Barnhard Blog

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Sleepy Baby - Click here for this week’s top video clips

Contrary to Hollywood notions, the 40-year-old virgin is not an awkward yet funny and endearing electronics salesman played by Steve Carell. He is a church-going teetotaller who has neither been to jail nor served in the military, according to a new survey of more than 7000 people. He also represents an estimated 1.1 million American men and 800,000 women aged 25 to 45 who have never had sex.

Men and women who attended church at least once a week were respectively 5 and 3.9 times more likely to be virgins than those who attended church less often. Virgins of both sexes were slightly less likely to have swigged a beer in the last year, compared to non-virgins. And women with college degrees were 5.4 times more likely to be virgins than women who never got their Bachelor’s.

Read more: Newscientist.com - Meet the real 40-year-old virgins

Top Ten Reasons Why Your Company Should not Have a Blog:

(1) You get part time results for part time effort
(2) You never heard of a never ending “campaign”
(3) You publish only “perfect” posts
(4) You benchmark every post against best practices
(5) You think it’s marketing’s job to write and edit the posts
(6) Your readers’ comments are in lemon ink
(7) You ask all your sales people to hit the blog daily to get good traffic
(8) You hire an agency to blog for you
(9) You’re ill prepared for the Trojan Horse at your door
(10) You don’t have it in your DNA

Read full post @ Conversationagent.com

There are several of these kind of ideas around. The patent thing kills further innovation however, sad.
Now wishing that the number of wall plugs is reduced, like the phone rechargers.

THE solar system’s clockwork motion is by no means guaranteed: one day the Earth could collide with Venus or tear Mars apart in a close encounter, a new simulation has shown.

Read full article @ Newscientist.com

Simply smiling in a photo is so boring, why not strike a pose? Asians are notorious for their quirky and cute poses and this site focuses on documenting these poses. To help you recognize various poses, visual aids will be provided courtesy of popular Korean, Japanese, and Chinese models. The site’s style was inspired by the website Stuff White People Like, which often includes witty remarks, sarcasm, and stuff that is offensive if you can’t take a joke.

Website: Asianposes.com

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable.

Read full article: TED - Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran [via]

Afgelopen dinsdag vond in het Spant in Bussum het VINT Symposium 2009 plaats. Het centrale thema van de dag was ‘Fast Forward’ en Michiel Boreel, CTO van Sogeti waarvan VINT een onderdeel is, trapte af met de stelling dat we, in deze tijden van crisis misschien maar zo snel mogelijk weer vooruit moesten gaan en naar voren moesten kijken. Maar niet zonder terug te kijken op wat er nu eigenlijk aan de hand is en hoe het nu zover heeft kunnen komen.

1. Verander je mindset
2. Overbrug de kloof
3. Combineer ‘know how’ met ‘can do’ en ‘know who’
4. Bouw vanuit een ander dna
5. Weg met complexiteit

Artikel: De toekomst is zaak van ons allemaal [via]

This is a great video showing exactly what happens when one man with passion (or just plain self deprecating humour) starts dancing at a festival. Psychologically it’s a great little video, because it shows a bit of how crowds can form.

So how does it work? This could easily be a Social Media campaign overview: read more here

The smiling, ethnically diverse family featured on the cover of Toronto’s latest edition of its summer Fun Guide was digitally altered to make the photo more “inclusive,” which city officials say is in keeping with a policy to reflect diversity.

A spokesman for the department that publishes the guide listing recreation activities confirmed the publication was doctored to insert the face of a different father.

Altered cover + full article: City digitally adds black guy … to make it more ‘inclusive’

[via]

Engine Yard Flex (self healing cluster)

Jon Crosby (Engine Yard, Inc.), Joe Arnold (Engine Yard, Inc.), Andy Delcomb (Engine Yard, Inc.) “Agility in Deployment - Rails in the Cloud” The ability to release early and often becomes more important as your product scales. With Engine Yard Flex, Crosby demonstrates creating “One Button” deployments that scale. He also demonstrates building a high-volume Rails cluster and shows how easy it is to create a “Clone of Production” to test at scale.

[via]

“Please investigate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s complaints”

Read more @ BBC: Freedom craving ‘fuelling Iran unrest’

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.

The Iranian government had experimented with the equipment for brief periods in recent months, but it had not been used extensively, and therefore its capabilities weren’t fully displayed — until during the recent unrest, the Internet experts interviewed said.

Read more: Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology [via]
Lees meer: Dutchcowboys.nl [dutch]

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Luisteren, aanwezig zijn en eventueel actie ondernemen. Keywords als het gaat om social media en online reputatie management (ORM). Heel makkelijk gezegd en niet te betwisten. Toch wagen nog maar weinig partijen zich echt aan een actieve dialoog.

Hoe kun je die dialoog het beste aangaan? Zijn de traditionele PR- en perswoordvoeringsregels afdoende? In dit artikel kijk ik naar hoe je kunt reageren op buzz. Afhankelijk van de motivatie van de consument en de impact die zo’n uiting op je merk heeft.

Interessant artikel op Frankwatching.com

Rotterdam will host the start of the Tour 2010, next year on the 3th and 4th July 2010.
The launch of the preparations was made a few days back. There was competition from other cities, however Rotterdam has generously hosted many cycle events in recent years for national competitions and good will campaigns. The cities experience on major events (eg. Euro2000, BavariaCity Race) with a good proposal “New Energy” made the choice easier.
Read the rest of this entry »