Just a few things I don’t understand: Why are 90% of beauty salons named with a pun? (“Shear Energy.” “The Mane Event.”) Why do real estate and insurance agents have their photos on their business cards, when it actually makes them seem less trustworthy? Why do bureaucrats (and people who aspire to bureaucratism) say “at…

Andrea Jarrell pointed out an interesting article recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a list of ten people to follow on Twitter, but it also includes some interesting discussion of what Twitter is and how you might use it. It’s geared toward academics — people who often live and interact in pages rather…

My friend Peter Levine, in an article that examines ways to look at the question of “whether President Obama is trying to do too much too fast,” mentions an analogy Bill Galston makes to Jimmy Carter’s early days in office. In Peter’s view, those days are not at all comparable to where we are now.…

Yesterday two things converged that really got me thinking about localism. First, I published my analysis of Rockville Central’s reader survey. It was my first chance to see what the readers of my hyperlocal news site really thought about my volunteer work over the last eighteen months or so. It was very gratifying, and at…

Beth Kanter had a great post a while back that rounds up a number of bits and pieces of advice for nonprofits interested in using social media. My favorite graf: The economic crisis has changed the external environment. So, it is important to think about that as part of considering how you need to revise…

There are insurgent personalities throughout media, pushing and prodding it ahead to the future. WCCO’s Jason DeRusha is one of them. In this interview, he discusses an important aspect of what people’s relationships with institutions are becoming: I’ve been experimenting with posting my good questions on my blog and inviting people to answer them, to…

Through one of my Twitter contacts, I ran across an interesting article by Jyri Engeström about why some social networks work and others don’t. It has to do with the presence — or lack — of an “object.” In this case, that means a reason to connect with others. One example is Flickr, which has…