I’m always one to endeavor to only toot my horn if I can do so without blowing it.  So this is meant as a quiet toot:  In case you haven’t read the August 21 issue of BusinessWeek, check out this tasty blurb on metacool from the front of the magazine. 

Design geek, indeed!

I spoke at Design 2.0 last week, and had a lot of fun doing it.  I actually enjoy public speaking, so I had a great time talking about ecosystems and design and business.  Unfortunately, I can’t post my slides… more on that in a bit.

Here are two really good summaries of what I talked about, done by two guys who I wish I had known in college — they would have been great people to supply me with engineering lecture notes for all those fluid mechanics lectures I skipped:

• Nick Baum  (he has great coverage of the entire conference)
• Luke Wroblewski

The reason I can’t give you my slides is that they were on my trusty PowerBook, which took a big, freakish fall during the conference.  It stayed alive for 48 hours, only to die a quiet death later in the week.  I think it may still be saved…

But my favorite review of the conference is this one, which points out that the conference highlight was  "… a really nice Ducati desktop background on Diego Rodriguez’s Mac."  Gotta love those audiences full of designers.  Got their priorities straight.

I’ll be speaking at Design 2.0 next week on the topic of "Products and their Ecosystems: Understanding the power of context in product innovation"

metacool turned two earlier this week.  What started as a way to really understand how ideas diffuse across the Web morphed into a place to play (seriously play) with ideas about design and innovation and marketing (which, if done right, are all one and the same) and meet a lot of cool people (no assholes allowed).  Thanks for all the fun and insights, so let’s keep on keepin’ on.

I went cold-turkey on Internet connectivity over the past few weeks, not because I had to get stuff done, but because I had to not get stuff done.  It was good not to be so connected. 

I remember reading a quote somewhere from the great Italian designer Ettore Sottsass that went something like "The problem with computers is that people will stop painting with water colors." 

I love the Internet because of its seemingly infinite potential for engendering connectedness and depth of thought and meaning.  But I suspect that there’s a curve of sorts at work here, and as one travels across that curve things start to trend toward the shallow and the trite. 

Here’s my latest column for BusinessWeek Online.  On happiness.

How does that saying go?  If you look like your column photo, you’re too ill to write?

The Google PageRank for metacool just flipped up to 7.  Good.

I don’t blog in search of ever-increasing numbers of readers.  Far from it.  I care much more about quality conversations, quality ideas, and quality insights.  But, one of the original reasons I started blogging was to get to know — know by doing —  how  ideas diffuse across the web.  Creating infectious ideas is a fascinating topic, you know?

Reaching seven makes me happy because now I can add another data point to the diffusion curve, and that’s the interesting part.  That’s all.  Thanks.

feb 27 update: well, it dropped down to 6 today.   Hmmmm… a dynamic metric?  Interesting.

feb 28 update: back up to 7 today. 

I’m doing a little bit of guest blogging over at TED Blog. 

Borrowing language from another sphere of my life, my TED stuff represents a market adjacency to my core metacool blogging activites.  Related, and pulling from the same core capabilities, but not addressing the same target segment.

In other words, different subject matter viewed through the same lens of design thinking.