Archive for October, 2005
October 22, 2005
My First Podcast
Jeff De Cagna and I are partnering up on a presentation for ASAE’s Great Ideas conferences where we will introduce podcasting and discuss its possible use by associations. The fun part is that we will actually record and assemble a podcast during the session by recording interviews with some of the attendees.
The Distance Learning Coalition was kind enough to invite Jeff and I to present to their group on Thursday, which was a wonderful opportunity for us to make a dry run through our material and the process of recording with a live group. Here is the podcast if you would like to listen to it. Two of the attendees decided to hijack our podcast and record their own mini show within ours, which was a lot of fun.
Jeff and I pre-recorded some sections of the podcast via a Skype call. As you can tell, I need to get a much better microphone for these things.
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October 15, 2005
Using the Bottom of Your Page
Derek Powazek had a nice post a while ago on how to reward visitors who read an entire page:
When you’re designing pages - specifically content pages - what is the best possible thing that could happen? I mean after the user has bought a computer, gotten internet connectivity, figured out how to use a browser, and somehow found their way to your site … what is the single best thing that they could do?
Read. That’s right, read. And read all the way to the bottom of the page. In this business, a user that actually reads all the way to the bottom of a page is like gold. They’re your best, most engaged, happiest users. You know, because they haven’t clicked away. They did the best possible thing they could do, and now they’re at the bottom of the page. And how do you reward them?
With a copyright statement. Maybe, if they’re lucky, some bland footer navigation.
If you ask me, that’s just rude.
Read the rest of the post for the ideas on to provide value at the bottom of your pages.
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October 10, 2005
MySQL and Oracle
Oracle just bought a company that provides a key piece of technology for the MySQL database. Here is Jeremy Zawodny’s summary of the situation.
MySQL is now faced with the prospect of licensing technology they cannot ship without from their biggest rival. Interestingly, there’s always been once piece of the InnoDB puzzle that’s not available under the GPL: the InnoDB Hot Backup Tool. Without it, database administrators cannot backup their InnoDB tables without shutting down MySQL or at least locking out all transactions.
Oracle just bought themselves a whole lot of leverage with MySQL AB and a talented team of database engineers to boot.
Keep an eye on this if you use MySQL within your organization.
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October 10, 2005
Kevin Holland on Email Marketing
Kevin Holland shares his best tips in 5 Things I’ve Learned About Email Marketing for Associations:
This week, the 100th issue of our organization’s free e-newsletter will hit the streets. It’s very different from when it started because we didn’t know anything 100 issues ago! I probably still don’t, but having now generated hundreds of new members through email newsletters and sold tens of thousands of books, I think I’ve picked up a few things. (And yes, to the blog-faithful out there, I still am a huge proponent of email marketing, even over blogs.)
Great tips in that post, check it out! Pretty consistent with the article I posted last week.
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October 7, 2005
Going to N-TEN DC?
I’ll be attending N-TEN’s DC meeting next Tuesday, Oct 11. The theme of the conference is data integration. Who ever has issues with that? ;)
If you’ll be there and want to say hi, just drop me a note.
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October 7, 2005
Google RSS Reader
Google is launching an RSS reader service.
(Via evhead.)
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October 7, 2005
Presentation Zen gets all Zenny
I mentioned the Presentation Zen blog earlier this week. Love this zen-like line I just read in a recent post about Larry Lessig’s presentation method:
The number is not important. To be concerned with the number of slides shows that our head is in the wrong place. Because…it is the wrong question to ask.
And what is the right question? You’ll have to read the post to find out.
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October 6, 2005
JPEG Patent Woes?
Just saw this on Paul Bissex’s blog: Burn all JPEGs?:
Some recent news is giving me flashbacks to 1995, when Unisys sprung their GIF patent surprise on the young World Wide Web. We got quite angry and some enterprising people even built a replacement for the beloved GIF.
Are we going there again? Forgent, a Texas company that “develops and licenses intellectual property and makes scheduling software” (it makes me feel dirty just to type that) is suing 40 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo, for infringing on JPEG-related patent No. 4,698,672.
Sounds like patent trolling to me. Hopefully this will not become an issue (I imagine it will unite a big chunk of silicon valley to fight it if it does).
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October 5, 2005
New Article: Getting the Most from Your E-marketing Efforts
Just added another article to the resources section of the site: Getting the Most from Your E-Marketing Efforts:
Do you need to improve your e-marketing results but don’t want to add to the torrential downpour of marketing messages that hit your members every day?
Then focus on improving your existing efforts rather than increasing the frequency of your messages.
This article was originally published in an ASAE newsletter.
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October 5, 2005
Good Intro Article on Web Analytics
Digital Web Magazine has published a nice intro article to web analytics: Dollars & Sense of Web Analytics:
Web analytics, whose origins date back to the invention of the Web, has worked its way from the domain of the technically minded to marketers, thanks in part to software with improved user interfaces and easy-to-understand reports. Despite these improvements, there is still a lack of understanding of the technical side of analytics. Web developers and marketing folks need to share the analytic tool, and each group has specific needs that can be fulfilled by the tool.
Check it out.
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