07.22.04

Locks of Love Again

Posted in General at 10 pm

Yes, there’s a reason why I’m linking to this… Locks of Love – Donate Hair

Get your pictures before Sunday….

A litle Apple research

Posted in General at 10 am

Going back though Apple’s Press Release archive I put together this little chart for a friend. It lists the number of months since the latest refresh of each of the computer models from Apple.

PowerMac: 1.5 months ago
iMac: 7 mo
PowerBook: 3 mo
iBook: 3 mo

(Obviously the iPod was just updated this week.) But I’m sure I saw a web site out there that had this same information except it went back a few years. Has anyone else seen that? Please PingBack, Comment or send me a note if you have the URL for the site I’m talking about, as my Google-fu is failing me.

07.19.04

WebVisions Follow up links

Posted in General at 11 pm

I added these to a previous entry, but for those of you who don’t studiously track the edits of each one of my 800+ entries, I present them here. This list is being continuously updated as more links come in.

07.18.04

Why I watch the captions

Posted in General at 10 am

It’s a bit annoying for others in the room, but I enjoy watching TV with the closed captioning on.

First off, I do seem to have a bit of a problem hearing things clearly. It’s difficult for me to pick out spoken words when there’s a lot of background noise like the two box fans we’ve had on during the nights, plus I’m easily distrac- Ooh! Shiny thing over in the corner!…

[…]

As I was saying, I enjoy watching the captions because sometime you get more information that way. For instance just last night some commercial was on with captioning and it said “Techno Mix of the Saber Dance”. I had no idea what piece of music was called the Saber Dance, so I proceeded to hop on over to my Mac and brought up this work that is obviously famous enough to be referred to simply by it’s title.

Now of course, just after the first few bars of the piece it becomes very obvious what it is. But like many symphonic, non-vocal pieces that people may not know the name of: Flight of the Bumblebee, or Beethoven’s Ninth, or Rhapsody In Blue, it difficult to find out about these pieces on the Net unless you have a specific word or phrase you can use to hook into the piece’s digital net.trail.

07.17.04

Seven Gaffs

Posted in General at 8 pm

Out of 550+ people, 4 tracks with 15+ sessions, Exhibition Hall and 12 hours of on the floor duty we ended up with only seven miscues and problems for the whole day. (That I knew about anyways.)

  1. At 10:30am or so, the audio in the Executives Hall/137-138 went out. Oregon Convention Center (OCC) staff had to reset the room audio to bring it back.
  2. At 1:40 or so the lights in the Panels Hall/134 flickered and went out. OCC had to ‘reset’ the lights.
  3. At about 2:40 or so the lights in the Panels Hall/134 flickered and went out. OCC had to ‘reset’ the lights.
  4. One of our Speakers showed up 5 minutes late to a session. We had to get the laptop and mic together while the speaker was already on stage. (I nearly went ballistic on that one.)
  5. One of our panelists showed up late to their session… because they got lost… In The Convention Center.
  6. Another panelist was with the first one.
  7. At the last minute we tried to play an apology video from a panelist who missed their plane and didn’t make it. The video was supposed to play on the iBook (mine) that was running the interstitial screens. It was only just after the video began playing that I realized the audio was not hooked up to the sound system, therefore we saw a talking head and nothing else. Fortunately, Kevin Smokler, our primary host/MC provided and impromptu retelling of the apology.

Overall, not a bad day. If fact it was a very very good day.

(Later Edit: Thanks to Nick for the list of Weblog mentions:

That Morrocan Bus

Posted in General at 9 am

Ah the interesting mail you get on the IntarWeb…

On Jul 17, 2004, at 3:00 AM, chexxxxx3@xxxxxxx.usa.com wrote:

“URL: http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/mode/bus/

Cheddad Abderrahmane
14 rue al benafsaj no. 3 Mers sultan
Casablanca – Maroc

Messieurs,
Ayant l’intention de prendre en exploitation des lignes de Bus dans certaines villes du royaumes du Maroc , j’ai l’honneur de vous prier de bien vouloir m’adresser par retour , les dépliants avec Prix de votre fabrication.

— French to English Via BabbelFish —

“Dear Sirs, Having l’intention to take in exploitation lines of Bus in certain cities of the kingdoms of Morocco, j’ai l honnor to ask you to want m’adresser by return well, the folders with Price of your manufacture.”

And my Reply. Notice my use of A) very short sentences, and B) words with the fewest meanings that would translate more specifically.

Messieurs,

You are asking a question. You want to know the cost. The cost of covering a bus. Covering a bus with graphics and pictures.

I do not provide this service. I am a fan of “Depeche Mode”. I am a connoisseur of the music of “Depeche Mode”.

I cannot paint a bus for you. I am sorry. My apologies.

— English to French —

Vous posez une question. Vous voulez savoir le coût. Le coût de couvrir un autobus. Couvert d’un autobus de graphiques et d’images.

Je ne fournis pas ce service. Je suis un ventilateur de “Depeche Mode”. Je suis un connaisseur de la musique du “Depeche Mode”.

Je ne peux pas peindre un autobus pour vous. Je suis désolé. Mes excuses.

…Ross…

07.15.04

WV Diagram

Posted in General at 8 am

See that diagram at Textura Design? That’s mine. One of a set of 6 that have been very helpful in communicating how the rooms are to be laid out. How am I supposed to collect royalties tho?

At least this entry is a little more interesting than the one I had in mind. The one that said “WebVisions” over and over again… That was going to be titled “BrainDump”

07.12.04

Gmail Privacy Concerns

Posted in General at 3 pm

If you want to risk it, you can e-mail me a ‘rolson’ at the new gmail.com service. I got one through my blogger subscription which I use to update the news feeds at Bad-Seed.org and some other places.

I do like how they bucked the InterCap trend and went with a simple Initialcap.

07.10.04

CamWorld: Upcoming Travel Schedule

Posted in General at 12 am

Well that’s cool. It looks like a blogger I’ve been reading for a number of years is showing up at WebVisions.

Cam’s Upcoming Travel Schedule

When I first saw this I had to double check the conference site to see if he was speaking. I’m pretty sure he’s presented elsewhere, but I hadn’t seen his name on the materials so. That said, I wouldn’t have put it past Nick Finck to get Cam to fly out from NY for this.

07.09.04

E-mail Deliverability Top 10

Posted in General at 8 pm

The Deliverability Top Ten

By Chip House, ExactTarget

  1. Get and Confirm Permission Receiving permission from your subscribers is the crux of a successful email program. Capturing an opt-in and confirming it with a follow-up email is the best practice to ensure you only add recipients that want your email. To find out if you are sending something that is unwanted, look at your email from the eyes of your recipients. Will they anticipate receiving the email? Does it contain information that interests them? If the answer is “no,” then you should not send it. It is likely to get filtered due to complaints or content and will cause harm to your deliverability, as well as your brand and profitability over time.
  2. Send Highly Valuable & Highly Relevant Emails As the inbox gets more crowded with spam, your users are looking to your email to provide them with relevant content – the content they expected when subscribing to receive your email in the first place. The age of email blasting is over. Begin capturing data on your subscribers via surveys or during sign-up. Over time you will be able to send more relevant content, which lessens the chance that your email will be interpreted as spam by your subscribers.
  3. Set Content & Frequency Expectations Nothing can trigger subscriber dissatisfaction like continued emails that do not meet subscriber expectations in terms of content or frequency. Did you promise valuable, informational content, but continue to send only product pitches? Did you promise a monthly newsletter, but send weekly promotions? A recent study* shows that 65% of men and 56% of women define spam as “email from a company that I have done business with that comes too often.”
  4. Use a Service Provider with a Good Reputation Commercial email is getting more difficult with the advent of the CAN-SPAM Act and the increase in ISP filtering. Staying up-to-date on current legislation and policies of ISPs and anti-spam groups is difficult to do on your own. Reputable service providers such as ExactTarget dedicate significant resources to managing ISP relationships, monitoring email deliveries, and evaluating current email laws. If you do not have similar resources or an in-house expert, outsourcing could be the best way to get your messages delivered.
  5. Use a Recognizable, Short, and Consistent “From Address” Before even opening your email, a user has to recognize you, your company, your publication, and remember that they requested your email. This leads to many users accidentally reporting email that they opted-in to receive as spam or deleting it all together. The email “from address” is the first thing email recipients look at when deciding if they should open a message. It is important to keep this in mind with all email applications, but especially when mailing to AOL since their application only shows the email “from address” (info@example.com) rather than the friendly “from name” (XYZ Company). If your email address looks like this (iqytchg@cz.example.net) you are likely to receive a high number of spam complaints that could result in your email routing to the bulk folder or being blocked completely.
  6. Ask to be Placed in the Address Book or Safe Senders List AOL 9.0, Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN and Outlook 2003 all remove their email filtering techniques when the sender’s email address is in the recipient’s address book. This is another good reason to keep the same address over time. Once your “from address” is in a subscriber’s book, your emails will continue to reach the inbox with images and links intact.
  7. Maintain List Cleanliness One sure way to get your message blocked is by “looking like a spammer.” Most ISPs use list quality filters to detect when a sender is attempting to deliver email to a large number of invalid addresses. These messages “bounce” back to the originating server, which is why they are called bounces. Filtering can start at a bounce rate of just 10% at many ISPs. Even a good, permissionbased list will see bounces over time. Per Return Path, an average email list will lose 30% of its names each year due to subscribers changing email addresses. To stay clean, monitor your bounces on a regular basis and remove bad addresses from your list.
  8. Promptly Remove Unsubscribes and Respond to Complaints No matter the quality of your opt-in efforts, some subscribers will not want to receive your email any longer. Nothing will cause more problems for your deliverability than ignoring unsubscribes and complaints. It is also important to manage your reply email address so that manual requests can be removed and complaints can be monitored. Monitoring your complaints closely is an effective indicator of how clearly you informed your subscribers regarding content and frequency when they opted-in to your publications. In the age of CAN-SPAM, it must be easy for users to manage their subscriptions or unsubscribe. A profile management form allows a user to select the publications to which they want to subscribe to or be removed from. This enables you to stay in compliance with the 10-day unsubscribe removal period mandated by CAN-SPAM, while still offering another option besides unsubscribing from all of your communications.
  9. Use ISP Inbox Testing Setting up an “ISP Test List” can be a fast and easy way to find out if your email will pass through spam filters. You can do so by simply setting up email accounts with the major ISPs such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Before sending to your entire subscriber list, send to your “test list” and make sure your email reaches the inbox of each ISP. If it lands in a bulk folder or is blocked all together, you are then able to investigate and make the appropriate changes.
  10. Avoid “Spammy” Words and Phrases Systematically scanning email subject lines and body content (also called content filtering) is the most widely used filtering method among ISPs.** Avoid overly promotional words and phrases, multiple exclamation points, all capital letters and other text often used by spammers.

    11. *DoubleClick, 2003
    **Jupiter Research