In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share some really cool ‘gifts’ that I ran across this week – fascinating, helpful, interesting and fun. I don’t know if you’ll get stuff this cool at home during the holidays (apologies if I’m spoiling you). 
Gift 1 – the Gift of Challenge
Hopefully you’re familiar with Seth Godin – his approach is unlike anyone else on the internet. I’d suggest that more people should emulate him, but I’m not sure it would work – he’s interesting and unique and he does some really cool things that are just him.
His latest cool thing is organizing a free eBook he’s giving away on his site. It has some ties to promoting some charitable organizations, but mostly it’s a series of 1 page essays written by a very diverse group of authors and experts with a general theme of what they are all thinking about and doing now.
It’s called What Matters Now and it’s well worth the download – go check it out.
I especially enjoyed Hugh MacLeod, Howard Mann, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, Daniel Pink to name a few – who challenged your thinking?
Gift 2 – the Gift of Tech
Special thanks to Don Rossberg of KCDataworks – he was the first to point out Seth’s eBook to me and he also wrote a great blog post recently on the 12 Days of (free) Tech where he shares 12 online tech tools / gadgets that are free and more importantly really helpful stuff. He covers everything from Xobni (check it out – highly recommended) to a way to print things easily and quickly to a PDF format.
By the way, if you are a business owner who’s struggling with the appropriate tech support and you’d like to work with someone you can trust, someone who can actually talk to you like a person AND knows what they’re talking about – you should meet with Don. He’s a great guy and would be a huge benefit to any small business owner!
Gift 3 – the Gift of Ooooh and Aaaaah
One of the reasons why I like Twitter is that it’s a great way to find stuff that you’d never come across on your own. It’s like walking along a beach and getting to see all sorts of interesting stuff wash up. One of the things that washed up this afternoon was a really cool photography site that will grab your attention and make your jaw drop.
The first post is a set of 360 degree panoramic photos from stunning locations (like the top of Mount Everest)! I’m not sure how they got some of these shots, but it is very cool (make sure to click through to get to the actual 360 shot). You can find the panoramic gallery here.
As if that wasn’t cool enough – the same site has a set of extreme macro photos of Snowflakes, which are amazingly beautiful and a lot more varied and interesting than I would have thought – check out the Snowflakes here.
What cool online things are you sharing these days? Share them in the comments below – I’d love to check them out.
Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach
photo by 
Delicious solves all of the above and more. Save interesting sites to your Delicious account with tags that are meaningful to you. Share those sites with co-workers or friends (and check out the sites they shared with you). Need to find a site later – just log into your account from any computer and search by keyword or tag. Doing research on something? Do a search overall on Delicious and find the most recent pages, the most popular pages or just what people are saving the most of right now.
photo by