, I am so fed up by people who tend to believe that the communication structure of an institution should mimic its hierarchical structure.

They come to you, and they ask why they were not told before you, before some intern, before their boss, before, before, before…

Get over it!

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Awesome Ed Catmull Video trying to answer a paradoxical question: “why do successfull fail?”

All of this taking the history of 3D graphics as an example: from the first unknown companies, to Silicon Graphics, NVidia, and Pixar.

Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small (via stanfordbusiness)

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In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.

Chatroulette

Probably the best explanation of chatroulette that I’ve read. Good work kottke!

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Coke’s ‘fans first’ approach in social communities

Really interesting. It’s impressive to see Coca-Cola stating that Coke’s homepage “isn’t just coke.com, it’s google.com” and even “hyves.nl, youtube.com, facebook.com”.

On Facebook alone, they got 95 videos, 4 600 photos (!), 90 000 comments (!!), 500 000 likes (!!!). How hard would it be to do the same thing on their own website. What energy would it consume. I have long been advocating for people to go to where people are (all the popular websites), instead of trying to attract them somewhere they don’t want to go (your own website).

But there is an interesting consequence. It looks like you can create a levy effect when you rely on other popular websites, and that people will actually use these websites to create content for you: they will put comments about your brand on facebook, pictures of your events on flickr, etc.

Once again, how hard would it be to get the same amount of content on your own webpage?

Coca-Cola is right in saying that their job is to be everywhere instead of trying to lure their fans to go to some ridiculous centralized website that will be desert as hell.

The obvious problem is that you need to be able to adapt to these various websites. You cannot communicate the same way on Flickr and on Facebook. But isn’t it better to spend your energy on this, rather than reinventing the wheel by trying to create a so-called “social network” on your own webpage?

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[GRAPH] Fascinating picture of the social graph of the US Facebook population. It’s impressive to see how they split in 7 big clear regional districts. The United States of Facebook

[GRAPH] Fascinating picture of the social graph of the US Facebook population. It’s impressive to see how they split in 7 big clear regional districts.

The United States of Facebook

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