I logged into my Yahoo! Mail account the other day and was presented with the option to test their new interface. Overall, Yahoo! Mail Beta is pleasant to use and feels like a regular desktop client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. You can read RSS feeds alongside your mail and have the option of forwarding stories to your friends. You can also drag and drop email messages between folders without refreshing the page, thanks to a lot of AJAXy goodness. You have the option of using a preview pane for messages or a handy tabbed interface.

However, the big disappointment would have to be speed. There are noticable delays when you attempt to load a folder and sometimes even when you select a message. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer stall when I attempt these basic tasks. However, it’s still faster than the old method of refreshing the page.

Almost two years ago, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost, which is now powering Yahoo! Mail Beta. Integrating two existing pieces of software can take much longer that it would first appear. Even after a lot of effort, the results can still be less than ideal. When time is limited, it is essential to decide early on exactly how far you want to take software integration. Otherwise, you could just get stuck waiting for your mail to load.

Back at my Midwestern high school, state law mandated that students could not graduate without having taken a course called consumer seminar. Though a wholly informative course, after college and graduate school, I can’t really remember much about the course or what we learned. I know that I took it during summer school after my junior year of high school and that we spent our last day in class watching this (awesome) movie called “Breaking Away” as a reward for making it through the course. I know that the teacher’s daughter worked in advertising and had written a famous sports jingle, but that’s about all I remember about that class.

Not too long after high school, you find yourself making actual decisions without the benefit of all the information. You sign things because you are either too busy or too visually impaired or too impatient to make out the mouseprint. Sometimes you simply don’t know how to advocate for yourself. You meekly pay your bills, buy your groceries and submit to what companies describe as external pricing pressures. Once in a while you pop open the newspaper to find that a desperate and strung-out consumer has written to a columnist about how her phone company or credit card misbilled her and could the reporter please advise her on what to do? Sometimes the reporter does oblige, and after the whole sordid tale is in print, the PR people usually start looking into this. Things tend to get resolved when bad publicity is at stake. (more…)

I just downloaded the beta version of Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer. Here are a couple of quick thoughts on it:

(1) This is a very RSS friendly browser, and will go a long way towards getting non-geeks to use the technology. IE 7 has a little RSS icon (shown on left) that is highlighted when you are browsing a site that has an RSS feed associated with it. After you select a feed type (such as RSS 2.0), you are taken to a page that shows the feeds’ contents and prompts you to subscribe. Once you subscribe, you can view the feed in a built in RSS feed reader. Below is a screen shot of the subscribe page:

I’m a broken record here, but I really believe you need to include an RSS feed on any new website you develop.
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So, it looks like we have example #1,211 of a politician (or more aptly, their staff) abusing Wikipedia for political gain. This time Morton Brilliant, the campaign manager for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Cathy Cox, edited the entry of opponent Mark Taylor to include a reference to Taylor’s son’s DUI arrest. The campaign manager has resigned, and the typical media feeding frenzy is gearing up now.  You can view a version of the entry with the DUI information here. 

To play on an old saying: Don’t make any edits to Wikipedia that you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of the New York Times.

You can read more on Wikipedia here.

In a post a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that organizations post their videos to viral sites like YouTube as a way of reaching a larger audience. Well, the advocacy group Public Knowledge has done just that, posting a video on the net neutrality issue currently before Congress.

It seems to have worked, too. So far the video has been viewed 43,000 times and ranks 39th on this week’s list of YouTube’s most watched videos. Just as importantly, the video has created a pretty good conversation on YouTube about net neutrality, with thirty four comments so far.

Here’s the video, for those interested:

Like a lot of people, I have a camera phone. And like a lot of people, I don’t use it. When I first got it, I went through the motions of playing with the camera. I took a bunch of pictures and emailed the better/funnier ones to friends. Cool. Now what? I got bored with it quickly, and I am now pretty focused on using my phone for phone calls (and text messaging) and my digital camera for taking pictures.

Having said that, I’m intrigued by the concept of moblogs. A moblog (mobile weblog) is a type of blog that focuses on content posted from mobile devices like phones and PDAs. Services like Text America and Moblog UK allow you to quickly and easily publish photos from your camera phone to the web via email or MMS. You can also post mobile video clips, assuming your camera phone has that capability. Lots of moblog communities have popped up, with anyone with a camera phone able to contribute. Moblogs are a great way for people to share/report on events in real time as well as an interesting way for marketers/PR folks to hype products and events. (more…)

Some of my colleagues and friends have called me ‘paranoid,’ ‘crazy,’ and ‘apocalyptic,’ but I continue to stick to my guns on the issue of America’s intellectual decay. Our economic and cultural dominance has always stemmed from our ability to attract and retain the best-of-the-best intellectuals from around the globe, and our ability to nurture and grow our own base of talent. Our military dominance is also clearly predicated on our economic and intellectual superiority. In short, we can out spend and out gun all others because during the Twentieth Century we built the world’s greatest base of knowledge and talent.

Quite some time ago our ability to cultivate our own internal talent began to fade (witness the poor state of our primary and secondary educational systems), and over time (especially since 9/11) we have failed to garner the rest of the world’s best, largely due to immigration regulations. We are just starting to see the effects that this will have on our competitive advantage in the global marketplace. If nothing changes, we will see a rapid and painful descent into economic mediocrity and a marked decrease in the average standard of living. (more…)

As yesterday was deemed Fake Writer Day by Gawker, it seemed appropriate for the Denton-ites to start the day off with a blurb involving a Harvard student whose literary dreams were coming true, only to be squashed by her school paper’s revelation that she might actually be a plagiarist. Metafilter and The New York Times, as well as a number of British, Australian and Indian publications, quickly picked up the Crimson story. Kaavya Viswanathan’s teen college admissions drama very recently made The New York Times bestseller list and has also been optioned by DreamWorks. All of that came to a standstill over the weekend when The Harvard Crimson determined that language and certain passages in Viswanathan’s book had been directly lifted from another book.

The Harvard Crimson broke the news on its website on Sunday and by now, there are more than 400 hits on Google search alone. The New York Times carried two stories about the news yesterday alone: the first being the Crimson story and the second being the apology/explanation Viswanathan issued through her publishing house later in the evening. After Viswanathan apologized, the news circuits (if there were such a thing) began lighting up again. By 8 p.m. ET yesterday, a number of major publications, including The New York Times and Washington Post had published the story.
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I read Business Week every week. Not necessarily from cover to cover, but pretty close to it. Although I think that it is a quality publication and clearly I derive value from reading it regularly, honestly there is not too much in there that really surprises me. This week’s edition is definitely an exception to that rule.

The cover story is about the virtual world of Second Life. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a Web-based massively multiplayer game. But, unlike most games in this genre (i.e. World of Warcraft) where the players have missions and are somewhat guided by the game, Second Life has absolutely no game-imposed limitations. It exists as a virtual world where the people themselves form the landscape, culture, goals, etc. through interaction, just as we do in the real world.

Now, that in and of itself is not news. If that were the whole story I would have simply flipped past it – online virtual words are old news. What made me stop, and what I still cannot believe, is that through this world people are actually making REAL livings creating virtual properties, goods, and services! How?

The game has a currency system pegged to U.S. dollars, and players can use a credit card to buy and redeem real dollars based on those earned / spent within the game itself. It also enables players to use tools to build their own items within the game, and to maintain the property rights to those items. Again this is not that shocking to me. Maybe it is a neat feature, but so what? I can buy and sell virtual clothes and cars and houses, oh my.

The thing that is overloading my logic circuits is that, according to the Business Week article, there are people earning $90,000 in real U.S. dollars a year selling within the game, and people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of virtual real estate holdings. More mind blowing, this level of economic activity is coming from a relatively small group of people – just 170,000 players. That means that each of them is spending some serious real world money every month for these virtual goods and services. That is, of course, unless there is some funny Enron-style accounting going on in the World of Second Life.

OK, moving beyond that ludicrousness, something else the article discussed was real companies using Second Life to mock up products, test advertising, and conduct training. Now, that makes a lot of sense to me. By doing these things virtually, companies can save a large amount of money. The Second Life world functions very similarly to our own world, and the people who interact within it are real people. Advertisers, market researchers, and product designers can clearly save time and money by conducting all of this online.

I have to wonder if this “game” will eventually morph more into a business tool than a pseudo-social entertainment experience. I suppose that they are really too interdependent for one to fully evolve without the other. I also wonder if this can reach a critical mass and sustain it over time. We will just have to wait and see.

To use an awful cliche, when I first started reading blogs I was a kid in a candy store. I wanted to read everything and thought all information was valuable. I didn’t have the palette to differentiate between blogs that offer value to me personally and those that, well, don’t. I’ve read about lots of people that read hundreds of blogs on a daily basis. At one point, I might have tried to keep up with thirty (never daily). But the more I’ve gotten into writing blog posts the less blogs I read. I’m down to maybe ten, at most, that I read regularly, with the occasional fit of exploration. For me, reading lots of blogs results in diminishing returns.

One of the blogs I’ve always found valuable is PBS Mediashift by Mark Glaser (I’ll do a post on the others I read religiously at some point). Why? I actually learn something new when I read Mediashift because Mark is an actual journalist/blogger who writes about things I care about. Mark’s series this week on Wikipedia is a great example of why Mediashift is a great blog. Below are direct links to Mark’s Wikipedia articles this week:

• Wales Discusses Political Bias of Wikipedia
• Negativists, True Believers Debase Wikipedia’s Trustworthiness
• Top 5 for Wikipedia Week
• MySpace, Wikipedia Cope with Growing Pains
• Is There a Neutral View of George W Bush?
• How Much do you Trust Wikipedia?

If you have an interest in the Wikipedia phenomenon, read these articles. Great articles. Great discussion. I left a comment on one Mark’s posts. Following are the key points I made for those that care.

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…or not. I’m not usually one for distributing this kind of thing on our blog, but this is something that affects the industry we work in, and all of us on some personal level also.

You may have already heard about “Net Neutrality” — it’s a term that describes what we currently have: neutral delivery of interent content across networks. Big ISPs are lobbying to change that as the new Gatekeepers of the Internet.

The recent explosion of quality content in today’s Internet is largely due to grassroots participation and initiative. Without a “Net Neutrality” law big ISPs could charge web content providers for “preferred” access through their Internet networks, or choose to lock out non-paying web content providers altogether — including alternative media, like blogs.

The Internet is probably the strongest democratic tool in the world right now and I for one would hate to see the neutrality of the delivery of the internet become changed or influenced by Congress or large corporations in any way.

This is slipping under the general public’s radar as the mainstream media hasn’t really caught onto this in any major way (yet?). There are loads of articles to be found on it, just do a news search somewhere for “net neutrality” or can read about it here. You can also do something about it here or contact Congress people individually here.

The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors that AOL is about to launch a social networking site to compete with MySpace. Word is that the new tool will be tied to the AIM instant messaging tool, tapping in to the 43 million users of that service and their existing “buddy” lists. A couple of thoughts on this:

(1) I think it’s inevitable that MySpace starts showing some vulnerability and that a competitor rises up to challenge its’ dominance. Why? Its’ users, 13-18 year olds, are trend followers and will abandon MySpace in a second if something perceived as cooler comes along. I think social networks are here to stay, but MySpace’s dominance of the space is a trend. I personally think we’ll move towards more niche communities instead of massive networks like MySpace and the new AOL network. I’ve been wrong before though.

(2) Isn’t what is being described pretty much MSN Spaces, which is the social networking site tied to MSN Messenger that I don’t think anyone uses? This is all rumor at this point, so we’ll see if there is more to it than that.

A month ago I read a review of Dabble DB on Techcrunch and I was immediately intrigued by the concept of a collaborative, Web 2.0 database program. I’ve been using Microsoft Access to maintain assorted lists for years, and have also been involved in the development of a number of custom online databases.

These experiences have made me think there has got to be a better way to do this stuff.

So I was excited yesterday when I was given access to a Beta version of Dabble DB after being on the waiting list for awhile. Generally speaking, I love it. Below is a breakdown of things I like, things I think are missing, and additional functionality I’d like to see down the road.

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A strange persona entered and shook up the PR world (at least the part that is online and blogging) rather recently. Strumpette, a blog written by one Amanda Chapel, has inspired a great deal of vitriol from online PR folks such as Steve Rubel, fellow Edel-ite Phil Gomes, the young and ambitious Flackette and even Shel Holtz. A strange site to see, as most PR bloggers are rarely critical of the industry and are genuinely giddy about the power of blogging. But when faced with Strumpette in March, they quickly switched into an attack mode.

The overall response to this particular blog is 180 degrees from what was received by the blogger formerly known as Anonymous Lawyer. Anonymous Lawyer turned out to be a 3L at Harvard Law School with a gift for writing well enough for people to wish he were real.

Amanda Chapel,a.k.a Strumpette, on the other hand, receives constant criticism from industry heads such as Media Orchard’s Scott Baradell who wrote that Strumpette was “pompous and condescending”, “dishonest” and “purposely hurtful to others”because she doesn’t respect the public relations industry enough. (Ironically, the most popular and entertaining blogs necessarily fit the qualities Baradell uses to describe Strumpette. I, for one, am a Denton-media addict and could not do without my daily cup of cynicism.)

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I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how viral videos aren’t really a new trend.  In Time Magazine’s current issue, they have a long story exploring the history of viral videos and explaining their recent explosion.  More interestingly, they rank their ten favorite viral videos of all time. 

Note: I sometimes wonder if the mainstream media gets in a room together once a month and decides what they are going to write about.  This is at least the fifth viral video “think” piece I’ve seen the last few weeks from a major publication.