Archive for June, 2006

Don’t you hate how badly most web pages print? Wait. I don’t print web pages. Well, if you do, don’t you hate how badly they print?

Lexmark would like you to use your printer more to print more stuff, and one sure way to get you to do that is to help you print more web pages.

To alleviate the frustration of printing from the Web, Lexmark has developed the Lexmark Web Toolbar. The toolbar makes it quick and easy for users to print what they need from the Web. With a few simple clicks, users can:

• Print text only, eliminating ads and other unwanted images
• Print the entire Web page without cutting off images or text
• Print only in black
• Print borderless photos from Web sites
• Preview their selections before printing

Lexmark users can download the Lexmark Web Toolbar for free from http://toolbar.lexmark.com.

Installation was pretty easy… though I had to restart IE to get it to pop up.

It worked terrific. I printed http://www.cnn.com and it came out looking like a well formatted newspaper. Above is the before (printed with standard IE print on the left) and the after (printed with the Lexmark toolbar)

The printout was really very good quality. The artifacts you see on the illustration here were not on the paper output (just the PDF version) which is odd. I’ve never seen such a nice, simple system for putting web pages on paper. It will be terrific for those of us who want to take copies of other web sites to client meetings.

No firefox or Macintosh version yet, from what I can tell.

Text Only Output of CNN.COM

The Photo printing works nicely too. It did a good job of grabbing all the photos on the page and getting them prepped for printing. It was a nice, simple interface designed with ink consumption in mind, of course.

Photo Extraction and Printing.

But if you want a simple, efficient way of grabbing content to send to your printer or PDF file, this is the best I’ve seen.

Pay per Action is being tested on the Google Adsense network. “We are currently testing a cost-per-action pricing model to give advertisers more flexibility and provide publishers another way to earn revenue through AdSense,” Google said. “We’re pleased with how the test is progressing and will continue to gather feedback from advertisers and publishers.”

We’ve had Valueclick and others out there doing CPA, but they were difficult to the average blogger or website owner. For the same reason that advertising networks exploded with the introduction of Google Adsense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, this system will bring PPA marketing to the mainstream for advertisers and publishers.

With Pay Per Action, marketers only pay for the ad when a lead or purchase is finished, not when a visit to the site is tallied. This removes the issues of click fraud and removes much risk from the marketer as they try to determine converesion metrics.

It changes everything in terms of landing page design, ad writing, and calls to action. I’m anxious to see what works best during split testing of this method.

I thought I had a virus. Or spyware. Or something. My hot rod Dell laptop went to the dumps in performance. I couldn’t even type my article, the hard disk was sweating from working so hard. It turns out that the latest XP update reset my page file settings. It turned off the “system managed” page file and set it to “manual” 768k. No wonder my machine was struggling.

 

Now how many folks would have known what to do? - few, I’ll tell you. Most would have just suffered through the problem. The number of people needing a “manual” page file is incredibly small. Why doesn’t Windows just “question” this setting occasionally.

 

Or, why not ask about it when you do disk maintenence? It’s likely to be the culpret long before fragmentation is.

 

They could easily pop up a window occasionally like “Your computer is set so that you must manually control the performance of virtual memory. Unless you have been specifically told to do this for a certain technical reason, you should set this back to “automatic.” Would you like to reset your virtual memory management to “automatic?” It’ll probably speed your computer up quite a bit.

 

If you’re machine is running slow, go ahead and check this.

In XP, Go to Control Panel -> system. Click on Advanced, then Performance

Click on settings…

Down on Virtual Memory, click on “change”

Make sure that “System Managed Size” is set, then OK your way out. Oh… and for some stupid reason, you must click on “SET” before you click on OK, or it ignores your settings. Go figure.

If you changed the settings, reboot. Enjoy your faster machine.

C’mon Microsoft, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Craig Aaron, Directory of Communciations of Free Press and Save The Internet a media watchdog group, says big telecom companies have declared open season on ‘Net neutrality.’ He’s afraid these companies will dictate how we use the Internet, and I had the pleasure of speaking with him today and thought I’d put a few hilights here. Be sure and look for the full article in the June 30 Business Lexington Magazine.

Many Businesses seem to know little about the issue, and few seem to think it affects them. What would you say to these folks?

Unless they are huge, or partners with one of the large cable or telephone companies, their website’s performance may degrade. Their cost of doing business can be raised long term by a lack of competitive pressures on telecommunications companies.

For companies that are not using a lot of bandwidth now, the issue might seem distant. Should they be concerned?

Think back to the days of dial-up access. If you’d have asked them about legislation that might affect broadband, they might have not taken much interest. But think how it would affect them now if there were restrictions.

Some say the Senate are going to just let the telecommunications firms have their way and hope that the FCC will just watch for infractions – sort of a shoot them all and let the FCC sort them out approach. What do you think about that?

The legislation being written prevents Congress from establishing clear rules for the FCC, and forces them to handle complaints on a case-by-case basis. This can take years, and many smaller firms affected by infractions will already be out of business by the time their cases are heard. Consistent, enforceable rules are needed for the FCC so that everyone knows what the rules are, and this legislation prevents that.

Doesn’t Google and others already have a huge influence over the success and failure of a business by virtue of their search engine positions?

This is a smokescreen that the opposition are putting up. Google does not allow anyone to buy better rankings in their regular search results. You can buy ads, but it’s clear they are ads. If they started altering that policy of no payment for top position, consumers would go elsewhere and the market would correct it.

This is not true in the case of the telecommunications companies controlling the last mile of cable. The telcos lobbied to get out from under 70 years of policies that ensured open access and somehow convinced the FCC that two were enough for broadband (98% of the US can get DSL or cable only.) Now they have no competition for access, and they can take advantage of that position.

How can we build out the technology while still protecting the democratic nature of the web?

I think the Telcos are crying wolf to make more money. They could make it the old fashioned way. They could invent now and innovative services that people want. We could also have a good broadband policy that allowed competition for access like Japan or South Korea. There’s no need to undercut small business. There is plenty of money available.

Thanks to Craig Aaron, a very busy man, for his time.
Free Press can be found at http://www.freepress.net/

A cool new feature offered by Google Calendar allows you to send a text message to 48368 (GVENT) after verifying your phone number initially. It’ll send you what’s coming up - as long as what’s coming up is in your “main” calendar.

• Send “next” to get the next event.
• Send “day” for things on your calendar later* today.
• Send “nday” for tommorow.
• Send “evil” to get the current Google evil level. (just kidding)

It worked great on my Cingular phone, though the ‘day’ command only lists things that are in the future. I’d like it to send me EVERYTHING from today, even if it was earlier today, and I really wish it would send me reminders from all calendars I had turned on - not just my “main” calendar.

What’s really wonderful about the “stacked calendar” feature of Google Calendar is the way you can merge events from multiple calendars. The trouble is that all notificaiton options other than “pop up” windows only work with the “primary” calendar. So if you want anything , including the SMS commands above to work, you better “copy to main calendar”… and it is very, very easy to forget to do. I guess I’ll get used to it.

Google also gave me more hope by saying “(We’re also working on full calendar syncing for mobile phones and other devices.)” … that will rock.

Tonight I was at a Lexington Legends baseball game, enjoying watching them trounce the Greensboro Grasshoppers (really, that’s their name) …just looking for a little R&R with the wife, kids, peanuts and beer after a tough week in the office.

Around the third inning, I looked up to see the new Lexmark infield banner that had the brand spankin’ new slogan…. “Lexmark, We’re Always Working” Always? Like, on weekends - evenings? While others are out watching baseball with their kids? That is one awful slogan. It makes you think of unpaid overtime, nights spent at the office, etc. You’d think, with more of the world trying to strike a work/life balance that such a slogan wouldn’t make it past the initial brainstorming session.

Some stats I looked up in a few minutes on Google…

• Nearly 50% of all US workers feel overwhelmed by a growing number of job tasks and longer work hours.
• The structure of the modern family has dramatically changed and diversified. The traditional family had two jobs, one paid (father) and one not (mother). Today, there are three jobs held by two parents – two paid wage earners, and one unpaid for the care giving and household responsibilities.
• Monster’s 2004 Work/Life Balance Survey concluded that 81% of the respondents said they were unhappy with their work/life balance.
• Mothers in dual earner income homes spend at least 25 hours per week devoted to childcare, housework, and shopping. This is on top of a 40 hour work week.
• 78% of senior executives and managers say they have 90 minutes or less of personal time on a typical work day.
• 85% of workers have daily responsibilities to go home too.
• The typical middle income married couple works 3,885 hours per year, an increase of 247 hours or nearly one week more than their counterparts ten years ago.But perhaps it’s because I know so many folks who work at Lexmark, giving it their all. Perhaps it’s because I am always striving to strike work/life balance. To be fair, Lexmark is not nearly as bad as many other companies like it in terms of forced unpaid overtime and weekend work - many say it’s a really great company. But where in the world did they get that slogan?

Aggghh…FAILURE… again. As I try and try and try to send a clean business locations file to Googlebase, I sit here wishing that Googlebase and Google Spreadsheets would simply get together. Hit the pub and buy each other a pint why don’t you.

If the Google Spreadsheet tool had a button “Send to Googlebase” I would buy the pints. What’s really driving me nuts is the delays between attempts on the Googlebase. I’m really sorry I had that extra period in there, sir. May I please try again?

If Googlebase would simply have a spreadsheet interface (think MS Access table view) I could simply paste in my data… or import it from a tab delimited file. Then everything is on Google. who knows I might be able to get a business locations file in without 20 tries…