Month: July 2005

Jill Yablonski: “You can support someone because you like them or because you don’t like their opponent. A new study published in the latest issue of Political Psychology examines this concept to find that people are less likely to change their preference when they cast their vote against the candidate they do not like rather than for the one they do.”

Larry Osterman:

What’s the dancing bunnies problem?

It’s a description of what happens when a user receives an email message that says “click here to see the dancing bunnies”.

Keith Ferrazzi: “One of the coolest things about LinkedIn is how easy it is to reconnect with past colleagues. After you input your past employers’ names in your professional profile, every time you log in to LinkedIn’s main page you’ll be automatically notified of current and past colleagues who are LinkedIn members.”

Sloan Brothers:

Unlike many of the other inventors who were shoving their cards into our hands, this gentleman kindly requested one of our cards and said in passing he’d be happy to send along a free sample to us. “Sure,” we thought, “like he’s really going to even remember that he just said that.” But it was a kind gesture nonetheless.

Well, two weeks went by. We hadn’t heard a peep from the many inventors who had shoved their cards into our hands. And then a very heavy box arrived via FedEx.

quadspot >> waterloo: free classified listings for the waterloo community.

Update: Comment from Michael Hiemstra:

Everyone note that “waterloo community” means University of Waterloo community. Read more about the startup of quadspot here.

Michael A. Covington:

• The world is run by people who write.
• Clear writing leads to clear thinking.
• You don’t know what you know until you try to express it.

Jeffrey Moses: “Contacting a competitor may seem counterintuitive to your small business’s growth, but next to the technique described above, this is the best way for a company to take on new work at little cost. Who knows? The competitors you contact might have an overflow and be grateful for your call.”

John Cass, who is doing some very interesting work with his Corporate Blog Survey, talked with me about my recent bug reporting stunt:

I recently received some criticism of the blog survey case studies interviews in the marketing and PR forum of SoftwareCEO.com, a forum member had suggested I should not accept statements from large company employee like Microsoft at face value, and that their statements were probably just marketing boosterism. Inspired by this critic I thought I’d contact Ken directly to get his thoughts on the case study.

It was my first interview, and it shows in the quotes. Nonetheless, I had lots of fun talking to John about the bug report and pontificating on the state of Microsoft.

Bob Parsons:

I worked as hard as I did because I loved the idea I was working towards creating. My father told me once (what a wise individual he was!) that for anyone to be excellent at what they were doing, they had to love it. He said that if you didn’t love you job, you would never be better than average. When I asked him why this was the case, he told me something I would never forget. He said, “When you love something, it tells you all its secrets.” This always made a lot sense to me. Those who love what they do, spend the extra time to learn the subtle nuances and all the not so obvious things that overall make a tremendous difference. The secrets I would soon discover were what made Parsons Technology come alive.

(via Randy Holloway)

Nichole L. Torres: “Some of the most successful businesses in the world only came to be after a few serious failures. From prototypes that don’t work to a service that doesn’t sell in your local area, a first business can quickly turn into a first failure. But can you as an entrepreneur come back into the fray and start again—successfully?” (via Dane)