April 15, 2003

Corporate blogs make personal connection

Doc is quoted in Crain’s B2B Marketing article about corporate weblogs:

“Weblog expert Searls said that companies of all stripes might do well to consider complementing their formal marketing messages with the more direct connection to customers that Weblogs can deliverÂ—with or without the endorsement of the marketing department.”

April 14, 2003

Google as a Knowledge Operating System

From Microdoc News:

“Google, a Knowledge Operating System (KOS) manages your knowledge activity on the Internet. Google, as a KOS, manages your requests for information, indexes your web pages, responds to applications you may be running on your computer that interface to it via the Google APIs, and integrates knowledge and information from millions of computers into a single large managed database.”

This seems to be a little excessive in that I don’t know if I’d want to give one company that much information about me, but the high-level idea is interesting.

April 14, 2003

Knowledge management and weblogs

Smarty enabled b2 mod

Cool! I found a b2 hack by Donncha O Caoimh that incorporates the Smarty template engine.

Just what I was looking for to speed up the responsiveness of this blog! Now, I just need to find some time to test and install it.

April 12, 2003

Seed or hydroseed

I need to seed my backyard, but I can’t decide between hydroseeding and pain old seeding. I’ve already factored out laying down sod, because according to this it appears that sod will be 50% more than hydroseeding.

However, what’s benefit over seeding? This Old House seems to favor hydroseeding, but it’s still unclear of the cost gap.

Hmm…

April 11, 2003

Blogging as Jazz

Lilia Efimova, Diana Mehta and Sebastian Fiedler have an interesting discussion going on about using the metaphor of a Jazz band to describe the interactions that take place in the blogshere.

Diana Mehta uses a quote from jazz musician Doug Little on her Ryze page in reference to improvisational “interactions”:

“What I play will inspire the drummer to play something. The drummer might inspire me to play something. The musicians listen to one another and make spontaneous decisions. The possibilities are endless. It is always within the form and it is always interconnected with each person but it is never the same.

April 10, 2003

Using RSS for corporate communications

Via Jon Udell I’m happy to see that the PR Industry is starting to preach the value of blogging and the versatility of RSS.

For example, Phil Gomes writes in MediaMap’s ExperPR article:

“Today, companies — and, by extension, the agencies that represent them — can publish their corporate communications content in their online press rooms using RSS-supported, weblog-rooted principles. While perhaps not in widespread use now, the day will come when the online location of a company’s RSS feed will be just as much of a PR proÂ’s email signature file as his or her email address, homepage, and phone number.”

April 9, 2003

Five steps to finding the perfect dog

My wife Catherine stated today what I hope will be an ongoing series of articles about pets. (So please encourage her :-)

The first article outlines the five steps to finding the perfect dog.

Of course she knows this because we found our “perfect” dog, but on top of that she has much more particle experience by volunteering at a shelter and studying canine massage.

April 8, 2003

Blogs, dialogue and identity building

Lilia Efimova nicely pulls together various opinions on how blogs and the dialogs they produce provide a perspective into ones identity not necessarily found in the office.

April 7, 2003

Wi-Fi and cell phones

Martin Cooper, the father of the first cell phone call, has the following to say about Wi-Fi:

“”Wi-Fi is wonderful. It is a superb local area network–what it was designed to do–and it does that very well. When you try to make Wi-Fi cover a wide area, it’s absolutely the worst way to do it. Think about it. In order to cover a city, you need a million sites; we actually did an analysis of that. And every one of them has got to have backhaul. So it turns out it’s neither economical nor practical.” (via cnet)