This collaborative dictionary revels in its self referential glory and the silly way that three letter words can be strung together to create meaning sometimes and nonsense that seems like it has meaning other times. It’s my way of weaving together the word dorks in my life, so if you’re up for it check out the project and shoot me an email… my guess is you have my email address if you happen to be reading this blog ;)

>> Learn more about the 3 letter word dictionary.

>> Check out the 3 letter word dictionary wiki itself (beta – only the “A” section is done)

(and yes, I’m still working with Bold Interactive even though I moved to Philly…)

Based on watching this I recognize that what I wrote about here: The Community Correspondent: a Guide to Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation is more about skimming off the top of a community rather than building community.

Further, because I’ve not created incentive for community building in this particular project I will have to continually work outside of the system to keep generating content myself. It’s hard work writing massive articles – it’s going the long way around to generate community-oriented content (but still a great place to start learning…).

The Threadless founders focused on having fun and building applications that they would want to use and that resonated with their friends.

This feels alien to me, as someone who’s always looked for ways to help others monetize their own projects, but it brings back a recurring dream of mine – the idea of creating hundreds of little seeds and spreading them to the winds just to see what happens. The idea of a concept a day for a year – concepts folded quickly and launched like paper airplanes.

When I interviewed Garrett Camp of Stumble Upon for SEJ (SU Defined and Marketing with SU) I found a similar approach – they built for their community first and STILL don’t give a big crap about monetization. They funded themselves for a good bit and paid bills through donations in the early stages.

If your site/business can motivate people to DONATE to you then you’re probably on the right track.

This video is 45 minutes long. I got a nice kick in the pants from it and I hope you do too.

Thanks to exploding-boy I learned how to turn of the obnoxious visual editor and embed this video directly for you :) – Turn Off WordPress 2.0 Visual Editor

I spotted this video on Karl Long’s TCritic.

Update:
It probably didn’t hurt that in my email I had a meeting conversation going too… so it makes me wonder if the ad was indeed triggered by the mellow mushroom and raleigh keywords or the raleigh meeting keywords, as both could be considered potential targets by the advertiser, Raleigh Take-Out.

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

BoingBoing