Archive for August, 2007

1 year ago, one of the worst plane crashes in recent years happened here in Lexington. 49 people died when flight 5191 went down due a runway mix-up.

This morning, WTVQ decided to send out last year’s RSS feed headline and story again resulting in the image you see below. Did we have another crash?

It turns out the web page is showing a “one year later” discussion, but the feed itself was obviously forgotten.

Look closely at this news story’s date.

People using content management systems need to educate all users of what will go out not only on the browser, but on the RSS feed.

Recently FoxSports.com Sportswriter and New Yorker Jay Glazer (I’m not linking to him) visited Georgetown, home of the Cincinnati Bengals training camp for a story. For those who don’t know, Georgetown is a few minutes North of Lexington, and is a very small town - home to Toyota Motor Manufacturing, one of the largest auto manufacturers in North America. It’s a blue-collar town, laid back, with a good college, and this is one of the reasons that the Bengals are there.

But Mr. Glazer has decided that he’d do a “Central Kentucky Alcoholic’s” tour rather than talk about the Bengals (I’m not calling Mr. Glazer an alcoholic, for the record.) He could not wait to use the word “hillbilly” in his article. He manages to spend 80% of his writeup talking about alcohol consumption and misspellings of Wal-Mart and Wendy’s signs (forgetting that his article includes spelling errors.) I don’t read sports much - and now I remember why.

He blasts the fact that Scott County (Georgetown) is “dry” (no alcohol sales except in restaurants receiving 70% of their revenues from food.) I think the “dry county” rules are old-fashioned, and they probably should (will) go away. But it’s that community’s right to put it to the vote and then enforce the results.

….First of all, it’s in a dry county. Why is there anywhere in America that is dry? Let’s get real people. Not selling alcohol in one area is the dumbest thing in the world. You know what it does? It forces you to travel long distances to the next county to get drunk and then drive aaaaalllll the way back to Georgetown. How stupid is this rule? It also leads to the freaking hillbilly who was selling moonshine out of the back of his truck. Did I just say moonshine? Did I just say hillbilly? Folks, I’m not making this stuff up…..

…Force you to get drunk? Do you think that everyone wants to get drunk? Do you know the difference between “buy” and “drink?” Did you know that you can actually carry liquor to your home BEFORE you guzzle it down or do you sit down on the sidewalk of the liquor store and pop-a-top? Look…I’ve lived in Kentucky most of my life, and have never seen anyone selling moonshine except on TV. Then again, I’ve never been desperate to stereotype a city in an article….I will admit you cannot gather with friends at a Bar in Georgetown, which is a bummer if this is important to you. You do need to go to Lexington, where Sports bars are plentiful.

But even Fayette County (Lexington) has old, fast-fading rules about alcohol purchases on Sunday. But that’s probably going to change. The Urban County Council has tentatively approved, 13-1, a dramatic change which would allow retail establishments to sell alcohol on Sundays. But Mr. Glazer graced our city with his presence too soon and decided to verbally abuse the employee of a local bar who was following the city ordinances.

Worst bar I’ve been to on the road: The Pub in Lexington, Ky. I’ve written about places I’ve loved but I have to give both sides of it. A few Bengals friends and I drove down to Lexington on a Sunday evening to find a few beers and arrived at The Pub in Lexington at 10:30. We were immediately informed that we could only get one round because as the waitress explained, “The police will come in and grab them right off your table at 11 p.m. sharp.”

Are you kidding me? That’s what the police spend their time on in this town? Are they chasing around bootleggers in old Studebakers? Can you imagine that?

Anyway, back to the waitress and her 11 p.m. cutoff. Last I checked I’m good for a little over a beer in a half hour. Last call? Fine, everyone in my party will have three drinks each and we’ll have them polished off at 10:55. Guaranteed!

The waitress, bartender and manager all panicked over this idea as if Elliott Ness would raid the place at any minute. Come on people, we’re all adults here. We’re talking three lousy beers.

That wasn’t the bad part, though. The manager, a total Doogie Howser-looking goober, walked over and the following is the actual conversation that ensued:

Goober Pyle, Manager Extraordinaire: “I understand you ordered three rounds but we can’t do that because all alcohol has to be finished by 11.”

Aggressive New Yawka Glaze: “That’s OK buddy, we’ll have them finished off for you, no problem.”

Goober Pyle, Manager Extraordinaire: “We can’t do that, the police will take them out of your hands. I’m sorry.”

Aggressive New Yawka Glaze: “It’s OK, I’m willing to do the time.”

Goober Pyle, Manager Extraordinaire: “Sorry, it’s not going to happen. I can only give you one. We’re only looking out for your best interests.”

Are you kidding me? This is where I got a little… frustrated shall I say.

Aggressive New Yawka Glaze: “Doogie, you want to protect my best interests, get me a damn 401K plan! Don’t let me buy a dog from Bad Newz Kennels but don’t tell me you’re going to play drink police.”

Goober Pyle, Manager Extraordinaire: “It’s for your own safety, sir.”

Aggressive New Yawka Glaze: “I’m so lucky to have a guardian angel like you at my side. Seriously, where were you when I fell out of that tree house when I was 8, or the time I got my ass choked out in the Octagon or the time I took a blow torch in high school and cut off the roof of my car so I could have a convertible. Thank you so much oh Hillbilly guardian.”

Goober Pyle, Manager Extraordinaire: “(Blank look)”

It shows real restraint by the bar manager that Mr. Glazer didn’t have the remainder of his beer on his head or end up seeing what Lexington Police really do for a living. I think it’s sad that Fox Sports sees fit to let someone like him float into a community and try to establish any sort of perspective by bellying up to bars. If it were his personal blog, that’s one thing, but Fox is seen as an authority news property on the web.

Despite the attempts to drag “New Yawkers” into the mess, he doesn’t fool me. I know better. New Yorkers are NOT at his level. He is not like the New Yorkers I know - who tend to be culturally broad-minded, funny, and adaptive to their surroundings.

UPDATE: Foxsports.com has shown some wisdom by pulling down his posting.

Please DIGG my post here.

I’ve been poking around for inspiration for a new business card (for conferences, letters, etc.) and have come across some designs that break the mold pretty nicely. My own cards have mostly been replaced by the “I’ll send you an email with my contact info on it” closure to conversations, and somehow that feels empty with certain people. As I move closer to doing informational products and workshops, I find I should have some cards around. Since I Know I won’t distribute many, I think I should make a good impression. Click to see a slide show of some amazing ones.

The same gallery with artist / credits is over at the “Art of the Business Card” at Daily Poetics. I’ll add new card galleries to this post as I find them, so bookmark me!

And just as I was about to publish this I see on my RSS reader that Seth Godin (a name you’ll see mentioned frequently on this blog) has recently published his thoughts on some common business card mistakes. I’d like to hear what he has to say above some of those above. Do you have a card design as awesome as those above? Post it on a photo site and post a link.

If elegance is not your thing, and you just want to make people spit out their drinks in laughter, pop over to the GapingVoid comic cards site.

David Airey calls out some good designs on his excellent blog, too.

Be sure to check out the folding chair business card in this collection at Creativebits.

If you want to look at more business cards than you’d get from a Ferrari Drawing Fishbowl at Macworld, check out bla.st, the Free International Business Card Site

Saw this in the checkout line at Kroger grocery store. They say never go grocery shopping hungry. You probably shouldn’t go shopping broke, either. Too much temptation.

Actually what you see here is evidence of a slow, but important change in the retail and banking industry.  Kroger already owns a mortgage company, so that’s no stretch, and the other services are easy if you have the capital. Costco and Wal-mart are getting into the banking business, so America is surely getting used to seeing it in non-traditional places. Banks must be scared to death of this - especially those with a branch RIGHT IN THE STORE. But many will simply be confused, probably, into thinking the branch in the store is related to the services.

In reality it’s just an ad for services distributed via a website and via forms at the service desk.  It’s just a bit odd to see it here. What’s next, delis and soda coolers in banks?

The school supply list looked normal until I reached the line that said “100 #2 pencils” …that’s one-hundred.

In a world of brand-smearing, free shipping, and “lifetime-value economies,” why not do something small, and remarkable?

It would cost about 40c or so, wholesale per box to make the experience of opening and using this $70 item much more pleasant. But instead, I received the gizmo from Brookstone for my birthday and it came with four little bitty things that required TINY screwdrivers to install button batteries into. Rather than having their customer happily experiencing their device, I was busy sorting through my junk drawer, cursing to myself wondering where I put my precision screwdriver set.

My guess is that less than 20% of the households in the USA have those-sized screwdrivers. People probably started whipping out pocketknives, toothpicks, and god knows what else. The whole time, the Brookstone brand passes up a huge branding opportunity.

Furniture manufacturers already give away tools for assembly. It is appreciated. Many are inscribed with their brand, phone, and web address.

Just a little idea on a Friday for a retailer that wants to be remarkable.

Managed rights photo shops, such as Getty Images are bound to protect the rights of photographers, illustrators, and videographers in order to preserve the value of their work. Especially in light of an ever increasing level of choice and quality from the very low cost stock photography sites such as istockphoto.com, they are seeking to offer the professional media producer a reliable way to make sure they’re paid each time their work is used in print, online, and elsewhere.

These folks employ a variety of tools, including picscout, to crawl the net looking for unauthorized uses of their work in websites and blogs. Through image recognition and invisible watermark technologies, the crawler seeks out and reports on locations where their photography exists, and then compares the locations to the licenses on file. If a disparity is found, it is reviewed and then action is taken on the website or blog owner. Expensive action sometimes, without a trace of a C&D. I’m certain that at this human-point of the activity there is discretion applied about how to handle it.

For those of us managing dozens or even hundreds of sites, it is very, very easy for an unauthorized image or illustration to make its way into a website. While most have absolutely no intention of defrauding the artist or the stock photography shop, some may find a bill in the mail for hundreds or even thousands of dollars showing spider-finds of photographs on websites. For the hundreds of thousands of sites built upon web templates or the packs of 250,000 images for $99.95 on ebay, you could be tagged at any moment.

As also pointed out on the Signed Media blog, it’s the era of the era of user-created-content. I have a client using a CMS system to provide websites to over 250 individual users. Other clients edit their sites regularly and post images. These newbie users, despite our best attempts, do not think twice about grabbing an image from another website or from Google Images. Too often, these are images from a managed rights photography shop. We remove the image as soon as we can, scold the site owner, but it’s a formidable task. We have taken “reasonable steps’ as requested by the DMCA procedures to inform users of the policy. I try to tell them it is the site OWNER who will receive the letter/fees, but that doesn’t always help. They see a kitten, they post the kitten, kitten photographer be damned. (more…)

Many web merchants rightfully worry customers won’t see the value of their products due to an inability to touch and feel the quality. It’s impossible to bring that experience to today’s web surfing experience in the traditional way, but using well-captured experiences one can get close.

But here is an example  that bridges the gap, giving the viewer a near-tactile experience. I don’t have access to the performance numbers of this ad (would love to see them) but have a hunch this is the wave of the future. The ad was not easy to make, and they are out on a limb with it. But can you think of a better way to demonstrate the virtues of the product visually, with humor, to a mess mass audience? I mean, it’s a freaking floor mat - what’s duller than that?

(Ps: you need to get through 30 seconds before the ad gets cool. I would definitely have changed that if I were designing it. Move some of the ‘facts’ and ‘intro’ script into the interactive stuff so you lose fewer people while she’s talking it up at the start. But that’s just my opinion. And she definitely should have liked one of the messes - maybe the ice cream.)

And not just on the desktop-web this type of thing has legs (rimshot!). Think about an LCD touchscreen on the shelf next to the products, activated by customers. A small linux-driven LCD photo frame type display with a motion detector would do the trick. How about a proximity bluetooth ad which displays on a mobile device?

You probably have some ideas too, even though you may not be able to put your finger on them right now.

It seems everyone’s bending over backwards to optimize my pay-per-click campaigns for free these days. Google did it a couple of weeks ago, and now Microsoft Adcenter has chimed in. Can the PPC campaigns really offer good value to customers without conflict-of-interest becoming a problem? Or is it a “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” issue? In my opinion, clients are best served by a mix of marketing ideas, outside analytics, and design consultation that blends the pay-per-click element into a wider-angle view of a websites’ performance.

In my in-box today:

As a valuable member of Microsoft(R) adCenter, we’d love to help you reach out to more potential customers. That’s why we’re offering you up to 45 days of one-on-one assistance from an expert Media Specialist at no cost to you. It’s our way of saying “thank you” for your continued support

From keywords choice to copy style to the way you structure our search campaigns, the goal of our service offering is simple: to help you save time, potentially attract more customers, and maximize your ROI.

Our search experts will help you get the most out of your adCenter investment by helping you identify strategies to:

- Test your ad copy
- Identify your most successful keywords
- Expand your search terms
- Track your sales conversions
- And more…

PS: When is Microsoft going to roll out any kind of accredited program for professional consultants? I thought this was coming?

What have we become? I saw this loaded-down 2-year-old kid at the zoo with diapers, wipes, water bottles, and lunch - while other kids are running care-free. Sometimes you should take the burden away and let them fly a bit. This would have been one of those times, in my opinion.