Author (#1)December 2003 Archives

Bloggers must be feeling the stress of the holidays and the year-end things needing attention. Dave Pollard offers Time-savers for Bloggers. Read his The blogging process and you can see why he might need to save time. His posts are better than average, but he says he spends up to 3 hours a day working on his blog.

Down in Tom Mangan's entry "Gushing stroke piece alert" is "Blogging: a reality check Or, what the hypesters never tell you." He concludes "blogging is worth doing well, it's just not especially easy to do well."

He's among those (Romenesko, Jarvis, Lassica) reacting to USA Today's Dec. 30 front-page article Freewheeling 'bloggers' are rewriting rules of journalism Objectivity? Not here -- and the masses eat it up.

With cheap cell phone rates, people may be tempted to drop the traditional telephone. Jim Lynch, writing in ExtremeTech Opinions, tried it, but found he still needed a landline phone.

The experience of others of doing without their landline phones are included in the comments after the article. Tip from Smart Mobs.

Next year the issue won't be landline or cell. It will be landline or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Telecos and ISPs offering VoIP now. The Charlotte Business Journal reports on a bank in a small town outside Charlotte, N.C., that switched to VoIP.

OSHA does little to police businesses which operate hazardous work sites beyond civil penalties, according to a Dec. 22 article in the N.Y. Times.

Last February, Atlanta Business Chronicle had a series "Risky Business" which focuses on the dangers to customers at Home Depot.

Anil Dash writes on how New York Invented Christmas.

I've always wondered how our Christmas traditions would be different if Currier & Ives had lived in Florida? Those winter images are so deep in our culture that Floridians feel compelled to start fires in their fireplaces, but then must turn on the air conditioning because the house gets too warm.

If Currier & Ives had lived in Florida maybe our traditions would be caroling in shorts, enjoying a round of golf on Christmas and hanging Spanish moss from our crepe myrtles. The Christmas feast would be eating seafood or having a picnic of hamburgers and hot dogs.

Also people in Australia wonder if they shouldn't have traditions more suitable to a Christmas summer?

Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003. In November, he published Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines.

TerraFly sells satellite images of your town, your street or even your house. It's a service of Florida International University. Checked out my house and could see the cars parked in the driveway. Couldn't tell if the flag was up on the mailbox though. Tip from ResourceShelf.

Amy Wohl looks at the differences between three forms of writing: her blog, her newsletter and writing for clients.

"Blogs are a new and very pleasing method for communication. Whether it's the immediacy, the personal tone, or the ability to create a dynamic and interactive community, we like blogs. Where they will go, we're not sure. But we are pretty sure they are here to stay."

New York Daily news reports that Christopher Byrne, aka The Toy Guy, is a long-time paid consultant with the toy industry and also takes special fees to mention specific toys on TV broadcasts. The TV stations said they did not know that, should have been told and won't have him back unless that is disclosed during the broadcast. The unasked question is did any stations ask before asking him to appear? His close association with the toy industry and was visible for years.

From Sree Sreenivasan writing on Poynter Online -- The Year's Best WebTips.

After David Byrnes premiered his PowerPoint art in LA, Clive Thompson writing in New York Times highlights Edward Tufte's essay that PowerPoint is a terrible way to convey information. From the Times article: In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading.

Wired Magazine has a column by Tufte highlighting points in his essay and a column by Byrne about making art on PowerPoint. Wired later published this interview with Byrnes. Tufte's pamphlet can be purchased from his site.

Another use of PowerPoint: The Gettysburg Address.

Steve Outing reviews the first 10 years of online news including what news organizations are not doing well such as failing to grasp that "published content online isn't nearly as powerful as the communication between people that the online medium facilitates. E-mail and chat were consistently the features that were most popular in the early days -- not news stories published online. Most news companies still don't grasp this."

Also: "Carlson (David Carlson, Cox Foundation Palm Beach Post professor of new media journalism at the University of Florida at Gainesville) suggests that where the news industry makes its biggest mistake is in failing to create services that are personally useful to people. E-mail; instant messaging; e-commerce; package tracking. It's no easy task, but the news industry still needs to figure out how to offer online services that are as personally useful as those."

From Reuters on why funeral-home operator Stewart Enterprises laid off workers: The company said earlier this month it would cut 300 jobs, or about 5 percent of its work force, to reduce costs after several years of declining deaths in its markets. Gee, that's too bad people didn't die according to budget.

The Denver Business Journal looks at HR issues instant messaging raises in the workplace. Among 300 employees surveyed about instant messaging: "One-third said they had made "sexual advances" over the popular chat and real-time messaging software; and 65 percent said they had used IM to criticize company management."

Counter that with issues about employee privacy and what happens to employee morale if employees feel spied upon, and it looks like more minefields for companies to tread.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a three-day series on spam including a spam entrepreneur being pinched from all the efforts to block spam. She says her business is now only break-even.

Jonathon Delacour writes a good piece about information overload and how we waste our time with unnecessary information. It's the dilemma of urgent versus important information. Much of the day's news is urgent, but little of it is important.

Highlight: "Self-employment, a constant Internet connection, a weblog, and a mildly addictive personality turn out to be a killer combination—even for someone who no longer feels compelled to post regularly, let alone every day".

The Color of Money group tracks political contributions down to ZIP codes. Check out your area with their site.

Parody from a Mac user. Very funny.

With the noreaster from last weekend, several journalists wrote about what should change with winter storm coverage. Tim Porter writes that it's time to end the oh-so-predictable stories and use new methods, such as blogs, to bring personal stories of the storm's impact.

I just finished Ed Cone's article in Baseline The Marketing of a President. Good reading about the impact of online, offline and your neighbor.

Highlight: "But the lesson of Dean's campaign is that the Web is not for micromanagers. With the Internet, an effective campaign creates a community that will on its own begin to market your product for you. Properly done, you won't be able – or want — to control it."

I used to play LucasArts Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe years ago. Now there's Secret Weapons over Normandy. I've put it on my Christmas list. But some folks reviewing it on Amazon gave it weak reviews.

Lots of talk about cheaper high-speed acess. The Bell operating companies and others cut prices to compete against the cable companies, who are winning high-speed contest. One worry from a consumer view: the prices may be too low to cover the cost, says an analyst with The Yankee Group.

Had reason to look up how many unmarried Americans there are. The Census Bureau has the answer. It's part of the Population and Household Economic Topics series. The Census Bureau is a great resource, but it's been difficult sometimes to find what I've wanted on the site.

Cigarette maker R.J. Reynolds is no longer the lead sponsor of NASCAR's premiere series, which Reynolds had for 33 years. Here's an insightful story originally published in Sports Business Journal of How NASCAR outgrew RJR's tobacco-stained image. Now the series will be sposored by Nextel, a wireless company.

I regularly check Yahoo! News' Most Viewed page to see what people are viewing both in the U.S. and in other countries. There's also Yahoo's Buzz Index and Google Zeitgeist to see what's on people's mind. Now Amazon has Amazon Purchasing Circles where you can see what people are buying from your area.

I checked the books circle for Charlotte and wasn't surprised to see Civil War books showing up, but where are the NASCAR books?

Now that Berkeley Breathed re-started Bloom County, will Bill Watterson bring back Calvin and Hobbes? This profile in Cleveland Scene says it's unlikely. It sounds like he's a recluse even in the town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland. One thing he objected to was the major push to license products with the strip's characters.

This week, American Journalism Review has two articles about the Readership Institute's latest research on what readers like and how newspapers are implementing the results of the research.

The Readership Institute's report is big, but here's a quick summary from AJR: Indeed, the so-called "local-local" news issue looms over everything. In what may be the most attention-getting sentence in its voluminous data, the Readership Institute says, "Intensely local, people-centered news ranks at the top of the list of content items with the greatest potential to increase overall readership."

The articles are similar to Editor and Publisher's recent article about readership editors that I mentioned last week.

Monday's New York Times has an article of how spam has cut email response so much that many email marketers have reverted back to Web sites and other non-email ways to deliver advertising.

The article said the problem is similar to the English commons of the 19th century where common pastures "became depleted because no individual farmer had an incentive to moderate the size of his herd."