AIDigest: 8/6/09. Mattel’s New Mind Game.

Daily links on AI, IA and where social tech meets the two. Today: Reports from 7 Gadgets, Fox News, and PC Magazine.

Who Will Speak Up About “Distracted Driving?”

This is the post-2.0 era, where so many issues cannot or will not wait for a brand to the lead the conversation. But from my perspective — the perspective of a communications consultant who often advises companies on both their opportunities and duties in public affairs — it really doesn’t matter who speaks up first. We are all guilty parties to this affair. Who among us has never picked up a phone behind the wheel and dialed or texted or emailed or taken a photo, all the while knowing that it’s reckless — perhaps criminal — to do so when operating a one-plus ton piece of machinery on wheels? Like drunk driving, distracted driving may have to claim more lives before we all care enough to take serious action. Hope we will not have to wait long this time around. But device addiction, like many other post-2.0 consumer behavior, is rooted in a great need to stay connected, in a world that demands we stay connected. This is not going to be easy.

AI Digest: 8/5/09. “The Truth About Grit.”

Daily links on AI, IA and where social tech meets the two. Today: Reports from The Boston Globe, CNET, and New Tang Dynasty Television.

The New “Company Town”

Over the past six months, my business partner and I have been on the road quite a bit, meeting with clients, friends, and prospects, and we’ve had the luck to see some of the greatest contemporary expressions of a rather ancient idea: the corporate campus. In an age where the distributed workforce is the controlling idea, there are a number of very large organizations thriving on the foundation of the well knit “society within a society” that was a mainstay of corporate life long ago.

But what about the rest of the corporate world – the many companies that do not have the resources or inclination to build corporate campuses?

AI Digest: 8/4/09. Synthetic Life

Daily links on AI, IA and where social tech meets the two. Today: Reports from The New York Times and Geek.com.

My Life as An Amphibian

Starting Monday, August 10, I will be running a weekly column chronicling my learnings — and blunders — over the past 10 years as a marketing professional in Silicon Valley. The thread of the story — it began exactly ten years ago — is my struggle to survive a life that increasingly got more difficult as the demands of my profession pulled me away further and further from the physical world and more and more into the virtual world. A unique client engagement in 2008 helped me to articulate the condition that I and most of my peers have found ourselves in: we have become amphibian, living in two distinct worlds, and suffering as much as we are evolving as a result. In my weekly posts, I will try to tell the story of how we have all become this way, using my personal story as a source for insight (if not just amusement).

The story begins in a doctor’s office — an accomplished ADD expert in Belmont, California — who diagnosed me in 1999 and sent me off to my first job in marketing with a poignant warning. If you have ADD, a life in marketing in Silicon Valley can be a curse or a blessing; you’re actually in the job of creating the conditions and tools — the weapons of mass distraction — that make life so difficult for so many people. For me, the marketing life has been both a curse and a blessing. But for this column, I’ve chosen to highlight the former. It makes for a better story, and it is a bit closer to the truth.

AI Digest: 8/3/2009. Japan Loves Robots.

Daily links on AI, IA and where social tech meets the two. Today: Reports from Time Magazine, The Austin Statesman, and Gizmodo.

AI Digest: 8/2/09. The Problem with IQ Drugs.

Daily links on AI, IA and where social tech meets the two. Today: Reports from BBC Channel 4, The Guardian, Wired, AFP, and Reuters India.

AI Digest: 8/1/09. “Oprah Bot” Saves the Day.

Daily links on AI, IA and where social tech meets the two. Today: reports from Wired, Associated Content, and the Examiner.com.