Yearly Archives: 2007

Google reaches out

Posted on by
3

Google ReaderOkay, make of this what you will. A few days ago I posted a couple of lines about having a problem with the “Share” feature in Google Reader. I did not report the problem to Google. But within about 24 hours, I received the following email:

“Hi Steve, if you send me your email address I’d be happy to take a look at your account to see what’s going on.

Justin Haugh
Google Reader Engineer”

Justin subscribes to a search feed for “google reader” at blogsearch.google.com, saw my post, and reached out to see if he could help. (The issue had already resolved itself.)

Think about it. There must be a bazillion people using Google Reader. I didn’t ask for help, but someone at Google took watch for users needing help and take time to offer. Does your company go that far? Does mine? Do the Google Fan Boy T-shirts come in medium?

De Niro and Pacino reunite in $60M indie

Posted on by

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino will team on-screen for just the second time in “Righteous Kill,” a $60 million indie production in which they play cops chasing a serial killer. The script is by Russell Gewirtz, the guy that wrote “Inside Man.” De Niro and Pacino had just two scenes together in “Heat” but will be on-screen together pretty much throughout this new flick. With that budget… and these two movie greats… I have to wonder how you could make a shitty movie. Let’s hope they don’t.

Seth Godin: “Blow up your home page”

Posted on by
Reply

“Do you really need a home page? Does the web respect it?

Human beings don’t have home pages. People make judgments about you in a thousand different ways. By what they hear from others, by the way they experience you, and on and on. Companies may have a website, but they don’t have a home page in terms of the way people experience them.

The problem with home page thinking is that it’s a crutch. There’s nothing wrong with an index, nothing wrong with a page for newbies, nothing wrong with a place that makes a first impression when you get the chance to control that encounter. But it’s not your ‘home’. It’s not what the surfer/user wants, and when it doesn’t match, they flee.

You don’t need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they’re all just as important.”

This post by Seth Godin perfectly says what I’ve struggled to communicate to clients and friends as I try to steer them away from traditional “home page” websites… and toward blogs. It’s a hard sell because it’s easy to throw up some bull shit copy from those old corporate brochures we spent so much on, and really hard to engage with your customers in a fresh, timely and relevant way.

The First Tech President

Posted on by

The Personal Democracy Forum lists six requirements for the first "tech president": [via Buzz Machine]

  1. Declare the Internet a public good.
  2. Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless Internet access nationwide, along with protecting and expanding unlicensed spectrum for public use, and make the Internet a reliable part of our infrastructure….
  3. Declare a “Net Neutrality” standard forbidding Internet service providers from discriminating among content based on origin, application or type.
  4. Instead of “No Child Left Behind,” our goal should be “Every Child Connected.”
  5. Commit to building a Connected Democracy where it becomes commonplace for local as well as national government proceedings to be heard by anyone any time and over time.
  6. Create a National Tech Corps….

(George, this is the perfect follow-up post to our three hour chat this morning.) For those of you that weren’t there, this morning’s topic was: "True or False: Sometimes We Are Better Off Not Knowing."

Creed’s Blog: www.creedthoughts.gov/www.creedthoughts

Posted on by

The Office is a comedy. And a love story. And probably the funniest thing on television since Seinfeld. And I’m not sure it isn’t the equal of Seinfeld. Here’s a little shout out to bloggers from last night’s season finale. Here’s what I could make out (freeze frame) of Creed’s “blog” post:

“Hey-o, everyone out there in SyberWorld. It’s old Creed Bratton coming at your again, here from my perch as a Quality Assurance Manager at Dunder Mifflin paper. Just a few observations on the world around me. What do you guys think is the best kind of car? To me, you can’t (off screen) motorcyles. They’re small and dangerous.

I go…”

Did one of the writers compose that post? Did they let the actor who plays Creed write it? Did that someone know some blogger/fan would go to the trouble to post Creed’s post? Am I the only person on the planet to do so? Is there another Beck’s in the frig?

PS: Holy shit! The actor who plays Creed (Creed Bratton) was a member of the 60s rock band The Grassroots. I’m the only one that didn’t know that, right?

Beyond blogging with TypePad Pages

Posted on by

smays.com is hosted by and managed with TypePad, a blogging platform. I’ve been a happy camper since making the switch from Blogger. The ONLY thing it didn’t offer was the ability to create individual pages (as opposed to a blog post). And this morning I see they’ve added a "TypePad Pages" feature. Yessss.

I’ve been steering clients to TypePad for the last year or so and the inability to add "static" pages has been an issue. I’ll add a page or two here at smays.com and let you know if this is as handy as I expect it to be.

Bringo: Talk to a real human

Posted on by
Reply

Call a customer service phone number and end up in automated operator hell. With Bringo, you don’t even need to dial your phone. Just find the company you want to talk to in their directory, type in your phone number, and a couple of minutes later Bringo calls you and connects you to an operator at that company. [via Tech Crunch]

Google Reader share feature

Posted on by

I am a Google Fan Boy. I can’t help it. I love most of the Google services I’ve tried. And I keep discovering new ones. The “Share” feature in Google Reader is not new, but I just got around to playing with it and I love it.

I frequently come across a story that I’d like to share. I’ll sometime email it to friends and –if I have the time– post on it here. But there are times when I just want to point you to the story and have nothing to add. With one click in my Google Reader, I can add the story to a public page (“Steve’s Shared Items”). The five most recently “shared” stories also appear in the sidebar here at smays.com.

This simple tool extends my role of “who asked you?” editor/aggregator. While I cannot post on everything I find interesting, Google Reader has made it easy to share.

“Child-safe and Disney-friendly”

Posted on by

“the future of any audio entertainment that is financed by advertisers is a future where the content is child-safe and Disney-friendly – a future specifically monitored by agents with agendas to ensure that the inoffensive, the harmless, and the docile float to the top of what’s “acceptable.” – Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0)

Which only means that we’ll have to pay for the good stuff.