I’d have five cents.

So, I trimmed my RSS list not long ago and made a category called “Must Reads”. I’ll share those here:

• Brian Oberkirch: The ultimate aggregator
  
• Joshua Porter: Social web design
• Creating Passionate Users: Empowering user to kick ass
• Jeremiah Owyang: Social media guru, though he digs far deeper than I do
• Dan Cederholm: Because he’s my hero
• Chris Messina: He’s just got his finger on everything
• Tara Hunt: Pinko marketer extraordinaire
• Guy Kawasaki: The legend
• Ryan Carson: Just because I love all of his ventures

I know, for a “designer” it’s a little light on design blogs. But I figure if anything too crazy is talked about in the design world, I can get that from Dan or Chris. I also listen to Paul Boag’s Boagworld podcast, which helps out on that front. But what can I say? I love the strategy side of things.

So, Brian’s latest interview is with Guy Kawasaki of Garage. I touched on my long fascination with Guy before when Jennifer Jones interviewed him. One thing that I like about Brian’s chats is that he often is doing his interview subjects as much of favor as they are doing him by granting the interview. A lot has to be said for a good brainstorming session with a fresh set of eyes and ears. I’ve taken part in a few of these lately and I love the feeling of being helpful and being helped.

When Brian was talking to Guy about the possibility of blogging his next book chapter by chapter, Guy made an interesting analogy. He compared blogging to working out every day and blogging to going on a binge Jenny Craig diet. Frequently blogging keeps your writing—and your thought process—in shape. I noticed I’ve been slipping a little over the winter (an analogy for my physique as well?), so it’s time to start “working out” more.

Here’s a few things I’ve been doing/have done lately:

• Getting ready for the release of Aptima’s CogBlog. We will be launching February 28. When I say “launch”, I mean changing our URL from https to http. Then, of course, we’ll post our first content again so that our trackbacks and pingbacks can work properly. I recently wrote my first post for the blog. It is called “Distributed Learning for the Army: Cost Effective or Just Plain Effective?” I’m consciously trying to make sure the subject matter between my two blogs don’t overlap too much. I’ll be one of four bloggers when we kick off, along with Daniel Serfaty (our brilliant and engaging founder who I have been working on “alternative” blogging methods with), Jared Freeman (our VP of Research), and Webb Stacy (our VP of Technology). Then there’s me. The web kid.
• Working on TRACE-SE. TRACE-SE is the project that really kicked off this blog. It is a community resource site for cognitive systems engineering, so I started this blog to document what I was learning about community and Web 2.0. Well, we’re back into some serious development on that project after a bit of time off, so I’m quite excited. Late last night I was getting my kicks doing an Andy Budd-esque CSS-based image map. Woo!
• Chatting with some interesting folks. As I mentioned above, I’ve had some good brainstorming sessions. I’ve also “met” a guy named Nick Peters, who has been writing some about Microformats and OpenID. One post of his that particularly smacked me upside the head was one about the iPhone and Microformats. As I wrote in the comments on that post, the iPhone (being a mobile device with a real, usable web browser) has the potential to really make use of microformats. Code marked up as phone numbers can be instantly detected and called. Code marked up as an address can be sent directly to that sweet Google Maps widget. Contact info can be added to your address book and synced back to your Mac or PC. Sweet.
• Playing with the new MacBook Pro. Oh god I love this thing. One other thing I’ve noticed… don’t listen to what they say about Rosetta. Office still opens as soon as I click on it. Going from PBG4 to MacBook Pro is insane, even on non-native apps. And the thing is just so sexy. The key to great computer hardware development is making something people just want to touch. When they’re touching, they’re typing. When they’re typing, they’re getting shit done. When they’re getting shit done but still thinking they’re just touching this extraordinary piece of hardware… well, then they become a fanboy.
• Securing everything for SXSW. Hell yeah, I’ll be there. Also, I saw that Webvisions 2007 is going to be in May. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it this year. But that’s when it was in July. May… that could be a different story. Two days? Cheap price? Gonna do my best to swing it again. It was life-changing last year.

Man, all that typing while getting back into shape? I’m gonna be sore.

Guy is as pleasant as ever. I have to admit, I have not been keeping up on his blog (not that I’ve been keeping up on too many blogs lately). He made a few great points about how marketing is changing, especially when marketers are trying to reach young people. This is the Tivo and YouTube generation. Traditional advertising is just not reaching them. A key point he made is that a teenage is far more apt to buy a watch because Jack Bauer was wearing it on 24 than if an ad for the same watch was shoved down their throat.

Two fun moments were when some strange squeaking noise (that sounded like a chimp) overtook the podcast. Jones’ asked “what was that?” Unfortunately, we never found out. Another highlight was Guy cutting out for a second to tell is son that he can’t practice piano while he’s recording a show.

A couple other recent shows of note from Jennifer include interviews of her new Podtech colleague Jeremiah Owyang and blogging guru Seth Godin.