Solutions Playground

Solutions Playground

Originally uploaded by miss_rogue.

A friend of mine on the Podcamp NYC team sent me the link to this great photo of a sign at TransitCamp. TransitCamp was an unconference held in the Bay Area to help brainstorm solutions to the day to day solutions to the ongoing public transit issues there. I [...]

Mobile post sent by WhitneyHoffman using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Mobile post sent by WhitneyHoffman using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Empowerment

Too often, we put ourselves into a box of limitations.  When we look for solutions to problems, we immediately start up with the “I can’t do that” list, rather than the list of things we can do, or should consider.  Whenever I hear “I can’t do that”, I try to ask- “Why not?” Surprisingly frequently, [...]

Social Media Valentine’s Day

I met my husband, Matt, as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania. When people ask how we met, I say I hit him over the head with a newspaper, but that’s only part of the story- the punch line of a romance that continues now for 24 years, although we’ve only been married [...]

Why I Think Hillary May Not Win, and How She Could

Let me preface this post by saying I think of myself as an average suburban mom. I am a democrat, which is unusual in the republican stronghold where I live. I have an ivy-league education, and my own podcast about education issues. I am sure some of my “demographics” put me outside [...]

Bad Service is Intolerable

I have the Comcast triple play at home.  Cable, TV, Internet.  The service can be spotty from time to time.  The  service went out sporadically for several days at a time recently, without any prior notice or acknowledgement of the problem, except for dealing with my irate phone calls.   No- I am sorry we had [...]

End Users & Predicting Who Will Win

Tech Crunch is reporting that Revver is in trouble and willing to sell itself cheaply, having accumulated almost $1 million in debt.  Microsoft is launching a hostile bid for Yahoo.  This smells a lot like the late 1980’s merger and acquisition market, now moved over into the high tech arena.
There’s a great book I read [...]

Social Networks, Marketing and PR

Chris Brogan asked a question on his blog -Is social media built more for PR types? Is the value there much easier to define than the value for marketers? It generated a lot of comments, mostly in the “PR is part of marketing” vein.
For me, social media, including twitter, utterz, my blog, facebook- all [...]

Public vs. Private Education

K-12 education in this country is an institution.  Massachusetts was the first state to enact compulsory school attendance laws in 1852, followed by New York in 1853. (1)  By 1918, all states passed laws requiring children to attend at minimum elementary school, and a Supreme Court ruling in 1925 held that private schools, as well [...]