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Subscribe...- 4/22-23 Make Faire @ San Mateo Fairgrounds
- 4/29 7pm - 7am - SuperHappyDevHouse 9 - at SuperHappyFunHouse
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5/9-11
CSS WG f2f
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CWI, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Hosted by CWI.
- 5/16-19 Xtech - at Amsterdam
- 5/22-26 WWW2006 - at Edinburgh
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6/13 7:30pm-8:30pm
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Geo Microformats BOF II: Developing a "directions" Microformat
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Paseo Room, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA
The goal of this BOF is to once again bring together key interested folks in the geo and microformats communities, discuss the work on the directions microformat to date, and brainstorm on proposals for a directions microformat.
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6/15-17
@ QEII conference centre, London, UK
- 6/20 10am-7pm - MashPit @ Wharton School, SF (wiki)
- 6/20 8pm Microformats.org 1 year anniversary
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6/21 8:30-10:00
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Supernova 2006 workshop: Decentralizing Data
@
Wharton West Facility, San Francisco
There is a sea change coming in the shift from centralized walled-gardens of data, content, and social-network profiles to a world where the vast majority of such data is decentralized and users have far more control and ownership over their own data. These changes will impact nearly every site on the web as we know it.
- 6/21-23 Supernova 2006 - at The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA
- 6/23-25 - BarCamp San Francisco - at TBD
- 10/9-11 CSS WG f2f - at Mozilla Corporation, Mountain View
Posts
Make it easy for bloggers to promote your products and services
- created
- 4/30 5:43 PM
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tags:
If you make products or offer services, make it easy for bloggers to promote them.
Obvious right? It seems so obvious that it feels like someone else must have already blogged this, and yet with a bit of searching (using multiple servcies), I couldn't find any prior discussions.
In short: for every product you make, and for every service you provide, at the minimum, the following two things will make it much easier for bloggers to promote you: (1) images and (2) permalinks. One at a time:
- Images of your products/services. Provide nice, simple, clean, freely usable (Creative Commons licensed preferably) images of each your products and/or services that bloggers can download, and post on their blogs when they discuss or review your product/service. Ideally provide several sizes, anywhere from icon-sized to as large as you want. Afterall, if a blogger wants to put a huge image of your product on their website when discussing it, shouldn't you make it easier for them to do so? Case in point, in my previous post, I had to go search Amazon for a nice clean photo of an iBook G4 because Apple failed to provide one.* Bloggers shouldn't have to go to someone else's site to get photos of your products and services.
- Permalinks to your products/services. Provide a stable, clean URL to each product and service. Provide distinct permalinks for each new version of iteration so bloggers can link to and discuss a specific product/service. Afterall, if they write a critical review, you want them linking to a particular version, so that when you come out with an update, you can distinguish between reviews of the old and the new. In the case of the iBook, Apple fails to provide different permalinks for the most recent iBook G3 vs. the iBook G4 (nevermind all the previous iBooks). Note that a simple blog post on your company/organization blog about the specific product/service is sufficient, perhaps the product release announcement. Bloggers understand blogs (imagine that) and will more than happily link to such announcements as proxy permalinks for the specific versions of the products themselves.
*Update: I just did (another?) Google image search for iBook on apple.com and easily found some images. Odd, I really thought I had tried this, but either this changed since I blogged (I doubt it, but possible), or I simply blanked and forgot to try the obvious search. I have updated the previous post to use the apple.com image of the iBook, and linked to the previous image from Amazon that I had used inline above in the post.
Hmm.. I just took another look at the Apple iBook page, and found a link to the gallery page which has the photo that the Google image search that I just did found. Ok, now I'm suspicious because I definitely looked closely at the Apple iBook page for a link to an image that I could use and didn't see one. I think they might have actually added the link to the gallery since this blog post!
More evidence that this might have just changed: for the heck of it I checked the Apple PowerBook page, and as of 2006-05-02 8pm PDT, there is no link to a "gallery of high-resolution photos" of the PowerBook (unlike the iBook page), though there is a QuickTime VR link (similar to the iBook page).
Regardless, well done Apple for linking from the iBook page to a page of images that bloggers can easily use.
*Update 2: The previous image for an iBook G4 that I had found on Apple's site is now gone - 404ing. So once again I have to use an Amazon image. I hope someday Apple provides permalinkable images of its products. Until then, I'll be using other sites.
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New iBook!
- created
- 4/22 5:32 PM
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This week I received a brand spanking new replacement iBook for my broken iBook G3 which has been shipped back to Apple for dissassembly, landfilling or whatever is the fate of broken machines they replace with new ones.
Thanks very much to Allen of Apple for both offering me this option (in addition to my other option of just getting my iBook G3 "repaired" (AKA logic board swapped) for the nth time) and following up to make sure I received it in good condition. Since iBook G3s are no longer manufactured, the new iBook is a G4. I asked at the time if I could get memory and disk upgrades at the same time (hey, it never hurts to ask), and they said yes, for a nominal upgrade fee which seemed reasonable.
After many hours of setup (to be described later), I am now writing this post in my blogging tool running on my new iBook G4/1.33GHz/1.5GB/100GB (which is much snappier than my iBook G3, hopefully that means I have a chance at actually catching up on blogging all the amazing things that have happened in the past couple of months). Thanks Apple!
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