My parents recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. So my sisters and I held a celebration at the Four Seasons in Vancouver … and we also created a book showcasing my parents’ lives and our life as a family.
I used Blurb to create the book. It was great, but as with all projects like this, the hard work was in selecting, digitizing, and cleaning up the photos. My wife Teresa and I probably put in over 50 hours of work into the book, but the results are spectacular.
Who makes their clients heroes? Who makes their clients feel like purchasing a product is a significant life choice? Who makes their clients an instant member of a cool, exclusive, and yet world-wide club … the club where all the smart people, the happy people, the successful people go?
Apple, of course:
(Whether you believe it, of course, is entirely different from whether or not it’s true.)
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
Awe is a good word – one trillion is a big, big number. Wow.
Matt Rissel interviewed 100 highly successful people, trying to find the tools they used to make themselves successful. Only problem? There wasn’t any tool commonality.
However, there was a principle commonality. Here are the top 10 common principles that highly successful people share. They tend to …
Have passion for what they do
Surround themselves with excellent people
Create an environment within which excellent people can succeed
From the somewhat cool and gently gratifying department: I’m in the Shmap.
What is the Shmap, you ask?
Exploring a Schmap Guide is a uniquely interactive experience: maps and guide content are dynamically integrated, allowing intuitive, real-time access to reviews and photo slideshows for places of interest.
They’re available for iPhone and iPod touch, and they use photos that amateurs like myself have taken. Here are the two places my photos are being used:
I signed up for a 60-day trial of Apple’s new MobileMe service today only to find it is not currently compatible with OS X 10.4.11, more commonly known as “Tiger.”
The latest version of Mac OS X is 10.5.x, or “Leopard.” My home machine runs Leopard; my PowerBook still runs Tiger – and the preference pane that is supposed to be Mobile Me is still the old .Mac.
Which means, unfortunately, that all of Apple’s instructions regarding how to sync my iPhone and laptop are useless.
If someone could please explain to me why this application is in the “Productivity” category of iPhone applications, I would really like to know.
The entire application consists of a “game” of holding a button on your iPhone (or iPod touch) for as long as possible. Unshockingly, “Hold On” is the name of the application, and also the entire instruction manual.
The “app” is by IMAK Creations, and I can only assume it was their first attempt.
Funny!
At the very least, they’ve got people talking and linking, and that can’t be bad.
Are high gas prices driving faster adoption of distance education?
Distance education has already been growing rapidly over the last few years. But some are now seeing an even quicker uptake … and connecting that fact to higher gas prices. From a recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“It’s getting to the point of either gas or class,” says Robbie K. Melton, associate vice chancellor for the Tennessee Board of Regents, where this summer the number of students taking online courses spiked 29 percent, in part because of the high cost of buying gas to drive to campus.
Oil prices have doubled in just one year, and the price at the pump is expected to double again by 2010. With inflation like that, a 60 kilometre round trip that resulted in a daily gas bill of $10 a year ago is $20 today, and could be $40 in a few years. That’s going to drive a lot of behavior change – even among those who’d prefer in-person education.
“I would prefer to actually go to school and be there to do it,” says Ms. LaBadie, a single mother working toward a degree in medical administration. “But it’s hard enough paying tuition, much less the price of gas.”
Fortunately, this is happening at a time when the options and quality available for educators and corporations to provide e-learning have never been so good. Cheap, simple, and quick options such as Moodle are available and free to all, and there are other good open-source as well as proprietary solutions.
Increased use of distance education will likely drive increased investment as well, which is great for learners. Institutions usually don’t see it, but the majority of the costs associated with e-learning are not technology provisioning costs, they’re instructional resource development costs.
In fact, in the first paragraph, there are no less than 7 links – and no less than 7 of them are to ReadWriteWeb itself. This is a childish attempt at boosting traffic and gaming Google, and it’s below the stature of a site like ReadWriteWeb.
I left a comment … we’ll see if it stays live.
Please fix:
When you have a name linked, a visitor’s assumption is that the link is to the site associated with that name. Example: Reddit, in the first paragraph.
When you instead hijack that expectation and take users to your own website’s tag page for Reddit, you’re losing credibility and goodwill in order to eek out one more pageview from your readers.
Uncool, unprofessional, and in the long-run, unprofitable.
Hidden deep in the Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision inserted by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America’s small businesses.The provision, which was added by the bill’s managers without debate two weeks ago, would require the nation’s payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.
Five times in the past 3-4 weeks I’ve written and published a post on this blog only to come back a day later and see it not actually published and live. What’s going on?
The question in my mind is: am I actually publishing the post or just hitting Save? As you can see … the two buttons are side-by-side in the Wordpress screen where you write posts.
Although I can’t be sure, I don’t think so. I never click Save, because WP auto-saves posts every few minutes. And I’m pretty sure I can’t have made that mistake so many times.
So I’m wondering if there’s a bug in Wordpress … and if anyone else has noticed it. I think there is, and I think I might even know where/when it is. I say where/when, because my guess is that the problem might be occuring when two things happen at the same time: Wordpress auto-saves a post, and simultaneously, I click Publish.
I wonder if anyone else has seen this issue. To help me find out, I’m now going to very deliberately click PUBLISH.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
If someone could please explain to me why this application is in the “Productivity” category of iPhone applications, I would really like to know.
Five times in the past 3-4 weeks I’ve written and published a post on this blog only to come back a day later and see it not actually published and live. What’s going on?
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
