You know six dozen versions of this video are coming. Omar Gallaga and I have already started writing the script for whomever wants to run with it.

“I haven’t been to ANY panels!” (on day four)
“Escalator’s broken.”
“Our app is a Facebook killer. Hey, wait, come back!”
“Did you bring a power strip?”
“Can I borrow your iPhone charger?”
“My iPhone is dead!”
“It’s okay, my iPad has a camera. Don’t worry, the resolution is so low, you won’t even look like you have a hangover.”
“Guy Kawasaki is an investor.”
“Ashton Kutcher wanted to invest, but we turned him down.”
“We’re this year’s GroupMe, except we’re still in stealth.”
“Mike Arrington hates me.”
“There’s already a line for the keynote!”
“Are you getting on the bus to Salt Lick?”
“Is there a Foursquare venue for this panel?”
“I heard Lady Gaga is playing the Twitter party.”
“I heard Bill Clinton is the surprise keynote.”
“I slept 45 minutes last night.”
“I’m pretty sure my Klout score proves that I’m an influencer.”
“Is that Mark Zuckerberg? Oh, no, it’s the falafel trailer guy.”
“I haven’t paid for a meal or a drink for three days.”
“Want to hit the grilled cheese truck? There are six different ones.”
“Your panel isn’t at the Convention Center or the Hilton? Well, tell me the hashtag for it and I’ll tune in from the blogger lounge.”
“I haven’t left the Driskill bar for 36 hours.”
“Breakfast? I had disco fries and a quadruple espresso at the CNN Grill.”
“We’d better get in line for the Zynga party while it’s only six blocks long!”
“Is that a Trey Ratcliff photowalk or the line for the secret Facebook party?”
“I wanted to book a table for more than 10 people at Champs, but the manager said I have to go through SXSW.”
“Are you SURE that’s not Mark Zuckerberg? Oh, wait, it’s the janitor.”

Feel free to add your own in the comments!

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

via Techdirt

There is a common myth that, when an exchange takes place, someone gets the better of the deal. [T]hat is simply not the case. There are two parties to an exchange and they do it because they would rather have what the other one has. Each person gains. It’s a win-win. Each person has more value than they had before because each person has something they’d rather have. This is how wealth is created.

One of the things I appreciate most about Madsen is that he has always enthusiastically embraced the potential of the online space, and was open to trying things and learning from what worked and what didn’t. I’m so glad he’s brought his talents to YouTube to explain some very fundamental economic ideas in a fun, engaging way – and in an astonishingly short clip. I cannot wait for the rest! (You can buy his new book, Economics Made Simple, from iTunes or Amazon.)

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. So sick of eyeballs.

What does this box of chocolates have to do with the topic? They were a gift from the guy who moderated these fascinating conversations at Pixar last weekend (thanks again, Frans!). My favorite quotes, courtesy of Chris Yeh (whom I owe forever, for introducing me to Frans and for so much else):

The original idea sucks. You can’t show it to marketing or the toy people, because they won’t get it. But you can’t protect it for too long; engaging with the world forces you to make the necessary decisions. There’s a lot of pressure on us to get the process right. ‘Hey, if you guys got it right up front, this would be a lot easier.’ Getting the process right is *not* the goal. (implied: The goal is to make something great)

You want to signal to everyone else that it’s okay to be unusual. ‘That guy is really pushing it, and he didn’t get in trouble, so I guess I can too.’

We have had some films that failed. We didn’t release them. Toy Story 2 was a restart. Ratatouille, we kept one line from the original script. The first version of Up took place in a floating castle in the sky. The only thing left was the bird and the word ‘Up’. The next version, there was a house that floated up and landed on a lost Russian dirigible. The next version, the bird laid eggs that conferred long life. You can say that these were failures along the way. The things that don’t work right are just things that we tried. That’s learning. Why do we associate that with the word failure? We should associate it with the word ‘learning’.

We bet on the person, not the idea. We never start with the idea. We ask them to come up with three ideas so they aren’t stuck on a single idea.

I complain far too much about the cold and rain right now, how much I hate it and want it to be over and cannot stand knowing we have many months of this to go. But I quite like the misty mood Manhattan takes on in this weather, which is sort of enjoyable if you’re indoors.

I’ve become so accustomed to looking out my bedroom and bathroom windows and seeing this view that I really wonder how I ever got by without such a reassuring, constant presence of resilient structure.

Words to live by.

I keep suffering corneal abrasions that force me out of contacts for weeks at a time. So I’m throwing in the towel and going for LASIK, finally. Know a good surgeon in NYC? Let me know. I’d love to see properly, somehow, someday.

From our earliest days at school we are trained to think that if we don’t have order of a particular sort then we have chaos – and chaos is a bad thing. If we don’t have the grown ups in the centre of our society, maintaining order, then it falls apart. Those in power in companies, institutions or nations all have a vested interest in perpetrating powerful myths that keep the rest of us in check. In fact the degree to which they have power is determined by their success in convincing us that without them looking after us we would get in a mess. As a result we have a consistent and pretty fixed sense of what organised means, what organisations look like, and how unattractive the alternatives are. We cling to this sense of order like a lifeboat in the stormy seas of life.

Being part of this myth generating group has a strange effect on its members [...] They see people in the same situation as themselves and start to gravitate towards them because it feels more comfortable to be with people who understand. Next thing you know they are starting to see the world in terms of us and them, black and white. They need to defend something they are part of from people who are not.

-Euan Semple, whose new book is now available