Posted on

Two sites and brands with the same info?

There is something I can’t figure out about the strategy at ZDNet/CNet. This morning I read a story on ZDNet about the latest Comdex gizmos and this afternoon I catch the same article on CNet. They are exactly the same except for the differences in each site’s layout.

What’s the point of this debacle? Seems silly to me that after all this time ZDNet and CNet feel that they have to maintain copies of the same articles on both sites. I know there was something of a merger announced some time back …Why not choose one site and brand to use for news and leave the other for other things. Instead they maintain both and create confusion across the readership. I guess the brand management was unable to be convincing enough.

In many cases when companies merge into newer forms they maintain a transition period so that customer (readers in this case) are not confused by a sudden flip of the switch. It would not hurt to send an email communicating the changes, and hopefully the advantages found through change as well. Nothing like this has happened at all. Seems like no one is thinking out there.

Posted on

Annoying forwarding bug in Mail.app

While it is not a new bug, and also not a consistent one, “crash on forward” issue continues to frustrate me. Seems it only happens when it wants and only seems to effect html emails. There is a work around I am using until this little bug gets squashed… As noted on OSXHints and reported previously you can forward through a cut and paste method…

Posted on

The return of the content king?

This could be good news for AOL and for the subscribers… AOL has been deliberately slow to roll out true content oriented offerings to its members, which is difficult for me to understand considering that is the only advantage they have.

With the number of properties across all forms of media, AOL is the site/portal/service that should truly be king. While the certainly have the largest subscriber base, it is only a matter of time for that base to mature and jump ship. As they have seen over the past few years, subscription growth is slowing, especially with the adoption of broadband, since people no longer need AOL to get get online initially.

AOL Chairman to Present New Initiatives: “Thursday’s presentation about AOL’s future is a crucial test for AOL Time Warner and a chance for AOL’s new chairman, Jonathan Miller, to ease investors’ many worries.” Source: New York Times: Technology

Posted on

I have to just say it!

I wish I had a larger readership… I picked up this story a few days before any other site I can tell noticed…or at least gave me credit for.

Follow Up: Salon Ultramercials: “

Media Post: Salon Breaks New Ad Ground

Last week we covered Salon’s new advertising format that gives users day past access premium conent in return for viewing 4 full page ads. Today Media Post adds some detail to the story. It turns out that this format wasn’t developed specifically by Salon, but is in fact the brainchild of Ultramercial, an ad technology company. Significantly Ultramercial have a patent pending for this approach to advertising, which if granted could prove very valuable if the format were to take off.

” Source: marketingfix

Posted on

NetNewsWire and Moveable Type

More great news from Brent, Moveable Type blogs will be able to be edited and posted to directly from NetNewsWire Pro. AS noted below it is sometimes tricky to get things working outside of the blog environment where the developer of that program has concealed some of their work.

Archipelago allows posting and editing to all the major blog systems, but you still need to know some key technical details in order to get it to work. Brent notes needing the Blog ID for moveable type to work, the same issue I faced setting Archipelago up. Hopefully the info I relayed back to Daniel over the weekend during my transfer were helpful…

The more I think about how much NetNewsWire Pro will be able to do, the more I wonder what will happen to great apps like Archipelago. It seems that Daniel is involved in some way with Brent working on NNW, but if an app can pull in RSS feeds, post and edit your blog remotely it should hande all that you want. I guess certain details and preferences will always keep people using one system vs another.

NetNewsWire and MovableType: “I’ve been testing NetNewsWire‘s weblog editor with MovableType—and it’s working. Here’s my test site.

One of the painful parts of weblog editors is configuration, as Daniel Berlinger points out in his RFC on discoverability.

I had to send an XML-RPC request to get the blogID of my MovableType site. For Manila the URL of the site works as the blogID. I don’t know what I’ll find when I try other weblog publishing systems, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find them all slightly different.

This needs to get much easier.

Ideally all it would take to configure one’s editor is to know the URL of the home page of your site. (And of course you’d know your username and password also.) A user should never have to know or figure out the blogID, RPC URL, and supported API or APIs.” Source: inessential.com

Posted on

Philips converges and (hopefully) incorporates Rendezvous

They are already publically a licensee, so one can only hope since this box sounds like a very cool addition to the digital home. Hmm…I wonder how things will work between this and the Moxie/Digeo box discussed yesterday which also can utilize 802.11, though I don’t think it has Zero Conf (Rendezvous) yet…

Philips converges on convergence: “Digeo isn’t the only company going after the “convergence” market. Philips has just announced its own convergence device, the Wireless Home AV Platform, a box that wirelessly connects your PC to your TV and stereo, so you can watch or listen to video or music files stored on PC. Read…” Source: Gizmodo

Posted on

Not the way Schiller sees it…

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to edit digital movies on our DVDs anytime soon,” Schiller said. “Over 95 percent of homes already have toilets, but that doesn’t mean you are going to edit videos on them.”

PCs, gadgets scrap for home dominance: “PC makers take on the consumer electronics industry in the battle for the living room, putting Apple and Microsoft in the unusual position of being on the same side.” Source: CNET News.com

Posted on

Not exactly an Apple announcement

I guess the rumors were just too good to be true for now. There is always MacWorld SF and the hopeful release announcement of the IBM Power4 64 bit chip. For now though Apple seems publicly tied to PowerPC.

At Comdex, AMD touts win, bangs head: “The chipmaker’s CEO announces a customer win and the official name of the company’s new desktop processor during a keynote featuring digital guitars and a cameo from a rock star.” Source: CNET News.com

Posted on

Wireless AP at SFO?

Does anyone know if there is an available network at the SF airport? Seems I will have a serious amount of time to kill next Monday after my meetings and before the red-eye back East. I did a quick check and only found an AP in the Admiral’s Club which is for AA and I am flying United. Does Starbucks have anything there? I am willing to pay for access if necessary…

Posted on

Direct Marketing and Branding …living together in harmony

Branding and Direct Marketing Lived Happily Together Ever After: “

Line56: Online Marketing and ROI

[B]rand advertising is more effective at the bottom rung of the ladder, where it is essential to build awareness and establish perceptions. Direct response tactics must then take over during the suspect and prospect phases, in which the user needs to be given incentive to take action. Direct gives way to brand again in order to transition a user from a customer to loyal brand advocacy. But in all cases, elements of both brand and direct must be used in each message.

[…]

Brand-direct marketing requires a careful collaboration between these two formerly isolated practices. No longer is it an “either/or” situation. Instead, direct marketing allows us to strengthen the brand, to go deeper into it. Direct marketing essentially puts the customer in control of the relationship, and in so doing it allows the marketer to substantiate the brand image

” Source: marketingfix

Posted on

Bring it on!

I was a loyal Newton user until size just beat it out when Palm got their act together and I have been Palm loyal since. The idea of an Apple handheld or tablet is intriguing… I would love to see this happen.

Waiting for the Mac Tablet: “Waiting for the Mac Tablet: “Technological considerations aside, there are also marketing priorities that should drive Apple tablet-ward sooner than later. As a vertically integrated company whose product lines rely completely on its own proprietary hardware and software, Apple can’t afford to take a flyer on every new initiative attempted by the Wintel juggernaut. But with a large percentage of its revenues based on its portable devices, it also can’t ignore a new effort to reshape the notebook market.” [Is all this tablet stuff Star Trek lust? Or is there more to it?]” Source: Archipelago

Posted on

Hotmail back in your inbox?

I have not tried this yet, but it certainly seems like an easy way to take advantage of the free accounts you might already have. I’m thinking that this app into Mail.app with Spam filtering could be a nice thing. I might even consider using my hotmail account if I was successful in suppressing most of the spam.

Mail Forward for Mac OS X

Mail Forward allows you to forward mail from up to 20 Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo web mail, or standard POP e-mail accounts to any e-mail address.

Posted on

Is Handspring Getting Desperate?

This morning I received my second email promoting the latest offer from Handspring: A FREE DVD Player with purchase with purchase of a Treo. Seems like a fairly big deal considering that the products are not related in any way and they would have to acquire them outside their normal channels. I wonder why a large memory card or some other handheld related accessory was not offered instead.

Speaking of desperate… I love the new Palm Tungsten T. I don’t have one yet, but Palm really wants to make sure I know it is here and available for next day delivery. They have sent me no fewer than 6 emails on the subject. These did come to two different addresses, but even 3 is a pretty high number.

Perhaps the newer lower cost PPC devices being shown at Comdex are making everyone nervous? Don’t know why they would… they run Pocket PC! 😉

Posted on

Success

Thanks to some much needed assistance over the weekend I was able to import the full history of my Radio blog into the MT system.

As I previously noted this was no easy task. I tried to get the scripts from Jonathon Delacour to run but had too many issues with the config. I am not sure that the code is 10.2.2 friendly yet. I had also found a script from Aaron Swartz which did the trick. Thanks to everyone for their help – I am live (as you can see) here in MT-land.

Next steps are to tweak my templates, get the blogroll working, turn on categories and tweak some of the imported posts. For now though, I am VERY pleased with MT and how it all works. It is quite amazing to me how I allowed my experience to suffer using Radio. Oh well – lesson learned. I just wished I had waited longer to pay for it. I won’t make that mistake again.

Posted on

Moxi / Digeo PVR in action!

This is one tasty machine… I’ve been hoping to see something from them since CES last January. Everything they have said is there and more with connectivity to external devices a very real possibility. Charter needs to launch this successfully so other cable systems can take advantage as well. Time Warner are you listening?

The Moxi product is the most powerful PVR system to be found today in this specific embedded market. It runs on a 733 Mhz C3 Cyrix x86 CPU, uses a Broadcom graphics chipset with dedicated video capabilities and is fully configurable by a cable provider. It comes with 40 GB of hard drive, but can easily use more than 100 GB. Moxi supports HDTV and has a TV-out (naturally), but no VGA output. Providers can customize the machine and the OS will also provide the required software for any additional peripherals (for example, a DVD or a CD-RW drive).

Moxi PVR — features, flexibility and DRM: “Paul Allen’s Digeo has demoed its Moxi PVR for OSNews. The device has got lots of sweet features — runs on GNU/Linux, allows for easy expansion, and will record both digital and analog TV signals. You can plug in CD burners or DVD players, and it doubles a videophone. On a disturbing note, though, the device apparently comes loaded up with DRM out of the box:

PCs are not secure enough for the PVR purpose, as most channel providers won’t like to see their content easily pirated. Moxi provides such security after special agreements with the cable provider or channels.

LinkDiscuss

(via /.)” Source: Boing Boing

Posted on

Palm on your wrist, part deux

This seems like it actually might work. The picture looks interesting, a bit less from the future this time and seemingly practical.

A Palm That Fits On The Wrist: “A Palm That Fits On The Wrist: “Now Fossil is taking a second crack at it. And this time it’s putting the Palm operating system into a device no bigger than a digital watch. If you’re a Palm user who’s not as careful to carry your handheld with you everywhere you go, you might find yourself without access to your contact list just when you need it. At least with a watch, you’re less likely to leave home without it. ” [Not bad…]” Source: Archipelago