Bug In Google Toolbar?

I’ve been getting tons of these…

It’s not always Hungarian, sometimes it’s Croation and others, but it’s never right. The page is in English.

Hmmm.

Fun with Google Sidewiki

I don’t know if I am thrilled or disappointed yet with Google Sidewiki. Google’s new public “slambook.” I like the disruptive, democratic aspects of being able to “tag” anyone’s web page but I’m not thrilled about having yet another thing to check on all my pages. I did discover a little twink too that I’ll share with you. When I first discovered Sidewiki, I went to the site and claimed our primary site so I could put a permalink at the top of the page. You do that with Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t done it yet I recommend doing it now. By putting a meta tag you can write the always topmost sidewiki entry.

The hiccup I ran into is I originally added www.netfishbowl.com so when I accessed it at netfishbowl.com the comments weren’t there. A little quirky, I can’t check if deleting the www still covers the subdomain just yet. It takes 24 hours to kick in.

I also went to other pages, I’m NOT the webmaster of and tried to add the first sidewiki entry there too. Just in case some clever chap wanted to bash me secretly. This brings up my other “scary” moment with Google sidewiki. On my Xackr twitter page I wrote a banal “hi there” entry. And when I went back I got this…

I hadn’t seen this before on the other posts I made. The yellow block suggesting my entry “may be less useful” was new. I would guess because it is short and maybe at some algorithmic lower reading level, it doesn’t meet up to their standards maybe?

Which leads to the bigger question. Someday in the near future will I be adapting what I say and do to please the robots at Google? I know we already do to get our pages ranked higher but me on my own twitter page? Seems a tad F’dUp.

On pages that are “mine” but I’m not the webmaster on – like http://www.twitter.com/xackr. This could be source of concern. You can’t really choose to opt out because you have to manage your “brand”. And technically they could say they are not modifying the page. The only recourse I can imagine at this point is that Xackr is my copyright and they must be using it to tag their sidewikis but I can’t imagine how I could (or even if I would want to) pursue that.

Again, I’m not opposed to sidewiki. I’m not even down on Google yet. I love and use a lot of their stuff. Xackr.com is a Google app. I do pause at the idea of being so into it, that I don’t step back and keep perspective on it.

Finally, if you really want to help me, are a Firefox user, have the Google Toolbar and have sidewiki – go to http://www.twitter.com/xackr and rank my comment useful. It will really help my sagging self esteem.

I Get The Feeling I Haven’t Mastered Squidoo Yet

Twitterpeek makes Adam’s brain hurt..Awwww

Adam Frucci has a problem. He says the TwitterPeek is so dumb it makes his brain hurt. I might suggest, Adam, that if your brain is hurting maybe it's not the TwitterPeek that's dumb. Just saying. His recent Gizmodo rant starts out with why the hell would spend $200 on this? He then neglects to do some very simple math. He asserts that you would be nuts to spend $200 on TwitterPeek when you could just use a smart phone. As a proud owner of TwitterPeek, I'll be more than happy to help Adam do some basic math since my iPhone recently became an iBrick when the battery stopped holding a charge. That smart phone cost me $399 to purchase and approximately $106 a month for the two year contract. Even if we substitute the new price for a iPhone of $99.00, the total still comes out to be $2643 for the life of the contract.

Now feature for feature no one is going to argue that the TwitterPeek competes with the iPhone. For someone who purchases the iPhone to twitter with and just to twitter with is certainly overkill. Even if you just add unlimited texting to a regular cell phone it will run you, with AT&T, $240 a year. A regular cell phone has less features than the TwitterPeek. You're not able to download your followers. You can't easily do a search for @ mentions. And since you're under a two year contract, the total out of pocket is going to be $480. That's double what the TwitterPeek cost as a one time expense for the life of the unit. Besides that the batteries user replaceable and the extra battery only cost $9.95 at the Peek boutique. So the question " why would you want to carry a single function device that is compact, cool looking, works anywhere without purchasing Internet access, connects to the social site ranked 13th in the United States of America, and cost half to one 10th as much as the other options?" Seems a little bit easier to answer.

Let me give you an example of use for the TwitterPeek that I've found in the peek forums that I think is a good example of an application of this device. A mom is concerned about giving her daughter a cell phone to text to her friends with. Text messages can be deleted. It's hard to know who she's talking to and a cell phone has ways they can run up a bill they can be a real burden if not kept in control. This mom can give her child a TwitterPeek for a one time $200 investment and because the child's tweets are public and who she tweets to is public Mom can monitor and protect her child. Also now her child can communicate with all her friends as easily as texting. If she buys this device for child in seventh grade and the child manages to take care of it until the 12 grade, even with throwing in three replacement batteries (yeah you can replace the battery). She's spent $230 vs. $1440 for the near equivalent of unlimited texting. That'll pay for her textbooks her freshman year.

One of the ways that I plan to use it, is to keep his sitting by my computer while I work so that if I get a tweet, I’ll get notified. I don’t have to stop working and switch over to my browser. The TwitterPeek will chirp and I’ll know I have tweets. I just grab up the TwitterPeek and read and reply. This way I avoid running a program in the background that pops up constantly like TweetDeck which I use to monitor tweet and FB. By staying in the program that I'm working in and using the mono functional TwitterPeek, I avoid all temptations to get distracted by the big bad wonderful Internet. In some cases not being able to do something means you get something else done.

Also, while I’m tweeting away remotely, I’m NOT draining the battery on my mobile phone. I’ve got double power.

I'm sure there are plenty of other valid situations where the TwitterPeek makes sense as an economical solution and maybe some of the other TwitterPeek owners will add their own uses to this blog.

The ensuing comments in Adam’s public headache progressively got more and more vicious attacking both the TwitterPeek and then Twitter itself. I think my favorite comment of all was:

"I still can't believe twitter exists. It's a blog site that ONLY lets you post 140 characters at a time."

Ironically that comment is only 104 characters long.

I would have to say that any one that doesn't see the value of a global asynchronous conversation that makes the speaker get to the point and allows you to mark keywords, resend the message, share links, or directly communicate with people of interest to anyone who has a cell phone capable of text probably would have a brain that hurts trying to grasp the Twitterpeek and should just stick to debating whether or not Superman could beat up the Hulk in the forums.

What’s Up With That Guy?

UPDATE: The smart ass ending of this blog post was clearly misunderstood and like many things, as this has aged I question the intelligence of this blog post. I'm going to leave it to remind me, if you are just criticizing someone else's gig you are NOT necessarily doing anything youself. I.E. you are disreqarding my productivity rule No. 1 "If you aren't filling time, you're killing time." I do want to end with an old Italian proverb which says "only a friend will tell you when you have something on your face." Which I believe is what I was kind of going for.

Original Post>>>>>>>>

Full disclosure: earlier in my life I went through a Guy Kawasaki fan boy phase. I can clearly remember chasing him down at a printing equipment show in Atlanta to get him to autograph a copy of his book “How to Drive Your Competition Crazy”. So I’m not void of emotions like a Vulcan when I write this blog.

So I installed TweetDeck and was learning how to use it. I highly recommend TweetDeck by the way if nothing else it’s a good example of what Adobe flash programming can do. Part of the TweetDeck features is that it recommends people at random for you to follow. One of the people that flashed on my screen was former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki. I’m not sure why but I’ve always liked Guy, and I think I’ve bought all of his books though I don’t thing I’ve ever actually read a single one. Anyway I felt confident I could actually read 140 characters generated by Guy Kawasaki at a time. Especially if they followed tweeter etiquette and represented the occasional, personal, insight into how Guy sees the world.

So I was a little surprised…wait…make that really surprised, when over the next 45 minutes I received no less than 15 tweets from Guy Kawasaki all with pithy small mind digestible slug lines and a bit.ly compressed URL pointing to a page on his Alltop site. It only took me about 10 minutes to realize I was going to have unfollow Guy. While I was trying to figure out where all the compressed links went I dug around a little bit on Alltop, which is YACAS (yet another content aggregation site).

One thing I did find that I’ve found interesting was an article by Guy on the Art of the Repeat Tweet. In it Guy Kawasaki explains why his tweets (which as it turns out are not really his tweets after all) are frequent and repeat. Guy has timed his repeats 8 hours apart with each tweet being sent three times. He repeats his tweets because he found he gets as many clicks on the second and third as he does on the first tweet. What he doesn’t really mention is, but is clearly in the subtext, that he doesn’t want to tell you anything - he’s just wanting to get you to click on the links. I.E. for him as a social marketer, tweet is just a traffic building tool.

There’s a couple of things the trouble me deeply about the strategy.

First, the golden rule of new marketing is that you have to bundle something of value in with the message. If you’re not going to give something away that’s useful to your audience with your communications they’re going to ignore you. Being ignored can be good but ultimately it’s a lot less satisfying than being the center of attention.

Second, and this is the one that really bakes my cookies, Guy has a secondary tweeter account called @Alltop that post these spamlike links just once. He encourages people that hate the repeats to follow it instead. What really flips me out about this is Alltop is a brand that may come and go but Guy will be Guy Kawasaki forever. So maybe Guy’s forgotten that he is his own brand. And while he may be pimping out his new venture, he is surely chipping away at his eternal one which is his own credibility. After snooping around Alltop, I’d say that’s not a good trade. Yawn.

Let’s face it, if you’re a man in the middle, meaning you are not generating the original content or you do not control the channel through which it disseminates, you got nothing except your sense of humor or your good looks to distinguish you from 10,000 competitors who are competing for the same eyeballs. When you’re deciding what’s signal and what noise is, you’ll definitely be noise.

Now Guy Kawasaki can a probably afford to be that (for a little while anyway). Let’s face it though the top spots in content aggregation are taken and for the time being they don’t look like they’re going to be dethroned any time soon. Nonetheless I wish Alltop all the best in their venture (Annie should just post more tofurkey pics).

I would like to offer a new name for what Guy Kawasaki is doing. I think I’ll call it “Social Persistent Alltop Marketing”.

Guy is pretty unapologetic about his strategy. He suggests to me that if I can’t handle it that I should just unfollow him and have a nice day.

That sounds like a plan to me Guy. You have a nice day too. Oh and if you want to buy my signed copy of “How to Drive the Competition Crazy” it’s on eBay.

I Can Finally Make Videos Without Tearing Out My Hair

I have several video editing packages. I have Sony’s home version of their Vegas Studio, Adobe’s Premiere Elements, and the movie editing software I’ve been using most lately Windows Live Movie Maker. I don’t have anything against Windows Live Movie Maker because it’s what’s gotten the job done lately. I loathed the idea of ever trying to use Adobe premiere elements again. Aside from the fact that it always crashed trying to create an HD video because it was making the files so huge the system couldn’t handle it, it decided frequently to just quit working in the middle of an edit. And as it is with most Adobe Elements brand products there are no bug fixes, that’s not because there are no bugs – far from it. It’s because Adobe’s idea of a bug fix is to buy the upgrade version of the next release of the product. Now any other software company in the world, especially as small struggling one, could not afford that luxury. I’d get pretty hacked when I think about it, because all I really want to do is make an HD video and upload it to YouTube simply and quickly.

I had gotten Windows 7 and the new Windows Live Movie Maker has an addin that allows it to upload directly to face book. I’ve found this quite handy. I did however encounter formats that the program could not handle but for the most part it worked just fine. Many of the videos that I wanted to make would be screen captures showing our customers and my students how to do things that they had done in class. A friend had recommended tipcam which turned out to be a pretty nice product. The problem with tip cam was that it made an 800 by 600 video and that resolution turns out to be quite fuzzy compared to 1280 X720 HD video which is crystal clear.

So when I got an email offer from Serif software to buy their Movie PlusX3 software package at a bargain price with a 30 day money back guarantee, I decided to go ahead and purchase it. I own a couple of Serif software’s $10 packages that they sell and then try to upsell out to the current version. Both of them, while not being flashy or glitzy, do a respectable job of getting done what I wanted to do.

When the software arrived from merry old England via the United States postal service, the first thing I noticed was I had gotten a Manual along with my software. There was no cardboard box to throw away thank god. I loaded the software and initially it seemed to think something else was being installed in my system but after ignoring that, it installed just fine. The software ran quickly and when I drag files from the explorer to the media bin a couple of times it crashed at first. It would also try to recover and automatically restart when it happened. While that was a little disheartening at first, it was easily circumvented by just saving my project when I first opened it and occasionally as I was working. The crashes seemed to vanish after about the fourth movie I made.

One of the nicest things about Serif software is they have a live Owner’s Manual in the left most pane of the software. So I went from installing the software to using it in a matter of seconds. It’s contextual too so it has a list of what to do based on what view you are in. As luck would have it, my favorite screen capture program Fraps had released an update that was compatible with Windows 7. They had also made several improvements to the program which included compressed video storage. So I was now easily able to make HD screen capture video. The question was would the Movie PlusX3 three package be able to handle it. Premiere couldn’t handle it. I created a screen capture clip and dragged it into the media bin of Movie PlusX3. The preview block was grayed out. Not looking good but then the software asks me if I wish to pick the correct encoder for the file and told me which one to pick. Boom. I was making HD quality screen capture videos complete with titles, and background music. Total time spent on task from walking back to the house from the mailbox to posting to YouTube about 45 minutes which included a lot of reading the wizards that won’t be necessary next time.

Not only did Movie Plus X3 render my video really well, it took a 400 MB Fraps file and after adding titles and background music rendered the whole clip as a 49 MB file. It uploaded in less than 3 minutes. If I had tried to do the same thing with Adobe premiere the file would’ve been over a gigabyte or most likely crashed altogether.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a package that would compete with a high end video editing products but if you’re wanting to make videos and do it quickly and just get it done, you really can’t beat this package. You can pick up your copy by clicking here:

MoviePlus X3 from Serif - offers everything you need to produce outstanding movie masterpieces, photo slideshows and DVDs.

There is no demo version but there’s a 30 day money back guarantee and I’ve talked to customer service twice and both times they were extremely helpful and while I didn’t have a problem they helped me accomplish what I wanted to do. I also checked the web site and much to my delight there were many updates to previous versions of programs meaning they go back and fix bugs not make you buy the fix.

Having used about three of their packages now, I’m wondering if small companies like Serif won’t thrive in an environment where the monolithic companies play a numbers game and go for volume over customer service knowing they’ll lose a few customers here and there like me. The real-time connected web could create several new contenders.

After having such success with their movie package I went ahead and took the plunge and picked up their web software WebPlus X4 as well. I’ll let you know how much it I like it is well but for now I can recommend Serif software’s Movie Plus X3 package with two enthusiastic thumbs up.

What Happens When Your TV Has a Web Browser?

HP is marketing a new printer that has a built in web browser, it’s called the HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web All-in-One Printer. What sets this printer apart from the rest is that it has a “web browser” in it.The price point for this item is $399. I saw a touch screen picture frame yesterday for $299 with WiFi. Same price as a netbook really. I didn’t dig enough into whether or not the browser in the printer was a full featured browser or a crippled browser that was limited to choices predetermined by Hewlett Packard.

Regardless, the implications for the future are pretty clear. It’s very likely that everything that we use in the future will have a web browser built into it. Just as the Java mavens at Sun predicted. If everything that we use has a web browser then what becomes the point of having a PC as a standalone device? The biggest danger of course, is when your plasma screen TV also has a functional web browser that allows you to access your e-mail, your favorite news, and your voicemail messages what incentive do you have to invest in a virus prone PC that easily already is a fairly large intrusion in our life in that we have to wait for it to boot and shutdown before we can actually do something. So imagine how hard we will be tempted to use it to purchase that coffee we like when we can just touch the screen on the refrigerator and accomplish the same thing.

For the longest time the major computer players have invested millions and millions of dollars in winning the browser wars. Even to this day each major player has their own flavor of browser that they want you to use. While they have scrambled and fought and scratched and clawed for mindshare in that market space, what if the browser itself has achieved ubiquity in a standard form that is easily created and marketed. When that happens, and clearly it is happening, the player who has the most significant investment in computing that requires only a web browser has the advantage. Suddenly, having the coolest or most functional hardware and software that runs locally becomes increasingly irrelevant to getting the day to day work done.

The other problem becomes the major stakeholders in the monolithic systems that have lost their relevancy will feel the pain as the market of their vendor shrinks the cost of the legacy systems will surely increase - creating even greater opportunity for the smaller more lithe organizations that grew up adopting and implementing browser-based cloud computing.

The current price point for anything that seems to connect to the Internet is currently around $300 whether it be a printer with a web browser, a smart phone, or a photo frame with 8O2 .11G. As the demand for a touch screen that also has the ability to display HTML5 standard web pages dramatically increases and the standard stabilizes, you’ll see the price point drop to as low as a $75.00 component and in many many products. Expect your next car, tv set, and possibly clothes dryer to be surf friendly. When that happens, Google will probably be in a unique position to serve the needs of this new environment. So if you’re currently deciding what tech toys you should spend some time learning and getting cozy with it’s probably a good idea to give a hard look at the apps are being developed in the Googlesphere.