Shanti’s Dispatches

… like an old pal of mine does over at I F’ing Hate Celebrities.

The Craiger writes (re: Sean Penn being tired from acting):

This statement is nearly incoherent, but I think heís saying heís really wiped out from reading aloud words written by other people.

In the movie Penn plays a governor. Sadly, since pretending to be a politician has proven so cripplingly exhausting for the guy, actually being a politician must be just plain prohibitive. Those of us pining for Jeff Spicoli to launch a Senate campaign will likely be disappointed.

Read more at I F’ing Hate Celebrities Blog.

You know who you are.

LinkedIn, for those new to the service, is a popular social networking site for business / work associates.

Like Friendster, but used instead by and for mostly dudes who want to schmooze virtually and help each other get jobs, close deals and make business connections.

Here’s a quick quiz:

• Do you have over 500 LinkedIn contacts?
• How many of these have you actually met face-to-face?
• How many of these people have you met outside of LinkedIn?
• How many of these people would you feel extremely comfortable recommending (for a job or consulting gig) to a very close friend?
• Do you just send the generic LinkedIn invitation request, without personalizing it one bit?
• Do you not reply to polite emails asking for more information, or just saying hello back, after you “invite” (*cough* spam) people in your network you don’t know?

If you answered Yes to most of the above questions, with a high # of connections met only via LinkedIn, there’s a good chance you’re a LinkedIn Ho.

Ross Mayfield, founder and CEO of Socialtext, posted a great piece on running a virtual company (no group office space).

I definitely have some thoughts on this that I’ll post later. For now, it’s great to see other companies / startups doing this.

I’ll definitely have to checkout FreeConference.com, not to mention get an IRC group setup eventually =)

The Onion reports that Scientology is losing ground to the new Fictionology movement:

Created in 2003 by self-proclaimed messiah Bud Don Ellroy, Fictionology’s principles were first outlined in the self-help paperback Imaginetics: The New Pipe-Dream Of Modern Mental Make-Believe.

Fictionology’s central belief, that any imaginary construct can be incorporated into the church’s ever-growing set of official doctrines, continues to gain popularity. Believers in Santa Claus, his elves, or the Tooth Fairy are permitted‚Äîeven encouraged‚Äîto view them as deities. Even corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid Man are valid objects of Fictionological worship.

“My personal savior is Batman,” said Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Greg Jurgenson. “My wife chooses to follow the teachings of the Gilmore Girls. Of course, we are still beginners. Some advanced-level Fictionologists have total knowledge of every lifetime they have ever lived for the last 80 trillion years.”

LOL. If you haven’t read much about the scary and bizarre history of Scientology, I definitely recommend perusing A Piece Of Blue Sky.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll hurl. =)

Strangest acquisition of the week: Google acquires dodgeball.com

Del.icio.us gets a blog.

Fundable launches - raise money for group projects / purchases. Site code to eventually go open source. (that’s what they say, at least)

Seth Godin recommends a new site on how to improve your conversion rate

Is Google the Starbucks of the Internet? “There’s one on every corner!”

Over at the labs, we had an idea a while back for an auto-BitTorrent downloader that would kind of be an iPodder + Tivo on steriods.

Thankfully, we knew when to say when and drop the idea. Our core competencies lie in developing web applications, not client-side GUI apps.

I’ve seen apps that come close to our ideal uber Tivo-podder, and this post lays out some of the implications that we had seen coming.

Of course, the thing that would blow Podcasting out of the water is if the porn guys caught on, and started offering specialized pr0n podcatchers with their feeds already added. You heard it here first.

I think Seth gets a bum rap sometimes because he articulates things in such a way that once you read them, you think: well, of course!

Now, actually doing them is something else altogether.

On the road to his upcoming book, All Marketers Are Liars, Seth has pulled out some some golden marketing nuggets on “What Every Good Marketer Knows” :

• Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
• Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
• You can‚Äôt fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
• You‚Äôre not in charge. And your prospects don‚Äôt care about you.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you‚Äôll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

More golden marketing nuggets from the Godinster.

“Deliver news and opinion since May 9, 2005″ - is that a badge of honor?

I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far out of Arianna’s post.

I think this thing really has some legs… though I wouldn’t expect all the big name writers to stick around forever.

I’ll bet most of the big name, first-time writers are enthusiastic about the project for a month or so, then their interest will wane. (could be wrong, just speaking from personal experiences of organizing disparate groups of writers for collaborative blogging efforts…)

They’ve got Adam McKay of SNL and Anchorman fame. Not to mention Bill Maher.

Luckily, Arianna’s psychotic ultra left-wing politics don’t seem to be the central thrust of the effort.

For some reason, that sounds just wrong.

But Greasemonkey does indeed rock. (I haven’t played with it too much just yet)

Now it’s got a free online book released via GPL, by the man himself.

A de-normalized approach to tags:

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how to implement tags on your own web site, and I wanted to share how I did it. By no means am I an expert code writer and my way may not be the best (it’s de-normalized), but at least I hope that it will give you some ideas of how to do this on your own. I’ve been using this system for about three months on two web sites and it’s working great (here, and brotherjoe.com). It is made with PHP and MySQL, and uses REGEX for tag matching. My system does popular tags, related tags, tag addition, and the ability to seperate tags with commas so you can have multi-word tags. Let’s get started…