Scott Gjerdingen

2G & Kristi

2008-06-30T23:05:00.002-05:00

frick'n youtube/google can't tell the difference in dogs and won't post my video

Bongs

2008-06-21T01:38:00.000-05:00

Playing with Pups

2008-06-13T17:35:00.002-05:00

Poor Office Behavior :-)

2008-06-13T12:52:00.003-05:00

Update On Twitter Stability

2008-06-01T00:10:00.000-05:00

The Puppet Captures Dave Winer...I Think?

2008-05-17T23:51:00.004-05:00

Loren Feldman is brilliant with the puppet, I may have to post a few more of these, they rock!

This one totally captures the image I have had of Dave Winer after reading his work for the past 5 years or so.

...I love the ending about the "truck parket outside" LOL!

Awesome Puppet Intervention!

2008-05-16T20:36:00.003-05:00

As a distant observer, Mike Arrington has seemed pretty tense as of late. I do hope he gets a huge laugh out of "The Mike Arrington Show"

Ya-Who?????

2008-05-04T13:22:00.000-05:00

just preparing a headline for tomorrow :-)

Yahoo v. Microsoft - Ballmer Must Be PISSED!!!

2008-05-04T10:25:00.002-05:00

Now that the baton of Microsoft leadership has been clearly passed from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer.

For the emerging "Rock Stars" under Ray Ozzie's direction (the "more open" cloud/browser based architecture) this represents a defeat. For the "stodgy"old office/vista crew, this is a "told you so" victory.

So the question I have is, is this dealing done? Microsoft could cause the value of Yahoo stock to drop to a record low and then swoop in with a hostile takeover, who could blame them at that time, they tried to play nice and Jerry Yang fucked them. The big buyout parachutes Yahoo put up for employees is no longer valid if there is no buyout....what will keep the Yahoo "Rock Stars" at Yahoo...I doubt developer alliances at Yahoo run so deep that Microsoft could not lure away a substantial tallent pool

Anyways, the big winner here is Google, they were the deal breaker, they don't give a shit about Yahoo unless it strengthens Microsofts hands. So maybe Yahoo is completely off the radar and Microsoft squarely goes after Google.

SO, it will be interesting to watch the stock price of both Yahoo and Microsoft next week. I would also suspect Microsoft needs to brush this aside and clearly signal it's next move before folks dwell on the Yahoo deal as a sign of weakness.

Tomorrows honey due

2008-05-03T22:53:00.003-05:00

Fix the hot heater pilot that keeps going out - thermocoupler replacement!

TED: Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind

2008-04-29T22:30:00.000-05:00

Danny Wheldon wins IRL Race @ Kansas

2008-04-27T18:19:00.001-05:00

...crap, no volume...better see what I did wrong.

Mesh Live Preview

2008-04-27T16:47:00.004-05:00

The Gillmor Gang hooked me up with
an invite to play around with Mesh Live (thank-you Steve Gillmor and from Microsoft - Dave Treadwell).

I'm time restricted today, but I was able to log in and start to play with the sharing options. I have watched some MS videos about MESH and have yet to find anything that inspires beyond file sharing (which is a "boring" yet core cornerstone).

I've got to do some creative thinking to see what I can do with this. I might even have to peek at the SDK (but me coding may be dangerous, it has been over 8 years since I coded on a daily basis)

WOW, I Found My High School Graduation Picture on The Internet

2008-04-26T20:56:00.005-05:00

I had not done a "vanity search" in google for a very long time and it appears a classmate put all of the High School Senior Pictures online after the 25th class reunion...this makes me actually want to attend one of these :-)

SO here is the younger and better looking me :-)

vs. now (on a boat in Jamaica with hair braided and in beads) LOL!

What a wonderful thing the internet is.

My First YouTube Video

2008-04-25T21:40:00.004-05:00

Video taken was pretty much by mistake, and spent 2 minutes editing via iMovie, but heck, this was just an attempt to see if I could do it :-)

Blogger Custom Domain - Another blog is already hosted at this address

2008-04-24T18:28:00.003-05:00

I just hit a snag migrating the blogger domain over to my own .com

I found this site on blogger help The Real Blogger Status

that suggests Google has a DNS bug and if you hack around trying to reset google apps it can correct the issue....well, I don't have the energy for this at the moment, so I wend down a different path - Magical Custom Domain Form they indicate ~ 48 hr turnaround, I can wait and see what happens

Mahalo Idol, Jason Calacanis - PLAYING WITH THE CONTEST

2008-04-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

Update - I failed to solicit input...so, dropping this from a top listing

-------------STIKY SESSION-------------------

If you have "write in candidates", post them in the comments section and I'll consolidate them

Write In Candidate 1 - Roseanne Barr (love to see Jason work with her)

COME ON FOLKS, BRING IT ON, VOTE OR WRITE IN! LOL

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy Theremin Jam

2008-04-23T19:29:00.001-05:00

Yea, this has been floated around he net quite a bit, But I still find it very cool!

MESH - What's Around The Corner?

2008-04-22T23:04:00.008-05:00

Beats the crap out of me :-) ...but it sure has Steve Gillmor excited (is that an appropriate word for a grown man LOL).

As I can gleam so far, it might have something to do with Silverlight and Silverlight is Ray Ozzy's architecture shift that will move Microsoft truly into the internet/cloud computing space.

So, MESH?...I'm guessing another name for it could be glue in that it is what binds mashup like apps except unlike glue it is not "sticky" making it more agile and extensible.

My actual "developer" days have long since been ported over to other folks in India so sitting through the Microsoft developer presentations on Silverlight would result in a faceplant on my keyboard...there are hours of video here for those interested.

SO, it kinda looks like Adobe Air, I suspect it has linked in huge amounts of .NET API's, I suspect it may have SQLServer or other database interfaces built in, heavily leverages xml and may have hooks built in to an OS that allow it to easily scale in a cloud server environment...and in a .NETish fashion, it steps further into running on VM so you can essentially port it everywhere.

So, we'll see how I did with my guess. Apparently there is a rollout of a significant app tomorrow with news to follow....and Steve Gillmor is going a GillmorGang podcast tonight to talk about this in more detail.

Watch me be 100% wrong :-)...hey, it was just a guess LOL

UPDATE - trickling in....but for the most part I believe I did a pretty good job of nailing this! :-) Now I just need to get in the beta program and play.

Shel Israel Interviews Sim Margolis From Utterz

2008-04-22T19:49:00.001-05:00

Mahalo Idol Finalists

2008-04-20T16:44:00.000-05:00

UPDATE - More from Mahalo - Mahalo VLOGIdol Finalists

It looks like we have 13 "stage 3" finalists for an opportunity to co-host Mahalo Daily.

The contest is already under way, finalists have been selected and their pictures can be found in this Flickr Slideshow

Jason Calacanis has also posted brief interviews with each contestant on ustream

For fun, I put up a poll to pick your favorite candidate.

Good Luck to all!

Danica Gets Her First Indy Car Victory!

2008-04-20T11:13:00.000-05:00

Found: The Point of Twitter

2008-04-18T23:59:00.000-05:00

By Jason Lee Miller - Mon, 04/21/2008 - 5:06pm.

Why Social Networks Matter to Small Biz

Hopefully, we're over wondering what the point of Twitter is and we can move on to how, exactly, using it or other social media can be good for business. Sometimes the biggest obstacle is just wrapping your head around something.

The short and skinny of what is to follow is this:

Understanding humans better benefits business
Think overall strategy, not just tactics
Twitter has good search placement (tactic)
Twitter is a goldmine of permission-based marketing (strategy)
Building relationships also builds trust and opportunities
Niches are inevitable (and present); find yours
One-to-many communication is efficient and on your terms

Previously, I and others suggested Twitter was destined for spamminess, or at least some kind of deceptive marketing. Indeed it is and indeed it has already begun. That's not a reason, though, to avoid it. Use it while it still has value.

Also previously, I waxed existential about Twitter being, for me, a place to observe and learn from humanity. While that doesn't seem immediately useful (if you're old school, it seems like a real waste of time), a very large part of marketing is not just identifying your market, but understanding it better. Twitter provides a perch from which to observe and learn. A new app called Twittearth makes that perch that much more intriguing.

Search Engine Guide's Jennifer Laycock referred to it as "acceptable eavesdropping." From this perch, you can exercise a novel concept in marketing: listening. This is the difference between you and a spammer or spaghetti-against-the-wall message-pounder, always with his mouth open and his ears shut.

"Personally," says Enquiro's Gord Hotchkiss in a blog post on the difference between strategy and tactics, "I’ve felt that by providing glimpses into user behavior, I can help provide a lens to help see things from the outside in, an essential perspective for strategic evaluation. Part of any strategy in marketing always depends on gaining a deeper understanding of the common denominator, humans."

So what's the difference between a strategy and a tactic? A tactic would include actions like ones used by the aforementioned loud-mouth spammer, who, if we're just talking Twitter, would either never be followed to begin with or would be unfollowed as soon as he betrayed a Twitterer's trust. Or, it could include utility of the knowledge that Twitter, like Wikipedia, now ranks very well in Google's search results.

Rocketboom's Andrew Baron showed us this when he noted that only eight people ranked for "I got a call from eBay." Sure enough, there's more to it than the one freak occurrence. At Shoemoney, AJ Vaynerchuk shows how well Twitter users' personal brands ranked in Google's search results. Twitter profiles appeared on the first page almost without fail. Tactic: Establish a brand on Twitter, a site with high trust (the creator is a Googler, by the way), and you could establish some visibility in the SERPs.

What good does that do you? None if you don't have something to offer. But it could fall into the greater strategy of connecting with people and building relationships. The deeper, harder to crack usefulness of Twitter is via the oft theorized but little focused on concept of permission-based marketing. Twitter followers and followees are in your network by choice, and if you've earned it, they'll listen.

"It also gives you some insight into who companies and bloggers are as people; their likes, their dislikes, their personalities," says Ms. Laycock. "This can be invaluable when it comes to putting together pitches and building relationships both inside and outside of your industry.”

In a small survey of online marketers done by SmallBizTrends, two social networks popped up most when asked which were the best for small businesses to use: Twitter and Facebook. That's because they allow you to unobtrusively interact with your market to build relationships and trust within – and here's the important part – your niche. You'll see more and more niche-based networks pop up and those will be useful too, but in the meantime, there's a good chance your niche is already hanging out at Twitter or Facebook or even LinkedIn.

Messages are short and to the point, which people like, and those same people have given you permission to interact with them. It doesn't have to be a marketing message (besides, nobody likes a pitch they can smell), but a genuine relationship to build trust. Think carefully about trust: When buying a car, you'd be more likely to deal with the guy your dad has dealt with for 30 years than you would with the kid that just shook your hand on the lot, right? It works the same way. People are more likely to do business with people they are already familiar with.

And you don't build that familiarity with on-message bombardments people are likely to ignore or resent. You build it by understanding them better and by helping them understand you better. Tweet to tell your audience about recent successes, about what happened on the way to dropping the kids off at school, about your thoughts on current events, about a really kick-butt blog post.

Really, that's the best part about these sprouting one-to-many, permission-based communication channels: It's your message on your terms. Just ask the Prime Minister of Britain, whose team has a Twitter account to deliver his messages without the media's filter/translation/supposed bias. You can wax about whether you can trust anything coming out of a governmental office, but the idea makes a lot of sense. Others have used it for free giveaways and to answer customer questions.

Hopefully, this illustrates how businesses can use Twitter and other social networks in a meaningful, strategic way; hopefully, how you apply the knowledge will foster two-way, permission-based relationships, not marketer-versus-customer tactics. Remember that box you're supposed to think outside of? Welcome to the outside.

Ad Sense Test

2008-04-18T23:48:00.000-05:00

vacation, amazon, target, realestate, mortgage, jobs, baby, mom, dad, church, finance, broker, gadget, europe, computer, cars, camping, clothing, clearance, toys, ebay, college, macy's, mother, father, UPS, FEDEX, BMW, Porsche.

I just set up ad sense, looking to see if this word list will alter ad placement...I suspect so, but which will it pick?

Gillmor Gang Live (generally 1pm PST)

2008-03-24T15:51:00.000-05:00