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Your Space, MySpace, Barack’s Space

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Senator Barack ObamaSome people consider 2008 Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama to be the most “wired” candidate in either major political party. That is, he has utilized online social networks and even streaming video channels to his advantage – showing that he’s hip and understands a younger generation. He even has a MySpace page profile that had 160,000 “friends”. An Obama supporter has been running it for nearly three years, with the blessing of the Senator’s campaign team. They suddenly decided, though, that they were uncomfortable with an “outsider” running the page, which of course represents Obama’s viewpoints, etc.

The campaign team wanted control of the profile page, and the supporter, Joe Anthony, a paralegal, was fine with that, though he wanted nearly $50K in total fees to do so, which the Senator’s team said no to. Big mistake. At $50,000 of effort put in by Anthony to build 160,000 friends, each “friend”, and no doubt supporter of Obama, cost only about thirty cents. The stink that ensued caused Myspace to step in and decide that the Senator’s team could have control and Joe Anthony could take the contact info. All 160,000 friends. So what if it was supposed to be volunteer work?

Does this translate into 160,000 lost future votes? Maybe. Maybe less, maybe more. Who can know? The fact is, there are now only just over 21K friends. Obviously, it was a monstrously stupid move for the campaign team of a seemingly well-loved, charismatic candidate who has been a historic figure and may continue to be. Someone on the campaign team should be fired. It’s not like the campaign money isn’t there. But even more to the point, Anthony obviously was a good buffer and did a tremendous job building goodwill for the Senator.

Will the MySpace page be the same with the official campaign team running it? I doubt it. However, the Senator phoned Anthony to offer his apologies and try to win back his vote. Had the campaign team invited Anthony to be part of their team, everyone would be way ahead.

Originally posted on May 3, 2007 @ 2:29 pm

No Pandora For You!!

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Pandora music recommendation serviceNo Pandora for you, like Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi” character might say. At least, not if you are an international user. That supposedly means anyone outside the United States will be prevented from using the service, due to a certain federal statute. This is of course due to net radio royalty issues. Last.fm is apparently being purchased by Viacom. I’ve not heard anything regarding Pandora.

This is very disappointing news as for a long-time music fan like myself, I’ve never come across anything quite as cool/ brilliant in its recommendation functionality. However, despite being in Canada, my IP address sometimes shows as being in the US. This might explain while I can still see the site as of this writing. Oddly, I didn’t receive any email from Pandora, though I have received newsletters in the past.

Originally posted on May 3, 2007 @ 9:42 am

Mashing Up Spreadsheets

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Dave Winer describes a very cool piece of web functionality: web service data calls from web spreadsheet cells. Need a piece of data to plug into your ZohoSheet, Google Spreadsheet, or whatever web spreadsheet you use? The syntax he describes would make a request to the desired web service and the returned value would appear in the requesting spreadsheet cell. As a stats junkie and a regular user of web services, I was wishing for exactly this functionality, except I hadn’t thought about the syntax or methodology.

What’s nice is that the framework already exists. Spreadsheets simply have to add this feature. And since Dave has a history of his ideas manifesting, we should see this functionality soon. It’s one more piece in interconnecting documents and data of all sorts. Sort of like a hyperlinking of data objects, if I understand correctly. I see very powerful uses of such functionality on the horizon.

Web services calls from web spreadsheets

In the example above, a spreadsheet to analyze your stock portfolio might synchronize with notes/ events from your Google Calendar. The spreadsheet makes calls to both servers and receives data back. Logic on the spreadsheet side, of course, decides what to do with the data, including possibly even sending an email or SMS alert, or initiating chat session. (Google Spreadsheets apparently has chat features now, though I haven’t tried it.)

I can also see how this functionality would be great if you’re a blogger managing multiple blogs, and want to get a simple overview of web statistics for all of them in a single spreadsheet. This is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and might in fact be the iceberg that sinks standalone spreadsheet applications such as Excel. (Anyone else wondering why Microsoft still doesn’t have a web version?)

Originally posted on May 1, 2007 @ 6:37 pm

Blogger, Name Thyself

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Build your blogger brand - brainstormOkay, maybe you don’t think that a blogger needs to build a brand. But in light of the response that the infographic on the You’re Brand One? post received, it’s evident that branding is important for some bloggers. That is, if you plan to either earn a living from your blog professionally or indirectly. (Darren Rowse has a great post about making money because of your blog.) In which case branding is a necessity, be it a cool, memorable brand name, an infographic, or even just a picture of you.

If you want to blog professionally, even if just to promote your consulting or other services, I highly recommend getting a domain name with your name in it, or some variation. Set up a blog and make that your brand, to promote all your online and offline activities. You may even want to use a blog name that isn’t your name. Remember that you have to compete with websites plus 70 million blogs. Or is it 15 million? Who knows. Fact is, you need to stand out, and there are many aspects to building a popular site (promotion, content, posts, etc.), but branding yourself is the glue that ties it all together.

For me, I want to be the geeky diagram/ screencast guy. Hence my brand “Internet UltraGeek”. But here’s something to consider: I didn’t bother registering internetultrageek.com because I don’t like the way it looks. This should be a factor when you decide on a brand name. For example, noted web designer Chris Pearson uses Pearsonified, which I think is great. It’s more than his name, it’s a brand. Be creative when you set up your “brand” blog. And you don’t have to post every day. Each post should be well thought out and relevant to your brand. Once a week is probably sufficient.

If you need some branding pointers, NameWire, a blog about product naming, has a post on personal branding, with links to other relevant articles including, yes, my own. Though have a look at the rest of the blog and you’ll realize how much thought goes into naming a product or service. Or at least, how much effort should go in.

Originally posted on May 4, 2007 @ 2:41 pm

How To Anonymize Your Email Address

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Contactify personal contact formDon’t feel like giving out your email address? How about a URL that anonymizes your email address? Contactify apparently does that, and uses a CAPTCHA to reduce spam. If you have your own blog on a self-hosted domain, however, I’m sure  you can find a free form plugin. In fact, anyone that works online should really consider buying their own “FirstnameLastname.com”, or close variation, and using that on a Moo card. Now set up a contact form on your personal site’s “contact me”, “about”, or “services” page. Then anyone who needs to get hold of you can just use the contact form. What could be simpler? You don’t even need business cards in this case. If you don’t want to go to the trouble, then Contactify is a (supposedly) nice alternative. Of course, if you are ultra popular, you may get too much email disrupting your workflow. In which case, you may need to use an extreme email message classification system.

Originally posted on May 3, 2007 @ 9:52 am