Squidoo?

"Squidoo?"

That's what my wife said to me.

Yep. It's at http://www.squidoo.com/. It's Seth Godin's newest project - and I think it's a great idea. The theory is that if you want to know about something, where to you go? Probably to Google and type in your question, then you sift through the results to figure out what's meaningful and what's not.

That's where Squidoo comes in. If you go to the website and then search for your topic you'll probably find out what you want to know. I was wanting to find a summary on how to podcast. (No, I'm not going to create one, my church is going to podcast sermons and it'll be uploaded by yours-truly.) So when I typed "How to podcast" into Squidoo's search box it immediately took me to a very enlightening page. I found everything I needed to know here, at one of the links I found in the "Useful Links" section. PodOmatic is exactly what I'm looking to start out with, and their summary page gives me exactly the info I needed: 250 MB of storage with 7.5 GB of monthly traffic is more than enough for our needs.

So the next time you're looking for information that's not easily found in Google, go to Squidoo and check it out.

My Prophecy has been fulfilled.

My friend Johnny is well on his way to drinking black coffee. He admitted it on his blog Technical Duckery on February 23. Some of you know Johnny - and he used to drink a concoction that was 50% coffee, 40% milk, and 10% sugar. That's not coffee.

Coffee should be appreciated for its own unique flavor. Sweeteners confuse your pallete and mask the coffee. Drinking coffee with sugar is like listening to your iPod while you're at a concert. I prefer Guatemala Antigua coffee from The Coffee Fool. It's the smoothest coffee I've ever had. Don't try this stuff if you can stand to get hooked.

What a press release:

A friend pointed me to the funniest press release I've ever read. Here's the backstory & the release:

Overstock.com filed its original lawsuit against research firm Gradient Analytics and hedge fund Rocker Partners in August 2005 when it learned the firms colluded to publish false and misleading research in a scheme to engineer stock fluctuations from which Rocker and Gradient's owners could front-run stock trades while harming Overstock's reputation with consumers, suppliers, and employees.

Here's the press release:

"Eight months ago Gradient and Rocker
were thumping their chests threatening
to counter-sue us.  I said at the time 
that they would not because these 
miscreants could not survive the 
discovery a counter-suit would trigger.

They still have not filed suit, and now,
once again, they are doing whatever 
they can to stall the discovery process.  
I once again invite them to counter-sue, 
and let us move to discovery quickly." 
"In addition, while Gradient, Rocker and 
their cronies attempt to spin this as a 
First Amendment issue, let me remind 
observers that the activities described 
in our witness's declarations are covered 
by a technical term: 'illegal.'  It is 
'illegal' to let favored clients doctor 
research then publish it as independent; 
it is 'illegal' to permit such clients 
to front-run that same research; it is 
'illegal' to front-run it themselves 
through hedge funds they secretly control.  

Their arguments that this conduct is 
somehow all protected by the First Amendment 
were roundly rejected by the Honorable 
Vernon Smith, whose decision these 
blackguards now dismiss as an 'erroneous 
trial-court ruling.'  

Good luck with that, fellows."
 

You can find the link here.

Sattelite finds Noah's Ark

Some guy thinks he may have found Noah's Ark. CNN ran the article.

Fortune arrived today.

And it's got a particularly good cover story.

Marissa Mayer is the VP of Search Products & User Experience of Google. She's the gatekeeper of the famously spartan Google Homepage. [The story goes that Google's founders (Larry & Sergey) didn't know much HTML when Google was going into its testing phase, so he wrote the minimum amount of text for an interface. It's funny how people loved it.]

So Miss Mayer keeps all that together. There is an interesting writeup about how she goes through her daily routine - if you can working at Google routine. It's got a few interesting points - Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) is annoyed by people typing next to him during a meeting. So am I. Mayer uses a text file to track her outstanding tasks and upcoming meeting agendas. Very GTD'ish of her - David Allen would be proud. (If you're in to GTD - there are a lot of new Inbox Zero posts over at 43Folders.)


Carlos Goshn is the CEO of Renault (of France) and Nissan (in Japan). Two companies. Crazy. The interesting thing is that of he and Mayer, Goshn is the only one who talks about balance. If you think you're busy, you should spend a month in this guy's shoes.

I've been getting Fortune for 3 months, and it's been a pretty good magazine. Good stuff.