One of my favorite business authors, David Meerman Scott, is running a contest on his blog in relation to his discussion of the book, The Cool Factor by Del Breckenfeld.  His little contest comes with a very cool prize, a guitar signed by Billy F. Gibbons of ZZ Top.

The goal is to define cool in two sentences or less. So here’s my shot at glory and a wicked cool guitar.

Cool is an intangible aesthetic tempered by eccentricity colored by indifference.

My list of cool looks something like this:

• Miles Davis
• Ray Ban Wayfarers
• Jimmy Hendrix’ Star-Spangled Banner
• James Dean’s red jacket
• Big-Wave Rider Laird Hamilton
• The 1961 Lincoln 4-Door Convertible

What’s cool to you?

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Congratulations to The Pitt Rugby Club that won its 4th ARU Championship in 7 years last weekend with a 24-17 win over Slippery Rock University.  Pitt became champions by winning the game and scoring a bonus point (4 trys scored) to top WVU by one point in the SLS system.

Back in 1990 I was one of the original re-founding fathers of the club after a 8 year forced hiatus (see the picture below to find out why). It’s great to see the team I helped start come so far. Our inaugural season was pretty ugly, I think only a handful of us had ever played rugby before that season and many of us as ex-football players had a bad habit of blocking for the runner(a penalty in rugby). Now Pitt is a perennial league contender. It’s great to see the boys doing so well. Some day I am going to get in shape and go back in play in the alumni game.

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The October edition of the Harvard Business Journal has a contributed article by Intuit co-founder Scott Cooke on how to build your business using communities. I thought it interesting that he used many of the standard “crowd-sourcing” examples like Skype and Wikipedia but no open source software examples. Given Intuit’s proprietary nature I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Some tips from Scott that I like:

• Protect experiments from your company’s natural control instincts.
• Let enthusiasts and young employees provide ideas and leadership
• Let users “vote,” early and often.

He makes some other suggestions that I am not sure I agree with in every case but they apparently worked for Intuit. Definately a worthwhile read if you are a community builder.

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As I mentioned before I really like Trent Reznor not only his music but his philosophy on making music. He’s cut out the record labels makes his music available for free. He does make money by selling tickets to shows and albums he produces himself.

I got this note from him this week (actually everyone who registered at NIN.com probably did) asking what you want from NIN – nice touch an artist doing market research. Actually the survey was way too long but he gets points for asking things like, your favorite song, your entertainment preferences, etc. so he can do his job better.

Read the rest

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I thought this was an interesting description of what analysts do and how they like to be treated from Red Monk’s Michael Coté.

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