While flying home for Thanksgiving,
I noticed a couple of passengers without any carry-on items. As a person who
always seems to have a carry-on and a "small personal item" (a backpack), I was
amazed to see fellow passengers without any bags. The idea of the no baggage traveler intrigued me enough that yesterday I tried flying with nothing but a copy of William Zinsser's
On Writing Well.
The result? The best flight I have ever taken. I floated on
and off the plane and and airport security was a breeze - no waiting
for the bag to clear the X-ray machine. Just my book and me - call it air travel
lite.
For those interested in in air travel hacking, Lifehacker has a guide for power travelers and as well as an"air travel tip" tag. 43folders also has a decent travel hacks wiki page.
Seth Godin's recent post on the Wikipedia gap was quite interesting. And it got me thinking.
In the real world, there are few, if any, times when a person has to do something completely from memory. If someone wants to know the date the Treaty of Versailles was signed, they will simply Google it, not try to recall it from the days of 10th grade Western Civ. I am not saying that learning how to commit things to memory is not important either.
I think Seth is right on when he says:
Here's what just about every exam ought to be: "Use Firefox to find the information you need to answer this question:" And as the internet gets smarter, the questions are going to have to get harder. Which is a good thing.
Until teachers get unstuck, our kids are going to be stuck and so will we.
America's schools should be focused on empowering students to find information on the Web, not memorize soon forgotten facts from a history textbook. Function over form people.
Here is are some I see at least once a month (if not weekly or daily):
- GOOGLE PHONE!!! Or for the more refined audiences/fanboys, Gphone.
- iPhone hacked!!!
- Another (meaningless) Facebook app hits 10 million users!
- A new Twitter mashup! (that does the same thing
- Will Facebook be bigger than Google?
- Will Google be bigger than Microsoft?
- ACME Advertising bought by {Google, MSFT, or some old media company} for billions and billions
- Rails vs. Django
- Ruby vs. Python
- Best wiki software?
- Is Wikipedia reliable?
- Y Combinator is awesome!
- Y Combinator is wicked awesome! (Boston people)
- OMG!!! Apple is developing {insert ridiculous product} - Note: this one is not always far fetched. Just usually two or three yeas premature.
- Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 is better than Wii/Xbox 360/PS3.
And that's just a small sampling. I haven't even touched the whole GTD/Lifehacking crowd. Although, I have to come clean: I always read anything on Lifehacker dealing with working on improving sleep and getting up early. I guess we all have weaknesses.
Plain and simple: Facebook needs to implement RSS all over the site. Rather than spamming users with email updates (I have Gmail automatically delete them), Facebook could allow them to subscribe to a authenticated RSS feed. They could be customizable, such as new pictures feeds and individual user feeds.
As of right now, Facebook is
a data black hole: information goes in but hardly ever comes out. Obviously at the end of the day, it's their data that's valuable, so it makes sense to keep more of it coming in than going out. But as the RSS adoption slowly inches higher, an increasing number of people would benefit from an RSS-enabled Facebook.
I was recently thinking about
Richard MacManus recent post on why Digg needs editors (
TechCrunch also posted on the issue). And there is really a simple solution: submit the content yourself. Before any of the Digg linkers find your post, simply submit your entry/post/essay/meme yourself. Now I understand that some within the Digg community might look down on this, but at the end of the day if your Digg submission is better written, everyone benefits.
Another option would be if you knew the entry/post/essay/meme was going to be huge beforehand (hint:
TechCrunch and
Read/Write Web) would be to partner with a Top 50 or 100 Digg user. They would become a publicity agent of sorts. No money involved (completely avoiding the ethics of paying per post or digg) as the submission would have most likely made it to the homepage of Digg to begin with. The Digg user gets another story on the homepage and the big time site gets a better worded post. Everyone is happy.
Update: Since I was suggesting to post your own content to Digg, I went ahead and followed my own advice. And here is an obnoxiously large Digg This! button for your convenience.
Additional update: Digg categorized my story as
News »
Sports »
Other Sports. Not exactly the most relevant category.
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