For those who are fans of Guy Kawasaki, there is a phenomenon he is fond of calling "Guy's golden touch." It is his own trademark reversal of a well known saying, where he likes to note that "everything that turns to gold is what Guy touches." One site that is definitely gold right now is Twitter, riding a wave since it's popularity at SXSW last year, the site steadily seems to be getting more and more users.

This summary of an article from the December issue of the Journal of Advertising Research (good luck finding the issue online because I couldn’t) says that common word-of-mouth advertising by regular folks is more powerful than “key influencers.” Which is to say that sucking up to A-list bloggers may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. It seems like it’s a bad day for celebrity endorsements.

Here are the top-ten Leopard tips from my friends, Adam Engst et al, at Take Control Books. They’ve already released five ebooks to help people upgrade to Leopard. Take Control publishes minor updates for free, so the authors can revise their books on the fly. These guys are the experts, but I have two Leopard tips as well, more about them later.

Frank Warren started PostSecret as a community art project in November 2004. Since then people have sent in one hundred and seventy-five thousand anonymous postcards. They are featured in art galleries, a music video, and Frank’s bestselling books: PostSecret, My Secret, and The Secret Lives of Men and Women. His new book is A Lifetime of Secrets.

My buddy at Redfin, Glenn Kelman, decided he wanted to bare his financial soul so that other entrepreneurs could get greater insight into the witchcraft called financial modeling. In this two-part posting, he reveals his numbers and his lessons. They are eye-opening for most entrepreneurs.

Halo 3 shipped on Monday at midnight, and there were launch parties at Microsoft campuses around the country. These are pictures from the Mountain View, California location.

Like CEOs, marketers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, lawyers tell their own specialized tales. Most of my experience is with lawyers who do work for tech entrepreneurs, so this is my focus.

Amazon—yes the place you buy books from—has a cool service called the Mechanical Turk. It’s a system that enables people to complete online tasks (“HITS”) such as tagging, classifying, searching, grading, and transcribing. For example, you could pay people to do tasks such as:

I love the Internet because I wake up every day and discover something cool. Today’s discovery is TrendHunter, a site that recruits people around the world to spot trends. Here are some examples:

Today’s Science Daily tidbit is that advertising during television programs with sexy content is less effective than during programs with no sexy content. This is the research finding of Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of the Department of Psychology of the University College London.

The guys at iInnovate posted a lovely interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Among the topics they covered were:
Anti-trust (with a beautiful deke to create “time and space” as we say in hockey),
Innovation, Competitive advantages, Motivation of entrepreneurs, Maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit, Traditional and non-traditional organization design, What Microsoft and Yahoo does that impresses him and Invention of disruptive technologies. My favorite line was: “You don’t learn very much when you yourself are talking.”

The latest TED Talks are now online. The last time I blogged about TED Talks, I made that claim that Majora Carter was as good as Steve Jobs and that created a controversy. One of my favorites is Richard St. John’s. It’s from 2005, but it’s still highly relevant. He gives a great definition to CRAP. The quality of these videos is so high that you will be thanking BMW for sponsoring them and won’t mind the BMW ad in the beginning (Thanks to Bill Meade for pointing these videos out.)

Avenue A Razorfish recently published the 2007 Digital Outlook Report (6230.6K). This report examines trends in the way consumers, publishers, and advertisers employ digital media to have a conversation with each other. Specifically, it covers the following areas:

This is a picture of my copy of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It has broken my record for the “book with most stickies.” My system is that the stickies on the top edge are ideas for my next book, and the ones on the side are ideas for this blog. As you can see, it’s a gold mine for great stories about entrepreneurship. Here is a list of some of my favorites. The major lesson: Entrepreneurship is all about tactics, hootspah, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money.

On the day that Apple announced the iPhone, my eleven-year-old son decided that he wanted one. Since then he’s done chores above-and-beyond the call of duty in order to earn $500 to buy one. Fast forward to last week when this news appeared in the business press: