Happy Birthday Lou (a day late)

Happy Birthday to Lou Congelio. I’ll get those pictures posted soon.

The full photo gallery is posted on the OnlyInHouston.com site. 

IBM *and* Lenova Thinkpad

Laura Ries is going to tear this one up.  It won’t be pretty.

New ThinkPad Is All Work, and Some Play
David Pogue

THE Subaru Corvette … the Green Bay Dolphins … the Microsoft iPod.

There’s no getting around it: sometimes, a company’s name just seems like part of its product name, and anything else just sounds weird. Take, for example, the I.B.M. ThinkPad. Since I.B.M. sold off its entire Think division last May, the laptop line should logically be called the Lenovo ThinkPad.

Yet even Lenovo is torn about that name. Take its new Z-Series laptops: on one hand, a letter to reviewers begs, "Please ensure that you give proper attribution to Lenovo. …Do not refer to products as ‘I.B.M.’ … Use ‘Lenovo ThinkPad.’ " On the other hand, the laptops themselves are stamped with large, colorful I.B.M. logos, molded into the plastic of both the lid and the keyboard deck – and the word Lenovo doesn’t appear anywhere.

Can you say "identity crisis"?

PR Disaster: Candidates that lie

This one is amazing, after everyone repeating over and over "no fake blogs" we still get fake blogs.  And for bonus points, innacurate fake blogs for a politician.  Great.

On the Candidates’ Blogs, Writing Right and Wrong
By PATRICK D. HEALY
Published: September 28, 2005
…
Mr. Ferrer, the Democratic candidate for mayor, nevertheless found himself stumbling yesterday after his political opponents pointed out something amiss on his campaign Web site: a personal log entry "posted by Fernando Ferrer," in which he recalled attending "public schools for most of my education."  Mr. Ferrer actually attended Catholic schools for most of his education
….
They maintained that Mr. Ferrer did not write the blog entry attributed to him.

"An item submitted by Freddy Ferrer was inaccurately edited regarding Freddy’s education," Nick Baldick, the campaign manager, said in a statement. "We apologize for the mistake and have corrected the entry."

Yet even that explanation was not quite right. Jen Bluestein, a spokeswoman for the Ferrer campaign, said the candidate did not submit a written item but rather "passed on some ideas" to an aide, who then wrote three paragraphs and posted them in his name.
…
"This happens in political campaigns all the time," she said. "In this case he called in some ideas, and someone got a little loose with the editing."

Oh, well if everyone does it then I guess it is OK.  Uuuuugh.

cognitive analysis of tagging

Tagging is easier than categorization because you don’t have to make as many decisions.

A cognitive analysis of tagging   (http://www.rashmisinha.com/)
(or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)
….
With tagging … you can note as many of those associations as you want. This is how tagging works, cognitively speaking. Yes, it’s that simple.

What I suspect the author is saying is that we don’t like to make decisions.  I don’t.  I get home from work and sometimes I can’t figure out what t-shirt to change into.  As I post this on typepad there is a keywords box shown below that does cause me a bit of stress at the end of a post.  Basically keywords are tags, or relevant topics at a minimum.  I suppose keywords have a sort-of-unwritten rule that they are supposed to be nouns while tags can be nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.

Other challenges of tags, or really any ontology:

1) You can’t guarantee other humans will categorize like you do, so even if you can remember your own categories your methods may be in no way helpful to others.  For your mp3 collection this is fine, but for social software you are breaking the social contract and not providing value to others.  We will find a way to derive value, but you get my point.

2) Time changes how you categorize stuff.  As a young man you might put owning a yacht into the "success" category while a former boat owner would categorize this as "classified listing".

2) A sense of fairness can screw up categories.  This is just a brain game we all play.  If I categorize 50 items and they get divided as 25, 10, 10, 4 and 1 – I will really look at the category with one (1) item to see if I can’t refile it in one of the larger categories.  It is the odd-man-out so surely it must fit in another category or nobody will ever find it in the future, right?  I can’t explain this reflex.

4) Cultural relevance, although I believe tagging and categories both suffer from this limitation.  Rashmi, the author of the above article, discusses cultural relevance in her article but this probably warrants a complete novel unto itself.  We need a cultural-tag-encyclopedia in the future.  "Cadiallac means AAAAAAA in Detroit and Cadillac means BBBBBBB in Tokyo… or similar.

I will defer to Rashmi’s analysis on the cognitive aspects of tagging.  Definitely worth further thought.

Pay Per Call Model – maybe for small businesses in some situations

I was linked an article on pay per call pricing model for web sites.  This means the web site works to generate leads and only charges if it results in a phone call to the client company. 

At a technical level this means that the pay-per-call provider does not want the prospect to call the company directly, but rather through a tracking telephone number so they can fairly measure the number of calls generated.  This will work.  It will result in calls.  But it seems a short sighted overall strategy because;

1) It omits the value of branding. The company is paying for the leads alone, nothing more.
2) Contacts will continue to call the tracking number in the future reporting false positive matches on inbound calls. 
3) You are going to market as someone else’s brand, so not only are you not getting the branding value but you are also paying to build someone else brand!
4) If you end your contract that pay-per-call company can, and will, redirect the campaign to a competitor.  Given the importance of tenure on the Internet this could be a real problem effectively locking you into the pp-call program.

All of that said, yes there are times when this model will work for some businesses.  But it is definitely not as Earth shattering as Pay-per-click advertising has been with the low cost of entry, performance based pricing and free branding side affects.