Crazy Friday Night

I'm still pretty snowed in by brand tags. More than anything else, it's just keeping on top of emails with new brands to add. I can't complain, but it's definitely kept me from reading/thinking as much as I might like. But, I haven't been totally dormant, so here's some random things I've read/seen/thought about over the past week or so.

• 1) let me get some brand tags business out of the way: 1. I reached 1 million tags. 2) I launched a brand tags blog (which will include announcements and hopefully observations by me and others). 3) I launched uk brandtags and hispanic brand tags. 4) This is a bit old, but brand tags was on NPR and they made this cool video segment.
• I'm off to San Francisco and LA next week. If you're around and want to meet up, drop me a line.
• Faris and I wrote an article for this month's Contagious Magazine all about the importance of data visualization. For me, at least, it was in part inspired by a quote from Ed Cotton: "in a data driven world, infographics are the new art." Anyhow, Faris has a little writeup of the article and a link to the full thing in PDF form.
• I know I'm a little late to the game on this, but: Thing Younger Then McCain. Some of my favorites include automatic transmissions, LP records and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
• This poster is awesome.
• I keep saying this to people, but I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here ... I think the best way to understand what any business does is to listen to what it says it's not. If you feel like you need to defend yourself preemptively by saying you're not something than that's probably exactly what you are.
• After one week of hard core training new Zappos employees are offered $1000 to quit. The idea is that if you're willing to take the cash then you weren't right for the job anyway. I think that's awesome.

That's all for now. Thanks to everyone again for all the brand tags support and sorry for ignoring the blog for a few weeks.