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Last Thursday I went to the second Triangle Tweetup, held at Capstrat, a local media agency. It was quite a nice location, though we did fill it with the 60+ twitterers who showed up. As always @waynesutton did a great job of organizing interesting presentations, among which were:

• Twitter Movie Reviews, a cool app by @JazzyChad that aggregates twitter movie comments to catch the vibe about a movie.
  My thoughts:Pretty Hip, but I can probably get the same info by just listening to my feed, many trends seem to emerge from small groups and be echoed by the masses. Aside from that, I know which of my friends to trust on this front. Listening to the masses might end up with me watching the next jackass movie, no thanks. Either way, it is a great way to show the power of twitter to find what has buzz and what the crowd likes – crowd sourcing at it’s most pure.
  The big downfall I saw to this tool was that it was almost completely manual, and that just won’t scale. However, Chad seems to be on top of getting things automated, if he can sort that out he may be able to branch out to other areas instead of just movies. What about restaurants, hotels, vaca spots, or products. There could be money to be had here…

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I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

I thought I’d just throw a quick plug for a great new shirt I got: Twitter Overload! I thought it was pretty nice… I got the shirt from startupwear.com, check it out.

I’m a recent convert to Netflix, I think I’ve mentioned that a few times before. My recent blog series on their email marketing program (that’s three links for three posts) can attest to how much I think they are getting it right.

I’ve also recently gotten Watch It Now up an running as it’s own activity on my sweet Harmony 880 (review coming, I swear) – which is telling for how often I watch from that ever growing library.

However, on Monday they had a bit of a stumble. There were reports of the site being down, I think one report was “Netflix is down, I don’t know what movies I like.” Very cute. Apparently it was due to an errant maintenance session.

Well, it wasn’t just the site, their shipping system went down with it. So movies didn’t go out. Definitely a bit of an annoyance, especially when you are trying to plow through all of season II and III of Battlestar in time for the premier of season IV next week. But I’ll truck on, I really wasn’t that affected, I mean, it’s just movies.

But apparently Netflix wasn’t gonna chance the outrage, they quickly sent out a mea culpa. They said oops and took a few bucks off my bill. 5% off isn’t much, but it’s the thought that counts. Email is, of course, the medium of choice for something like this, and I bet Netflix didn’t think twice about how to convey this message. Again, it’s simple and well done, like all of their emails.

Well done guys.

Just got a link to this great video from phillymac on twitter. Definitely worth checking out if you’re still not sure what twitter is or why it’s for you.

Twitter in Plain English | Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English

I like to think that twitter is almost like having some friends and aquantances in the room with you. You can choose to listen in and respond or ignore them, but they are all there, just keeping you posted.

If you’d like to follow me, feel free.

The guys over at google are always introducing great new products and apps. But it’s not always the products they introduce, but how they introduce or educate you about them. Check out this video from Google Russia showing what you can do with gmail. It happens to be in russian, but it’s still a great video to watch.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCNSWwAJNZE[/video]

For more info and detail into this video, check out the blog post from google’s blog.

I’ve been playing with Twitter clients over the past few days, trying to see which one would best serve my needs. Here are the results of what I’ve found. Oh yeah – obligatory twitter page pimp.

Before I dive into the various clients, I’ll first say that I found them all to be pretty easy to use as well as pretty much the same. There really aren’t any big differentiators. They’re all bubbly, web 2.0, with pretty much the same interface right down to the icons. There are differences in how you configure them, but with how infrequently you go through that I don’t see that as a differentiator.

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I’ve been using twitter for a bit over a week now and it’s quite nice. I am still trying to find the right cadence for my tweets (posts to your bloggers). I’m not the “Getting a short, skinny, hazelnut, cappuccino at starbucks”, “Just got up, hope it’s a great day!” kind of person. I try to pass along a bit more value with each tweet. To each his own.

With my short time using twitter I’ve found that they’ve done a good job with the interface, so I decided to do a bit of a review. Check it out, let me know if you agree.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/v/jfNM8TIVobo[/video]

It’s my first foray into this type of post, but I really liked doing it, I think you’ll be seeing more of it.

I just got back from a great conference, Email Evolution, out in San Diego. Ever since joining Bronto Software, myself and DJ Waldow have really been getting involved with the email marketing community out on the internet. DJ especially has been ferocious in his efforts to add something to the already amazing resources that are out there.

We’ve really worked to push Bronto to commit to providing a valuable resource for marketers in general, not just our customers – and it is something that Bronto has now achieved through the combined efforts of our team.
Well this week we finally got to meet up with a number of the other bloggers and industry experts that we have been trading links and blog posts with for the last year or so. (Such as Chad White, Tamara Gielen, and Dylan Boyd just to name a few)
It was fantastic.

This is a really enthusiastic community, after having spent just a few days with everyone it is easy to see that we aren’t driven by competition with each other, but rather cooperation and a genuine love of email marketing.

Google has just posted that they have a new project they are working on: Knol. They want to spread knowledge by having experts write on subjects they know about. Their goal is “find a way to help people share their knowledge,” hmmm, sounds familiar. I think some one else has a little side project trying to do something like that, what’s that called? Oh yeah, Wikipedia.

It seems like the only differences are:

• It integrates with you google accounts
• You can make comments
• The author gets a picture

This seems like a bad idea for several reasons. The biggest one is that I don’t think we need competition for good content, this is like HD vs. Blu-ray – let’s focus on one thing. If experts have to try to keep knol and wikipedia up to date they give up on one or both – so which do I use.

It’s nice to attribution, I wrote this article, Yay for me! But no one knows, or cares, who I am. They didn’t care in Encyclopaedia Britannica, they don’t usually care much in wikipedia, and they probably won’t care here. I don’t know who to trust in the field of insomnia, and I if I did, then there probably wouldn’t be anything on Knol that would be news to me. Attribution is nice, and it’s the right thing to do, but it’s mostly vanity – no one cares, they just skim over it. Admittedly, there is value when you are doing research, such as writing a reference, but wikipedia could probably be slightly augmented to better support references (if it hasn’t already).

There are probably a lot of other problems with this, but I will point one last thing out – comments. Why is this helpful? This usually devolves into useless drivel, Google doesn’t even allow comments on their blog, why do they think it will work here? Wikipedia has a discussion page that is accessible, but not visible, from the main article. This makes sense, people who maintain these articles can debate finer points, but most of us don’t need to see that, it’s just confusing.

I don’t mean to sound overly sensative, but I think it’s silly for google to create such a system and not address the obvious question: “Why do this when wikipedia is already the expert here?”. Well, ok, I think they did, just not directly:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Oh, google, you guys are tricky! That’s it right there. I’ve often wondered about the debates people have had with Jimbo Wales trying to convince him to throw google ads into wikipedia instead of just asking for donations. Heaps of money are there to be made no doubt.

And if there is one thing that people at google are good at doing, it’s make heaps of money.