The picture below shows what awaited me in my mailbox today:

Those papers were immediately discarded into my “spam box” in my kitchen.

Why don’t snail nail spammers get with the program? This crap doesn’t work. Though I’m obviously biased, if I was a marketer trying to reach a local audience, I’d choose to use showcase ads to buy share of voice in a ZIP code over snail mail anyday of the week.

http://windowshop.com/

What do you think?

[via Arjun]

I haven’t flown much over the past few months, but I had the chance to fly to Houston last week to attend REBarCamp and noticed something I haven’t experienced before — an airline charging for a (non acoholic) beverage. Even though it’s just $2, it still feels wrong to have to pay for a beverage on an airplane that cost me $400 to get on. If airline executives really want to charge for the beverages served on board (which have always been free in the past), just add another $2 to the cost of the ticket — 99.99% of the people won’t notice the difference and you won’t give the impression of being cheap.

Is charging for beverage standard in the industry now, or is it just specific to US Airways?

I’ve often wondered whether I’ll end up writing a book at some point in my career. I still don’t have the answer to that question, but there’s an article at MediaShift that’s worth a quick read for those who have thought about writing a book — 6 Ways Authors Can Succeed by Self-Publishing Books.

I’m off to Houston tomorrow morning for REBarCamp Houston — looking forward to my first ever trip to Texas (outside of the Houston airport)! If you’re in the Houston area and want to meet up at some point, shoot me a mail at meyers dot drew at gmail (dot) com.

Facebook announced the 25 recipients of their fbFund who received $25k grants today — BarTab was on the list and the description caught my attention:

Send a drink to a friend, with Facebook! BarTab allows users to send real drinks to each other for only $1. Drinks are redeemed through the user’s cell phone at partnered bars and restaurants.

I think a lot of pieces will have to fall into place for this to work, but there is potential for this application to both improve drinking for the 21-30 crowd and increase overall sales at bars & resaurants. Here are a few challenges they’ll need to overcome:

• critical mass of bar goers
• awareness with bar owners
• technology inside of bars to enable someone to redeem tickets/credits with a mobile phone

Which gets me thinking — Yelp should buy this application, or build this same functionality themselves. They’ve already got two of the three pieces to the puzzle.

I think this article in the New York Times is a very good sign that mainstream media is starting to “get” this whole linking thing.

After seeing a photo like this (via a friend on facebook), how could someone not want to take a trip to Alaska?

Notice anything about the picture below?

If you didn’t catch it, the point I wanted to make is that the floor of this home is composed of dirt.

I’m taking another trip (I went last year) to the Dominican Republic in late November with a few friends. In addition to getting more microfinance experience and visiting some beautiful beaches, one of the things we are going to be doing in pouring a concrete floor or two for a couple families. Yes, you heard that right. Pouring concrete floors. Living here in the United States, we take the floors of our homes for granted. In the developing world, not everyone is so lucky — many homes still have dirt floors. My friends and I are going to be spending a day or two helping improve the living structure for a family or two. There’s is a hook to this — we have to raise the money to buy the actual concrete and for transportation. In order to “sponsor” our work, we are trying to raise about $1,000-$1,500 from family and friends.

If you want to help improve the life of a Dominican family like the one pictured below by sponsoring our work (you don’t have to sponsor the entire cost, anything you can provide would be helpful), please either leave a comment or e-mail me at meyers dot drew (at) gmail. I promise to share pictures afterward

This will be us in late November (with a little support from you hopefully)

It’s no secret we’re experiencing a financial crisis worldwide right now. Ryan Calkins asks the question “Will the Global Financial Crisis Hurt Microfinance?” over at myKRO.org — if you have an opinion or thought you want to share, leave a comment!

If you had purchased $1,000 worth of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left.
If you had purchased stock in Fannie Mae, you would have $2.50 left of the original $1,000.
With AIG, you would have less than $15 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling deposit, you would have…

$214 cash.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily (and recycle).

[via Michigan Green via a college friend]

Social Security:

McCain said that fixing social security is easy and he knows how to do it. Really? That’s funny — why the heck hasn’t anyone done anything in the last 30 years to fix it then? And note McCain has been an active figure in Washington DC for almost 30 years and nothing has been done. Explain that to me. Or at least explain how the problem is so easy and yet no one has come up with a workable solution.

Health care:

McCain thinks health care is a responsibility and Obama thinks it is a right in America. I’m going to disagree with both of them. Not that I don’t think health care SHOULD be a right, but let’s be realistic here. Whether or not you choose to believe it, access to affordable health care is a privilege in this world. With an estimated 2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day, health care is most certainly not a right worldwide. We are working, and should continue working, towards a point when access to health care is a fundamental human right. But we’re not there yet.

Foreign Policy:

McCain doesn’t think we should talk with our enemies. Obama does. Running the United States really is just like running a business and I think most business strategies can be successfully applied to politics. Furthering relations with other countries and signing up new allies takes the same tactics as finalizing a business development deal with a new partner. It’s obvious one of the tactics to closing deals is…TALKING.

This issue is dead simple — talk to your allies as well as your enemies. What happens if you don’t?

NOTHING.

And that’s not acceptable.

For anyone hoping to become rich from blogging, there’s an article at Win Extra worth reading. Here’s one interesting excerpt:

Anyone who is looking at blogging as being their primary income source needs to understand that all that reading – all that networking – is done in order to help make you an authority that other people will come to. As you become more well known opportunities to speak at conferences will start to pop up, opportunities to write books might surface or possibly you might have the chance to run your own conferences. The fact is that much of the serious money in the blogging world isn’t made from behind the keyboard. The knowledge and contacts you make from behind it are where you make your money.

The lesson? Blogging can indirectly lead to riches, but monetizing your actual blog content or impressions is not the likely money making scenario. Blogging is a fantastic networking tool, and the opportunities that arise from that network is where the (majority of the) value is.

Or there’s the slight possibility that you can do what bankaholic did and dominate expensive keywords in a lucrative niche and get bought for cash. But that’s a longshot.

Alcohol has an effect on everyone…even pumpkins!!