“SpoofCard calling cards offers you the ability to change what someone sees on their caller ID display when they receive a phone call. SpoofCard offers the ability to select a Male or Female voice when making a call. The feature works in real-time and allows the caller to speak in a normal tone while the person on the other end will hear the changed voice.” So, if you receive a call from a nine-year-old girl talking dirty, it’s me.
Don’t need no stinkin’ press release
I only go to one technology conference a year: Gnomedex. It’s small, as such events go. Just 300 attendees and sort of a tough ticket. I’ve been going since Chris Pirillo started holding them in Des Moines back in the late 90’s. I’ve gushed about it here so I won’t bore you with why I love this conference. This year Chris is doing something unheard of: No press release.
This year’s conference has sold one-third of its available seats since opening registration a mere week ago. Despite having not yet unveiled speakers or sponsors, the conference is well on its way to being sold out for the second year in a row.
If you’re planning on attending, let me know.
Website relaunch death march
We’re just days away from “relaunching” our corporate website. I added the quotation marks because what we’re really doing here is applying a new template to a few thousand existing pages. Our current look is more than three years old and it’s time for a fresh face. And the nature of our company has changed a lot in those three years. I think the new look reflects that nicely. Andy Waschick and his development team at Gestalt have done a fine job of giving us just what we asked for on this project. My role has been that of the stock dog that runs around yapping and nipping at the cows legs, hearding them in the right direction. In order to do my job, I have to be a little annoying. But I’m pleased with the result and will post here when the new look is up.
Podcasts, blogs and Dave Barry
According to a piece by C. W. Nevius on SFGate.com, Dave Barry has left the newspaper business. A little more than a year ago, Barry announced that he was taking a sabbatical from his column, and has now decided to make the break permanent. The reason, he stresses, was not that he had a lack of faith in the industry, but that he was ready to move on. Still, he has grave doubts about the future of newspapers.
And the story talks about Barry’s blog and his interest in podcasting. Is this a very funny rat, leaving a sinking ship? I never read Barry’s column in a newspaper but hit his blog frequently. Somehow this seems…significant. [Thanks, David]
Blog anniversary beers
This Friday (February 3rd) will be the fourth anniversary of smays.com and I’m going to mark the occasion by attempting to drink four cold beers. I invite any bloggers and/or readers to join me at Chili’s right after work (five-ish). If I succeed in drinking four beers, I probably shouldn’t drive so please bring this phone number (Checker Cab) with you: 636-7101. It’s possible you’ll be the only one that shows up and I don’t want to throw up in your car.
Time Machine
A few years ago, a sale rep for our company asked to have a commercial written and producted in a ridiculously short period of time. My advice was something along the lines of:
Go down to the basement where we keep the Time Machine. Set it for two weeks ago. When you get back there, submit this work order and it’ll be ready by tomorrow.
Since then it’s become something of a running joke for a few of us at the office. Yesterday it occurred to me how much fun it would be to have a Time Machine in the basement. It would be the highlight of every tour. I don’t have the skills to build such a device but I have some ideas on what it should include:
- Computer and monitor
- Headphones
- Analog date display (more fun than the monitor)
- Flashing lights
- Siren and/or horn
- Levers (lots of them)
- Switches (lots of them)
- Seat belt (shoulder harness would be better)
- Helmet (women probably won’t wear this or headphones)
And I sort of see this on a platform sitting on some huge coil springs, so there would be the slightest movement as you climbed into the seat. Which should be either an old dentist chair, or one of the old metal tractor seats with the holes in it.
What started as a gag could be a great marketing tool. A fun way to review significant moments in the company’s history. But we could also look into the future. This would be huge. I predict we’d have so much word-of-mouth on this, customers would be calling us, asking if they could visit and take a ride in the Learfield Time Machine.
So who could build such a thing? I have no dought some artist or sculptor has already created exactly what I’m looking for. But it’s in a museum or art gallary and damned expensive. My childhood friend RP could have built this in his prime. Not sure about today. He has the imagination and technical skills.
Joe Browning could design it but I’m not sure he could build it. He’s an architect in Santa Fe so he probably knows someone that could make this real. If you know of someone that could pull this off, put me in touch. Hell, I might even be able to get the Grownups at our company to come up with some dough. If not, we’ll have a series of car washes or ham and bean dinners and raise the money.
Naked Conversations
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:
- Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
- Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
- “First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
- Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
- If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
- If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)
If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.
I’ll update this post as I move through the book.
Death Row Blogger
“Vernon Lee Evans Jr. — amateur advice columnist and convicted murderer — is scheduled to die next month by lethal injection. He is one of the very few death row inmates to have a blog and, activists say, perhaps the only condemned man worldwide to use a blog to take questions from readers.”
— washingtonpost.com:
More Squirt Cheese in History
“It was against this backdrop that Marco Polo floated into Japan in a hot air balloon, carrying with him the most luxurious goods from his homeland: extra virgin olive oil, Venetian blinds, and his 5 remaining bottles of squeezable parmesan cheese. The Japanese people, after years of gustatory oppression, gobbled Polo’s golden ribbons of delight with gusto. They rose up against their oppressors, won their freedom, and never looked back.
Is there a lesson for the modern reader in Japan’s tragic romance with its scrumptious first love? Perhaps it is this: we fight the good fight for that which we hold dear, but ultimately, to win or lose is a mere footnote to our having tasted our bacon-flavored life to the fullest.”
Wouldn’t you love to know and hang out with someone that can write like this? I am so pleased to know David Brazeal and so sad we don’t get to hang out.