The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.
Probably won’t be blogging much over the next couple of days as I’m at the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media show this week. Then, next week, it’s Ad-Tech. (Then I’m off on my cross-country jaunt.)
Will be sharing news and thoughts on ClickZ News and Experts. For those of you at these shows, I hope to see you!
Here’s hoping that all my U.S. readers will be experiencing some variation on what I did this morning (but maybe without the same level of chaos). The crowded gymnasium at PS9 in Brooklyn grew more and more crowded as I picked through the masses to find the correct line, chatted a little with my fellow voters, and got chastized by a bullying election worker with a West Indian-sounding accent. Things would have gone much more smoothly had there been more such workers (bullying or not) helping people through the process. Still, as is usual in NYC, people peacefully self-organized and got on with their business, with a little grumbling here and there.
The line inched slowly forward until I, too, found myself in the booth under the basketball hoop, to flip the switches, check and doublecheck my vote, and, finally, crank the lever. It’s done. At least for me. And you?
Other voting stories:
Matt blogs about Vonage and other VoIP services. I tried Vonage when I moved to the apartment where we’ve been for the last year and a half, but we decided to quit. At the time, we were having to pay for a phone line anyway, because we had DSL (no cable was available in the area). It was also a little buggy. We had to do resets way more often that I would have liked.
Now that we’re moving again, I signed up to try Vonage with our new area code. I’ve had the service working in my current apartment for several weeks now, and it seems to be pretty darned reliable. The dial tone is there, it works when I need it, and it even makes that super annoying sound when my cat knocks the phone off the hook. The only problem I had setting it up was my own problem — I had stuck the phone line into the wrong jack. Looking forward to getting it up and running for real in the new home.
As Matt says:
I hate to sound like an ad for the thing, but it’s just a better way of having a phone at home. The only real risk is an outage with your cable modem, and while that does happen from time to time, most people now have cell phones as a backup, and if your modem is out, calls go straight into voicemail.
A tidbit from a piece I wrote about LookSmart’s earnings. A new Furl.net is coming this week, says new CEO David Hills. New functionality will let users search across all of the public URLs that users have saved. Interesting stuff.
Bill Flitter at Pheedo has a great post about the nature of blogs and blogger best practices.
From the post:
1. This is a NOT a medium where a message can be forced.
2. It takes time and attention to effectively reach out and build relationships.
3. Blogging is NOT a direct response medium. It’s a relationship medium.
4. Blogging ROI is NOT measured as a cost-per-lead but as a cost-per-influence.
So, you know how you run anti-spyware applications to get rid of nefarious pop-up ads spawned by rogue code that has infected your system? Well, it turns out you will soon be able to rid yourself of spyware — for free — if you agree to accept pop-up ads. This is the result of a deal between contextual ad player WhenU, which delivers its ads through a network of desktop software apps, and Aluria Software, the same company that partners with America Online for anti-spyware offerings. It’s all part of WhenU’s aggressive PR offensive.
The whole arrangement seems ironic on some levels. Here’s a spyware scanning (and killing) program that’s supported by adware. As you probably know, many people don’t draw a line between the two.
Though this may be perceived as a strange partnership, especially by some anti-spyware crusaders, if Aluria really feels like WhenU is “squeaky clean” — and its president, Rick Carlson, assures me it does — then why not let consumers have the application for free, if they’re willing to view ads? Just so they understand what they’re getting into. The software isn’t available yet, so it’s unclear exactly how they’ll disclose the ad support.
Meanwhile, I contacted “spyware hunter” Ben Edelman, who has spoken out loudly against WhenU in the past. He’s been discussed here and here. What did he have to say? A very mysterious “no comment.”
“I have no comment as to this release, or as to any other matter pertaining to WhenU,” he wrote. When I probed, he replied, “I’m sorry, but I have no comment as to the reason why I have no comment on any matter pertaining to WhenU. I look forward to speaking with you on other matters.” Hmmm…
UPDATE: Just to be clear, the WhenU page I link to above lets you download the free initial scanner. If you find things on your hard drive that are questionable, however, you can either buy the full Aluria software now, or wait until later (it says November 15) to get the free, ad-supported version from WhenU.