|
@dewitt: Very neat! @mihai built an open-source PubSubHubub to XMPP gateway on App Engine: http://blog.persistent.info/2009...
|
Today, at least in the US, it’s Columbus Day. While I won’t pretend that the claims by the famous Italian are somewhat up for debate, and certainly with their share of controversy, I’d rather offer someone else for your consideration for the discovery of this here hemisphere: the 6th century Irish monk known as St. Brendan.
What, you expected Leif Erikson?
You see, nearly a millennium before Christopher Columbus’s famed trip on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa-Maria, St. Brendan got the moniker “Brendan the Voyager” for completing a rather impressive journey that took seven years. According to the extant sources, St. Brendan went looking for the Garden of Eden, but may well have stumbled across the New World in little more than a leather-clad boat sometime between 513-530 CE. In fact, some even claim that Christopher Columbus himself was inspired by the monk’s journey, and is reported to have written in his travel log before leaving on his historic trip, “I am convinced that the terrestrial paradise is in the Island of Saint Brendan, which none can reach save by the Will of God.”
I first came across St. Brendan during a seminar in medieval history my senior year of college. At the time I was rather intrigued with hagiography, the study of saint’s lives, and admittedly St. Brendan’s voyage was much eclipsed by my interest in St. Columba (not to be confused with Columbus) who recounted, it is said, one of the first sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. But what always stuck with me regarding St. Brendan was how unusual his story was (thoug, in all fairness, Brendan encountered his own sea monster, as well). While much hagiography is ascribed to the rather colorful imagination of medieval minds, in the 20th century many began to speculate about St. Brendan’s, and a rather intriguing amount of evidence pertaining to his trip emerged.
In the late 1970s, a man named Tim Severin decided to put the story to the test, seeing if he could navigate his way from Scotland to Nova Scotia using what he believed were St. Brendan’s “stepping stones”–Scotland, the Hebrides, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia–in a boat modeled after vessels St. Brendan could have used. It was successful, if not hard-won. From Severin’s account:
Brendan [Severin's boat] touched the New World at 8:00 p.m. on June 26, 1977, on the shore of Peckford Island in the Outer Wadham Group some 150 miles northwest of St. John’s, Newfoundland. She had been at sea for fifty days. The exact spot of her landfall has no particular significance to the story of the early Irish voyages into the Atlantic. It was merely the place where the wind and current had brought a twentieth-century replica of the original Irish skin vessels….
And while other theories have surfaced, including speculation on supposed ogham (Old Irish alphabet) in West Virginia, the jury is not yet out on the Columbus vs. Brendan debate. What do you think? Plausible? Poppycock? At very least, I love that this particular theory inspired such a geeky–and heroic–endeavor. That, if anything, should be celebrated.
Related posts:
Today, at least in the US, it’s Columbus Day. While I won’t pretend that the claims by the famous Italian are somewhat up for debate, and certainly with their share of controversy, I’d rather offer someone else for your consideration for the discovery of this hemisphere: the 6th century Irish monk known as St. Brendan.
What, you expected Leif Erikson?
You see, nearly a millennium before Christopher Columbus’s famed trip on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa-Maria, St. Brendan got the moniker “Brendan the Voyager” for completing a rather impressive journey that took seven years. According to the extant sources, St. Brendan went looking for the Garden of Eden, but may well have stumbled across the New World in little more than a leather-clad boat sometime between 513-530 CE. In fact, some even claim that Christopher Columbus himself was inspired by the monk’s journey, and is reported to have written in his travel log before leaving on his historic trip, “I am convinced that the terrestrial paradise is in the Island of Saint Brendan, which none can reach save by the Will of God.”
I first came across St. Brendan during a seminar in medieval history in my senior year of college. At the time I was rather intrigued with hagiography, the study of saint’s lives, and admittedly St. Brendan’s voyage was much eclipsed by my interest in St. Columba (not to be confused with Columbus) who recounted, it is said, one of the first sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. But what always stuck with me regarding St. Brendan was how unusual his story was (though, in all fairness, Brendan encountered his own sea monster, as well). While much hagiography is ascribed to the rather colorful imagination of medieval minds, in the 20th century many began to speculate about St. Brendan’s, and a rather intriguing amount of evidence pertaining to his trip emerged.
In the late 1970s, a man named Tim Severin decided to put the story to the test, seeing if he could navigate his way from Scotland to Nova Scotia using what he believed were St. Brendan’s “stepping stones”–Scotland, the Hebrides, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia–in a boat modeled after vessels St. Brendan could have used. It was successful, if not hard-won. From Severin’s account:
Brendan [Severin's boat] touched the New World at 8:00 p.m. on June 26, 1977, on the shore of Peckford Island in the Outer Wadham Group some 150 miles northwest of St. John’s, Newfoundland. She had been at sea for fifty days. The exact spot of her landfall has no particular significance to the story of the early Irish voyages into the Atlantic. It was merely the place where the wind and current had brought a twentieth-century replica of the original Irish skin vessels….
And while other theories have surfaced, including speculation on supposed ogham (Old Irish alphabet) in West Virginia, the jury is not yet out on the Columbus vs. Brendan debate. What do you think? Plausible? Poppycock? At very least, I love that this particular theory inspired such a geeky–and heroic–endeavor. That, if anything, should be celebrated.
Related posts:
|
The Ext JS Designer tool looks nice. Fall 2009 will be the time of the Web Developer Tool call outs! http://www.extjs.com/blog...
|
|
Chrome Win Size; Playing with Chrome extension mechanism: I have been watching the work of Aaron and the Chrome.. http://almaer.com/blog...
|
|
Chrome Win Size; Playing with Chrome extension mechanism - http://almaer.com/blog...
|
There’s no delicate way to put this. If you’re a regular Copyblogger reader, you’re just . . . well . . . smarter than most people looking to market online.
You’re not interested in lame “get rich quick” schemes. You’re not trying to build a business with no work, no time, and no sense. You’re not chasing after that magical silver bullet that will solve all your problems.
Mainly, you’d just like some solid, smart advice on online business that actually works.
In other words, you don’t have to be an Einstein to “get” this stuff. But you’d have to be an idiot to believe some of the stuff peddled by traditional Internet marketing “gurus” (many of whom have never done what they’re “teaching” before).
Copyblogger has been delivering solid, smart advice for nearly four years now, and starting this week, we’d like to take it up a notch.
Oh, and one more thing: we’ll be doing that for free.
Brian and I have been kicking around the idea of a focused email newsletter for months, but we wanted to make sure we put something together that reflected the high standards we always try to set for the site.
We wanted to create a systematic, simple way that you could get a good grasp of the power of effective online marketing.
We wanted you to have an easy-to-navigate tutorial on the “Copyblogger method” of creating and marketing a profitable online business.
And we wanted a way to make sure that you got a chance to see all of the “best of the best” that’s appeared on Copyblogger over the years.
Thinking through what this would look like, we found four themes that kept coming up.
So we created an introduction to the newsletter that works through these four themes, systematically introducing you to the most important concepts we think every online marketer must know about. It’s like a course in Internet marketing that prepares you for the more in-depth newsletter content that follows (still all free).
These are the cornerstones of how to build a business with the Copyblogger model, using everything we’ve learned over the years.
Ready?
Creating strong relationships with an audience is critical to everything we do here. Rather than constantly hunting down new customers, we’d much rather create a valued environment that benefits our existing readers and customers and keeps pulling them back. We don’t advertise in the traditional sense; instead, our readers do a great job of “spreading the word” for us.
It’s about having consummate respect, always, for your audience and your market.
It’s about focusing almost obsessively on their needs, over and above your own (and getting what you want, almost magically, in the process).
It’s about making a commitment to creating a quality experience for your readers and subscribers.
We certainly stay abreast of the latest social media trends (and sometimes create them), but underlying everything we do here is solid copywriting techniques.
Starting with a killer headline and moving strategically through the copy to a stirring call to action, traditional copywriting technique works amazingly well in social media.
“Old-fashioned” copywriting advice can make all the difference between a business or blog that limps along and one that truly thrives.
We’ll show you precisely what we mean in the initial issues of the newsletter.
What’s the backbone of the Copyblogger formula?
Deliver great content. Deliver more great content. Deliver still more great content.
Keep doing that in a strategic and focused way.
Every once in awhile, make a great offer that benefits the reader and involves the exchange of cash money.
Of course, we’ll give you some more specifics on how to do that once you’re on board. 
Everyone is selling something. It might be a service, a product, a download, or simply an idea.
Whatever you’re selling, it’s got to be worth the price. (And never forget that reader attention is a valuable commodity that’s in strictly limited supply.)
Whether you’re asking for dollars, euros, yen, or valuable time and attention, you’ve got to deliver something that towers above your asking price.
Each of these four pillars enhances the others. Together, they’re much stronger than they would be if any of the pillars were missing.
Internet Marketing for Smart People is a free course and continual newsletter that’s delivered via email. Each week you’ll get a new lesson on one of the four pillars.
You’ll get lots of pointers to archived Copyblogger content, but with a new frame that will help you “connect the dots” and start putting this advice to work in your own business, web site, or blog. It’s much like the approach Brian took with Authority Rules, but ongoing and ever-evolving as the Internet marketing space does (which is fast).
To make it work even better, we’ll also be including “behind the scenes” lessons that show you how we put our own marketing systems and launches together, and the role each piece plays.
Enter your email address here to sign up for the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter:
So check your inbox after you sign up (and put us on your white list… we’re not spammy at all, but thanks to some less-than-ethical internet marketers, our topic is often viewed that way by the major email services).
And of course we’re never going to rent, sell, or otherwise share the information we collect. That would pretty much be a violation of everything we stand for.
Let’s say we have two balloons of the same size, but one filled with twice as much air as the other one. We then connect both via a flexible hose and let the air flow through. What will happen? Will the pressure in the one that has the most air cause the other one to fill up so that their size evens out after a while? The following video has the answer, which might surprise you.
Another good explanation of the phenomenon can also be found here.
[Via Neatorama]
Related posts:
We’ve all been there. You take a photo of somebody on your cellphone during an evening of merriment and when you see the image, your expression slips for a moment. That’s all it takes for the subject of the photo to demand to see it and, once they realise that their natural beauty has been replaced with bloodshot eyes and a reddened nose, you’ve got misery to deal with.
But no more. Because Adobe has somehow figured out how to get Photoshop onto the iPhone.
As you’d probably gathered, it’s not the full image editing suite, but rather an ultra-slimmed down version available without charge through the iPhone app store. The app – full name Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone – includes standard manipulation options such as cropping and rotating, along with color changes and a few special effects such as soft focus, warm vintage, vignette and sketch.
The app also lets users create an account at Photoshop.com and store up to a 1000 images on the site which can then be accessed on their iPhone without being stored on the handset.
Control of the app is entirely through finger gestures on the touchscreen: for example, swiping a finger left or right on the screen will increase or decrease the severity of an effect. Those who’ve previewed it say it’s notably intuitive and accurate.
Of course, several other image editing apps are available, but none have the brand awareness of Photoshop, one of the few computer apps whose name has become a verb. (Incidentally, how come we Google for information and eBay our unwanted Christmas gifts, but nobody ever says they are going to “Amazon a book”?)
Related posts:
