January 2005

Last night a reporter and photographer from The Boston Globe sat in on the Boston WiFi Meetup that I help organize. I was impressed that they stayed for most of the event. Amusingly enough, they had to leave so they could get to the belly dance meetup at the Middle East in Central Square. We had a productive meeting at our gathering but I have a feeling the dancing may have been more entertaining.

The new Mac Mini is much sexier than the old cube. And I’m pleased to see that Apple has released a smaller capacity music player called the iPod Shuffle. I bought an external hard drive a year ago when my old Dell notebook was about to die and as a place to store all my MP3s and high-res photos so I don’t really have a need for another device with lots of storage space. Jeff Jarvis writes: “The entire point of the iPod is that it gives you control. Hell, the entire point of media that succeeds these days is that it gives you control.” Losing control? Not really. I decide what music I put on there. It seems like it’s particularly well suited for a themed playlist. Gizmodo has a reader-submitted review of the iPod Shuffle.

It looks like Zephyr Teachout, the former online organizer for the Howard Dean campaign may have a new weblog called Zonkette hosted at Blogspot.

I’m conspiring with someone on a project and one of the things we are working on is a list of people we’d like to invite to the first event. The list is 99% men. Are there any women in the Boston area who are tech/internet related innovators such as developers and founders of an interesting tech/internet application or website?

Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and Berkman Center are hosting an invite-only conference about blogging, journalism and credibility. Here’s the list of invited participants (aka the usual suspects). The comment thread on that page is particularly interesting. Several people have pointed out there don’t seem to be many independent/hobbyist/amateur webloggers on the list.

From The Head Lemur:

Blogging is a tool, Journalism is an occupation, and Credibility is a goal. They are strange bedfellows.

Update June 27, 2005: December 2004 through February 2005 I was part of Marqui’s “Pay to Blog” program. I wrote about them and linked to them once a week. During the three-month program I had this icon displayed on my site in the right sidebar area.

I usually ignore spam or don’t see it at all if my filters pick it up. The other day I was organizing my inbox and came across an email with the subject line: “Content management comes to life in new demo.” At first I thought it was an email from Marqui, the communications management system I’m being paid to write about until the end of February. Nope! It was spam from what appears to be one of their competitors: EMC²’s Documentum. Then I thought perhaps they sent this piece of spam to the bloggers writing for Marqui. Unlikely, but possible. Upon further inspection of the email header, I noticed that the spam was sent to an email address at sooz.com that I stopped using over a year ago. Looks like it was just some sort of random coincidence that I’m currently checking out a content management system.

The email tries to lure me over to the Documentum website to view a Flash demo of the product. I clicked the “See it now!” link and landed on a page that asked me to provide my first name, last name and email address to view the demo. First they spam me, and now they want my contact information just to view a demo? Marqui does not try to use their Flash demo as a lame lead generation tool. Since EMC² has already messed up their attempt to build some sort of relationship with me with spam, the least they could do is let me view the Flash demo without collecting additional contact information.

Here’s a PDF of the spam I received. Similar to Marqui’s “The Marketer�s Guide to Optimizing Your Web Content for Search Engines“, EMC² wants my contact information for a whitepaper linked in the spam about their content management “15-minute guide”. Which is unfortunate on both of their parts. But I guess the consolation for Marqui is whether or not they spam to get this information. Either way, they should let the information speak for itself. If it’s useful and relevant then they’ll hear from the potential customer.

Happy Birthday, Shannon.

You might want to turn the sound down on your computer before clicking on the birthday link.

I posted a few photos on flickr of my new shared studio space. One thing I was looking forward to this Winter was not having to commute to an office job when the weather’s bad. The added bonus of my new studio space (beyond the fact that I’m doing only freelance work - no temping!) is that it’s a five minute bus ride away. Thank you, #80 bus!

I’ve got a couple events coming up. Free Agent Dinner takes place on Thursday, January 13th at Polcari’s in Kendall Square. Unfortunately, I’m stuck sharing January 20th (my birthday) with another George Bush inauguration. To ease the pain, I’m conspiring with True Grounds, my favorite cafe (also conveniently located in my Ball Square neighborhood) for a birthday soiree and game night. I’m using Whizspark’s online event planning tools. I look forward to their enhancements which will offer more customization for the layout and links. The black background layout comes with red links which looks a little weird with the purple I’m using elsewhere on the page.

A third event at the end of January is in the works with my new studio compadres. More info about that, soon!