Sorry, but I have to pick up TED again. I think this talk by Erin McKean is worthwhile to listen to for all of you who are working with language. I myself spend a lot of my time writing. Words are the tools I use daily, and in this moment while I just used the word tool, I am aware of the fact that this is not the right term. Because a tool for me is rigid, words are living creatures within a context, they express a way of thinking, they are embedded into real life.
Dictionaries don’t take this into consideration, they isolate words, and they overrule us with their authority. Dictionaries, so Erin McKean are outdated, they are inapt to fullfil their task. With wordnik Erin McKean launches a dictionary that is not a dictionary 
! To me it seems like an organism alive and multifaceted. I love it, and the presentation Erin gave on TED I love it too. It is intelligent and it has got the sense of humour I adore.
Rural villages worldwide are being deserted, as billions of people flock to cities to live in teeming squatter camps and slums. Stewart Brand says this is a good thing. Why? It’ll take you 3 minutes to find out.
Listening to the news, and the whispered rumors, to the huge current of hear and say flooding our minds every day makes us believe to be connected to the real world out there. But are these not preconceptions surrounding us like a lullaby? This short presentations by Stewart Brand shows us completely different perspective on a situation. This does not necessarily mean that it is the real world out there either, but it underlines once and again that we should not take anything for granted.
I know that you out there, my team, that you prefer the innovation, the prototype, the unbeaten path … so do I, but sometimes one should allow the exception from the rule!
Three years ago when I made the decision to walk away from the classical marketing strategies, Web 2.0 and the viral marketing approaches seemed to me as a solution to achieve something with small money. That it may enable small companies like ours to spread messages through an unknown realm was and is still very tempting for me. Nevertheless, I underestimated the unpredictability of our enterprise, and how dodgy it is. Nowadays, it became so important to work in an opposite direction, in an opposite direction and drift with the flow , however. If flowing, if being authentic, then I think, one may have the chance to get picked up and spread, and finally become viral. This is beyond control, but not beyond having a concept. It demands a highly dynamic way of thinking and that’s difficult for us Europeans, it seems. And we have to know, when we have to let things go, when we have to leave things to the others to develop, to interfere …
I pick the Dutch example without knowing whether it is/was successful, but it sounds interesting and worthwhile to consider it.
Here the concept in one sentence – short and concise:
A Coffee Company in the Netherlands is giving away free coffee to students who sneak in a branded slide into their homework PowerPoint decks.
