A good internet marketing friend of ours, Steve Rogers, is an Actor (credits include Sherlock Holmes and Sweeny Todd) and has recently featured in some Swiss ads for a tyre company (Pneu Egger). Apparently the ads relate to reminders for the residents of Switzerland to change their tyres from Winter to Summer and vice versa.

The ads featuring Steve are funny (especially when you know him!) but there are also many others on YouTube so I think they are one of those cult style ads where people wait each year for the latest ad to come out.

Enjoy!

Inspirational TED Talk from Jamie Oliver from both an obesity/food angle and his energy and passion for the subject.

I read Seth Godin’s blog. Today there was a great short video of Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV and author of the recent book ‘Crush It’ about what makes someone indispensable.

Simple, yet profound.

Love it.

You know he means it.

Thought I’d share.

GaryVee on Seth Godin’s Linchpin Video Series

What do you think?

I read an article in the paper this week (sorry I can’t remember which one; I tore the page out but the name isn’t on the bottom!) about a new type of search engine that is being developed in Illinois, US, by a British computer scientist, Stephen Wolfram.  It is called WolframAlpha and it is the web’s first ‘computational knowledge engine’.

It holds only factual data, more than 10 trillion pieces nand it is checked by experts.

Have a look; I typed in my birthdate and found out that I am 2,085 weeks or 14,597 days old!  There are sample searches suggested on the home page so you can have a real play around.

It’s still being created so quite a few searches don’t return anything, but definitely one to bookmark and keep an eye on!

Let me know what you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine (coolhunting.com)
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This made me cry; it was so uplifting!  I don’t watch Britain’s Got Talent, so I didn’t see it, but I picked it up online.  I can’t embed it but I would encourage you to click through.

Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent

Sadly, I attended a thanksgiving service a couple of weeks ago in our local church for Maurice Maisey, a lovely man who was part of the fabric of Hythe; he was Deputy Mayor at one stage and was a founder of the biennial Hythe Festival.

It was a lovely, very moving service and one of the moments where I struggled to hold back the tears (me and most everyone else!) was when his daughter read a lovely poem, which I have found online as a video.  I thought I would share The Dash as it is really poignant.

Link to a BBC interview with Stephen Fry about his interest in, and use of, Twitter.  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at jododds

See you there!

I have seen this a couple of times on blogs lately and I just love it! Thought you might like to see it too. Enjoy.

I found this video really moving and felt that I should share it. What an inspiration…

I recently read a post by Vicki Flaugher of Smart Woman about multi-tasking that really struck a chord with me.  For years us women have been showing off about our ability to multi-task when all along we’ve been getting it wrong!  Multi-tasking isn’t doing lots of things at the same time, it’s doing lots of things very quickly one after the other, and that often means doing lots of things not very well.  At least that’s what Vicki is saying in her post, and I’m inclined to agree with her.

Vicki refers to an article entitled The Myth of Multitasking by Christine Rosen, in the New Atlantis and provides some quotes from it.  I have found some of my own from the same article:

Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles warned,

“We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”

Christine Rose goes on to say:

when we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”

So, what I take from this is something that I have been trying to do, with some success, for a little while and that is to have some interrupted time every morning to focus on just one project (or multi projects over a few hours) and then only getting involved with email, the phone and the other ’stuff’ from lunchtime onwards.  Not a perfect solution but at least it’s a start!

What are other people doing to get the ‘big things’ done?