The expert’s guide to napping
Do you nap? I’m not much of a napper. i just can’t sleep during the day. My wife, on the other hand, can nap at the drop of a hat. I guess that’s why we have a cat and not a dog. Get it, cat nap? Yes, I am a communications professional and not a comedian.
Still, if you are a napper, then you need to visit the Expert’s Guide to Napping. Some of the highlights:
- A short afternoon catnap of 20 minutes yields mostly Stage 2 sleep, which enhances alertness and concentration, elevates mood, and sharpens motor skills. To boost alertness on waking, you can drink a cup of coffee before you nap. Caffeine requires 20 or 30 minutes to take effect, so it will kick in just as you’re waking. Naps of up to 45 minutes may also include rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which enhances creative thinking and boosts sensory processing.
- Limit your nap to 45 minutes or less, if you need to spring into action after dozing. Otherwise, you may drift into slow-wave sleep. Waking from this stage results in sleep inertia, that grogginess and disorientation that can last for half an hour or more.
- However, if you want a long nap, nap at least 90 minutes. Many of us get about an hour to an hour-and-a-half less sleep a night than we need.
How about you, do you nap?
The first white house blog
I generally don’t get into politics. Too controversial and I’m just not that into politics, especially on a national scale.
However, doing what I do, I can’t help but notice what our new President Obama has done with social media and the web already, and I can’t wait to see if it continues.
Well, so far so good. At 12:01 est on the day of the Inauguration the first White House blog debuted. If people were doubting the legitimacy of blogs…well, I think that’s a pretty good indicator for you.
Now on to some fun stuff.
Here’s a link to some Inauguration pictures on the Big Picture. Amazing photo site.
Here’s a link to the Inaugural address on YouTube.
Top 10 stats from the social media numbers game
I’m constantly asked for different statistics or metrics to justify what people want to do or are doing. Sometimes it drives me a little crazy that some people still don’t understand what’s going on with the web. There are still groups that seem to think the web is a fad and not an integral business and communications channel.
For those that are somehow still in that group, here’s a great post from futurebuzz.com. Here’s ten of the more interesting statistics here but do visit the link for the full list. Very impressive.
- 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) – approximate number of unique URLs in
- 2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily
- 2,695,205 – the number of articles in English on Wikipedia
- 684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year
- 70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube (March 2008)
- 412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)
- 133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
- 346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)
- more than 1,111,991,000 tweets to date on Twitter
- 150,000,000 – number of active users on Facebook
This stuff isn’t going away people.
Why I don’t use the term Web 2.0
I don’t generally use the term Web 2.0 when discussing the current form of the web. That form being what most would call social media/networking, I see it as a logical evolution of the web as a communications channel. The reason I don’t use the term Web 2.0 is there are a ton of varieties of the definition. If you go to wikipedia you’ll see they currently have Tim O’Reilly’s definition as:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.
A couple paragraphs down you’ll see they have Tim Berners-Lee, the guy credited with “inventing the World Wide Web”, if you can really credit one guy with that, as saying,
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technological components of Web 2.0 have existed since the early days of the Web.
Now, I won’t say I never use the term. I use the term on some occasions because people will shake their head and I can go on with whatever real point I’m trying to make about their communications. But generally I try to stay away from Web 2.0 and just use the term web with some sort of descriptor.
Don’t be fooled by terms. What you need to keep in mind is that the web is just a huge communications channel with many subchannels (blogs, wikis, forums, listserve, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.). Each of these subchannels can serve a different purpose in your communications strategy. Call em Web 2.0 if you like but they’re still just tools for you to use effectively…or ineffectively.
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