"Money doesn't talk, it swears." Bob Dylan

"The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese." Steven Wright

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." H.L. Mencken

Today's image: Cable Car in the Rain by Thomas Hawk. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Welcome to July. How's your summer so far? By asking that question I revealed my "north of the equator" bias, after all, it is winter in Australia and all countries in the southern hemisphere. With apologies to my readers south of the equator, how's your winter so far?

A bunch of really good books out this season. Here are a few of my suggested reads. Fiction: the English translation by Lucia Graves of Carlos Ruiz Zafon The Angel's Game (Amzn), China Mieville The City & The City (Amzn). Non-Fiction: Stan Greenberg Dispatches from the War Room (Amzn), Sir Ken Robinson The Element (Amzn), Jonah Lehrer How We Decide (Amzn) and the long awaited first dead tree writing of popular blogger, and official N=1 cartoonist, Hugh MacLeod Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity (Amzn). A new stack in the making, stay tuned. Should you be interested in keeping up with my latest reads they may be found in the left column. This list does tend to lag a wee bit.

Upcoming - alot of buzz about the latest Chris Anderson - Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amzn), it drops this week. Certainly a must read. In fact, I've pre-ordered the dead tree version in appreciation and tribute of an earlier promise made by Chris - the online version will be released FREE. Malcolm Gladwell advance reviewed it for The New Yorker, here. Be sure to also read Seth Godin Malcolm is wrong as Seth weighs in on Gladwell's review and the Anderson thesis here. Got a great summer read to share? Want to bring attention to your best book so far of 2009? Would love to have you leave a comment, please do.

My time away from the blog has been spent on the day job involved a variety of cool projects. The first six months of this year a good deal of my bandwidth was spent developing, writing and presenting a brief on the social media phenomenon. As many of you know our team took the first deep dive years ago researching and advising our clients on the emerging trends in hyper-connective social tools. As part of that "research" our team began learning by actually doing. While it has taken time away from this blog my thought is it has been and continues to be time well spent. Twitter (the little app that could which we tipped here in 2007) recently made the cover of TIME magazine. Clearly, these social media toys have gone mainstream. Our suggestion is your team should gain competitive advantage by using these toys as nascent tools. If you or your team are not yet waist deep in all of this social media stuff, no worries. It's early - only the beginning. My notion is MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, digg, et al, are crude tools on our way to a much more robust and effective portfolio of amazing apps and solution sets. My counsel to you is to mind that old adage still employed in the education process of modern medicine "Learn one, do one, teach one." As of today, the social media brief has been presented twenty-three times with more scheduled in the weeks ahead thanks to all the kind words, good reviews and WOM. Each talk has been a challenge, a pleasure and a privilege. I've met some exceptionally bright folks and learned much that can be shared. If you are on Twitter please let me invite you to follow me so that I may follow you. Not on yet? Sign up today, get into the conversation.

Bonus: Getting Ahead of Change by Tom Webster via Edison's The Infinite Dial, here. The cool kids have The Infinite Dial in their readers along with Tom's personal blog, brandsavant, the A students also follow him on the Twitter where he tweets under Webby2001.

Bonus 2: Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2009 Results, here. Related back story and interview with winner: Bad Writing Leads to Literary Award - courtesy ATC/NPR, here.

Don't miss it, if you can. A killer app > Posterous

Congrats & cheers: CBS Radio programming ace Kurt Johnson and his Dallas team blowing out five candles on their Jack's birthday cake today. Quoting PJ seems apt here, "In all of art it's the singer not the song." (Hint: as said here previously, formats don't get stations into success or trouble, managers do.) Penny Baldwin and Landor Associates each hiring on to play a role in the coming makeover of Yahoo!

My sincere thanks to all of you who have been in touch about this blog. Your nudges and continuing support are much appreciated. One person interrupted me during a phone conversation last week to say "You're wasting this on me, one person, why aren't you blogging about this?" Indeed. Back tomorrow with a brand new show. Thank you for stopping by.