Do a bit of poking around online, and you can find out that the weight loss industry is anywhere from a $35 billion to $70 billion dollar a year industry, depending on whom you believe. The late-night infomercials, the Jenny Craig pre-made dinners, the diet supplement stores. Weight loss is an unmistakable national obsession.

Ironically, on the whole, we’re only getting bigger and fatter.

But I’ve got a pretty inspirational story about weight loss. And here’s the beauty of my story: I don’t want you to subscribe to my program, join my gym or buy anything with a money-back guarantee that you’ll lose 20 pounds. Honestly, I don’t really care all that much whether you lose weight. I just think it’s worth telling the story of my father’s weight loss, because I know there are lots of folks out there who aspire to lose a lot of weight.

A bit of history on my father

First some background on my dad. He’s now 71 (started losing the weight when he was 70). When I was a young ‘en, he was a big guy but not overly big. When I was a school kid, he probably weighed around 250 pounds. He could have afforded to drop 50 pounds. But he carried his weight well and did not appear to be a terribly overweight guy.

After my folks divorced and my siblings and I all left for college, my father ended up living in a number of places without significant others or a lot of friends around. Over time (and perhaps without much oversight or input from loved ones nearby), he gradually gained weight.

Throughout these years, my father was an on-again, off-again habitual dieter – like so many millions of people. He knew he should lose weight, and he’d go on diets that he’d stick with for a few months. He’d lose weight – 10, 15, 25 pounds. One time, he lost more than 50 pounds. But invariably, the weight would find its way back. No diet ever really stuck.

Over the years, my dad got big. Very big. At his heaviest, he weighed north of 360 pounds. And there were attendant health problems. He was diagnosed with a heart disease called atrial fibrillation. He was pre-diabetic. He had high blood pressure, and he had pain in his legs and feet. And the most problematic health issue was that his hip began causing him so much pain that he had to have hip replacement surgery in June of 2009. At the time of the surgery, he weighed 355 pounds.

As I write this just after Thanksgiving in 2010, my father weighs 220 pounds. In other words, he has lost 135 pounds since that surgery 17 months ago – 120 pounds since the beginning of this year. The last time he weighed that much was when he was about 44 years old.

He’s still not a triathlete. He can’t walk for great distances or go on jogs, and his hip still bothers him a bit. He’s still less than certain walking down stairs, and he keeps a cane with him. But the difference between my father of today and my father of 11 months ago is absolutely remarkable and inspiring.

The secret is there is no secret

So you’ve got the high-level details now. But perhaps you’re wondering how he did it. Well, I’ve got some bad news and some good news.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way: If you’re looking for an “a-ha” moment, you’re out of luck. There is no magic trick. No silver bullets. In fact, his story about how he lost weight is a bit dull.

Now for the good news: What my father did is within reach of anyone who totally resolves to do it. Not only that, it doesn’t cost a lot of money.

Here are the details of how things unfolded.

In January, when we weighed a bit north of 340 pounds, he had back-to-back meetings with his primary care physician and his orthopedic surgeon. They restated the somewhat obvious – that he had multiple health issues and all of them were made worse by his weight. There was one simple thing the surgeon said that stuck with my dad vividly: “We’re only trying to make the rest of your life as good as it can be.”

My father became ultra-motivated to lose a lot of weight. A nutritionist he saw recommended a low-carb diet that eliminated all high-glycemic foods. More specifically, he was to eliminate all “white foods” -- refined sugar, white flour, rice, potatoes. She asked him to keep his food intake under 165 carbs a day.

My father decided he was going to be a bit more radical than that. He aimed to keep his carb intake under 80 a day.

So what did he eat? For breakfast, he ate lox and berries. One thing I should add is that my father is extraordinarily frugal. So when blueberries were cheap, he’d have blueberries for breakfast – for weeks on end. When strawberries were on sale, it would be strawberries for weeks.

Another constant staple was salads. These salads consisted of lettuce, cucumbers, red peppers and tomatoes. He did not limit his salad intake. He made his own dressing to make sure it included olive oil, a “good” fat.

At dinner, it would be broiled or grilled chicken, turkey or fish (or at least it was at first; things changed a bit later on, which we’ll get to) with a salad or steamed vegetable dish and sometimes fruit for desert.

What did he eliminate from his diet? No cereal, no bread, no pita, no chips, no pasta or noodles -- all high glycemic food. No sugar-laden desserts like cake, pie or cookies.

He also joined a gym and started going to the gym 4-5 times a week at first. The primary exercise for him was swimming laps in the pool – the only form of aerobic exercise his recovering hip could handle. 

Quick out of the gates but then a slow-down

The weight loss came rapidly at first. He had lost around 45 pounds by April of 2010. But an interesting pattern started to emerge. He would hit these plateaus where despite the fact that he was adhering to his strict diet, he would level off and stop losing weight for 2 or 3 weeks. But then, after pushing through those stretches, the weight would start to come off again. He’d lost 90 pounds by mid-summer.

Losing more weight became more difficult after he reached 250 lbs. And when he got to 235 lbs., he hit a stretch where he stayed at the same weight for 6 weeks. So he dialed up the rigor of his diet. He essentially cut back to two meals a day, and he cut the chicken, fish and turkey out of his diet, replacing those foods with tempeh, tofu or soy milk plus small servings of lox or pickled herring for protein. He also upped his work-out schedule to every single day, and he started an aqua aerobics class (Interestingly, by his account, the working out only accounted for a small percentage of the weight loss).

Some fatherly advice

There’s no doubt that this has been a Spartan routine for my father. But the results are truly amazing. He has some pretty interesting perspectives on maintaining a regimen of this sort.

The downsides are pretty straight-forward. There was the hungriness and the temptations. But there is also perspective. “The pain in my hip is more difficult than being hungry,” my father says. And the challenge of eating less obviously correlates to less pain in his hip.

Also, his dieting experiences of yesteryear helped him on some levels. “Because I’d been on many diets, I knew I could cut out any food I wanted. In this case, I just had to stop eating a whole bunch of stuff.”

And here’s some somewhat sobering advice he has: “Eat foods that don’t taste that great. That way you’re less tempted to over-eat.”

An interesting technique he employed involved imposing rules and routines on himself: “Eat only at home and stay away from home as much as you can.” (this is probably easier for some than others). And on a related note, my father thinks “it is important to have other activities to take your mind off food, but these activities should not be stressful or cause you to just cram food down your gullet because of limited time or to comfort yourself as a countermeasure to that stress.”

Then there was the common advice to make dinner your last food intake for the day. In other words, no night-time snacks.

Did he ever want to quit?, I asked him. “Not really. I was committed.” The ferocity and frequency of food cravings subsided after a few months. And there were all kinds of other benefits aside from the psychic rewards of shedding pounds. His energy level was higher. He could walk longer distances. He stopped getting winded going up a flight of stairs.

Parting thoughts

Over the past few days (Thanksgiving and the 3 days after), he’s been off the wagon for the first time in 11 months – indulging in the gluttony of this particular holiday. But he’s totally confident he can get right back into the mode he’s been in since January. His goal is to get down to the 175-180 lb. range, at which point he says he’ll add a few indulgences into his diet – like whole grain breads and a bit of peanut butter. But he’s quick to add that he’ll only add in foods if it doesn’t result in weight gain.

This commitment and confidence is wonderful for me to hear personally.

My father literally looks like a different person. It struck me every time I laid eyes on him for the 5 days he was staying with me. Besides looking trim, he seems more animated and more in control of what he’s doing. He doesn’t slouch as much as he used to, and he doesn’t limp the way he used to. He also seems just plain happier.

Is this kind of weight loss a terrifically challenging undertaking? No doubt. Does it seem worthwhile? No doubt.

I cannot stop thinking about the all-day event I attended on Friday – Future M’s Startup Marketing Bootcamp. When your day-to-day reference point is locking yourself in your basement most mornings and remaining in solitude as you try to help build a startup, spending 7 hours immersed in great discussions and surrounded by smart and vibrant people leaves you feeling like you just got served a feast.

Of course, there were only 120-150 people at the event, which means a lot of people who may have been craving some startup marketing insights didn’t get a taste. I took pretty exhaustive notes, and in an effort to make sure anyone who wanted a bite of the knowledge doesn’t go hungry, I’m going to try summarize what we heard from the inspirational people who presented at the event. The notes that follow mimic the order of the sessions at the event.

Disclaimer: This is by no means a comprehensive review, and I’m just jotting down the things that caught my ear and got me thinking – so it’s gone through my personal filter (for better or worse). 

What's Next in Marketing -- Valeria Maltoni, Conversation Agent

Valeria is a bit of a social marketing maven, and her comments echoed comments I heard from another social media visionary, Michael Troiano (@miketrap), on Thursday night. A few themes:

• Be playful (reminded me of Mike’s comment that you need to entertain, inform, promote – in that order)
• You can’t think of customers as faceless targets anymore
• The product is your marketing
• Be interested and be interesting

10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design -- Leslie Bradshaw, Jess3

I have to confess something. When Jess first started talking, I kind of dismissed her because she looked so young. By the end, I was eating out of her hand. She is smart, well-rounded, to-the-point, and she absolutely crushed it with all kinds of helpful tips. I hope I get the chance to work with Jess3 some day. While all of her things CEOs need to know were valuable insights, some of the things that stood out were:

• PowerPoint is not a design platform, it is a delivery mechanism! Many of us have learned that our PowerPoint decks should be visuals that help us with our story. The thing most of us (well, me) haven’t figured out is that PPT isn’t what we should be using to design compelling visuals. Design things in Photoshop or Illustrator, and then bring them into PPT.
• Leave color out at first. Sketch, wireframe, storyboard. No, this isn’t a message aimed designers. This is a message aimed at founders, CEOs, executives. Regardless of your artistic level, force yourself to sketch things out a bit. It will help you convey your vision in the literal sense, and it will help designers understand that vision when it’s time for them to get started on the real design.
• Hire a designer as your cofounder. As Leslie sees it, that’s how important design is. And in this day and age, I’d have to say I think she’s spot on. At my startup, KangoGift.com, we talk all the time about how we wish we had a full-time designer to help us think through the entire user experience. Valeria made the point in the first session that the “product is your marketing,” and to such a large extent, the design is your product (particularly online). 

Principals of Great User Interfaces -- Karen Donoghue, Human Logic

OK, confession on this one… I had to bail out after about 10 minutes to take care of a tiny bit of work and pop some more quarters in the parking meter (only downside to the entire day was running out repeatedly to put more damn quarters in the meter, only to find out at the end of the day I had been ticketed around 11 AM.. ugghh! Am I the only person on earth that thought if you kept time on the meter by putting more quarters in every 2 hours you could avoid a ticket!?) So from what little of Karen I did see, here’s what I found interesting. You can think of design in some pretty quantitative, analytical ways. Here were some of Karen’s interesting high-level points:

• User experience is an engine to drive business metrics
• Design is not about making websites look pretty, it’s about making business work
• Building a great product is a supply chain challenge
• To do rapid UX development, “kill early and kill often” It’s cold and Darwinian but effective.
• Eliminate ALL possible friction points before or during transactions
•  Gather data/input any way that you can 

Mastering the Long Tail – Chris Kenney and Dan Marquees, Gemvara & Micah Rosenbloom, Founder Collective

I immediately liked Dan and Chris. They’re in that casual genius genre of entrepreneurs. They both used to be at VistaPrint (which poached a lot of my coworkers back in my Monster days), and they clearly know their stuff when it comes to online marketing, SEO and SEM. Gemvara (whose founder and CEO spoke a bit later in the day) is actually a company I didn’t know about and glad I do now. They sell jewelry online, and without the constraints of having to carry the physical inventory, they can give people access to an enormous range of products – “mass customization” if you will. In other words, they capitalize on the “long tail” of jewelry.

Here are some takeaways in no particular order:

• 57% of Amazon’s sales are the result of keyword searches outside the “popular terms” (unfortunately, we never quite heard what the definition of “popular terms” is in this case, but the general point is clear – those niche items add up to more than the mass market items in some markets).
• Dan also mentioned a concept I’d never heard of before, which is “tails within tails.” So in other words, in the world of jewelry, perhaps “amethyst” is part of the long tail. But within the realm of amethyst, amethyst pendants with gold casings is part of the tail within that category. Gemvara seems to be conquering these many tails, and they also seem to be en route to disrupting the jewelry category in the process. As a guy who shelled out many thousands for an engagement ring after an exhaustive online search for just the right thing, I can attest first-hand there’s a market there.
• From and SEO perspective, Chris Kenney emphasized the importance of a flat site architecture that is as spider friendly as possible. Also, you need to have rules-based content creating and meta data baked in. This allows you to have structured yet relevant, unique content over time.

Micah Rosenbloom then spoke, and he’s one of those folks that within 60 seconds of him opening his mouth, you’re painfully aware that he’s so much smarter than you are (that was a bit of a recurring theme throughout the day, come to think of it). Micah’s with Founder Collective and was the co-founder of Brontes with Eric Paley (who’s also at Founder Collective). For the record, I’ve seen Eric speak and he’s another one of those guys we Bostonians we refer to as “wicked smaaat,” and it’s no wonder that Brontes is a phenomenal success story and Founders Collective is a hot VC firm these days.

Before I get into my takeaways from Micah, an awesome story about him: Micah recounted how after college, chasing a dream to work in the world of celebrity talent management out in Hollywood, he ran out to the West Coast to land some kind of gig in the dog-eat-dog world of talent agencies. The job he landed? – assistant to the real-life person that is the inspiration for the Ari Gold character from Entourage. In other words, he was the real-world Lloyd! While Entourage is something special for me on Sunday nights, it’s gotta be a whole different kind of special for Micah.

So I think how Micah’s story ties into the “Long Tail” phenomenon is that the product Brontes built could be considered a niche market. Hopefully I’m not butchering this too badly, but Brontes helped create a better way to do 3-D images of people’s teeth. Here’s the thing: There are 50 million dental impressions done by dentists every year -- for everything from retainers to dental prosthetics. Among the many interesting observations Micah had is that while you might hope to nail one vertical, then move on to others (I gather that this was Brontes’ game plan; after dentistry, they planned to move on to other types of 3-D imaging), you better be damn sure to a big enough vertical to start with, because you might end up being there for quite a bit longer than you think.

Other things that Micah emphasized:

• Get PR and get buzz. That creates the pull marketing for you. Brontes was featured in all kinds of media outlets, which helped them get clients on board.
• Brontes was also aggressive about getting their existing customers to market on their behalf. When someone said misleading things about them on message boards, they’d call up existing customers and ask them to comment on the message board to set the record straight.
• Even in this online world where many of us live, you still need to have offline tactics. For example, he mentioned that he’d recently read that Groupon has 1,000 sales/business development people these days (if anyone knows more about Groupon’s sales force, I’d hope you’ll share it with me).

Approaching the Social Media Opportunity, One Perspective -- Joe Chernov, global director of communications and social media, Eloqua

Joe gave a great talk about social media, but putting social media aside for a second, there a few small things that made me think the world of this guy. First of all, he gets up to the front of the room and says he worked really hard on PowerPoint presentation, but he’s going to call an audible and scrap it and speak off the cuff. To my way of thinking, it’s impossible to not respect someone who puts in a bunch of work on something, and then makes a split decision to abandon it all because he thinks the change will benefit the audience. And the other thing about Joe that was just really striking to me is that he was the embodiment of modesty. It was clear that he’s accomplished amazing things in his career, but he almost downplayed his own achievements -- and then to top it off, he bent over backwards to compliment his business rivals (HubSpot in this case). Absolute class act.

Some of the things that Joe said that stood out:

• When it comes to social media marketing (and many other things), Joe likens himself to Cicero’s approach to philosophy – he simply took the best of what others had to offer (if you’re like me, you’ll just pretend you knew this about Cicero already). But the point is pretty basic – when you see someone doing social media in a smart way, you pay attention and incorporate it into your strategy if appropriate. And in Joe’s case, you also leverage other people’s great work and you make it your own. The internet makes it easier than ever to do this. As Picaso said, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
• While modest, Joe is clearly quite clever. He talked a bit about setting “ego traps.” Mentioning how great someone or some company is in a white paper, for example, turns out to be a pretty effective way to get them to promote it for you.
• Joe also talked about the technique he’s using lately to stagger the buzz associated with a certain piece of content he’s published. He’ll release something on YouTube, then tweet about it, then a week later he’ll promote it on LinkedIn groups. In this world in which content streams move so quickly, you need to be strategic about staggering your promotion of content to get the most out of it.
• Joe also talked about how important it is to get influencers in your company on board with your approach early in the process. Giving people ownership is the best way to get people lobbying for your ideas and strategies.

Designed to Spread, Creative Content Strategies – Jon Kay/Sonja Jacob/David Hauser, Grasshopper Group

Jon, Sonja and David were like the wild kids at the party – a crew that everyone remembers. And in fact, I suppose that means they proved out their point – which is that to be remembered, you have to do stand-out things. You also have to tell stories that people want to pass along. Of course, doing stand-out things that people want to pass along can take a lot of different forms, and here were a few examples:

Jon raved about a New Zealand Air commercial called “Nothing to Hide,” in which real employees (including the CEO) went about serving customers wearing nothing but body paint. The commercial was done in a completely classy way, yet it’s a bit arresting. As you might imagine, it became something of a viral sensation.

Sonja presented a great video she created called Thank a Teacher. It taps into core emotions of thankfulness and gratitude. As you can see on YouTube, 200,000 people have viewed this piece, meaning folks who saw it wanted to pass it along.

David Hauser, Grasshopper’s co-founder, recounted how they took South-by-Southwest by storm, with Jon dressed as a matador and someone else dressed as a bull -- turning heads everywhere they went, gathering attention for Chargify (whose mascot is a bull) at one of the world’s great technology conferences. These tactics reminded me a bit of my times at Monster when Jeff Taylor was still there. Jeff would do all kinds of stunts (water-skiing while being pulled by a blimp is the one that stands out) to garner attention for Monster, and while they made me cringe at times, some of those tactics paid off in huge ways.

Refining the Platform: How to Test and Optimize Your Product and Marketing Channels, David Cancel, Performable

David Cancel is another one of those understated-but-clearly-brilliant guy, and he gave a no-fluff, no-B.S. presentation. Some of the stand-out things he touched on:

• Generation 1 of marketing was “outbound”, Generation 2 is “inbound”, Generation 3 is “lifecycle” (Here’s a pretty interesting blog post about lifecycle marketing)
• In David’s opinion, you need to create a data-driven marketing framework to optimize your company for learning.
• He stressed the importance of having a dashboard. Don’t automate it! Use Google Docs. Keep it simple, keep it cheap. It’s going to be painful: Your teams will spend hours working on it every week, and you’ll find out where you suck the most. And you’ll be better off for it.
• Multi-variate testing is useless for start-ups, according to Dave. There’s just not enough data for it to be statistically meaningful. Stick with simple A/B testing, with the best kind of test being a “show/no-show” test (i.e., how do things perform when the widget is there, how do things perform when the widget isn’t there). The point of testing is to prove things quickly! And you should never stop testing; it needs to be baked into the culture as a continuous process.

Making it Happen in a Shoestring: Crowdsourcing Your Marketing Activities -- Ross Kimbarovsky, crowdSPRING 

Ross jumped from being a lawyer to starting crowdSPRING, which crowdsources web design, logo design and writing services. I cannot help but respect someone who believes in a nascent idea in such a powerful way that he walks from stability and swings for the fences with an idea like crowdSPRING. And he also won me over with his view that “planning is over-rated. Just fucking do it” As he said, you’ll learn more in a day of doing it than a month of planning it.

So some specific things that Ross mentioned that stood out as great ideas/concepts:

• If you’re just trying to do fundamental market research, use Mechanical Turk to conduct incredibly cheap surveys with a broad audience. It’s not perfect, but if nothing else, it’s going to help you refine your questions.
• If you’re trying to identify specific audiences to do market research and surveys, social media (twitter and blogs) can be amazingly helpful.
• When doing crowdsourcing, there are a few keys 

1. 1. Be crystal clear on what you’re looking for. The more direction you’re able to give, the better results will be.
   2. Focus on the right details. Ask questions to figure out what the right details are. Gaining some knowledge in any given field is a good step before crowdsourcing (or outsourcing at all).
   3. Avoid “committeecide”

The day culminated with six awesome entrepreneurs getting up at the front of the room and talking about the lessons they’ve learned starting companies. It was as awesome session with great people:

• Laura Fitton, oneforty
• Seth Priebatsch, SCVNGR
• Ross Kimbarovsky, crowdSPRING
• Seth Lieberman, Pangea Media
• Jennifer Hyman, Rent the Runway
• Nabeel Hyatt, Conduit Labs
• Matt Lauzon, Gemvara

But I’m closing in on 3,000 words here, so I’m not going to summarize the last session. Suffice it to say, I admire all of them.

It was a tremendous and inspirational day, and I feel lucky to have been part of it. 

This is one of those stories that’s not new – just new to me. I came across it last night a bit randomly and couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was a bit of an innocent social experiment organized by a Washington Post reporter that leaves you feeling a bit of pity for us humans (is it me, or do all “social experiments” seem to point out how pathetic we are?).

Joshua Bell is one of the world’s finest violists. He’s a young, charismatic guy, and he commands hundreds of dollars per seat when he tours the world’s great concert halls. He plays to sell-out crowds from Boston to Berlin to Beijing. One magazine declared that his ability to play music "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." Apparently, his violin isn’t too shabby either; it’s valued at $3.5 million. I’m no expert, and honestly had never heard of the guys ‘til I came across this story, but you gotta think Joshua Bell is pretty good with the fiddle.

So what happens when Josh Bell plays some of Bach’s greatest masterpieces for free in a completely public place? Throngs of people queue up for hours for a chance to listen to him, you guess.

Not quite.

What actually happens is that as Bell plays for 45 minutes, more than a thousand of people stroll by, barely noticing he’s there. After concluding some of the most intricate scores ever written, not a single persons claps or really acknowledges him at all. Think this is hyperbole? It’s not, and in fact, you can watch for yourself.

To be fair, Bell was playing in a Washington, DC, subway station at rush hour. Bell, of  course, isn’t a household name or face, and apart from his obvious (or perhaps not-so-obvious) abilities, most of wouldn’t ever realize that this man playing these songs as a world-renowned musician.

But it’s a bit of an indictment on humanity, nonetheless, isn’t it? Here is this man, considered by experts to be a true gift to music. He totes his Stradavari to this Metro stop and plays for free – quite literally providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for anyone lucky enough to be walking by. And those “lucky” people just walk by, 99% of them too consumed with making the next train to so much as turn their head to look, listen and appreciate something rare and beautiful.

A few observations:

• When awake, I rarely go more than 2 hours without being connected to email, Twitter or the Internet at large – either on my laptop or through my phone.
• When awake, I rarely go more than 2 hours without being connected to email, Twitter or the Internet at large – either on my laptop or through my phone
• The other day, my 6-year son just finished his 400^th puzzle in the game Unblocked on his iTouch

These types of observations have been on my mind quite a bit of late. Not long ago, I heard someone with a better flare for phrases than me talk about how we are constantly being bathed in “ambient information.“ For example, a Pew Research Center study found that the average girl between the ages of 12 and 17 sends and receives 80 text messages each day, and one in three teens sends or receives over 100 text messages daily.

I also look at my own behaviors, and the extent to which I am bathed in ambient information.

For example, I find myself drifting through my Twitter stream from time to time – not because I need to know what’s going on in anyone’s life, but it feeds me links to information about what’s happening in the world around me – sometimes news, sometimes technology, sometimes politics, sometimes just humor and entertainment. Ambient information is exactly what it is, and it is soothing and it’s addictive. I crave it when I’m away from it for long.

While I guess it was subconsciously evident to me how addictive the Internet and a digital existence can be, I recently came across two stories – one through Twitter and one on a podcast (speaking of ambient inflow of information) – that really hammered home how real this addiction can be.

The first story was about a study recently conducted at the University of Maryland – one in which a class of 200 students were asked to go without any digital consumption for 24 hours. About a third of the students couldn’t get through the assignment. Some reported feeling nervous, jittery or sad. Here’s one description of the experience a student gave: “Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort. When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

The second story was a Frontline documentary called “Digital Nation,” which I’d eagerly recommend watching. It describes all kinds of unintended consequences of this digital age – from South Korean kids literally dying from exhaustion after playing video games for 48+ straight hours in Seoul’s famed Internet cafes, to kids at prestigious universities like MIT completely unable to concentrate on any particular topic for more than a few minutes at a time.

I love the Internet, and I love the digital age. I’m a cofounder of a great little company that taps into the whole digital age phenomenon.

But I also have to say that the ramifications of such abundant information flow are a bit scary. There are parts of our brain that we’ll cease to use. My son might be actually learning something by getting through 400 Unblocked puzzles, but will he be able to remember his home phone number (then again, will he have to?)

It’s an interesting story – one that I’ll follow the years ahead on my Twitter feed.

Visual appended on 6/6/2010