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Self-described change agent Seth Godin has put together a free e-book that I’d like to share with you. What Matters Now is a compilation of one page essays by over seventy notable authors.

One of my favorites was titled “Gumption” by novelist J.C. Hutchins. His message, like many contained in the book, is well-timed and thought provoking end-of-the-year reading.

Most of us settle in, and settle for what we have. Rather than pursue, we accept. Our lives become unwitting celebrations of passivity: we undervalue our work and perceive ourselves as wage slaves (and so we phone it in at the day gig), we consume compulsively (but not create), we pine for better lives (but live vicariously through our televisions).

These corners we paint ourselves into, it’s no way to live. There’s no adventure here, no passion, no hunger for change. Remember that relentless optimism you once had? The goals you wished to achieve, before settling in? They’re still there. You need a nudge to find them; a little gumption.

You can start that business. You can lose that weight. You can quit smoking, and learn to garden, and write that book, and be a better parent, and be all the things you want to be … the thing this world needs you to be. It requires courage and faith, both of which you can muster. It requires effort — but this effortless life isn’t as satisfying as it seems, is it?

Declare war on passivity. Hush the inner voice that insists you’re over the hill, past your prime, unworthy of attaining those dreams. Disbelief is now the enemy, as is the notion of settling. Get hungry — hyena hungry. Get fired up. Find your backbone, and your wings.

Flap ‘em. It’s the only way you’ll be able to fly.

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Now you’ve seen it. Have a nice Sunday.

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A new project from Small Batch Inc. looks to change all that. Typekit promises to give you the ability to embed fonts on any web page with full fidelity and typographic control. 

Typekit is not yet available, but you can sign-up here to be notified as soon as it is.

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Dropcard aims to solve that problem, and could even eliminate the need for business cards altogether–a very green idea. I read about Dropcard on WebWorkerDaily and immediately saw how I could’ve used this.

How it works

The concept is simple. You register on Dropcard and can create two profiles: business and personal. You control how much or little information you want to share. When you want to send your “business card” to someone, you do so either via text message to 41411. When I meet Bill G., I can ask for his email, then send him my Dropcard by texting drop billg@windows.com to 41411. 

If you’re using an iPhone, you can thank your lucky starts and skip the text message, opting instead to use the clean, web interface you see to the right. Either way, it’s quick and easy. 

What happens next?

Once you send an instruction to send someone your contact info, they get a nicely formated email with all your details and a vCard attachment for quick import to Outlook. 

Dropcard allows you to enter multiple phones, addresses, chat networks, websites and personal profile addresses. 

There are no advertisements. Dropcard is supported by paid subscriptions. With a free account, you can send up to 15 Dropcards per month. $4.99 a month gives you as many as 20 profiles, and the ability to send up to 100 Dropcards per month. $9.99 a month gives you unlimited Dropcards. 

Oh yeah, my old skool carbon-based business cards did finally arrive this week. I’m not ready to ditch them, but Dropcard will be a handy backup in the future. 

Check out Dropcard.

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Being the weekend, I’m sharing something a little more recreational in nature.

When I first bought my iPhone 3G (same day they came out), the lines were horrendous. But I did have plenty of time to learn about the new apps that were available. The Apple store employees were showing off their favorite apps, one of which was Midomi.

Midomi essentially let’s you find songs when you don’t know the name or even the artist. You can hold it to the radio and it will tell you the artist, the song title, the album and even provide links to YouTube videos and the ability to purchase the song on iTunes. But even more impressive, you can hum or sing a bit of the song and Midomi will find it for you… usually.

I didn’t really get the appeal of Midomi when the guy in the Apple store described it, so it wasn’t until a week ago that I downloaded it and gave it a try. The verdict? Midomi is FUN!

This week when I was driving to Dulles airport, I had the radio tuned to a classic rock station, and heard a song that I wanted to add to my personal library. I fired up Midomi,

Midomi records about 10-15 seconds of the song, sends it to their server and returns a list of matches. In my experience, grabbing songs from a radio was extremely accurate.

To purchase via iTunes, you must be connected via wifi. Since I was on the road, I just added a bookmark so I could return later and purchase the song.

Now for the real fun…

Midomi is useful, but the real fun begins when you try singing or humming a song. Lynn and I were cracking up as we tested the accuracy of Midomi (and our singing talent). Here’s how to play:

Get a few friends together. In round robin fashion, you challenge your friends to “match” a song from the band or artist of your choice. They choose the song, and sing or hum into Midomi. Who ever gets a match (or the highest match, if you’ve got a group) can decide the next challenge.

Let the laughter ensue.

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After using it for a week now, I can say I’m sold. It’s got some great features for users of all types. Best of all, it’s simple, clean and uncluttered. It mostly stays out the way and lets you make the most of your browsing experience.

I won’t go into the details, since you can get a great overview from Google’s Chrome site, but I was surprised to see Chrome take off at BigBlueBall, where today’s stats show that over 4% of the visitors to the site used Chrome. Pretty amazing for a browser that’s still in beta and barely a week old.

Currently Chrome is only available for Windows XP and Vista, but word is that every day Sergey asks the Chrome team when the OS X version will be ready.

Google Chrome website

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So what is Office 2.0?

For starters, it’s the name of the conference described on the web site as “…a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go.”

Wikipedia describes Office 2.0 as “…a marketing neologism representing the concepts of office productivity applications as published applications rather than stand-alone programs. The term leverages the Web 2.0 concept to conjure imagery of collaborative, community based and centralised effort rather than the more traditional application running on a platform locally.”

So just as Web 2.0 embraces the community and user-generated content, Office 2.0 explores new ways of working in a primarily online, collaborative environment.

I’ve seen firsthand success with collaborative online communities, particularly with the online, community-centric approach Fluor has taken with knowledge management. Distributed ownership, administration and accountability, coupled with a culture that encourages every voice to be heard has proven to be not only extremely effective, but essential to success.

In the spirit of “eating your own dogfood” the conference is paperless. Instead, each participant is given an HP 2133 Mini-Note running Linux, with wireless access to all of the tools necessary during the conference: Google Apps for email and calendaring; ClearSpace for discussions, blogging and publishing; Zoho for presentations and so on. On Wednesday, we will split into teams and respond to a simulated enterprise crisis in which we’ll put all these tools to work to solve the problem.

I’m looking forward to meeting others who are applying these concepts to support their business strategy, and learning innovative ways to stimulate similar success throughout the enterprise.

The Challenge

Probably the largest challenge to Office 2.0 is breaking down the barriers put up by IT Czars and establishing trusted, reliable ways to work outside the firewall and in the cloud. Most enterprises are leery, and rightly so, of putting their eggs in someone else’s basket. It will be interesting to see how other companies are tackling this issue.

Check back here and via Twitter, and I will keep you posted throughout the week from Office 2.0.

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One of my favorite tools when learning a new language has been Google Translate. I know that it has plenty of problems, as does pretty much any software-based translation system. There are many things that simply cannot be cleanly translated without the application of a little human intelligence. But it does a reasonably good job of getting the gist of a conversation. I found it useful for “checking” my own translations.

Google has done a great job of getting their other products (mail, calendar, even docs) iPhone enabled, but their translator was neglected for some reason — until last week.

Yep, Google Translate is now available on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s very quick and being free, makes an excellent resource for travelers (or students!). To access the new iPhone interface, just point your iPhone browser to http://translate.google.com. Yes, this is the same URL that you can use on your PC, which makes it easy to remember.

Unfortunately, Google has decided to auto-detect if you are browsing the site with an iPhone and automatically serve the iPhone version. This is convenient if that’s what you want, but the iPhone version doesn’t have all the same functionality of the full website. Most notable exclusion? The “translate this URL” function is missing from the iPhone version. And Google didn’t see fit to include a link or an option to view the full version (which, up until last week, you could do on an iPhone).

So kudos to Google for (finally) providing an iPhone specific version. And curses to Google for forcing us to use a limited version, with no option to get to the “full” translate site.

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Flump is an Adobe AIR application that lets you download all the public photos from any Flickr user. Written by a couple of Adobe employees — Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers — Flump makes it easy to backup your photos for archival purposes — useful if Flickr ever looses your stuff.

Personally, I have grown to trust Flickr for all my photos, and often I don’t even bother keeping local copies. This trust in “the cloud” sometimes worries me, especially when I hear the horror stories of people losing their Gmail inbox or worse. Flump fills the gap and makes it easy to create a nice clean backup to my local drive, where I can then burn it to DVD and file it away.

You can get Flump now at Google Code.

Thanks to Amit for the tip.

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Everyone is familiar with origami. The art of folding paper into beautiful creations is hundreds of years old. Robert Lang, formerly a physicist at California Institute of Technology and now a professional origami master, shares how origami has evolved as an artform and is being applied in space exploration and medicine.

The following video is 20 minutes long, and is as entertaining as it is thought provoking.

The video was recorded at TED in February 2008. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, and started out in 1984 as a conference to bring the best thinkers from those areas together. This fantastic conference has broadened to cover a range of topics, with all presentations limited to no longer than 20 minutes. And as a bit of trivia, TED was founded by my first-year architecture professor, Richard Saul Wurman, who gave me high marks for my environmentally friendly beach house design.

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Four years ago (man, this blog has been around for a while!) I posted an in-depth explanation of how I came up with the BigBlueBall name and an anecdote about how one of my favorite musicians, Peter Gabriel, had (at the time) registered the .net and .org versions. I was curious to find out what his Real World record company would be doing with those domains, and now it’s clear. After more than 15 years in production, they’ve released (today!) Big Blue Ball, the album.

It’s fascinating to learn that Peter Gabriel had the same idea — Big Blue Ball symbolizing the global community and collaboration — with a similar inspiration; the astronaut’s view of Earth from space.

You can listen to some samples or get DRM-free MP3s below:

Enjoy!

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Nike Soccer has made a couple of shorter commercials from this, currently airing during the Euro Championship. Brilliant, and worth sharing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now — what would a first-person film of your life look like?

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