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It was recommended to me by my friend Mark, who used to be an IT guy but then went over the the “dark side” and now is in marketing. He’s a big fan of Seth Godin and is always talking about things like purple cows and dips. So, here I was, about to read a book written by a marketing guy, that was recommended to me by another marketing guy (even if he is a good friend). I figured I was about to read a book about how to dupe people into buying things by making them think they’re part of some cool, elite group or something.

I couldn’t have been more wrong (and quite happy about that fact). Tribes is really about leadership. I guess the subtitle “We Need You to Lead Us” should have tipped me off. It really ties together technology and leadership and he tries to show the reader what is possible by using many real-world examples. Anything resembling marketing just seems to flow naturally from the creation of a tribe, and not in the Madison Avenue-kind-of-marketing way, either.

Another nice thing about the book is that it is short. I find many of these books outlining new ideas or concepts seem to me to be easily double the length they should be, and they ramble a lot. Not so for Seth Godin. He is clear and concise and doesn’t mess around.

When you are finished reading Tribes, there is a very good chance you’ll feel inspired to do something, anything, to test out what he tells you. By the way, he doesn’t tell you how to do it, just what is possible and how some others have done it. He quite emphatically states that the book is not a step-by-step guide. I know I’ve got a few ideas for tribes I would like to get started, or follow if I find that they already exist.

You certainly don’t have to be a marketing person to get something out of Tribes.

I’ve been reading about all kinds of sustainable-type building, and the use of passive solar to heat places and such. The most compelling seem to be around Earthships, because they’re mostly up in the mountains of New Mexico, where it can get pretty cold, and the houses still seem to be inhabitable, and a lot of people seem to say that even in the cold spells they don’t use their wood stove because the house is still warm enough to be in with a sweater on.

Now, that sounds great, but I have a couple of questions for which I have yet to find answers.

Taos is about 16 degrees farther south than the Canadian prairie. That means that the sun’s rays are at quite a different angle in the winter than they are up here. The heat we get from the sun seems minimal in the middle of winter. (I say “seems” because the city planners here in Toontown seemed to think it was better to orient the majority of the houses east-west, so I don’t have a southern exposure).

Also, when it gets cold here, I’m pretty sure it’s a little colder than in the mountains of New Mexico. We have had a long stretch with high temperatures not getting above -20 (celsius), and we’ve had overnight lows below -30 (-47 with the wind chill). This seems to me to be extreme enough, that, coupled with the lower angle of the sun, it would make passive solar pretty ineffective. My big concern would be that those nice, big windows would become a huge liability for a couple of months every year.

Anyone have any experience with this? anyone?

Anyway, it does some nice things. I like having the updates in the sidebars for Facebook and Twitter (which are really the only two I use).
I also just found a status field that will allow updates to my social networking sites. I just tried it and it works like a charm.

One odd thing is that the updates on the friends widget keeps telling me that the connection to Twitter failed and it will try again later. Oddly enough, though, it seems to still get updates from time to time.

Help is really odd, because it opened up over an existing tab. I can see my window in the background and when I scroll, it scrolls the window in the background, and not the help that opened up. There doesn’t appear to be a close button anywhere that I can find, either.

One other thing I really like is that it gives me the option to sync my bookmarks. That’s nice because I’ve previously been too lazy to do that. When I installed Yoono at home, it asked if I wanted to synchronize them, which I did. After merging, I realize how poorly organized my bookmarks are

Well, it’s on to Web Notes next to see how they work. So far, it seems to work nicely instead of using Flock.

We’ll have to see how it goes…Technorati Tags: technology, web 2.0

So I get thinking that basically Flock seems a lot like Firefox with some fancy plugins, so I decided I’d see what plugins there are for Firefox that would help.
I came across a couple of add-ons: Stumbleupon and Yoono. They seemed like they would do the trick. So no problem, I’ll set myself up accounts and away I go, right?

Well, it’s not quite that simple. I’ve devised a scheme for creating complex but easily remembered passwords. These passwords use special characters. So, when I’m logging in to these services, here’s what I get:

Stumbleupon – Passwords can only be alphanumeric.
Yoono – Passwords can be alphanumeric or contain – or _.

well, there goes my system. As a result, I probably won’t use these services because it now means a lot more work to remember my passwords – something I just put a lot of effort into avoiding. What decade are we in where a software system accepts only alphanumeric characters for a password?

“There is a tremendous appeal to the idea that we can think, think, think about a planned system and then write all the requirement as “The system shall…” That sounds so much better than “if possible, the system will…” or even “if we have time, we’ll try to…” that better characterizes the reality on most projects.”
- from User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn