• Give out free licenses to various groups (like Microsoft MVPs) who are known to be community influencers in what they do. Make this public on a special page on your company’s site, with an application form.
• Create a special week/month long promotion where any blogger that meets a certain criteria (at least 3 months existing blog) who writes a special excerpt about your company\product on their blog (text which you provide) and sends you an email telling you about it, gets a free license.
• Make your product free for open source use (if it is a developer related product, this is crucial). open source projects are viral by nature - if it is in the source code, you automatically gain new users as the amount of contributors to the project.
• Create a "Lonely developer" license where for a very small fee a person can get their own full license without breaking the bank. this gets you "in the door" with many people, driving more traffic to your forums, site and more.

• Don’t leave a personalized message on your voice mail

That way, when people call you up, If they wanted to leave you a message they’d get a female automated voice saying the person is not available, please leave a message and so on, but it only tell them what number they dialed, not the name of the person they reached.  so they would be left wondering whether they got the right person, and why doesn’t that person take a minute out of his time to let people know they got where they want to go. They’ll wonder: “Is he simply to lazy to do this?” , he doesn’t have time to do this? , Is he too stupid to work a voice mail answering service?

In any case, the real answer is obvious: You as a manger seem less professional, less attentive to your potential and existing clients, and you overall seem to be pissing over whatever people consider to be the smallest bit of manner over asynchronous interaction  between people.

That’s how I feels, anyway. And a company I was consulting for a while ago had a CEO and several of his VPs do this exact same thing: not even bother doing this. Even after I told them about it they said “OK” and continues to ignore this.

Well, good luck! If you can’ make the small things happen, can I trust you with the big things?

Update: Looks like they finally added a search box. Now I  know  they read my blog.

Before I forget - Lots of great tutorials on using Adobe After Effects for some really cool effects on movies (time freeze, metamorphosis etc..)

( I like the Demon face best)

Podcasts are technically challenging.

In 2004 I tried to answer the question “Why is RSS adoption so low?” . My main contention was that you needed to be a technically proficient computer user in order to “get” what RSS is about, and that the tooling available back then was just not accessible enough to the wide public. this has changed considerably in the last year or so. As easier tools and easier ways to subscribe to RSS have emerged, RSS adoption by big sites is practically mainstream these days, or close to that.

That’s why I think the same can happen with podcasting as well. It is currently a matter of technical accessibility. You need to know how to subscribe to a podcast, to download it, and to listen to it. It is still a challenge, but as the technical barriers come down for regular users (My mother is a good example) more and more people will “get” it and it will become mainstream just as RSS did.

It will take a couple of years, though, until we see the Google Pod-Catcher, or the NY Times Pod News with a simple 2 click software install to listen to it.

• It’s unique DIV id tags mean you can currently have only one of these widgets running on the same page. that’s either good or bad depending on your needs.
• The width is way to thin to server as a “real” chat inside a wider page. They should be coming out with a wider version of the widget soon.
• The minimum width for the widget is 190 pixels. size it thinner than that and it gets truncated at the edges, which sucks for my tech blog which has a thinner sidebar.
• Sounds are pretty annoying. You can turn of all sounds using a script parameter, but you can’t only hear “new message” sounds but disable “joined” sounds right now, so I ended up muting it fully in the script (see script syntax below)
• It’s pretty cool and powerful, but I’d like to see it add voice abilities like Kyte.Tv’s chat behind the videos.

The basic script for using this:

Generic RTL version (Hebrew Enabled)

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=” http://www.xpanity.com/widget/EmbedXpanityWidget.js.ashx?culture=he”></script>

 Generic LTR version

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=” http://www.xpanity.com/widget/EmbedXpanityWidget.js.ashx?culture=en”></script>

Parameters:

? location ? defines a URI for a site wide channel you can use. all widgets with the same location will show the same chat.

? culture ? defines GUI language (graphic elements with text, alerts etc.)

? skin ? the customer specific GUI

? width ? defines width (px) of the drawing area for widget

? height - defines height (px) of the drawing area for widget

? collapseUsersList ? defines whether users list will be collapsed on first time entry or not by default (true  | false by default)

? muteAll - defines whether sounds of the widget will be turned off or turned on (true  | false by default)

? autoStart - defines whether splash screen will be shown or not on first time entry (true by default  | false)

Example:

Here’s an example of the syntax I use on this blog (which is a site wide chat channel, so multiple widgets will show the same chat):

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=” http://www.xpanity.com/widget/EmbedXpanityWidget.js.ashx?culture=en&location=http%3A%2F%2Fcommunityhacker.com&autoStart=true” ></script>

(note that the location has to be in URI format including escaped characters)

You should see a chat window if you view this page inside a browser: (update: sounds have been muted to stop the annoying “joined” sound)

You give them your email, you get back a conference number and code and that’s it. give the number and code to the rest of the attendees and you’re done.

Ever watched a video you shouldn’t? Perhaps of a sexual nature, perhaps some other “nasty” content? Well, get ready to be called on it if you’ve been watching it through a Viddler flash player. Your name might be exposed to the world under that video’s page. Shocking, but simply true.

If you go the the Viddler page hosting a specific video, you can quite easily see all the places where that video has been playing, including user’s personal temporary folders on their local machines, inc many occasions.

• Go to the video’s page Viddler. You don’t even need to be logged in to Viddler or have a viddler user name. just browse to that page.
• Click on the “Links” tab under the video
• Hovering the mouse over one of the links in the tab shows the full URL in the status bar of the browser.

The Viddler flash player “pings” the Viddler website when it is played and sends the location of the URL it is playing from, even if that URL is located on the local machine of the user, under some temporary file name.

Here’s a screen shot of a page of a video I published (click to enlarge):

This can be a potential problem for many people who might use viddler to watch videos they are not supposed to be watching (porn, violence, watching from the workplace etc…).

As far as I’m aware, there is no way to turn this off, or remove a link from that page once it has been published.  It should be a pretty simple act of changing the flash player’s behavior to only “ping” Viddler.com if the URL is not run from a local machine, yet someone must have missed that over there.

Next time you’re watching a Viddler Video, be aware of this.

Take David Boschmans’ blog, for example. David, a Microsoft employee, whom I’ve known personally during various conferences, has recently passed away at an untimely age, and everyone who knew him was amazed to hear this, including me. I was not really sure how to handle this, so I even made video for him with some Flickr photos form the group that was set up for him.

David’s blog remains orphaned, with no one to post to it, to let what ever dedicated readers he had, know what had happened, or even to tell future readers who some across his blog during some future google search what was the fate of the blog’s owner it seems that the fate of orphaned blogs will be to aimlessly stay afloat in blogsphere, as a semi-interactive monument to the person who is no more.

Will blogs.msdn.com (hosted at Microsoft) continue to host his blog now that he’s gone? for how long? forever? Does someone actually have David’s password for posting something to the blog about his demise?