January 2007 Archives

Lost Remote: Report: Online will be 20% of ad spending this year

Research and advice company Outsell projects that 20 percent of U.S. ad buys will be online in 2007. Outsell surveyed marketers to find out about companies’ ad-buying plans for the year. No surprise - the dollar shift continues to online. This year, those polled will spend about 18 percent more than they did in ‘06. That would bring the ‘07 online ad buys to one in every five bucks of an even-bigger pie. From ClickZ: “The share held by TV, radio, and movie ad spending is expected to slip 3.5 percent this year.”

Link to ClickZ article

NY Times: Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively -- More than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal.

NY Times: Levi’s Turns to Suing Its Rivals -- The design for a Levi’s pocket, first used 133 years ago, has become the biggest legal battleground in U.S. fashion.

The lawsuits, which Levi’s says it is compelled to file to safeguard the defining features on its jeans, are not about the money — one settled for just $5,000 in damages. Instead, the company says, they are about removing copycats from stores. Nearly all the cases have settled out of court, with Levi’s smaller rivals agreeing to stop making the offending pants and to destroy unsold pairs.

But those competitors say the lawsuits are the last resort of a poor loser, a company that has lost billions in sales, laid off thousands of workers and flirted with bankruptcy as the denim industry exploded.

NY Times: Games That Sell While Others Languish -- There are growing signs that Nintendo’s Wii, which gets couch potatoes off the couch, has taken the lead over Sony’s PlayStation 3.

USA Today: Ace more than holds its own

Every time he gets on an airplane wearing his gray Ace Hardware work shirt, Ray Griffith hears expressions of concern.

Fellow passengers always want to know if the venerable cooperative is managing to get by OK in the face of competition from ever-proliferating home improvement superstores. It's a question Ace's chief executive finds almost embarrassing, he says, because the retailer-owned company is doing so well.

There's no need to worry about Ace. With a focus on convenience and knowledgeable service, the 4,600-store chain has staked out a modest but healthy share of the huge hardware market, supporting the biggest new-store expansion in its history.

Ace is also a lucky winner the chance to win an Ace Hardware store worth $1 million. According to Clickpress: Entries for the Dream Ace contest will be accepted throughout the month of January at www.dreamacehardware.com. Successful contestants will demonstrate a combination of business and sales expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and home improvement knowledge, as well as a true commitment to helpfulness.

Recent video of how folks else whwere are as bad as Southern drivers in driving on icy roads.

Washington Post: An Old Dog Learns to Write a New Blog -- J.W. Marriott Jr., who will soon be 75 years old, is not a computer enthusiast. He takes notes on legal pads during meetings. While visiting some 250 hotels around the world each year he jots down his thoughts on note cards, then slips them in his jacket pocket.. Now he dictates into a tape recorder and someone transcribes it for the web.

NY Times: Firms Fret as Office E-Mail Jumps Security Walls -- More Internet-literate workers are forwarding their office e-mail to free Web-accessible personal accounts.

A growing number of Internet-literate workers are forwarding their office e-mail to free Web-accessible personal accounts offered by Google, Yahoo and other companies. Their employers, who envision corporate secrets leaking through the back door of otherwise well-protected computer networks, are not pleased.

NY Times: The Media Equation: 24-Hour Newspaper People -- Having a blog makes me approachable, reader-friendly and engaged. Perhaps too engaged.

For those of you who don’t have a blog yet, think of one as a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention.

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism — letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?

NY Times: Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says -- Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply in 2004 than any group in the country.

The study, by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, also shows that tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available, while rates for people at the very top continued to decline.

I finished reading this month The great American tax dodge : how spiraling fraud and avoidance are killing fairness, destroying the income tax, and costing you by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele so I was already feeling a little put out about income taxes.

Link to the Congressional Budge Office report.

NY Times: Your Money: You’ve Hit the Jackpot. Now What? -- If you fall into a lot of cash, you should pause before you spend and think about how much you’ve really won and how you relate to money.

WSJ: The Twilight Years of Cap'n Crunch -- Silicon Valley legend John Draper made his name with Brains and pranks, before slipping to the margins. This looks at a legendary programmer, phone phreaker who developed software such as ez-writer and developing the technology that is now our modern telephone menus. But the world of technology changed and his eccentric personality was no longer tolerated. Now at 63, he lives hand to mouth, though he's a legend in technology circles. He got his nickname when he found a whistles given away in the cereal boxes perfectly mimicked a telephone code.

Mr. Draper calls aging veterans like himself part of an "off-the-grid" community. Steve Inness, 47, helped develop touch-screen cellphone technology and does programming work for startups. In recent years, he's lived on the floors and couches of employers; he was last seen hitchhiking in the desert outside Las Vegas. Roy Kaylor, 68, built one of the first electric cars in the early 1970s and contributed to a government-supported effort to develop the technology. He lives in a trailer without electricity in the Santa Cruz mountains. Mr. Draper's recent lunch host, Mr. Bengel, 61, designed an electrohydraulic machine tool and says he has worked for several Silicon Valley companies.

Boing Boing: Adirondack "bushman" captured after 20 years in the woods

Alan G. Como, 56, was captured by police after eluding them for 20 years. He lived in the Adirondack woods of New York, burglarizing campsites to survive. Big and muscular with little fat on his body, police said he is in remarkably good shape for someone his age who has apparently lived in the woods for at least several years. “He’s a pro. He knows what he’s doing,” Cleveland said. Only items needed for survival — clothes, sleeping bags, food and batteries — were taken during the burglaries, with the thief leaving behind valuables like jewelry and electronics, the sheriff said.

Michael Hyatt, president and chief executive of Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville shared productivity and other ideas in his Working Smart for a long time. Last month he decided to stop writing there, keep writing in his other blog -- From Where I Sit, but keep the site and entries.

Here are some of the Working Smart items I don't want to lose:

* My Daily Reading List
* Automated Email Follow-up -- I’m afraid that in the race to get through the scores of messages that daily hit our inbox, we hit the proverbial ball over the net, but never really follow-up to see what happened when the ball arrives in the other person’s court. Was it hit back? Was it tossed to someone else? Or, did it just hit the court and lay there with a hundred other balls. If it was the latter, then you really didn’t accomplish anything.
* Tom Peters on Presentation Excellence
* How to Start a Blog -- I would suggest that you be patient with yourself. Writing is like anything else. The more you do it, the better you get. If you have a little talent, and stick with it, you’ll eventually get into the rhythm and joy of it.
* Corporate Blogging Rules and Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Draft #2
* The Master Task List -- For several years now, I have profited from using a “Master Task List.” This is a way to group your work-related activities so that you do what you were hired to do and keep from getting side-tracked by “trivial pursuits.” I first learned this technique from Todd Duncan, whose book, Time Traps, is a must read.

USA Today: State quarter program gets new push to include D.C., U.S. territories. Too much of a good thing?

The 50-state quarter program was launched in 1999 and is scheduled to wrap up at the end of 2008 with the minting of the quarter for Hawaii, the last state to enter the union. The program has been extremely popular with collectors. From 125 million to 130 million people in the USA — or close to half the U.S. population — collect the state quarters, according to the American Numismatic Association.

CNet: Cisco touts the networked home of future -- "By 2010, 20 homes networked together in a neighborhood will have more load across their network than the entire Internet did in 1995." -- Cisco CEO John Chambers

USA Today: Can small businesses help win the war? -- The U.S. military is studying small companies such as 24-employee Craigslist to see how the online bulletin board has all but terrorized the newspaper industry by siphoning classified advertising. Such research may unearth ideas that will help the United States fight the war on terror.

How large, traditional companies fare in this fight may prove invaluable in developing a strategy against al-Qaeda. That's why the military is going to school. A book making the rounds at the Pentagon is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. It was written for a business audience, but military strategists are saying, "This is the best thing I've read that applies to counterterrorism," says Lt. Col. Rudolph Atallah, a Defense Department director in international affairs.

The premise of The Starfish and the Spider is that centralized organizations are like spiders and can be destroyed with an attack to the head. Decentralized organizations transfer decision-making to leaders in the field. They are like starfish. No single blow will kill them, and parts that are destroyed will grow back.

Wired News: The Lost Lunar Landing Tapes -- NASA puts a man on the moon -- then loses the videotape. A grizzled crew of ex-rocket jockeys goes on a star-crossed mission to find it.

Amid concerns about lost technology, unreadable formats and data integrety, it's often the human element -- the lost or forgotten record and carelessness -- that's as much the risk. Also this story shows that old memories can sometimes yield the best clues.

WiredNews: Who's Killing MP3 and ITunes? -- DRM is toast. Here are seven reasons why major record labels will abandon it in 2007 -- and why that's bad for Apple.. Also TechCrunch: The Inevitable Death of DRM -- Notwithstanding Apple’s announcement today of the sale of 2 billion songs on iTunes (all with DRM), most of the recent market signs suggest that the eventual demise of DRM is inevitable. Consumers are more frustrated than ever that certain file types are playable only on certain devices. The only real questions are when, and will it be replaced with something far more sinister?

NY Times: Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat -- Thousands or even millions of PCs are being hijacked by malicious programs to commit Internet crimes.

NY Times: By 2040, Greenhouse Gases Could Lead to an Open Arctic Sea in Summers -- New studies project that the Arctic Ocean could be mostly open water in summer by 2040 — several decades earlier than previously expected.. Also, NY Times: Recalculating the Costs of Global Climate Change -- Exploring the implications of alternative assumptions is likely to lead to better policy than making a single blanket recommendation.

Christian Science Monitor: Eons: 'MySpace' for the boomer set -- Seniors are logging on to Eons.com and discovering the world of online networking.. There's also thirdage.com.

Hugh McLeod: How to be Creative -- MacLeod highlights the value of authenticity and hard work, and reveals the challenges and rewards of being creative.

Freakonomics Blog: More Evidence That Hand Washing Really Works

A few months back, we wrote about one hospital’s very creative effort to get its medical staff to do a better job of washing their hands. Because so many people die in hospitals each year from bacterial infections they acquire while being treated for something else, the Institute of Medicine had sounded a loud alarm, urging all hospitals to do something about the problem.

One of the easiest ways to get a potentially fatal infection is if you have a central-line catheter put in; as many as 28,000 patients die each year from infections caused by the insertion of a central-line catheter.

The current New England Journal of Medicine reports on a study conducted in Michigan hospitals to see if increased vigilance on hand hygiene would cut down on the incidence of catheter infections.

And it worked, big-time. “The results are pretty breathtaking,” Dr. Peter Pronovost, a Johns Hopkins researcher and the lead author of the study told the Baltimore Sun. “The numbers of infections went down quickly and they stayed down.”

Earlier at Susan Kitchen's 2020 Hindsight: Hand sanitizing

A few weeks ago, I saw this NYTimes article: staff at Cedars-Sinai hospital successfully modified behavior for the greater good. Culture doctors’ hands. Wait. Photograph the bacteria. Convert to screensavers hospital-wide. Watch the rate of hand-washing go way, way up. Above 90% Happy-Hospital-Certification to damn near 100%. Hooray.

A few days ago I recalled the story. I was at the local hospital visting an elderly patient (the one listening to music on my iPod+speaker-dock). Doctor comes into room. We’ve not met, so we introduce. Shake hands. Discuss treatment, diagnosis. Stethoscope comes out for a listen (the patient has pneumonia). A little more chit-chat, then the doctor leaves. As he reaches the doorway, his hand hits the dispenser pump next to the door, and then he’s gone. The pump holds hand sanitizer. He’s A Good Doctor. I note his actions and describe the gist of the NYTimes article about the screensaver to my companion.

Today I thought of this story when I read about hand-sanitizing on the campaign trail. Yep. Also for trade shows. And after swing dance classes where partner trading is the norm: “Wait, I’m not ready to leave yet. I have to wash my hands.” Then, too, there’s washing your hands in a public restroom, immediately followed by touching the door handle that everyone else touches in order to leave the restroom.

Is there a correlation between increased fastidiousness in middlin’ years and decreased tolerance (both constitutional and attitudinal) of icky-poo colds n flus?

Washington Post: Immigrants a Driving Force Behind Start-Ups, Study Says --
About 25 percent of the technology and engineering companies launched in the past decade had at least one foreign-born founder, according to a study released yesterday that throws new information into the debate over foreign workers who arrive in the United States on specialty visas.

Microsoft and its PR agency send out ultra-cool laptop computers and then a tale begins, as recalled by Lost Remote: Edelman gives free Vista laptops to bloggers, recalls them

How does Edelman PR simply not learn from past ethical lapses? As the PR firm for the Vista launch, Edelman sent selected tech bloggers a free Acer Ferrari laptop complete with Windows Vista installed. It was apparently “up to the blogger” whether they wanted to keep the $2,300 laptop or test and return it. Microsoft blogger Long Zheng reportedly broke the news, quite happily, last week. Edelman took heat, deservedly, and then asked the bloggers to return the laptops. You may remember that Edelman is the PR firm that engineered the Wal Mart flog disaster. Richard Edelman blogged about it, and even listed changes being made at the company as a result. Backpeddling is, apparently, ethical.

I'm doing it this way now. Found on Make magazine blog

NY Times: Catch the Next Chapter on Your iPod (It’s Even Cheaper) -- Unlike onscreen e-books, which never quite caught on, downloadable audiobooks have taken off, driven by the explosive popularity of the iPod.

NY Times: Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm -- Google, in typical eccentric fashion, has created an automated way to search for well-rounded candidates.