Happy New Year everyone! I’m finally taking my vacation, no new posts until Tuesday.
Thanks to everyone who’s been following the blog and the podcast (yes, traffic is up 4x since June).
2006 was fantastic and I’ve already got even more great projects lined up for this year, buckle up!
I’m starting off with a fresh coat of paint for The M Show, I’ve only got the homepage rolling, but I’m really liking the new look. Best of luck to you in 007.
Am I the only one feeling that way? DVD’s have become the new magazines, just a couple of bucks and not even worth reselling (and more fun to just pass on). There are a number of great podcasts that I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never get to them. Vidcasts are even worse, Tiki Bar and the Rumor Girls make the cut, and even they pile up now and then.
I’ve got the XBox 360 up and running and the integration with Live has been stretching my brain – how cool is it to be watching a DVD and get a pop-up that a friend on the other side of the country is looking for a game?
Add producing my own media to the mix (I saw the New M Show template today!) and that’s it – I’m doing this morning’s post at 11pm. But – I’m having more fun than ever. The bad news is that the bar is rising and the mediocre content is falling off my list. Perhaps the rising tide will raise all boats. Please comment if you’ve dropped casts or other media that you used to find compelling but no longer have time for.
A little late thanks to the holiday, but why not stop by for a listen anyway? You can check out the best business podcast by just clicking through!
Or more importantly the people in Seattle that added that functionality to Amazon. It was a regular Christmas, me sitting around doing a lot of reading and plenty of visitors up here at the farm.
Of course the burning question that has not changed since I was 6 years old – “Tell us about the loot!”. Amazon has made the holiday a lot more satisfying. I got my nephews stuff that they were psyched to get, as opposed to being the weird old uncle getting them an ugly sweater or whatever. The lovely Carin got me a rare german Rick Astley disc (sorry, I’m a child of the 80’s), the type of thing that would be impossible to find in a pre-Amazon era.
I never got around to recording an M Show, probably tomorrow, not a lot worth chatting about on the Marketing front – except that Land’s End has been pummeling me with email, you’ve got to love a vendor with the guts to send me a reminder about holiday shopping on Christmas day.
I hope your holiday has gone well and you are enjoying your time off.
To me that means Merry Christmas, if that’s not the case for you I hope you enjoy whatever your celebration of choice is. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who celebrates Kawanzaa, I hear a lot of people mentioning it to be PC but I’ve never met anyone who actually celebrated it.
It’s been a great year again for the Podcast, especially with PodCamp on the scene. The blog has already been a lot of fun, I was surprised to see over 100 uniques today on a day I expected things to be totally dead. The past year has been incredible, if 2007 is even half as interesting it’s going to be great.
I’ve been posting daily but I may slip a day or two here until Wednesday (unless I get bored (usually every 2 hours or so)).
In other big news Carin scored with a killer Geek gift, I got the tricked out XBox 360! HD Games here I come!
So I thought I was pretty clever earlier this week with my Rule of 2 (don’t waste your time with social networks that you only hear about once), then Chris Penn, of The Financial Aid Podcast weighed in with a brilliant comment – who gives a damn about the 2 minutes it takes to register, join every network out there to lock down your namespace (protect your brand in Marketese), and he’s absolutely right. He also pointed me towards some other crazy crap Google is trying.
The thing is, this is not the first time he’s dealt me a brainbuster. He’s doing crazy stuff all the time over on MySpace and he’s always experimenting. He’s also good at scripting, and I’m not, so that makes me jealous.
You may ask “Why only an Honorary Ronin”? Chris is actually a ninja, so calling him a Ronin would be an affront. I’ll let him correct my limited understanding if necessary, but the Ninja work for the emperor, sort of like Navy Seals (but you never see them and if there was a movie about them with Charlie Sheen in it, everyone involved in the film would end up assassinated). The Ronin is often without a master, usually because they have been disgraced – basically mercenaries.
In other words it’s sort of like how Colin Powell would be Sir Colin if not for that altercation we had with the kingdom back in the late 1700’s.
I also salute him for working at this place that, for some unknown reason, he’s the only one there that’s not a supermodel (actually I just checked Flickr and for some reason there were some other guys at the holiday party this year, maybe they took some heat for discrimination or something).
So Chris, this sangria’s for you.
As a hip, swinging Web 2.0 kind of guy/gal, I’m sure you have the same problem – every other week, at minimum, you get an invite to join YASN (Yet Another Social Network). After a while your inbox is crammed with notices and spam from a bunch of websites have names with no vowels, and no traffic.
Fear naught, the answer is here! The defense is “JFunk’s Rule of 2”. Anytime I’m asked to join YASN I make a mental note of the name of the network and if I ever get asked again (this is where the 2 part comes in…) I’ll join. I figure that if a social network can’t get on my radar from more than one source, it’s probably not going to make it anyplace.
Not the most earth shattering post, but for some reason I feel much better on passing up an invite for YASN… “Oh, I’m sorry, we just have rules about these things, It’s not that I have anything against giving my personal data to some group nobody has ever heard of before”.
In other news we had the work Yankee Swap. I got a candle (not a guy’s gift), swapped for some lottery tickets (which always move on), swapped for a Mag-lite flashlight. I was happy with that but then that got swapped out for a cheaper no-name flashlight. I would have preferred the Best Buy gift certificate I threw in the ring, alas…
This just happened and I had to sneak over here for a quick post. My plan this morning was to go to a holiday gathering of former co-workers from DCI. I just heard about Crayon’s holiday party in Second Life… I’m actually considering passing on the real world event for the virtual one.
About a month ago I noticed that with the exception of a “dummies” book there were very few print resources out there on the big SF so I decided to turn to the blogosphere. I stumbled across SalesforceWatch.com and found a post that they were looking for usability testers for the next release of Salesforce for the Treo.
Because I was an alternate I never got an NDA, but I’m not going to yap and betray Melissa, who gave me the guided tour. The one thing that I liked the most is already in the existing version – the ability to see the latest Opportunities that have Closed as Wins. It’s a cool system but I really need to upgrade my Treo 600 to take advantage of it. In other SF news I still have not been able to get the Google AdWords/Salesforce integration to work. My server only likes forms that use “Submit” and I need to use a different term if I want the SF snippet to work. More experimenting this week to see if I can get that to work. I’m also doing a bunch of hygiene with Ringlead and that’s working well.
I sent off an email campaign yesterday and finally got around to testing a full-color HTML message vs a plain text one. I’m an old enough fart to remember how open and click-throughs exploded when images were added to email so this could be the coming of the full circle. Trying to get a plain text email out proved to be quite a challenge, there’s no way in ConstantContact to just click “Text Only” (but I thought of a workaround for that, of course 1 day after moving hell and earth to get it out via an Outlook mail merge, which is another horror story of it’s own adding to my December from hell).
So in the spirit of the Rocky Balboa release today, I’m wondering if there are any opinions out there on who will be triumphant, the champion or the challenger?