Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Category: resources (page 1 of 2)

Chris Anderson – Free

Wired posted a great article on thinking/acting abundantly from the “long tail” wizard Chris Anderson this week. His basic premise is that businesses tend to think and act on the basis of scarcity and not abundance. He article offers excellent insights for businesses, families, and even churches. In fact, he is echoing a thought that shows up again and again in Scripture. Jesus tells a parable of the sower. While we tend to focus on the various places the seeds are sown and which seeds produce. We might also step back and think about a sower who sows everywhere–whether it looks like fruitful ground or not.

Anderson offers an excellent chart comparing the scarcity management model vs the abundance management model. Most often, I’ve worked around the scarcity model, but one boss at Philips Magnavox demonstrated the abundance model on a regular basis. One point of comparison is on the nature of rules in the two models. Rules in a scarcity paradigm sound like this, “Everything is forbidden unless it’s permitted.” On the other hand, the abundance framework suggests that, “Everything is permitted unless it’s forbidden.” The church has often operated within the former model, but Chesterton wisely pointed out that the latter model is the real thing. Listen to Chesterton on the Ten Commandments:

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.”

In one sense, this is what Anderson is exploring in his article on Managing for Abundance. Here are the highlights, but be sure to visit the article because he models his premise by giving away the audio of his latest book: Free.

One theme that shows up in his article is the “power of waste.” Anderson writes:

When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.

He illustrates this with a reference to Cory Doctorow and his ideas on “thinking like a dandelion.”

The science fiction writer Cory Doctorow calls this “thinking like a dandelion.” He writes: “The disposition of each—or even most—of the seeds isn’t the important thing, from a dandelion’s point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions. The dandelion doesn’t want to nurse a single precious copy of itself in the hopes that it will leave the nest and carefully navigate its way to the optimum growing environment, there to perpetuate the line. The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!”

Read his article, his book, and don’t forget to visit his blog, The Long Tail.

Emusic Wants Your Poor, Your Tired, Your Huddled Cell Phones

Don’t throw out your discarded Cell Phones and MP3 players. EMusic is offering cash, paypal and even charitable donation options. That charitable idea is great, and I’m glad they’re offering it!

Anybody who offers Larry Norman downloads is already rocking in my book!

Great map resource for city information

Going to a new city? Lost in your own city? TechCrunch just reviewed the newly revamped Ask City, and they’ve made me a believer!

Ask City is  a cool tool for looking up restaurants, movies, events, dog parades, and more. It combines maps, reviews, and a variety of customization like saving snapshots while I search, integration with other sites and services, notes on maps, and e-mailable permalinks of my searches. Ask City may become my new first stop for finding out about where in the world I live.

blip.tv rules the video sharing world!

I know all the talk over the last year has been about YouTube, and I’ve spent my fair share of time browsing and uploading. But today I tested blip.tv, and I must say: it rocks!

This video sharing service offers RSS feeds for your videos, automatic blogging and cross-posting options, multiple formats and even multiple uploading options. And this is just the start. If you are serious about videos or setting up an online channel. Use blip.tv!! I love it!!

Avoid Spam – Get A Vanishing Email

Christopher Null posted an interesting new concept in e-mails yesterday: 10-minute emails. When a site requests an email, you can use this instead of creating a new account or inviting the spam piranhas to your current account. It’s easy and fast:

There’s no registration, no verification. Just click over to the site and hit “Get my 10 Minute Mail e-mail address.” You’ll instantly be given an address that ceases to exist after 10 minutes. You can then use this address in filling out web forms or whatnot, and a very simple web-based interface gives you full access to any mail the account receives. You can reply to any messages, but you can’t send mail to an account that hasn’t already emailed you. If you can’t get the job done in 10 minutes, you can reset the timer to 10 minutes at any time. There’s no need to login, no password to remember.

Pretty whack. Sounds like disappearing ink. Just sign the contract and walk away baby. Get your evaportating e-mail here.

E-Commerce Shopping Sites

Not that I’m encouraging anyone to spend more money this season, but if you’re interested, Larry Chase sent out a list of interesting of shopping sites that you might want to check out. I think I’ve written about some of this before, but here are the highlights:

FruCall –  One quick call tells you if an online price beats the store price. “Frucall not only reads back the best online prices to you, but it also allows you to buy items directly from online merchants while you’re on the phone!”

CyberMonday – Shop.org set up this site to show all the various deals online today.

Dealcatcher – Comprehensive list of online and offline deals.

Like.com – A shopping search engine.  This is an interesting concept that captures photos of celebrities and allows you to search fashion items they are wearing and find similar items for sale.

Shop Local – Find all the deals in your neck o’ the woods.

Pronto – Named “”Best Online Price Comparison Site” in 2006 by Kiplinger’s, this site searches product reviews to create an overall product rating and then it connects you to various online merchants.

ThisNext – This a social shopping site that lets you connect with like-minded to find their recommendations on specific products.

Kaboodle – Another social shopping site that lets you organize your wish lists from various sites on the web.

Bidnearby – Find the closest ebay auctions to your zip code area and save or avoid shipping.

Google Checkout – It’s growing.

Disruption and Opportunity – The World of Web 2.0

Reporting on the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Michael Calore suggests that “the theme of the summit is ‘disruption and opportunity,’ and it could be argued that it’s also the mantra of the entire Web 2.0 movement.”

Totally. Breaking down the walls between the giants and the dwarfs, the air of Web 2.0 seems intoxicating. With open source, startups, the culture of generosity, the innovation explosion, Web 2.0 is about expanding horizons and connecting people on more and more levels in multiple venues. This seems to be springtime of possibility. Will it last? Doubtfully but for now, the surge of creative juices and dripping like a giant coconut rolling around on the beaches virtual beaches bordering the ocean of Eureka.

Some of the cool developments Calore mentions include a music mentoring site called In the Chair, 3B (that allows you to put websites and photos into a personalized 3D space), Turn (a target advertising portal that uses data analysis to create perfect matches – sounds like the business version of EHarmony), and more. All of the developments continue to focus on the growing importance of a social computing model.

Of course, the Web 2.0 Summit wasn’t all about geeking out. Lou Reed showed up to brighten everyone’s day.

Google Suite

Google updated its spreadsheets and documents interface this weekend. I like the new spread better than the Writely look before.

via Bits of News

Free Education!

Lifehacker posted some great free education resources. This excites me because I have so much to learn.

When I graduated from college, I thought I was pretty smart. By the time I graduated from Graduate school (’94), I realized that I was completely ignorant. Since that time, I’ve been trying to catch up but it sure feels like I’m getting dumber as the years go by. So there may be no hope!

But who knows, maybe Lifehacker combined with The Teaching Company may at least keep me from fading into total illiteracy.

Go to Google School

I discovered a helpful section on Lifehacker today. They’ve tagged a whole series of articles called “Google School.” These entries provide helpful tips on searching. I like it, so maybe you will to.

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