Month: June 2006

Monday, 19 June 2006

RSS Puts Identification in the Hands of Your Customers

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on RSS Puts Identification in the Hands of Your Customers

I’m listening to the Individualized-RSS podcast over at Marketing Edge podcast. The conversation is an attempt to bring the weakness of email into the strength of RSS (or verse-vica as the case maybe) – unique reader identification.

This is what I alluded to in this post from a couple months ago. There’s nothing in the technology of RSS that prevents people from identifying themselves – just by adding some identifier (another url for example) to the end of the URL string.

Any more registration isn’t necessary or even good (yes, this is a hack.)

Plus, it’s a much friendlier way to build a relationship with people. Registration (of any sort) requires people to make a commitment before they know the relationship will be useful and valuable. Not cool.

On the other hand, there are some specific situations where a locked down, personally-identifiable RSS feed actually adds value to the customer. I’m thinking of communications that needs audit-ability, a high-level of filtering, and guaranteed delivery. We’re not talking marketing communications here – we’re talking Very Serious Business and in that case, I recommend talking to Kris at Pale Groove about CastLock.

Wanted: High Efficiency Washer / Dryer Recommendations

by Garrick van Buren 7 Comments on Wanted: High Efficiency Washer / Dryer Recommendations

Like Shel‘s, our current washer and dryer is ancient. More ancient than the one we left at the last house. So, our washes aren’t as washed as we’d like and well, damp is not a synonym for dry. I checked.

We were going to wait a year and do a huge home appliance upgrade (fridge and and stove same vintage). Tumbling around in my head Kristin is saying, “… blah blah paying for inefficiency until then blah blah…”

So, we’re looking for recommendations on high-efficiency washer and dryer set, Not a combo, separate machines. Front-loading preferred.

What do you like?

UPDATE 20 January 2007:
We decided on the Whirlpool Cabrio pair from Warners Stellian. We got a good price, and Warners Stellian offers the best home appliance shopping experience in the Twin Cities. Also, it was a super easy decision – these were the only top-loading, no-agitator in the store.

Saturday, 17 June 2006

6 O’Rocket News Boom

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on 6 O’Rocket News Boom

A pretty big storm passed through town last night. Thunder, lightening, complete down pour for hours. Kinda thing that makes you glad to be inside (we weren’t when it started).

I flipped on the TV, to get some idea of what we should be expecting. This is the first time I’ve watched the local news in…well…um…years probably.

  • Short, out-of-context, video clips from around the world – Check
  • Half-amusing/half-smarmy, politically-loaded commentary – Check

Feels exactly like RocketBoom.

Wednesday, 14 June 2006

The Bottomless Feed and the Need for Now Context

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on The Bottomless Feed and the Need for Now Context

“I’ve punted on trying to catch up on 19,000+ updated posts in Bloglines. I don’t have the time, or interest, in trying to sift through them all. I picked out a few blogs from a few categories that I’m absolutely interested in and skimmed through them and then marked all as read.” – Ed Costello

I do the same everyday – independent of vacations. There’s no reason to feel uncomfortable coming back from a 10-day vacation and not reading every page of the daily newspapers you missed or watching every minute of the evening news you missed, the same applies to blogs.

So, a couple of notions we all need to get good and comfortable with:

  1. There’s always more to do. I’m not big on stressing out how much work there is to do – work scales, time doesn’t. Work is persistent, time (despite what Dali says) isn’t.
  2. There’s always more to read. If every person you know, would like to know, are interested in, or is connected to you in the slightest way is publishing on any regular interval – there’s too much to keep up with. Especially if you’re also publishing and attempting to accomplish something during the day.

Welcome to the Post-Scarcity world.

We don’t yet have the tools that can actually, really help us. The aggregation and filtering tools we have are extremely simple. In my experience, they all filter the most basic, single-dimension attributes; publisher, date, or some notion of category/tag. Nothing more complex.

The problem we all have yet to solve is deceptively simple:
What should I pay attention to right now?

There’s a reasonable chance that this exact post at this exact time is what I should be writing. Some much much smaller chance says this is the exact time you should be reading this exact post. Yet, here we are.

The best tool we have to determine exactly what we should be paying attention to right now is….our guts, our insecurities, obsessions, fixations, interpersonal relationships, and Google.

The majority of the information we receive during any given day is FYI at best. No action required. Depending on your definition of spam – it can probably be immediately deleted. There’s always one Best Next Action out there – finding it will only become more of a challenge.

Tuesday, 13 June 2006

Applications and Features I’m Interested In

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Applications and Features I’m Interested In
  1. Shared read/write calendar – so multiple people can change the information on a specific event.
  2. Shared presentation application – so a group of people could easily see the same thing, controlled by a single person, sans-projector.

Monday, 12 June 2006

PodcastMN Live to Hard Drive June 2006

by Garrick van Buren 2 Comments on PodcastMN Live to Hard Drive June 2006

Tonight, PodcastMN was at the Acadia Cafe for the inaugural PodcastMN Live to Hard Drive event.

The line up included:

I had a great time. Learned about how each of us do our show, wine tasting, the word “Amen”, and well, since I’m writing this while The Nameless Band Representing Creot Radio is playing, that’s it thus far.

Cinema Playground went all out with a 3-round movie trivia show with – non-podcasting contestants. Remarkable…and hard.

Overall, a refreshing change from the sitting-around-drinking-talking-geek meetups. About 15 seats were filled at any given time so, I’m declaring it a success. There were even requests for another one. I’m up for it. Who else?

Thanks to Ted and the Acadia Cafe for the space, Matt for running the sound, and everyone that did their show.

J Wynia has took some photos of the evening.

Sunday, 11 June 2006

Don Norman – ‘User’ is Derogatory

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Don Norman – ‘User’ is Derogatory

“Psychologists depersonalize the people they study by calling them ‘subjects.’ We depersonalize the people we study by calling them ‘users.’ Both terms are derogatory. They take us away from our primary mission: to help people.” – Don Norman

Individuals. All of us. Alone together. Even though we hide behind organizations, keyboards, and words – we’re all individual people.

Friday, 9 June 2006