If you're searching for blogs on Marine Corps Marathon, Blogger's search works well. Here's a great story.

Interesting value add from a radio station. It's a Lifestyle guide, from Scott, who always wears a nametag. Good approach to building loyalty.

Marketing Sherpa has an article entitled: Feeling Dorky -- 10 Tips on Presenting at Webcasts and Live Teleconferences. We've recently started using videoconferencing at our office, and after realizing I had spent a decent part of the test looking shifty from looking off screen, long forgotten television knowledge started to resurface. The article linked above has some good tips. I'm going to try and look directly at the camera, not wear shirts with small patterns on them, and be careful with the handwaving.

I've seen/heard about 6 Verizon ads (Metro/Email/Signage) in the last two days. Most were promoting their $14.95 high speed (768Kbps). Where you search their site, they try to upsell you to their 3.0Mbps which is eventually 29.95/month with a contract. They've been using the tagline in their graphics: This is Powerful Stuff. I'm wondering how this is going to play in the markets where they're simultaneously offering FIOS. It appears they're assuming the people who order FIOS are sophisticated users who know the benefits of high speed, while perhaps the DSL ads are more at people who just want a bit more speed and not dialup? Or, FIOS is widely unavailable, and they'll adapt their strategy as the roll out grows.

Should VoIP Start Ups Start to Worry? by Om Malik.
Infonetics report that has Time Warner Cable at 25% of the VoIP market in 2Q05. How that's defined is a little unclear in the press release.

Steve Pavlina is experimenting with Polyphasic sleeping. It's a method of sleeping 6 times a day for about 20 minutes. Theoretically, you go right into REM sleep. Supposedly, one of the famous Renaissance artists used it. ...I read vigorous debates on training techniques of famous runners, on a running site, with multiple sides, and have even seen the actual runner himself shouted down, so I'm skeptical anyone would know what Michaelangelo did...
It's a fascinating read, as Steve is trying to cope with the effects...

Read about MC Hammer's recent visit to Google. Love the visitor tag.

Busting Vegas

I happened to pick up a copy of Busting Vegas the other day. The story is in the same vein as his previous book: Bringing Down the House, a story of MIT kids who used advanced math and disguises to win at blackjack. The interesting thing in Busting Vega$ was the description that none of the tactics used were "card counting". Mezrich holds off for a few chapters on revealing the secrets. It turns out they weren't card counting, and it takes a while to wrap your head around the idea that there's another way to win. It's a fun read, and goes very quickly, if you need something for a plane ride.

Here's the phrase of the day: "continuous partial attention" Marc Eisenstadt has 12 years of email, and lots of detail on what it's composed of. Here's the interesting paragraph:
25 emails daily (and thereare many I know who have WAY more than this) is a lot to deal with, especially since the emails don't cluster evenly throughout the week. To get to a 25-per-day average, you're looking at more like 30-40 per working weekday, if you're the kind of person who switches off at the weekend (ha!). If each email requires 3 minutes of thinking/response time (you're lucky if you can average that), then you've got a guaranteed two hours straight down the tubes every day.

But wait a minute, "down the tubes" is incorrect: surely your emails involve key interactions, networking, brainstorming, appropriate drudgery and admin, in short what you get paid to do, right? Well, that's not clear... and requires drilling down a bit deeper into the data.

The analysis that follows, about midway down his post, highlights all the different facets of his email, which looks somewhat universal in the high-tech world.

Some more fun links to books.
Getting Things Done: Great book on organizing. Best tip: Labels and file folders make getting rid of the pile of things on your desk a lot easier.

The Success Principles: Lots of familar principles; put together in an easy to read format.

Cryptonomicom: Fantastic book about World War II, hacking, and cryptology! Even better if you have a vacation coming up, since it's 1100 pages.

I've been meaning to set up a bookshelf section of the blog, to highlight some of the good business books I've read recently. This prompted me to finally sign up for an Amazon.com Associates account, which I'd been meaning to do for a while. This provides another avenue to get some stats on the blog, and may eventually net me a free book or two. I recently read "Never Eat Alone"... It's a great book on "networking"...more accurately, it's got a lot of great tips on improving how you interact with people everyday. Definitely worth reading if you're in a business working with clients on a daily basis.

All publicity is good publicity? Probably not, if you're Verizon and have 10,000 phone lines out, in midtown Manhattan.

I'm a big fan of Backpackit.com. It's a great tool for easily managing a to-do list when you use multiple computers. Kareem posts on their philosophy of development.
I was also happy to see that FeedBlitz is now sending out postings, after the recent issues, so next week, I'll be highlighting some of the interesting posts that may not have made their way out.

I'd like to thank everyone who's subscribed to this blog via email. This will likely be the first email post to many of you. See techical details below...Thanks for subscribing, and be sure to visit www.joshgreene.com for anything you might have missed.

Technical details: I had been using Bloglet to mail out posts. I switched to Feedblitz, but couldn't get it working. It turns out I wasn't creating atom.xml on joshgreene.com, which in turn wasn't creating a FeedBurner feed, which then wasn't feeding into Feedblitz. I think I've got that all resolved, and hopefully an email goes out tonight around midnight with this post.

I was thrilled to read that AOL was acquiring Weblogs, Inc, Jason Calacanis's company. I'm in a completely different part of the company, but I think he's been doing great things in the blogging space, and that area can do nothing but grow. He seems to have found a business model that works, and with more resources behind him, could grow to something that would challenge About.com, which was purchased for 10x more. Plus, with the new resources behind him, that should enable the network of blogs to grow that much faster, and bring in more revenue. Great news!

How to do a deal with Google. Good insight into how the world works there.
The inside story of Napster, in 20 minutes or less. Probably the key lesson: Test your assumptions before spending lots of money. Interview your potential customers. Understand what their top 10 problems are. Don’t try to convince them that you have a solution to a problem they don’t know they have. Take a survey of 100 potential customers. Ask them to list their top 10 problems, without prompting from you. If you don’t see your problem area listed…move on to another problem.

If this Dilbert cartoon shows up several times, are people trying to tell me something?