Eubie's notes

Michael Hyatt, president and chief executive of Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville shared productivity and other ideas in his Working Smart for a long time. Last month he decided to stop writing there, keep writing in his other blog — From Where I Sit, but keep the site and entries.

Here are some of the Working Smart items I don’t want to lose:

* My Daily Reading List
* Automated Email Follow-up — I’m afraid that in the race to get through the scores of messages that daily hit our inbox, we hit the proverbial ball over the net, but never really follow-up to see what happened when the ball arrives in the other person’s court. Was it hit back? Was it tossed to someone else? Or, did it just hit the court and lay there with a hundred other balls. If it was the latter, then you really didn’t accomplish anything.
* Tom Peters on Presentation Excellence
* How to Start a Blog — I would suggest that you be patient with yourself. Writing is like anything else. The more you do it, the better you get. If you have a little talent, and stick with it, you’ll eventually get into the rhythm and joy of it.
* Corporate Blogging Rules and Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Draft #2
* The Master Task List — For several years now, I have profited from using a “Master Task List.” This is a way to group your work-related activities so that you do what you were hired to do and keep from getting side-tracked by “trivial pursuits.” I first learned this technique from Todd Duncan, whose book, Time Traps, is a must read.

USA Today: State quarter program gets new push to include D.C., U.S. territories. Too much of a good thing?

The 50-state quarter program was launched in 1999 and is scheduled to wrap up at the end of 2008 with the minting of the quarter for Hawaii, the last state to enter the union. The program has been extremely popular with collectors. From 125 million to 130 million people in the USA — or close to half the U.S. population — collect the state quarters, according to the American Numismatic Association.

CNet: Cisco touts the networked home of future — “By 2010, 20 homes networked together in a neighborhood will have more load across their network than the entire Internet did in 1995.” — Cisco CEO John Chambers

USA Today: Can small businesses help win the war? — The U.S. military is studying small companies such as 24-employee Craigslist to see how the online bulletin board has all but terrorized the newspaper industry by siphoning classified advertising. Such research may unearth ideas that will help the United States fight the war on terror.

How large, traditional companies fare in this fight may prove invaluable in developing a strategy against al-Qaeda. That’s why the military is going to school. A book making the rounds at the Pentagon is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. It was written for a business audience, but military strategists are saying, “This is the best thing I’ve read that applies to counterterrorism,” says Lt. Col. Rudolph Atallah, a Defense Department director in international affairs.

The premise of The Starfish and the Spider is that centralized organizations are like spiders and can be destroyed with an attack to the head. Decentralized organizations transfer decision-making to leaders in the field. They are like starfish. No single blow will kill them, and parts that are destroyed will grow back.

Wired News: The Lost Lunar Landing Tapes — NASA puts a man on the moon — then loses the videotape. A grizzled crew of ex-rocket jockeys goes on a star-crossed mission to find it.

Amid concerns about lost technology, unreadable formats and data integrety, it’s often the human element — the lost or forgotten record and carelessness — that’s as much the risk. Also this story shows that old memories can sometimes yield the best clues.

WiredNews: Who’s Killing MP3 and ITunes? — DRM is toast. Here are seven reasons why major record labels will abandon it in 2007 — and why that’s bad for Apple.. Also TechCrunch: The Inevitable Death of DRM — Notwithstanding Apple’s announcement today of the sale of 2 billion songs on iTunes (all with DRM), most of the recent market signs suggest that the eventual demise of DRM is inevitable. Consumers are more frustrated than ever that certain file types are playable only on certain devices. The only real questions are when, and will it be replaced with something far more sinister?

NY Times: Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat — Thousands or even millions of PCs are being hijacked by malicious programs to commit Internet crimes.

NY Times: By 2040, Greenhouse Gases Could Lead to an Open Arctic Sea in Summers — New studies project that the Arctic Ocean could be mostly open water in summer by 2040 — several decades earlier than previously expected.. Also, NY Times: Recalculating the Costs of Global Climate Change — Exploring the implications of alternative assumptions is likely to lead to better policy than making a single blanket recommendation.

Christian Science Monitor: Eons: ‘MySpace’ for the boomer set — Seniors are logging on to Eons.com and discovering the world of online networking.. There’s also thirdage.com.

Hugh McLeod: How to be Creative — MacLeod highlights the value of authenticity and hard work, and reveals the challenges and rewards of being creative.