American Madness

B.L. Ochman says the Red Cross is the best organization to give money to in order to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

BuzzMachine has a great collection of links to various sites that will help you sort out the best charities to give to.

I’ve only had limited experience, but I would have to agree with BL. When my next-door neighbors house burned, the Red Cross was there with the fire trucks and set the family up with a place to stay that night.

Everything I’ve seen tells me that the Red Cross delivers real help really fast.

Please, please, please don’t fall for one of those email scams soliciting help for Hurricane Katrina victims. I’ve already received one today. Sick, really sick.

The Red Cross donation page is a little slow. Be patient, the victims need our help now, and for many months to come.

Also, Wired magazine has and interesting article, “Reclaiming the Big Easy Means Hard Choices,” and Craigsblogs shows how people are using craigslist in the emergency.

We are near the point where very sophisticated content management systems are going to put “enterprise publishing” (e.g. the technology behind NYTimes.com) within reach of nearly everyone, and business bloggers are catching on.

Steve Rubel points to InfoWorld report suggesting that the information management power of blogs could easily replace expensive corporate content management systems. Steve also hypes his client simplehuman, which built its press room using TypePad.

I love the idea, but I’m surprised that so many public relations and marketing bloggers hype TypePad and MoveableType. These certainly are not the tools that spring to mind when I think of a sophisticated content management system.

I’m much more interested in the opensource offerings that are becoming increasingly powerful and userfriendly, like Mambo and Drupal for content management, and WordPress for blogging. The pace of innovation in the open source community is staggering and it makes expensive proprietary systems look clunky by comparison.

Within the next year we should see an easy-to-use, opensource, publishing platform that combines standard CMS features with blogging, wiki, and bulletin board functionality. Right now an experienced network admin could cobble together a system like this by using various applications in tandem. Soon this publishing power will be available to everyone. Will it revolutionize personal publishing like the blog did? Can we handle this much power? It waits to be seen.

To take any available opensource CMS software for a spin, check out opensourceCMS.com.

I just got a complimentary copy of Fortune Small Business, September 2005, and happened to turn to the Editor’s Notes. Staring back at me was a smiley group of 18-22 year olds. I thought, hmm… this is an awfully young editorial staff. It turned out that they were interns, which made more sense, and gave me some reassurance that the articles within might be of some substance.

However, Managing Editor Dan Goodgame went on to explain that these interns had actually written and edited significant parts of the magazine, and that recent interns are now writers with FSB.

My favorite quote was:

“Other interns I know are making coffee and copies,” says our Brandi Stewart. “They’re surprised that I get to report and write.”

Me too!

I always thought it was a dirty little secret that writers for many established publications are so young and lacking in experience. I didn’t think that this was the kind of thing you highlight prominently.

It doesn’t send a good message to your readers when you say, “Hey! The interns are writing the magazine.” This tends to conjure up images of Jason Blair and Stephen Glass. In any case, I read BusinessWeek.

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post in his continuing series on the value of owning content. The following quoute got me thinking about what teachers and professors could do if they teamed up to create their own textbooks, and how publishers are losing their grip on the means of publication.

?We need to create our own texts, because we can. Our students need to help us, because they can. We need to ask relevant, diverse, living sources to participate, because they can.? - Will Richardson

It sounds like Mr. Richardson and the teachers of New Jersey should start a Wiki to create their own curriculum content. It would be a great alternative to relying on textbooks. Print on demand could turn the final product into a ?textbook? very easily, or they could just buy laptops for all their students with the money that they would save.

Once teachers and professor start making the texts for their classes, the textbook industry will be in serious trouble. If states and academic institutions begin approving these texts, thereby giving them an official status, it will be the dawn of something completely new.

The “What’s Hot” Plug-in for Google’s new Sidebar tool automatically generates a list of what is most “popular” on the web. Google doesn’t say what criteria the “What’s Hot” titles are based on. They are obviously keeping their own interests in mind with the insertion of titles like “Google Sets Tongues Wagging with Talk.” It is interesting what you can do when you control the means to information. Anyway, I deleted this little propaganda machine.

Google has a reputation for clearly separating advertising from information content. Are the waters going to get a little muddy going forward?

Gone are the days of having to quickly hide your email, news, blogs, etc. when your boss walks by. The compact, customizable, unobtrusive Google Sidebar now puts a variety of workplace procrastination tools at your fingertips. The tools are actually useful for work stuff too, so nobody can say you are just slacking off. Here?s my quick evaluation.

It took a while for the Google sidebar app to index my hard drive, but now that it is up and running I can officially say that the Google Sidebar rocks. In addition to indexing and allowing search functionality for your entire hardrive, it offers: easy access to Gmail, news, RSS Feeds, a scratchpad, Photos, Google Talk, and other widgets.

I?ve used similar apps in the past like Microsoft?s taskbar, however the Google Sidebar is clearly the best of breed for the quick launch genre.

Being a Mac user I was disappointed to see that the Google Sidebar has not been released for Mac. However, it seems that Google and Apple are taking chapters from each other?s playbook. Many of the features offered in the Sidebar add functionality to XP that has been obviously missing, since Apple introduced OSX Tiger in May.

Apple?s Spotlight search technology was certainly inspired by Google?s foray into PC search, and the Google Sidebar is very remindful of the micro app concept seen in Apple?s Widgets.

Until Windows Vista debuts this may be the best upgrade to XP that we are going to see, and if Vista is delayed any longer Google might just launch their own operating system.

—Rumors—

Is Google creating an operating system one component at a time? Could they eventually release a complete operating system? Some geeks think so.

David Kiley writes a great weekly marketing column/blog called “Brand New Day” for BusinessWeek. Recent posts include subjects like advertising to the 2-3 year olds, the WNBA, and Nike’s Big Butt ad.

He’s got a great writing style and I love how he can wax poetic about the subtle points of a big butt ad.

Sure, there are “real” people with pecs and abs working out. I’m not anti pec. But this ad shows a greater spirit of inclusiveness, while maintaining an air of aspiration.

The comments to the big butt post are even better. They range from a reader frustrated with white folks recent fascination with big butts to a suggestion that women in “reality ads” are still too attractive.

Other BusinessWeek blogs include: Blogspotting, Deal Flow, Economics Unbound, Hot Property, Tech Beat, and Well Spent.

It seems that BusinessWeek actually gets this blogging thing.

Google talk just debuted to some fanfare today. I was using Iphone, a similar service, on Windows 3.0 in 1994. As far as I can see, Google Talk is not radically different from the other IM services. Yahoo chat and AIM have allowed voice chat for years. No market anomaly here.

When I can make outgoing phone calls to any phone number I chose and talk for free, that will be a radical shift.

—Update—

Google Sidebar has just been released. Is Google creating an operating system one component at a time? Could they eventually realease a complete operating system? Some geeks think so.

There are a lot of blogs that have gone silent recently. It?s August, and I sense that after a year of hyperactive blogging, there is a lot of burn-out going around. I know it?s happened to me and I?ve only been blogging for a little over a month.

Corante?s Flackster blog, which went offline last month, brought this burnout problem back to mind. I recently hyped Corante, as a leader in creating a model for the kind of ?blogging network? that may eventual compete head to head with major online newspapers. Yet, it is clear that Corante is still not the media machine that can churn out posts on a particular beat day after day like the big media outlets.

Corante, like most blogs and blogging networks, is still a small collection of human beings, and the members are subject to human problems like getting tired, losing their day job, having family problems, etc. Making media more human and less like a machine is a great thing. However, make no mistake about it, we bloggers are not going to trump the ?old media? and establish a new framework for publishing by being human.

Big media networks will always have an advantage over small groups of individual bloggers, because their legions of underpaid journalists can more consistently deliver content. At the major media networks, the organization as a whole does not get tired or have to take a vacation, even if a few writers do.

If we bloggers want to create the kind of revolution in media that is so often talked about -or even just take a vacation- we’ve got to form networks of our own that rival the scale of our old media counterparts.

There is a great post on Corante?s Flackster about faulty billing at PR firms. The post, “If it Moves, Bill it!” by Michael O’Connor Clarke, is his final entry in a series that he wrote about ?why so many PR agencies are just so horribly bad.? As you might imagine, there is a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled anger and frustration directed towards his former employers. That is what makes the posts great. They still have that old blog-tell-all style to them, which indicates that this is a real individual venting and telling the truth.

It seems that Mr. Clarke?s blogging may have landed him in a bit of trouble careerwise, since his last post was on July 21st, and other posts prior to this one indicate that he is still looking for a job. Mr. Clarke was recently President of Mansfield Communications and before that a Senior Vice President at Weber Shandwick in Canada. I hope that he is doing well and returns to blogging at Flackster.

I think that I will write Mr. Clarke an email to find out more about what exactly happen after he tore the PR industry a new @$$-hole.

Clearly, blogging can be harmful to ones career. Given the amount of money that most bloggers make, it is a wonder that any of us do it.