ItSeemstoMe

Diabetes? Take 2 Asperin and Call Me

Aspirin could treat diabetes

Researchers from Boston's Joslin Diabetes Center has revealed that a class of anti-inflammatories, including aspirin, could help treat Adult Type 2 diabetes by deactivating a key genetic trigger located in the liver.

I know a lot about this, I'm one of 17 million Americans (by the last time I checked) that has the disease.  It's one of those things my dad gave me that I could have lived without.  The good news is that it's motivated me to exercise, eat right and stay trim.

It's not yet time to jump for joy.  Joslin, the world's leading diabetes research center, has so far only cured diabetes in mice. But this is the most promising breakthrough on diabetes ever.

Ironically, I first heard the news from Ephraim Cohen , an extremely talented PR Guy (but blog resistant), who took me to Singapore last year to see what that country was doing in technology.  The only disappointment was when we visited Biosphere, thinking we were going to tour stem cell facilities for diabetes cures.  Instead two underlings gave us a PowerPoint presentation.  When we asked to tour the facilities, they walked us around the outside of the building.

The Joslin approach seems like a simpler, better, faster solution,and one that just might happen in my lifetime.

Jonathan Schwartz on DeCaf

Just like everyone else, I just love Jonathan Schwartz's blog. He has all the componentry of a great blogger, and like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems is unquestionably a company that needed a more human face than the one Scott MacNeeley was presenting.

But I have noticed an oddity. Jonathan has organized his blog into three compartments: "General," "All" and "Java."  The first two have identical entries.  That's because Jonathan who must have started blogging nearly a year ago, has never posted an entry regarding Java.

Does this make a statement, about the focus of Sun's senior executives? I think so.

/

Venus Flytrap & My First Wife

From New Scientist Print Edition

Somehow, this reminded me of my first wife:

VENUS flytrap snaps shut faster than you can blink. And now we know why. Whereas our sluggish movements are the result of muscles contracting, the plant snaps shut in the way that a torn tennis ball flips inside out.

When Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University and his colleagues used a high-speed camera to film the leaves closing, they noticed that the curvature of the leaves flipped from convex to concave as the trap closes. The transformation takes just one-tenth of a second. They reasoned that the leaves were snapping from one stable shape to another - a movement that can occur much faster than muscle contraction.

Fair Weather Friend

Today, in Boston where I'm from , there was a low of 19.  People were relieved, because it was cloudy and no more shovelfuls of snow were coming down.  In Seattle, where not long ago, Scoble gloated about blue skies, it rained.  It rained there yesterday and it will rain there again tomorrow. It's about the same in Portland, where out kids and grandchildren live.Today in Truckee, near Lake Tahoe, where Paula and I spend so much happy time between April; and October, the low was 15 and there isn't a day in the next where the low will reach 20.  They had over seven feet of snow this month.

Today, in San Carlos, California where I live it was sunny, 60 and you couldn't find a bluer sky.  Crocuses are starting to come up in the yard.  The vincus is blooming. The San Francisco Penninsula is one of the costliest places in the world to live. The economy remains frayed.  Traffic is getting worse again.

But some days you realize you get what you pay for.

Jambo's Rating Gains

My clients Jambo Networks are being distracted from their launch at Demo in about ten days, by the addictive game of watching their blog ratings and they find it demoralizing to note that they are at a mere 124,712 rating on Pubsub LinkRanks, while this site has made it all the way to 37,761, which I guess is about the C list, while my book site shared with Robert Scoble has made it into the low 4000s.

By my count their blog is about two weeks old.  I don't know where ItSeemstoMe was at that point, but at the end of my first year, I ranked 418,000th, and there were three million fewer blogs, so personally I think they should be ecstatic.

If it turns out they wish to have a masochist statistical viewpoint, they should track Scoble. PubSub rates him #337, last I checked.

BTW, when I help a company get ready to launch, I usually worry more than they do.  I've been through well over 100 start up launches, and I have a long list of variables to worry about.  I don't want to jinx anything, but in the case, I'm feeling kind of bullish.  These two founding partners are a tight team, and the rehearse like they've been through this before which they have not.

We shall see.

Rep. Barney Frank Blogs from Davos

http://www.forumblog.org/blog/2005/01/response_to_cri.html

Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has always had one of the most honest voices in elective politics.  He displays this in a blog posting from Davos where he discovers that voices on the left do not always sing in harmony.

Bob Lutz is Changing My Mind

My first car was a 1958 Chevy Biscayne, two-tone canary yellow and white, six cylanders, four doors and three on the post.  It would be the last General Motors car I would ever own.  A 1974 Mustang, the first car I ever bought new would be the last American car I've ever owned.

I probably wouldn't even be reading the Bob Lutz FastLane Blog if I wasn't working on a book about business blogging, but damned, it's good. Okay, there's some turkey editor interlacing corp marcom stuff, but that will get shaken out like a rattle in a new sedan.  The point is that Lutz has what it takes to create a great blog.

In the last month I've felt his passion for the Saturn and the Pontiac.  I believed his arguments that GM is trying to turn it around.  In one month he has softened my resistance to GM cars.  If I don't watch out he's going to persuade me to consider buying one of his cars.

That's the power of the articulate corporate blogger.  There are a few around.  But Lutz is the new guy on the block, and he's highest ranking (unless owning a pro basketball team counts more).

TypePad needs a dictionary

Don't get me wrong.  I love my Typepad and I wouldn't leave it for anything.  I even pushed Scoble to leave MSN Spaces to get over here.  But I just hate it's spell checking tool.  For one thing, there's no user dictionary.

Tell me I'm not alone in getting tired of having the thing tell me there's no such word as "blogger," and insisting the word should be "logger." Itried writing first drafts in Word, then pasting, but that turned out to be an abomination with all sorts of programmer do-hickeys fouling up the copy.  I tried going back to plain text but that feels like my grandmother's blogging tool.

Am I alone here?  Am I doing something wrong?  If not, let's all tell Anil to make a Dash toward better editing tools with a Dictionary being the top need.

Committee to Protect Bloggers

http://committeetoprotectbloggers.blogspot.com/

A while ago, I posted about the torture and imprisonment of Iranian bloggers.  Now there's a site dedicated to protecting and defending them.  I often puzzle about a community that gets more passionate about Web browsers and geek dinners than they do about suppression and imprisonment. 

I say support the cause of free speech everywhere.  Today it's Iranian bloggers. Tomorrow it's American journalists.  How far back in line do you think you are?

PR & Ethics

I've been stewing up this all day. A blogger, who I won't name, sent me some flaming  email today. It seems that he was at a blogger dinner in NYC last night and a bunch of bloggers were ranting about how PR people are all just terrible, awful people. Among the comments I read before relegating him to my spam catcher's Block Sende list was:</p>

"You insult everyone working in Marketing every day, just say you're in PR and you lie for a living."

In a way, I'm relieved. These days, I've been wondering how to make a living.  Usually sweeping stereotypes hurled in my direction refer to either my religion, my politics or living in Caliornia.

Of course, anyone who has read anything I've written for the past three years, is aware that I no longer practice PR.  But, that is besides the point. His comments offend me. This guy says his dad was in marketing and his work was mainly on numbers, and that's "the real marketing." PR is some inferior, dirty little something.

My succinct answer: Bullshit. You don't know what your talking about and you show your ignorance whenever your fingers collide with your keyboard.

I was in PR for more than 20 years, and am proud of the work I did. The majority of people I knew and worked with were good and honest people who, if anything, were guilty of trying too hard to please both clients and the media. PR people generally counsel clients to come clean on controversial news.  Get bad news out and get on with it. Tell the public your sorry, when you've done wrong and make sure you repeat the mistake again. Cover ups never last--so come clean up front. Yep, we had our shady characters and over a beer and in private I'll share a few stories with some of you. Every industry has liars. Every industry industry has people who open their mouths and display ignorance.

It's ironic. Last week, I was getting lambasted for speculating that many PR practitioners may find themselves out of jobs because their business models are broken in terms of media relations, the mainstay of most PR practices.  I didn;t say it in malice, but as an observation, that that will be expanded upon in the book I'm writing on business blogging with Scoble.

I've also, been recently taken to task for asserting press releases have lost credibility. But not because PR people are lying. The problem is committee review of them. They are written, refined, rewritten and repolished. They obfuscate, hedge and hyperbolate.  They come accross as pompous gibberish, because too many hands had to insert too many adjectives, not because of inherant dishonesty.

Any way, I'm ranting a bit. Most of what I say here, I've already said previously. But this guy really pissed me off. Talk about misleading. He mentioned a particularly well-known person who attended this blogger dinner, making it sound like the view he was emailing me was the view of that famous person. When I pushed back on him, he admitted that person did not even participate in this PR-flogging conversation. He was just somewhere at the table.

Sounds like a little of that old black PR magic to me, wouldn't you say?