This is just a remarkable post on the obscene growth of YouTube and the transformative effect of a piece of great content on a platform prepared to catalyze that traffic bump into real value.

I don’t have much to say about this post, except that I have not been able to stop thinking about it since I read this post over the weekend.

Enjoy.

Welcome back to school teachers. Have a great year. I had the pleasure of helping my wife get her class set for the year and was totally floored at the amount of time and effort that goes into just setting up a classroom for the year.

Anyway have a great year and please join PlansForUs and benefit from creation through collaboration.

So we had a great response to our inclusion in the History Channel back to school emailing. Welcome to all of our new members who found out about us through this emailing. As a result of this huge boost in traffic, PlansForUs had a breakage. If you registered with us yesterday be on the look out for an email from us. This email will detail the breakage and any steps that need to be applied to fix it, but we are working on eliminating your steps.

Two other notes for today.

Clarence’s “School Begins…But Not Here” is a really cool post. I wish that we had video Skype back in the day so that I could have communicated between New Trier (my alma mater) and our “sister school“. No wonder Clarence is an educator of the year in Canada…and yes I continue to encourage Clarence to give PlansForUs a try.

Sarah you might want to look Clarence up to discuss using Skype for video conferencing between classrooms. I know you had asked me for my thoughts, but Clarence is probably a better resource, though I am of course open to discuss.

Finally, I am really loving Caribou and Phoenix right now. In particular the song “North” by Phoenix and “Eli” by Caribou. Check them out on HypeMachine and let me know what you think.

First thought: The most e-mailed article today in the NY Times was “With Turnover High, Schools Fight for Teachers“.

Unsurprising given the huge number of teachers that are retiring. I wrote about this in a past post “Retiring Teachers, Evergreen Knowledge.” These mass retirements are compounded by the fact that the echo-boomers are a larger generation than the baby boomers and by the transition in teaching styles brought on by the expansion of broadband access and the maturation of the Internet and mobile communications.

Second thought: I noticed today in my MyBlogLog widget that I had a new reader. So, as I usually do I clicked on the associated icon. It ends up that crummychurchsigns (that’s his mybloglog name) is a teacher. His real name is Joel and he blogs at crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com. I intend to get around to reading his blog soon, since I definitely have seen my share of crummy church signs.

Now for the interesting part. When I clicked on the “Joel’s Profile” link on his blog to find out more, it was revealed that I could take one more step into the blogosphere. When I clicked on Teacher, I was led to a page that listed the 35,400 blogs written on Blogspot by self described teachers…seemed like a lot more teacher bloggers than I had suspected are blogging.

Third thought: PlansForUs is a business founded in New York City. We love New York City. Steve has lived here for 17 years and I have enjoyed the past 6 years here in the city. We love it for its culture, its vibrancy and the fact that there are more educators here in NYC than in any other city in America. It’s also interesting to see how Bloomberg is messing around with education.

What we are a little intimidated by is the climate for start-ups. As many of you know, New York is synonymous with Wall Street. Wall Street guys own the big apartments, the fancy cars and the luxurious vacation houses. Wall Street is also a culture that despite its swashbuckling culture is devoted to eliminating risk and maximizing returns….sometimes by collateralizing it and selling it off to buyers who have no idea what it is really worth; but that is not really what I want to talk about.

Founding a startup company is not an exercise which necessarily mitigates risk. While I would love to collateralize my financial risk, the wizards of Wall Street have not quite figured out how to pool me and my fellow entrepreneur’s risk, therefore we are forced to try to sell our crazy ideas to a pool of investors that by and large made their money in endeavors much less risky than a startup. Despite this it seems that NYC is becoming a place for startups. Today’s post from Roger Ehrenberg was a real boost for Steve and I, because NYC is where we want PlansForUs to be and a vibrant startup culture is a huge asset as we attempt to get PlansForUs off the ground. I look forward to sharing PlansForUs with the New York City angel/venture investment culture soon. In the meantime I will work on mitigating some of our startup risk.

Finally, A quick thanks to the History Channel for including us in their Back to School emailing, we will share the impact of that inclusion with your team soon.

I have been thinking about the similarities between you and I for awhile. I see it everyday with my wife and read it in these blogs. I attempted to dig deeper into this connection but got side tracked. I am sure that teachers and entrepreneurs are the same and therefore I am performing a blog burning of the phrase:

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

That phrase no longer exists in my consciousness after today’s blog burning.

Any thoughts on the similarities between entrepreneurs and teachers, please share in the comments section.

Scared, elated, tense, relaxed, focused, diffused, confident. All of these conflicting emotions course through me on a regular basis. I know that I am supposed to just keep an even keel. No matter, good or bad, it’s all a product of your work level, so keep on working hard, the swings will even themselves out and that’ll be just great. I figure if my dad could do it, with all the pressures of raising a family, then I should be able to do it in my admittedly less pressurized situation. I don’t have a kid, a dog or a mortgage. I do have a beautiful and supportive wife and I owe it to her to keep an even keel and work my butt off to grow PlansForUs.

But the reality is that beneath my veneer of even keelness, I am a roiling cauldron of emotion. Now can I mellow that out by taking a step back, absolutely, but as things happen throughout the day and then replay themselves nightly before I go to bed; I have to admit that starting, launching and growing PlansForUs is an emotional exercise. I have read and heard from others about the emotional rawness of being an entrepreneur, but experiencing it is another thing totally.

To deal with this I have returned the coping strategies that have never failed me, physical activity. In my case basketball, running and soon, bicycling. You can find me almost every night, when I am in the city, around 6 at the Stuyvesant Courts in NYC playing hoops. Sometimes it’s 5 on 5, sometimes 1 on 1 and sometimes it me working on a shot that refuses perfection despite over 20 years of ongoing work. When I am not in the city or when the weather changes, you can find me punishing myself with a run, seeking that ultimate payoff, an endorphin rush. Soon you will find me on a classic Vitus 979 (thanks Uncle David) road bike cruising the roads of the East End and upstate New York. Come Fall, I will explore some longer rides up from the city up the Hudson.

The point of this entry is that I am interested in inviting those of you who are creating something and finding the emotional crucible of creation really intense to join me in some of these endeavors. Perhaps you are a fellow entrepreneur, perhaps you are a teacher embarking on a new experience. If you use physical exercise as an outlet, leave a comment, lets get together and regain our even keel through exercise.

So a quick observation. I have two types of educational bloggers in my blogroll. The first are those teachers that share their teaching lives in vivid detail on a regular basis. They describe the triumphs and the miseries of teaching. Sarah Puglisi’s A Day in the Life is one of my favorites. I have recently been adding some NYC based teacher bloggers like Nancy Brodsky’s Se Hace Camino Al Andar and will continue to add these local bloggers, as PlansForUs would love to hear their points of view in person.

The other type is the “technology in teaching” bloggers who advocate innovative ways to apply technology within the classroom. While they may be facing similar situations in the classroom, they choose to write about how technology can affect the classroom.

PlansForUs sits at the nexus of these two groups. We are trying to integrate technology into teachers lives by making that technology synch with the demands that are being described by the teaching life bloggers.

Please check out the blogroll, there is some good stuff.

In today’s WSJ is an editorial entitled “Not By Geeks Alone” about the need to maintain a liberal arts education in our K-12 schools. It is premised on the fact that there is a huge push by the US Government to bolster our competitiveness with Asian countries in the subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Consequently there has been overwhelming support for the America Competes Act which will focus on funding those programs and institutions that show MEASURABLE success at increasing our STEM aptitudes.

The authors acknowledge that increasing our STEM aptitudes will have positive benefits, as our country will most likely close the gap with our Asian competitors in these aptitudes. The question they pose is an interesting one: What is the net effect of deemphasizing liberal arts?

As someone who graduated with an economics minor and has been enjoying Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics over the past week, I am hyper aware of the laws of scarce resources. If we spend more time on STEM subjects and rigorous testing, we will have to take time away from our study of liberal arts courses. Like the authors I believe that the ongoing success of our economy rests not only with our ability to be technically proficient, but with our ability to discover non-linear economic activities. Apple, Google, Sam Adams, Starbucks…PlansForUs. America’s success derives from those who seek solutions to problems that have non-linear economic outcomes. The skills required to identify those outcomes are described by the authors as “…creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition and problem-solving prowess.”

An engineer can have these skills, but only if that engineer spent some time thinking non-linearly. Maybe it was a class on Greek Comedies or on the Rise and Fall of the Qing Dynasty, but one must be intellectually flexible enough to absorb the huge amounts of data input that our world is constantly creating. We will never match up to countries like China and India on a pure technical basis. Sheer numbers make the probability of our success impossible. The way to maintain the success of the US amidst world competition is to generate non-linear economic thinking. Solve a problem that only you have perceived and then get funded by the incredibly flexible market system that we have constructed. Have your company destroyed by an upstart and do it again. This is the reality of our global markets, we no longer have any more access then any other country, therefore we cannot engage in an intellectual arms race.

Competitiveness, technical understanding, technical skills are important…hugely important. Now overlay that with the liberal values described by the authors above and lets keep cranking.Well rounded students are our best bet at success, so lets stop trying to churn out cogs of consistent shapes and sizes…We may all be cogs, but there is no reason that our myriad sizes and shapes can’t work together in a most harmonic way.

By the way, China is feeling like they need to bolster their liberal arts education. If you have NY Times Select (worst idea ever, glad it is being removed) look up the article “Re-Education“.

I don’t know Charlie O’Donnell, though I understand he is a minor celebrity on Silicon Alley due to his work and his prodigious networking skills. Anyway, Charlie has posted his business plan presentation online, here. I am a big fan of transparency and this seems like a cool tactic for getting attention on your idea. Best of luck Charlie.

Well it is a hot day in NYC today and I am inside with the A/C on.
Regardless, I have spent the day thinking about how to engage our Delta Region Teach for America friends and how to engage the educational bloggers who have been such a great source of insight for the PlansForUs team and me.

Back tomorrow with something more substantive.