Last night my wife and I got into a debate. We heard Aerosmith’s cover of Come Together which we both agreed was better than the Beatle’s original. So we started talking about other covers that were better than the original. I threw out UB40s cover of Red Red Wine. She insisted that Neil Diamond covered UB40 (which is odd because she’s like a musical encyclopedia). What to do? Ask Twitter. It didn’t take long to confirm that UB40 was, in fact, the cover band. Since it seemed like a good theme, I asked people to help put together a list of covers that were better than the originals, and here’s what the social web said:
@FullQuieting: Comfortably Numb by Copper Box, Baby’s Got Back by Jonathan Coultan.
@sickrubick: Gin and Juice by The Gourds, Hendrix’s take on All Along the Watchtower.
@danlarsen’s wife: Urge Overkill’s cover of Girl You’ll Be a Woman Soon.
@danlarsen: I Want Candy by Bow Wow Wow (srsly, Dan?). Also Pearl Jam, Last Kiss.
@maxgladwell: Anything Jerry and The Dead covered from Bob Dylan. He also says that technically, “Georgia on My Mind” by Ray Charles was a cover.
@edubya: Obidah Parker covered Hey Ya. She also suggested B****’s Ain’t S*** by Ben Folds, but this is a family blog, so we’ll bleep that out.
@aaronh: Aaron brought his a-game calling out No Scrubs by Blink182, Oops I Did it Again by Travis, and Imperial March by No Doubt, Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley, Don’t Know What to Do w/Myself by White Stripes, seconded All Along the Watchtower by Hendrix, and The Sign by Mountain Goats. Apparently, Aaron listens to a lot of obscure bands.
@aaronh and @danlarsen independently called out Dynamite Hack’s cover of Boyz in the Hood, which I have to admit was pretty good.
But the call of the night was @andresmax who nominated Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door by Guns ‘n’ Roses. Anything by G’n'R Rocks.
If you love covers, check out the Coverville Podcast recommended by @FullQuieting. There’s some good stuff there. As of now, I’m officially a subscriber.
This list is no where even close to exhaustive. There are tons of cover songs out there that you might think are better than the original. What are they?
If you haven’t heard of ChaCha, they are a human powered search engine focusing on mobile. To use ChaCha, you enter your question and a human (allegedly) ChaCha guide goes out and searches for the answer for you. The guides are paid a few bucks an hour and work from home. They used to be a web based human powered search engine, but a cottage industry sprang up of people who asked inane questions to mess with the guides. TechCrunch LOVES ChaCha.
Recently, ChaCha started taking requests via Twitter. You just send a question to @ChaCha and a few seconds later, an answer automagically shows up in your Twitter stream with a link to the “source website,” or where the guide found your answer. Sometimes this works…sometimes hilarity ensues. So without further ado, here’s today’s @ChaCha hilarity…
It all started when @AustinNealeigh asked, “When are they raising the national minimum wage?
And @ChaCha replied: “@AustinNealeigh answer: Raising the minimum wage now will hurt businesses which will harm the economy. Thanks for using ChaCha.”
And along with their answer, they sent a link to HumanEvents.com who has been “leading the conservative movement since 1944.” This answer was sent by James W., who claims to be a french translator. Notice that James didn’t answer the question. The article is an opinion piece about why raising minimum wage is bad.
I found this funny and a bit odd that ChaCha was taking a political position on minimum wage, so I told people about it, as I’m prone to do. And since I started my tweet with “@ChaCha,” they replied to my non-question, as they are prone to do. Beth, who specializes in body piercing and anxiety symptoms among other things, sent me this personal reply:
And to back up her assertion that raising the minimum wage will hurt businesses which will in turn hurt the economy, she sends me a link to a Baltimore Sun blog post about…wait for it…Obama blowing his nose. Well done, ChaCha! Bravo! Nice work! Really, there’s not a lot more I can add to this. ChaCha just wins.
And in case you were curious, on July 24, 2008 the federal minimum wage will increase from $5.85 to $6.55.
Here’s a hilarious cartoon about the funniest of all topics…social networking. I mean, just the words “social networking” make you crack up, right? Or is that just me? Whatever. Anyways, have a great weekend. BTW, Friendster is my favorite (in the cartoon…not IRL).
It’s been just over two months since I got laid off. Last week I turned in my final paperwork at Yahoo. I also did an interview with the NY Times to talk about how social media helps people who are back out looking for work again. And, as I’m prone to do, I Twittered about it. And the first reply came from @hci:
And that got me thinking. First of all, she’s right. That is a weird branding vibe. But it’s not really about that I got laid off, it’s more about what I do next because of it. I’m far from unemployed right now. I’m loving what I do now more than I ever have.
“Getting laid off” has a negative connotation. Which I get. One day you’re a productive wage earning member of society, the next day you’re unemployed. No purpose. No money. Misery. Depression. Unemployment checks. There’s this pathetic vibe that comes with that, and I think that’s what Cindy was associating me with.
But let’s flip that around. Two months ago, I was doing what I had to do. Now I’m doing what I want to do. And looking back, it was a change I’d always wanted to make, but as long as I was drawing a steady paycheck, I didn’t see it as a change that I could afford to make–for me or for my family. Looking long term, I’m not sure it was a decision I could afford not to make.
Getting laid off forced me to make the change that I’d always wanted to make anyways. And it may work out or it may not. But the point is that I’ve made that change now. I’m doing what I’m passionate about. I’m building things. I’m meeting people. There is no bureaucracy anymore. My future success depends entirely on me.
Over the past few months, I’ve found myself talking quite a bit about what happened to me. It’s been very therapeutic. And it’s also had its benefits in that it’s brought with it some recognition and the opportunity to meet some people I’d never have met otherwise. There’s been this inverse curve where the closer I was to the day, the more I talked and thought about it. I still talk and think about it, but in a much different context. Now the context is the amazing opportunity I’ve been given whereas then it was about what I’d lost.
Thanks to everyone who has been a part of things for the past few months. Sometimes, you just need a swift kick in the ass to get moving–this morning, my wife called it “forced change.” There’s that old saying that it’s not what happens to you, but what you do about what happens to you that matters. I’m hoping to make the best of this opportunity.
If you were forced to make a change, what would you do? Why are you waiting?
I’m writing this post from Blog It, inside of Facebook. Blog It is a tool from Six Apart that lets you post to multiple blogs or update multiple statuses from one place. For example, I just updated both my Twitter and Facebook statuses from here.
Summary: Love Blog It, but I wonder why it needs to be a Facebook app…
Blog It the idea is awesome. I’m simultaneously posting this on my WordPress blog at www.ryankuder.com and on Vox (which I rarely, if ever use). Being able to update multiple statuses is great too. I’m constantly updating Twitter, but I update Facebook status much less often. And many of my Twitter updates just don’t make good Facebook updates. Blog It let’s me choose what goes where when. When I hit “Post” in just a minute, it should update both blogs, put an event in my Facebook mini-feed, and post on Twitter about the new post (not sure where it will link to–we’ll find out soon!). Blog It gives me great control, integrates with everything I need it to, and does everything I’d want a multi-posting tool to do.
My question is this: Do I want to go to Facebook to do this? I gave some feedback to the Six Apart team that I’d love a desktop widget for status, because it’s immediate and it would be great to post from IM or a client. But when I think to myself that I’d like to write a blog post, do I think of going to Facebook to do it? Not really. I go to Facebook to find out what my friends are up to–which is tangentially related to blogging and status updates, but not the creation of them. Same principal for rating restaurants…I think of going to Yelp, not Facebook. Same principal for most other things I do online. I get that FB platform lets all these apps and their full functionality exist in FB, but is that where people want to go to use them?
I’m working on a project right now where we’ve been debating this exact point. Should we build a fully functional, full page app in Facebook? If we do, it means that we’re expecting people to go to Facebook and then navigate to our app when they want to use it. Or should we build a destination site that uses a Facebook app to update activity streams, exposes limited functionality, and links to the destination site for the full experience?
I’m leaning towards the later right now. That’s not to say that things will change and Facebook becomes the de facto internet operating system, but I don’t think we’re there yet. Facebook is still primarily a social application with the main function of facilitating interaction amongst friends. Writing this post required no interaction with any of my friends, so why Facebook? I’d take a stand alone site, bookmarked for easy access with all of the same functionality. Am I missing a core feature of Blog It that makes it NEED to be in Facebook? Maybe the guys who own www.blogit.com just didn’t want to sell their domain.
Do you think of Facebook as a destination for things other than interacting with your friends? What makes something a good FB app v. a stand alone destination site? Would you think of going to Facebook as the place where you write your blog posts?
P.S. This is the first time I’ve posted from Blog It. Keep your fingers crossed that this all shows up everywhere the way I’m hoping it does.
UPDATE: The WordPress part of the posting didn’t work. It said my username and password were incorrect. They were not. I’ll do some more research on this. It did hit Vox and Twitter just fine. Twitter link went to Vox. I’d like that to be configurable.
If you live outside of Boston or are not a runner, you might have totally missed that Monday was Patriot’s day. Which is cool if you are in Boston. But if you’re a runner who doesn’t live in Boston, you might know it better as the day they run the Boston Marathon. I’ve had friends run the past few, but didn’t know anyone running this one, until I met Dave Fleet.
Dave blogged about his training at The Toronto Runner. The thing is that as if it wasn’t enough to be training for Boston, Dave was doing it in Toronto. In the winter. Are you @#$!ing crazy, Dave? Go back inside and sit by the fire. Through @davefleet, we heard all about his tempo runs and his long runs and his injuries and how he was doing it with shoulder height snow berms outside in the freezing weather.
He ran a 3:07, which is pretty damn fast. It averages out to a 7:35 mile. For 26.2 miles. If you’re Canadian, that’s 42.16 km. But even more impressive is that he raised $2,300 to help fight breast cancer. My sister in-law is a survivor, so thanks for what you’ve done, Dave. It’s not too late to help raise even more–you can donate here.
I came up to San Francisco today to see what was going on around the Web 2.0 conference. I don’t have a conference pass, so I’m sitting in one of the lounges working. I’ve seen a few familiar faces around and even ran into my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Randy across the street when I went to grab lunch.
When I was at Yahoo, I didn’t do a lot of conference attending. But now that I’m free, it’s a great way to get out and meet the folks you know, but don’t really know. It’s also interesting to look at the way that real connections form. For instance, I just had this conversation with Stowe Boyd (who I met just briefly over the weekend):
Me: Hi, Stowe. Ryan Kuder. We met at the BBQ on Sunday.
Stowe: Hi, Ryan. How are you?
Me: Good, thanks.
Stowe: I think I read something from you today…
Me: Oh…I commented on your John Edwards post.
Stowe: Riiiight.
Me: All right. I need to go find power. See you around.
“I think I read something from you today.” “I commented on your post.” Never would have had that conversation two years ago. And yet here are two people, virtual strangers, who have a point of reference for a social interaction. Things like this happen all over the place.
Think of all of the different ways that you communicate with people. Or even better, think of all of the different ways you have the opportunity to communicate with people, whether you do or not. You might be surprised how much of the conversation can happen outside the formal channels and how you may not even realize it. Where you communicate, what you say, who you say it to…these are all indicators of who you are, how you think, who you know, and what you’re doing. And collectively, each of these points of contact helps build real human relationships. There’s a powerful network out there that lets total strangers pick up a dialog from a point well after the conversation started.
Social networking on line is great. But underlying it all are human connections. Whether it’s between you and someone else, or your brand and a customer, or total strangers. Behind every screen name and avatar is a person who you just might run into at a conference at Moscone Center one day.
I don’t have a picture of him or know his name, but the guys at 10kthings want to find him and give him $100. But who is he? For all I know…he could be you. He’s not me. I know that much. All this guy has to do is friend Dave Winget on Facebook. Bam. $100. Easy?
It’s a social media experiment. These guys are trying to see if news of one video can reach the guy they randomly selected through social channels. How are they going to find him? They’re not. You are. And I am. By doing things like posting this blog post. Which if you read, hopefully you’ll blog about too. Eventually, all roads lead back to Dave Winget.
OK, so it doesn’t roll of the tongue quite the same way that that “War” does in the Edwin Starr song. But with so many social networking sites out there for so many different things, I figured I’d give my take on what’s best for what and how I use the different primary social networks I’m on.
Keeping in touch with friends: Facebook. The News Feed is the single best way to keep up with friends who you don’t otherwise talk to or email on a regular basis. If you’re like me, you’ve got a small group of people who you see regularly and a much bigger group who you like and would love to keep up with, but you just don’t get face to face with all that much. Nearly all of my Facebook friends are people I’m friends with in the real world. Between status updates and the activity stream, Facebook wins here. Honorable mention goes to FriendFeed, which aggregates a host of your friends online updates, but very few of my real friends use it. It’s mostly my fake friends.
Meeting new people:Twitter. After I got laid off at Yahoo, I had a ton of people start following me on Twitter. Most I did not know. But after watching what people talk about and jumping in on the conversation, I’ve met a bunch of new folks who I like and respect. It’s like listening in on a conversation at a cocktail party. When you’ve heard enough to determine if someone’s interesting, you introduce yourself. If they’re not…you leave. I’ve met several handfuls of people in real life. And I’m looking forward to meeting a bunch more at Web 2.0 next week.
Business contacts: No brainer. LinkedIn. I tend to use LinkedIn more as a glorified address book than anything. It’s great when I need to find an old friend or colleague who I’ve lost touch with. I do not typically accept requests from people I haven’t met, but if I’ve met you at least once, I’m likely to either add you or accept your invitation. The downside for LinkedIn is that there aren’t a lot of features that keep me coming back on a daily basis.
Affinity Groups: For joining smaller groups who I share an interest with, I’m fascinated by Ning. I run a network for my neighborhood. But there are also networks for Swedish entrepreneurs, teachers who love tech, and freestyle motocross riders. The great things about it is that if you can’t find a network for whatever you’re interested in, you can start your own in two minutes.
Absolutely Nothing!: And the winner is MySpace. I have a page, but never go. I get a MySpace invite about once every three weeks, and inevitably…it’s from a porn star. No thanks. Your mileage may vary. If you love it, let us know why. I’m open minded.
What about you? Any other categories you want to name a winner for? Am I missing the point on some of these, or is there a better solution for one?
Like just about everyone else, I follow Scoble. Since I also follow a few other folks, Scoble’s musings don’t fill up my timeline the same way they do with a lot of other people’s, so I usually miss most of his Tweets. However, I’m glad I caught this one. It was interesting. Hmmm…that gives me an idea.
Today’s Interesting Person of the Day is Abhilash Ravishankar. Abhilash is an oil field engineer in Saudi Arabia, a Web 2.0 geek, and a caffeine junky like me. I’m imagining the movie Armageddon where the guys on the rig are all running around yelling and there’s black oil shooting everywhere and years of training is the only thing that controls the chaos and there’s Abhilash updating us all on Twitter from his iPhone while drinking a cup of South Indian Drip coffee. I imagine that it’s not often like an action movie on the job, but even if it’s not, it sounds very exotic.
Abhilash, what you do is so different from what most of us in Silicon Valley do everyday, I find it fascinating–even if, in reality, it’s a bit more mundane than the romanticized version I think of when I think of oil fields. Have fun at the Schlumberger Olympics tonight. Everyone else, give Abhilash a read here and a follow here.
