Technorati helps you pick the winner

Why has the world of online marketing not picked up on the image campaigns of radio stations and trade shows? There are individuals willing to wear your t-shirt, place a bumper sticker on their car, or answer their phone proclaiming their love for your product if there is a chance of a product giveaway reward for compliance. The street team, the random person in the trade show crowd that just might sight you and reward you with an iPod or free concert tickets.

In the world of weblogs, a marketing company would team up with Technorati for a marketing campaign. Every participant would need to have a Technorati profile for notification purposes and to please the sponsor. The marketer then seeds a meme and provides a tracking method. It could be a quotation, a product page, or an image. Technorati provides the marketing firm with market attention statistics.

Example 1. Bungie launches Halo 2 on November 9. A fan base already exists for the product, but Microsoft would like to amplify the hype. Bungie hosts an image counting down the time until the Halo 2 release based on your time zone. You place the counter on your site. Technorati crawls your site, sees the image source, and you are in the contest. Prizes rewarded by time zone, overall, by week, etc.

Example 2. A new rock band heads out for a 20 city tour. They would like to gather fan feedback without spending a lot of money. They create individual pages on their site with set lists and photographs from the event. Fans link to the individual concert page. There is now feedback for the road tour, indexed and live. A written set list could be a give away, or a larger item such as a guitar or iPod for a contest spanning the entire tour.

The Technorati Developers Salon is just a few days away, yet we have not heard much from the company since the Emerging Technology Conference in February. I have lots of ideas. Dave says he is listening.

Nike MP3Run

Nike has a new $299 MP3 player with 256MB flash memory and Bluetooth. ZDNet profiles the Nike MP3Run. It includes a special pedometer you attach to your shoelaces and your data is stored on the flash memory. “While you’re running, you can press a button to temporarily silence the music while a synthesized voice tells you how far you’ve run and at what pace. When you’re through with your run, you connect the player to your PC, and your time and distance are uploaded to the Training section of Nike’s running site, where a training log allows you to track your progress.”

My new PowerBook

PowerBook

I just sold my Compaq TC1000 Tablet PC and bought a 1.5Ghz 15-inch PowerBook. So far I am satisfied with my purchase.

I wanted a computer to hold all of my work. I had a Tablet and a desktop machine and I was never sure which one had the data I needed. A desktop replacement laptop seemed like the perfect response.

Size matters. The TC1000 has a 10.4-inch screen. The quality of the screen is a bit cloudy, a result of protecting the surface from pen scratches. I wanted a bigger screen.

Choosing an OS. My desktop PC is very moody. I have blue screens of death, corruption errors during installs, and none of the software felt integrated. Apple can test its software against standard configurations due to its small hardware base. OS X is a lot more stable and innovative than Windows XP, and Microsoft is a few years away from doing anything about that. Panther introduced a Bash prompt, so I can dig deep if I would like.

Taking the plunge. I wanted a DVD burner, USB 2.0, DVI, and S-video out. I also wanted good styling, and the 14-inch iBook feels a bit childish to me. So the 15-inch PowerBook it is. $2500? Priced a Dell, IBM, and a Sony, and they were in a similar price range for a similar configuration. Yes, it is tough to determine a similar CPU configuration between a Pentium-M and a G4. I looked at both 1.8 and 2.0 GHz.

So far I am happy with my decision. Still trying to get my printers working wirelessly, both through the USB port in my AirPort base station and the stand-alone HP Deskjet 5850.

Movable Type 3.0D

I just upgraded my weblog to Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, also known as Movable Type Free.

Limitations of the license:

  • No support from Six Apart
  • No access to paid installation service
  • No access to fee-based services
  • No promotion of your weblogs through the Recently Updated list
  • No commercial usage
  • No more than one author and three weblogs

Sounds okay to me! Paid licenses start at $70 and includes “a guaranteed path to future versions.” If Movable Type does change, at least all the entries are on my own server, in MySQL, and I can move to a separate publishing system. I donated money to Movable Type when I first created my Movable Type weblog, and there is still an area for a ping key in my preferences.

Code that Kills

Scott Rosenberg of Salon attended the Systems and Software Technology Conference to research the military’s dependence on software code.

The average acquisition cycle for a military product, according to conference speakers, is 10 years — and that’s an optimistic figure. Between the time the Pentagon commissions a system and a contractor delivers it, whole generations of private-sector computing software and hardware have come and gone.

XML and Web services are crucial for protecting America. If you’re writing software today for a system that’s going to take years to deploy, you have no choice but to plan on everything changing around you.

Gender benders

Donatella Marazziti of the University of Pisa in Italy found that new lovers adjust their testosterone to more closely match each other.

“[M]en and women in love have considerably higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol.” “Men who were in love had lower levels of the male sex hormone testosterone – linked to aggression and sex drive – than the other men. Love-struck women, in contrast, had higher levels of testosterone than their counterparts” “[W]hen people look at their lovers, the neural circuits that are normally associated with critical social assessment of other people are suppressed”