- Posts tagged General
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My New Network of Blogs is Alive!
Tonight I completed the transition from a single blog hosted on WordPress to a new network of blogs based on Posterous.com. The transition was painless but it took me a bit of time to get each of the six blogs, this all-topics aggregator and five topic-specific blogs, designed so that I'm reasonably happy within the limitations of the platform. Here's a list of the five topical blogs, each of them linked. Some of them don't yet have any posts, but they're coming soon.
You can subscribe to any one or several of the blogs. Or you can subscribe here if you haven't already and drink the entire fire hose.
A fair warning: I occasionally write posts that transcend these not-so-neat little borders. In such cases, I reserve the right to do the unthinkable and cross-post to multiple blogs so that nobody who even might be interested in the subject misses it.
Why did I make this drastic change? Because I've discovered in my research into online marketing in the past few months that topic-specific blogs create better opportunities for cross-links and backlinks (and thus improve search engine ranking without being dishonest). I also believe it will make it more likely for other people with blogs on related topics to be willing to link to my specialized blogs. If you're a sports blog host, you might find something I wrote worth linking to but if you see that my blog for that day had comments on several other topics that are uninteresting, or even off-putting to your readers, you're likely to take a pass. I want to avoid that.
I'll be interested in hearing what you think of this move.
By the way, I intend to keep cross-posting everything to my WordPress blog as well, so if that's where you're reading this, nothing changes.
You're welcome. :-)
This "Commercial" Will Make You Soar...and Maybe Cry
My good friend Tobi Lytle passed this video on to me today. It's a four-minute "commercial" for a hair-care product. If I needed what they make, I'd be a bunch of it just to encourage this kind of great work and messaging.
Beautiful 2-Minute Video on Perseverance
Take two minutes from your busy life right now to watch this beautiful and insightful video from my friends at Motivation in a Minute. You'll be glad you did.
Two Challenged Athletes and Their Crossing Paths
KarmaTube offers an inspirational short film about two challenged athletes, one American, one Ghanian, and how their paths cross in improbable ways to mutual benefit. You might want to have a tissue handy while you watch. Gives each of us even more reasons to be thankful this season!
I See Airlines Are Still Screwing Their Best Customrs
I don't travel much any more. I've fortunately reached a place in life where the need is near zero and the desire is below zero. I chalk it up to fortuitous timing given the intense hassle of air travel these days. But I had to consider the idea of traveling to LA later this month for a one-day conference. So I checked into airfare from my cozy little airport in Monterey to LAX. Prices were higher than I expected but I do know that flying from a smaller airport is often more expensive. And that's fine. I was, however, more than a bit surprised to find that the airlines, who have been in financial trouble longer than almost any other industry that hasn't yet totally collapsed, are still trying to balance their books on the backs of their best customers: business travelers. In this case, I had to get to LA before 9 a.m. on a Friday and wanted to return that evening to avoid an overnight stay. Typical business travel plan for such a nearby trip. Here's what I found.If I wanted to do that one-day trip, I would have to fork over $500+. (For comparison purposes, a round-trip from Monterey to NYC was just over $300.)If I were willing to fly down on Thursday evening, stay overnight, and fly back Friday evening, I could get the price down to $330. But if I were to fly down Friday morning and stay overnight, flying back Saturday, I could get the price down to about $225.So if a business traveler is ok with being away from family and office for an extra day -- and even better if that day is a weekend -- then he can get a relatively decent price. But if he wants to minimize time spent on business and maximize time spent with family, he pays a severe penalty. This crap has never made sense to me and it still doesn't. I guess the airlines figure that you have to get there and you have to fly to get there, so they have you by the short-and-curlies. And they wonder why they keep losing money. Yeesh.
Sure Glad I Didn't Get Up at 4 to See the Lunar Display
Well, that was a real dust-up. Or maybe I should say a dust-down. I got up this morning eager to see video of this early morning's NASA experiment only to find that there was no video and not even any interesting still imagery of the event.
NASA officials, who are far more interested in data than in stunning photography, are ecstatic at the success of the program but it's a bit of a PR crisis. The media -- mainstream and otherwise -- overhyped this event with some help from NASA. Though to be fair many of the more spectacular animations that had lots of people salivating over the visual impact of the crash were not generated by NASA.
The experiment will prove immensely valuable to the science community. But it's been quite some time since NASA had a PR event that captured the national imagination and they know full well that absent such fluff, they will face funding issues in a Congress not inundated by public demands to keep spending money on space exploration.
What Do iPhone, Health Care Have in Common?
Users of the iPhone have no choice of phone vendors. Consumers have no real choice in health insurance. Both create bad situations.If you're an Apple iPhone user like I am, you're stuck using AT&T for your cellular service. That means that you get less adequate service than any other iPhone user in the world and less than almost all other American cell phone service providers, including AT&T's non-iPhone customers! How's that make you feel? AT&T's U.S. iPhone customers cannot use two important features of the phone simply because the telecom behemoth has chosen not to make them available We can't send and receive photos, sound files or movies directly on the phone using messaging. And we can't use the phone as a link between our computers and the Internet, a technique referred to as tethering.
That is pure unadulterated crap. They only get away with it because they know that we love our iPhones enough that we're not going to toss them because the service provider sucks and treats us arbitrarily. I've written the FCC and the FTC asking for an investigation of these discriminatory practices. (These aren't the only such decisions AT&T has made; I'm just focusing on two for the moment because they are ticking me off.) Similarly, in most parts of the United States at least, you as a consumer/employee have little or no choice when it comes to health insurance. You get the plan your employer decides to offer. Period. You may get a few "menu" options to make you feel like you're in control, but you're not. Pricing among plans is like gas price differences: for all practical purposes, non-existent. But you cannot affordably purchase coverage that is better or more closely suited to your own needs even if such a plan is available because your employer selects one plan for everyone. Some larger companies offer employees a choice of multiple plans but that practice appears to have fallen into disuse in a difficult economy. This is the ultimate reason a public option is absolutely essential to real health insurance reform: it is the only meaningful way to provide true choice to consumers. And only when faced with true choice that consumers themseles can exercise directly, without employer intervention, will health insurance companies have to become reasonable and competitive in their business practices. Otherwise, they are effectively able to operate as monopolies within given market segments or geographic territories. How do I get this iPhone removed from my rectum where AT&T has shoved it?
That is pure unadulterated crap. They only get away with it because they know that we love our iPhones enough that we're not going to toss them because the service provider sucks and treats us arbitrarily. I've written the FCC and the FTC asking for an investigation of these discriminatory practices. (These aren't the only such decisions AT&T has made; I'm just focusing on two for the moment because they are ticking me off.) Similarly, in most parts of the United States at least, you as a consumer/employee have little or no choice when it comes to health insurance. You get the plan your employer decides to offer. Period. You may get a few "menu" options to make you feel like you're in control, but you're not. Pricing among plans is like gas price differences: for all practical purposes, non-existent. But you cannot affordably purchase coverage that is better or more closely suited to your own needs even if such a plan is available because your employer selects one plan for everyone. Some larger companies offer employees a choice of multiple plans but that practice appears to have fallen into disuse in a difficult economy. This is the ultimate reason a public option is absolutely essential to real health insurance reform: it is the only meaningful way to provide true choice to consumers. And only when faced with true choice that consumers themseles can exercise directly, without employer intervention, will health insurance companies have to become reasonable and competitive in their business practices. Otherwise, they are effectively able to operate as monopolies within given market segments or geographic territories. How do I get this iPhone removed from my rectum where AT&T has shoved it?
