merici

My Lean In story - one week later

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:00:51 -0400

About a week ago I shared my Lean In story and I’ve been surprised - in a good way - to read all of the comments from people who knew my parents are taking the time to reach out and say hello. People I’ve never heard of or haven’t heard from in years have found the post and left a comment.

Kirsty McNeill put it best:

Everything cynical I ever thought about whether online connections could be genuinely meaningful has disappeared reading the comments Merici Vinton’s #leanin story. People are pretty extraordinary.

Thanks for that.

lauraolin: We haven’t lost our sense of humor, that’s for damn...

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:44:24 -0400

lauraolin:

We haven’t lost our sense of humor, that’s for damn sure.

marissamayr: I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an...

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:43:49 -0400

marissamayr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs. With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of thefastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day. Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

As I’ve said before, companies are all about people. Getting to know the Tumblr team has been really amazing. I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.

Both Tumblr and Yahoo! share a vision to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas by focusing on users, design — and building experiences that delight and inspire the world every day.

http://yahoo.tumblr.com/

“We promise not to screw it up.”

Potluck and Pabst for new consumer crusaders

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:02:51 -0400

Potluck and Pabst for new consumer crusaders:

Employees had taped paper snowflakes to the windows and hung a strand of white Christmas lights from the ceiling. Soft music played from an iPod, and a plastic penguin greeted guests arriving from their cubicles two floors below. The potluck offerings stretched across several tables - homemade…

No big deal, shouted one staffer as the laughter subsided, “We’re a start-up.” - Merici Vinton

maxistentialist: A 6th grader’s advice to next year’s 6th...

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:01:39 -0400

maxistentialist:

A 6th grader’s advice to next year’s 6th graders.

freedomtomarry: To all the mothers and mothers to be, we say...

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:07:19 -0400

freedomtomarry:

To all the mothers and mothers to be, we say “thank you” for showing us what the freedom to love really means.

Love, Freedom to Marry

getting an education

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:38:00 -0400

Last week I started my new role and project: I am joining the A World At School initiative as Senior Advisor and Director of Digital. A World at School is a new organization that solely exists to work towards achieving the UN’s second Millennium Goal - getting the 61 million kids who are out of school…into school. And working to get quality education to those who don’t yet have it. We were founded by the children’s charity, PiggyBankKids, led by Sarah Brown, who previously worked on the amazing and successful global health campaign around maternal mortality. Additionally, we are supported by the UN Education Envoy, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Our approach is targeted and combines ongoing education efforts at the highest levels of governments and NGOs alike with the grassroots efforts of individuals and impactful projects happening globally. We are going to start with the 10 countries that have the highest number of children out of school and work with them on projects that will help us get closer to achieving the Milllenium Development Goal.

In addition to digital, I will also be building partnerships with ed tech organizations and awesome projects that work to get girls in to STEM education. If this is you or someone you know or someone you think you know, please ping me (merici at aworldatschool dot org).

For me, it’s a really cool/terrifying challenge - I am thrilled to work on a global, macro campaign (#meta). It’s great because Gordon and Sarah (and our partners) are incredibly committed with a strong emphasis on impact that I know we will be able to move this campaign forward. [We will also be working in country with partners - so while our mission is global, we are trying to make it as local as possible] [probably. it’s only my 5th day.] Also, can I just say how cool it is to work with a kickass lady? This is my first time having a direct supervisor who is a woman (!!??!) and there needs to be more of us in management.

I’m totally down to talk about our work and we are always looking for more people to get involved - as partners, fans, noisy campaigners - so ping me.

Let’s do this.

aworldatschool.org
@aworldatschool
facebook.com/AWorldAtSchool

"I did that"

Tue, 07 May 2013 06:17:46 -0400

"I did that" :

“You should bring something into the world that wasn’t in the world before. It doesn’t matter what that is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a table or a film or gardening — everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, “I did that.’”

- Ricky Gervais

(via @swissmiss)

Video

Sat, 04 May 2013 09:18:00 -0400

so. cool.

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:41:30 -0400

so. cool.

jedsundwall: viewsource: Letter to JFK from Kurt Vonnegut “On...

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:40:45 -0400

jedsundwall:

viewsource:

Letter to JFK from Kurt Vonnegut

“On occasion, I write pretty well.”

BEES? an oldie, but a goodie

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 06:48:39 -0500

BEES?

an oldie, but a goodie

RIP Grandpa. An amazing 94 years old. #amazeballs

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:52:21 -0400

RIP Grandpa.

An amazing 94 years old. #amazeballs

newsbeastlabs: Tracking the presidential groundgame As the two...

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:03:06 -0400

newsbeastlabs:

Tracking the presidential groundgame

As the two presidential campaigns launch into their final throws, we wanted to see who had the biggest footprint of campaign headquarters across the country. The map above ran with the resulting story showing Obama with a large advantage, especially in swing states. We thought getting from idea to map / chart would be as easy as checking the candidates’ websites or calling their press offices to request a full list. Not quite.

Finding Romney’s offices

Governor Romney’s campaign didn’t get back to our requests so we dug into their website. Romney only had volunteer offices in 16 states, each of which has a web page and a map showing office locations. Here’s Ohio’s. The data that powers the map is visible if you look at the Javascript files that power it, so we copied the data sixteen states into one file and saved it. They were in JSON file format — but more on that later.

Finding Obamas’s offices

President Obama has offices in many more states than Romney so going state by state is more of a hassle and his campaign’s website doesn’t have the same convenient state-by-state maps. Instead, you input your zip code and it gives you a map of all locations within forty miles of you.

Needless to say, getting a comprehensive list by canvassing the country in 40 mile chunks was out of the question. Digging again into the javascript that powers the website (aside: the Obama website has some slick ASCII art in their source code), their volunteer center finder works by sending out a query that looks like this http://offices.barackobama.com/postal_code/10011/ with your zip code making up the those last five digits. If you put that in your browser and hit return you’ll see the centers closest to the Daily Beast offices in Manhattan.

It automatically looks within 40 miles of you but if you add “?distance=1000” at that url, it will search within however many miles you want.

So if you add the zip code for the rough geographic center of the US, Lebanon, Kansas and a distance of 10,000 miles you get something that looks like this:

http://offices.barackobama.com/postal_code/66952?distance=10000

which will give you a list, in JSON again, of every volunteer center in the country.

This list returns a lot of information we didn’t immediately need, though, like hours of operation and email address contacts. We wrote an R script that took just the fields the we needed for our map, mostly the latitude and longitude, city, and state and made a clean spreadsheet in CSV format.

From there we were able to do counts by state and plot them on a map. Once we had the final count, the Obama campaign confirmed that our number was in the right ballpark.

BONUS: Obama’s offices all include a Foursquare ID. If you want to play around with them, here’s the data, right click and choose “Save Links As…” if it doesn’t download automatically. Some interesting things could be finding the mayors of the obama campaign offices, which location has the most check-ins, check-ins over time in different locations etc. — let us know at newsbeastlabs@gmail.com and we’ll put up your stuff.

Let's reconsider our "users"

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:38:05 -0400

Let's reconsider our "users":

jacks:

us·er
/ˈyo͞ozər/

Noun
1. A person who uses or operates something, esp. a computer or other machine.
2. A person who takes illegal drugs; a drug user.

Synonyms
consumer

During a Square Board meeting, our newest Director Howard Schultz, pulled me aside and asked a simple question.

“Why…

so relevant for a project I’m working on…perfect!

ICYMI: THE WEATHER YESTERDAY (Taken with Instagram at Hoxton...

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:22:29 -0400

ICYMI: THE WEATHER YESTERDAY (Taken with Instagram at Hoxton Square)

An awesome hotel with fantastic views #unicornhoneymoon (Taken...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 03:41:53 -0400

An awesome hotel with fantastic views #unicornhoneymoon (Taken with Instagram at Heritance Kandalama Hotel Dambulla)

Cookies for Breakfast: So a Girl Walks into a Comedy Club....

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:10:26 -0400

Cookies for Breakfast: So a Girl Walks into a Comedy Club....:

ICYMI, rape jokes *still* aren’t funny. (and they never have been)

breakfastcookie:

This is something that happened to a friend of mine in her own words.

“So, on Friday night my friend and I were at her house and wanted to get out and do something for the evening. We brainstormed ideas and she brought up the idea of seeing a show at the Laugh Factory. I’d never been, I thought…

#thingsIllmissaboutDC Military drone mistaken for ‘UFO’ along DC highways

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 22:06:07 -0400

#thingsIllmissaboutDC Military drone mistaken for ‘UFO’ along DC highways

#TheMericiAndDomAreLeavingDCsoonParty photo courtesy of @nekaro

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:30:04 -0400

#TheMericiAndDomAreLeavingDCsoonParty

photo courtesy of @nekaro