Sclogging - A Different Slant On Blogging

This week I had an idea for a different form of blogging. This stemmed from the fact that we've been seeing a great response with opt-in email and responsiveness to email campaigns. Communicating directly with your audience via opt-in email gives you such a closer and detailed view of who your are communicating with than you can get with RSS feeds.

Lately I've been hearing bloggers mention the great volume of their readers receiving blog posts via email. This is understandable, since blogging is still relatively new to the world and the large majority of it's users really do not understand most of the blogging mumbo-jumbo, such as "RSS" and "blogosphere". The idea of receiving a daily or weekly email on a given subject fits much better into a slightly older view of how the Internet works.

One example of this is from Paul Piotrowski who wrote of blog post in August that showed the huge spike in traffic reported from Feedburner when he incorporated the statistics from Aweber by linking the accounts. Aweber specializes in sending opted-in email and does it very well. I'm hoping to write a post on Aweber in the future.

The next part of this thought process came when I was listening to an episode of the TWIT (This Week In Tech) podcast in which Jason Calicanis spoke of how he is favoring sending emails to a mailing list instead of blogging. He now has a following large enough that he does not need the exposure that blogging brings and he finds that the feedback rate from direct emails is much higher. Many readers, for various reasons, do not want to publish their opinion to the world, but will express it directly to the author if given the chance.

So we have two great communication mediums. Blogging gives you great exposure and direct emailing brings you closer to your audience. Is there a compromise between these two open and closed forms of blogging? I know that, in my company MailChannels, we need exposure. We are building a community of readers as we establish ourselves as experts in the arena of anti-spam. We'd like to draw them in from all the unknown places they arrive at our blog from and then continue to build the communication relationship with them in a forum they understand and in which they feel comfortable to express their views.

I've been thinking about this and the best idea I can come up with, that would work for us, is to have a blog for exposure and then finish each blog post with email opt-in for further thoughts from the blog author and opportunity to reply directly to author via email. I know there are many die-hard bloggers who may think this redundant and that RSS is the perfect medium, but I really believe that email is still an extremely powerful medium.

Obviously, if this is something new then it will need a new name. If video blogging = vlogging, then I guess semi-closed blogging = sclogging.

Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this. Or would you prefer to reply via email?

Welcome To Rogers - The Story Of The Phantom Caller

I recently purchased my first iPhone. Here in Canada, like every other country, there's only one provider of the iPhone, which is Rogers. I've really not enjoyed my experience with Bell and I had heard that Rogers was just the same so it made no difference in switching. When I switched our numbers over the Rogers immediately I started receiving long distance calls from the same number 416-645-2105.

The first time I answered it. Silence. I've had scams where they first check you'll answer with a non-speaking auto-dialer. When they establish somebody is there and you'll answer, they being calling you up and trying to sell you things. My first thought was that I was going to bombarded with calls now. I'd had a similar experience with a competition I had apparently won without entering. Therefore, I told my wife not to answer it and I did the same. What made my suspicious was that we've had these numbers for almost 2 years now, so it was a little co-incidental that these calls started when we switched these numbers to Rogers. Was this a glitch in the Rogers system or had they or someone in their company sold our numbers to marketers or, worse, scammers?

I did some research online and apparently I'm not the only one with this problem. Initially I read only the first few pages of complaints. "I keep getting this call... silence. It's definitely from Rogers". Countless people had the same problem since joining Rogers. I tried to call Rogers customers services twice, but 40 minutes was as long as I could wait.

The third time I called I was set up for a long haul. I had my cuppa tea (Earl Grey) and called them from Skype so I could be hands-free and surf the Internet whilst I listen to the on-hold music of Michael Bolton and listening to how important my call is in the "higher than unusual" call load. So as Michael sang about "how the love isn't like it used to be", I read into the Rogers complaints on the website a little further. Somebody wrote of how they had called the number back and it was actually Rogers Communications on the other end of the line. Someone else had done some more research and found it was a money saving exercise by Rogers.

In order to optimize their call-centre 100% they have a machine call you. When you answer they pass it off to call-centre employee. The only problem with that is when they are too busy to answer your call. This results in the silence on the other end of the line. Better for Rogers, a nightmare for the customers. Some have been plagued by this for months and months up to 7 times a day. Rogers refuse to block any numbers.

When I finally got through to the nice lady at Rogers customer services they said there was nothing they could do about this and they know nothing of this number. Which is strange, since I found a number of other people who had reported the same thing. I spoke to her manager who told me they would investigate. I hoped they could resolve it.

10 minutes later the phone rang. "Rogers Weirdness!!" was the caller-ID. I set it to this so as not to answer it by mistake. I also used a picture from Evil-Dead II to scare my wife into not answering it. I answered the phone. "Hello?... hello?", I patiently waited for the silent machine to hand over call to a human. "Hello?", I waited. A few moments later, "Hi! This is Rogers Customer Service calling you to welcome you to Rogers Wireless". I could not help but laugh out loud. I explained to her what had been happening, but I could tell that her call-quota was diminishing by her listening to my story. She was relieved when I let her continue to confirm my details and go over my plan. She confirmed that myself and my wife had been removed from the system.

Now I wait to see "Rogers Weirdness!!" appear once again on my phone. I know there are countless others out there who have switched to Rogers to get the new iPhone 3G. My advice is to stay on the line when you get a call from 416-645-2105. Wait past the silence. End the nightmare.

iPhone 3G - Battery Dies Twice As Fast

I'm finding the battery 3G iPhone is dying very fast. Hopefully the 2.1 iPhone firmware update being released on Friday will do as they say it will and make the battery life better.

"Simplify Media" For The iPhone - Too Simple?

Like most people nowadays my computer's music collection has grown out of all proportion. I have more music on there than I could ever hope to listen to. Gigabytes on top of gigabytes. Luckily there are plenty of great apps out there like iTunes that can manage this and let me search, rate, sort, structure my collection so that I can find and play what I want when I want.

Enter the iPhone. I bought the 16Gb iPhone because there is just never enough space, and I'm sure it will be full and I'll be struggling again before long. There's still far too much music on my computer to fit on the phone. The current count is around 70Gb. Where it all came from I have no idea. Therefore I have to select the playlists I'm keen on at the time and switch them in and out as my interest dwindles.

Enter Remote. One of the first iPhone apps I tried, called simply "Remote", I fell in love with. When I'm at home I can view my whole collection on my iPhone and can monitor the currently playing song. The functionality is very complete. You can navigate the collection in every way that you can within iTunes, via search, playlists, artists, albums, songs, genres. You can rate, pause, scan, adjust the volume. It's as if you're sitting at the computer using the iTunes. The limitation? The limitation is the distance between my ears and the computer I'm controlling. You cannot take it on the road with you.

Enter "Simplify Media". The idea behind this iPhone application is exactly what I was looking for. Remote control of iTunes - remotely. So now when I'm on the bus I can stream music from my iMac at home directly to my iPhone. Perfect! I've installed it. It works.

Too simple? Well my first complaint, and I like to complain, is that I cannot search for music. I can scan up and down the list of songs or list of artists, but what about that song that's got "love me" in the title. Is it "Please love me" or "Just love me"? Using this application I'm really missing the lack of search. The control of song play is also lacking. There's no scan, or rating (I constantly rate my music), and no album art. For these last two, the reason is that the system as a whole is not specific to iTunes. I know this because it's also compatible with Linux. And we all know it will be a long while before we see iTunes there. The interface is a little mono-tone for my liking. All the menus use the same basic select-list.

So what redeeming features does Simplify Media have? It cannot be all bad can it? No, actually it is not. The more I played with it, the more I liked it. For one, it grabs lyrics from LyricWiki. This is a great feature. It also gives you a info page about the artist.

When Apple releases the ability to run applications in the background then it would be great to play the music in the background, like you can with the native iPod application on the iPhone.

I'm looking forward to the next update of this iPhone app. Hopefully we'll get search.

Google Chrome In Parallels - Flash Is Too Slow

I use Windows on my iMac using Parallels and Firefox runs very well. There's not really anything I cannot do, since it is actually the fasted experience of Windows I've ever had. This is mainly due to using Macs and having not needed Windows for a long time, whilst the speed to computers and virtualization progressed.

Youtube is fine on Firefox in Parallels. I have not noticed any problems with running Flash in general. When Google Chrome came out this week I was desperate to test it out. Since it is currently only available on Windows, I fired up Parallels and installed it. I really wanted to see how much faster JavaScript was and how the experience compared in general.

One of the first places I went was YouTube. I was astonished by the fact that video just would not play. There is soooo much lag that it's the equivalent of watching a slide with really bad choppy sound. What is going on here? I started up Firefox in Parallels to check, and everything was fine.

Is anyone else seeing these major performance problems with Flash in Google Chrome?

Pandora Genome Meets Apple iTunes?

With iTunes 8 just around the corner and some rumored changes that include iTunes suggesting songs you might like or in some way to grouping your music better, I saw a potential acquisition for Apple or possibility or partnership with the Internet radio station Pandora.

Pandora uses what it terms "the music genome" that it has been developing since the being of the millennium. Engineers break the music down into it's musical DNA and then sets about finding long lost relatives. Did you know that Beatles song "Hey Jude" is actually the long-lost great-grandfather of Britney Spears' "Oops I did it again"? Anyway, there's some magic under the hood and most of the time it works pretty well.

For me, living in Canada, Pandora is long gone. I used to listen to it regularly, but last year it became limited to within US borders due to another of the music industry's crackdown schemes.

Now the music industry is doing it again as the Copyright Royalty Board requested that performance royalties be doubled and then some. The will cripple Pandora's revenue potential. There's talk of pulling the plug at Pandora. They just cannot afford to function as a business with costs that high.

Now that the rumor of Apple's new Pandora-ish (as I see it) iTunes features in iTunes 8, I cannot help wonder if it would be in the interests of both Apple and Pandora to work together on this. Pandora may be going cheap right now if they are talking of pulling the plug. Apple is always trying to creep further and further into the entertainment industry, and if they can use the Pandora technology in iTunes I think the days of people complaining about iTunes inability to do shuffle may be long gone.

Amazon Buys Shelfari. Will They Buy Delicious Library Too?

No not Del.ici.ous, or is it De.li.cio.us? Can never remember. Anyway, neither of those. I'm talking about the Mac app "Delicious Library". I thought of this because the design of Shelfari looks just like Delicious Library.

Delicious Library is really impressive (when the scanner works). You wave the bar code of any book, CD or DVD in front of you Mac iSight and a voice reads out the title and adds an image of it to your virtual bookshelf.




Other than the similarity in the look between Delicious Library and Shelfari is that most of the information Delicious Library uses is sourced from Amazon. Reviews, ratings, synopsis... and I think also the images.

When it works Delicious Library imports you whole collection very quickly. This would be great to link to your Amazon account.

There's another interesting post about the aquistion at profy.com - Amazon Acquires Shelfari and Places It in an Awkward Competition

Ubuntu is great

Ok, so I just updated to the latest version of Ubuntu - "Feisty Fawn". Couldn't notice a whole lot of difference on my work machine, and the effects didn't work. But on my laptop it seems much much faster and that's with the wobbly windows and other effects running full whack.

The update process wasn't so smooth. This was because at work we had the full CD and not the alternate CD, and I was trying to be clever. At home I didn't have any CDs but had downloaded the ISO image of the alternate CD and mounted that as if it was an actual CD. The command line upgrade didnt seem to work too well. I may have been doing it wrong. I recommend doing it through the System->Administration->UpdateManager and letting it download overnight, for an easy life.

Lately I noticed Firefox crashing a lot on Ubuntu. I don't think this is because of the Feisty upgrade though. Hopefully it's a minor issues that just needs finding and fixing.

VLC on my laptop needs sorting out as I cannot see any videos, and DVDs won't play at all. I think it may be due to hacking the previous version too much to get things going.

But, overall Ubuntu is starting to look great. Am looking forward to the next release.

Things to look out for when building a large application.

Things to look out for when building a large application.

Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us



A great list of advice for anyone building a large scale website.

"Ads By Microsoft"

Microsoft to Put More Money Into MSN - New York Times

I'm surprised so many large companies are so slow to duplicate Google's highly successful "Google Ads". We developed the system for selecting appropriate ads to display on our livedoor.com pages and the biggest repository of Japanese blogs. Where we failed was not developing the other half of the system that allows anyone with a website to set up an advertisers account, so we were limited to only large advertisers and less specific ads, which diminishes the power of the advertising system. Why we were prevented from publishing such a complimentary system is still one of those upper management mysteries to me.

But what was obvious to me was that to start such a system you need to already possess one half of the system. You need, like we did, a huge repository of websites with a broad variety of content, such as blogs. This will attract advertisers to want to set up an account advertise with you, and start the ball rolling. Or, if you do not have the web content, you need the other half - a large repository of ads or advertisers, with which to tempt ad-hosting website owners. Microsoft has 7000 to start with, and due to the confidence building size of Microsoft, this will grow pretty quickly from Thursday, when they open there doors to all advertisers from "Barbara's Home-Made Jam" to "Apple's iPro Quadruple MacBook Mini".

Like most services on the internet nowadays, the strength of this service, lies in the number of people using the service. More sign-ups lead to more sign-ups, the snowball rolls and becomes bigger.
But, I think that if Microsoft does not offer incentives for switching your advertising dollars from GoogleAds, it will not grow quick enough to be successful. Not having such a wide spread of both advertising hosts and advertisers, the match-making process between the two will not be as efficient. And as big a force as Microsoft is, they are going to have to work very hard to catch up with GoogleAds, which has become a veil drapped over most of the internet.