Archive for February, 2009

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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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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In honor of Steve Jobs’ 54th birthday …
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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This is seriously interesting:
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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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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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