I have now been using Writely for 6 months and still love it. Google Spreadsheets have become a core tool of my business for communicating tabular data to my clients. These “lightweight” apps are better than I ever expected. I am updating my Writely – A Web Word Processor document as things progress. It looks…
DetailsOne of the companies I admire most, Adobe, let me down today. Do you guys ever really “use” the updates you send out? Have you considered that we’re not all sitting in little cubies in Mountain View when we do our updates? In a standard security update for Acrobat Standard 6.0, you get stuck in…
DetailsCraig Aaron, Directory of Communciations of Free Press and Save The Internet a media watchdog group, says big telecom companies have declared open season on ‘Net neutrality.’ He’s afraid these companies will dictate how we use the Internet, and I had the pleasure of speaking with him today and thought I’d put a few hilights…
DetailsThis old post is being kept because it was in here that I predicted the Google Local Knowledge Panel and Customer Presence-based Google Ads click to zoom I was toying with some ideas related to the sensing internet, and thought of a customizable wall-mounted device for small businesses. This little device would be given away…
DetailsWe need some new carpet for our Sienna so I popped online and found an ad that looked pretty good…. and what do you know, blog material! Here, a classic case of broad match and a lack of negative keywords. This merchant has put up a shotgun toyota parts campaign – but doesn’t sell interior…
DetailsA month or so ago I was asked to review an application that would be used on a website for signing up to a seminar. It was DENSE. I had all kinds of little nit-picky items like may we contact you using the phone? may we contact you using email? may we call you by…
DetailsDoes anyone have any idea how mad vanity phone numbers make customers when you put them on printed material without their numeric equivalent? I wasn’t totally aware of this until the past six months, [large company here] began publishing their vanity customer service number on emails sent to clients from their billing department. Instead of…
DetailsI’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how much energy and money has been wasted on “fruify” web development and clueless SEO efforts. Thousands of companies have spent endless dollars on tag-tweaking “search experts” and pixel-tweaking flash animators without a Key Performance Indicator in sight! Countless thousands of amateur web designers have sold…
Details
“I know you’ve spent a lot of time and energy on the site, but Google can’t crawl it, and you’ll have a hard time to rank competitively in the future.” Cut to the SEO discovery meeting…Here we sit, looking at your website (the one you just spent a lot of time, energy, and money to…
DetailsAsk yourself this question: “Within 15 seconds of visiting my site, does the visitor unambiguously head towards the goal(s) I need them to accomplish for my website to be profitable?” If you’re like many, the answer is “not even close.” Over time, websites evolve until they’re blurry. They lose their focus as demands of new…
DetailsHotstop is a map site with subway and bus directions in New York, Boston and Washington DC, but it brings some innovation to the table that pushes forward the public transportation and local advertising paradigm a few notches. First, Hotstop gives you transfer information for public transit that you can put on your mobile phone,…
DetailsIdea 1: Imagine if you will a podcast widget. This little box looks like a tape recorder. It has a play, record, rewind, ff, and pause button, all large and friendly. It has a small (gasp) speaker. When you want to record, you treat it just like an old fashioned tape recorder. But there’s a…
DetailsThis blog entry moved to my articles page. writing for the web in an age of hummingbirds.
DetailsI also finally learned Carp and Grouper XML/Atom translation techniques for dynamic page generation and blog publishing. I took this and created a second tab on my home page that will hold my blog entries. Cool software – it has lit my idea light a bit on how my clients might be able to utilize…
DetailsI’ve been experimenting on a new side project (like I have time) that will use the WikiMedia software to allow visitors to Kentucky State Parks build their own park descriptions as they visit the parks. This will let those who know the parks up and down provide details and updates that we could never expect…
DetailsYou know how food critics never show their faces in their articles? Well, imagine every blogger a critic. I just saw this article, and I think it’s just the beginning of a new wave of shake ups in crappy businesses – and it’s a good thing. Let’s just hope that those with good experiences sing…
DetailsLittle ALT tags (those little text pop ups you get when you roll your mouse over graphics on well designed sites) can save the day, you know. Take Amazon’s change card info page: Midway through the checkout process on amazon, I try to change my card to use for payment…and a big WTF. I cannot…
DetailsOnly 10 years ago, conversations on the phone or in the hallways were forgotten quickly, introducing reasonable doubt if ever questioned in a legal context. But now these conversations, conducted electronically, are woven into the history of a company via electronic logging and backups.
DetailsWeb site marketing work is like scaffolding. You can skip it, but every effort you undertake after that will require much more effort. Savings are an illusion. As anyone in the construction trade will tell you, scaffolding is essential. It costs time and money to erect, rent or buy, and disassemble. But once it is…
DetailsWhat a great weekend. Spent lots of time on the porch writing about blogging for the new BizLex article. It’s hard to write about blogging – I mean it’s hard to write about something changing so fast. You know that as soon as you’re published, it’s old – done, passe. I just hope I have…
Details