NevOn

Under the weather

'Knocked for six' could be another idiomatic way of describing my state of being this past two days. Since returning from the Manchester conference midweek, I've been out of action with a malaise that kept me firmly in bed until today.

Burning the candle at both ends is unquestionably the reason. So after two days of catching up with sleep with just one break, to produce Thursday's edition of FIR (the show must go on!), I should be back up to speed very soon.

Quite a bit of catching up to do if my RSS feeds are any indicator. But no blogging in pyjamas this weekend! Full service will be resumed on Monday.

If I were an architect

If I were an architect, I wonder what my critical eye might make of the design of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, through which I travelled yesterday.

It's one of the ugliest airports I've ever been to, a sprawling mass of bare concrete that evokes an absolute air of coldness. As you ride the inter-terminal bus from the RER station to Terminal 2, you feel it's the kind of place that seems to go out of its way to make you feel unwelcome, so oppressive-looking that you feel depressed just going there!

It's the kind of architectural design that you can quite easily compare to the lack of soul typified by drab building design in the post-World War 2 Soviet era that you saw all over eastern Europe. Certainly not inspired by Stalinist classicism architecture.

Inside, though, it's quite a different story. There you have some great imagination.

I took this photo yesterday of the roof in the departure area as I waited for my flight back to Amsterdam. This is a view of the beginning of the gate areas as you come out of the security checks.

I've flown through CdeG quite a few times and it's still a breathtaking cathedral-like vista every time your eyes take in the scale of what you're seeing. It's still all bare concrete inside the terminal building yet, unlike the exterior of the drab buildings, it is a welcoming sight.

As the saying goes, though, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I wonder what Howard Roark would have made of it all.

By the way, I took the photo above with my Nokia N70 - posted the pic and a couple of others to my moblog - with which my love affair is unending.

Listen to your hard drive and weep

Weird noises from your hard drive and you're not sure what they mean? Well, you know they mean something bad is undoubtedly about to happen, but how do you find out what, exactly?

Go to this Hitachi page and check out the .wav recordings there of various noises you might hear that likely indicate a failing hard drive. Listen to them and weep. But at least you'll know

I've experienced the slow spindle motor death sound. The scariest sound - head damage #3!

(Via Digg)

Keep cool with egoSurf

Via Steve Rubel, news of egoSurf, a tool that searches Google and other engines against your name and blog or website, and calculates your ego ranking.

Naturally, I gave it a go. it says my ego ranking is 11,845. Is that good? Can I exchange those points for a free flight to New York? That would be nice.

So why would you need to egoSurf? From the website:

[...] egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.

Of course. 'Nuff said.

(Conceptually, it reminds me a bit of Preople which I wrote about last March. Still haven't figured that one out.)

Test your geek quotient

How much of a geek are you? Take the geek test v 3.1 to find out.

I scored 30.17751% which makes me a Total Geek, according to this test. About normal, then ;)

How do you rate?

(Via Digg)

No more email guilt

BBC News: Live8 organiser Bob Geldof has revealed his contempt for e-mails, blaming them for tying up people's time and stopping genuine action. Mr Geldof told a conference in London that e-mails "give a feeling of action, which is a mistake".

Here's the best bit:

[...] He told delegates that what workers achieve each day will be linked to the number of e-mails they ignore. He explained that the "doing part" of a job is proportionate to the amount of e-mails you do not answer. "E-mails get in the way of serious consideration of what you want to do," Mr Geldof said.

Right on, Bob. No more guilt!

An alternative to email catchup

Light posting ahead until the weekend as I'll be travelling, meetings, etc.

Then, a massive email and post-comments catchup.

Do I really mean "catchup"? Comments to blog posts, definitely, but email? My email inbox looks truly horrendous. Boy, do I identify with this:

[...] My email inbox is totally out of control, with more than 8K messages to wade through (that's *after* the spam filter--I might need to just set fire to it and start again!) [...] the usual demands of our accelerating red-shift modern lifestyle means that my email inbox has become obese and should probably be put out of its misery. Does anyone have a match?

Tom Foremski has a way with words!

Related NevOn post:

• Handling the email guilt trip

Remembrance Day

Never forget the victims of 9/11.

Technorati: 9/11

A bit out of balance

Little time this week for posting commentaries to this blog, sorry to say. Trying to balance business and home life is always tricky and especially so this week. Something had to give and my blog was it.

A semblance of usual service will resume at the weekend, and fully back up to speed early next week.

Shari Kurzrok still needs help

Some weeks ago, I posted an appeal for help regarding Shari Kurzrok, a PR professional in the US who urgently needs a liver transplant. PR bloggers throughout the global PR community posted similar appeals.

What's been happening in the ensuing three weeks?

A post yesterday on the Help Shari Kurzrok blog says that her life-threatening condition remains the same. Earlier posts say that she was in intensive care in the NYU Medical Center. Last Wednesday, the blog carried an appeal for blood donors.

If you can help, visit the blog for details on how.

Support a charity trek in Peru

In September, three women will be trekking the Inca Trail in Peru to raise money for a worthy charity campaign.

One of the three is Pam Hobson, my sister, who says:

Between 14th & 27th September I will be undertaking the most arduous challenge of my life! [...] With my friends Karen Slatford and Fiona Coughlan, we are raising much-needed funds for The Prince's Trust to help young disadvantaged people in Berkshire in the UK.

Starting from Cusco, the capital of the Inca Empire over 500 years ago, they will spend four days and nights trekking to Machu Picchu.

Their trek is tough – while only 43km (26.6 miles) long, it involves climbing over 3,000 steps at altitudes of between 2,400m (9,000ft) and 4,198m (13,700ft) and coping with extremes of temperatures in the day of between 10-20C, falling to as low as freezing at night. The three women will probably experience some frost or snow on some of the higher passes.

So if you would like to help Pam and her friends achieve their goal of raising ₤2,000 for The Prince's Trust, the charity founded by the Prince of Wales in 1976, please consider donating a few euros, pounds or dollars.

You can donate online at a secure website and your donation may be tax deductible. Thanks.

Can you help a PR colleague in the USA?

This is a sad tale which I'm posting in the hope that a reader might know how to help. From O'Dwyer's via Jeremy Pepper:

Liver Transplant is Needed

Shari Kurzrok, a 31-year-old VP at Ogilvy PR Worldwide, will die within days if she does not receive a liver transplant.

She was admitted to New York University Medical Center last weekend, and was told she needs an immediate liver transplant to save her life. Her illness is unexplained.

Ogilvy is reaching out to the PR industry on Kurzrok's behalf.

The Great Neck, N.Y. native is to be married in October. She led Ogilvy's "Save-a-Life-Tour" to raise the awareness of the need for blood donations in a campaign for the American Red Cross. That effort collected more than 3.2M pints of blood, and registered more than 38,000 new donors.

Information about a liver transplant referral for Kurzrok is at +1 877 223 3386.

[UPDATE] More information on the Help Shari Kurzrok blog including other contact info.

Safe and back in Amsterdam

A quick post - just arrived back in Amsterdam. I am amazed by the over 20 emails and more than a dozen voicemails I'm picking up now from family, friends and concerned readers asking if I'm ok. Thank you, everyone. Yes, I am!

I've been in London over the past two days. Caught up in the chaos at Paddington station this lunchtime which, as I arrived there to catch the Heathrow Express, was evacuated because of a bomb threat. Police everywhere and hundreds of people rushing out of the station. But the massive inconveninece today resulting from my being indirectly caught up in the effects of the terrorist outrages pales into complete insignficance compared to the direct and awful effects of those outrages with more than 35 people dead and over 700 injured.

Just to put things into proper perspective.

More later.

[EDIT 7/7/05] When I finally got back into Paddington station and onto the Heathrow Express train to Heathrow airport at about 1:45pm this afternoon, I recorded some thoughts about what I'd experienced while those thoughts were fresh in my mind.

A 10-minute commentary as a podcast; you'll get it automatically if you've subscribed to my RSS feed via Feedburner, or click the image below to download it directly (2.3Mb, MP3):

I really don't know if anyone will be interested in this, but it's here if you are.

Technorati tag: london

Speaking of podcasts, today's edition (show #48) of For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report is up but the show notes aren't done yet. I'll post those on the podcast blog and here tomorrow morning. You can download the show directly or subscribe to the RSS feed to get future shows automatically.

Flickr Pro gifts

I have two Flickr Pro accounts to give away. $24.95 value each. Deadline is 6pm CET tomorrow, 30 June.

I'd be happy to give them to the first two people who email me with the correct answer to this question:

Which bank has 120 internal blogs?

The answer is here in this blog!

Final decision on the correct answer is mine. Just in case anyone might construe this as a competition, no correspondence will be entered into, no discussion on the answer, void where prohibited by law, etc, etc.

[UPDATE 29 June] Both gifts snapped up pretty quickly! So now all gone.

If you're wondering, the correct answer is: Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

Too much of a good thing

I bet this rings a bell for many people:

It's a gazillion degrees in my house right now, but I can't figure out the thermostat controls, so the heat's still on and the air conditioning unreachable. My new Denon receiver/tuner sounds amazing--good thing I'm using it mostly with my iPod; I have no clue how to tune in a radio station. When I bring up the newer versions of Microsoft Word, it looks so utterly foreign and overwhelming to me now that I give up and close it. And all I wanted to do was type a simple letter...

The opening sentence rang a bell for me as I had a new thermostat installed at home a few months ago which has a nice big LCD screen with a drop-down panel underneath which reveals an amazing array of buttons and dials each with multiple functions, some requiring a PC-like control-key combo to do things. I still have no idea how to work it unless I read the manual. The previous thermostat had a couple of buttons and switches and a rotary dial that made temp adjustments dead simple in about 2 seconds. And no need for a manual.

There's more:

[...] My new Subaru factory-supplied car stereo uses that most evil of designs--modes. With so many features to support, they ran out of controls... so every control does multiple things depending on which mode you're in. None of it is intuitive or natural. Lose the manual and I'm screwed. Ten years ago, if you'd told me I'd one day need a manual to use my car radio, that would have been inconceivable. All I want to do is find a frickin' radio station!

This post about "featuritis" by Kathy Sierra on the Creating Passionate Users blog illustrates what happens when manufacturers over-feature their products, and offers some good advice - listen to customers.

On the road

Heading to the airport shortly, over to London. Tonight I'll be attending the London geek dinner. Nearly 200 people signed up for that!

Very little blogging until the weeked as I'll be participating in and presenting at the Communication Directors Forum conference which takes place from 8-11 June. This event is on a cruise ship and I'll blog/podcast if I can. Satellite internet access will be limited and it's unlikely I will be able to get to email between now and the weekend, so apologies in advance for less-than-timely responses.

Have a good week!

Time pressure...

Imagine - no real time to blog! That's been where I've been at all this week, hence pretty light posting in recent days. No signs of that improving, sorry to say, until early next week.

This is also affecting my ability to respond promptly to comments left on various posts. Lots of great conversation-starters, and the ball's in my court on most of them. Same with email.

Shel and I finished recording today's edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast an hour or so ago. Earlier than usual as Shel's traveling and wrapped up in meetings all day. Unfortunately, that means we probably won't get the MP3 file up and available via the RSS feed until Shel gets back home late tonight (his time, PDT), unless he's able to get online at the airport while he waits for his flight. So the show notes won't be posted on our blogs until during tomorrow morning (my time, CET).

Just time today for a couple of quickies, both about RSS:

• Microsoft makes all Knowledge Base articles available via RSS feeds. Huge development - access via RSS to everything technical you need to know about all Microsoft products. (via Robert Scoble)

• RSS: full feed or extracts? I commented about this in a post last week on getting more from your RSS feed. My firm view is if you publish less than a full RSS feed, I won't subscribe to it. So what happens to writers whose thoughts and opinions I enjoy reading? People like Chris Pirillo and BL Ochman, for instance, both of whom publish less than full feeds? Well, I still have their feeds in FeedDemon. But, frankly, I'll be skipping through them pretty quickly from now on as I'll be focusing on those feeds that have complete content. I do all my blog reading in my RSS reader, so you'll need to figure out some new ways to drive traffic to your blog or website.

[UPDATE: For today's show, Shel managed to get a wireless network connection at the airport and post the podcast (MP3, 22Mb). That meant I could do the show notes earlier, which I posted this evening Amsterdam time.]

Impersonal bloggers coming

This cartoon, included in an eWeek article, might raise a chuckle or two:

(Speech balloon says: "And this is our crack team of impartial bloggers who are just wild about our products.")

Don't chuckle too loudly, though - this is a portent of things to come.

If you think impersonal call centers are bad, wait for the impersonal bloggers - they're on the way. You can be sure this will happen, sooner or later.

(Hat tip: Stuart Bruce)

Got the T-shirt!

A few weeks ago, I ordered one of Hugh McLeod's bespoke Gapingvoid cartoon T-shirts. It arrived in the post yesterday.

Hugh's right - high quality, well made and very nice indeed. I chose the "Was it good for you?" cartoon:

Heh! I bet we see a human T-shirt catalogue on parade at the London geek dinner next month... ;)

Cops and blackberries

Why should a BlackBerry only be used in business?

Tech journalist Mike Wendland writes in the Detroit Free Press about how BlackBerries help the Wayne County Sheriff's Office catch the crooks:

[...] Instead of checking e-mail and stock prices, the deputies are using Blackberries to call up mug shots and warrants from the field. Already, they've helped catch one fugitive.

In March, sheriff's deputies and Southgate police officers were on the trail of a suspect wanted for failing to show up in court on a drunken-driving charge. "When they walked into the location, the officers were looking at a room full of people," said Wayne County Sheriff Warren Evans. To avoid confusion, Evans said, one deputy pulled out his Blackberry, typed in the suspect's name and date of birth, and hit send.

Immediately, the little screen on the handheld device displayed the suspect's mug shot, taken the night of his original drunken-driving arrest by Southgate officers. Bingo. The face staring back on the Blackberry matched one of the men in the room. "That easily, officers picked the suspect out of the crowd and took him into custody," Evans said.

Detroit Free Press | Devices prove handy in fighting crime

On the road

Light posting ahead until the weekend as I'll be in the UK for the next few days. A client meeting, catching up with some friends for dinner and something quite special.

Next month, I'm co-leading a session about new media channels such as blogs at the Communication Directors Forum. This stellar event takes place on a cruise liner, the P&O Oriana, with about 500 people sailing around the south coast of England for three days. Amazing opportunity for any kind of presentation, actually - a truly captive audience!

So the organizers, Richmond Events, are hosting a dinner in London on Thursday for all the speakers. Getting acquainted type of thing. And that, by the way, is the reason why I won't be live with Shel for Thursday's edition of the Hobson & Holtz Report (I've done a recording which I've sent to Shel).

As it's likely that I won't be able to post anything more until the weekend, unless I have an opportunity and there's a convenient wireless network, I'd like to leave you with three items for your reading pleasure and commenting:

• A Silicon Valley veteran offers an explanation on top marcoms shuffles at top tech companies in response to an article by Tom Foremski in Silicon Valley Watcher.

  The non-identified contributor says, "In my 20 years toiling away in marketing and corporate communications roles, I've seen time and again that whenever an organization is undergoing significant change and faces more than the usual set of business challenges, the tendency is to park many of the problems at the feet of the senior communications person, who is given the job of 'fixing up' the company's image."

  Ne'er a truer word!

• Engadget interviews Bill Gates twice - Part 1 and Part 2. Quite a coup for Engadget (part of Jason Calacanis' Weblogs Inc empire). A lot about Xbox, plus some insight from Gates on the future of Windows Mobile in Part 1.

  In Part 2, there's some very interesting comments about the Tablet PC, especially this from Gates: "When you finally get that magic thing where you get the right hardware and software and right marketing it’s never really the size of the marketing budget, it’s more how you get the exposure. Because after all, all marketing does is take enough of a group that loves the thing and gets them talking to their friends. And we have a little bit of that right now. The people who own Tablets, many of them are rabid Tablet evangelists, and so we need about ten times as many of those before we’re moving towards the mainstream."

  Well, Bill, Steve Rubel came up with a perfect suggestion in February to address Robert Scoble's vexation about this very point. Why not give that a try?

• Jason Calacanis slams CNET who claim that Engadget and other Weblogs Inc blogs have no ethics. Key point from Calacanis: "The fact that you’re losing scoops has nothing to do with ethics, it has to do with hustle - something you clearly don’t have since you couldn't even be bothered to get your facts straight in this editorial. Blogs are out-hustling you plain and simple. The audience is voting with their eyeballs as are the big companies who appreciate the transparency and passion of blogs."

  New-new media versus new-old media. This looks likely to develop into a lively conversation!

Just one of those days

'Harried' would be a good word to describe my day today. Sorry for the absence of new, original and/or intelligent content in this blog today.

So, for today, I'm going to be purely a connector. I'd like to offer you a half-dozen places to go and content to see that I'm sure you'll find interesting. And then, I'm actually taking the weekend off.

Have a good weekend and see you on Monday!

• Newspapers should embrace blogs - listen to Rupert Murdoch's speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 13 April. 38-minute audio, free download.
• If you issue press releases, Tom Murphy has some tips on how to check beforehand whether your email press release will make it through your recipients'  anti-spam filters or not.
• The BBC has released a version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for smartphones and handheld computers. The portable edition contains 7,000 articles from the H2G2 website covering life, the Universe and everything. Phone and PDA users can get access to it by sending "H2G2" in a text message to 81010 or visiting http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/h2g2.
• Talking about the BBC, a news report today says that the BBC is making 20 more radio shows available for listeners to download onto their digital music players. The BBC News report says these are podcasts but you can't get them via RSS: you have to go to the website and manually download the. So who's quibbling over what's in a name?
• The May edition of PC World magazine (the only print magazine I still subscribe to) has a great feature on 50 ways to make software do more. The features describes 65 add-ons to various Windows programs, many free, and I'd almost guarantee you will find at least three things of value here.
• Another excellent and so-helpful screencast from John Udell, on content, services, Google AutoLink, LibraryLookup, Greasemonkey, Google Maps, and OpenSearch. He makes it all so easy to understand.

Back tomorrow

My first chance to combine a) access to the net and b) and opportunity to jot down these few words for the blog. Currently sitting in the departure area in Terminal 4 at London Heathrow waiting for my BA flight back to Amsterdam. Low-cost ticket so no lounge access this time. There's a nice Starbucks, but it's full. At least I could get a coffee to go.

But no matter, as there's a powerful wireless network in this terminal, a T-Mobile hotspot. A bit pricey at 5 pounds an hour, but at least I can use my 90 minutes of waiting time a bit more productively, catch up with email mostly. I can think of little worse than hanging around an airport waiting for a flight.

Normal blog service back during tomorrow.

Light posting

Things will be a bit quiet on this blog for the next few days as I'll be on the road. That's the only reason, not due to any crunches or burn-outs!

Depending on time, opportunity and available wireless networks, I hope to post at least occasionally between now and the end of the week. Shel will be hosting Thursday's edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report although I plan to contribute a little recorded input.

Normal service resumes on Friday.

Ego surfing with Preople

Anyone who writes a blog does a bit of ego surfing now and again. Or even again and again. It's true, isn't it? You know, looking for your name on Google and Technorati to see how many mentions you have. Checking your site stats to see who's linking to you. Et cetera.

Via Krijn Schuurman, I came across Preople - an intriguing-looking web tool that ranks your name based on a complicated calculation on how many times your name is found in a few search engines (according to the FAQ).

The only trouble is, I don't understand what it means. Take a look at this, which is my Preople ranking based on a one-time visit to the website:

The small print in the graphic says "There are 1,756 names that have a higher Preople Ranking and 16,275 names that have a lower Preople Ranking." Ok, is that a good thing? I guess it is.

But what does it mean? Is it simple to understand and it's just me who doesn't get it? Should I pay any attention to this?

Yak shaving and other blogosphere tales

Today's one of those Sundays when yak shaving seems to be the order of the day.

A day of catching up with much-neglected email and prep for the week ahead. Trouble is, I'm a piler not a filer when it comes to email. So first I need to engage in some yak shaving.

What is yak shaving? you may ask. Well, there's a story about it, courtesy of a post on Joi Ito's blog (complete with a great example), from his review of an article in the new Make: magazine.

Yak shaving is defined as "Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on."

Perfectly summarizes my day so far as I'm still at the "seemingly pointless activity" stage.

So as part of the yak shaving process, I've gathered notes of some interesting things that have been going on out there in the big wide blogosphere during the past week:

• There was an interesting-looking debate on "The Fall and Fall of Journalism" at the London School of Economics last Monday, on blogging and journalism. Suw Charman posted commentary on the event, and has also done a podcast (80-minute MP3, about 28 megs). Brilliant, Suw!
• You probably have stats for your blog so you know who's visiting, from where, what pages they look at, etc. How about knowing what links your visitors click on when they're on your blog that will help you understand what content your visitors actually like? Check out MyBlogLog.com and take it for a free trial. Very neat service. (Hat tip: Steve Rubel.)
• Bill Campbell and Stuart Henshall have started Skype Journal, a blog for independent news, views and support for Skype users and developers. Definitely a useful resource if you want to get more out of your Skype experience, eg, finding out about recording podcasts over Skype.
• My podcasting partner Shel Holtz has written two thoughtful commentaries on the huge role communication plays in engaging employees. The first post focuses on the key to creating satisfied employees; the second on how much Wall Street has to do with making workplaces employee-unfriendly.
• While still on the subject of podcasts, Jonathan Marks announced that he is the world's first podcast consultant. From his post: "I am happy to help those podcasters who want to sound professional, with a proper critique on the style needed for a better, more engaging podcast. We could start by putting a limit on the length of the shows. 20 minutes is great, 40 minutes is super specialist....an hour means you don't respect the listener or you are hoping to reach people with nothing to do in their own lives." Shel, it looks like we're in Jonathan's latter category here ;)
• Another big PR agency, Burson-Marsteller, has resurrected the blog they started back in 2002. News about it from Constantin Basturea says it has all the bells and whistles - permalinks, comments and trackbacks. But, Constantin says, "all postings are signed by a gentle Anonymous under the name of "e-fluentials", instead of being signed with a person’s name. And, despite the fact that it offers three flavors of RSS, plus ATOM, none of them is listed on the weblog."
• Finally, TypePad launched localized blogging services in Finland and the UK which now brings to 8 the number of such localized services. TypePad is also the engine of the new Friendster blogs. Such developments could by why Six Apart (which owns TypePad), may still be a tempting target for Yahoo, who Reuters says (in a Yahoo News report) is "likely to build and buy tools that help its users create, publish and search blogs [...] [and also] expand into social networking software, which lets users share and organize content."

Ok, yak shaving progressing well! Now continuing with the recursing...

[Yak image courtesy of Jennifer M. Leonard, found through a quick search in Google Images. Used totally without permission; hope you don't mind, Jennifer.]

A short break

A couple of posts today to follow this one, then a blogging break until the weekend.

The show notes for today's edition of the Hobson & Holtz Report bi-weekly podcast will be up on the podcast blog and on Shel's blog as usual later today once the show's been done (after about 8pm Central EuropeanTime); I'll get the notes here at the weekend.

Update 3-March: No blogging break, actually, as things today didn't quite go as planned...

Good for your... er, health

News via irrepressible columnist John Dvorak of the latest aid to healthy and safe computer practice - the busty mousepad.

Wonderful product description on the vendor's website, ChestRest (love the name!):

Kannazuki Mai, from the hentai series G-Taste illustrated by the artist Yagami Hiroaki is now immortalized in busty mouse pad form. Let her ample ergonomic bosoms ease your aching wrists and slide you into computing paradise.

Quite. No doubt these (there's more than one design) will sell like hot, er... cakes.

But imagine the potential issues that would arise in the workplace (especially) if people started using these mousepads. Oh, and Dvorak has a rather more topographical photo on his blog post.

A serious point, though - one person's frivolous amusement could be the cause of significant offence to others.

Outed by the bloggers

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central is a great example of stand-up comedy on the web at its very best.

The Daily Show last Thursday was just hilarious, a satirical take on mainstream media and the blogosphere, the fake White House reporter and his naughty secrets and the recent Eason Jordan scalping by US political bloggers. Includes an additional brilliant segment by 'Ted Hitler.'

A timely dose of political satire to start Monday morning!

Quicktime video, about 9 minutes 30 secs. An alternative to Quicktime is Quicktime Alternative (logical !)- all the functionality without any of the config hassles with Quicktime.

(Hat tip: Norman Jenson at onegoodmove)

Declare your personal blogging policy

Definitely the next must-have accessory for the serious blogger who wants to make a clear statement:

(Hat tip: Guillaume du Gardier)

Handling the email guilt trip

For me, managing email is one of life's little chores that I never seem able to really keep up with. Outlook is my email program, but what I use as an indispensable tool to really manage it all is the excellent NEO Pro, a shell program that runs on top of and in tandem with Outlook.

I've been using NEO for the past three years. The program enables me to see my email in threads and conversations. It sorts all my email for me, creating the folders and grouping together what I receive and what I send so that I can have different views on it. I don't need to do anything.

With just a mouse click or two, I can see my email by person, by conversation, by topic, by date, etc. I can decide what's important, what's regarded as bulk mail and what I don't want to see at all. I can search my email, find those attachments and manage everything quite smoothly.

I can even access emails in all my archive PSTs from within the same program. Yes, it's a real productivity tool.

So why is it that I still have a problem with email?

Jason Clarke may have the answer. You see, I'm a Piler not a Filer:

Filers tend to have a very large hierarchy of folders that they have built over time, and carefully move each email to it’s rightful place once it has served it’s purpose. For filers, nothing feels better than to completely empty their inbox; it means everything has been tidied up.

Pilers, on the other hand, tend to leave everything in their inbox. They feel that they can quickly search their inbox for anything that they might need, so they can’t be bothered to take the time to build a complicated and confusing hierarchy of folders to have to go looking through when they need to find an old message. Pilers consider their inbox as a storage area for tasks that are on the go, reminders, pretty much anything they might want to store in digital format.

In reality, I'm a wannabe Filer. NEO Pro does all the folder hierarchy for me. I do make an effort once a quarter, sorting stuff, archiving it, etc. Yet I still have a massive inbox in Outlook.

Then Jason hits home:

I consider Pilers to be rude.

You respond to your voicemail in a timely fashion, don’t you? If you can’t be bothered to adhere to a system that ensures you respond to the email you receive, you’re being rude.

If you're a Piler, it really does need a commentary like this to make you stop and think about how you seem to others who send you email and don't hear back from you, either in a timely fashion or at all. Even with a great productivity aid like NEO Pro, I am so guilty! Heck, I've even got other tools like Copernic Desktop Search that also searches emails.

Maybe that's part of my problem. I have these tools that let me find anything. I don't need to spend ages manually sorting, creating folders, etc, when I can call up a tool, type in a keyword or two and find the stuff I'm looking for. Maybe it's a left-brain/right-brain thing. Indeed, it all counts for nothing if you don't have the right approach in the first place.

However you approach it, Jason has made some excellent points and offers some simple guidance on managing your email. Thanks, Jason. I promise to do better and not to be rude.

Four invitations

Google have given me four invitations for free Gmail accounts.

If you're in the communication business - PR, marketing, employee communication, or related fields, or a student taking a communication-related subject - and would like a Gmail invitation, here's how to get one:

1. State which part of the communication business you're in.
2. Leave your request here as a comment.

Just to be wholly clear - leave your request here as a comment: don't send me email. Sorry, but I won't respond to email requests.

First come first served until they're gone!

The evolution of cats

I just couldn't resist it:

Gmail invitations

I have 6 Gmail invitations up for grabs.

If you're in the communication business - PR, marketing, employee communication, or related fields - and would like a Gmail account, leave your request here as a comment and I'll send you an invitation.

Just to be wholly clear - please leave your request here: don't send me an email.

First come first served until they're gone!

Rolling out the catch-up recipe

One of the exasperating things about being away and wholly offline for a week is the catch-up required when you get back. This used to mean reviewing the 300+ emails that arrived when you were offline for that time.

My recipe for that is quite simple. There's no way you should spend the time going through such a volume, reviewing, answering as required, etc. You have to focus on those that you need to pay attention to relatively immediately; the rest you might get to later, or not. If you miss something, well, so be it.

Now it also means applying the same recipe to reviewing your RSS feeds as you see what's been going on whilst you were away.

A quick scan this morning of just three of the primary feeds I read every day shows that there has been a lot happening. So I've earmarked much of today for some primary-feed reading and reviewing. Some commenting here as appropriate with hopefully not too much that's already been talked about elsewhere.

Let me know if you see too much of "Yes, that's very interesting but we know about that already" in the next few days.

Season's Greetings!

Just two days until Christmas Day and time for me to sign off for the holiday. I promised my wife I would not put blogging fingers to keyboard during this time; instead, I would wholly focus on my family. So I will try to keep that commitment.

Wishing everyone all the very best for a peaceful and happy Christmas, wherever you are.

I'll be back next week, probably around the 29th.

In the meantime, for your amusement and pleasure, I've included below a Christmas poem that I first encountered in a discussion forum on CompuServe in about 1990. I have never known who wrote it until now, thanks to a quick Google search.

The poem's mostly in English, and it will definitely help if you understand or speak a little Spanish as well.

A day out in Paris

Yesterday was a wonderful day out - I took a Thalys high-speed train to Paris and had lunch with Guillaume du Gardier and Elizabeth Albrycht. Down early in the morning, back late in the evening.

That's one of the other terrific things about blogs - you get to meet the best people. Guillaume and Elizabeth are both in Paris, I'm in Amsterdam. We're virtually neighbours. Not only that, we have much in common, both in what we do and how we think about what communication tools like blogs can do for organizations.

So we enjoyed a delightful lunch at Restaurant Les Alchimistes just off the Boulevard des Italiens and whiled away quite a few hours with lots of discussion. I also had the pleasure of meeting communicator and blogger Christophe Ducamp. While we all didn't fix the European business world's problems, we got darned close!

It's been a while since I was last in Paris, and the last time my journey was by KLM to Charles de Gaulle Airport, not by Thalys to the Gare du Nord. The Thalys service really is excellent: modern, fast and very comfortable trains. The journey is a little long (4 hours) because the rail network between Amsterdam and Brussels - basically, in The Netherlands - just isn't yet up to scratch for high speed trains like Thalys. From Brussels to Paris, it's a different story - TGV all the way. A new high-speed line is under construction in The Netherlands; when completed in 2006 it will mean a journey time to Paris from Amsterdam in less than 3 hours.

So some quick impressions as I traversed Paris. The Metro is as unremarkable as ever. The service is fine but the trains are old and uncomfortable. There never seem to be enough metro trains running as any train is always absolutely packed with people. At least, that's how it was on routes 5 and 8 yesterday.

The Gare du Nord is a highly efficient station, as far as railway stations go. It has a wireless network, which I didn't actually use so I can't tell how good it is. A highly visible service, though: signs everywhere in the station to buy a token card to get a login ID and password. (Think what a great customer relationship boost SNCF would enjoy if they offered free wifi at the station.)

One thing about that station, though, that is the same every time I've been there over the years - in the winter, it is damned cold in there!

I'm writing this post on the train back to Amsterdam in between chats with my seat passenger, a delightful young Parisian lawyer. She has an iPod, which was how we got chatting. She thinks it's very cool indeed, perfect for use on long train trips. She listens to music on it (well, yeah!); I think she'll be thinking about podcasting now as that was a topic we discussed quite a bit. I've really got to get one of these digital players, not necessarily an iPod.

I can't do anything with this post until I get back to base and can connect to a network, so it won't go on the blog until Friday morning. The day must come soon when transport services like trains offer a wireless network. If airlines are beginning to do it, so must services like Thalys.

Yes, yesterday was indeed a wonderful day out.

On giving up blogging and other wondrous things

Copywriter Bob Bly is planning to give up the ghost, so to speak, on blogging after just a week. Remember, Bob's the guy who sparked a little blogosphere storm (in a teacup, really) last month with an article in a marketing newsletter that basically said blogs are a complete waste of time.

To give him some credit, he did eventually start a blog as a means of seeing for himself what this is all about.

This morning, my RSS feed included a post on BlogWrite for CEOs by Debbie Weil commenting on Bob's new plan to give up. A quick jump over to Bob's blog and lots of comments there on why he should stick with it.

Will he? Up to him, but he'd be very silly to give up on it now. What's more, all the posts and comments about the value of blogs are giving him some keen marketing advice which he certainly wouldn't get without blogs. A waste of time? I don't think so.

So, continuing scanning my RSS feed from a few days ago - doing some catch-up reading - a few wondrous things going on caught my eye.

From Evelyn Rodriguez at Crossroads Dispatches, a great definition of leadership:

Leadership is communicating people's worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves. Notice the words worth and potential. People must feel an intrinsic sense of worth - that is, they have intrinsic value - totally apart from being compared to others, and that they are worthy of unconditional love, regardless of behavior or performance. Then when you communicate their potential and create opportunities to develop and use it, you are building on a solid foundation. To communicate people's potential and give them a sense of extrinsic worth is a flawed foundation, and their potential will never be optimized. - by Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit.

Chris Pirillo writes about LabelsWin, a rather neat little add-in for Windows that let's you add colour labels to your folder icons. Whoopee! you say. But I love stuff like this.

A news item in The Register says if you thought Oracle's attempt to acquire PeopleSoft has been fun, then hang on for a series of wild rides. Oracle is in a buying kind of mood, according to its president. "We have said all along that there are multiple acquisition possibilities," Oracle's co-president Charles Phillips told Reuters in an interview. "We are talking to other companies as we speak. We have multiple ideas."

Other people with good ideas include French newspaper Le Monde who has launched reader blogs. As Loic le Meur reports, Le Monde is one of the first newspapers in the world to offer blogs to their readers, putting those readers on the same level as professional journalists.

In a similar vein, Josh Hallett has news about a Chilean newspaper website where readers determine which stories are followed-up on. Josh also speaks about the Financial Times and how they are looking at using search logs to predict what stories may be out there. Participatory journalism indeed.

Back to blogging now. Frank Paynter at Sandhill Trek conducted a little survey for the IT Kitchen collaborative blog project by simply asking "why do we blog?"

Says Frank, "I thought it would be valuable to compile insights from some of the articulate digital self publishers known as 'bloggers.' Little did I know it would turn into a hobby. Here are reflections from thirty-five bloggers, an even three dozen if you count me."

Bob Bly, you should read this.

It's been an interesting week.

The minister of silly walks online

John Cleese has a website! Lots of very silly things and the Church of Jesus Christ Capitalists. Very Pythonesque.

An extension of the Cleese brand - it costs $50 to get access to "laughs, exclusive sketches, CleeseTV streaming videos, limited edition merch and meet and greet opps, access to the community, message boards, periodical chat rooms with John, family vacation footage, behind the scenes "making of" video and much much more."

TheJohnCleese.com

(Via Nick Bradbury)

Protect your bananas

Hold the front page! Here's crucial news about how to protect your bananas:

Are you fed up with taking bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? Our unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere [...] The Banana Guard was specially designed to fit the vast majority of bananas. Its other features include multiple small perforations to facilitate ventilation thereby preventing premature ripening and a sturdy locking mechanism to keep the Banana Guard closed. The Banana Guard is of course dishwasher safe for easy cleaning.

Order online (in 9 different colours - I especially like the glow-in-the-dark choice) from BananaGUARD.

This news comes to you via - who else? - Straight Banana.

Incidentally, as I reported back in August, bananas are of critical importance to our legislators in the European Union, who like to look at ways to ban bananas that aren't straight. Of course, I could be wrong with this view as indicated by Straight Banana's excellent rebuttal which offered an entirely different and plausible view.

3 Gmail invites available

I have three Gmail invitations left.

If you're in the communication business - PR, marketing, employee communication, etc - and would like a Gmail account, just drop me an email and I'll send you an invitation.

First come first served until they're gone!

How American are you?

Spending 30 minutes clicking on things and I just came across a highly amusing site with a quiz to judge how American you are.

I guess I didn't do too badly for a Brit:

How would you do?

How F**king American Are You?

How to get your blog noticed: 3-step alt method

Robert Scoble's post yesterday on How your blog will get discovered provides some helpful tips on what you should do with pinging, Technorati, etc. Then there's Shelley Powers rejoinder This is Wrong on Oh So Many Levels that provides some extremely sensible advice focusing on content and actual writing.

Bloggers, pay no attention to such misguided views! I now know the real secret!

Here's the 3-step simple procedure on what you have to do to get your blog well onto the radar screens of other bloggers and anyone else of influence:

1. Publish a stupid humourless ridiculous funny cartoon - ideally, one about if pets could blog - on your blog that gets the attention of Robert Scoble. Yes, you guessed it: he's key to the success of my cunning plan, Cap'n Blackadder!
2. Robert sees the cartoon, has a good laugh, and posts a link to it in the Scoble link blog! If he thinks it's hugely funny, he may also post it in the actual Scobleizer! If you get the twin hits, you're on your way to Notice Nirvana.
3. Next, fire up your blog stats page on your hosting service - the page that tells you hits and referrers - and watch the traffic roar in faster than Michael Schumacher with Rubens Barrachello up his tail pipe. You don't have to wait at all: the instant that the Scoble and Scobleizer RSS feeds go out, you get the hits.

Then sit back, relax, and bask in the rosy glow of knowing that you have helped the great social levelling process that is what blogs are all about, as clearly everyone in the whole world has exactly the same sense of humour about cats and dogs who blog. Why would you get so much traffic otherwise, eh?

Unless Robert gets truly muzzled by Microsoft, this foolproof plan has no downside! Guaranteed to work! Trust me.

The mirror to this - not getting noticed by anybody at all - would, of course, be doing what Brent Charbonneau suggests.

If pets could blog...

Found at Joana Filipa's personal blog.

Things happening 19 Sept

Sunday morning, scanning my RSS webfeeds, some interesting things going on that caught my attention:

• Jan Baan, a name synonymous with one of the great ERP success stories of the 1990s (and one of the greatest business controversies in The Netherlands at the time of that success story's demise in the early 00s), is back with a new company, Cordys Inc. It develops web services-based collaboration and integration software that enables companies to create composite application frameworks. Cordys launched its namesake platform earlier this week, aimed squarely at competing with the likes of SAP. (eWeek)
• Father of the internet, Vint Cerf, explains his vision for an interplanetary net: " What we are looking at now is the possibility of using the internet kinds of protocols to support the communications for spacecrafts that are moving around in the solar system." (BBC News)
• The stakes are so high in Oracle's interminable campaign to buy out PeopleSoft that both companies could end up bleeding themselves to exhaustion in this war of attrition. Should PeopleSoft run up the white flag? (eWeek) [See also my recent post on corporate reputation.]
• What's happened to Martha Stewart? Remember, corporate fraud conviction last July? Well, she announced this week that she doesn't plan to appeal the decision in her case, and that she would like to go to prison asap - no doubt a good move as part of what's needed to repair her brand image. (Fast Company)
• If you despise the RealPlayer media player as much as I do, with its ads and popups and stealing file associations and trying to connect to the net all the time, but need something to play RealAudio and RealMedia files (like much of the audio-visual stuff on the BBC website), you'll like Real Alternative, a free replacement. (PC World)
• Very nice add-in for Microsoft Word - WordToys. It puts many of Word’s advanced features at your fingertips by adding an array of icons and toolbars to the application. Great for tablet PC users especially. Free and pay versions. (Scoble)
• Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997 and graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic. (Slashdot)
• Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Ahoy, me hearties - Arrrr! and Avast! (Dave Barry | Miami Herald) And Microsoft UK issued a spoof press release about pirate day, according to Neowin (but I don't see it on the MS UK press release website).

(Written with BlogJet 1.1.0 build 20 and published live - this post has only one category.)

Microsoft exhibition stand needs a caption

During my visit this afternoon to the IBC 2004 exhibition in Amsterdam, I took some photos of various scenes in the exhibition halls. This one of the Microsoft stand (back end of it - click image for larger pic) is just missing a caption: