The Sweet, the Creepy and the Aha Moment

Starting off the week with a few stories I got to over the weekend.  Enjoy

The Sweet: Carl Sagan’s Interstellar Love Story – Enjoy NPR’s Valentines Day story featuring Ann Druyan, (Carl Sagan’s Widow)  The recording Carl and Ann made for NASA to represent life on earth to alien cultures includes something very personal.

The Creepy: In the abuse of technology department, the Lower Merion (PA) School district has clearly crossed the border of sanity with it’s policy to make secret video recordings of student’s behavior in their own homes!!!

The Aha Moment: I really admire Robert Scoble’s ability to come up with the words that cut to the heart of an issue.  And I may be a bit jealous of his access.  Here’s a fabulous quote from Scoble on “Why Google won’t give Twitter or Facebook a buzz cut.” –filed the day before Google made its crazy Buzz release.

“3. Google doesn’t have Mark Zuckerberg. Mark gets how to hook people in through social tricks that very few people understand. FriendFeed, for instance, didn’t get it. Neither does Twitter. Most people think of Mark as an awesome businessperson or a tech genius (his major at Harvard was computer science), but most people don’t know his minor was Psychology. He studies how people work and how they get addicted to things at a level that Google’s founders struggle to understand. Google’s founders are also not nearly as comfortable around other people as Mark is. Everytime I meet Larry Page or Sergey Brin it’s tough to get them to talk socially. Mark, on the other hand, hugs people and is easier to just hang around and be personable with. That difference translates into the software that Facebook makes and how it hooks people in. Look at the tags on photos in Facebook, for instance. They hook people in in a way that no other service has yet.”

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