“Involved heavily in technology, Nemeth runs a new company called Smart Meeting Design and admits to having a penchant for communication and hooking up compatible communication and technology models. ‘I like to think about blogs as being a new type of conversation,’ Nemeth said.”

Wow. I said that?

The irony is, it’s attributed to Greg Nemeth. My father is a faternal twin, his brother’s name? Greg. Did I mention my Dad’s name is George too?

I wouldn’t worry about what Cool Cleveland is distributing. I’d worry about what my wife and I saw on the CNN ticker. Way to go, (Cleveland) Ohio.

Heat fresh water over an open campfire. Add one fist-full of coffee for each cup of water. Bring to a boil and then add a splash of cold water to settle the grounds. There is no such thing as strong coffee, only weak people.“

Fortune elloquently reminds us coffee consumers that we’re still being screwed:

“illustrating the article is a crucial breakdown of where the coffee dollar goes (actually, the coffee US$3.75!), provided by my dear friends at the scaa.

you get the US$0.03 for the farmer; the US$0.18 for the roasters & importers; the US$0.07 for the paper cup; the US$0.40 for milk (more on that in a second!); the US$2.82 for rent, marketing, labor, investment costs; the US$0.25 for coffeeshop owner profit. but what they leave out is a crucial component: sugar.

it is that omission that lies at the heart of the article — and the industry’s — total oversight of the big picture. i love the coffee industry. but despite being the world’s second most widely traded commodity, coffee people just don’t seem to see the dead horse on the table.

that cup of coffee: coffee, milk, sugar, which is how most people drink it. . . think carefully dear readers and you will see how it is actually the signal marker for the nation’s whole agricultural policy! and how it is balanced to rip off consumers, the ‘third-world,’ and the coffee industry itself.”

Something to think about:

Social capital, or aggregate (connected) reputation, is a form of credit. Some formal transactions can be supported by social capital. Informal transactions are rarely underpinned by financial credit or legal agreement and instead rely entirely social capital. We all have our internal calculators keeping tacit track of who is wronging and righting, the health of the relationships and adjusting our actuarial tables according to experience.”

Thanks, Tim. I appreciate your vote of confidence:

“In researching the social software space I found that I had to get in up to my elbows. First I contacted trusted friend and advisor George Nemeth and then sat down with equally trusted Valdis Krebs (a guru in the social network space) to get the 100k view.

Then, I actually started using Ryze (I had set myself up on LinkedIn and found myself wanting more).

Ryze is surprisingly interesting. I think the idea of having networks for people that share at least a common interest, outside of I want to meet other people, lends itself to better introductions. By taking a ’saw your post on xyz and share your position.’ lends itself to stronger possibilities of interaction than ’saw you work for such and such and you know so and so who is six friends away from me … so, you wanna be friends?’

danah boyd seems to get it right… get in there and USE it before you comment on it. I wish more ‘traditional’ journalists would do the same.”

Here’s an appropriate quote:

“I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life.” - Anthony Perkins, 1932 - 1992

Interesting to see these two stories on the same page. What do you think the correlation is

Over half of U.S. high school kids don�t know who the Allies fought in WWII. Allies? Huh? 18% think the Allies included the Germans. Bruce Cole sounds an alarm…

and

An IT engineer in India might as well be in the next cubicle, and he may soon be. The U.S. will need Indian brainpower as baby boomers retire…

I wonder if an IT engineer in India know who are allies were in WWII? I’m sure they need to learn it as part of their citizen test.

You know holiday shopping is offensive and wasteful. You know Christmas “wish lists” and “gift exchanges” degrade the concept of giving. You know Christmas marketing is a scam, benefiting manufacturers, stores, and huge corporations, while driving individuals into debt. You know this annual consumer frenzy wreaks havoc on the environment, filling landfills with useless packaging and discarded gifts. Yet, every year, you cave in and go shopping.

Together, we boycott Christmas Shopping, Christmas decorations, Christmas cards, and every variety of Christmas Crap. We refuse to support the Holiday Industry. We show our love for friends and family by giving our time and care, not by purchasing consumer goods. We maintain the integrity of giving by giving spontaneously and from our hearts, rather than during a specified season.

What’s your reason for celebrating the upcoming season?

The Word of the Day for November 28 is:

zeugma � \ZOOG-muh\ � noun
: the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense or makes sense with only one (as in “opened the door and her heart to the homeless boy”)

Example sentence:
“She left in a huff and a Chevy,” said Jack, employing vivid zeugma to report of Marissa’s departure.

Did you know?
“Zeugma, like the pun, is economical: it contracts two sentences into one . . . it links unrelated terms�mental with moral, abstract with physical, high with low�and thus generates surprise.”(Walter Redfern & Basil Blackwell, Puns)

ChaplainPaul initiates a discussion with the hopes of getting “the ball rolling on some substantive regional conversation in this ryze network”. I can oblige him, will you?

Bloomba is a mail client that I read about in BusinessWeek a while ago. I downloaded the 30-day trial, and like it so much that I just spent about 5 hours loading all of my RSS feeds into it. Yes, that’s one of the reasons I like it. It’s a powerful search client, that will find what you’re looking for in all your email folders and RSS subscriptions. The drawback is, there’s no way to import your existing feeds, so I opted to hack the subscription.csx file, instead of using the wizard for event single one of the almost 150 feeds I’m subscribed to. Not a lot of fun, but it’s well worth the investment for the productivity I gain. That’s the other thing Bloomba does well, filter spam. Instead of me filtering the first pass with another program, Bloomba does a good enough job that I don’t have to. I’m almost ready to say goodbye to both Microsoft and Mozilla email clients. The only thing that stands in my way is the $60 licensing fee. Productivity enhancements do have a real cost.

Juxaposing two ideas - I’m reading a number of blogs that are discussing what blogs are, and also seeing a number of references to this - How many forum members does it takes to change a light bulb? Click on the title, and see if your experience is similar.

Next time you’re in Cleveland Heights and need WiFi, thank Eric Meyer for spilling the (coffee) beans:

“If you’re on the east side of Cleveland and want a nice warm caffeinated place to get online, the new Arabica on Lee Road, just a block or so south of Cedar-Lee, is the place to be. The network SSID is 2WIRE173; it is a closed network but they’ll tell you the password at the counter. Note to Mac users: you’ll need to enter the password as a 40-bit hex key, not as a plain password. Something about their security setup causes this, although neither I nor they knew exactly what that might be. I figure it’s no big deal, since once you enter the information and add it to your Keychain, you’ll never have to worry about it again (unless of course they change it).”

This weblog by Northeast Ohioan Dave Patterson through Anita Campbell’s newsletter. Thanks, Anita. I’m adding Dave to the NEO Blogroll. Please send any NEO Blog URLs to me so I can add them!

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy

A Thanksgiving Day quote from of all places the National Federation of Independent Businesses’ newsletter.

Reminds me of Tavis Smiley’s innocuous but powerful question: “How you livin’?”

Someone by the handle Cold Coffee posts:

The PD said yesterday Tower City now went WiFi.

Sure enough,

Tower City Center said it will create a “WiFiCity” next month, offering free wireless Internet service. WiFi, or wireless fidelity, transmits a radio signal that gives computers and other devices a link to high-speed Internet service. The service should cover all three floors of the mall, Tower City said. It will also offer public computer terminals that use the service. The WiFi network will be one of the largest indoor wireless services in Northeast Ohio, according to a search of Internet databases. Tower City said retailers will use the service to offer special promotions. The service will block what center officials described in a news release as “undesirable” Web sites.

Thanks, CC!

The other day at the CoC, Randall Kempner showed a slide that he borrowed from REI@Weatherhead’s Gregory Stoup. I asked Greg for it and he said it’s published to their website, which I’ve linked to in the title of this post. Here’s the image that puts into real numbers how far Northeast Ohio trails behind both the national average and 20 metro areas that REI’s study finds similar to us

Thanks to Gregory and all of REI for their continued work researching the economy here.

Accidental Conversationsauthor and SmartMeetingDesign partner Jack Ricchuito wikis: (is that a word? I would think that wikiing is writing on a wiki, but who am I to say?)

Networking is as old as speech. For billions of years, people have thrived thanks to their exchanges of knowledge, resources, and opportunities. Communities emerge from webs of value exchange.

Networking has the greatest value when our world is unpredictable. The heart of networking is the accidental conversation where we allow ourselves enough freedom in our connectivity to surprise each other with knowledge, resources, and opportunities.

The power of accidental conversations is based on the fact that we are most likely to discover unpredictable possibilities in unpredictable conversations.

Networking is a social contract. It based on a mutual intention for mutual value. Networking doesn’t happen or yields low returns when any participant’s intention is for unilateral value.

We all have all the core competencies required for networking. We know how to talk about ourselves, ask people about themselves, offer and ask for help, ask for favors and return favors.

Crain’s Cleveland Business reports:

“Cleveland biopharmaceutical company Athersys Inc. has laid off 30 employees, or roughly one-third of its staff, according to sources close to the company. Sources said Athersys, which earlier this year asked Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals of Cleveland to invest up to $25 million each in the company, was negotiating a partnership with a medical device manufacturer that included an estimated $40 million investment. However, the sources said negotiations for that deal fell apart.”

It’s hard to paint a glowing picture of the region when things like this happen.

You are given a situation. What you are determines what you see; what you see determines what you do. - Haddon Robinson (seminary professor)

What do you see?

At the risk of being labelled negative, I’ll repeat what Thomas printed in Cool Cleveland:

When the Council on Competitiveness slouched into town with their Powerpoints and dry podium pounding, CrainTech’s Chris Thompson saw them for the usual suspects they were: “mostly the same people (predominantly old, white men) who have attended similar meetings in the past.” What’s called for instead are interactive sessions calling on the talents of our creative sectors, “There’s not enough ‘unusual suspects’ in the room,” stated acting ED of the Council’s Center for Regional Innovation. One reason for our brain drain is our negative attitude. “Everyone knows the problems [of our region] and nobody’s talking about how great it is.” Nobody but Cool Cleveland, apparently. See CrainTech here. See PD’s version here.

One point I’d like to add, as Chris Thompson points out, Randall Kempner was the one who made the call for unusual suspects. My guess is that he looked around the room and saw very few people like himself: young, energenic men with a vision and a plan to make things better. Chris sat in the same break out that I did, so I appreciate him calling for “interactive sessions calling on the talents of our creative sectors”. Exactly why my partners and I formed Smart Meeting Design. One thing I’d like to point out. If you get people from the creative sectors involved, they’re not going to tolerate the sort of jawboning that the GOB network needs to get “ideas” going. They want to put an end to the talking and start doing. I’m stiil waiting to hear from the “Action Team” that I signed upf for…