I just came across a flickr photostream from a user named expressyourself. I wasn’t blown away until I realized that the photographer is 2 and a half years old.

Looking at the world as a child is refreshing and something you can’t often do.

Check out the rest of her photos.

I wouldn’t call myself a photographer, but I do shoot pictures. I finally got around to updating the photo section of this website. You can check it out here. I am going to attempt to put up several a week from here on out. I also have a few thousand photos on Flickr.

Girl: “Are Mike & Ike’s Kosher?”

Guy: “Good question. I’ll call my cousin. He’ll know.”

I have always had a weather problem. I decide what to wear by how it looks outside, or alternatively, how I feel inside. An example, if I am cold when I get ready for the day, I layer up - even if it is actually warm outside. I have also been known to look outside at a bright and cloudless sky with the sun streaming through my closed window, and decided that, because it looks beautiful outside, it must be so. Of course I am shocked to find that my t-shirt and jacket are no match for the 32 degrees (17 with wind chill).

I am thinking about this because I was in bed this morning in my nearly windowless room and got a text from a good friend that read “it’s beautiful outside!” I shot out of bed, put on a t-shirt and light jacket, and bounded outside to find that it was…

snowing.

I suppose that it beautiful… but not the beautiful I was imagining.

And now, it is sleeting and I am really freaking cold.

Fred Wilson nails it with his post about how NYTimes Select has killed the influence (online at least) of the top op-ed writers at the Old Grey Lady. Back in the day, the first thing I did in the morning was go to NYTimes and read the latest from Dowd, Friedman, Rich, Tierney, etc. Their opinions mattered. We discussed their ideas on blogs, they were thought leaders. They are no longer - due entirelyt to the NYTimes decision to hide them behind the “Select” vail.

An even sadder side effect of the walled garden that is the Times Select is the fact that their “most interesting articles” feature has been watered down. That list used to be a first class shortcut for finding the articles that I had to read. Now, I rarely find an article on the list that really captures my interest. It has become a B-list of sorts - what would have been the #25 - #50 most forwarded articles by users.

I’d love to see the data for the months following the implementation of Times Select. Did readership dip online? Have they actually increased revenue by getting more pulp subscriptions? I suppose that if they have increased revenue or if their readership online hasn’t decreased, then is their value to having their key writers widely circulated on line? And I wonder if there will be a larger, more noticeable difference further on down the road?

Seth Godin makes a great point about the words we choose when we are advocating (or marketing… aren’t they the same?). Seth outlines some of the problems inherent in the way that the global warming debate has been framed, starting with the term “global warming.” According to Seth:

Global is good.
Warm is good.
Even greenhouses are good places.

How can “global warming” be bad?

I’m not being facetious. If the problem were called “Atmosphere cancer” or “Pollution death” the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.

I have been thinking about framing a lot recently. A similar problem exists in the abortion debate. The right has coined the term “partial-birth abortion.” Who could be for a partial-birth abortion? And the term has been highly effective because even the left is forced to use the term when engaging in the debate. I wonder how the debate would turn out if the left refused to use the term - refused to reinforce the framing chosen by the opposition. I am not Seth and haven’t been able to come up with alternative word choices that are as effective as his “atmosphere cancer” example for global warming. But I think the problem is the same. Or perhaps its a mirror image - that is - “partial-birth abortion” is as graphic and as negative as “pollution death” and the left needs to not only shift away from focusing on the extreme procedure all together, but find more harmless sounding words to describe what is going on when a family decides to end a pregnancy.