Via Judgmental Maps. Click to biggify. I live in the Strollers and Bars part of Brooklyn and work in the Artsy Folks section.
Category: Brooklyn
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Understanding Social Media
This is a really important thing. If you use your Twitter feed to try to promote your brand with a hashtag, you really need to consider how popular your brand is in the first place. Because there’s no rule that a hashtag has to be used the way you intended.
This should be obvious.
Jenny McCarthy asked a fairly innocuous question, “What is the most important personality trait you look for in a mate?”, on Twitter and asked people to respond with the #JennyAsks hashtag. But she’s a notorious anti-vaccine person so most of the responses were like this:
I guess the NYPD is equally clueless. They asked this:
I’m generally a fan of the NYPD, but it’s not clear why they couldn’t see this coming
Honestly folks, find someone in their 20s and ask them what could go wrong with your proposed hashtag. I’m old and I could see these coming…
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+ POOL
I thought I had blogged about this before, but maybe not. It’s a crazy concept so perhaps I was waiting for it to get closer to reality. I donated to the Kickstarter ages ago, just on the off chance it could work.
The concept is a floating pool in the East River off of Brooklyn Bridge Park. That’s my neighborhood. The technology is to filter the water so it uses filtered river water.
This would be 5 minutes from my office.
Can it work? Who knows? They’ve met with city planners, engineers, boatloads of folks. And they just launched the Float Lab to actually test the technology in the river.
If they can pull this off, it will be the coolest urban enhancement ever. And yes, I bought a tile…
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NYC Nightlife According to Citi Bike
Citi Bike recently released a ton of raw data for developers to run wild with. Someone wondered if you can infer late night activity based on Citi Bike usage. Yes, yes you can.
Below is a map of percentage of Citi Bike departures between midnight and 4AM on weekends.
If you don’t know NYC, the party winners are Williamsburg Brooklyn (big section on the right) and the Lower East Side (big section in the middle).
I, being old, live in one of the lighter sections…
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Flowers
With Valentine’s Day approaching I have to tell my florist story.
A million years ago when I worked at Marsh we sent our administrative assistant (who was fabulous) flowers. We ordered them from 1-800-flowers. They died the next day. But 1-800-flowers was excellent and sent replacement flowers the next day.
These were gorgeous and lasted two weeks. Our admin told me she’d never had such beautiful flowers and gave me the card of the place that sent them.
My wife has never received flowers from anywhere else.
It never dawned on me before to ask what flowers are fresh. Since that episode, if I’m ordering roses my first question is “what colors are fresh?”. I’m sure not every florist is honest, but these guys tell me what arrived that morning. And I order accordingly.
At Valentine’s Day prices, they better last.
My other tip would be if Valentine’s Day is Friday and you are sending flowers to the office, why not send them early? Do you think you wife will not like getting flowers two days before her friends? And if bringing them home is a pain, you want more days of beautiful freshness.
I don’t know much, but I haven’t screwed up flowers in a long time…
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A Messy Commute
Snow to sleet to freezing rain in Brooklyn this morning. A sloppy walk to school with the girls and a jam packed subway ride of annoyed New Yorkers got me here:
(Manhattan Bridge in the background, my office to the right)
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Citi Bike as a Verb
I hadn’t thought about this until I read this Times article on Citi Bike during the winter (and yes, I’ve ridden in January). Like TiVo, FedEx and Google, Citi Bike has become a verb.
“Are you catching a cab?”
“No, I’ll Citi Bike over”
The line from the article is perfect:
…as Citi Bike, the bike-share program in New York, quickly evolved from curiosity to lifeline to verb..
In the month of January, Citi Bike averaged almost 10,000 rides a day. Hard to believe people though this wouldn’t be a success.
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Super Bowl Visitor’s Guide to Manhattan
Really nothing Super Bowl specific about the advice. Two separate authors had one very similar point:
I swear to God, if I see you eating pizza at a Sbarros, I will have Rog invalidate your game ticket. Don’t test me.
Don’t eat a chain restaurant in New York. Not even once. It will destroy your soul. Mine too. (Dan: Let’s just call this The Sbarro Clause.)
There is nothing worse than coming to New York and eating at Olive Garden…
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Don’t Be a Jerk
Humorous tourist tips for visiting NYC…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 