Thoughts from Howard Yermish about technology, music composition, wine, bicycling and being human.
John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing brings us this post:
He talks about blending advertising, public relations and referrals to create a balance between cost, credibility and control.
My 2 cents was about making sure that advertising, PR and referrals worked together to create a continuum. Most businesses isolate these activities rather than designing a strategy so that one amplifies the other.
If you are new to Twitter or even for seasoned users, head on over and take a look at the Twitter Cheat Sheet. And if you aren’t following me yet…
If you happen to be clutching an iPhone and you live or work in the Philadelphia area, SEPTA has developed a nice iPhone application: iSepta.org. (Click on the link from your iPhone.)
What makes this interesting is that SEPTA’s website is pretty inconvenient for finding train schedules, but this iPhone optimized website is quite brilliant. You simply enter the start and end points and it shows you what trains and the schedules of the next five running. Even though it is a small audience, more public transportation services should see this example.
The application is executed perfectly. It answers the user need: “I’m in Berwyn and I need to get to 30th Street Station…(tap…scroll…tap)…Ah! The R5 and it leaves at 10:34am. Thank you, iSepta.org!”
If you are looking for Web 3.0 goodness, Twine is probably a good place to start. I just started playing around with Twine while it is still in invitation only private beta. I’m in a sharing mood, so if you want to check it out, either post your email in the comments or @hyermish me on Twitter and I will set you up.
As this post appears on the blog, I will be in the car heading to an undisclosed campsite. I doubt that I will have cell phone reception and I highly doubt there will be an open WiFi network in range. There will probably not be an extension cord long enough to power my high-tech habits.
Time to unplug for the weekend.
No blogging, no web surfing, no email, no Twitter, no LinkedIn, no RSS feeds, no podcasts.
And now, my haiku for the Internet.
This infinite cloud
of technology creates
possibilities.
Time for a weekend of hotdogs, tents, marshmallows, dirt, sleeping bags, pointy sticks and lighter fluid.
Wish me luck.
Take a few moments to read the following article from the Knowledge@Wharton site:
Microsoft’s Vista: New Horizon or the End of the Road for PC Operating Systems?
From the bottom of the article, the author writes the following:
Another radical shift for Microsoft would be to make Windows a more open platform where the company would give away the software to collect revenue from transactions and advertising. “The only long-term solution is for Microsoft to make a radical shift and turn Windows into a truly open platform,” says Werbach. “Eventually, the big money is going to come from services and transactions, not software licenses. Microsoft understands this and is moving in the right direction, but it will eventually have to go much further. As long as it has the DNA of a software company, it will be weighed down in the new era.”
The problem is that Microsoft’s products have gotten bigger and more powerful, but not necessarily better. Wouldn’t it be great if the next version of Windows was super fast and sleek so that a 3-year-old laptop had a fabulous experience with the software, perhaps faster than with XP
A suggestion: create a light-weight client edition of Vista that is free, but not eligible for technical support from Microsoft. If they must, charge $50 for it. Give the user an incentive to remain a Microsoft customer and keep it cheap enough so that users stay legal. More powerful editions of Windows would have specific target audiences, such as business users, home users, gamers, and creative professionals.
Otherwise, Macintosh and Linux will continue to make significant gains.
A full rainbow spans the horizon looking east over North Broad Street after a brief rain shower in the early evening of Thursday, May 22, 2008 in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Tom Mihalek)
Happy Birthday to German composer, Richard Wagner, born in 1813.
Known for his vignette operas such as Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and Der Ring des Nibelungen (a.k.a. The Ring Cycle).
One of my favorite memories at Eastman School of Music was when my composition teacher, Christopher Rouse, asked me to listen to the entire Ring Cycle (16 hours) over the course of two weeks to discuss as part of my studies.
So with that in mind, grab a nice glass of German Riesling and cuddle up to four hours of Wagner opera tonight.
For a little more than two weeks, I have been investigating BrightKite, a new website that brings location and photos to Twitter.
Now onto my experience. After receiving my private invitation to the service, signing up with BrightKite was simple.
With any social network application, the overall experience gets better as more friends participate. BrightKite is no exception. Fortunately, they have developed a tool to discover existing friends from your Twitter network. During the private beta, you have a limited number of email invitations available for sharing. (Let me know in the comments if you are interested in trying it out as I have a few extra invitations available.)
Searching for locations was quite easy as you can put in an address or a business name in your search. Once you find a location, you can add it to your “Placemarks” for easy recall. In my testing, I found that searching was very good and I was always able to locate the business or address without any problems.
Posting photos is seriously simple. If you are online, you can upload a photo a create a caption through the web interface. Since BrightKite is about being mobile, posting a photo is just a matter of emailing the photo from your phone to a special email address at BrightKite. The subject of your email becomes the photo caption and the photo is posted to the place where you are currently located. That said, it would be nice if they included a quick instruction about the subject line becoming the caption for the attached photo.
BrightKite has a very nice iPhone interface. For this reason, I didn’t use the SMS capabilities for updating my location with BrightKite. I found the iPhone interface very responsive and very nicely designed. It wasn’t an afterthought, rather it was clearly designed to include the bulk of the functionality that you would want when you are on the go.
The downside of the service is that it is new. It will obviously get better as more users join the party. You can totally tell that some people are posting the equivalent of “Hello World” while others are posting constantly. Over time, the novelty will wear off and posts will be more interesting.
One thing that BrightKite made perfectly clear: I have a boring social life. Basically, I go to work and I go home. Yes, there were a couple of times where I actually went out and I posted my location to BrightKite and posted a photo or two. But for the most part, I wasn’t the party animal that BrightKite is targeting.
If you own a restaurant or a night club or other venue, you should be on BrightKite. Take pictures and post with captions to BrightKite even if you never move. When a user gets near your location, BrightKite lets users know that you (or your venue) are close by and your “Placestream” becomes a marketing message for you.
It would be nice if you could selectively post to Twitter. Right now it is all or nothing. Perhaps a checkbox for the online posting form or a tag (#notweet) in the email message to prevent a Twitter posting.
When looking for people nearby, you should be able to expand your radius out more since the service still needs more users. The current limits with the current user base basically let me know that I’m the only one around.
Privacy options should be more flexible, perhaps allowing you to specify placemarks (specifically home) where you want to be private compared to a restaurant where you want people to find you. Seriously, I don’t want to share my home address and related posts with everyone, but if I’m at a chic restaurant, I want everyone possible to find me there.
Trust by user is a nice feature, but with a lot of users, could become difficult to manage a long list of friends. Perhaps BrightKite could allow you to group your followers so that when someone starts following you, you can put them into one of several groups.
BrightKite shows serious promise as a web application. It does what it sets out to do quite well. Clearly the target is a younger demographic that has an actual night life. Clearly, if you are not a fan of Twitter, BrightKite will not turn you into a microblogger overnight.
But will I keep using it? After two weeks of use, I think that I might post to it occasionally if I have a great photo or funny quote. I like the fact that it is focused on locations, text quotes and pictures. Its strength is this focus. I can see restaurants using it to promote themselves by encouraging users to post great stuff at the restaurant.
Favorite tweet: Merlin Mann from 43folders describes what it is like to talk to a Windows user about the Mac.
And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out the “You Look Nice Today” podcast.
