Overflow

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Throughout my adult life, I have been thinking up various applications for technology.  I can remember sitting in a bar called Peabody’s in Binghamton NY discussing the possibility of inventing vending machines that would be placed in college dorms to dispense soft-serve ice cream cones.

That concept never really took off, but that kind of thought process has remained a constant for me.

Most of the ideas lose some steam and fade away, but some developments actually take root and turn into something functional.  Presently, I’m not considering turning my attention to bringing something else to life, it’s more like I am making a wish list and expecting today’s great innovators to come along and meet my demands.

I am thinking about my IPhone and the amazing applications that are being developed.  There is a great two part series rundown of IPhone applications at Todd Crawford’s blog called Todd Talks.  I recommend looking over his advice and choosing the most appropriate applications for your needs.

The application that I want to see developed for my IPhone corresponds with my growing frustration whenever visiting medical treatment facilities.  There is great debate about letting a company like Google store your personal medical records, prescriptions, allergies and all pertinent information in their vast databases for access via ubiquitous web applications.  This certainly raises serious concerns over patient privacy and many health care industry regulations would have to be amended to prevent unlawful searches.

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 King Kustom Podcast One [12:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (68)

Fluid Media is pleased to announce the official launch of a web site for King Custom Cycles.  We are excited about the opportunity to assist our good friends Laura & Phil King in expanding their community base of motorcycle enthusiasts via Web 2.0 tools, and to help them generate business for their parts and repair business.

Let’s share with you some of our initiatives:

First, to touch on the logo design for the brand.  We were brought in on the tail end of the design process and Cameron was able to salvage some of the elements that had been developed, but immediately the concern regarding the “distressed” look revolves around replication issues on merchandise and smaller collateral.

So to avoid losing the little K in custom and other smaller bits, a non-distressed application is being created for certain usage.

We also added a secondary color palette and font styles for use on the web site and collateral materials.

The intention of the web site is to ultimately act as an online community where friends of King Kustom Cycles can interact, exchange tips on great places to ride, discuss new gear for their bikes … or just pass the time during the intervals when not on the road.  In order to achieve this objective we are integrating some exciting new applications and are waiting for others to be released from beta testing!

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WOW, we live in an amazing time in the development of internet tools .. and communication in general. I can’t wait to implement these game changing, community systems that are right now in the early stages of development.

I’ve detailed the enormous potential of using Twitter in brand building, and was very disappointed when the Track functionality was shelved (for business or technical reasons we don’t know) earlier this summer. However, while we were all lamenting the discontinuance of service, the Gillmor Gang podcast of July 21 included guests Evan Prodromou of Identica and Loic Le Meur of Seesmic/Thwirl. I listened to the discussion led by Steve Gillmor about federated communication via microblogging services such as Identica, and it immediately peaked my interest! I set up my account that day.

They discussed many exciting aspects of Identica including the fact that tracking would be available with the platform, plus many more features that would be built by the open source community itself … however, the most powerful element they discussed was the distribution of the Laconica platform (Identica is built on it) to a wide variety of entities.  Evan can envision the ability to add micro-blogging to a community as simply as installing a Wordpress blog is today.

I can envision so many businesses and organizations that would be able to take advantage of this kind of power. Evan’s objective is to get micro-blogging to the level of ubiquity as email is today. Keep in mind that email used to be a silo’d communication tool where you could only send messages to others within your same provider. Did you have a Compuserve or a Prodigy account?  We need to get away from the silo’d limitations of our current micro-blogging platforms.



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This past Saturday night I watched the future of “television” .. at least in the form that I personally believe to be the direction that the format is headed. It all started with a twitter post, and ended up with me staying up late at night watching a live stream of Wilco playing at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago.

After a day full of the usual weekend responsiblities, I was kicking back ready to watch a baseball game and reading through current tweets.  The following message from someone with the handle ATTBlueroom (I’m sure it is someone who serves in a Community Manager role) caught my attention, “Broken Social Scene and Wilco are up next on tonight’s Lolla webcast.” I am a huge fan of the band Wilco, so I got very excited to log on and check it out.

What I experienced made me realize that the famed “convergence” of television and internet that has been spoken about since the early dotcom days is upon us.  The stream was flawless on my dsl connection and all I wish was that I had a better sound system on the computer so that the full music quality could have been experienced.

The added feature of communicating with others via Twitter while simultaneously watching the show only added to the excitement.  Actually attending the event in person would be the only better shared experience.

Some observations:

• Apple TV and other web connected television appliances are going to explode on the scene shortly as the next big consumer appliance
• Using Twitter as a way to announce programming is a must for any broadcast channel
• ATTBlueroom actually needs to do a better job of monitoring the conversation to interact with viewers.  I had two people directly state that they were having trouble with the feed and it would have been a perfect opportunity for some direct company involvement (Contact me if you want to talk about my ideas!)
• I suspect that the issues were due to only having the option of Windows Media Player as the format for the stream, and possibly it would serve to have a variety of options based upon the users preferences.
• Television plus Twitter (or another communication platform - gaming consoles allow for actual conversation) for live events is going to be an integrated part of the viewing experience.  It will be important to allow the viewer to directly compartmentalize the communication being received however.  Non-relevant tweets during the broadcast would detract in some cases, which leads to more sorting of conversations into silos along with a search (track) functionality.  This is making me reevaluate the silo interface of TweetDeck, which just needs to become more stable at this point.
• Sporting Events, Concerts, Award Shows, Political Debates … any event that is being broadcast where interaction with others in real time adds to the experience will benefit from this convergence.
• It’s still unclear how the entire monetization strategy will work in these live events.  They could have interjected lower third promotional messages or sponsorship logos without harming the quality, but I believe that branding messages will need to be more subtle to be acceptable.

Wilco demonstrated why I believe they are the best band in the land right now.  The AT&T Blue Room broadcast was very well done in terms of production, while needing some assistance in the community interaction area.

I was extremely glad to have been part of the event, and wanted a big encore from the band as they left the stage.  I know we’ll see more of them and more of these types of events down the road though.

I spent the day today recording and editing Episode #2 of a podcast for Kush Supports.com called The Kush Report.  In this episode, Cathinka Chandler the company Founder & CEO and I review the various customer profiles of women who purchase Kush Supports, including women who are pregnant or nursing, and sleep support for women post augmentation.  We discuss details of the upcoming trade show they are attending, plus reveal that the Kushsupports.com web site will be re-launching in 2 - 3 weeks.

When the web site launches, we will have integrated a new blogging platform where we can establish a “home base” for all of the Social Media Marketing efforts that we have implemented, plus a location to launch the podcast.

The Wordpress blogging platform has become a major component of Fluid Media marketing initiatives for clients, simply because it is so much more versatile than building a traditional .html or .php based web site.  The most obvious advantage is the flexibility in adding new content and functionality that in the past would have required more significant resources.  It’s common knowledge that indexing and search results (and resulting web traffic) benefit from a steady stream of content .. and architecting and building a static web site does not achieve that need for updated, relevant content.

Clients do not have to entirely scrap the existing web site that they have, especially if there is a commerce engine built into it, a blog can simply be set up at a third level of the domain so that the entire site benefits, for example http://blog.coastalbean.com as part of the www.coastalbean.com domain.

However, the hardest challenge when adding a blog is the time involved in adding new content on a consistent basis.  When talking to prospective clients or even existing clients considering adding a blog, the first stated concern is having the time to post written entries on a regular basis.  With that in mind we have started to move more and more towards recording and posting podcasts as content.

Technology now allows us to use voice over IP connections to initiate and record what could be classified as a form of a “telephone call”, after completing the recording there is desktop editing software to help add some finishing touches like opening and closing music and credits … and voila, you have some rich media content to help to communicate the marketing message, that extends well beyond the pictures and text of a static web site.

As a side note, previously a transcription of the show would be posted as a blog entry to ensure that search engines index the post, but Google is creeping forward with speech recognition software that may soon peak inside a podcast in order to index the contents.  That would be an amazing advancement for podcasts and videos on line!

So if the hesitation about adding a corporate blog to your web site stems from the lack of time to write entries, there is now an approach that is just like picking up the phone.