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Saturday, September 18, 2010

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10 Celebrities Who Have Used Online Dating Services

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Online dating services have become the preferred way for many busy singles to find love and companionship. Even celebs!

Obama's Problem With Business

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The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise?

Al D’Amato Calls Bullshit on Racist Conservative

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So there's this conservative talking head. Name's Jack Burkman. He had some point about how post office employees would be a better source for unskilled labor than immigrant Nigerians.

Best Buy: reports of the iPad cannibalizing notebook sales are grossly exaggerated

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Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn backpedaled on his statement that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs.

Email Overload Fix: 3 Sentence Emails

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Email is taking up too much time in our lives. Do yourself and your recipients a favor by making your emails 3 sentences or less. If we all do it, imagine the time well have to do other things. If this was an actual email reply and not a blog post, it would have ended before this sentence started. Ive been trying a new solution to email overload by limiting emails to 3 sentences or less. You can learn the details in just 5 sentences at three.sentenc.es. The basic concept is to treat all email replies like SMS messages. I take this one step further and try to write initial emails in 3 sentences or less whenever possible. I first learned about 3 sentence emails from a post by Kevin Rose, where he lists 5 good email time saving tips. The inbox has become the dreaded inbox for so many people. A recent study by Xobni claimed 1 in 5 Americans check email either as the first thing they do in the morning or the last thing at night. 26% of Americans feel they cant handle or feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive during vacation. Another report [PDF] by The Radicati Group says the typical corporate user sends 36 emails and receives 61 legitimate emails during the average day. An IDC study estimates email consumes an average of 13 hours per week per information worker. Since starting at TechCrunch TV, I get about 100 to 200 emails a day which require action or a response. The newly launched Google Priority Inbox, which is getting postive reviews, helps. Although venture investor Jeff Clavier discovered it can make some mistakes. Google decided his wifes emails werent important. Not good. Even with Priority Inbox, staying up to 2am and working on emails 2 to 3 hours a day during my commute, I still cant keep up with the email avalanche and get my inbox to zero. My inbox problems are nothing compared to the TechCrunch writers. Or, to my boss Michael Arrington. Two years ago, when he wrote a post about email overload and a crisis in communication, he had 2,433 unread messages sitting in his inbox. Today, the count is 8 times higher: 20,131 unread messages. And this doesnt include additional inbox items from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, voicemail, text messages, Skype, etc. Lets assume Mike did nothing else but read emails 24/7 no writing posts, no talking on the phone, no eating, and no sleeping well, that one might be accurate. It would take him 1 week to just read his email, assuming each email takes an average of 30 seconds to read and digest. Now, lets say all of his emails were 3 sentences or less. The average time to read them would be drop to about 10 seconds. He could get through them all in a little more than 2 days. Ill admit the 3 sentence email isnt going to solve the email problem completely. In Mikes email post two years ago, he wrote The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages. He said if he had the right solution, he would quit his job and go do it. Since then, there have been some minor solutions, but the email giant seems to grow just like Moores law. The new version of Twitter.com released this week might provide some relief. MG Siegler has been using the new service for a few days now. He told me he switched some email communication to Twitter Direct Message (or DM), which is now cleaner and easier. And Twitter DM forces you to keep things short. While more communication is being done by social media networks, email usage is still expected[pdf] to rise in the coming years. A Wall Street Journal article one year ago declared Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. Id say not quite yet. Mikes growing email overload creates problems for himself and the sender. He admitted to me, once an email comes in and doesnt get acted on immediately, it enters the black hole. Even if he wanted to reply, its now out of sight and unlikely to surface again. For the sender, you dont know whether the lack of reply is really a no, a never got read, or a just wait some more time for an answer. When Mike does reply, he has mastered the art of the short reply. Most of his replies are just 1 sentence or 1 word. Fine, Yes, No and an occasional Awesome. Usually, its the folks who are higher up in the organization who have perfected the terse reply. Just yesterday, we reported on unconfirmed 2 and 3 sentence Steve Jobs emails. He allegedly emailed a journalism student that Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry. Heres another 3 sentence Jobs email reply to a customer with a water damaged MacBook Pro, upset that Apple would charge $300 to look into repairing it: This is what happens when your MacBook Pro sustains water damage. They are pro machines and they dont like water. It sounds like youre just looking for someone to get mad at other than yourself. Steve Jobs is well known for his short replies. A study of 30,000 corporate emails found that high-status employees tended to send short, curt messages. That study includes some other tips on How to E-Mail Like a C.E.O. But, a short response still requires clarity and some extra thought. A long, detailed email getting a reply like fix it or change it, may not help unless both parties know what it is. Critics may say this could lead to over-simplification or a dumbing down of communication. But, emails are not the place to write War & Peace (1,475 pages.) Email has come a long way since 1971 when Ray Tomlinson typed an insignificant and forgetable message. Its a great way to get asynchronous feedback. Ill admit some emails shouldnt be condensed, especially if they involve a lot of details or you just want to share some thoughts with friends. But those should be the exception. Many business emails I read and yes, I write, would benefit from trimming. The next time you sit down to write or reply to an email, think about keeping it short. The three.sentenc.es site recommends you add this to your email signature to help spread the word. Q: Why is this email three sentences or less? A: http://three.sentenc.es

Top 10 Ways to Organize and Streamline Your Workspace

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Whether you work from home, work in an office, or just a cubicle down the hall, you spend most of the day at your workspace. Here are some of the best ways to keep it from becoming a productivity nightmare.

Always Prepared (PIC)

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Patient Sues Doctor for Branding Name on Uterus

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Ingrid Paulicivic, a 47-year-old hairdresser from Orange County, had her uterus removed as part of a hysterectomy operation in June 2009. While recovering from surgery, she noticed some burns on her legs and asked her doctor about them in a follow-up appointment.

RBS Share Price Is Declining And Looks Like The Bank’s Crisis Are Not Yet Over

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Despite the Royal Bank of Scotland aiming to reduce its operation costs and increase the company's profits, it seems like most of its efforts have gone waste.

Foursquare campaign brings in 33 percent more traffic to McDonalds

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Still not sold on social media for marketing? A $1,000 Foursquare campaign boosted McDonalds foot traffic by 33 percent.

Alcohol Lobby Spending Against Legal Pot in Alliance w/ Police Complex

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Big Alcohol's decision to squash marijuana law reform to protect its bottom line is simply politics as usual.

Did Pollution Turn British Swan Into a Serial Killer?

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Since January, Hannibal the swan has brutally murdered 15 and injured 22 more. A wildlife expert speculates that pollution could be playing a role in the bird's anger.

20 World’s Coolest PC Designs (info/pics)

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Design-focused PC makers are launching laptops, netbooks, and displays and upgrading some existing models. Here, check out 20 of the coolest new designs, from pricey to more affordable.

You're What you believe

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Based on neuroscience research, your saying that you can "be careful what we ask for" has additional the teeth into it when compared with you could think about. The human brain is quite efficient at participating in order to anything you primary the idea for you to.

How to Deal With Someone With Inflated Self Esteem [COMIC]

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Everyone has faults. Helping people understand their faults is not rude, it's simply a necessity.

1960s boyish beefcakes flex for your pleasure

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Before the early 1970s, pornography -- which Your Crap Archivist defines as "media designed exclusively to facilitate the one-man-band approach to love" -- was forbidden in the American mailways. It helps explain magazines like Young Physique. Purportedly a celebration of grand human achievement in bodybuilding, it seems equally interested in what boys just get from God.

Will Debt Trigger the Collapse of the US?

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Throughout history the rise and fall of empires isn't slow or cyclical, as we like to think, but arrhythmic...it mostly happens very, very suddenly. America is a superpower on the edge of chaos, according to economic historian and author Niall Ferguson. U.S. debt levels, he says, and its unwillingness to address the problem, has put it in the same category as other great empires which have collapsed throughout the ages.Ferguson argues the world is changing. There's the rise of authoritarian China as a super-power; a Keynesian president leading a weakened United States; the re-emergence of democratic India as a great power; the continued decline of Japan; and the probability of continued global economic instability ahead.Is the rise and fall of empires cyclical or arrhythmic? How does economic profligacy -- whether the result of arrogance or naivety -- contribute to the downfall of civilizations? Not to be missed, the address will offer a timely review of primacy, leadership, and the complex factors behind the rise and fall of great powers and civilizations.

Wheel Of Fortune

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I love to play wheel of fortune. I also love when a hot chick in black boots is sitting on a skateboard wheel that has the wheel of fortune graphic on it.

America's top party schools

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Back to school is here. Back to beer is now. It's time for the Princeton Review's annual Best Colleges rankings. This year's top party schools? read on...

How to Make a Viral Video (According to Steve Brule)

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Dr. Steve Brule is never short on advice for your health, living alone without getting lonely, or selecting a good sweet berry wine. The eccentric bumbling man is a jack of all trades, offering life lessons he learned from school, cavemen, and his web-wiz nephew Josh. What sort of advice does Steve Brule have for creating a good viral video? We'll let Brule himself answer that one.

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