The Outsidr

FriendFeed, while not young in web years, is one of the few recent social-microbloggrigators currently gaining ground. Yes, I did in fact just coin a term to describe the wave of jack of a few trades web 2.0 communities that are all the rage these days. FriendFeed hardly has the reach of a service like Twitter, but there is a good and consistent flow of web chatter surrounding this new kid on the block and its traffic and user base is growing. For those of you who haven’t played with it yet, FriendFeed essentially allows you to pull in content from a wide variety of web services (Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Digg, Del.icio.us, Tumblr and so on) and present it all organized into one waterfall of headings.

So what is the purpose and / or appeal of a service like this? In my eyes it is twofold but feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below (or on FriendFeed…) if I’ve missed something. The first purpose is stalker tool. Users can all of their friends’ content flow through from just about any popular web 2.0 service they might use. Single out any one of your friends and you are now eying a record of his or her path around the internet. Uploaded photos, blog posts, tumbls, tweets, bookmarks, Disqus comments, reblogs, played tracks, watched videos and whatever else they might be up to. Stalk away.

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I’ll preface this post with “SPOILER ALERT”. While I won’t be spoiling anything specific per se, I will be ruining this movie for you if you plan to see it.

Last weekend I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie The Happening. I was going to put a post together the following morning but I decided to wait a while to see how I felt. I’ve waited and I’ve pondered – here are my impressions.

Important note: I am a huge Shyamalan fan. HUGE. I love his movies, all of them. His writing is amazing, his imagination is refreshing and his direction and tone are remarkable. I would go out on a limb and state that I view him as the best cinematic storyteller of our (my) time. With that said, The Happening was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in recent history.

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When fuel costs go up, all costs go up. Lately we are seeing all kinds of unwelcome reminders of this painful fact. An excerpt from an email that just made its way to my inbox.

Escalating fuel prices continue to impact our world economy, everyday life and the airline industry. Due to continued, unprecedented fuel costs, we will add the following fuel surcharge to Award Tickets originating from the U.S. and Canada, effective August 15, 2008:

• $25 for Award Travel between the 50 states and Canada
• $50 for Award Travel between the 50 states/Canada and all international destinations

This was a difficult but essential decision to ensure we are doing everything possible to offset the cost of fuel which has nearly doubled in the last year. This fuel surcharge will not impact any existing ticketed Award itineraries or any future Award Tickets issued prior to August 15, 2008, regardless of the date of travel. We hope this is temporary, and should fuel prices subside from current levels, we will reevaluate this surcharge…

Of course I am not upset with Delta Airlines for adding this surcharge. This measure being taken by Delta is simply the latest illustration of necessary responses to an ongoing crisis. Everyone is in a bad place right now and there really isn’t an end in sight. But we’ll all just keep paying our taxes and wait for the crisis to evaporate. That’s how it works, right?

Every night when I am done working, I shut down my PC. Leaving your computer on over night, after all, is a tremendous waste of resources and energy. There is plenty of information available on the internet detailing why turning computers off at night benefits your business (monetarily) and more importantly, the environment. Do some reading if switching computers off isn’t a part of your nightly routine. But I digress…

My work, like the work of many others, doesn’t end each night when I switch my PC off. It is a continuous cycle and each morning I pick up where I left off the night before. For this reason I have always been a huge fan of Firefox’s ‘restore session’ feature. It allows me to shut my PC down with as many Firefox windows and tabs open as I like and when I fire up my PC the next morning and launch Firefox, everything is restored just as I left it.

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Even when I was stuck at a job I grew to hate, I still took pride in my work. Every project, every report, every email, etc that you pass to another person should reflect your skill and work ethic. Spelling and grammatical errors in emails make you look foolish, plain and simple. When I am absolutely swamped, deadlines approaching, blood pressure rising and so on; I still triple-check every email I send out.

Here is the opening sentence from an email I just received from someone at a very well-known PR firm asking that I give a client some coverage:

I wanted to make sure you’re team saw today’s announcement from ********** about its **********.

So what exactly does this say to me? It says this person wants something from me – but not badly enough to warrant taking a few extra moments to proof his / her email. This is just plain disrespectful. It makes him / her look bad, it reflects poorly on the PR firm and it makes me indifferent towards the client.

Perhaps I am a bit extreme in this regard but when I get unsolicited emails containing errors of this nature from a PR firm asking me to cover a client… I delete them.