• The Simple Dollar: The Ten Most Important Things I’ve Learned About Money and Life In The Last Year – “Forget the paycheck – do what you’re passionate about. Time in and time out, I’ve seen that people will pay very well for passion – that’s the truly valuable thing on this planet. Whatever you’re passionate about, do it and the money will follow if you open the doors to it. I believe this from the bottom of my heart and I’ve reached a point where I’m passionate about everything in my life. My choices are merely determinations about which passion to follow at the moment.“
• A Miracle a Day: The Very Simple Secret To A Happy Marriage – “The specifics aren’t important… what’s important is that your spouse sees that you feel that they are worthy of your time and effort. “
• David Cohen: Have What it Takes? Start Thinking About Summer 2008 – “echStars will be accepting applications for the Summer 2008 program starting in late January, 2008. The application deadline will be in late March, 2008. TechStars will run from May 27 to August 22, 2008. “

• Media Week: CNN To Launch Bureau in Second Life Virtual World – “In the space, the network will create a variation of its i-Reports, the real-world vehicle through which average citizens contribute eyewitness reports. CNN will equip Second Life denizens with kits enabling them to transmit copy and photos. Visitors to Second Life will be able to get the latest news via kiosks scattered throughout the virtual community. ” – Via Business Communicators of Second Life.
• Alex Iskold: PR Tips For Startups: How To Get And Keep The Media Attention – “Here is the news, Press Releases are dead. We found them to be completely ineffective. To the point of zero leads. Zero. Instead, you need to prepare new kind of media. Remember that people are spoiled these days, so they will have high expectations. If you think you can show up and tell them that you got the best new technology, hand wave and then expect a write up, you are dreaming.“
• MSNBC: Now Boarding: New Preflight Procedures – “Alaska’s new system, which debuted in Anchorage in 2004, forgoes the counter for a cluster of free-standing podiums flanked by customer-accessible baggage belts. Passengers with boarding passes — printed at home or at kiosks located throughout the airport — can step up to any one of them, put their bags on the belt and have an agent print and affix their baggage tags.” – Via Display in hotel elevator.

• Virtual Worlds Jobs – “The only site dedicated to jobs in the virtual worlds industry.“
• Jonathan Snook: I Can’t Believe it’s Not Twitter. Snitter – “I built Snitter for a couple reasons. First off, I wanted to take AIR out for a spin and see what it could do. Secondly, I find using the Twitter web site frustrating at times because it doesn’t offer up features that I’ve always felt could be easily added. So, I’ve gone ahead and built an app with the features that I’ve always wanted.“
• foo/lib: > share and learn about {foo} _ – “ Foo/Lib is a media repository for technical knowledge. here you can share best practices, code and ideas through video, audio, documents and other formats.“

• Peter Van Roy: The Principal Programming Paradigms – “This chart classifies programming paradigms according to their kernel languages (the small core language in which all the paradigm’s abstractions can be defined).“
• Anne Zelenka: Mold the Virtual Space Not the Office Space – “It’s strange to me that the solution to improved communication in this time of ultraconnectedness is to change the physical space rather than molding and improving the virtual space. There are tons of ways that you can help teams communicate better that don’t take individual team members privacy and quiet away.“
• Alex Bosworth: Google is Destroying The Web And You Don’t Even Know It – “Prioritizing community building features that would bring in hundreds of visits versus Google features that would bring in hundreds of thousands of visits, what choice is there? I’m not really sure, but it seems like there has to be a better way.“
• Tara Hunt: Performing Seals And Other Such Creative Wonders Of Modern Business – “It’s a common misconception that innovation happens in a single moment, when, in fact, it always takes years of experience, the involvement of many others, dozens and dozens of smaller innovations along the way, long periods of concentrating, studying and thinking about a problem, and, often, after all of this is in place, taking oneself out of the environment and thinking about something completely different.“
• Astronomy Picture of the Day: Victoria Crater on Mars – “Visible in the distance in the above mosaic is the far rim of Victoria Crater, lying about 800 meters away and rising about 70 meters above the crater floor.” – Be sure to click through to the full-sized version. Wow!
• Wall Street Journal: Marketers Explore New Virtual Worlds – “A year ago, online virtual world Second Life was being hailed as the next big digital-marketing phenomenon. But it has begun to lose some of its luster. Put off by high costs and uncertain returns, marketers who had rushed to establish a presence in the three-dimensional online computer game are beginning to look elsewhere.“
• Paul Graham: The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups – “Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That’s one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.” – Via Jeffrey.
• Paul Graham: How to Present to Investors – “Practically every successful startup, including stars like Google, presented at some point to investors who didn’t get it and turned them down. Was it because the founders were bad at presenting, or because the investors were obtuse? It’s probably always some of both.“
• Joel Spolsky: Evidence Based Scheduling – “A schedule is a box of wood blocks. If you have a bunch of wood blocks, and you can’t fit them into a box, you have two choices: get a bigger box, or remove some blocks. If you wanted to ship in six months, but you have twelve months on the schedule, you are either going to have to delay shipping, or find some features to delete. You just can’t shrink the blocks, and if you pretend you can, then you are merely depriving yourself of a useful opportunity to actually see into the future by lying to yourself about what you see there.“
• No VC Required: For Your Next Opportunity, Look For Change – “If it’s Monday morning and you’re hunting around for your next big business idea, look for an industry that’s undergoing radical change for big opportunities.“
• No VC Required: Scaling Early Stage Startups – “Slow performance may also turn away visitors who may have become customers. If you’re a viral business, this can break your virality. It can take user adoption below that critical viral threshold.” – Be sure to check out the linked presentation.
• Travis Griggs: Second Life is Smallktalk – “Second Life looks cool, and not because of the little avatars, but for all the same reasons I’ve loved about Smalltalk for years.” – Via James.
• Wikipedia: Green Threads – “Green threads are threads that are scheduled by the Virtual Machine (VM) instead of natively by the underlying operating system. Green threads emulate multithreaded environments without relying on any native OS capabilities. “
• Don Dodge: The Eagles Shun Labels, Go Direct with Wal-Mart – “The record labels are failing to adapt to the new realities. They have had 7 years to figure it out and for the most part they haven’t changed a thing. They are still suing their customers, charging high prices for CDs, and giving the artists meager royalties.“

• Patty Seybold: Patterns in My Head from Talking with Technology Architects – “Commodity Services Are Great Building Blocks. These pioneers view most applications as collections of loosely-coupled intelligent objects and software services. The services can be can be sourced from anywhere in the world. They can be located anywhere. They can be swapped in and out.“
• Patty Seybold: How to Get Customers to Tell Us What Bugs Them? – “Don’t limit yourselves to customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys. Get on the phone. Call a customer today!“
• Phil Windley: Starting a High Tech Business: Get a Clubhouse – “One of the things I realized pretty quick after getting serious about a new startup was that you need a clubhouse. It’s fine to work from home, meet in coffee shops, and go cheap at first, but eventually you want to get real work done. For me, that means a place to go that is specifically about that effort“
• Raph Koster: Are We Mainstreaming? – “The bottom line is something that has been known for a very long time. Chat is never enough. Try to find a real-world business built on social interaction without something to do, and what you will find is that successful social (or “third”) places generally rely on a shared activity: drinks at the bar serving as a lubricant, bingo at the church, bowling at the lanes, a movie to ignore, and so on.“

• Metaversed: Turning Campers into a Positive Force – “The thing that stands out most about this more traditional corporate build for me, is the idea of using campers as a positive force.“
• No VC Required: Start… – “I’ve started No VC Required in the hope of starting a conversation about the benefits of not taking money from VC’s and how you might not actually need to take VC money.“
• Java Lobby: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project – “Expect to be surprised at the insights you get from those you had never heard of! Expect to gain a lot in terms of domain knowledge of the contributors involved. Open sourcing is fun, especially with Saturday projects, since they’re generally not time driven and can lead to a number of interesting encounters with developers around the world.“
• Theodore Gray: The Most Beautiful Periodic Table Poster in the World – “In August, 2006, after four years of photography and months of assembling, I finally published a photographic periodic table poster based on my collection.“

I’ve got an action-packed couple of weeks coming up, starting with a trip to San Francisco on Sunday evening. I will be speaking at the CSC Leading Edge Forum on Monday and then visiting with VCs and startups at Alsop Louis Partners on Tuesday. Before heading home I will also make a stop at Linden Lab.

After resting at home for a day, and then Trick-or-Treating with my kids (at least with the ones who are still young enough to want to do this) I will take a deep breath and board a red-eye flight to Washington Dulles. I will leap off of the plane as fast as I can, board one of those infernal inter-terminal buses at Dulles, get my luggage and my car, and then high-tail it over to Reston, Virginia and the New-New Internet conference. Dion Hinchcliffe will chat with Peter Coffee and I on the subject of “Defining the business potential for Web 2.0.”

I’ll take another breath and will then head into DC for a meeting with the Department of Homeland Security, and that will do it for the day.

Friday, I will talk to the folks at Unity08 and will also hang out at Startup Weekend DC for a while.

Over the weekend I will visit with my wife’s family in Maryland and then head up to Pennsylvania. I will try to see my mom in York while I’m there.

The following week will be equally action-packed, with visits to a number of large corporations and some startups, and a special AWS event in the city. I’ll fly home Thursday night.

I still have a little bit of open time on my DC / PA agenda. Please feel free to book some of my time if you would like. I also have some very short trips to Boston, San Francisco, and New Mexico later in the month and you are welcome to book some of my time there as well.

Whew!

• Baltimore Sun: Making a Living in Virtual World – “Circe Ragan, known as Circe Broom in Second Life, owns a club, a concert hall, an Egyptian-style stage and a park venue overlooking the ocean in the virtual world. The former jazz singer, who now uses a wheelchair, hires real people who play on real stages separately from, or sometimes simultaneously with, their Second Life gigs.“
• David Seah: Getting Focused 05: Productivity Tips from a Starbucks Barrista – “While I’m doing one thing, I’m thinking ahead to the next thing I’ll do. Newer crew have to stop and think about it, and that slows them down.“
• Christian Scholze: The new Second Life Grid Architecture explained – “Scary numbers.” – Via Hack’s Haven.
• Scalable Web Architectures: Scaling Technorati – 100 Million Blogs Indexed Everyday – “Indexing 10 million blogs with over 10 billion objects, and with a user base which is doubling every six months, technorati has an edge over most blog search engines.“

• TeachStreet: Learn about SEO in Seattle – “If you’re new to SEO, here are some quick tips and guides to getting up to speed.“
• Rick Segal: So Close and Yet – “None of this solves that instant gratification problem. The exact moment somebody is grooving on a song and wanting it is the exact moment you should be providing an instant, friction free way for the customer to get the song, not 25 clicks.“
• CBS: The CSI:NY Virtual Experience – “This is a 3-D environment where you solve crimes, play games and meet other CSI: NY fans. It’s completely free!“
• Ambling in Second Life: CSI:NY – A First Look – “The Electric Sheep Company and CBS, along with their chums at Cisco by the look of it, have obtained a mind-boggling 416 sims to support the inworld game – and these have just opened to the public.“
• Mitch Wagner: ‘The Office’s’ Dwight Joins Second Life – “Dwight’s avatar, “Dwight Shelford,” features “a profile that proclaims his love of a variety of NBC Universal movies and shows, and his desire to ‘calculate the exchange rate between Schrute bucks and linden dollars,’ ” according to Second Life Insider.“

I’m finalizing my plans for an upcoming evangelism trip to DC and Philadelphia and still have some open meeting slots. If you are interested in learning about the Amazon Web Services (ECS, EC2, S3, FPS, SQS, and so forth) I would be more than happy to talk to you, whether you are a user group, a corporation, or a lone developer in a garage or a basement. If this sounds interesting, please visit my Wiki page, find an open time slot, and put yourself in. Then send a confirming email to the address on the page.