March 2005

My new del.icio.us tag: peopleimetatsxswinteractive.

I noticed the other day that the welcome bar at the top of Dreamhost’s web admin panel said I’ve been a customer since February 2000. Technically I’ve used their services since 1998 but I switched to two other web hosting companies briefly in 1999. It’s interesting to see how much they’ve grown. Back when I first heard about Dreamhost (and not long after they started up) in mid-1997 they were just a handful of twenty-somethings with a couple servers in college.

They’ve got an excellent referral/rewards system, too. Anytime you refer someone and they put your account name (mine is susank) in the “Found Us” question, you are paid $97 for the direct referral and $5 if it’s a secondary referral. I’ve got the “Code Monster” plan which they dropped the price on a while ago from $39.95/month to $19.95/month. Each of the plans are a few dollars less if you pay a year or two upfront. Most personal websites would probably be fine with the $9.95/month plan: 800MB of storage, 40GB of monthly bandwidth, 600 email accounts, an excellent email announcement list tool, useful web admin panel, etc.

Dreamhost is running a special deal until the end of today (March 20, 2005) that triples the storage space and monthly bandwidth. My account name is susank if you’d like to note me as your referral. Feel free to email me any questions, too.

My annual pilgrimage to South by Southwest Interactive is coming to a close tomorrow afternoon. It seems like attendance is up this year which is awesome to see. Check out the video of Halcyon on Austin360.com describing why he keeps showing up at the festival after seven years. He captures the essence of why this conference is more than just another conference. I took a few photos with my camera phone and there are a ton of SXSW-tagged photos taken by other conference participants over on flickr, too.

Josh Darden and I are in Austin for a few days for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. I’m very much not missing the cold weather back home in Boston.

Yesterday Pete Caputa and I went on an appointment tour to various venues in Boston to talk about his company’s (WhizSpark) event planning platform and promotion tools plus my event planning services. I watched him handle a cold-call situation immensely well. I was interested in sticking to the places I had spoken to in advance but Pete is a braver human than I will ever be. He reminded me that it’s good to step out of our usual routines now and again. Very true! The highlight of our appointment tour was meeting with a corporate event coordinator at an upscale restaurant in Back Bay. I’ve known her for a couple years so that certainly helped make it more of a conversation and less a sales meeting. But also, she just seemed to get it — that WhizSpark provides a platform and tools that can make her job easier. And make her look good, too. Who wants to take oodles of RSVPs over the phone? That is so 2004!

A big client/project needs to hook up with WhizSpark so they can spend some money on design: customization of the layout and colors is key.

For a humorous interpretation of yesterday, read what Pete has to say on his blog.

I don’t seek out reasons to be sassy, honest. But today’s email from an SEO company working for one of my favorite websites/tools: local-i, is retarded. He sent me an email several weeks ago asking that I talk about local-i on sooz.com and also include it in one of my newsletters. I didn’t respond because well, it was lame. Had he spent a bit of time on my website he’d have seen that I have linked to pages at local-i several times already. He could have started out his email in a way that was less like a form letter and moreso a conversation. I’m already a fan of local-i.

Is there a cluephone that can be included with each copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto book?

The March 2005 edition of the Boston WiFi Meetup is tomorrow, March 9th at 7PM. We’re meeting at Toscanini’s in Central Square, located at 899 Main Street. We’ll be talking about the Boston WiFi Summit that Boston City Councillor John Tobin is putting together and whatever else comes up.

JPG Magazine announced that the theme for issue three is “fabulous.” They’ll start accepting submissions on April 2, 2005. Fabulous!

tag: JPG Magazine

I go by Susan Kaup or Sooz. There is no Sooz Kaup. Or if there is, it’s someone else, not me. Just for fun I’ve started to tag websites that I come across by other Sooz humans out there. Here’s the collection that I’ve tagged via del.icio.us.

I noticed a few weeks ago that my Audioscrobbler RSS feed was working again. It didn’t seem to be working for quite a while. So, if you’re ever wondering (bored? curious?) what I’m listening to on iTunes (when not listening to Exploit Boston! Radio), add this RSS feed to your newsreader.

Warning: Questionable (perhaps) music may appear such as the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream.”