I still haven't parted with mine, but only because it's built into my all-in-one printer. However, I never use it and that second phone line is going. If I can do it, so can you!

June 14, 2007 Why Do We Still Have Fax Machines? Posted by Renee Oricchio at 10:21 AM

I honestly can't think of one.

I'm one of those all-in-one printer kind of people. I recently bought my fourth one. Like it's predecessors, it includes a printer, copier, scanner.. and FAX! I almost let it go this time and, honestly, I already regret the decision. It's just plain silly to have a fax (much less that second phone line). I can count on one hand the number of times I use it annually. It's just one more way spammers can find me (and eat into my ink and paper supply like wharf rats).

There are plenty of companies online that will send attachments out as a fax for you, plus there's always Kinko's when I'm in a pinch.

I think it's a generational thing. People of a certain age, and older, still remember the pre-PC, pre-Internet world. We're not very good at backing up our hard drives, but we're really good at clinging to our old luddite technologies. C'mon, raise your hand! How many of you hung on to your IBM Seletric well into the 90's (just to type envelopes, I swear!).

Without giving my age away, I believe the line of demarcation falls somewhere around here: whether you had a metal lunch box or softsided lunch box as a kid. Lunch boxes went to soft sides around 1985.

If you grew up, as I did, taking a metal lunch box to school then I'm guessing you, too, have reservations about giving up your fax binky. I'm not the only one angsting about this. There's a great little posting about this very topic on Web Worker Daily.

Other luddite anxieties of the metal lunchbox generation:

- You still have a landline in your home and don't just use a cell as your primary phone.

- You still have an address book with handwritten numbers and addresses.

- You still buy CDs.

- It irritates you that your bank doesn't include cancelled checks in your monthly statement.

- Although you may pay some or all of your bills online, you still like to get a paper statement.

- You still have a VHS deck attached to your television, as well as a cassette player in both your car and home. You don't use either!

I'm going to betray my own generation and say this, about that. Let it go! Let it all go!

Here's my tip of the day for business owners: if you can't afford a staff IT person, at the very least tap one of your younger employees (of the soft sided lunch box generation) to be a part of all office technology decisions. You need their fearlessness when it comes to chucking the old once and for all. Do this, and you'll go along way towards cutting down on the paper and getting rid of old redundant technologies.

Like the fax machine, for example.

No, I'm not talking about all the TMI you're getting after several days shut in with your extended family this holiday week or from those family newsletters that come via Holiday card each year.

I'm talking terabytes. Read on...

August 14, 2007 Too Much Technology For Our Own Good? Posted by Renee Oricchio at 9:00 AM

Fujisitu has announced it's the first to break the terabyte barrier on a laptop. Yipes! In fact,it's a 1.2 terabyte hard drive to be exact.

A few months ago, I noted the announcement from Hitachi that it had come up with the first terabyte hard drive for a desktop PC. I guess one for a laptop was bound to happen. I just didn't expect it so soon.

Here's the problem: that's a lot of info to be schlepping around in your briefcase. One terabyte is the equivalent of 50,000 trees worth of paper. Any database that big is going to be very valuable and require lots of security. To quote a previous posting from June, here are my thoughts about TMI (too much information) on a laptop.

June 20th, 2007th Posting Laptops: The Loose Cannons of Data Security
Call me crazy, call me madcap, but....

Just because you can fit that much data on a single laptop, doesn't mean you should.
Does the average diamond dealer tool around town with his highly portable inventory in a little felt bag on the front seat of the car, while running errands? No! Just because diamonds are highly portable, we all know that stuff doesn't leave the building unless absolutely necessary and only then under armed escort in a Brinks truck. Organizations and businesses that traffic in personal information would do well to take their cues from the jewelry business.

aren't PR. They're IT, at least when you're talking about the customer-facing part of the business. For businesses that don't have a customer-facing side, ahem, that's a problem. Read on. I brought this one back for the added reason that I'm guessing many of you can especially appreciate this week my hissy fit over an bad travel experience I had with the airline industry over the summer.

Customer Service and Technology Posted by Renee Oricchio at 9:00 AM

The two go together like peanut butter and jelly. Let me put it this way. Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES! Nothing beats courtesy and respect extended from a real live human being.

But!

If you want to improve your customer relations, go talk to your IT department first. I'm guessing they'll be a lot more helpful than your PR person.

This comes from the perspective of a customer - me!

1. Customers want to be treated decently by the companies they do business with. They usually want it in the form of some sort of personal contact - or at least know that personal contact is a just-hit-O away, in case they need them.

2. After that, the real issue is immediate gratification. Customers want it now! Now, as in everthing. Customers want service - now. They want the product or service they're buying - now! They want buying information about the product or service - now! They want information about delivery - now! And if you screw up, they want an apology and a tangible offer to make amends - now!

Now let me tell you about my flight home from Florida last night.

I flew from Pennsacola, Fl to Charlotte, NC and then from there switched planes to fly from Charlotte into White Plains, NY. My layover in Charlotte was to be about a hour and a half. I was traveling alone with my two small children, one with special needs.

I'll leave the airline's name out of this. The tickets were purchased on Expedia a month in advance. Sometimes you can pick your seats online. This flight didn't offer that.

Murphy's law: me, my four year old with mild autism and my six year old were assigned seats on three different rows. It happened both coming and going. I tried to get it fixed at the ticket counter. I tried to get it fixed at the gate. At every turn, I was told to just work it out with the flight attendants. Eventually, it all worked out. But only after being directed by the stews to basically pick a row of seats and become squatters, sending the passengers assigned to those seats to our real seats. It was awkward to say the least.

Back to the layover. It turned out to be four hours, instead of 90 minutes. The reason for the delay: operational. Whatever that means. No other details were made available.

My travel experience could have been much easier if the airline in question had followed my two simple rules of customer service, as explained above.

I won't bother complaining about the lack of human interaction or sensitivity. What galls me is how the airlines continue to get away with being technological hicks when it comes to customer-facing processes.

It doesn't take a Cray supercomputer to figure out how to rejigger seats and put families together on a flight. When the tickets were booked, my children were noted as young children. Can't the airline industry come up with a piece of software that would factor that in when seats are assigned? Somewhere on the vast world wide web, there's probably a free mashup available for download.

The age of the Internet has ushered in another age: the age of transparency. Customers (i.e. people) have come to expect full disclosure on everything. Companies can't simply get by with just a what anymore. They have to supply the why too. Why was my flight delayed an additional two and a half hours. Mysterious operational reasons don't cut it.

Why can't airlines figure out how to send updates by voice or text message to the cell phones of passengers when a connecting flight is delayed?

Why can't airlines set up a social networking feature on their web sites, so passengers could anonymously message other passengers on the plane swapping around seats in advance?

If airlines can develop software to juggle all the different ticketing pricing tiers among a hundred or more seats per plane, why can't they do the same to juggle the personal needs of where passengers need to sit for comfort and safety?

I don't fly often, but when I do (as in earlier this week) it seems like the process of migrating me from check-in to boarding to grabbing my bags on the way out the door is no different than it was twenty years ago. A lot of really great technology has come along since then: great ways to communicate more effectively, streamline service and customize the customer experience.

The friendly skies may be friendly, but they are medievel compared to most other business sectors today.

Okay, busted! It's a week of reruns on BusinessBytes. Sue me. I have a family and I want to spend time with them this holiday week.

I hope you're doing the same. But should you find yourself escaping to your computer (to get away from your family, perhaps! I do that too!), here's a reprise of some of my favorite postings of the year and a good way to look back on technology in 2007.

October 4, 2007 Five Reasons Why You Should Turn Off Your PC At Night Posted by Renee Oricchio at 11:00 AM

1. One single PC left on over night during the week and over the weekend creates an additional 920 pounds of CO2 a year. It would take 60 to 300 trees to absorb all of that.

2. It costs up to $15 a month per computer to keep them on after hours. Think about how many PC's you have running in your office and then do the math.

3. Now, add to that cost the extra cost and emissions from the air conditioning system that has to be cranked up after hours and over the weekend to keep all those computers cool.

4. Setting your PC on hibernate isn't good enough. In fact,an estimated one out of two American workers that use a PC on the job think that either their hibernation setting is on when it isn't or it's off and they don't care.

5,Would it kill ya?

(all stats and figures in this posting came from a recent survey, The PC Energy Report 2007, conducted by IE, a software company that develops solutions to automate power usage by computer equipment.)

Okay, busted! It's a week of reruns on BusinessBytes. Sue me. I have a family and I want to spend time with them this holiday week.

I hope you're doing the same. But should you find yourself escaping to your computer (to get away from your family, perhaps! I do that too!), here's a reprise of some of my favorite postings of the year and a good way to look back on technology in 2007.

October 15, 2007 Web 2.0 Vs Web 1.0: The New Generation Gap? Posted by Renee Oricchio at 11:00 AM

I won't tell you my age. But this posting will inevitably give it away. I came of age professionally in the 90's, hitting the emergence of the Internet just right. It was an exciting time to be in Corporate America. Communication, research, new ways to do business, new ways to have a life around business, new ways to network and all of it thanks to this new thing called the world wide web: the rocket ship taking us all to the moon.

Just a little over a decade later, people my age talk about those days like my parents used to talk about poodle skirts and The Ed Sullivan Show. I'm guessing to the average early 30-something (who has no idea that's actually a pop culture reference to a very popular TV show 20 years ago) or 20- something hearing about dial-up connections and Netscape 2.0 is about as quaint.

Web 2.0 is a very hot topic. It refers to the seismic shift in web technologies currently underway. It's widgets, social networking, mini web aps, mashups, wikis, blogs, the emerging mobile web and how all those things are making the web infinitely more dynamic and interactive.

Where there is a new technological wave a sociological one is soon to follow. I see it happening and creating a gap between the Gen 1.0 folks like me and the Gen 2.0 folks like,well, those a bit younger.

Let's compare the two generations.

Generation 1.0 uses email. Generation 2.0 uses twitter and text messaging.
Generation 1.0 still uses their laptops. Generation 2.0 wonders why they still own one, because they haven't used it in months. It's been supplanted by their Blackberries or iPhones.

Generation 1.0 keeps their resumes and maybe a professional web site up to date. Generation 2.0 keeps their Facebook and Linkedin profiles up to date.

Generation 1.0 still can't believe they actually get away with working from home once and awhile. Generation 2.0 is bitter their old fogey boss doesn't let them do it everyday. How silly!

For Generation 1.0, the mobile device is a communication tool of convenience. For Generation 2.0, it's an extension of self.
Generation 1.0 manages up and down. Generation 2.0 collabarates.

Generation 1.0 hunts for information. Generation 2.0 lets information find them.
Generation 1.0 consumes web content. Generation 2.0 contributes their part to web content.

Generation 1.0 thinks globally and acts locally. Generation 2.0 thinks locally and acts globally.

Just something to think about in the workplace and as you size up your customers.

p.s. 42.

Time Magazine announced yesterday that Vladimir Putin is their selection for Person of the Year.

Along those lines, I have my own newmakers of the year - in technology for businesses, that is.

Topping my list:

- Web 2.0, for making the web exciting again. Yes I know, people have been talking about Web 2.0 before 2007. But, this is the year it really hit critical mass.

- Google, for shaking up the industry with its web-based Microsoft Office knockoffs. Mostly because everytime the Google people burp, everyone pays attention.

- The iPhone, for being the most overhyped product of the year. Because its Apple, it's selling like hotcakes.

- Microsoft Office 2007 and Mac's OS X upgrade, the two tech products that actuallly delivered beyond their hype. That rarely happens in the tech world.

- Software as a service. It's coming fast and hard and its a business model that makes sense for customers that are smaller businesses.

- Wifi. Wireless is faster, safer and easier to install than its ever been. Cat 5 cables are out. Pre-N is in!

Specifically, not on my list.

- The printer manufacturers. You just don't get it. Continued overcharging for your ink cartridges and thinking up new ways to sell us as many as possible before we actually need them, while stomping out the competition who dare to make compatible or recycled cartridges at a more reasonable price. Boo! Bad for the environment. Bad will with the custormer.

- Spammers, Phishers and online scam artists of all varities. Shame on you. Go away. Better yet, go to jail.

Predictions for next year's top newsmakers:

- The economy tanks and slows down adoption of any and all hot new tech trends, like the mobile web.

- The mobile web, unless the economy tanks.

- Mashups and opensource, spurred on by a tight economy with businesses looking for cheaper solutions.

- Security: always recession-proof technologies. You gotta have it and you gotta keep it up to date.

Happy holidays. Next week, if you can't tear yourself away from this blog (I'm flattered, thank you!), I'll be featuring my Best of the Blog postings from the year.

- Renee Oricchio

People overwhelmed and horrified by the out-of-control Christmas machine love to pause this time of year and say "wait 'til next year". As in, next year we'll simplify - buy less, slow down, get back to the important stuff like family and sharing our respective holiday traditions.

Then the next October rolls around and we roll our eyes at the holiday fare being out before the Halloween fare - and then the day after Thanksgiving, we roll up our sleeves and do it all over again.

Myself included.

Another unplugging I wish would happen is technology.

It's December 20th and heading into the home stretch. Regardless of your faith, Christmas is both a national holiday and the Superbowl of American consumerism.

I wouldn't dream of undermining an already fragile economy and advise you to step away from the checkout line and put down the credit card now.

But, how about this...

- Set a time tomorrow and put your business email on out- of- office reply until January 2nd? And don't check it until then.

- At the same time, wish your colleagues and clients a peaceful season with their loved ones and then focus on your own to the exclusion of them. Screen out their calls for the duration.

- Play some board games next week, instead of minesweeper on your handheld. With the exception of Yahtze, all board games require at least one other player.

- Unplug your computer and your laptop.

- Stop walking around the house with a bluetooth looped over your ear. Hint: your family takes that as a threat that any minute you could be talking to the air instead of them.

- Put a banner across the front page of your company web site announcing you're closed for business until the New Year.

Don't dream of a white Christmas or moan about having a blue Christmas. Go green instead. Unplug it all and save some energy - for the rest of the planet and the people who matter most in your life.

I'll start..

My last post of the year will be tomorrow before noon EST. I'll wrap up the year with one last post and then wish you all a happy, happy before I UNPLUG until January the 2nd.

'til then.. shop til you drop.

- Renee Oricchio

There are any number of ways to track your flight status. But as long as you're on Google...

Just in time for road warriors working their way home for the holidays, Google has simplified checking on the status of the plane.

It's as simple as putting in the airline and the flight number in the Google search box and bam, there's the latest on where is Waldo (or the plane rather).

I tried it out last night on a couple of random flights and discovered, for example, AA Flight 588 from Miami to New York was running 16 minutes late (not bad for this time of year or any other time of year for that matter).

To those of you still on the road, Godspeed home to your loved ones.

I’ve been missing in action here on the blog as of late. I’ve been in the midst of a massive amount of travel. A couple of weeks ago my travels found me in the airport in Singapore for a couple of hours. In the restroom I saw a sign on one of the doors to a stall. The sign read:

PLEASE MIND YOUR STEP
SQUATTING PAN

I’m sure I heard a little “Ding” sound as a light flooded down on me and I instantly realized I was looking at the perfect metaphor to describe the fundamentals of computer security.

Many people expect their computers to work just like the ones on Start Trek did. You ask the computer to do something and it does so. Unfortunately this isn’t really the case and to use a computer securely diligence is required – you need to watch your step.

If you go to a public computer, such as at a hotel business center, watch your step. This is not a secure place for passwords or confidential data. If you access a wireless network, watch your step – the data can often be captured by nefarious people. When you surf the web, watch your step. Unlike a physical store that you do business with regularly, a web site can be set up by anybody and made to look very professional. Even legitimate web sites are probably not going to accept returns for products that advertise on their web pages.

There are a myriad of places in the online world that require diligence, so...

Please mind your step - If you don’t you will step in something quite unpleasant.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

If you're a frequent traveler and a web junky, you've probably been frustrated by your time on airplanes in a cramped seat with a movie you can barely see or hear and bad food.

Recently Jetblue started some limited internet access on planes and all the other airlines are lining up to do the same.

I wonder if they'll have a grumpy IT guy on board to help with those network issues?

Read mre at WSJ.

Second only to "Seven Dirty Words", "A Place For My Stuff" is perhaps comedian George Carlin's most famous comedy routine.

In the early 80's at the dawn of the Reagan era when personal consumption became not only fashionable but patriotic, Carlin satirized our insatiable need for more - as in more "stuff". You know stuff? All that stuff they sell at the mall and WalMart. Clothes, DVDs, CDs, books, containers to put our stuff in leading to bigger houses to put all those plastic tubs of stuff in, etc. etc.

The point holds up today and in fact expands into the virtual world.

Data storage is cheap and plentiful. Everyone from Google to Microsoft wants to store your digital stuff.

In fact it's so cheap and so plentiful, heck why should a business ever destroy anything? Archiving and search has never been easier. Solutions are getting better in that department everyday. Keep it all! Store it all!

We are drowning in data, folks!

And while digital information may be virtual and intangible, the data centers and servers that store it aren't. They take up space (sort of like all those McMansions housing all those plastic tubs of mall stuff) and they eat up precious energy resources.

Something to think about. Go green and conserve. Less stuff, including less data. Put this on your list of "to do's" for the new year: an information audit. What does your business really need to keep and what can it chuck as it goes?

Data storage may be cheap up front. But like everything else, there is a price tag at some point. It won't be so cheap, either.

In the original ancient Greek version, Narcissus is a beautiful young man who ignores the romantic overtures of one beautiful young maiden after another. The goddess Nemesis who witnesses all of this puts a curse on Narcissus to look into a pool of water, fall in love with his own face and stay there transfixed until he dies of old age.

Here's a more modern version. Picture that person with the constantly ringing/vibrating cell phone. Despite attempts from colleagues, spouses, offspring, bosses, direct report staffers, etc. this person with the cell phone constantly puts off those around them "just to take this one call", "quickly answer this one text message" or "glance at this new email in case it's important".

Raise your hands! Who knows at least one (if not many people like this).

Here's a profile of what I call the typical CPJ (cell phone jerk):

- He or she talks unusually loud completely unconcerned there are strangers in close proximity who really, really don't care what time your tee time is tomorrow.
- He or she thinks she's doing the other movie goers a favor turning off the audio and merely checking email in the dark during the slow parts of the movie, even though our eyes are distracted by your little glowing screen.
- He or she doesn't understand sometimes people during both professional and personal conversations need your undivided attention. Meaning: take responsibility for removing anything that could be a distraction (like your cell phone) until the conversation, presentation, interview, etc. is over.
- He or she has boundary issues (i.e. they don't have any).
- He or she thinks its cute to be a shameless "crackberry" or cell phone junkie and we should all just giggle along and excuse their rude behavior. No "pardon me" necessary.

Perhaps Nemesis has already struck. I suspect many will stare into their Blackberries, iPhones and Nokias until they die of old age, oblivious that there is a real life with real people going on all around them.

In the meantime, I leave you with my favorite clip on youtube right now entitled Cellphone Ettiquette.

I promise you will laugh!

Kudos to Ask.com.

What I search for on the Internet, where I go, what computer I use to surf there, my name, my IP address, etc. etc.: Frankly, that's between me and my God. It's not a matter that should be between me and my government and certainly not between me and someone's marketing department.

The big search engines find this notion quaint.

Ask.com doesn't. This week the little engine that would (not that little.. fourth ranked search engine) has debuted it's new feature AskEraser, which allows users to surf the Internet without leaving any fingerprints (a simplified explanation to be sure).

The feature was originally announced last summer, but went live earlier this week.

Privacy! Not too little to ask, not too little for Ask.

For those of you unfamiliar with LinkedIn (all both of you), it's the ever popular and growing professional social networking site: underline the word networking. That's what LinkedIn is all about: professional networking, sharing contacts and colleagues, fishing for work, recruiting, looking for expertise on a business or career issue, etc.

LinkedIn is having a busy week. First, check out it's new look. The homepage got a facelift this week.

Second, they made a pretty big announcement revealing actually some of the meat and potato details on the open source platform that is to debut allowing developers to build applications on top of the LinkedIn platform.

It's called the "Open Social Platform" and will allow people to put LinkedIn widgets mashed up with their own applications on their own sites, as well as on their LinkedIn profile pages. (So for example, imagine mashing up your LinkedIn contacts with Google maps and giving yourself a widget with a visual display of where your rolodex is spread out allover the country or world).

There's also now a new newsfeed option on the site.

And a busy week wouldn't be truly busy without some fun rumors to get us all in a twirl. The drumbeat of a possible acquistion is getting louder and louder. The most likely party to snap up LinkedIn: The Wall Street Journal.

LinkedIn would be a tasty treat for Rupert Murdoch. LinkedIn has 17 million registered users (albeit a significant chunk or inactive). They get 42,000 new users signing up every day.

More juicy and tasty: the median income of the LinkedIn user is higher than the average WSJ subscriber (slighty above 100k a year versus slightly below). The average age is 41 for LinkedIn versus 48 for the WSJ. (as quoted by LinkedIn to Read/Write Web)

And while Rupert thinks about doing a little holiday shopping for a social networking site to go with his new business newspaper and cable television business news channel...

Business owners might want to think about those demographics in terms of drumming up deals and new business without ever leaving the office.

This is one of those postings that's going to take you a paragraph or so to figure out what the heck this has to do with technology and/or business.

Bear with me.

I've been flipping through my latest copy of Smithsonian Magazine (What? You think I spend all my time dealing with widgets and wadgets from Silicon Valley?). There's a book excerpt from a new biography on Dwight Eisenhower, specifically about those anxious days before, during and after the Normandy Invasion.

Eisenhower was in charge of the entire Allied forces and the mastermind of the invasion. If it had failed, the good guys would have lost World War II. Period.

In other words, no pressure.

It was the most massive invasion ever executed. 170,000 soldiers, sailors, pilots and marines storming the Normandy shores to liberate all of Europe from Hitler's armies. There were a million reasons it could have failed and "Ike" knew it.

What touched me about the article is a reprint of a handwritten letter by Eisenhower, himself, written in advance taking sole responsibility for failure. Fortunately, he didn't need too.

My question: where is this same maturity, courage and integrity in business today, specifically the technology industry.

Compared to Microsoft Office, they aren't the most elegant applications that I've ever seen (Nor richest in features). But Google Docs and Spreadsheets (which now includes a PowerPoint knockoff, as well) is free and it's web-based.

And, it's gaining strength like a tropical depression in September. (Forgive my homage to Dan Rather. I'm from Texas and a retired TV news producer. I can't help myself.)

This verifies what I've always believed. When given a choice between pretty and practical, cheap or expensive. Cheap and practical is always a growth market. Case in point, it's how Sam Walton died a wealthy man.

Take a look at these latest web analytics from Compete.com.

In the span of a year, Google Docs and Spreadsheets has seen an 84% increase in visitors.

Here are some other interesting nuggets to glean from the traffic charts:

- The Excel knockoff (Google Spreadsheets) is getting the most traffic. It's gone from around 200,000 unique visitors in October of 2006 to 1.4 million unique visitors in October of 2007.

- The average time spent visiting Google Docs has hovered below, well below and back around six minutes throughout the year from October to October. Again, theories anyone?

Now that Microsoft has launched its Live Office site (yesterday, in beta), we'll see which way these lines go over the next few months. Up? Down? The same?

I promise to check back on this one. Until then, to both Google and Microsoft, I say "Courage".

Microsoft has finally launched "Microsoft Office Live" today (in beta, of course). This is the 'softies answer to likes of web-based and free Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho.

Sort of.

Fact: Microsoft Office is a cash cow. Without it, Bill Gates' home would only be 25,000 square feet instead of 50,000.

Fact: Microsoft ain't giving that up.

Unpleasand Fact for Microsoft: Web-based companies like Google and Zoho are offering similar applications (even compatible with) like Office. Web-based and free! Google and Zoho's offerings aren't as slick and rich in features. But hey, you can access your files from any internet connection in the world and did I meantion it's FREE! Have you priced Office lately.
(not free!).

Check out Live Office Space. Microsoft is walking a very fine tight rope. Live Office Space is designed to compliment Office (so you still have to buy it). It's not a free, stripped down web version. There is a Small Business Version, as well. Once you delve into that "learn more" area, you will find three tiers of pricing packages ranging from free to about $40 a month.

You decide.

First, I had an iGoogle page. You know the web-based dashboard you can fill up 'til your heart's content with widgets and a RSS reader for your feed?.

I loved iGoogle for about a month. Then, it was one too many crashes and finally it just froze up and lost all my preferences one day. I moved on to Pageflakes.

Pageflakes is a similar tool: a web-based dashboard with loads of widgets and a RSS feed reader. I customized it, as well. It doesn't have as many cool customization tools as iGoogle, but at least it worked better. Although, it too crashes from time to time.

Today was the proverbial Kiss O' Death. Everytime I click on a story in my reader, I get a popup asking me to make Pageflakes my homepage, with no option requesting not to be asked again.
It's more than annoying. I skim through lots of stories in my reader everyday.

I'm going to give Pageflakes the benefit of the doubt this is some flukey mistake and hope its corrected by tomorrow. Otherwise...

It was just a little less than a year ago that Dell Computers launched IdeaStorm. The idea behind IdeaStorm: to create a social network for Dell customers that would provide a feedback channel to Dell promoting what they would like Dell to do with its product lines and customer service.

Almost a year later, how's it going? Depends on who you ask.

Check out this one thread, for example, "IdeaStorm Protest". At issue: complaints run amok that Dell is not actually paying attention to what customers are asking for on IdeaStorm and when they do take an Idea, they modify it to the point that it is almost unrecognizable.

Is this fair? I dunno. Maybe yes, maybe no. But, that's not my point anyway.

Start reading through the thread. There are over 200 postings.... from roughly the same five or six people. Five or six people with that much time on their hands? Not what I would call a valuable focus group in the grand scheme of things.

I do believe adding a "social network" component can be a very valuable marketing intelligence tool for a business. I buy into the idea of turning your customer base into a community.

if, big if....

done right!

And maybe Dell is. Here are just a few ideas from the site they are taking to heart and in the process of rolling out...

There are many ways to make money online, including being paid for your blog postings, or generating revenue through Google Adwords or Yahoo's advertising network. Now there's a new way, being a wikipedia contributor. Only illustrators are getting modest paybacks but perhaps this is where we are headed...

It was just about a year ago that Dell Computers launched it's IdeaStorm site, a place for customers to form into a community with a voice telling Dell what would make their product lines better.

The first big thing to come out of IdeaStorm that got loads of press (and still does): 130,000 postings begging Dell to bundle the opensource Linux-based Ubuntu operating system as an alternative to Windows. Dell did it, but there's been lots of catches.

- It's only available on consumer models, not business models.
- It's preloading Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn), rather than the latest upgrade and more favorably-reviewed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).
- After extending Ubuntu to other countries, like the UK, it's already starting to yank them out of those same markets making U.S. Ubuntu fans nervous that they're next.
- Pricing: it costs the same, if not more, than similar models with Windows. One must ask why, when one of the biggest advantages to Linux is it's open source software with no licensing fee. Shouldn't it be cheaper, if anything?

Although Dell won't confirm these figures, reports abound around the Internet quoting unnamed sources that it has sold about 40,000 units with Ubuntu. So out of 130,000 Dell-istas begging for Linux, a little less than a third have actually pulled the trigger. I frankly think that sounds like a promising response.

Then again, Dell sells about 10 million units a quarter.

More on storm clouds over IdeaStorm tomorrow.

If you open a dictionary literallly to any page, you will find dozens and dozens of words per page each with multiple definitions.

For example, blunt can mean "not sharp" or "to be insensitively frank or honest" (Encarta Dictionary).

I understand that. You understand that. Hormel doesn't.

Once again, it has bedeviled (not to be confused with Deviled Ham) some poor spam fighting company with a copyright infringement suit claiming it's a violation of its copyrighted product Spam, as in spiced ham: the mystery meat in a can that has been a staple of bachelor cuisine for generations.

The other kind of spam is what we call all that irritating, often virus-laden, phishing-scamming email caca that weighs down our inboxes.

The only thing the two have in common, other than a name, is a personal visceral response - eew!

Anyhoo... Spam Arrest, a company that fights spam (as in naughty email spam), has been fending off Hormel in court for five years for violating their blessed copyright and finally won its case. A panel of three judges told Hormel, once again, that their spam copyright doesn't extend to computer software used to filter out unwanted email. So lighten up!

Once last Spam note: just so you don't think I'm being too down on Hormel. I would just like to plug the official Hormel sanctioned annual spam festival held in my beloved college town of Austin, TX. Go Horns!

Spamarama, which usually falls in April sometime, features the Spamalympics with such meaty competitions as the Spam Disc Shoot and the Spamburger eating contest.

And, no, I'm not kidding.