Brian Sweeting

I’ve made the switch recently from Bloglines to Google’s updated reader for reading RSS feeds. One cool feature they have is a bookmarklet that opens the next unread item in your reading list and lets you read the item the way it was intended to be viewed in the context of the original site. This is nice when you get tired of just unbolding things, and want to experience your RSS feeds in a unique way.

Bonus: When you get to the end of your unread items, you get this screen.

Tonight (June 13, 2006) at 6:30 at the Miller Innovation center in Sandy, Utah. Details

I guess I’m trying to set a record for the least timely write-up of a conference. A couple weeks ago I attended SxSW 2006 for the first time. I have to say that it was basically what I expected.

The Panels

Do not go to SxSW thinking you are going to get a lot out of the panels. I hate to say it, but most panels were pretty lackluster. I think I prefer a speaker vs. a panel. Speakers seem more engaging. The panels just seemed too disjointed.

The People

This was one of the better parts of SxSW. I really enjoyed meeting many people from my blogroll in person. There are too many to name individually, but it is nice to interact with these people beyond a comment on their blog or through email.

The City

Austin is a very cool city with much to do. I doubt it was just because of SxSW, but the place is loaded with venues hosting cool parties, concerts, and comedy shows. It’s a place I wouldn’t mind visiting again.

Things I learned from SxSW

• Take business cards, or something to give to people you meet that will allow them to contact you…the more memorable the better.
• Stay at the Hampton Inn. We were six or so blocks away at the Marriott, and I was not impressed. For a place that charges a couple hundred bucks per night, they offer no perks. We even had to pay extra for internet access.
• Eat local. There were a bunch of great places we ate at that are local to Austin: Stubbs, Daddy’s, The Iron Cactus, Paradise, Moonshine, The Salt Lick. Don’t go to Austin only to eat at Wendy’s.
• Take a small digital camera vs. a DSLR. I took the Canon 20D and basically it was too cumbersome to pack around so I ended up not taking hardly any pictures.
• Unless you have to, arrive Friday Night/Saturday Morning and leave Tuesday night. We were there from Friday afternoon to Wednesday morning and that was just too long.

Wrapping it up

I liked SxSW, but I’m not sure I would attned again on my own dime, unless I had a product/service/business to promote.

I’m off to SXSW this morning. For those of you going, I look forward to seeing you there. For those of you staying, I’ll be blogging as much of it as I can.

I have been using del.icio.us for about a year and a half, and it has been a great way to save links to things that are interesting to me. I recently started subscribing to some of my friends link feeds, because I find that what is interesting to them, is also interesting to me. I also subscribe to the del.icio.us popular feed to see what everyone is linking to. The problem I had is that to find other people’s link feeds, I had to guess at their username.

Enter Ma.gnolia. After finding the site through a link on Jeffery Zeldman’s website, I had imported my del.icio.us bookmarks, added some contacts, and joined some groups. It took about 10 minutes to make the switch. I also changed a single url, so the recent links section on my site was pointing at Ma.gnolia instead of del.icio.us.

I tend to be fairly loyal to a web service once I start using it, mainly because I become accustom to the way they work. With Ma.gnolia, I was able to easily make the transition and see that it has more to offer that del.icio.us ever has. Ma.gnolia does a much better job on the “social” aspect of “social bookmarking”. So go try it out and make sure to add me as a contact.

Guy Kawasaki, entreprenuer and author of The Art of the Start has started a blog. He only started it at the end of December, and I’ve hardly found a post so far that isn’t worth linking to. Great posts on entrepreneurism, venture capitalistism, innovation, Apple Computer, presentations, and life.

I’m back! Okay, so I didn’t really go anywhere, but I might as well have given the sad state of this blog. I have had a change of heart (and mind) as to what the purpose of this blog is. Several months ago, I redesigned, and changed the format a bit to more of a professional topics only sort of blog. I’ve decided that is not what I want this blog to be. The problem was that I would rarely update my blog, because I felt like I had to have something well-thought out, and poignant to write. Now this blog is going to be about me: what I like, don’t like, am thinking whether it is something about web design or how much I enjoyed my wife’s Chicken & Spinach enchiladas last night. I don’t expect this to make my subscriptions numbers go up…they might even go down, but that’s okay. I want to follow the same kind of formats that seem to work quite well for Dan Cedarholm, Todd Dominey, Jeffery Zeldman, and others like them. This means that a large portion of the content on this blog will be about things related to web design and usability, but it will also include more observational and personal-type stuff as well. My goal is to write a blog that is indicative of the type of person I am. It’s time to “get real”.

I’ve been penning a couple of posts recently, that I just don’t think are well thought out enough. So until I get them in shape, I wanted to catch up so here’s a hodge-podge of notable things that I’ve ran across lately.

Microsoft Gets Agile

The WSJ has a great about Microsoft realizing the mess Windows was in and how they made the call to drop the legacy code and start fresh with their flagship product.

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program.But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

Read the full article.

Have a strategy for your website

A great article by Greg Storey in issue 205 of A List Apart. Something I wish all my clients would read. Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)

AJAX Dialog Windows

Not a “how-to” but a “what for” for designing AJAX dialog windows by Luke Wroblewski. Quoting Edward Tufte…

“The border of an active window should be light in value (to avoid clutter with other windows), yet deeply saturated (to provide a conspicuous signal). Yellow is the only color jointly satisfying those conditions, and therefore proves valuable for bordering windows.” -Window Research: Color Guidelines

Looks like there’s as more importance to the “yellow” than the “fade” in the “yellow fade technique” .

TypeTester

TypeTester allows you to compare fonts for the web, tweak them to your heart’s content, and then export the CSS. This is a must for designers working with developers.

My Kingdom for a good Web-based RSS Reader

I have been a bloglines user since it’s inception. The problem I ran across lately, is that they do not support RSS feeds that require authentication. So I’ve been hunting around for something else. I tried NewsGator’s online aggregator since it seems they are becoming an RSS Reader empire. They do support authenticated feeds, and the interface is pretty, but there isn’t enough separation between the blogs I read when viewing entries as groups of feeds. I also wish the category/feed navigation was either in frames, or it floated along as I scroll down the page.

I’ve also tried Rojo. Didn’t like how it only allows a flat listing of feeds (gotta have my folders). Google’s Reader, but I could only get it to import about half of my RSS feeds and it doesn’t seem to support authenticated RSS either.

I just registered for SXSW 2006. The Interactive conference will be held March 10-14, 2006. I hope to see you there. Shaun Inman says that September 30th is the deadline for the 35% discount on registration, so register quick.

This will be my first time attending, so if you have any tips on what to see, where to stay, etc…please leave a comment.

Shaun Inman is going to unveil Mint this week. Mint is a web stats tool, which is the sucessor to his earlier (and free) ShortStat. It is interesting to see this trend of people building products and then using their markets (a.k.a. blog readers) to market the product to. This is exactly what Jim Coudal was talking about in his recent ALA article. Instead of building a product and then looking for a market, Shaun built up a market of blog readers, many of whom are ShortStat users, and now he has a love-group to hock Mint to. Pricing hasn’t been announced for Mint, but I highly doubt it will be free.

Shaun is also using something else that I’ve found very interesting lately. The idea of Blog2Blog marketing. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that the bloggerati allstars feed off of each other. Shaun has tapped into the “markets” of other high profile bloggers to build buzz for Mint. As of this writing, Mike Davidson, Jeff Croft, Keegan Jones, Matt Thomas, Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, and Rob Weychart have all posted on the “My favorite feature of Mint is…” meme. All of these people have been beta testers of Mint and now they are preaching its greatness to their readers. This has been going on a lot lately. Let’s look at a couple of other recent examples of Blog2Blog marketing.

37Signals

The Signals built a huge amount of buzz for Ta-Da List, Backpack, and sometime in the future Writeboard. They started out doing a series of four previews of the features of this mystery application on their SvN Blog. One that really got people going, was when they posted a screenshot that was large enough to give people some clues as to what this application was, but too small to give away any detail. For the final preview they pulled a Willy Wonka and gave out golden tickets to random people who had signed up to be notified upon Backpack’s launch. By the time Backpack had launched, they had built so much buzz that they had 10,000 accounts created in the first 24 hours of launch. Cost of this word-of-mouth advertising? Free.

BlinkSale

BlinkSale is web application targeted at small creative firms that allows them to send out invoices. I started noticing things popping up in my news aggregator about BlinkSale several weeks before they launched. The people behind BlinkSale used P2P Marketing by inviting some well-read bloggers to preview their application. Those people in-turn blogged about how great BlinkSale was. Then the buzz trickled down the blog food chain. By the time BlinkSale launched it had a huge amount of hype built up, and had a long list of testimonials to boot. The cost of this word of mouth advertising? Free.

Conclusion

I hope you see a trend here. Never before have companies been able to use word-of-mouth advertising so efficiently since the rise of blogging. Now just because this type of advertising is free, it isn’t necessarily easy. You have to put in the time. It takes time to build a community by giving them something they find useful, whether it’s a great product or sage advice. Word-of-mouth advertising is the hardest to come by, because it requires passionate customers. By blogging about your product/service which you are passionate about, you will win passionate customers.

If you know of other examples of Blog2Blog marketing, please post a comment about it.