Ferris’ New Website – for Apartments!

My cousin Rick sent this to me in a batch this afternoon, and I wanted to post it here for posterity, for when he's richer and more famous.

Indeed, it IS a jungle out there, and now you can rent through a local NEO broker.

Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2009 3:50 PM
Subject: Ferris' New Website – for Apartments!

Dear Friend,

I need your help! I have been working on a new internet startup with my business partner, Jon Pastor. The site is an apartment search engine (like Google) that scours the internet for every apartment listing in the U.S. (unlike Google, we specialize in apartment search only). We organize the results in a simple, powerful map/results page. We have ~1 million listings, which is 5x our closest competitor, and we just launched this week.

Please check it out at RentJungle.com. I would really appreciate your feedback and comments. In fact, if you're on Facebook, please become a fan of our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rent-Jungle-Search-Millions-of-Apartments-and-Homes-For-Rent/80142981156 and post a comment.

The map interface is particularly useful, try: http://www.rentjungle.com/mapapartments/oh/cleveland/.

So if you, your kids, parents, friends or relatives are in the market for an apartment, please give it a try: RentJungle.com.

Thanks, I appreciate it, and please share your thoughts with me,

Rick Ferris

Six Apart - Blog - politics and blogging

Here's an excerpt from a post-election post by Anil Dash, from SixApart/TypePad/Movable Type.

Now that the election is over, we're sincerely hoping that politicians across the political spectrum, and citizens of any stripe, will demand that these social publishing tools be used for a lot more than just raising funds online or getting out the vote. We firmly believe that our platforms, used intelligently and in combination with the many other services and networks on the web, can be powerful tools for better governance.

Blogging, especially when combined with a social publishing platform that bridges multiple social networks, is far too powerful a medium to be dragged onto the national stage once every four years. If, as has so often been stated, this is a "change election" here in the United States, then we hope that one change we'll see, not just at the national level but at a state and local level, is our government making better use of the web.

Given the long tradition of bloggers leading the conversation around politics, policy and government, we hope to play a part in encouraging government to make the same leap into the social web that so many of us have made in our personal and professional lives

Six Apart - Blog - Barack Obama and Blogging

Blog Link: For all Linked In users

TypePad - Features - Blog Link If you use Linked In, you'll probably want to add this Blog Link to your profile. It works with most other blogging platforms. It shows your blog posts as well as those of your Linked In contacts. It installed in a few seconds.

Whether you're searching for someone to hire, or for someone to hire you, you're likely gathering information both from LinkedIn profiles and also from personal and professional blogs. You've worked hard to establish your personal brand via your blog, so it makes sense to showcase it right on your professional profile. The TypePad team that brought you Blog It has created an application to bring your blog and your LinkedIn profile together: Blog Link powered by TypePad.

Blog Link is a free, easy-to-use application that allows you to connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile. The application displays a feed of your latest blog posts right into your profile, so you can extend your personal brand even further by sharing your thoughts and insights with your professional network on LinkedIn.

One of the best aspects of LinkedIn is the network you can build, and Blog Link has you covered there as well. The "Your Network" tab in the application shows the most recent blog posts of people in your network, automatically finding their blogs as listed in their “Websites” list on their profile. And as more of your contacts add the Blog Link application, your own latest posts show up in more places. It's another great way to broaden and enhance your network on LinkedIn.

Blog Link is powered by TypePad, and it supports all blog platforms, including TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, Blogger, LiveJournal, and many more. To learn more, visit typepad.com/bloglink and add the application to your LinkedIn account today.For a demo and more details on BlogLink, watch the video with David Recordon. David's our Open Technologies Lead, who's known for leading efforts around OpenID and OpenSocial, which powers LinkedIn Applications.

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: Joining the Blogosphere

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: At Lincoln House - March 2008 -- Well, they MetTheBloggers over a year ago, and now here they come with their own blog. Apparently, it's contagious. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Alvin, Heidi, and Mitch help us "get it" about what we've got

Financial Advisor Magazine -- We are now beginning to see the dialogues of the Tofflers--last evidenced in book form in Revolutionary Wealth in 2006--echoed in the holistic planning or life planning field, this time by Mitch Anthony in Financial Advisor Magazine. Here he talks of the concepts of intrinsic value, money, and capital, parsing the differences among them. There's some heavy, pithy stuff here. I haven't seen anybody try to use the word "educed" for years. For instance:

“Money is the great wheel of circulation … the gold and silver which circulates in any country, may very properly be compared to a highway, which while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either.” ––Adam Smith

“Capital is now confused with money, which is only one of the many forms [in] which it travels. It is always easier to remember a difficult concept in one of its tangible manifestations than in its essence.”
––Hernando de Soto

There is a transcendent value educed from the measurable resource (material in nature) by the application of the immeasurable resource (invisible to the eye) that is known as thought and vision. It is these immeasurable resources of thought and vision that are the true capital resources in our society and business. . . .

. . . Jean-Baptiste Say, the French economist, once said, “Capital is always immaterial by nature since it is not matter which makes capital but the value of that matter; value has nothing corporeal about it.” This insight tells us that we need to better understand the capital that funds our business, and that capital is immaterial in nature. The real value lies within the thoughts and visions and ideas that live within our clients. . . .

this Saturday: Play Until Dark at Wendy Park

I just got this email:

Dan and I want you to know about the Wendy Park Foundation event, "Play Until Dark at Wendy Park: Get the Towpath to the Lake" happening this Saturday, June 30, 2007. At 10:00 AM the @ 12 mile roundtrip bike ride begins at Wendy Park with registration on site at 9:00 AM.

The bike ride will start at Wendy Park and will proceed through city streets to Steelyard Commons and on to the Canal Way Visitors Center and back. As you may recall, the funding for the Towpath to Steelyard Commons is already in place, and Wendy Park Foundation is committed to extending the Towpath to Wendy Park at Lake Erie.

The park site event begins at 11:00 AM and ends at 9:00 PM. – it will mark the first opening of the Coast Guard Station site to the public. The inside of the Coast Guard Station will not be open, but in the future we are hoping it will become an interpretive center for the Towpath Trail.

The day will be filled with all kinds of entertainment, including kayak rides; Harvey Webster's animal show, including live raptors; windsurfing; kitesurfing, fishing, archery, rockwall climbing, and eating delicious food; bungee trampolining; live music from Whiskey Island Ramblers, Will Bowen, Inner City Outlet and Carlos Jones; nature photography, bird watching, and wildlife identification; more food and drink.

The day will be FUN at Cleveland's only outdoor sports and recreation festival! You can get tickets in advance by going to www.playuntildark.org , then click "Get Tickets" ($5.00 per person -- children under 10 are free). Please note that the deadline for website ticket purchases is on Friday, June 29, 2007 at noon. You can also buy tickets at the door for $8.00 per person.

Would love to see you and your family at Wendy Park!

Marge and Dan Moore

Linked In: from the NYT Dealbook

LinkedIn: Press Releases: LinkedIn Names New CEO--LinkedIn, a Web site that allows users to create online networks of business contacts, said Monday that it hired a new chief executive to replace Reid Hoffman, one of Silicon Valley's most active angel investors.
Go to Press Release from LinkedIn>>
Go to Article from CNet News.com>>
Go to Item from GigaOm>>
Go to Previous Item from DealBook>>

The Krum Kult [sic] of Personality

Last Thursday I mentioned we had a great day with Meet.The.Bloggers, and it started in the middle of the afternoon down at the Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) where we talked to two other bloggers, Fred Krum (View from 1228' at http://www.akroncantonairport.com/person2.htm) and Kristie Van Auken (It's a Trip at http://www.akroncantonairport.com/person1.htm). We met Kristie in September at the Akron Marketing Association presentation we gave on business blogging, and she said we just had to meet Fred, because he was a genius, and an early adapter, and could therefore understand implicitly what we were trying to do with MTB. She was right.

The podcast of the interview will be posted soon, but I wanted to alert you to it, and how Fred began years ago to combat the rap that CAK was a place to find "small planes, high fares, going nowheres." We sat in a newly revamped terminal that just felt good, and found out about the values available from carriers such as AirTran and Frontier, and the great fares to great places like New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Fort Myers. Fred focuses his staff on providing a "great experience" replicating best practices, and partnering with the best that there is. He is clever and raised by Jesuits and uses phrases such as "a charisma bypass" alongside sayings such as "the only thing that brings freedom is discipline." He points to the fact that CAK may be a market-maker for low-priced fares in this region, and that it has "made commuting possible" between this area and Florida, and perhaps even NYC. One CAK early innovation is something sensible they call "the cell phone lot." Gloria uses the phrase/slogan "a better way to be best," and we go on to the fact that CAK is an extension of the Akron/Canton Chamber of Commerce and does some heavy local advertising promotion, unlike Hopkins where we get all the national ad things we see everywhere else we go. The CAK brand is also its philosophy ("A Better Way To Go"), and they acknowledge that the first rule of leadership is "You gotta get excited." There's no doubt that free wifi is one of the first things to implement in a place that wants to attract and serve the public, and the session wraps with reiteration of the first rule of life: "You gotta know what you want and then go after it."

This session is a short course in leadership, service, public relations, and promotions, all integrated and timely and on time, too.

Our next stop that evening was at Midtown Brews, hosted by Jeff Fridman and Webtego, to talk to Hunter Morrison. And speaking of brews, CAK has Great Lakes Brewing Company as a showcased, featured business partner & vendor.

IBM full Lotus position

IBM Lotus Takes Social Networking to New Heights--I've been a LOTUS fan for years, from 1-2-3 to Magellan to Agenda to Notes, even through the transitional years of LetOnlyTheUsersSuffer when support was in short supply. Now, here's a new iteration we're going to have to watch closely. For me, reading the whole article, it sounds like it might help my workload and overall organization. Here's the lead-in:

With collaboration as its legacy, IBM's Lotus division went back to its roots and announced its plans to deliver social software for businesses.

IBM's announcements at the company's Lotusphere 2007 show here represent the "most dramatic expansion of collaborative technology ever," according to Michael Rhodin, general manager of IBM Lotus, particularly as opposed to competitive alternatives "that tell you what you have to buy."

Foremost among the new technologies IBM announced on Jan. 22 is Lotus Connections, which enables users to gather and share information through social networks and provides dashboard views of projects, people and connections in various communities.

The Lotus Connections software borrows from IBM's deep research pockets and features five Web 2.0 technologies: Activities, Communities, Dogear, Profiles and Blogs. Activities is a Lotus technology that shares and organizes e-mail, instant messages, documents and other items related to a particular activity or project into one logical unit. Dogear is social bookmarking software that enables users to bookmark pages within their intranet. Both technologies came out
of IBM Research.

Rhodin called Lotus Connections "the industry's first ready-for-business social software platform to connect us to you, and you to us, and you to each other and to others beyond this room."

and tomorrow, we all have coffee and congeniality

Here's some more info I got from Betsey Merkel. I think the Midtown Morning/Brews blog/website at the link needs updating, so my data below should be considered more current information.

Midtown Mornings (Info here) Share an awesome view of The Lake at a very cool Midtown loft office space. Sip early morning coffee and bagels, make new connections and work on transformative initiatives.

Date: Friday, January 12
Time: 7:30 A.M. - 8:30 A.M.
Place: Nead Brand Partners
3631 Perkins Rd, Suite 6A Cleveland, OH 44114
P: 216-431-9301 ext.12

Coming up...Friday, January 19, Andreas Boardwalk Cafe

Read the I-Open White Paper here.

Learn about economic development in a networked global world. Read the EDPro Weblog here. Ed Morrison, Editor.

COSE NEOSA promo tool

I saw this item in the latest COOL CLEVELAND newsletter:

NEOSA and COSE: "To Blog or Not To Blog" on Thu 1/18. We know bloggers are implied as Time "Persons of the Year" but is blogging sensible/viable for sm bus and corps as promo tool? Info

The Info link was broken. Anybody know anything about this? Anybody going? Four of us from MeetTheBloggers ran a session on business blogging for the Akron/Canton chapter of the AMA (American Marketing Association) a good while ago, this past September, but we know nothing of this COSE NEOSA offering.

"COSE NEOSA." It has a certain ring to it...sort of an Italian flavor. Maybe it's a good thing NOT to be on their radar.