why MTB's dynamic is so important

Network Weaving: 1 Day F2F = 1,000 emails -- Here's a post from our friend Valdis Krebs yesterday that explains why emailing and blogging alone are only part of the whole communicative process, and why MeetTheBloggers and The Cleveland Weblogger Meetup, Midtown Brews, I-Open, and Ryze, are so important. Make sure you click through his "excellent article" link.

Archwood Street Fair, this Saturday and Sunday

Last night, we in the Brooklyn Centre neighborhood again emptied out attics and garages and then prowled about our houses looking for the wretched excess baggage of our lives that we foist off on y'all every year at the Archwood Street Fair. It has something to do with improving on our feng shui.

Judging from what I saw last night at Ray and Rudy's and at Mike's, this year will be another good one. In desperation to have something to sell, we're all dragging out a lot of the good stuff that we have held back in prior years. We finally gave up Duke the Wonder Horse and the Victorian pressback high chair; Mike dragged out all the high-end china his relatives have given him over the years.

I believe the fair runs today and tomorrow, on Archwood Avenue between Pearl and Fulton. Wear sensible shoes. Don't forget to bring some food by for Rev. David Bahr and Archwood UCC.

inaugural launch of The Real Deal: Now is the accepted time

The Real Deal--I got an email this morning announcing this new NEO blog by our friend Richard Andrews, whom we know through the Meet.The.Bloggers sessions at I-Open's Mid-Town Brews at WebTego and through Mid-Town Mornings at Nead Brand Partners. Are you beginning to see how the networks work, and what the names are and the brands imply? Attribution is hard because there's so much collaboration and overlap, but I hope everybody's beginning to get the picture.

But, back to The Real Deal. Richard is a writer with a track record that goes back a good while. The Real Deal shows promise of being just that. Go there now. I'll meet you.

hoya boys

The Holy Cross Fraternity -- I'm glad others like Father Brooks as much as I do. Each year when he used to breeze into town around this time of year for the annual NEO alumni dinner, he was like a breath of fresh air--or more specifically, a breath of Boston--for those of us who hadn't heard or had an Eastern Massachusetts accent for a while. Note that there are two side features here, one a slide show in which you see a youthful Ted Wells, pre-Scooter-Libby, and another in which Clarence Thomas makes a rare concession to the MSM and grants an interview, because Father Brooks asked him. Another Brooks fan who just recently popped up is Mark Holowesko of Templeton. Jesuits have an impact, to be sure.

Hunter Morrison unchained

Meet the Bloggers » Midtown Brews: Hunter Morrison--I first became acquainted with Hunter back in the late 1970s; I was recently arrived back in town from Atlanta, a newly minted Realtor with a focus on older properties, hanging out with all the young visionaries promoting Ohio City, downtown living at The Park & The Chesterfield, the reintegration of Hough, Clevelanders for 1,000 Families (Garrett Brodhead), adaptive reuse, and all the other cool things that were happening in Boston and Baltimore. Then, Hunter fell silent for a while, but now he's back, and he's speaking the truth, embellished only by a happy turn of phrase every now and then. This podcast of our February 1st sit over at Webtego's conference room is something we all must listen to, and then listen to again. There's history, hubris, and a glimpse of the future of the region.

Mentioned are his directorship at the Center for Regional Studies, David Sweet, Youngstown State, George McKelvey, the Hough Development Corporation and Kucinich, the planning award garnered by Youngstown 2010, "co-convening," the condition of Youngstown prior (peeling paint, bad attitude, and no place to go but up), Urban Strategies out of Toronto, and the vision statement of Youngstown, which entails the extraordinarily liberating effect of accepting that they're a shrunken, small city. There's also the I Will Shout Youngstown blog, the European experiences from Newcastle and from Dresden, and the idea of dying and reviving cities aligned with the idea of dying and reviving gods in our culture, along the lines of Sir James George Frazier's Golden Bough. I think that somewhere around here comes mention of the old Cleveland networks and David Hoag, Alton Whitehouse, and Joseph Gorman, and a distinction made between the old hierarchical and the new networked structures. Then come Jay Williams, Tim Ryan, Alvin Toffler, and phrases like "a buzz going on," "anomaly of the comeback city," "take the dreams and boil them down to the deals," "you've got to celebrate your successes," "megapolitan areas," "the commutership," and what happens when "the 'me' gets replaced by the 'we.'" He also talks of Jim Rouse and Faneuil Hall, Hope 6, the exploitative history of milltowns and the steel industry, black boxes, identity, Volney Rogers and the first metroparks, intrinsic value, the concept that "retail follows rooftops," values, authenticity, being very siloed and very parochial, and Tim Ryan's basic question of "Who are we collectively?"

There's incredible value in this podcast. There's also passion, concern, and a bit of outrage. This is one of the more significant offerings of the MTB "portfolio"--make sure you listen to it soon.

"the fish rots from the head down"

I was just thinking, given the messes we have in governments, in corporations, their boardrooms, and hierarchical systems in general, might it be possible to name a blog "the fish rots from the head down" and keep it full of content effortlessly?

Sunday: catching up on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: Tim Ferris--Today was the sort of day to catch up on software and databases. I installed speech recognition software in XP and amused myself as it failed to understand me--just like adding another member of the family.

I also surveyed my realm after over three years of collecting names, beginning with a re-focus on community-based data in July of 2003. My LinkedIn connections are now approaching 400--my public profile's at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/30a/559. I used to think that people with that many connections were promiscuous networkers or insincere accumulators or just plain old obsessive-compulsive, but after a while of hanging out, you just happen to accumulate a good load of links. I still happen to think LinkedIn will have some usefulness down the road, but I've backed off Ryze, and I'm scared to death of MySpace. Other computer social or business networking attempts have come up short or even been darned annoying, and I can't even remember what most of them were right now, except for Konnects, the truly annoying one.