HappoDammo Ratio: Happiness Generated divided by Damage Caused

For years I've heard Gifford Pinchot talk about the HappoDammo ratio, so it's nice to see him finally put it into written words:

I realized that we had had a very happy afternoon and done a tiny fraction of the environmental damage done by a typical afternoon of golf followed by a dip in the club pool. No bulldozers were used to make the Linnaea course. No trees were cut down; no sand hauled in; no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides or irrigation were used. I guessed that we had achieved at least the same level of happiness with less than one thousandth of the environmental damage.

Read the full article.

Seven year old blog post: "[LinkedIn] about four weeks into a viral explosion"

Thanks to archive.org, I was able to find this seven year old blog post of mine. I had just attended the Planetwork conference in San Francisco, a combination social media - social responsibility conference.

In my blog post from June of 2003, I found this gem:

I signed up for LinkedIn, another hot topic at the conference. LinkedIn, like Friendly Favors is a social networking site, that allows us to utilize the relationships we already have. For example, let's say that you know I know Peter Theony, author of TWiki. And you would like to make a proposal to Peter, but you also want to make sure he'll give it due consideration. So you ask me to give you an introduction to Peter, or to forward your proposal to him, and putting in a good word for you. Well, this is exactly what LinkedIn does, except that it does it automatically, and allows us to utilize relationships that you don't know about (like my unusual connection to Weekly World News). Conference reports suggest they are about four weeks into a viral explosion.

It's funny to consider that we really had to explain what it was, or people just didn't get it.

I also wrote:

I met Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook. We had an interesting conversation on the social effects of macroeconomics (amazing what you can talk about as an MBA student). We also talked about my WikiAdoption experiences at HP. 

That chance conversation led to a panel presentation on wikis at SXSW in 2004.

Socialnomics

A compilation of statistics regarding the ROI of social media from Socialnomics author Erik Qualman (via John Perez):