Many thanks to AJ for putting together the first Minnesota PodSafe Music Awards and asking the PodcastMN community to help pull it together.
If you haven’t hear my voice in a while…I introduces the nominees and announced a couple of the winners.
Month: January 2007
Thursday, 18 January 2007
Listen to the MN PodSafe Music AwardsSome Post-Pre-Dad Thoughts
Daddy Types is collecting thoughts for Soon-to-Be-Dads.
Mine:
Everyday, take your family for a walk.
And a bonus story:
One of our neighbors rang the doorbell one night back when Little C was just a few months old. Jen and I were watching TV and I was giving Little C his early evening bottle.
The neighbor asked if I could help him unload a new swingset from his car.
The he noticed what I was doing and said: “No rush. Enjoy this time. It doesn’t last that long.”
The News Block by Block
Chris nails the idea I’ve talked about on this blog (1, 2, 3) and in numerous lunches: the blog-on-every-corner news.
St. Anthony Village is a pretty small town geographically, 3 square miles. Imagine if just the houses on the corners published something community-related every other day. That’s 1/3 of your neighbors writing about what’s happening on their block – regularly. More frequently than any of the papers – all without an ‘Associated Press’ byline.
Sure, the same topics will be covered…but the importance (relevance + intimacy + community) will be so much greater. Plus, far greater comprehensiveness on any given subject whether High School Ice Hockey or City Council proceedings. Overlap verifies.
Later 11 Apr 2007
I just picked up blogbyblock.com.
Wednesday, 17 January 2007
Color Me Stressed
I took the ColorQuiz 3 times this afternoon. Hear the results
Monday, 15 January 2007
Balance in the Air
A couple very recent quotes on balancing your life from two of my favorite bloggers:
RSS: Rude Screen Scrapers?
“I hate it when RSS
scrapersstealmycontent” – Thord Daniel Hedengren
Yes – crediting the source is polite. I make a point of linking back and crediting, and expect the same those of you that find what I write interesting. That said, spammers are inherently rude. They don’t change their ways when asked politely.
If a publisher doesn’t want their publication re-published (w/ or w/o credit – the come together) then they shouldn’t be using RSS.
Or the internet.
Or anything that can be digitized and uploaded.
Or the publisher could put a block on any site they don’t want accessing their site, something in the .htaccess usually works pretty well.
Fun for the Comments: Re-state the quote above without using the blacklisted buzzwords.
Sunday, 14 January 2007
Something’s Burning
My 2 most recent pet peeves:
- Permalinks that are actually Feedburner redirects.
- Feed links that are actually Feedburner landing pages
Anyone else or just me?
LATER:
Some elaboration as requested by Jake Parrillo from the Publisher Services Team:
Jake,
Thanks for the note.
To start, I use NetNewsWire as my aggregator.
By redirects, I mean the tag of an item being a Feedburner link redirecting to, rather than being, the item’s permalink. When I’m quoting and linking to the item, I want the actual permalink. Today, to get it, I need to load the Feedburner link into a browser and wait for the redirect, then grab the permalink. Artificially inflating pageviews and generally slowing me down.
Yes, by ‘landing page’, I was referring to the “Browser Friendly” pages. When I clicked the feed link, I expected the feed url to be passed to NetNewsWire. With the “Browser Friendly” pages; I need to first realize that I need to take an action, then make a selection, then the url gets added to NNW. Again, slowing me down and not what I expect to occur.
Saturday, 13 January 2007
iTouché-ing
I believe it’s been said many times before; while there are many other tech companies out there – Apple is the only one worth complaining about.
If Apple was actually interested in short-term value and a simple, highly-constrained, highly-polished experience, the iPhone wouldn’t do 2/3 of this things it’s purported to (still being vaporware and all) and it’d be 1/2 the price. But wait – OS X has BSD underneath it, responds to AppleScript, Automator, I can create all sorts of custom software on it, and is quickly turning into the choice development platform for developers – because of the integration of elegance and underlying access. Apple can do both – their pedigree is in making it easier for regular people to make things – while encouraging consistency.
On top of that, the iPhone is being positioned as the replacement for the Treo and the Blackberry (if only in price point). A new closed system will dramatically slow adoption. Adoption by a highly vocal, discriminating, influential, and well off group of people.
Did I mention, the majority of my developer friends have switched to the Mac? They expect to have access to their devices. I know I do. Lots of organizations sell controlled experiences. From Disney to our state penal system. While lock-in may have been a feature 10 years ago (AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe), today it’s a bug. Walled gardens – no matter how pretty – are simply less fulfilling on the second visit.
Oh, and Scott, by the way, all my clients are welcome to post to the Work Better Weblog. And if you want to change the layout, feel free to parse the RSS feed into something that works better for you.
Lastly, where will Apple get their next great interaction idea from – if not their own developer community?
Friday, 12 January 2007
Take 40% Off the Top
What would your business look like if you cut out 40% of the overhead – while improving your customer relationship?
LATER:
40% – that’s like an entire business itself. Reminds me of the old adage, goes something like: “I know 50% of my income is from my business, I just don’t know which 50%.”
Feeling Temporarily Secure
I’ve been to handful of airports – the underlying architecture of them all is: open, flowing, permanent.
The ironic exception is the airport checkpoints – like pop-up stores in malls. Foldable tables, movable queue markers, equipment on wheels – makes it feel so temporary. Like it just might packed up and gone tomorrow.