IDEAS

BTW – We agree

Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.

Here’s what I took away from the talk

Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.

Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.

Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.

Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.

Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:

1. Be transparent - it will help you connect with people and if you don’t say it, people will still find out
2. Be relevant – media is fractured so ask your customers how and what they like to hear from you
3. Be brief - our attention spans 140 characters at a time (or 2.7 seconds)
4. Stay top of mind – talk to people often

Again thank you Peter for the great talk.

Congratulations Marek and Flore! Welcome to the wonderful world of wed lock

But that’s how I got introduced to wedsite.com. My good friend and non web developer created a lovely online experience to introduce us all to his wedding plans.

Big props to wedsite.com for allowing couples to communicate their very special wedding plans.

Now, this won’t replace the formal invitation, but there are so many ways that this is a fantastic supplement.

• more information
• will keep me up to date
• photos
• music
• background (As I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the bride to be yet)

Moreover, their pricing is great and you can get your own domain and a keepsake CD.

BTW – 4 out of 6 people who signed the guestbook complimented the website

And no, I do not work or get paid from wedsite.com to say this. Being in the web world, I get tons of friends asking me how much would a wedding site cost and this is my response.

I’ve been saying for years that job searching costs way too much, and always thought of demolishing the whole industry by putting the craigslist business model into place for the job search industry. Looks like someone beat me to the punch, and its one of the pioneers of the industry itself! Read the whole article here

“Pioneer of online job search starts over again

Bill Warren founded an early online job board in the 1990s, helped kick-start an industry and was president of Monster.com, one of the leading Internet career sites. But these days he’s not very happy with the results.

So he’s taking another crack at it, going after Monster, Career Builder and similar commercial job sites. Warren is starting a nonprofit job listing system that could lower the costs that employers pay to list positions and make the process easier and more fruitful for applicants.

He has the enthusiastic backing of hundreds of large companies, including IBM Corp., American Express, AT&T Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, the kinds of employers that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year searching for new talent.”

This portion is a great idea that wasn’t in my original idea, but it’s a very clever idea that will help put these websites over the top:
“Companies that belong to the association pay a $15,000 annual membership fee and will receive prominent placement on the “.jobs” Web sites. Smaller companies can purchase a “.jobs” domain name for about $125 a year and then post jobs for free. They can also work through their state employment agencies, which post jobs online at no charge.

At those prices, the new “.jobs” system could be another online innovation that undercuts what currently exists — much as the invention of job boards themselves undermined newspaper help-wanted ads.”

Got this email below today about dimdim.com’s newest features which finally include quick desktop sharing and username based URLS to simplify starting a meeting. If you don’t know what dimdim does, it’s a web conferencing tool that is free for up to 20 users and the price goes up from there, but it’s very reasonable and it’s very stable.  For the attendee to a meeting there is no software to install, for the host that wants to share their desktop, there’s a small plug-in to install and it works for both PC and Mac.  I just used this tonight to view a Mac user’s screen and she was able to install without any direction from me.  It was pretty sweet to send her a URL that goes directly to the meeting I’m in that’s based on my username instead of some long guid URL.

If you haven’t used this product, give it a try. If you have meetings with less than 20 heads, I’m sure you’ll find this comparable to webex or live meeting.

Here’s the email from DimDim:

“Thanks to your suggestions, we’ve made Dimdim faster, easier, and a lot more powerful.

The instant you log into Dimdim you’ll notice the change. A big red button invites you to “Meet” Click it once (go ahead, try it) and in seconds you will be in your live Dimdim meeting room.

Now look at your browser’s navigation bar URL. It will be http://my.dimdim.com/username Simply email, IM, Skype or Tweet this Smart URL and your guests will join your room just as fast as you did — all without installing any software!

Speaking of software, if you choose to share your desktop in a meeting we’ll prompt you to install an optional plug-in we call Dimdim myScreen™ You’ll call it magic. Just click the new system tray icon (PC) or menubar icon (Mac) and you will instantly share your screen — even without opening a browser or starting a meeting! Share your Smart URL and your guests will see your screen in seconds.

If no meeting is running or you are not sharing your screen, your Smart URL points your guests to your new profile page where they can register for future public events (any event without a meeting key is public) or wait for your event to begin.”

Just read this off of the AP (Original here):

“Google plans to build experimental, ultra-fast Internet networks in a handful of communities around the country.

The search company said Wednesday that its fiber-optic broadband networks will deliver speeds of 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 Americans. Google Inc. says those systems will be more than 100 times faster than the networks that most Americans have access to today.

In a blog post, the company said the networks will let consumers download a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes and allow rural health clinics to send 3-D medical images over the Web.

Google says it will seek input from communities that might be interested in getting one of the testbed networks.”

My thoughts:

1. I already have FIOs and I think that my 20 megs down and 5 megs up is fast (check out the image I’ve attached), but more speed won’t hurt right

2.  This is Google getting around the normal ISP’s and their nonsense of wanting to double dip by charging the users who pay ISPs already and content providers like Google who don’t have to pay the ISPs currently

3.  The motto “Google does no evil” is getting weaker everyday something like this gets launched.  Don’t get me wrong, I love that they’re pushing other companies to get their ish together and offer services at better quality for lower prices, but they’re have such a cash engine behind them that they can wipe out whole industries

4.  They’re slowly getting closer to the root of the internet, first they’re running their own DNS servers for users, and now their own portion of the internet, soon they’ll make their own Root Servers and we’ll all be paying a google bill for home services

5.  if you think they track alot of your internet usage now, what about when they are the ISP…. and couple that with what they already know about u…

Overall, I’m still in a wait and see mode with Google and all their ventures as we use a lot of their services and don’t mind giving up some info in exchange for those services.  But I’m watching and waiting for some greed or shadiness to happen because if it’s possible, it will happen….

Many people watch for just the commercials, and most like me love the game and can’t wait until next season! At the party I attended, it was like Mystery Science Theater 3000 with everyone spitting out the opinion quickly and often I would say we had more thumbs down then up, and very few that I can remember today. Godaddy (the use of females tearing off dress shirts), Doritos (funny ones, especially the Doritos ninja), Hyundai (people carrying the car), Etrade (Talking babies still work), Jay Leno, Letterman and Oprah (have no clue what it was for, but was awesome to see).

But by far the best commercial was definitely the Google one, very clever, very simple, and pulls on your heart strings. I only remember seeing it once, and it was so memorable. If you can think of a better commercial let me know in the comments, but I think they ended up with the best bang for the buck commercial by far:

This is a great first at Dale Carnegie.

So you have subversion (SVN for short), and the built-in dreamweaver support for SVN sucks, now what?  TortoiseSVN of course, the best open source SVN client available.  But Mike, “I don’t want to have to go to a separate program to check in and out my files!”…. That’s where Subweaver comes into play.  It brings the Tortoise SVN menu commands directly into Dreamweaver through an extension.  Here’s the installation instructions along with links originally found here:

Installation

1. Download and install TortoiseSVN fromhttp://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
2. Download Subweaver from http://code.google.com/p/subweaver/downloads/list
3. Run the .mxp extension package file that you downloaded. The Adobe extension manager will guide you through its installation.
4. When you run Dreamweaver now, you will see a new menu in the menu bar, called SubWeaver.

That’s pretty much it.  Also, if you’re in a windows environment and you’re looking for a super simple installation of Subversion, take a look here at the VisualSVN Server.  The standard version is free, but even the added features of the enterprise one only costs $500.  It’s a very simple installation and gets you up and running with Subversion within 10 minutes.

Yup, that’s the definition according to wikipedia.  It was a very interesting find when I went out looking for an online backup tool.  As I was scouring the internet for an inexpensive and easy online backup tool for LW, I ran into lifehacker’s article on the subject.   They of course mention the big guys such as  carbonite, mozy, crashplan (featured here on the LW blog in the past!), but I like to go beyond the article, that’s where the true diamonds in the rough are found.  As you read the comments, you quickly realize that there are 2 types of products people mention there, syncing software and online backup software.

For small amounts of data, some people preferred the syncing software as they have access to the data from various entry points and machines.  For larger data sets, the online backup tools really came into play.  One comment pointed me to Live mesh by microsoft which caught me off guard when the comment mentioned that they had a Mac OS client!  One of the products we did like to use in the past for syncing was microsoft’s groove.  Problem came into play with the Mac OS machines, so we dumped it after trying it out for about 6 – 12 months.

Check it out here, we will be

“Your work computer. Your home laptop. Your Mac. Your mobile phone. Devices live in multiple places. But the files you need—and the programs that open them—often don’t. Live Mesh changes all that.

Working on one computer, but need a program from another? No problem. Use Live Mesh to connect to your other computer and access its desktop as if you were sitting right in front of it.”

Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web. The concept of thin clients are really starting to take shape in this operating system. In the video below they describe how all data will be stored in a cloud.

The experience of Chrome is built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security. This is a demo video to give you a feel for the Google Chrome OS user experience.

Here’s is a more high-level and entertaining overview and introduction to the Chrome OS.