I was thrilled to see Andy Monfried and his new venture, Lotame, getting pub as I made my way around the Internet today. First, Seth Godin gave a nod to Andy’s recent piece on creating value in startup. And then GigaOm wrote a piece on the Company.

I had the pleasure of working with Andy briefly at Advertising.com while he was at headquarters preparing to open the New York office. He was remarkable in his role at Advertising.com and overall is just a fun guy to be around.

Good luck Andy. I know you will find success.

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on money as a social barrier.

According to Guy, participants in a study that were cued to think of money spent 70% more time before asking for help and 50% lesss time assisting others.

Guy concludes:

This may be my own twisted logic… , but this study has important—and perhaps counter-intuitive and even puzzling—implications vis-a-vis the evangelism of products and services. That is, if a company brings money into an evangelistic relationship with its customers, it could create barriers and instead of incentives—for example, if Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Tivo paid their customers to spread the word. After all, evangelism is the process of selling dreams, and selling dreams doesn’t necessarily require monetization.

I do think that introducing money would have a dampening effect on evangelism. But the study struck me as particularly apt in relation to Google Answers being taken to the woodshed to be put out of its misery this week.

According to Google’s Blog, only 800 or so people answered questions over the life of the product. Alternatively, Yahoo Answers is thriving with with over 60 million unique worldwide monthly visitors, who have written 160 million answers to questions.

So whats the difference between the two services?

Google used a pay for answers model. Yahoo opted for a free model.

Of course, there are good reasons for why Google went with that model (Michael Arrington does a good job of laying them out), but the fact of the matter is, money likely depresses not only the number of people that will ask questions, but the number of people who will answer them.

I don’t know if there is anything too it, but the study that Kawasaki references just might hold a key to why Google’s model ultimately failed.

My traffic on this site doubled a few days ago. I hadn’t had a chance to dive into the stats to see what was amiss. Turns out a ton of people were searching for “mike oliver” + nypd or “mike oliver” and “police officer.”

After poking a round for a sec, I realized that this all has to do with the groom who got shot by the police in Queens several hours before his wedding. Apparently the officer who shot 31 of the 50 bullets and I share the same name.

I noted my love for Mitch Hedberg when he died a year and a half ago. I was pleasantly surprised to see this Mitch Hedberg random quote generator among Charlie’s del.icio.us links.

Sshhh… you hear that? That was my productivity walking out the door.

Despite being an English literature major, I have always had a hard time reading novels. Unless I can devote a solid amount of time to becoming invested in a story, I find myself starting over at the beginning every time I sit down to read a book until I give up (and inevitably blame the book for being of a caliber incapable of winning over my attention).

Since I am back to the 9-5 (who are we kidding? 11 - 9) after graduating, I have fallen into a nightime routine that gives me enough time to get invested (turns out it wasn’t the books after all).

I just finished A Very Long Engagement last night. I hate reviews for lots of reasons. I fear I might say something about the book that is imprecise. I often can’t wrap my mind around precisely why I liked or didn’t like a particular work. In some instances I simply don’t want to deny others the exciting process of discovery that I had.

So this is my review:

The book contained two lines that caused me to stop reading dead in my tracks, filled with a jealousy I can’t remember ever having felt before. And this is officially the first and only book to make me consider learning French so that I could capture any hint of additional beauty that may have been lost in translation.

I thought this article about email sign-offs was a bit of a filler piece for the Post Thanksgiving Monday until it happened to me today.

This morning, after exchanging a string of one-line question and response emails with a colleague (I would also like to blame it on my head cold), I simply forgot to add the niceties that typically go along with an email to anyone outside of the office.

In response to a very helpful email I received from a professional contact outside of the office, I wrote:

“i’ll look there. thanks.”

I did not greet the recipient by name. I did not sign off with a traditional “Best”, “Kind Regards”, or even “Sincerely”. Hell… I didn’t even give my fragments (let’s face it they weren’t sentences) the proper capitalization.

I didn’t even notice my mistake until the recipient replied and nearly apologized for his previous email. It was clear, though he didn’t say it outright, that he thought that I had taken offense to his prior note. Why else would I have been so terse?

It’s at times like these that I am reminded that, while digital modes of communication (email, IM, blogs, etc) make it so much easier to connect, they require much more care and attention than we typically give them. We have only begun to develop nascent tools in the digital realm (think and LOL) to solve the problems which non-verbal cues, tone and timbre have been smoothing over for generations in our face to face (and voice to voice) interactions.

The Goonies is on. I saw this movie in the theater 3 times in 1985. Still a record.

There was a good profile of the poet Paul Muldoon in yesterday’s Sunday Magazine.

Muldoon shot straight into the top ranks of my personal canon back in college when I was assigned his peom “Incantata” from his book of poems entitled The Annals of Chile.

Apparently this Nobel Laureate to be has a band.

Damn that was too close for comfort…

I watched my first game on a HD flatscreen today. I was skeptical until I actually could see a defensive lineman’s face so clearly that I could tell how badly he fell for a fake by Smith.

Going to have to get one of those sooner or later.

A friend of mine talking to his wife on the phone:

Wife: How is your day?

Husband: This certainly won’t be an Angel From Montgomery evening.

I love when I find out that words exist to express concepts or experiences that I have had.

I recently learned from an article on the OED in the New York Times that a misheard lyric is called a mondegreen. According to the New York Times:

It is named after Lady Mondegreen. There was no Lady Mondegreen. The lines of a ballad, ”They hae slain the Earl of Murray,/And laid him on the green” are misheard as ”They have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.”

For the record, I have always been curious to know who this “Sweet Saranda” was in the song Bitter Sweet by Big Head Todd and the Monsters?

And today, I learned from Jason Kottke about the Cupertino Effect, or incorrect spellcheck suggestions that make it into finalized documents. The word comes from a spellchecking error in the various European Union Documents where the term cooperation was mistakenly replaced by Cupertino.

I wonder what other wonderful words exist for those experiences that I have had but never been able to explain without using several sentences? I wonder if, in fact, this very concept has a word to express it?

Turning on the television and trying to choose between the good the bad and the ugly, rocky IV (the one where Apollo creed is killed by drago), Friday, cool hand luke, o brother where art thou, grave of the fireflies, and raging bull.

I have been having a ton of fun over at Long Bets. The purpose of Long Bets is to improve long-term thinking.

Someone makes a prediction. Once the prediction is on the website someone can make a wager that the prediction will not come true. The subject of the prediction or bet must be societally or scientifically important. Predictors and bettors must provide an argument explaining why the subject of their prediction is important and why they think they will be proved right. The wagers are held in an escrow account and are payable to the a charity of the winner’s choice. The list of predictors and bettors is a who’s who of big brains.

For instance, one of my favorite bets is between Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) and Craig Mundie (CTO of Microsoft).

Craig believes that by 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes. Eric decidely disagrees. You can read their arguments here.

Long Bets is a project of the Long Now Foundation which was founded by, among others, Brian Eno (who coined the term).

The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 and hopes to “provide counterpoint to today’s ‘faster/cheaper’ mind set and promote ’slower/better’ thinking. [They] hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.”

I read a fantastic article by Eno wherein he came up with the idea of the Long Now. I can’t put my finger on it now. Here it is.

A wonderful description of the writing process:

Writing is a job, like plumbing is a job. There are days when all you do is screw words together like pipes, make the joints as tight as you can, and then flush shit through it to see if it leaks.

I think this quote struck particularly close to home because I have been spending quite a bit of time drafting agreements, and this describes that process to a tee.

Read the rest of Derek’s post entitled How to Write a Book in Three Easy Steps.

On a recommendation from Sheila, I recently read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It really captured my imagination. Much of the book is told from the perspective of a 9 year-old New Yorker with an over active imagination:

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

I absolutely love those last two lines.

Email from a friend who will remain unnamed:

The house goes dem (and maybe the senate - George Allen? Really?), Rummy resigns. What’s next? Do I get my 40 acres?

Gmail recently launched a Gmail mobile application (not to be confused with the mobile browser version located at http://m.gmail.com). This app is super fast and has most of the features you have come to love in Gmail (e.g. converstions, auto address complete, etc.). I am using it on a BlackBerry Pearl. A full list of supported devices is here.