Thursday, August 28, 2008

The China Adventures...Finally!

I know, I know, I promised to post these 2 months ago but I've got a good excuse.

TickerHound's been going surprisingly well this summer and it's been monopolizing the vast majority of my time. So now my blog AND my girlfriend hate me and my entrepreneurial spirit :(

j/k

In any case, here are my pics from June's trip to China...we had an AMAZING time!

Beijing is much cleaner than it was 3 years ago, but it also lost some of its "edge". There were no more gypsy cab drivers at the airport trying to drag me into their overpriced cabs, no more fake DVD's being sold on the streets of Beijing and my white T-shirts didn't turn brown from the rain anymore.

I guess some would call this progress, but for me, I missed my Beijing funk.

Don't get me wrong, there were still some funky sights to be seen, but China definitely got its act together for the Olympics.

Shanghai was great too, but then again, it always has been. I think on my next trip to China I'm staying out of the cities and heading into the countryside. It's high time I see what the vast majority of the country lives like, not just the wealthier (comparatively speaking) city folk.

So without further ado, heeeeeeere's China!















This was my friend Winston's wedding. His wife's mother was one of the higher ups at China's CCTV. Therefore, there were more people manning cranes, cameras and fog machines than there were guests!

Great wedding though! Congrats again Winston!

Who's ready to drink??


My boy Mao lives here.


I don't know why but I thought these outdoor, branded food/drink kiosks were so cool.

A spot of tea?

And now for the food!


I'll post more pics soon enough...this just made me reeeeeally hungry!

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Hagel's So Far Ahead of the Curve...

"Stories offer potential to communicate some elements of tacit knowledge. They help to provide enough of a sense of context to reconstruct and extend parts of the tacit. Stories, properly told to communicate the richness of context, do not reduce to snippets."
From a recent John Hagel article that talks about where the internet might be headed.

For a long time I've been thinking about the concept of narratives and how they can be somehow structured and distributed to not only provide a new means of self expression but also to transfer knowledge. It's clear that it's on the mind's of other folks in this space and I can't wait to see some of the start-ups that begin to explore it.

We have a ton of narrative out here in the blogosphere -- who will dig through it to extract and present it all in a meaningful way?