everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • General Motors gets mileage from blogs, now Podcasting

    General Motors created a lot of excitement and gained serious cred in the blogging world when they launched their Fast Lane blog several months ago. Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz hosted Michael Wiley, the sponsor of the the program in one of their podcasts.  Neville is a huge fan of Podcasts and I guess it rubbed off because now GM is podcasting and, according to Christopher Carfi who took time out to listen, has kept the “behind the scenes” feel right through to the podcasts which is great and should continue to draw car enthusiasts to their site.

    Looks like the team at GM has done it again and broken another precedent in the world of corporate blogging. All good stuff for the world of blogging and good for GM too!

  • You must not throw up at the Dojo

    You must not throw up at the Dojo

    Izumi IM’ed me at work today:

    izumikennedy: we have to come back from Aikido, tyler throw up, he cough too much.
    me: oh no
    me: is he ok now?
    izumikennedy: he is fine , before class started, he was showing off to one of classmates about aikido and then he got too excited. and he started to cough and then he threw up.
    me: poor guy, at least he’s excited about akido

    Tyler needs to learn humility and respect. Less fidgeting, more attention.

    This reminds me of the time my father was learning kyudo, the art of Japanese archery. For weeks he dutifully went to the dojo to practice and the sensei said that he would first need to practice his form with an old piece of rubber surgical tubing. He would stretch out the rubber as if pulling back a bow, then release and it to make this horrible, ungainly sound, phwap!!

    It was so crude and clownish compared to the other archers who looked so graceful, releasing their arrows and having them sail the length of the gallery towards their targets. Each week Dad looked over at the others, longing for the day when he could try a real bow and each week, it was back to the surgical tubing. Stretch, aim, phwap! Stretch, aim, phwap! It was like practicing a crude form of scales. He had to practice in the corner, away from the others because the phwapping was distracting to the others, like loud farting.

    After several weeks of this, sensei came over in the middle of his phwapping and gave my father an old bow. My father was told it was time to move up to practicing with an empty bow. Still no arrows but at least he had moved on from the surgical tubing. Barely able to repress his glee, he grasped the bow and joined the others in front of the gallery. He drew back, true to form, took aim, and zing the bowstring whizzed past his face and hooked his glasses and flung them a good twenty feet out into the gallery!

    Sensei barked out for everyone to halt their practice and, through tightly pursed lips, hissed to my father to go fetch his glasses. When he scampered back to pick up the bow, sensei shook his head slowly, took the bow back and handed my father the limp old surgical tubing. It was back to the corner, for more stretch, aim, phwap!

  • Topix.net takes on mainstream media investors

    Topix.net, the automated news aggregation service, has taken on investment from Knight-Ridder, Gannett, and the Tribune Co. The idea is to gain some financial backing to grow the service but also to gain access to content from media companies that they were negotiating with anyway. I think each of these companies look at Topix as a distribution channel which is a wonderful validation of this business model of having third parties re-package snippets of content for ad-supported redistribution.

    Remaining editorially independent is key and there are assurances from Topix that they will remain so. I guess I feel much better that it’s a triumvirate each owning 25% of Topix and not a single media entity. The will need to learn to share.

  • Yahoo Generates Buzz

    The folks over at Yahoo Research have teamed up with O’Reilly and Newsfutures to run a simulated stock market, Buzz Game, where players can buy and sell companies, technologies, and other memes on an open market. You get a virtual $10k to start and the players with the most in their portfolio by the end of July get actual prizes.

    I just bought a bunch of stuff and already I’m down to $8k in less than 30 minutes which doesn’t bode well.

  • Corporate RSS Made Simple

    I share a lot of the burden of explaining what blogs & RSS feeds are all about with my brethren who develop RSS readers. Sandy Hamilton of NewsGator posts a nice run down on corporate RSS feeds, why they’re not as complicated as they sound, and points to examples of companies that use them.

    I think it’s the acronym that’s really tripping people up. As my colleague Anil says, "If someone told me 15 years ago that I really need to buy a VHS recorder instead of a device that allows me to tape TV shows, I would have balked as well."

  • Thanks Tail

    A polite society based on mutual respect and courtesy requires new tools for the road. You flash your brights when you sugget someone go ahead or if warning on-coming traffic of a speed trap but what to do to when you want to indicate thanks to those that let you into traffic? Thanks Tail is a robotic rendition of a dog’s tail that is controlled from inside the car and can be wagged as an expression of “thank you” to the car behind you.

    This thing would get you killed in New Jersey.

    Thanks Tail – only in Japan

  • Hey You Potter!

    For Tyler’s 6th Birthday we didn’t have a big party. He chose instead to redirect the birthday funds into a six disc DVD set of the first three Harry Potter movies. We’ve been reading the Potter books and Tyler has found a new world to explore beyond Thomas the Tank Engine. He picks up every piece of trivia, asks detailed questions, and is now studying the movies as eager as an acolyte.

    Because her playmate is now entranced by the spell of Potter, Julia’s picked it up a bit as well. She hasn’t quite gotten the name of the the series down yet so she calls it “Hey You Potter” but she’s got the theme music down and both of them came to our bed this morning and greeted us with their renditions.

  • Affiliate marketing offline browser

    People always ask me how they can make money writing a blog. The question is like someone back in 1870, a few years after the invention of the telephone, asking how someone can make money dialing a telephone call. With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, it’s the message not the medium.

    Interactive advertising is playing an dangerous dance with the bloggers with initiatives such as Marqui that blur the independence of the writers. Affiliate marketing is something that is also unique to the internet and has the potential to tempt bloggers looking for a quick buck. Affiliate programs such as Amazon’s Associate Program pay for purchases that originate via a link on your site. It’s an great solution for spiffing someone that sends business your way but it can be abused at the expense of editorial vision.

    There is a whole industry that is growing up around the work-at-home industry of affiliate marketing websites and now there is even a blogging client that will help you compose your text while inserting affiliate links as needed to stress your point and boost your revenue. One hopes that the search folks will keep their spiders groomed so that blatantly advertorial posts will fall off the bottom of the Google & Technorati rankings and keep things relevant but I’m afraid that the capitalistic urge to harvest click-throughs will prevail until we raise the cost of such behavior or the public ceases to buy into tangential links. The fact that there are still so many infomercial programs on television doesn’t provide much hope for any change in the public’s support of such behavior.

  • Yahoo to buy Flickr

    In other news this weekend, Yahoo has confirmed that it has purchased online photo collaboration and folksononomy pioneer, Flickr. Major cred points for the folks in Purple and Yellow. Write ups from Jeremey Zawodny at Yahoo and Caterina at Flickr. It’s now really getting interesting!