Polymer Studios::Web Consulting

A massive, subprime bailout of links

24. September 2008

Oh my, has it been a week since we last talked? If we follow each other on Twitter, then it’s probably been more like a few minutes, as that’s where I’ve been spending/wasting my time. Which brings us to the first in this cavalcade of content: Graeme Thickins, of DoApp and Tech~Surf~Blog fame, ponders whether using [...]

Social media: What’s keeping you from wading in?

15. September 2008

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There’s a fair amount of hand-wringing on the part of marketing execs over what to do with social media (aka Web 2.0, Social Web). It’s on the news and in the papers, so the CEO hears about it and asks the CMO, “should we be doing that?” And so the lukewarm potato gets handed downward [...]

The human jungle

12. August 2008

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I never would have step foot in the Amazon rainforest were it not for a failed trip to the mountains two years ago with my daughter. We went to Cusco, with the hope of making it to Machu Picchu, but instead met up with a case of soroche, or altitude sickness. Except for the World [...]

A land with many faces

18. July 2008

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Over the coming weeks, the posts on this blog might take a turn for the exotic, as I’ll be posting stories and photos from the far reaches of Peru. On the agenda: Hunting for megalodon teeth with Desert Man of Ica, who was recently written up in the New York Times. (Fortunately, we made our reservation [...]

Punching the clock

8. July 2008

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When you work for an employer, it’s usually a pretty straightforward contract. You trade 40 or so hours of your week in exchange for a salary and some sprinkles. What happens during those hours is between you and your boss. But when you cut the tethers of employment and became a free agent, what’s the agreement? [...]

Permission, schpermission

2. July 2008

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Photo by Lars Klove It’s amazing how we need others to give us permission to break with societal norms and do the unthinkable. I don’t mean unthinkable acts like marrying your first cousin. Unless you’re royalty, in which case, it’s probably ok. Rather, I’m referring to what passes for unthinkable among neurotic social climbers in New [...]

In praise of whimsy

12. June 2008

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How serendipitous. A friend of mine sent an article that contained a link to the very story I had been wracking my brain to recall for some time. It’s about a college student who drops out, but chooses to follow his whimsy and takes the odd class in calligraphy. He never finishes college. Years later, however, [...]

Kids rule. No, really.

31. December 2007

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While we adults were geeking out about the potential of Second Life, the kids had their own virtual-world revolution. Brooks Barnes reports in NYT that Webkinz (by toymaker Ganz) had 6 million logins in November. I can attest personally that most of those sessions were probably longer than one hour and ended only with lots [...]

Spies like us

21. November 2007

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Hotel Room 1931, by Edward Hopper NYTimes has a story about how hotels and airports have started to notice that their customers like to carry laptops and use the Internets when they travel. OMG, who knew? It’s fun to snark at big companies for missing the obvious, but I don’t think this kind of blindness is [...]

Emptor caveat

30. October 2007

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Beware the buyer. (Okay, I’m not a Latin scholar, and Latin grammar probably doesn’t work that way, but you take my meaning.) NBC Universal made a high-profile decision in August not to renew its contract to sell its video content through iTunes. Instead, they’ve chosen to join forces with News Corp. to build a new [...]