I confess. I’ve been a post-slacker on the RexBlog.

However, over on the Hammock blog, I’ve participated in a couple of posts that might interest two or three of the 12 RexBlog readers.

The post called “How Safari’s Shared Links Will Reward Content Your Customers Love” predicts that browsing patterns among non-techie users will change when links from their LinkedIn connections and Twitter subscriptions become a prominent default feature on the browser that accounts for around 10% of the mobile and desktop web traffic. (By the way, this post was from Hammock’s Idea Email that’s gaining popularity and subscribers. You can find back issues and a subscription form here.)

In an accompanying post that I wrote, I share (with a blog-friendly subject line), “5 Ways Savvy Marketers Should Prepare for Safari’s Shared Links.”

Enjoy.

Credit: Eric Frommer, via Flickr. (Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

If you live in or near a city where the bluegrass band Steep Canyon Rangers is playing, buy your tickets now and thank me later.  As you can see from that tour link, most of their performances this summer include the addendum, “w/Steve Martin & featuring Edie Brickell.”

Last night, my wife and I attended one of those “w/Steve Martin & featuring Edie Brickell” performances at Nashville’s spectacular Schemerhorn Symphony Center. As much as I hate to admit it, bluegrass sounds almost as good in the Schermerhorn as it does in the joint a block away where the genre was made famous (and some can convincingly argue, where it was invented), or the other joint down the street that’s one of the best bluegrass and roots music venues anywhere.

The “w/Steve Martin” guy tells jokes like Earl Scruggs and plays the banjo like Jerry Seinfield. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, he’s multi-talented and is the best evangelist for bluegrass since The Darlings sang Salty Dog on the Andy Griffith Show.

There’s no questioning w/Steve’s picking skills. But I’m serious: The guy is funny also. He could maybe even be a comedian one day.

As for the “featuring Edie Brickell” part of the show, I must admit that I had previously thought of her as being the Yoko Ono who broke up Simon and Garfunkle, as she’s married to the Simon part of that former duo. But much to my surprise, it turns out she was only four years old when Simon and Garfunkle broke up. (Or at least that’s what Wikipedia alleges.) So, free from that burden, I’ll go on record as saying Edie Brickell sings like an angel, which coincidentally, is also nothing like Yoko Ono.

Did I mention the Steep Canyon Rangers? If you happen to live in a town where they are performing w/o Steve Martin and not featuring Edi Brickell, still go. The comedian banjo player and the angelic singer are icing on the cake.

Promotional photo of The Doors. From left-John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, Jim Morrison. Source: Wikipedia Commons

On the way home earlier today, I heard this fascinating interview by Fresh Air host, Terry Gross, in which she speaks with Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for The Doors. Manzarek died from cancer on May 20, so the show re-aired this interview recorded in 1998.

I highly recommend a seven-minute segment of the interview to anyone interested in the process of creation, be it music or any type of art that uses a collaborative process and draws from various sources. It starts at time-stamp 12:45.

In it, Manzarek, who is seated in front of a radio studio piano, explains how the song, Light My Fire, was created.

If your perception of The Doors is influenced by the hallucinogenic fog created by Oliver Stone in his film that portrays Jim Morrison as a stoned sociopath, Manzarek’s seven minute explanation will make you realize the lucid talent, breadth of musical knowledge and study that went into the composition.

Manzarek’s edge-of-the-seat enthusiasm and passionate story telling sounds as far away from Oliver Stone’s Doors as one can imagine.

Highly recommeded listen.

You can find the interview on NPR.org.

It is with deep grief that we learn of the magnitude of the loss of life caused by yesterday’s tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. That so many of the victims were children is especially sad. Parents, especially, know it is the realization of that which we fear the most. Below is a re-posting of a blog post I’ve written, in various ways, in the past. As I know is true for all of us, my thoughts and prayers are with the people who are now coping with the aftermath of this disaster:

Over the years, I have written about many natural disasters and the human toll they’ve taken. I believe social media, writ large, make such events more personal to us all — a shared phenomena, even for those of us not on the scene.

When we start to see the images of these disasters, our first impulse is “go help.”

However, I’ve also learned from writing about these disasters (and having one occur in my hometown) that it’s always better to give the local citizens and experienced officials and non-government agencies a few days to address the immediate needs and to assess what the longer-term needs will be.

As I’ve written before, in the first days of any disaster, for those of us not on the scene, the best way we can help is always: first, send money.

This is especially true when a disaster is so widespread as Hurricane Sandy appears to be.

Personally, and because of advice I’ve been given by individuals who have been on the front lines of such disasters, I contribute, in a designated way, to the Salvation Army as it is supposed to be one of the most efficient ways to support first-responder, essential needs efforts.

Of course, there are many groups through which you can make such contributions.

[It's National Bike Month. And yes, this is another post about bicycling. You'll really like this one. I promise.]

Last fall, I had the privilege of spending six Thursday evenings volunteering at Nashville’s Oasis Center’s Bike Workshop. As I said in a Flickr set I posted at the time, during a six week session at the Workshop, disadvantaged kids get to choose a bike they will learn how (by doing) to take apart and then completely rebuild. At the end of the program, their work will be rewarded by earning the bike — and the knowledge to know how to keep it maintained.

Last Thursday, CNN posted the video below (full page) about the program. I am a tremendous fan of Dan Furbish, the founder and leader of the program, and the narrator of the video, and Adams Carroll, the other guy who you’ll see helping guide the kids.

It’s a wonderful program, and this is a wonderful video.

I  try to ride my bike to work 2-3 times a week, rain or shine, hot or cold. When I tell that to people who know where I live and work, they picture in their minds me riding down Nashville’s busy Harding Road/West End Corridor.

“No,” I tell them. All but a few blocks of my commute is free from traffic and I can hear birds chirping the entire way. Indeed, most of the route is via designated bike lanes, greenways or limited-access streets. At a nice and easy pace on my commuter bike (think pick-up truck), the commute takes about 40-45 minutes.

When I explain my route to those who live in Nashville, they quickly connect the dots and realize there are ways to ride long distances while still avoiding streets clogged by drivers who don’t know (or don’t care) that bicyclists have the right to ride on the street.

As Friday, May 17, is Bike to Work Day (all the others are bike to play, I presume), I’ve embedded below the RexWay bicycle route from Phillips Toy Mart in Belle Meade to the Downtown YMCA on Church Street. I selected these start- and end-points because the traffic light on Harding Road at that point allows for safe crossing of Harding and the railroad tracks — making it easy to jump onto the designated bike lanes on Post Road. This western terminus is easily and safely accessisible by thousands of residents of Belle Meade, West Meade and surrounding neighborhoods.

On Friday, rain or shine, I will be at Phillips Toy Mart ready to ride on Friday. Join me if you can and we’ll go to the festivities at the Metro Courthouse.

For more maps and information about Nashville’s Bike to Work Day, visit Walk/Bike Nashville.

Click through on the map below for my turn-by-turn route, created on RunKeeper.com.

This is a “fly-over” animation of the route created on the site, Map My Ride (Needs Google Earth plug-in.):

More of my bike geek stuff:

• A Bicycle Pinterest Board
• Photos on my Flickr account tagged “bicycle“
• The first time I blogged about participating in Bike to Work day was 9 years ago.

Recently, Chris Brogan invited me onto his very popular podcast where we talked a lot about how companies and businesses are using media and content to connect directly with their customers.

It’s sometimes challenging to explain what I do (especially to people with tweet-sized concentration), but Chris’ approach helped me come close. If you are one of the 12 readers of this blog, you may find it of interest.

Or not.

Either way, I had fun talking with him.

I’m glad to see that a PDF of this past weekend’s Baccalaureate Address by David Brooks has been posted on the Sewanee.edu website. It is filled with wonderful gems like this:

“The first thing to worry about: Will I marry well? This is the most important decision you’re going to make in your life. If you have a great marriage and a crappy career, you will be happy. If you have a great career and a crappy marriage, you will be unhappy. I tell university presidents that since the marriage decision is so central, they should have academic departments on how to marry. They should teach the neuroscience of marriage, the sociology of marriage, the psychology of marriage. Everybody should get a degree in how to marry. Nobody listens to me. So give yourself a degree. Read Jane Austen novels or George Eliot novels. Learn how to think about this problem from the masters. And take your time.”

At some point, I’ll be posting a link to lots of photos of the weekend our family celebrated with our son, the graduate.

One of this blog’s 12 readers (and a brother of mine, too boot) sent me a link to a story today because he recalls that in 2008, I decided to blog for a year about the technology I feel I’ve been cheated out of, as it’s been promised to me by science fiction writers my entire life: Flying cars. (That links to a year-end wrap-up of the stories I ran across during the year. And here’s a link to a Delicious list of about 50 articles I ran across that year.)

Since then, I’ve rarely blogged about flying car startups and concepts, but it’s fun when people send me items they run across.

Some of the most persistent press about flying car concepts comes from a company in Massachusettes called Terrafugia. I don’t know about their cars, but they have a great PR company working for them. Every year or so, they get coverage when they announce they’ll have a flying vehicle (or roadable plane) on the market “next July.” (I think they’ve gone through about six “next Julys” since I first heard about them.)

Today, there’s an article on Xconomy.com (a site I wasn’t aware my brother frequents) about Terrafugia’s newest idea, a self-flying car. Like everything Terrafugia describes, it sounds pretty cool. Indeed, I think it’s cooler than any internet start-up I’ve heard about lately.

However, I’m guessing it won’t be available until next July, if you know what I mean.

Note to the 12 readers of the blog. Excuse me.

I’m trying out a way to post to this blog using an approach I’ll be explaining in more detail in a later post.

That post will be:

• A little-bit country
• A little-bit rock-n-roll

That post will be about Fargo.io, an outliner web application

• An outliner is type of text editor (I guess it could edit more than text, but let’s stick with that now) that lets you arrange your text (ideas, thoughts, tasks) in a hierarchy.

• Doc Searls blogs about using an outliner in this post.
• An outliner is not an outfielder, a position in baseball
• An outliner is not an outlier, a person who does not reside in the tall part of a bell-shaped curve

While one of the things you can do with Fargo.io is write a blog post, the way it displays on this post doesn’t really look like what I’m seeing. However, if you click on this link, you can see a “read-only” version of what I’m seeing.

• Double-click on a dark wedge to expand or collapse what’s nested beneath that outline heading
• It works just like the outlines you created in elementary school — the kind with Roman numerals. (Or maybe they stopped using Roman numerals when kindergarteners started using PowerPoint.)

This test will continue, but feel free to change channels to another station.