All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).
- The Billy Mays 5-Step Guide to Easy Selling | Copyblogger – Billy bellied-up to bar with the TV viewer and spoke straight and to the point: you got a problem, I’ve got the solution, I can guarantee it or your money back, buy it now and I’ll make you an even better deal.
Inelegant to the max. But he sold and made millions. Not through artifice; there was no false imagery, cheating or stealing, just great showmanship and the secret behind great salesmanship.
- The Goldberg-O’Reilly Birther theory: It’s an evil Obama plot to make conservatives look like wingnuts | Crooks and Liars – [Bernie Goldberg]: I have a theory. And the theory is this: That the Chicago Mafia inside the White House want to keep this crazy controversy going. Because the longer it goes, the better the chance that they will conflate the crazy right-wing fringe with regular conservatives and regular Republicans.
- 2845 ways to spin the Risk | Understanding Uncertainty – In the animation below we show how risks can be ‘spun’ to look bigger or smaller, how medical treatments can be made to seem useless or to be wonder cures, and how lifestyle changes might look worthwhile or not worth bothering with. All by changing the words used, the way the numbers are expressed, and the particular graphics chosen.
- slacktivist: Reporting the controversy – We needed this. We needed to be confronted with obvious, ugly and ridiculous lies. We needed to trip over a supposed "controversy" that no reasonable person could ever think of as actually controversial. We needed a situation in which we could see, hold, touch, taste and smell the undisputed and undisputable facts of the matter and have some crazy person in a red shirt stand up and angrily deny that reality should be allowed to have any bearing on the claims we make about the world.
It's a lifeline, a chance to grab hold and pull ourselves back to shore. All we need to do to seize that lifeline is to say that the truth is true and the lies are not. All we need to do is our job. And in this case that would seem to be gloriously easy.
But yet I don't know if we're quite able to do it. Old habits die hard and our truth-telling muscles have atrophied from disuse. We've reached for the lifeline, but our hands have grown too weak to grasp it firmly.
- Geeky Mom: Personal Branding – There has been so much focus on people who put the wrong things online and on the extraordinarily rare occurrances of kidnapping and other similar crimes that few people stop to look at the positive side of putting yourself out there. Yes, there are risks and yes, there's sometimes a little filtering that needs to happen, but generally, good things accrue to those who take a risk and share information about themselves. Potential employers can get a clearer picture of who they're hiring and potentially someone might hire someone simply because they stand out from the crowd in some way. [Linked] are some of the points I covered in the presentation. Feel free to add your own ideas–what's worked for you?
- Through the looking glass on YouTube | Delawareonline.com | The News Journal – The star of the show — known as "Crazy Eileen" to callers of a Sussex County talk radio station — has gone into seclusion, declining interviews and avoiding publicity, even as previous statements by her have emerged referring to Obama as "the antichrist" and speaking of aliens and angels.
- Use the Five Whys to Get Comfortable with New Ideas – decisions – Lifehacker – New ideas and ways of thinking—or people who think differently than you do, for that matter—aren't always easy to embrace. Instead of sticking with your knee-jerk reactions, better understand your reaction with the Five Whys.
- Big spenders tend to marry big savers, researchers find – Yahoo! News – "Surveys of married adults suggest that opposites attract when it comes to emotional reactions toward spending," Wharton's Scott Rick and Deborah Small and Northwestern's Eli Finkel said in the paper.
They found that people who generally spend less than they would ideally like to spend, and those who spend more than they would like to tend to marry each other.
- 73 Ways to Become a Better Writer | Copyblogger – A few weeks ago I asked a question on Write to Done: What Helps YOU Become a Better Writer? The suggestions the readers offered were so rich and varied that I decided to gather them all together for Copyblogger readers.
- Philadelphia Mayor reveals “Doomsday Budget” | Its Our City | WHYY – At at city hall rally, Nutter said the picture would be bleak and said the city would be forced to make deep departmental cuts that would result in laying off up to 3000 city workers. Among those, more than 700 would be cops, over a 100 firefighters and all of the city’s library branches would be closed. Ouch.
This is a worst case scenario and by no means inevitable. Today’s rally is mostly about firing a warning shot to state lawmakers in Harrisburg that they’ll have blood on their hands if the doomsday budget is enacted.
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