This weekend we drove from our home in Leesburg, VA to visit my wife’s family in Staten Island, NY. Along the way, we passed through rural areas of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. I had my laptop with me, which we used while we were driving. I used my Blackberry 8830 as a tethered modem, and we enjoyed UNINTERRUPTED high speed internet access.

Would you like to rule the web? Mark Frauenfelder’s new book will help you do exactly that. I thought I knew about most of the cool stuff on the web, but thirty pages into this book it was clear to me that I was deluding myself. Mark is the founding editor of BoingBoing.net and editor in chief of Make. His book is called Rule the Web. Here are ten things that I learned about by reading it. I am sure you will discover many useful and cool tips in this book. He’s got a blog to keep up to date too.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of twelve books. Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. from Stanford.

Lois Kelly is the author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. This is her explanation of the top nine types of stories that people like to talk about. If you’re pitching your company to investors, customers, partners, journalists, vendors, or employees and you don’t use at least one of these story lines, you probably have a problem. And most likely you’re too close to what you’re doing, so you think that you’re uniquely “patent-pending, curve-jumping, and revolutionary.” :-)

Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.

Want to be inspired? Check out this collection of videos about social entrepreneurs from around the world. It’s called the FRONTLINE/World series. Here’s a description:

I don't wear ties.  It's not so much a rule as it is a preferred statement - learned over being in the interactive industry for more than ten years.  Instead, I often wear button down shirts, which leads me to the most serious of all wardrobe questions that men around the world deal with on a nearly daily basis ... how many buttons do you leave unbuttoned?