Kina Grannis

The other day, I saw this hilarious video about Digg from a singer-songwriter named Kina Grannis. You have to be a Digg regular to understand some of the inside jokes (email me if you're curious about why she mentions Ron Paul and the awful sound servers make when they go down). Hilarious!

Anyway, it turns out Kina Grannis is one of the 3 finalists for this year's Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. Doritos is sponsoring a sort of American Idol for the MySpace crowd, in which the MySpace community is voting for the 1 video they're going to air live on the Super Bowl. (I created a MySpace account just so I could vote!)

The whole episode -- starting with the Digg video below -- is a perfect example of this social networking, Web 2.0, user generated content, viral marketing thing that's sweeping the world (and here I am working on enterprise software). Kina's done a fabulous job using blogs, YouTube, Digg, and other Web 2.0 properties to supercharge her devoted fan base (check out the interview at Gizmodo) in a little over 6 weeks.

Good luck to Kina, and if you like this video or her other stuff (including a cover of Colbie Caillat's Bubbly, which showed up on iTunes the other day, yet another example of the changing power structure behind popular music) -- vote for her on MySpace. Today's the last day.

Ads vs. content

So I was watching a CNET video on my Tivo courtesy of TivoCast. The video was counting down the top 10 products at CES.

Out of the blue, Katie asked, "is this a commercial?" I said, "no, it's daddy's TV show about products."

She says, "so why are they trying to get you to buy something?"

Wow: my 4-year old zooms right in on the central dilemma of a media outlet like CNET: how do you dish out news and product reviews while raking in ad dollars to do it?

Sometimes Katie scares me with how innocently savvy she is about the world.

Genius Idea #2

While I'm thinking about it, here's another example of harnessing the creativity of entrepreneurial-minded people -- in this case MacArthur "genius" grant winner Amy Smith -- to solve problems in the developing world. I heard this one on the way the work last week as I slowly work my way through the astounding podcast archive at the TED site.

This one could help eliminate the leading cause of death in children under 5, which Amy tells us is respiratory disease caused by indoor cooking fires. I was shocked to hear that (I would have guessed malnutrition or maybe water-borne disease). Here's is Genius Amy's solution:

Genius!

I spotted this item on the Google blog yesterday: it's an ingenious answer to one of the developing world's big problems (access to clean water), and the grand prize winner from the Innovate or Die Pedal Powered Machine Challenge.

I love the idea of harnessing entrepreneurial energy to create breakthrough products for the developing world. Check it out:

Time to sky

With a little luck, you can just barely get these shots with the Canon Powershot. Yet-another-reason to get an DSLR, I suppose. I like how the lamp lighting makes it look like Colin has some kind of super-power. :-)

Happy New Year!

I'm thankful for the 2-week Christmas and New Year break. We spent lots of time to spend with friends and family and didn't need to rush anyway or sit in traffic or a tarmac. May God richly bless everyone with a healthy, joyful 2008.

1998 Volkswagen Passat

If you know anyone who needs a very fuel-efficient used car in good shape, we're selling our vee-dub-u.

We finally joined the minivan generation with the purchase of a Toyota Sienna. Surprisingly, our journey from a Honda family to a Toyota family is complete. (Though, as Fedora pointed out, it was a Long Time Ago -- probably before we got married -- that we each had Hondas and mine was technically an Acura.)

The big storm

In the big storm that just swept through the Bay Area, a tree fell over into our deck. Not sure if it's our tree or the city's, but looks like a tree removal (replanting?) and fence repair is in our near future. This will be our first occassion to call the city about something; we'll let you know what it's like.

We didn't see or hear it happen -- just happened to look out the kitchen window one of the mornings when it was raining pretty hard, and there it was.