Singley’s Blog Thoughts

Have you ever had a computer crash?  Hard drive failure, BSOD, an unfortunate meeting of Diet Coke and your hardware?  I have.  It’s painful.  Trying to restore data feels like something that the U.N. should condemn as universally cruel and unusual.  System failure and data recovery is such a horrible thing to go through, it used to be a nice source of revenue for my former tech company…people would hire us and pay a lot of money to see if we could recover their financials, their emails, their files and their pictures.  If you have ever gone though this, you know what I’m talking about.

I recently started using a company that I wish existed back when I was spending entirely too much time with data recovery.  Mozy is an online service that allows users to backup data from their computer to an online storage container.  Best of all? Its basic service is FREE.  The setup is amazingly simple; just sign up with your email address (no credit card required…nice!), download the app for your PC or Mac, and start your backup.  It’s secure as heck (128-bit encryption for transfer, 448-bit Blowfish key for encryption on their server) and very easy to use.  Some of the features of Moxy Home that are so appealing:

• Backs up Outlook automatically.  I love this, I cannot lose my email or contacts. This is a non-negotiable and is critical to me.
• 2GB of space!  If you take all of your downloaded music out of the picture, 2GB is enough for most users to back up most of their critical files. Of course if you want to back up music as well, you can purchase an account with more space than you’ll ever use for just $4.95/month. That’s not bad.
• Click and go.  The interface is so easy, the first time you run it Mozy will suggest folders that it thinks you should back up.  I was thinking that I would need to go through all of my folders and choose, but it took a potential hour long process and turned it into a 30 second decision.  I appreciate that!
• Automatic backups.  Although I won’t use this too much on my laptop because it’s off and on constantly, I will for my home computer.  
• Incremental backups.  This means that after the initial full backup it will only backup files that have been changed since you last ran it.  This makes backup time almost not even noticeable.  This is very important to me.
• Options. A lot of options.  If you want to just let Mozy set everything up for you, it’s not a problem.  It’s ready to go out of the box, and everything works well.  If you are like me, you want to pop the hood and tinker a little bit.  The options control panel let’s me satisfy my inner geek by giving me enough choices to make me smile.
• If you are on Twitter like I am, you can follow the official company account here. I love it when companies are on Twitter.

I think the Mozy Home service will work for most people, but if you are a power user or company, they offer two other tiers of service with things like SQL and Exchange backup, unlimited storage space and sub-administration/department controls.  

I’m listening to Viva La Hova while I write this. It’s a mashup mix of Coldplay, one of the greatest rock bands in the world, and Jay-Z, one of the greatest hip hop artist in the world. “A Spy’s Prayer” is playing much louder than I should probably play things while I’m trying to work, butI just can’t help it.  What a great song.  What a great mashup album! I started hearing some buzz about it a week ago, and I finally downloaded it today.  I’m pretty sure I will do the digital equivilent of wearing this album out (remember that with cassette tape? ha ha!).  Haven’t heard of it yet?  You will.  I think that in the next few days it will trend on Twitscoop, I think it’s picking up some momentum.  Why?

It’s Free.

Yes, the great minds that put this together, Mick Boogie and Terry Urban, are giving their music away.  You can go download it right now, DRM free, no strings attached…all 20 tracks. I wonder how hours they put into this project? I wonder if they were tempted to try to sell it? What kind of buzz would they have if there was any cost involved to the consumer?

I have lost track of how many business owners and managers have asked me to create “something viral” that makes money for them right away.  They want visible, tangible results that they can track on Excel, sort of the equivelent of a coupon that tracks sales of a product.  Here’s the thing…you won’t always see immediate results, but if you can break free of the traditional business model of cashing in on the first step, you will probably do better in the long run.  I don’t know what the future holds for Boogie and Urban, but I think they are going to do well. Buzz about this project will continue, people will download their work for free, and they won’t make a nickel off of it at first glance.  But…they will make money.  Publicity, offers, promos…

In your next team strategy meeting, will you try to figure out something that you can give to your customers and fans free of charge? Don’t add conditions and hoops to jump through, just give it away. The loyalty and buzz you create will likely produce more long term gain than anything you can gather in the short term.

I should probably note that before you download the album, the language is, well…hip hop.  If you are not familiar with Jay-Z and are easily offended, you may want to proceed with caution.  Consider yourself warned.

All day long I’ve seen people proudly displaying their new Twitter rank, the app du jour that tells a user how cool they are on Twitter.  There didn’t seem to be any real algorithm behind the ranking, and I watched random numbers pop into the Twitter Stream all day long.  Something about this one felt fishy.  I remembered my Tweet from mid August that wondered about this very thing…

Zdnet broke a story just a couple of hours ago and confirmed what many suspected, although it’s still a bit early to confirm for sure.  However, if you go to the site, you’ll get a 403 error, the site is down. The site is up, you can go peek here if you want.

It was bound to happen.  The innocence of the Twitter community has been broken, at least in a small way, and I for one believe it’s good.  A couple of lessons to be learned, I think.  First, be careful with your username and password to anything online.  Don’t just give it away because somebody asks for it.  Check out the service first.  Second, there are only so many different ego strokes we can have online.  Yes, we are all A+, 99.6% users…but we don’t need a site to tell us that.  That’s what our fabulous followers are for! Now, go tell somebody you follow that they are fabulous so they aren’t tempted to go give their password away to feel validated…

UPDATE 1: Good sites like Twitslap are going offline in light of this scare.  I know Twitslap is legit because my friend is behind it.

UPDATE 2: It looks like ryo.iloha.net has put up a nice disclaimer.  He says he is a good guy. Word for word:

Disclaimer I am about to ask you for your Twitter user ID and password. You should be afraid. This is where you ask yourself, “Do I really want to find out my twitterank badly enough to give some random dude on teh interweb my account info?” And if that’s not what you’re asking yourself, shame on you.

Hi! Yes, the text you see above was there when Twitterank first launched, because giving away your user name and password to untrusted 3rd parties really is a bad idea. I took it out because it was verbose, and it didn’t seem to deter people. Fortunately, I’m not out to steal ur twitterz. Frankly, I wish I didn’t have to ask for your account info, but Twitter doesn’t offer APIs using any other authentication mechanism (according to the docs). So blame them. Read more about what I’ll do with your account info/data in the FAQ.

I will not store your password. I will only use it once to calculate your Twitterank.

UPDATE 3: ZDNet has posted a response from the creator of Twitterank.  He explains that he really is a good guy.  It’s worth a glance if you followed this story yesterday.

Amidst the news of layoffs all over the tech and social media sectors, it’s nice to see news of a company that is hiring.  Twitter, the only service that I can honestly say I am completely addicted to, is one of those companies.

They’ve got a nice listing of jobs, and there is a lot of buzz about the chance to work at a company that many say will be around for a long time, continuing to change the way we communicate. I want to tell you why you shouldn’t apply, however.

Twitter is hiring!

As I’ve watched the stream of chatter about the available positions, it seems that a lot of people say things like, “I am a huge Twitter fan, I would be perfect there!”, or they have somebody do it for them, “My friend John Doe talks about Twitter day and night, @ev should hire him”. I’m not sure that these kinds of tweets are helpful in any way.  Why?  Let me answer your question with another question.  Just because you drive a car, are you qualified to work at Ford? You own shoes, right?  Does that mean you would be good in the marketing department at Zappos?  The use of a product alone isn’t sufficient experience for guiding the development of that product, or the strategy of the business behind it. No, more is needed.  Technical expertise, business acumen, and inherent judgement should be a part of who you are. I’m guessing that a good sense of humor would be helpful as well, given the nature of the industry…you need to be fast on your feet, firm in your decisions, and able to smile a little if the fail whale shows up. And then you fix it.

As Twitter continues to evolve, as it continues to grab the attention of national media and as it makes the world a smaller place during historic events, the future of this one-of-a-kind company is bright. The team that joins together to forge ahead should be the same.

Oh, should I mention as a disclaimer that I have thrown my hat into the ring as well?

If you feel that you have what it takes to makes numbers dance, to look down the road and reasonably predict where things will be in 6 months, in 2 years…then head over to the job board at Twitter and apply.  Don’t forget to tell Evan Williams and Biz Stone that I sent you though…

Have you ever found an online site that you wanted to sign up for, only to find out that your name has already been taken? If you have a common name (sorry, Bob Smith…) then you have probably encountered this so many times you have switched your online personae to a name like B_Dog747.  Fine if you aren’t branding, but what if you have a name or product that you need to own online? 

UserNameCheck is a one page, simple site that can really help you out with this…and it’s free.  Simply go to the page, put in your desired username and click “check”.  The site will spend a few minutes going through 68 popular sites like Twitter, Digg and 12seconds to check the availability.  Of course, there are some sites where you really need to own your name, like LinkedIn.

You can also use this like a reverse phone directory to find people that you follow on one social network and would like to find on others.  Sure, it could sound a bit like stalking, but I think this is a legitimate use of the service.

Something I really like about UserNameCheck is the “available” and “taken” links next to each network.  If I click “taken” it will bring me directly to the user I am looking up.  If the name is available and I click that, it directs me to the registration page.  Very helpful!

So…how important is your name to you? If the answer is “very”, then spend some time on his site registering yourself.  Of course for those of you with more time than money on your hands, you can hire me and I’ll do this for you. Trust me in this, going through dozens of CAPTCHA tests can be a struggle of epic proportions.

Let me ask you a question, and I’ll give you a moment to think about it. These days, what is the time frame that people expect to be able to access data…any data?  30 years ago, there wasn’t much of a threshold, perhaps a week or so.  20 years ago, we would wait for several days. 10 years ago, we would wait for several hours.  But what about today? People want information live.  They want it now.  Qik is a service that delivers that, and delivers it well.

The Qik service streams video live from your mobile phone.  Their front page says that “Qik enables you to share your moments live with your friends, family and the world - right from your mobile phone”.  While that is certainly true, I think there is a much larger connection to businesses that should not be overlooked.

Recently I was in West Hollywood at The Troubadour for the album release party for The 88.  This world-famous venue is intimate, only 500 or so people can fit in.  We added a few more to the party however by streaming parts of the concert on my iPhone through Qik.  The embedded video here is pretty difficult to hear, keep in mind that the music was incredibly loud and the lighting pretty dark…not ideal conditions for video.  However, the resulting 2:45 shot actually came out better than could be expected given the environment, a testament to Qik’s ability to handle the stream well. A bonus of the service? People were chatting with me on the steam live, via an instant messanger like service.  I was watching questions and comments pop up on the screen as I streamed.  Very cool.

I was setting up my Qik account on the fly, so I wasn’t able to use all of the features available to me, like the auto-notification to Twitter.  Yes, with Qik you can enable your account to send an update to Twitter letting your followers know that you are streaming live, including a URL of the stream.  If you link to multiple social networks and they update each other, the size of the social crowd to become aware of your live stream can be significant.

Does your business offer a service that would be valuable in live-time streaming? Do you attend functions, parties or conventions that would be interesting to your audience? I think it’s time for you to consider the use of Qik.  What kind of creative ways can you share live video content with your customers and fans? Remember, the more value you bring to your tribe and the more you share with them, the more loyal they will be.

You can follow Qik on Twitter, and you should subscribe to their blog. 

Of course sometimes you don’t need to add value, you don’t need to promote.  Sometimes you just want to share something that you know is significant. There are times when you are part of something much bigger than yourself, and at those times it’s handy to have live video.  I was in San Francisco for business on Election Night in the United States, Tuesday November 5, 2008.  I witnessed something in the streets that was nothing short of amazing.  I saw energy and celebration like nothing I could remember.  I had to take some video.  The clip is short, but it is the tail end of a trumpeter, on the shoulders of the crowd, hammering out The Star Spangled Banner with thousands of people in the middle of the street singing at the top of their lungs…

That, my friends, is what social media is all about.  Sharing a moment in time, not just with the thousands that surround me, but with the countless thousands roaming the internet at any given moment. Go check out Qik and start sharing with others.

My hands have a mind of their own when I’m working on my keyboard.  While my fingers quickly fly over the keys when typing up an email, a tweet or a post, sometimes I misspell something.  Oh, and by sometimes I mean often.  I type most of the day, and though I try to catch errors, even spell checker and a second (or third) look at the material doesn’t always work for me.  Let’s forget about spelling and grammar for a moment…what about facts?  Nothing on my computer has an automatic fact checker, and I’ve been called out a few times on errors that I have made.  Of course I’ve only made a few in my 36 years so this isn’t a common problem, but for others it might be.

There is a fresh new product on the market called gooseGrade.  I was exposed to them initially at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, and soon I found them (or they found me?) on Twitter.  Yes, always Twitter.

This brave new app may be the end of me.  You see, we (that is, me the writer, you the reader) have just entered a new phase of our relationship.  Not only can you comment on my posts, but now you can carry a big fat red sharpie with you while you read, not unlike your mean 4th grade teacher.  If I mess up…with spelling, punctuation, grammar, facts…you can correct me and grade me.  My glory or shame will be in a shiny red widget in my right sidebar, showing the world that I either passed or failed. All you need to do is click on the gooseGrade widget at the top right of my page, log in, and correct away.  Please, try not to smile so much while pointing out the error of my ways.

“All pages begin with a gooseGrade of 100 - a perfect score. Each time a reader suggests a correction, the writer’s gooseGrade is lowered. When the writer takes action - that is, when they choose to either accept or decline the reader’s suggestion, the writer’s grade is restored,” Founder & CEO John Brooks Pounders explains. “gooseGraders - that is, readers who suggest corrections, are also awarded a gooseGrade, based on the percentage of times writers choose to accept or decline their suggestions, which discourages gratuitous correcting,” (from gooseGrade Press Rooom).

I actually like this idea.  gooseGrade did a survey about reader satisfaction of blogs as they relate to these categories, and the results show pretty strongly that clean, well written and well edited blogs make you smile more than those full of problems.  That shouldn’t be too surprising.  In this world of user generated content, I think the addition of user generated correction is appropriate.  Of course I have to wonder…were the guys behind gooseGrade hall monitors in middle school? What have we done to incur such UGC wrath? Ha ha…brilliant, gentlemen.

So now I have one more thing to feed my neurosis…what is my gooseGrade today? Those of you that love to comb my articles for mistakes and email them to me, this is like a day at Disneyland for you, and there are no lines at Magic Mountain.  Have at it…read, mark me up, and enjoy your red sharpie.

You can go to gooseGrade and sign up now for free.  Install it on your blog.  C’mon, try it!  The whole process only took me a few minutes. Also, there is a small chance that I want an opportunity to go grade your page after you grade mine…

I was turned on to Xobni at the Blogworld Expo in Vegas a few weeks back.  I’ve been using it on my laptop and primary desktop computers, and I think that I really am a little more productive with it. That, and I am a freakshow when it comes to data and graphs and Xobni has plenty of both!

This Windows-only Outlook plugin is a free download and installs quickly and easily, no headaches when I went through it. Sorry Entourage users and others, I see that other platforms are in dev right now so hang tight. So what does it do? Read on.

As a window that sits to the right of my Outlook inbox it is…if nothing else…a nice visual break from the business look of Outlook.  It is more than just another pretty face though, it adds quite a bit of useful utility to my work day.  The first thing I noticed was its incredible tie in to LinkedIn.  When I get an email from somebody that used LinkedIn it previews the email with their public profile picture and allows me to link over to their information easily.  I’ve added a few people to my LinkedIn network this way.

It actually summarizes quite a bit of information about a particular person.  When I click on an email in my inbox it shows me that person’s “network” and allows me to click through to each person.  This has been useful a few times as I’ve needed to dig a bit deeper with somebody and was able to look at their associations.

Another beautiful feature, the one I use the most, is a preview of my conversations with a person (recent emails) and my ability to click thru to them and have a preview show up in the Xobni box.  Very handy.  Although it’s easy enough to search through my inbox and folders, this is even easier.  I love this part of it.  But wait…I’m a data geek right?  Where is the firehose of data?  Xobni installs its own submenu in the main menu, a quick click and selection of “Xobni Analytics” brings me to a place of statistics nirvana.

There are a raft of useful headings here, including “Time To Respond”, “Unique Contacts” and “Follow Up Delay”.  A click on “Mail Traffic” shows me a chart of sent and received emails and time of day.  A historical chart of this is quite helpful to me in terms of how I spend my time.  Also, it helps me to get into a new habit I’m trying to develop: not always having my Outlook opened.  I’m trying to check in every hour or so, but not be a slave to the constant preview pane of new messages.  So far this has been working well for me.

I’ve only scatched the surface of uses for Xobni, you ought to download it and try it yourself.  Of course you would be interested to know that the Xobni crew is on Twitter, they just don’t update too much. Drop me a note if you find Xobni to be useful, I would like to hear about other experiences.  I think a lot of people will like this.  Heck, the Wall Street Journal even does!

There are Twitter utilities for just about everything. You can love, hate, think and feel here.  You can check out politic tweets on each side of the aisle here.  You can search for anything you want here.  What more does the world need?

How about a service that scrapes curse words off of Twitter and posts them in one easy-to-find place?  Cursebird does just that.  I’m not sure if there is any real value to this, other than a good way to embarrass yourself at work, but it just goes to show that there is plenty of innovation left to be had.  Some of it is just a little less high brow than others.

Oh, if you do go visit the site, don’t say I didn’t warn you.   Truly, the only thing it does is aggregate the nastiest words it can find. Proceed at your own peril!

I tweeted about this earlier today, but I think it deserves its own post.  I love fresh and creative ways of spreading content around the web, and AC/DC has put out one bizarre and intriguing product: a music video down in Low Definition Excel!  Yes, that Excel, the spreadsheet program from Microsoft.

I downloaded the .xls file just to see if it work…and it does!  I think this has viral written all over it.  If you don’t have Excel or don’t want to download the file you can watch it on YouTube as well. I’ve embedded it here for your viewing pleasure.

It’s nice to see a band that has been around for a while coming up with really new and creative ways to get some buzz going about their music!