everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Month: April 2005

  • Julia’s Special Day

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    I took the morning off on Wednesday to take Julia to school for her “special day.” On this day, a parent stays with their child for the whole session and the child gets to sit up in front of the class next to the teacher and her parent and lead the activities for the day.

    She has been going pre-school two days a week since we moved here and was very excited to show me her school. We sang Julia’s favorite songs (I finally learned the words to I’m a Little Teapot) and she was the line leader as we headed out to the playground. Later, we came in and ate a snack (sliced oranges and milk crackers) that Izumi prepared and picked up the artwork they had worked on earlier.

    It was great to hang out with a room of three year-olds for a morning. I spent most of the free play time quizzing the kids on the various action figures that were in a bucket in the corner of the room. They knew them all – each of the Rugrat kids, various Star Wars characters, the members of the Incredible family, and of course the Disney animals. We also read a few books which they all enjoyed and was one way to quiet them down.

    It’s always neat to see your daughter within a group of her peers. Julia’s on the quiet side, she keeps to herself a lot, pays attention to what’s going on and doesn’t get involved with the gossipy girls in the back of the class. But inside, you can see that she’s got lots of energy and is taking it all in like a sponge. Her teacher’s nickname for her is “Julia Jumping Bean” and when we went out to the playground you could see where that came from – everywhere we went, she was hoping around or up on her tippy toes.

    Several times during the class, Julia would lean over to me and whisper, “Daddy, I like you very much!” I think she was pretty happy to have me there. Thanks for having me.

  • Mr. Smiley the Bus Driver

    One thing I love about living in the United States is the sense of humor that finds its way into daily life.

    The baggage handler at JFK that shouts out “Welcome to America!” at the top of his lungs as he hauls your bags off the conveyor belt.

    The Bart train driver who takes the time to explains the history of the West Oakland shipping cranes and how they were the inspiration for George Lucas when he designed the Imperial Walkers for Star Wars, all in the tone of a pleasantly brain dead Disney tour bus operator.

    The New York subway driver who tries to convince commuters from rushing into the same door at the bottom of the stairs by yelling into the intercom, “REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY. Everyone please jam into the same door at once!”

    Today’s wisecracking bus driver is the latest example of this very American humor. The ride back home on the Transbay bus is usually a mundane affair – folks are tired after a day in the work-a-day world and the muffled quiet on the bus is deadening as most just want to sink into their seats and reflect quietly on the day gone by. I have a choice of three buses to take me home so before boarding a bus I usually glance at my watch just to gauge if I should take the local before me or wait for an express. As I ran through the mental calculation the driver hailed me with a greeting and then said, “What are you lookin’ at your watch for, I’m on time. You want to leave earlier? I can do that too.”

    As I climbed on board he went on, trying to snap me from my post-work haze, “Hey, you dropped a $20 bill behind you.” when there was none there. Made you look is written on the faces of all the other riders already seated as I took my seat.

    Now alert, I patted the driver on his arm, thanking him for the joke and taking my seat. Each new rider was greeted with a new round of jokes and quips as he poked and prodded each commuter out of their automatic pilot.

    “I almost have enough, can I get on?” says a student. “I almost can take you, is that ok?” the driver shoots back.

    We’re pulling out of San Francisco and we’re all smiles, heading over the bridge with the sun setting behind us, a bus full of kids on a field trip.

  • We got Hats! We got T-Shirts!

    A shameless plug for the Six Apart Store. Be the first on your block (maybe the only one ever on your block) to wear a T-shirt that says “My other shirt is rebuilding” Shweet!

  • Thomas Nelson Corporate Blogging Policy

    One of the best corporate blogging policy guidelines I’ve seen. Written in plain English with just the right tone; not too corporate, not too casual – it’s just the right. I guess that’s to be expected coming from a publishing company. Their goals are simple:

    • To raise the visibility of our company,
    • To make a contribution to our industry, and
    • To give the public a look at what goes on within a real live publishing company.

    They also have established a Blog Oversight Committee, “a group of fellow-employee bloggers who are committed to promoting
    blogging within our company and making sure that the Company’s
    interests are served.” The BOC is there to evaluate new blogs to make sure they set the right tone and be there to provide direction if there is any doubt on what one can or cannot post on their blog. Their carrot and stick is inclusion into the corporate blog aggregator page which is equivalent to an endorsement.

    If you would like to have us link to your blog, you must submit it to the BOC. Before doing so, you should design your blog and write at least one entry. Once you have done this, send an e-mail to Gave Wicks with a link to your blog. The BOC will then review your blog and notify you whether or not it meets the criteria.

    The idea that one should dive in, set up the design and make their first post before submitting their blog for evaluation is a great idea too. Only those that are serious about blogging will get to this stage and by the time they have, they will have thought about their message and tone.

    It is also interesting to note that Thomas Nelson views each blog as the employee’s creation and therefore does not endorse a specific blogging package nor do they allow employee’s to expense costs for the blog (they also allow employees to run advertising on their blogs to offset expenses). This gets back to something Andy Lark explained to me. Whether they blog about their company or not, make sure to own their blog and it’s content. Your thoughts and relationships in a blog develop outside the context of your corporate affiliation and his view is that your blog, being the embodiment of all this, should be portable and follow you from company to company. This is why Andy established a blog on TypePad even while he was an employee at Sun which makes their own blogging product.

  • Boeing Blog takes off with Movable Type

    After a false start with “another blogging software package,” we’re pleased to see that Boeing has come around and launched their blog on Movable Type. After criticisms for not having an RSS feed, permalinks, archives, nor search they’ve come around and included all of these features in Randy’s Journal 2.0.

    They were also hammered for their style and what they wrote about:

    A number of articles have been written in print and on the Web,
    implying that Boeing’s blog and others like it just aren’t “real”
    blogs. Why not? Because we don’t rip on the company in the blog.
    Because we don’t trade in gossip. That’s funny. I happen to like the
    fact that I work for Boeing and talk about aerospace.

    I think that’s just fine. Define your passions and create your place to talk about them. That’s a true blog. You are a gardener of your space on the web and if it gets weedy and clouds out what you’re trying to say, it’s your job as an editor to keep things tidy for future readers. I do think it’s useful to have this direction stated up front which is why About pages are so important, they set direction and tone for your readers and future commenters.

  • Real Estate as an API

    This is a great case when two APIs get hooked up to make something greater than what each service could offer on its own. Paul Rademach, a tech lead for animation tools at Dreamworks, has connected Google Maps to Craigslist to present a visual UI for real estate listings. You can set your location and price parameters and get a map that you can zoom in on and scroll with pinmarks for every “hit.”

    A yellow pin indicates that photos are associated with the listing and clicking on the pin will bring up the information from Craigslist as shown in the image on the left.

    I dreamed something like this would be possible with other layers being added in as needed like those old Mylar overlays you would see in atlases or anatomy textbooks. I can already think of two overlays that I’d like to see if I were a homebuyer. Comparables and School Districts. Once geo-locater enabled web services are exposed for this data, it would be fairly trivial. I think much harder is getting this data.

  • Bite PR on Doc’s “snowballs”

    Bite’s Trevor Jonas posts about the marketer’s perspective of Doc Searl’s snowball metaphor – "frightening."

    I think it’s all about giving into the loss of control. It’s no longer about having a message to control and more about participating in a conversation as a participant and not a leader. This gets to what is still a new concept in marketing circles. Brands are owned by their customers, not the company. This leads to a whole new style of marketing that empowers the external champions of a brand. in this new world it’s all about working through the customers to drive a point, not leading them.

    Blogging is a platform that amplifies a message. If your story is told in a way that resonates with your customers, it will be picked up. If it’s well written, it will be picked up with all the contextual detail that will tell the story with less distortion and greater impact.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Mark Jen

    Mark Jen was fired from Google. He broke a few cardinal rules such as not being sensitive to Google’s culture which didn’t support blurting things out. He also broke a cardinal rule of blogging by deleting posts. This is a huge red flag that will only draw attention to the post which can be retrieved from RSS feeds and browser caches. He also mentioned sensitive information right before 4th Quarter earnings were released.

    Mark now works for Plaxo.

    Plaxo has a blog but they’ve made a decision to segment the comments over onto the forums.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Tom Foremski

    Tom previously was the Silicon Valley correspondent for the Financial Times and later founded the Silicon Valley Watcher.

    Tom joined to FT to take advantage of the brand and the infrastructure to get his word out. When blogging came along, this new publishing and distribution system came to the masses.

    Are bloggers journalists? Not a relevant question – it’s all about reach. It’s about a trusted relationship, a brand that gets built up reader-by-reader over time.

    Richard Koman on blogging ethics – most of the people that were paid to blog for Marqui ended up just blogging about being paid to blog about Marqui and didn’t write much about the actual CMS product.

    On SEO – don’t waste money on search engine optimization, companies should put their money back into “their knitting”. Why waste money on boosting your ranking if you can’t deliver on what you promise via your links.

    On sources – people can’t help telling you stuff. It’s important to let people know that “off the record” is default.

    No one has ever been fired for blogging, only for “inappropriate conversations.”