Joseph Carrabis is a patchword quilt of a braniac. The dude has written books ranging from cultural anthropology, database technology and methods, information mechanics, language acquisition, learning and education theory, mathematics, network topologies, and psycholinguistic modeling.

He’ll teach you how to know what someone is thinking in 10 seconds or less. He knows the inner secrets of a “Marketing Whisperer.”

He plays a dozen instruments and may speak as many languages, including Gaelic, which he does on the show.

Joseph Carrabis, Founder, NextStage Evolution on “Why People Do What They Do.”

And most interesting to me, he uses brain science to describe the different approach men and women take in the arena of community, power and social networking.

Oh, and he flies kites bigger than dump trucks.

Super special. Waaay smarter than you and I combined. You may end this episode feeling like you’ve squandered your slacker life, you may learn some amazing insights to help you with your business, you may get both.

“Susan is a wildly unique blend of uber tech-geek, social-spiritual visionary, spear-wielding Valkyrie, sweet soul and biz whiz. She is an inspiration, a walking wikipidia of the hip and Web 2.0, a genuine leader and so fiercely honest and present, she will burn away your illusions, personal or professional, like a human incarnation of Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Helluva cook, too.” November 26, 2007

Adam Gilad, Show Host: www.TheFearlessLover.com

Thank you, Adam, for this amazing gift. I will treasure it.

The Fearless Lover: The Spiritual Foundations of Present, Boundless and Enduring Love

Do you believe in “falling in” love?  Or “finding” love?

Or have you discovered that love is something you create, that you generate, refresh, nourish and inspire, day by day, minute by minute, breath by breath, choice by choice?

It turns out, that love is like an ember that requires us to ignite continuously with the sweet breath of our devotion, imagination and courage.

If you yearn to create a life full of ever-deepening and ever-expanding love, yet find that you carry fears which hold you back, then you have found an invaluable ally in The Fearless Lover.

Is it possible to continually open your heart and be the source of love that your lover, your family, your friends and all those whom you love yearn for you to be?  Is it possible to handle and dissolve those fears that hold you back from being that person for them?

It is possible. But it requires a passion for wisdom, and the willingness to put into action some solid, doable practices.

The Fearless Lover is about your becoming, every day, step-by-stumble-by-leap, a more fearless lover of life and its pleasures, most especially where it is both hardest and most gratifying – as a passionate intimate lover of your beloved partner(s).

Each week, The Fearless Lover will bring you wisdom – and simple practices - from all around the world, from the Toltec to the Tantric, from the Kabbala to the Christian, from the Sufi to the Sikh and beyond, in order to explore daily practices that help you open your heart into being the Fearless Lover you may aspire to be.

Hosted by scholar, writer, producer and teacher, Adam Gilad, The Fearless Lover will bring you interviews on wisdom and practices from all traditions, with spiritual leaders, writers, thinkers, noted psychologists, scholars, ethnologists, noted cultural creatives and visionaries.

The single goal: to bring, week after week, the most potent and grounded tools and wisdom from around the world in service of you growing into bolder love, more playful intimate communion, and a life of creativity, adventure and joy.

Because, honestly, what else is there to do?

This ring is so pretty. My show sponsor, ICE.com, gives all my listeners a 20% off coupon code DISHY and free shipping. If you are going to buy a holiday gift for your wife, mother, girlfriend, sister, daughter, friend…think about using my promo code. Jewelry is the #1 thing women want for the holidays.

Retail Value: $750.00 ICE Price: $375.00 Special: $300.00 You Save: $450.00 (60%)

Then you get another 20% off ($60) for a net cost of $240.

And free shipping for goodness sake!  And a 60-day money-back guarantee that if she doesn’t like it, she can have anything else they sell from their huge collection!

It’s-taking-everything-I-have-not-to-buy-this-ring-right-now!

Out of the 20 weekly podcasts on Personal Life Media, 9 of them are about relationships, sexuality and intimacy.

One of our newest and most fun advertisers is Dream Brands. Gary Kehoe and his wife invented a new personal lubricant that uses a natural ingredient called Carrageenan, derived from red sea algae. Instead of petroleum-based lubricants like silicone or sticky lubricants like glycol, Carrageenan is slippery and silky.

Have you read the ingredients in lube? E-gad! It’s all horrible chemicals these big companies expect us to put on our delicate parts. I purposefully went out and found companies that are focused on making natural, organic, vegan and safe products. Why use anything else? Carrageenan is an all-natural brand.

They are running a :30 second podcast advertising campaign in six of our weekly shows including Tantra & Kama Sutra; Beauty Now; Expanded Lovemaking; Just For Women; Sex, Love and Intimacy and Aging Gratefully.

Their research shows that women in their 40’s and 50’s are having “the best sex ever.” And these women are among the biggest users of personal lubrication. The ad campaigns are running in radio, on TV and in print as well as innovatively in podcasts to reach their core demographic.

You can use promo code LOVE at checkout to receive 20% off your order or you can post a comment germane to the discussion of personal lubricant and/or podcast advertising and I may select you as the lucky recipient of a full-size product sample. Choose from the regular or warming lotion.

MarketingWeb from South Africa delightfully reprinted Trendwatching’s 2008 Predictions. The one that caught my eye is Trend 3: Snack Culture.

It talks about the rising popularity of on-demand “media snacking.” I love that term. And I see the realization of that trend in my own series of podcasts in that one of my top shows, The Joy of Living Creatively, runs between 8-12 minutes long. It’s frequently an iTunes Top 100 show and in addition to being about a popular subject - creativity - it’s also great simply because it’s a short, powerful boost to one’s daily life that takes a few precious minutes.

Listen to it while you’re waiting for your baggage to arrive, while you’re zipping to buy milk, while you’re walking to a meeting, while you’re walking the dog. The idea of a deep subject, broken into small portions is powerfully appealing.

Click Here to Go to the Blog and Listen to the Show in Your Browser

Click Here to Subscribe to Joy of Living Creatively in iTunes. 

Trend 3: Snack culture (reprinted from MarketingWeb)

Snack culture represents the ‘transient sphere’ on steroids, catering to consumers’ insatiable craving for instant gratification. It embodies the phenomenon of products, services and experiences becoming more temporary and transient.

It is not a ‘new new ‘ trend, but definitely one that will continue to thrive next year.

According to the New York Times: In just three years, sales of 100-calorie packs of crackers, chips, cookies and candy have passed the US$200-million-a-year mark, and sales grew nearly 30 percent last year. According to analysts, the market for these pint-size packages could easily double because of their simple appeal: they help consumers eat less without having to count calories themselves.

A report from the Hartman Group found that 29 percent of Americans believed that 100-calorie packages were worth the extra cost. For manufacturers, snack packs are about 20 percent more profitable than larger packages.

Then there’s media snacking

“Music, television, games, movies, fashion: We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips-in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. Today, media snacking is a way of life. In the morning, we check news and tap out emails on our laptops. At work, we graze all day on videos and blogs. Back home, the giant HDTV is for 10-course feasting - say, an entire season of 24. In between are the morsels that fill those whenever minutes, as your mobile phone carrier calls them: a 30-second game on your Nintendo DS, a 60-second webisode on your cell, a three-minute podcast on your MP3 player.”

We have a nice promotional image, courtesy of the team at iTunes, on the podcasting home page today. It matches our new “publishers page” which looks amazing, thanks to the creative genius of Brooks Cole of Holocosmos.

Guest Blogger, Doug Weaver, founder and CEO of Upstream Group gives us his perspective on Forrester’s ad spending projections - see report highlights, courtesy of KenRadio.

According to Doug:

Forrester’s numbers pass the smell test for me, although I find them still tethered to the old-fashioned concept of place. It’s all about “this or that channel will grow and we’ll put ads there.” I don’t see (or I missed) the discussion of the massive levels of audience selling that will be taking place through the exchanges and “ad operating systems.” This is where the web starts taking a big bite out of TV GRPs: when we can sell consumer audience segments in efficiently packaged bundles with great scale. I think this is the same story that was a the heart of the IBM report. See Doug’s opinion on the IBM Prediction here.

“Ad Operating Systems” is my term for the bit tech/data/portal conglomerates:
Google + DoubleClick
Yahoo + Right Media + Blue Lithium
Microsoft + aQuanative
AOL + Ad.com + Tacoda

The premise is that these are going to be huge transactional engines for the buying and selling of audiences on line. They disintermediate a lot of the low level hondling that too many people get paid way too much to do.

Forrester’s Interactive Spending Projections

No Slowing Down Interactive Marketing Spending (worthwhile free subscription to Ken Radio)
Interactive marketing spending in the US will more than triple over the next five years, reaching $61 billion by 2012, according to Forrester Research. The report expects that a maturing perspective about interactive channels coupled with technology advances will eventually lead to interactive technologies infusing all marketing efforts, and the interactive marketing organization will dissolve. The growth in interactive marketing spending represents a 27% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years. Interactive marketing — which currently comprises 8% of all ad spending — will grow to 18% of total ad budgets in five years.

• Search marketing will triple in five years. Mainstream marketers’ aggressive use of search marketing will grow the category at a CAGR of 26 percent to $25 billion by 2012 due to the increasing costs of paid search, additional spending on optimization tools and services, and international expansion.

• Display advertising will reach $14 billion by 2012. Display ads will be a key factor in the interactive marketing budget by having an essential supporting role for all interactive campaigns.

• Services and integration — not volume — will drive email marketing growth. Spending will focus on improving email relevancy with analytics and data management, and will grow to more than $4 billion by 2012.

• Online video ads will significantly increase. Growing consumer adoption of online video will result in a dramatic 72% increase in online video ad spending to $7.1 billion by 2012. More customer-centric online video applications will increase the medium’s appeal for consumers and marketers.

• Social media will drive emerging channels to $10 billion by 2012. Mainstream adoption will boost spending in emerging channels such as social media, mobile, game marketing, widgets, podcasts, and RSS. Spending on social media alone will grow to $6.9 billion as marketers understand how to use and measure this channel.

• Mobile marketing will grow to $2.8 billion. As consumers become increasingly tied to personal computing handsets, they’ll want to extend their mobile utility to accommodate transactions. This transition will drive mobile marketing to grow to $2.8 billion by 2012.

These changes will not only affect the budget structure of marketing organizations, but it will also give interactive marketing professionals a more legitimate seat at the marketing table. In fact, with interactive marketing gaining executive visibility as much for its popularity with young consumers as for its measurability and cost effectiveness, seeing a class of marketers emerging who will involve themselves with a few high-profile interactive experiments in order to catapult themselves into the CMO seat.

———————————

Susan Bratton

Founder and CEO

Personal Life Media, Inc.

Podcasts and Blogs for People on the Leading Edge of Culture

Twitter Me

(650) 948-0500 o

(650) 248-3483 c

DishyMix cuts through the clutter with fascinating guests routinely shocked out of press release mode into pure authenticity by Susan’s beguiling insight. Don’t miss an episode! — Listen now in iTunes. — Brooks Cole, Holocosmos

My House is For Sale

The #1 Thing Your Wife – Girlfriend – Lover Wants for the Holidays is Jewelry

Doug Weaver, coming up soon as a guest on the DishyMix podcast is guest blogging today about IBM’s “End of Advertising as we Know It” prediction.

Per Doug: It was interesting on a couple of levels. There was a kind of anachronistic ‘travelogue’ feel to the whole thing: as though the Big Blue team was discovering the ad business for the first time. It was intriguing to hear someone not rooted in the digital space describe all these changes from the outside, tranlsating it for the common business person. Of all their prediction-scenarios, the one I find most likely is the Open Exchange model.

The web is really good at disintermediating unnecessary people in the buy/sell process for commodities and cost/availability services. If it works for tickets and books, why not for impressions and GRPs? There’s nothing so magic about the buying of a garden variety ad. I’ve written on this topic as well (”The Oreo Doctrine“) and challenged ad sellers and buyers to redefine their real work as something more akin to consulting.

Where I think the IBM report goes off the rails is in its assertions about reengineered consumer behavior. I think the idea that consumers are going to become active participants in the selection of the ads they see is just off base. Most consumers get the fact that advertising is going to fund what they’re getting for free or for a greatly reduced cost, and they’re OK with that. We’ll accomplish a lot more by simply letting that compact stand and then using the powerful observations we make about the consumers behavior to pour more and more value into the ads themselves.

– Doug Weaver is founder & CEO of Upstream Group, a consulting and training company to Internet advertising, marketing and commerce-related businesses. Internet leaders like Yahoo!, CBS Interactive, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Online and
the Tribune Interactive, look to Upstream for timely consulting, focused training and quality networking and learning opportunities.

ICE.com is a sponsor of many of the shows on Personal Life Media.

They are pioneering podcast advertising in the ecommerce space.

It’s time to think about buying your wife a Christmas present. The #1 thing women want is jewlery.

You get 20% off any jewlery purchase if you go through my landing page.

I know you are afraid of choosing something she won’t like. ICE has a 100% guarantee that she can return what you bought and get what she likes, but here are my picks to make your choice easier:

I like this big gaudy cocktail ring. It’s over 8 carats, a pretty color and costs $335. Green is great for blondes, brunettes and redheads.

For a more casual style, I like these Andrea Barnes hoops. They are not too big and I like the various gemstones. I’d wear these every day with jeans. For $95, these are an excellent stocking stuffer. Really, you can’t go wrong!

If your girl doesn’t want hoops, these are more sweet and just a fabulous color. They can be casual or dressy. For $175, they are reasonably priced and every time she wears them she thinks about how much you love her.

Make the move. You’ll be glad you did!

And let me know how your shopping experience and gifting experiences panned out.

Happy Holidays!