Archive for February, 2009

Coworking in Abbotsford, BC

I’m starting to think about starting a coworking space in Abbotsford, BC. I’ve been working out of my home office for about 4 months right now, and while the commute is great, the community is absent. There’s a buzz and a beat to working with others – especially cool, innovative, smart, and creative people...
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Be afraid. Be very afraid

Be afraid. Be very afraid

I had to memorialize this interchange with my friend Cam Cardow on Facebook: The occasion? I had posted on JumpGate Evolution, after seeing this video:
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Stay hungry, stay foolish

In honor of Steve Jobs’ 54th birthday …
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KPIs and Metrics: what’s the difference?

KPIs and Metrics: what’s the difference?

OK. So you’ve launched your new social-viral-mashable-linked-web2.0-connected web place, and you’re tracking a million metrics. Which ones should you actually be paying attention to? Those are your Key Performance Indicators. As Rhian James at FreshNetworks mentioned in a comment on my recent post about measuring social media marketing efforts, that’s really the key. Burying...
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9 simple and free ways to measure social media marketing results

9 simple and free ways to measure social media marketing results

Measuring the results of social media marketing efforts has been challenging to say the least. Five or six years ago, when I was helping start-ups put blogging campaigns together to kindle the development of user communities, I didn’t really have a clear idea how to measure ROI. About the only things we measured were...
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FAQs that are not frequently asked (but companies wish they were)

FAQs that are not frequently asked (but companies wish they were)

I signed up for a Windows Live Messenger account this morning and was struck by the infrequently asked questions: The title says frequently asked questions, but they’re obviously not. They’re actually questions Microsoft wishes people would ask … What ordinary person – Joe in the warehouse, Betty in accounting – has ever asked: How...
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Blogapalooza 2009

Blogapalooza 2009

Early in 2008 Robert Hruzek invented Blogapalooza – a way to celebrate bloggers’ best posts of the year. This January he did it again. I don’t have a clue how he managed, but Robert Hruzek was able to get 128 posts from 128 different bloggers live over a couple of weeks in early January....
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Mouth-watering UI tools for web designers

Mouth-watering UI tools for web designers

If you design anything web, you must must must read 30 essential controls by Theresa Neil. Positively mouth-watering: As I commented on her site, I want want want these in an OmniGraffle stencil.
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Listening to the web: 8 free tools for reputation management

Listening to the web: 8 free tools for reputation management

Whether you’re an individual, brand, or company, it’s good to know when people are talking about you. It’s even better to know what they’re saying. The last thing you want is to find out that there’s a firestorm of negativity about your latest post, product, or brand when a forest of media microphones are...
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Intelligence in a Sea of Data: Teaching and Learning in the Google Generation

This is a 2700-word paper for ETEC 533, a course in my Master of Educational Technology program at UBC. Excerpt: But when just about anything anyone wants to know is a simple search away, what, specifically, constitutes education in the age of Google? And, is it enough to know about, without knowing how, or...
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Microsoft Retail Experience: Boring, Derivative, Shallow

Microsoft Retail Experience: Boring, Derivative, Shallow

As anyone who follows tech news knows, Microsoft is planning its own retail stores. Presumably, having seen the success of Apple’s stores, Ballmer thinks there’s a model to follow here. Key to almost every new business venture is a question: how is this differentiated from the competition. But based on what I’m seeing in...
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Twitter lesson #1: don’t do this

Twitter lesson #1: don’t do this

Just like launching your website or start-up too early, being too eager to be a big swinging you-know-what on Twitter can be a fatal flaw. Check out this Twitter account that I was invited to follow yesterday: In brief: Following: 584 Updates: 2 There’s an obvious discrepancy here. When you follow someone on Twitter,...
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Choices at the crossroads of life

There’s a great quote about life choices by Smoke Robinson, the wonderful author, mountain man, hiker, mountain climber, and all-round adventurer: Most choices at the crossroads of life are made under weak starlight with a feeble lantern that illuminates poorly the farther stretches of trail. I was going through some old posts today, and...
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Making music with GarageBand

We needed some music for a software product that we’re delivering to a client in a couple of weeks, so I decided to have some fun with GarageBand. Here’s the result … I call it Natural Vibes: Enjoy!
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Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology, social media, education, innovation ... and anything else that catches my fancy.

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