Christopher Carfi

Very cool morning.  The Tour of California professional bike race came screaming through Half Moon Bay this morning in the rain.  Grabbed a couple of quick vids.

There were two packs of riders.  The first was a group of about ten riders in the "break away" group, and then the rest was the "peloton" who came through a couple a minutes later.  (Lance Armstrong was in the peloton.)  This was before they went down through the rest of Half Moon Bay and then up the hill to Skyline, before coming back to Highway 1 for the sprint to the finish in Santa Cruz.  Three vids in this playlist: the set up just before the riders came through, the leaders, and the peloton.

(RSS readers click here to see the vids.)

There's some good tracking of the race going on at the live feed site.

Some great commentary from David Armano on the customer-filmed, customer-edited, customer-scored "Trader Joe's Ad."  David's thoughts are here.

The key takeaway:

Shot of the day from friend and San Francisco übershooter Chuck Revell. 

(Nice snap, Chuck!)

Kevin Kelly: "One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs
(yes he knew about them) was that 'you got messages rather than
conversations.' That's about as an accurate summation of our times as
any." [emphasis added]
link

Fave author Christopher Moore just came out with his new book, Fool. (Nutshell: King Lear told from the point of view from the court jester, in Moore's distinctive style.)  So, being the fanboys and fangirls that we are, we built a Ventana for the occasion.  Click on the pic to check it out.  (Works on the iPhone, as a widget, on other mobile devices, etc.)

(Also went to the book signing last night…it was packed.)

Does what you are delivering to your customers have personality?

Singapore hotel experiments with letting customers set their own price for rooms.  Neat.  (link)

"The new Ibis Singapore on Bencoolen hotel just last week launched a promotion that lets guests choose the rate they want to pay.

Rooms at the 538-room economy hotel, which opens this week in the
heart of Singapore, are typically priced starting at SGD138 per room
including free wifi. Through March 15, however, the pay-what-you-want
competition runs during a designated portion of each day, as announced
on the hotel's site. Interested consumers need only sign up as members
and make a bid for the price they'd like to pay during one of the
announced promotion times. If they're one of the first to bid, they can
win a night at the hotel at exactly the price they offered. Bids have
gone as high as SGD100, and the first promotional rooms sold out within
minutes of the contest's launch last Wednesday, according to a report
in the Sydney Morning Herald."

Hat tip: Judi

Just back from Atlanta, and the outstanding SoCon conference.  What a rush!

• Over 300 attendees
• Rampant, raucous live-Twittering all about #socon09
• Announcement of the $1.5MM grant to Kennesaw to develop "sustainable journalism models"

A number of folks asked for the slides from the keynote.  I've uploaded them here, and they are embedded below as well.

Others commenting on the event:

• Amber Rhea
• Jon Gatrell
• Dan Greenfield
• TechDrawl
• Sherry Heyl
  
• Leonard Witt
• Tessa
• GrabbingSand

And some great pictures here from Josh Hallett (including the one above).

Seth says creative is “the stuff you do at the edges”

I disagree.

Creative, or create-ive is something else.  It’s making something new.  (Dave Gray first introduced me to this interpretation here, please read – gives a ton of back-story.)

Rich Gold defined it like this:

When you say “creat-ive,” say it with the hyphen.  Completely changes the meaning of the word.

I'll be speaking at SoCon09 this weekend.  Looking forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta.