Why I Love Instagram

These shoes were left abandoned outside my office building a while back. They sat in the parking lot for days. I'm so glad I noticed and took this picture.

My “One Moment” this week

One of my friends asked a fascinating question recently on Facebook: “I’ve noticed that Instagram has become the default picture-taking/sharing app. Why do you who use it love it so?”

The question alone shows how amazingly popular this app has become. It’s only available for Apple devices at this point, yet already some see it as the “default” photo-sharing app. Instagram officials announced recently (at SXSW Interactive) that they have 27 million registered users — a number some predict will double when the app is released soon for Android. (Android users, you won’t have to wait long; you can now pre-register with Instagram for the Android app.) Continue reading

Worry About What’s Real

There’s a lovely little post on Kiki L’Italien’s Acronym Soup blog, in which she advises people to “stop extrapolating” and live in the moment in order to be more productive. “You can’t ‘do’ when you are always and forever dwelling on one detail or planning too far ahead,” she writes.

I have a corollary to Kiki’s rule — one I’ve tried to live by for years (with varying degrees of success): “Only worry about what’s real.”
Continue reading

Suggestion for Google Analytics: Better Integration of Feedburner

I love Google Analytics, and I love Feedburner. I especially love the new “Basic Blog Dashboard” custom report put together and shared by Justin Cutroni as part of Google’s rollout of its new custom dashboard sharing functionality.

But there’s one thing missing. I don’t believe Google has provided a way for me to pull my Feedburner subscriber data into a Google Analytics dashboard. This isn’t the same thing as seeing Feedburner-driven traffic within my analytics. Continue reading

What You Can Learn from Nerdy Science Geeks

This video has been making some rounds this week, and I think it’s worth sharing. I saw it first on the Sched events blog, whose author called it “simply awesome and one of the most interesting promotional videos I’ve come across in quite some time.”

I watched it; I liked it; I re-shared it on Twitter, and then other people started chiming in that they also had seen this video and loved it and could not stop watching it.

I’m going to be honest. Their praise went way beyond what I thought when I first saw this vid. Continue reading

Spam Poetry: “To Grow Improved”

I’m thinking about introducing a semi-regular series called “Spam Poetry,” with spam comments I have received that are so ridiculous or effusive — well, really just so outrageous in any way — that I feel compelled to share. Here’s the first. It made the “poetry” cut because the language strung together is so beautifully nonsensical.

Let me know if you think I should keep this up. And please feel free to submit your own favorite spam — from your own blog comments, from email, from social media, from anywhere — in the comments. Please do keep it clean, though — this is a family joint!

“To grow improved,
previously catch what forces you to grow regressed.
each person features personal lacks. To remove them,
we all are to find out them.
since your considerations are fixed on past, you are not able to budge.”