Do you pay $100 for a ticket and watch TV

or this?

I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Citizen Sports and Lenovo on Facebook applications for fans of 115 different competing countries for the summer games.  You can read more about it here and here. With the games about to begin, Iceland was making a strong showing with the second highest tally of fans using the application.  As Track and Field took center stage, the fans of Jamaica took center stage on the facebook front, seeing over 8,000 new participants in the last 8 days of event.

Unlike the actual Olympics, Team Jamaica was unable to surge past Team USA.   Apparently, some guy named Phelps had a pretty good Olympics too.  His country had over 45,000 people following Team USA.  All told, over 240,000 people utilized the applications.  Considering these applications were just a gleam in a publisher’s eye in May, pretty amazing stuff.

Congrats to the entire Citizen Sports team!

Ok, some background.  My pet peeve is the unnecessary use of “quotation marks.”  Really grates on me.

I’ve been thinking about starting a second blog to highlight the frequent abuse of this piece of punctuation.

Someone beat me to the punch.  Kudos to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

Thanks Schneider!

Many people got the following note when doing searches today:

What’s going on?

My father just got an account on facebook.  The many circles of Facebook -

-  Work/Industry contacts

-  College/Grad School Friends

-  High School Friends

-  Family

Anyone seen the Seinfeld episode where George’s “worlds collide?”

This could be huge.  More here.

Karl Long has a great post entitled Social Media Biggest Shift in Marketing Strategy Since Television? In it he examines the differences between marketers “dipping their toes in the water” and those that dive in head first.  Check it out.

Here the part I absolutely love - the first comment:

Amen.

Found this post through another great link from Dave Knox on the same topic.

One of the few pleasures of a long commute is the ability to listen to some amazing podcasts to and from work.  Here is one I feel I must share.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History is a true find.  One segment will focus on the Assyrian powers at the dawn of civilization and the next will focus on the meta dialogue around Winston Churchill.  Dan and Ben (his producer) are putting out an amazing program.  If you’re at all interested in history and have an hour of spare time, spend it with an episode of the podcast.

Check it out.

From Lee Gomes at the WSJ:

With the world at his beck and call, a president is one of the few people lucky enough to be able to learn more off-line than he would chained to a keyboard.

Wrong.  The Internet is such an important part of the US’ ecconomic and social framework our next President must understand as a user what that means.

I’ve given up on our current President mastering “the Google.”

In addition to the books sold, millions of streams of his “last lecture,” and TV coverage, the internet lit up upon the news of Randy Pausch’s passing.  Take a look at the response on Twitter.

And of course the YouTube Video:

I didn’t know Randy and never operated in the space he was best known for most of his life (no one would mistake me for a computer scientist.)  Still, I am struck by his death in much the same way I would be struck by the death of a friend.  It is causing me to think about things that are all too often packed up and put on a shelf.  So I will do what I’ve learned to do in all occasions where death and mourning are involved - I won’t try to say anything original or profound and I won’t try to fix anything, I will simply add my voice to the many who say I’m happy to know that Randy Pausch lived and that he was able to touch my life.

My sympathies to his family and I plan to keep thinking about Randy Pausch for some time to come.