Misc.

Why would anyone reading WSJ.com give a hoot about what page in the print edition a story ran on? So they can go out and buy the print edition and get a hard copy of the story? Umm, no.

It’s a small thing, I know, but an indicator of editors stuck in old mindsets.

I’m doing a little market research for a project and would greatly appreciate your advice. My question: What would you do with a personal avatar that looked like a comic-strip version of you? How would you use it? What uses could you foresee for a comic avatar of your face and body, or just your face (digital or physical-world)?

Here are a couple examples of comic avatars. Also see the comic avatar of me at the top of this page.

Leave a comment here or send me a private message. Thanks for your help!

I suppose this is a sign that spammers are getting smarter and have figured out how to get past the typical “captcha” that keeps those idiots from posting crap to websites and blogs, and in comment threads. (Captchas are designed to make sure that someone submitting a web form is actually a human.)

Here’s a captcha that I ran into the other day. Ugh. It’s not exactly a user-friendly way to encourage someone to post to your website. It takes some real dedication to slog through this one.

(Sorry, I don’t remember which site I spotted this on. I grabbed a screen shot and stored it, and by the time I spotted this on my desktop I’d forgotten where I found this.)

There’s a pet peeve of mine that crops up every January: Website publishers (including some big names) routinely forget to change the copyright dateline in the footers of their pages and in their e-mail deliveries. I usually post a blog item reminding everyone to make this simple change.

Surprisingly, I’m still seeing a lot of “copyright 2007″ notices, especially on e-mail newsletters. Here are a few screen grabs from e-mails that I received in recent days:

For those of you who still need reminding, stop publishing in the past.

You know how on the web you’re always serendipitously running into odd (and often interesting) stuff. That happened to me tonight when I was looking up the right way to spell the slang word “biatch.” I spotted this odd video of teen girlfriends “biatch slapping” each other.

Now, I have a daughter around the age of the girls in this video, and I realized after viewing this that Youtube is giving me a glimpse into the once hidden world of today’s teenagers. As a parent, obviously I’m not likely to be aware of this odd behavior (and probably worse) occurring when friends get together. But with this current generation of teens, they don’t keep their behavior (including bad stuff) to themselves; they post it for the world to see!

This is pretty amazing when you think about it. Sociologists must be having a field day with stuff like this.

For me, along with artist Steve Kearsley, last week I launched techGRL.com, an online comic strip that has as its heroine a 15-year-old, tech-crazy girl. So I need to try to get into the heads of girls that age. While observing my own daughter is useful in that regard, even better is the opportunity to peer directly into the world of teenage girls.

Thanks, Youtube!

I’m sitting on hold with my website hosting company, Bluehost, waiting for tech support. Here’s a company that impresses me with its customer service, and here’s why:

I landed in the tech support waiting queue and told that I was “caller No. 12.” A few seconds later: “You are caller No. 11.” And so on and so on till a tech support rep comes on the line. Nice! This is so much better than having no idea how long I’ll be on hold, which is how the majority of companies handle waits for tech support.

Information! That’s what consumers want. I’m much less grumpy waiting in this queue knowing what to expect than otherwise.

Can everyone start doing this? Please?!

I’ve just debuted a new website/blog designed to be a resource for ideas, tips and advice for online news publishers. It’s called GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, and it’s NOT another industry news blog. The focus is exclusively on advice. I hope you’ll find it useful.

I soft-launched the site yesterday, so hardly anyone knows about it. I’d love it if a few of you checked it out and maybe commented on the early posts. My intent is to post a tip a day. There will be ideas on how to increase traffic and earn more money, primarily. I’m aiming for actionable tips and advice.

Obviously I don’t know it all, so I’ve made the site open to everyone to participate in and contribute to. Comment on the posts. Submit an idea of your own if you’d like me to write it up for you (and credit you). Create an account and blog to the site directly. (I will be moderating submissions.)

I’m also looking for sponsors, so give me a shout if it looks like that might be useful to you.

Does your news organization have a YouTube video channel featuring a fresh stream of originally produced videos? It should. And it wouldn’t be that hard to do, nor expensive.

So that idea came to me after having watched a couple great videos on The Official Google Channel on YouTube. (I’ve attached one of those videos, a talk on the Google campus by Getting Things Done guru Dave Allen, to the end of this blog item.)

Google, being a great place to work, apparently has a stream of guest speakers coming through giving workshops and lectures. The company, smartly, videotapes the talks and puts them on YouTube. Being a smart company, they don’t keep this great information to themselves and restrict access just to their employees — even though Google paid for the speakers. Google is, after all, all about sharing the world’s knowledge, so it’s a fit with the company’s mission and ethics.

You know, of course, what organizations also are well positioned to have their own channels: newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, magazines, and online news sites. Nearly all news organizations have a steady stream of politicians, celebrities, athletes, experts, etc. coming through their doors — for interviews with reporters, with the editorial board, and so on.

So here’s a simple notion that’ll amp up your presence on YouTube and other channels (such as Facebook, MySpace, et al): Create your own channel, a la Google, and post raw video of interviews with some of those people. Record editorial board meetings where there are guests and post the video. This requires a change in mindset, from those interviews being a part of the reporting process not meant for outside consumption, to the interviews actually being content.

This would be relatively cheap to do. The only thing holding you back is clinging to the old ways.

Now here’s the Dave Allen lecture. As not of the most organized people in the world, I’m trying hard to learn from Allen. His Google lecture is worth a viewing.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some domains sitting around gathering dust (and costing annual renewal fees). In my case, projects that didn’t work out, or projects that were envisioned but never got off the ground, are the reason.

I’ve got a couple domains that I think are pretty good names:

• Clearmail.com
• AthleteMoms.com

Clearmail.com is from a long time ago, when spam wasn’t yet a huge problem and there weren’t many solutions to it available yet. I hooked up with a couple other folks, including a software developer who had a good idea (we thought at the time). It didn’t get off the ground. And I also wonder why I got involved, since it was a bit outside my expertise and interests.

There aren’t many domains left with “mail” in the name. Could anyone use this one? Make an offer (please!).

AthleteMoms.com I think is a great domain for someone wanting to target that demographic niche. Any takers?

The Huffington Post has a really nice feature that lets you look at map views of who has donated money to US political campaigns: FundRace 2008.

The flashy bits include the ability to look at a list of celebrities and see how much they donated and to whom — e.g., Cindy Crawford. It even includes their street addresses!

But it’s also fascinating (and yes, addicting) to use the tool to see who among your neighbors has donated. I was able to zoom in on my neighborhood and find that only one household had donated enough to trigger being in this database. You get the person’s name, address, occupation, name of the candidate money was donated to, and the amount.

For fun, I took a screen grab of Boulder, Colorado, where I live. Boulder is known as a politically liberal community, so I’d expect to see a lot of blue dots representing Democratic donations. Sure enough, it’s true:

The political antithesis of Boulder is Colorado Springs, a couple-hour drive to the south and a conservative bastion. Sure enough, there’s a much larger proportion of red there, representing GOP donations:

That’s pretty interesting. Colorado Springs’ Republicans don’t seem to be donating as much money as Boulder’s Democrats. That tells you something about the enthusiasm and drive of Democrats to wrest control back from the GOP, perhaps, vs. I would guess the lack of enthusiasm of Republicans. (From my point of view, I’d guess that the Republicans to my south are less enamored with their party after 7 years of George W. Bush.)