kathleen forden

Joe Melville and I have both worked the east and west coast selling our lollipops.  His company is one of only three left in the US that hand pours candy in the traditional manner. 

Candy.com gets pops in Emmy swag bag

Just a month after launching, Candy.com has a prime-time gig.

The Weymouth company, which sells more than 6,000 candy items online, has landed one of its products in the swag bags for the “Daytime Emmy Awards” party this weekend.

The 36th annual program, which honors soap operas and other daytime TV shows and their stars, will be broadcast on the CW Network at 8 p.m. tomorrow

lately i’ve been educated by the younger people i work with on my day job, on the way that language is changing “in the wild” (my tags for real life)

LolCats (http://icanhascheezburger.com/) was one of the first to start using it, but not the only one and twitter hit it out of the ballpark with the micro text portion
not only are these sites and adoptees changing the spelling of words, they are also changing the quantity and style of the written word

i do it
for my personal taste i forgo the limits enforced by punctuation and proper grammar
do i know them
yes, i do -  i just chose to not worry about them while i am expressing my thoughts on my personal blog

so knowing that change is evident and closing in fast, i started searching and found a wonderful discovery – the guide below

http://www.140characters.com – while going through the site, i discovered the history page

<excerpt>

The original post “How Twitter Was Born” follows.

---

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.

Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.

The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38:

Read more and preorder the book - “140 Characters – A Style Guide for the Short Form”

i know you’ve heard of or visited LoLCats or Failblog, here is Ben the founder talking about one of my favorite subjects

how his company makes 7 figures in ad sales last year is due to this method of development

i only wish i could park my vehicle with such style and grace

ahhh, the youth of our country

why all the lowercase?

first off – how i write my blogs – it’s with tribute to e e cummings’ orthography

i write in this manner because it pleases me and it appeals  to the design person hiding inside of me

tools i use for my lifestreaming and self learning

publishing/blogging/mobile

wordpress – for my blogs, easy and i love the owner and followers passion

addictionary – great website for new words entering our society, worth a visit a day

rim blackberry curve 8330 – i love it except for occasional memory issues with all my apps, use it for a quick camera as well

the flip - world’s easiest camcorder

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domains and software

godaddy – cheap domains – find a discount before you checkout by searching on google

vlingo – talk to your phone and don’t worry about typing ever again

viigo – easiest way in the world to read hundreds of blogs and resources daily with your bb

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marketing/resources

twitter -  for sharing resources i find and feel might interest others looking to learn

friendfeed to learn and discuss subjects of interest or just trivial discussions about life experiences – major geek city

hootsuite – great website to promote multiple accounts on twitter or to handle streams of folks you are following – offers stats and the ability to schedule  tweets

delicious - my favorite place to create bookmarks online for use anywhere

facebook – my personal friends only hangout, i now think of it as the friend and family reunion site

linkedin – my professional life and resume with references and groups i belong to

igoogle – great place for office tools on the fly, calendar, email, custom apps, my home page

cluetrain manifesto – a book written in 1999 that applies more today than ever before

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fun

playfoursquare - cool app to play and discover new places and old friends

brightkite – cool place to connect with people and places around you

pandora - online radio that allows you to create stations the fly without signing up

hulu – great television and older movie station, these folks get how it should be done

i just finished watching district 9 and i can only say “wow”

go see it and see for yourself

here is what Rotten Tomatoes says about it

Consensus: Technically brilliant and emotionally wrenching, District 9 has action, imagination, and all the elements of a thoroughly entertaining science-fiction classic.

i could not state it better

my son turned me onto a blog written by a young student at Cambridge

Alice and Kev is the name of this blog and i’ve been completely blown away by it.   if the following is of interest to you, i say read away and learn dear reader – experience, read and learn….

This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes. It’s based on the old ‘poverty challenge’ idea from The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting with The Sims 3’s living neighborhood features.

I have attempted to tell my experiences with the minimum of embellishment. Everything I describe in here is something that happened in the game. What’s more, a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over.

We’ll have to wait a bit longer for augmented reality-based apps to be available on the iPhone and Android platforms (word is that after Apple releases its 3.1 software update in September, we’ll see a flood of AR apps in the App Store). In the meantime, we’re gathering our wish lists for apps that bridge the gap between our digital social lives and our real-life ones.

You’re Twittering? Me too!
That’s the concept behind Michael Zollner’s TwittARound app that allows you to see live tweets pop up on your iPhone based on location. The app brings the real world into our digital reverie, enabling you to see both where the tweets ae coming from and how far away the person is that’s tweeting it. It could be a useful conversation starter, but mostly Twittaround just seems stalkerish.

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/5-futuristic-augmented-reality-apps-socializing

NEW YORK Until recently, augmented reality existed mainly in movies like The Minority Report and computer science labs at universities, where technologists grappled with comically clunky headgear.

Now, however, several new Web and mobile applications are changing minds and helping to bring AR into the mainstream.

In essence, AR holds the promise of marrying the digital and physical worlds by taking complex data and overlaying it with views of the real world via Webcam technology and multiple screens.

“The last thing I can [recall] getting this much hype is Second Life,” said Matt Szymczyk, CEO of Zugara, a Los Angeles-area digital agency. “But I think there will be more practical uses to this.”

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i4d0a69ad29e1cca5eb27fa6d2f367326

Anticipation for James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi adventure Avatar has been at a fevered pitch for seemingly forever, and cinephiles and geeks everywhere now have less than five months to see if it lives up to the hype (it’s scheduled to open December 18, 2009). But for the Comic-Con audience, where the toys are almost as important as the movie they’re tied to, Mattel set hearts aflutter with its announcement of its line of Avatar action figures that are expected to hit store shelves in October. And, get this: The toys offer augmented reality. (The good news just keeps coming).

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/stephanie-schomer/write/wait-avatar-gets-little-easier-these-toys-come-life-1