DesertStandard

I love the marketing emails I get. I choose to get them cause I want to know about sales and new products from the vendors I choose. The problem is that they are all Image based because the Marketers are lazy. This means that when I open them I see nothing cause Google Apps blocks images by default unless I turn them on. Stop It!

A new study from the E-Mail Experience Council turned up this frightening fact: e-mail from 23 percent of the retailers reviewed was “completely unintelligible” when viewed in an inbox.

The reason? When designing e-mail marketing messages, marketers overlook the fact that images are blocked, by default, for approximately one in two e-mail users. The e-mail council points out that workarounds — namely the use of HTML text and images — are not sufficiently being used in e-mail design.

E-mail Design: 23 Percent ‘Unintelligible’ - ClickZ - News and expert advice for the digital marketer since 1997

I have only recently caught the twitter bug. I learned of the service last year when it took off at SXSW but I didnt really understand what it was and none of my friends thought anything of it. So it went slack and I left it alone. Then I had a chance encounter with @biray and learned what twitter is all about: tracking all types of whispers in a room and being able to filter the ones you want to hear.

Naturally the Robert Scoble puts it better:

Twitter and inadequacy (er, the great friend divide) « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger
People still aren’t getting this. They didn’t get how I was using Twitter and still don’t. I follow the world’s best early adopters, business executives, and entrepreneurs. I really don’t care if I have a single follower. If I defined myself by my followers I’d always feel inadequate. If I define myself by the people who I follow, well, I follow the smartest, richest, coolest, funniest people in the world. That makes me smarter, richer, cooler, and funnier.

I am trying to take this same approach and its a wild ride and I have to do my best to pull away and get back to work or dinner or reading or sleeping or… You get the point.

Really cool effort to get Google to add bike route finder to Google Maps. Go to this link and sign the petition. This is something Google should already have:
Google Maps ‘Bike There’ Feature Request Petition

Had a great conversation last night about life and things. One point was made about writing with a constraint of 300 words is much tougher than free form because you have to be very mindful of your choice of words. I immediately thought of a post I had just read earlier in the day:Creative Constraints: Going to Jail to Get Free | 43 Folders by Merlin Mann. He starts talking about some examples of how Twitter enforces this.

In Twitter you are limited to 140 characters per message, just like a text from your phone. Mann points out that this creates opportunities for creative writing by confining us to how much we can say.

I am playing with the six word constraint for the rest of the week:
https://twitter.com/halfacat

Tweet Tweet.

One trend that occurs over and over on the World Wide Web is the shift from Centralized websites to De-Centralized websites. Centralization occurs because people get tired of searching hundreds to thousands of sites to find a few pieces of information. De-centralization occurs because we get tired of reading the same few pieces of information and want more detail. The first big time Centralized website was Yahoo and in recent years its been the Social Networks led by MySpace. De-Centralized websites were called HomePage’s(still my favorite web term of all time). With Myspace the impetus was for finding and sharing music interests. Now there is a shift back the other way:

What these changes to the musical framework of the social Web prelude, however, may well be a small trickle of a few names that grows quickly into an exodus of famous faces and voices intent on establishing more solitary existences on the Web. And if a trend to more individualized services among artists ensues, then we could in a couple of years potentially have a vast disarray of networks in our midst. Which, as many millions of social networkers today would probably determine, isn’t a prognosis many would find appealing.

Will Musicians’ Custom Networks Create Disarray On Social Web?

I can sympathize with both sides here. On one hand its a branding issue. No matter how big the artist is if you are looking at their info through Myspace then Myspace is winning the branding effort. Bringing the content into your own domain and website gives you the branding edge back, however you lose the advantage that Myspace brings = millions of users.

Michael Arrington talks about this in his post on FriendFeed and how its about owning your content:

…I think other people will want it too, is a place that they control where this information is aggregated. That may be right back at the blog for some people. For others it may be Facebook (who understands this fully). Wherever a person considers their home turf is where they’ll want all this data.

Here Arrington is talking about Data-Portability and how it will be and integral part of the web’s development. As we put more of our lives online we are going to need to be able to control it more and more. Just as we are starting to learn how to manage our music collections in digital form this grows exponentially with our words, pictures, and video as we put them online to share and discover with our friends and family.

What are you doing to manage your digital assets? Are you fine with posting them to another company trusting that they will always let you have them back? Or are you building your data fortress?

Will Musicians’ Custom Networks Create Disarray On Social Web?
FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability

Biray is going deep this week with an article on mindfulness and technology. She covers the topic of mindfulness, living in the present, and ponders how we can use technology to help others achieve mindfulness. Central to her argument is the use of Twitter:

If you’re introducing mindfulness to someone who has yet to fully experience it, how can you tell if what you’re teaching is helping them understand the concept? Or better yet, how do you know if they are even applying its principles? You don’t. Which is why I think using Twitter can be a metaphor for demonstrating both an understanding and the application of mindfulness.

This is a fascinating subject and one that is central to where we are going with how the Internet continues to encompass our lives. Its all about communication and a continuation of the telegraph to the telephone to the webpage. We are becoming more and more instant and permanent. This combination allows us to get more of our thoughts out to share with everyone else. Tools like Twitter and Facebook make it easier to organize and access this information.

What do you think? Can technology help us learn more about who we really are?

Be Fit With Biray » Mindful Tweets

This site is run by an open source software package called Wordpress. Its really easy to use and has some great features for getting all this really important writing out to the masses.

Anyway they are coming out with a new version really soon and have posted a screencast covering some of the new features.WordPress › Blog » Screencast and WordPress 2.5 RC2

The coolest one is the Gallery feature. Now instead of posting my photos to flickr and then linking to them from a post here I will be able to upload them straight into my post. This means that wordpress is handling the FTP’ing of my image files up to my host and then creating the links to them. While the current version of Wordpress lets you do this the new version makes it easier with a snazzy interface that makes it feel like a desktop application. Its pretty snazzy and takes a lot of steps out of the process.

If you need help setting up a wordpress site let me know. Its dead easy.

I have been on facebook for about a year now and have gotten in touch with a number of people that I have not talked to in years. This is very cool and I appreciate it. Facebook also has a few applications that are pretty neat like the Visual Bookshelf. The trouble is that there are a bunch of applications that I keep getting invites for that have no practical use. The latest example is ‘Send Good Karma’.

I was sent some good karma a few days ago and thought that was nice, but when I went to return the karma I had to add this application to my profile. One of the boxes you have to check is ‘Allow this application to access your profile information’ and I pause.

Who is the creator of this application? What is their intent? Would someone really take the time to build this and have purely altruistic intentions in mind? Or is it the product of Phillip Morris marketing and their new campaign to hook us on a new cigarette? Have I completely lost my mind?

In the end I accepted the application cause I have to return the karma.