Monkeyserver.com

Today I went out mtn biking at Lake Crabtree in Apex (I think). It’s always a great time out there, the trails - amazing! Some great stuff, it’s a lot of fun. But the other reason why I love that place is the wildlife. Every time I go I see something beautiful, even if it’s just the lake or the trees.

Today I saw probably the best scene so far, a doe with her fawn, I stood there for about 5 minutes, ended up being joined by 3 other people while we watched the two of them. The shots I got with my camera phone make me wish I had a real camera with me.

Well, it was quite a view, but if you want to see a better picture get out there for yourself!

Last Thursday I went to the second Triangle Tweetup, held at C[Capstrat]], a local media agency. It was quite a nice location, though we did fill it with the 60+ twitterers who showed up. As always @waynesutton did a great job of organizing interesting presentations, among which were:

• Twitter Movie Reviews, a cool app by @JazzyChad that aggregates twitter movie comments to catch the vibe about a movie.
  My thoughts:Pretty Hip, but I can probably get the same info by just listening to my feed, many trends seem to emerge from small groups and be echoed by the masses. Aside from that, I know which of my friends to trust on this front. Listening to the masses might end up with me watching the next jackass movie, no thanks. Either way, it is a great way to show the power of twitter to find what has buzz and what the crowd likes - crowd sourcing at it’s most pure.
  The big downfall I saw to this tool was that it was almost completely manual, and that just won’t scale. However, Chad seems to be on top of getting things automated, if he can sort that out he may be able to branch out to other areas instead of just movies. What about restaurants, hotels, vaca spots, or products. There could be money to be had here…
• The latest in media devices from @shepherdfx (Francis Shepherd). This was a review of the latest in mics and cameras mostly at the pro and semi pro level. Quite interesting to see where the market is going.
  My Thoughts: All this stuff is out of my price range, but it’s great to see everything is getting cheaper and cheaper, which means it could be in my price range soon.
• @critter, the local colorful twitterer, did a presentation on C[seesmic]]. I think Critter actually talked about this at the last tweetup as well. This time however, the app has grown more into its own, and I now better understood that it is more about interactive movie chat. Like a video twitter. A huge improvement is that there are threads.
  My Thoughts: I don’t do much video chat, it feels like the futuristic world that every wonk was predicting 20 years ago. It’s not that it isn’t a cool site, I’m just not hip to video posts yet. Maybe I’ll try it out soon, if I did, it would definitely be at seesmic, the site is slick and looks quite easy to use.

After the presentations we had some group chat, I didn’t take notes, but here are some major convos I recall:

• C[brightkite]] - cool or annoying?
  A lot of people have picked up on brightkite, a site that lets you broadcast your location in a twitteresque way. So twitterlike, that you can have it actually feed into twitter as well. A smooth integration that many were quick to jump on. The downside of this is that people are now getting spammed with everyone’s location, most of the time I don’t care that much, and many of the people aren’t remotely near me. Besides that, the locations are in address form, some one could be 50 feet away from me, but I wouldn’t know because I am horrible with street names.
  It’s a cool site, geolocal twitter, neato, but I think it still has some work to do before it is truly answering a pain.
• What if twitter goes down… I mean for good
  What will we all do?! Ok, it’s not that bad, but a common reply was “Get work done!” Sad but true. Pownce was brought up, a common complaint being that no one is there - not so true if twitter is dead. I threw IRC out there, because often times the only difference between the two is I’m a little more trigger shy on twitter.

After that the group mostly split up and headed over the bar Capstrat has across the hall (sweet!), some great conversations where had there as well, here’s a bit of what I took part in:

• @jessmartin mentioned that C[Startupweekend]] is coming to the triangle, with a background of coding and a love for startups, this sounds pretty enticing.
• Would C[brightkite]] be better if it were built into the phone, I see the possibility of more great innovations with android coming. Side note, why the heck did apply ruin the iPhone by stifling innovation and not allowing third party developers free reign? If it were built right in then I would have to do anything to tell people where I am, GPS coords could be sent back automatically, and if a friend is within X meters I could be automatically notified.
  
  The question was asked whether or not twitter should do this. Some argued that part of its essence is simplicity and that features like that would muddy it. I agree that the simplicity is key to bringing in new people and getting them addicted. I think the real challenge with any product is adding new features without adding complexity. Twitter’s vision isn’t clear, they may stay 140 char text box or they may branch out, only time will tell.



• Will twitter sell?
  Will they sell, or maybe the better question is after which milestone will they sell? Some postulated that they need to prove the monetary value of a user first, has facebook done that - I’m not sure. A good question was asked here, what if they try to make some money but do a bad job, because it’s not their specialty and by doing so falsely generate a lower valuation. Perhaps they won’t try at all.
• SMS marketing on mobiles
  I think this will take off in USA at some point, but several people brought up not wanting to be spammed. I think if it’s done right it will be more like a service than advertising. C[APML]] (I believe this is what people said) was brought up as a good start to making sure this was done right. Definitely a sticky bit that needs to worked out, exciting!
• How to start using twitter corporately
  I mentioned that I had obtained a few twitter names for Bronto, but that I haven’t done anything with them yet, since I haven’t figured out the route I want to go. @Justis said that was a great idea, think it through before you start a feed that is useless, confusing, or just not a good reflection of your company. Good point. Also, make sure to grab your company’s name and any variations on any new social network right away or some one else will, even if you’re not sure what you’ll do with it yet.

Other tidbits that got thrown around: Why C[Bronto]] is so cool (shameless plug, I know), how to open a beer bottle with your ring, SAS has great benefits, and I need to get into Raleigh for beers with @jefftippett and @Dimambro, among many many others.

Then we got tossed out at 10:00 so the Capstrat folks could go home. A fun night of stimulating conversation spent with some hip local people. After a couple years down here, I’m definitely starting to understand why the triangle is such a great place to live.

 

I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

I thought I’d just throw a quick plug for a great new shirt I got: Twitter Overload! I thought it was pretty nice… I got the shirt from startupwear.com, check it out.

I took part in the Raleigh Rocks half marathon this past weekend. My excitement had been growing, but so had my dread. Having run 10 miles recently, I figured I could finish, but I also figured it was going to be miserable.

I was happily surprised. The run itself didn’t get too tough until about mile 10. People had generally told me that the adrenaline would carry me through the last few miles, it they were pretty much right. The last 1/2 mile was just me telling myself I couldn’t stop now.

So I just ran with all I had left, and I finished in just under 2 hours. Which is what I was shooting for, and it was actually fun. (results)
So am I going to do it again? I’m not sure, I think I may try another half marathon, and a full marathon isn’t entirely out of the question. But I think I’m gonna take it easy on running for the next few weeks, I think I’ve earned that.

BTW, the nerd that I am, I actually managed to twitter from the race… see the tweet. I actually have been getting great support from fellow twitterers, mostly from Maddy Hubbard.

I’m a recent convert to Netflix, I think I’ve mentioned that a few times before. My recent blog series on their email marketing program (that’s three links for three posts) can attest to how much I think they are getting it right.

I’ve also recently gotten Watch It Now up an running as it’s own activity on my sweet Harmony 880 (review coming, I swear) - which is telling for how often I watch from that ever growing library.

However, on Monday they had a bit of a stumble. There were reports of the site being down, I think one report was “Netflix is down, I don’t know what movies I like.” Very cute. Apparently it was due to an errant maintenance session.

Well, it wasn’t just the site, their shipping system went down with it. So movies didn’t go out. Definitely a bit of an annoyance, especially when you are trying to plow through all of season II and III of Battlestar in time for the premier of season IV next week. But I’ll truck on, I really wasn’t that affected, I mean, it’s just movies.

But apparently Netflix wasn’t gonna chance the outrage, they quickly sent out a mea culpa. They said oops and took a few bucks off my bill. 5% off isn’t much, but it’s the thought that counts. Email is, of course, the medium of choice for something like this, and I bet Netflix didn’t think twice about how to convey this message. Again, it’s simple and well done, like all of their emails.

Well done guys.

@cpengel just posted a twittered about this amazing app phun that was created by Emil Ernerfeld as some sort of phun w/ physics tutorial. From the sample video it looks like he stumbled across a very cool, addictive, and from the looks of it extremely intuitive app.

Having spent most of my waking hours over the last 3 days thinking about how to make complex concepts simple, intuitive, and efficient, this is definitely right up my alley.

Too bad there is no OS X version…

Hey all, here is a few videos and sites that I love. They are from quite a while back, but they are good none-the-less.

Channel 101

There are a slew of off the wall “shows” that I used to watch on Channel101.com. All of these shows are somewhat of a parody of modern tv shows - weak plots, worse scripts, and overdone special effects. In the fashion of TV, each month the creators whip up a new ‘episode’ of their show. The shows are screened and the top 5 are carried on, while all others are cancelled. I don’t suggest checking these out if you are easily offended.

• The ‘Bu - As mentioned in a recent blog post, was my first introduction to The Lonely Island crew and (sometimes) features Elliot from Scrubs. Episode 1 is a good intro to this strip, I suggest going straight through, but if you are rushed for time then skip right to episode 8, the month where they “didn’t make an episode”. CLAP - CLAP
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• House of Cosbys - HoC to those in the know. If you lived through the 80’s and remember Jello, Picture Pages, and of course the Cosby Show, then this is the show for you. It had a great first few episodes but started to slide into the obscene, luckily it was saved from implosion by an unruly Cease and Desist.
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• There are many more: Yacht Rock, Most Extraordinary Space Investigations (often featuring Sarah Silverman), and so many more.
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Homestar Runner

Ok, this is definitely an oldy, and you shouldn’t need me to introduce you to this, but if you haven’t heard of Homestar Runner, or perhaps his more well known buddy - Strongbad, then please check it out right now. Below I’ve picked out a few of my all time favorites, but there are hundreds of fantastic videos on that site, you can lose days there. One of the best things about these videos is the easter eggs, you can find out more about them on the Homestar Wiki.
The intro to the site is available below (sorry about the bad audio), one of my favorite strong bad emails is anything. The side shows are pretty hot too, like Teen Girl Squad and many others!

Just got a link to this great video from phillymac on twitter. Definitely worth checking out if you’re still not sure what twitter is or why it’s for you.

Twitter in Plain English | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

I like to think that twitter is almost like having some friends and aquantances in the room with you. You can choose to listen in and respond or ignore them, but they are all there, just keeping you posted.

If you’d like to follow me, feel free.

Living the life of a blogger I found a recent SNL skit with Juno’s Ellen Page and SNL’s Andy Samberg as Diablo Cody quite funny. There are some great lines in there, such as “I blog to differ” and “Snoop Bloggy blog featuring Nate Blog”.

It’s getting linked quite a bit out there on the internets, and wth good reason, Andy Samberg is comic gold. I’ve followed him since his days at The Lonely Island, doing shows like The ‘Bu at Channel 101. Him, Akiva, and Jorma are gods of modern comedy. If you aren’t familiar with their work I suggest you check out The ‘Bu, earlier episodes of which actually feature Elliot from Scrubs.