Tuesday, February 25, 2003

RSS with rich media? says Tim Lutero: "RSS cannot replace personal weblogs... For personal and media intensive weblogs, I will never be satisfied with a big chunk of posts pushed through an aggregator." [evhead] Don't be so sure. Imagine subscribing to the QuickTime Movie Previews RSS feed, and being able to see any movie preview instantly. Why Instantly, because the movie data would download in the background, and the entry would only show up when the download is complete. Downloads could happen all night long at slow/low rates, and could automatically be cleared out when entries expire. 3:12:06 PM

CVS2RSS This is, of course, what RSS was invented for: Kellan's CVS 2 RSS - it generates an RSS feed of CVS checkins. This feed, for example, is the CVS to the famous Perl module XML::RSS. It works especially well at Sourceforge, they tell me. [Ben Hammersley.com] This is exactly what RSS should be doing... taking interesting content and feeding it to me in other than email! I'd love to get an RSS feed from Perforce. 3:08:45 PM

Adventures with BillPay Billpays sucks. Here's why. In November, I decided to use BillPay to automate our rent checks. I must have missed the blurb that said it takes 6 days from payment date to receipt, so our November rent check was late by 6 days. I screamed at a BillPay person, who hung up on me... I don't blame her, but dang was I upset! I ended up pre-dating the rent check to the 24th of each month, to make sure it arrived by the first. Fast forward to this month, and now our rent check has already cleared out account... uh, what?!?! Fortunately, we had enough to cover *most* of the amount, but what happened to the 6 days of float? Fortunately, we only have one more rent check to pay, so I've already stopped the automatic payments. I think I'll scream at another BillPay person. follow-up: the BillPay representative argued with me over how BillPay works. She indicated that funds were drawn immediately, and then a check is sent. I told her that wasn't very fair, since they would then get the float on that money. She persisted, while I told her to cancel my account. On and on she went... 2:55:02 PM

Overture to buy search services Tony G. is consulting at Overture. The company plans to acquire some services of Fast Search & Transfer, another sign that it intends to compete more intensely for the Internet search market. [CNET News.com] 10:02:45 AM

IT Crisis Counseling Interesting example of a unique marketing mix. DriveSavers is a $900-a-pop data-recovery outfit that specializes in resurrecting priceless data from crushed, crashed, soaked and mangled hard-drives. The problem is that their new business prospects often make initial contact with the firm in a white-hot rage or tears, berserk at the thought of losing all their data. So DriveSavers has hired a full-time crisis-counsellor late of a North Bay suicide hotline to talk their customers down off the ledge and into the technicians' loving arms. "There's a whole range of emotions people go through when they lose data," said John Christopher, a DriveSavers engineer. "From anger to grief." When the company receives a call from someone who's clearly lost it -- which can happen several times an hour -- Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place. Then the engineer returns to discuss the technical problem in detail. LinkDiscuss (via /.) [Boing Boing] 10:00:14 AM

On Selling Out and Buying In Ev sez: Blogger Sells Out, some guy says. Dave, of course, agrees. Sigh. Dave W. sez: A lot of entrepreneurs who sell out have a problem dealing with it. Even though they sold out they don't think they did. When I sold out in 1987, I went through the same thing. I am going through it now, living in a house that I sold. Did I sell out? Yes I did. It was raining yesterday and I was thinking how much the garden would love the rain in a couple of months when the sun returns. Ah ah. It won't be my garden then. For all I know the new owner will have already torn down the house and turned the garden into a dirty mess. It's his garden now to do with as he pleases. I don't think he really cares about it, he might not even know it exists. That's how selling a company works too. I was paid a lot of money to give it up. I sold out. Just like Evan did. Fact, not theory. I knew this about my company a few moments after signing the papers to merge it with Symantec in 1987. Immediately the mood changed. I was given an order. I gulped. It's so strange. Why is he giving me an order? Oh that's right, I work for him now. Oy. This will strike Evan at some point, and I hope he blogs about it. He would make history in doing so. Let's give the other side of selling out it's due. Selling your company to a larger company means buying into more resources. When I sold PuppetTime, it was because I knew we could throw many more resources into it, to take it further. And we did: we built a kick-ass website, and we got a windows port of the Producer app. It's also where I first learned to concept of the Four Ps of Marketing: product, price, place, and promotion (Thx Jim Pyle!). Of course, all we needed then was a little more time to actually launch :-) 9:57:28 AM