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End of the day here in Philadelphia, an uneventful flight. Reception with some of the advisory boards as soon as we got in, but still an early night all in all. It’s 10:37, and tomorrow morning is the big session. Once that’s over with, I’ll be able to relax and enjoy the conference. I don’t feel that bad about the session right now, and I know for sure that when I look out at 250 people, there’s gonna be at least a few minutes of pretty extraordinary terror and pain as I get through the opening section of the literature review. But again, once its over, all will be well, and I’m hoping to get over to the new Shalla(?) on Wednesday.

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just phoned in an entry via Jott. too tired to wait for it to come through. may be incomprehensible. if so, read into it whatever you might like.

Using the iPhone to blog from the airport. It’s slow going, for sure. One fingered typing and a keypad that blocks a good deal of the screen. As is the case with anything, some practice will make it all seem normal. By the end of the week, this ought to feel pretty comfortable. Or maybe by the end of this post.

Green tea soy latte. Mmmm. My Gift told me they were good, and I am trying my first one. A little syrupy sweet, truth be told, but gosh, I love anything with matcha tea powder in it.

Practice this morning was abbreviated so I could get to the airport on time. As is the case when one doesn’t get much sleep (I woke to a nightmare of being stalked by my Indian father, who intended to kill me due to my somehow besmirching the family honor), practice was very light and flexy.

I did suryas, standing (including the balance poses at the end), then moved to pasasana and the intermediate poses. I expected it to be harrowing, what with skipping all of primary and starting practice an hour earlier than usual. But. As it turned out, everything felt easy and light. Nice.

Urdhva dhanurasana, sore ribs and all, is something I look forward to more and more. Slowly cracking open.

Okay, enough practice report.

Over the next couple of days, I want to try using Jott to literally phone my blog entries in. Tempted to try it for this entry, but there is too much background noise. Plus I’d feel like an ass, dictating my thoughts in public.

Right now, a woman is singing the happy birthday song into her phone. Perhaps my self-consciousness is misplaced.

Owl asked where the conference is. Philly, I answered, noting that I hadn’t found any Mysore practice in the city.

Her reply: “Tomorrow, Yoga Sutra Philly opens its doors. This is David Kelman’s project and the sister studio to Yoga Sutra NYC. I have heard it’s a beautiful space. (YSNYC is gorgeous.)”

Mapped the studio, and sure enough, it is .46 miles from my hotel. Looks like I have a home away from home. With some luck, I’ll be able to visit on Wednesday and Thursday…

Lovely Sunday practice, with a weird little undertone from the upcoming conference presentation. When I have something scary coming up (yes, public speaking certainly fits into the “scary” category), I tend to have all of my thoughts stop at the event — kind of like the future doesn’t exist past that scary conference session on Tuesday. Fine.

Practice was clear and happy. I can do an abbreviated practice tomorrow morning, in order to get to the airport on time. And then Tuesday is a moon day, so no practice ahead of the session. Kind of a mixed blessing. The practice grounds me, but the super-distracted feeling of a pre-scary-event practice can be kind of exhausting.

Anyhow, this morning was lovely. Easy to concentrate, easy to let go of everything. There is always something, though, isn’t there? Who knows what will replace the conference session once the conference session is over…

Towards the end of practice, I had the sweetest sense of the purpose of practice. These insights, it must be noted, are definitely helped along by an easy, light backbending experience. Anyhow, it struck me that practice has helped me learn to manage my own frustration, impatience and greed. It has helped me learn to manage my “God, you suck at this” inner monolog — even as it gave me plenty of things to suck at. And it’s taught me to appreciate incremental progress, but to also be ready to accept if progress is gone the very next day.

Practice every day. All is coming. Indeed.

Ujjayi breath was a cavern this morning, far bigger than me. My thoughts, untethered, kind of rolled around in there and dispersed. No stickiness at all.

Is the rib pain of second series really the intercostals? I keep thinking thoracic diaphragm.

The Chinese master Dongshan once taught, “Concerning realization, through the body, of going beyond Buddha, I would like to talk a little.”

A monk said, “What is this talk?”

Dongshan said, “When I talk, you don’t hear it.”

The monk asked, “Can you hear it, Master?”

Then Dongshan replied, “Wait until I don’t talk, then you will hear it.”

I know, I know, it’s 4:56 AM and I’m back to the “where does marketing and product management fit into the social networking puzzle” question.

Here’s an interesting post that is a little helpful for thinking about this issue.

The pressure on PR firms and marketers alike to adapt and take advantage of this new paradigm is strong. Many will not survive the transition. The two most important ideas that must be relearned are that a) your communication channels are radically expanded by social media and user generated content…you must have a solid understanding of your potential online media outlets and the right message for each and b) it no longer stops there, you must learn to modify the medium to your advantage. More concretely, don’t just go to the NY Times and pitch your case study, consider what your presence should be on social networks, blogs, etc that are relevant to your customers…ask yourself: Where do my prospects congregate on line? Can I create my own community around my brand? Then, create your own content and adapt the message to both the audience and the medium: don’t just make a viral video, because they are hot…you might be as well served simply by posting insightful comments to the right blogs. And finally, focus on the medium itself to accelerate distribution and build a trail that leads back to your own website. Link, link, link. Syndicate, syndicate, syndicate. Everywhere, all the time. A news story in the print version of the NY Times lasts a day and then goes into library archives. A blog post or a gadget can be redistributed across the Web, and a link from your story back to your website on a page rank 9 site has a much longer lifetime in cyberspace than the print equivalent in physical space.

The post is specifically about the expansion of user-generated content into the “news” space. But it can apply to the expansion of social networking into the “product” space — in other words, in its positioning on the web.

Geez. Placement on the web. Good luck to anyone with that job.

And yes, I’m amused at the suggestion that all PR and marketing people brush up their understanding of linguistics and postmodernism. But mixed in with that amusement, I must admit, is a good dose of despair. Because as Freud might say, “Sometimes ‘the medium is the message’ is not just ‘the medium is the message.’”

Social networks aren’t products (and I mean the actual networks, not the applications that enable the networks). As this little blog entry points out:

A social network isn’t a product as such. Rather, the product that a social network provides is access to a large pool of other people.

I imagine people might counter-argue that social networks are a service, in order to make a case that they ARE, in fact, a product.

The notion that a social network is a product gives me a really bad feeling, gut-wise. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about product management or marketing to make a case.

Oh, just found something by Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, which refers to social networks as a “tool.” That feels better than “product” to me.

If there are any marketing folk out there, let me know what you think about this. Is a company’s social network a product?

Investigate business models around social networking.

If anyone out there has any thoughts/insights/books/resources to suggest, feel free…

NYU professor Clay Shirky recently used the term “cognitive surplus” to refer to the brain power we have left over at the end of the day. When you’re done thinking about the things you have to think about, what’s left is your cognitive surplus.

In the past, turning cognitive surplus into a product involved time, specialized teams and production expense: individual people did not have means to create their own video programming, music products, encyclopedias, published writings, etc. People organized specialized teams to do those things, and the rest of us sat around and consumed them.

Web 2.0 changes all of that. The means of production are available to anyone with a computer, and there are plenty of people out there who want to collaborate and interact and actively create content.

Chances are, if you are reading this blog, you are already keenly aware of all of this.

It’s very fun to see it catch hold as a notion at work.