Technorati tags: claimid, opera, spime, spock, search, development, twitter
So it was Earth Day on April 22nd and it seemed everywhere had some kind of “green” theme. Most of the major TV networks turned their logos green or had eco-friendly programming for the week, and some sites dedicated their home pages to green issues, such as our client USTelecom. But as we look forward to next year you may be asking yourself “what can I do in the meantime”?
Well, a fair bit if you spend some time online.
First things first, go and join Edenbee. This is a social network about lowering your carbon footprint and combating climate change. You can check out my Edenbee profile and join to get tips on everything from hybrids to recycling.
Flock is my favorite browser, but they now have an eco-edition browser, which will donate 10% of its search proceeds to a green charity of choice, as voted by the users at the end of the year.
You could also keep in touch with all things environmental at Treehugger - a site dedicated to green issues.
If you are looking at a new hosting partner in 2008 you could search out one of the many “green” hosting companies such as GoGreenHosting.
Technorati tags: earth day, green, eco-friendly, edenbee, flock, treehugger, ustelecom
Thanks to Linda for forwarding this. Cleveland is taking part of the "Day of .NET" and details can be found over at http://clevelanddodn.org/. Subjects to covered are Silverlight, Semantic Web and Sharepoint. Might be worth a look.
Technorati tags: twitter, seo, google, forms, skype, dance, video, social graph
The more I use twitter the more I find myself changing the way I communicate within it’s 140 character limit.
First of all I dropped capitalization, just for the sake of speed. Spelling is one of those things that gets forgiven by everyone due to the nature of the medium I think, pretty much like text messages on a mobile device. Same goes 4 using nmbrs and abbr 2 shrtn msgs.
As twitter is part life-streaming, activities such as what you are listening to, eating, watching, or doing all come into play. For listening I'm now using the prefix “ipod=” which seems to fit and putting the track or album name in quotations seems to be an accepted way to separate it from the artist.
e.g. ipod=“blue moon station” by solar fields
So why should you be interested in this? Well, I'm not the only person who is re-thinking the way they communicate. Others are too and there are sites and services springing around twitter up to accommodate this.
Some I’ve noticed others using and coming to the fore are:
There are also a number of blogs devoted to twitter. One of the new kids on the block is Twitter Thoughts by Roger Harris.
Any of these can used to get a look at and track what's going on around you, but unless you participate you'll never fully appreciate the new conversations. And that could be an EPIC FAIL.
So, say you’re a company that provides products or services to people. You've heard this rumor that people talk about you or your products behind you're back on the Internet. Are you being paranoid?
Well, the short answer is NO! And it's not a rumor.
Consumers at every level are using the Internet more and more to form, and voice, opinions on products, services and even the companies that provide them. This can have positive and negative effects on both your online and off line standing/sales. Best (or worst) example is DellHell.
One solution is to implement a blog as a communication channel, but for some companies this could too difficult for a multitude of internal reasons. Another option is to use a site like UserVoice which comes out of private beta on Friday.
UserVoice lets you set up your own sub-domain, control the C-Name and upload your logo - in the future uploading your own CSS too.
This is where you can garner feedback as well as float new ideas out to your consumers.
They also offer a widget that you can put on your site that ties into your page.
Users can suggest ideas or vote on ones floated by you or other customers. UserVoice also makes your interest a little more transparent by allowing you to show “official responses” and if ideas do get picked up, you can show the progress of them.
Another good thing is this is crawled by the search engines, though there are a few tweaks I would like to see on the SEO front.
Some people already using this service are RetailMeNot.com (see suggestions link at the bottom of their page) and CushyCMS.com (after signing in).
UserVoice fits right in to the way you (companies) should be looking at doing business online and is a great component in everyone’s online reputation management.
Technorati tags: uservoice, feedback, customers, reputation, online reputation management
Technorati tags: twitter, money, savings, mobile, food
Happy CSS Naked Day!
It kinda crept up on me this year, hence not doing it on my blog or freelance web design site, though it still brings traffic to DMWebsites from last year. Not sure if it’s just the word naked though ;-)
Other news today, Flickr has now started showing videos people have been uploading. I like the way you can play the thumbnails and how they have kept the whole Flickr esthetic rather than going all YouTube. Flock will have to do some catching up as their bar doesn’t recognise the videos yet.
Finally two twitter realted items:
Technorati tags: flickr, video, twitter, "css naked day", sxswi2008
No April Fools here :-)
Technorati tags: stockphotos, flickr, patterns, design, youtube, api
I'm the Director of Emerging Technologies at Optiem, an interactive marketing firm based in Cleveland, Ohio.
I'm British. Love spicy food. Live and work in the US and have been "on the web" for over 10 years now.
You can IM me by using this Plugoo widget.
