Archive for September, 2008

I watched a re-broadcast of Growing Up Online tonight. This is an excellent, nuanced treatment of issues with kids online, including cyber-bullying and online predators. This chapter on Ryan Halligan rips at my heart: My daughter Gabrielle is in middle school as well, and the thought of her being attacked online is difficult to...
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I’ve been woefully remiss in not checking my server logs and web stats packages lately. But I found a nice surprise waiting for me when I finally did tonight … Here’s the browser stats for Sparkplug9.com: Firefox: 29.2% Mozilla-compatible: 22.8% Explorer: 18.3% Safari: 5.5% A long list of spiders, agents, and RSS readers …...
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I saw a link to Google Moderator tonight on Matt Cutts’ blog and thought I’d try it out. It’s a tool to aggregate questions on issues and let the wisdom of crowds moderate up the most important ones. It can be used real-time to generate questions for a speaker or presenter – Google uses...
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I saw this on Clientside SEM’s website this morning: SEO up to now has been mainly technical (and tactical) in orientation. But as basic SEO skills become increasingly commoditized, SEO will require more than just technical ability to grow brands and companies on the Web — it will require a keen understanding of business,...
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It’s just about that ludicrous … I don’t like their continual reference to a black individual, however. It rubs me the wrong way, and the reality of the current meltdown is that it’s colorblind, and caused probably much more by middle-class white people trying to live in McMansions than any other class of people.
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Have you ever seen DearAdobe.com? It’s a site created by a designer who knows and loves Adobe products … and hates their many flaws. Visitors can add new gripes and vote up existing ones – just for fun, check out the top gripes. Most gripes are about Adobe’s installers (horribly awful), prices (sell-your-organs high),...
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I happened to see this Colin Powell quote in a PM Network magazine I picked up on a flight to Virginia today. Leadership is all about problem-solving. In the military, there is a lot of discussion about where a leader should be on the battlefield. Should the leader be up front where it’s possible...
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I’ve had the most amazing neighbors on flights lately … Last week it was a Google engineer who heads up the ?SRE? unit for Gmail. He works in Zurich, and his team’s focus is provisioning servers and other resources for the growing user base. Interesting phrase of the discussion: “up and the the right,”...
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I was in Texas last week when my wife sent me this picture: A visiting child didn’t have his Wii controller strap on, threw it at the TV, and poof! the TV is toast. Alas: all good things must come to an end.
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