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A Lesson for Local Business in How Not to Use the Internet
The other day I got a menu from Duccini’s, a tasty pizza place on U St. There’s probably two or three others in my kitchen, in the middle of the mess of menus in a drawer. On my way to the trash, the title on the top of the back page caught my eye: “See What the Blogs are saying about Duccinis!”
Wow, I thought. A local restaurant might understand the Internet. I expected to see a review from any of the numerous DC food blogs, or maybe even a comment from Yelp.
No, instead, it’s a screenshot of a random, unnamed bulletin board.
The first person quotes a previous poster who asks,
“Has anyone here had Duccinis Pizza, I got a menu from them the other day. looks great.”
The man with the fro responds,
“I put one of the children of the Duccini’s owners through college. A friend put a different child of the owners through college. Another friend bought their books.”
“Neptune,” represented by a ghost sticking out its tongue, offered encouragement.
“duccinis is quite good … and they always manage to deliver mighty quick. best stromboli EVER. the best part about duccinis, they deliver ben and jerry’s ice cream! yay for chocolate chip cookie dough!”
No URL, no name of the bulletin board. Nothing. Just a screenshot.
Man, those Blogs sure love Duccini’s!!!
P.S. One of my secret passions is online marketing for local businesses. With a little bit of work, local businesses could build their online reputations and drive customers from effective web marketing.
Jun 25, 09:37 PM / Comment [2]
All-in-one me
I put together my FriendFeed this morning. It’s pretty creepy, but if you for whatever reason want to see everything I do on the internet, it’s all here.
http://friendfeed.com/michaelwhitney
All Politics is Wiki: Kentucky Bloggers Wikify their Party
I posted this on TechPresident a few days ago. -MW
Kentucky bloggers are taking back their state’s Democratic Party, one wiki entry at a time. This week Ben Carter and Joe Sonka, proprietors of the progressive Kentucky blog BlueGrassRoots, announced the creation of BlueGrassWiki. The project aims to organize information about Kentucky’s 120 county parties in order to “infiltrate” local leadership in upcoming party precinct elections.
Carter and Sonka describe the BlueGrassWiki as a:
...community-based, collaborative effort to compile and organize information [that] will empower Kentucky Democrats to engage their local Democratic Party organizations…The immediate goal of BlueGrassWiki is to provide all the information Kentucky Democrats need to be involved in the party’s reorganization process this April. Essential to that goal is providing as much contact information we can for the individual counties.
After the party reorganization, we hope to use BlueGrassWiki to help the county parties and activists hoping to get involved find each other.
Why the infiltration? Kentucky progressives’ favored Senate candidate Andrew Horne was, as Sonka says, “forced out” of the race by higher-ups in the state party and the DSCC in favor of an establishmentarian. Incensed, Sonka penned a piece in which he called for progressives to build their own infrastructure to take back the Kentucky Democratic Party.
Bluegrass bloggers aren’t strangers to the limelight. The Nation profiled the rise of a homegrown anti-war movement with its sights on Sen. Mitch McConnell this summer. To progressive Kentuckians, Horne’s exit signaled their party’s capitulation of the Senate race; now, BlueGrassWiki looks beyond November 2008’s races to building a friendly and sustainable infrastructure to prevent similar incidents in the future.
To show what they envision for the Wiki, Fayette County’s wiki was pre-populated with a plethora of information about the local party structure. Besides the obvious inclusions of the website and name of the top leaders, the party’s pages also feature details of precinct chairs, elected officials, and organizations that work in the county- including their email addresses. Here’s a small sampling:
Contact:
Website: http://www.fayettedemocrats.org/
Phone: (859) 268-4448
Email: FayetteDemocrats [at] qx [dot] net
Meeting Time:
Day: 1st Thursday of every month
Time: 7:00 pm
Where: 431 South Broadway, Lexington (map)
The Executive Committee is comprised of 31 voting members including:
The Chairman of the Executive Committee – David O’Neill
The President of the Fayette County Young Democrats – Colmon Elridge
The President of the Greater Lexington Democratic Women’s Club – Joanie Taylor
BlueGrassWiki marks a significant step in grassroots online organizing. As the bloggers note, “building a wiki is not a two person effort.” As Kentuckians fill in the gaps of the wiki and start to connect, we’ll begin to see an actual uprising – all through the power of online collaboration.
State of the Union Overloads Twitter
First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight’s SOTU address Twitter’s servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.
A scan of Twitter’s public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush’s (hopefully) last address to Congress. Personally, I got a flurry of tweets commenting on the speech from the people I follow on Twitter.
Midway through, Twitter’s website failed to process new messages and friend requests for several minutes at a time. Overall, the service held up, but the outage spikes were certainly annoying.
Earlier this month at Apple’s annual Macworld event, Twitter’s servers failed during Steve Job’s keynote. TechCrunch wrote about the failure at the time:
Twitter will probably just shrug their shoulders as they usually do during outages, and ultimately we’ll all keep using it, but if there’s one messge I’d like to get through to Twitter: keep messing with Twitter users and eventually users might flock elsewhere…
In my book, this is strike two for Twitter. (Okay, maybe one and a half.) Potential competitors like Pownce should try to seize this opportunity to make a home for Twitter users who want a stable service for micro-blogging.
Jan 28, 10:31 PM / Comment [1]
Two great new products from the Sunlight Founation
It’s a busy week for the folks at the Sunlight Foundation, which released two new web apps: Punch Clock Campaign, a Google map mashup of seven members of Congress’ daily schedules; and OpenCongress’ Facebook app to share your favorite bills on your Facebook profile.
CNN discovers email forwarding.
It appears that the crack news team over at CNN.com did some investigating and found out that people forward email with funny pictures in them. This truly earth-shattering revelation was linked on the front page of the number one name in news. Check out the stunning details:
Dude, you have got to see this. Look in your in-box. Right there between the chain letter promising never-ending good fortune and the Top 10 list of reasons why cats are better than dogs. There it is: An e-mail filled with goofy images of sometimes dubious origins.If you’re like most people, you receive several of these offbeat e-mails each week.
The subject line says something like, “FWD: Re: RE: You think you’re having a bad day?” The images of crushed trucks, endangered daredevils and a horse gone through the front windshield of a car may or may not be genuine, but they certainly are incredible.
Such messages have their roots in chain letters that were once mailed out in paper form. Nowadays, the Internet allows for quick distribution of text, photos and video to many people at a time.
Lerick Johnson, 51, of Alliance, Nebraska, says he and his friends like to send funny photos and messages to each other and forward them on to friends and family. A few years ago, he went looking for Halloween pumpkin carving ideas and ended up sending photos of the more unusual jack-o’-lanterns as a mass e-mail. The photos are circulating again this year.
Stop, stop. You’re saying I can send things to people via email? Fuck off. No way. You’re lying.
I must stop writing. I have to go read I-Reporters’ stories of their mass e-mail horror stories. Have you seen the one with the redneck pictures?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!? LOLzzz!
del.icio.us drops the dots
del.icio.us popularized the domain name tactic of spelling out a word using subdomains and country codes, but as the social bookmarking site prepares for a major redesign and relaunch, Yahoo is moving the service to delicious.com. Cue the chorus: “Back in my day, delicious was spelled with periods in the middle!”
This whole “collaborative internet” of people connecting and communicating is great. FX’s showing of Cops just took it to a place it should never have gone. While you’re watching Cops, the channel puts up a “Cops 2.0” question. Today’s was “Have you ever been hit by a car?” Thanks to the Internet, you get to see what idiots who are watching cops respond to these insightful questions.
This screen cap shows the responses “yes and i died” and “no but i hit my mailbox”. Hurrah, Internet!
Aug 14, 06:20 PM / Comment [1]
These were announced a while back, but I finally got a chance to play with Digg’s widgets, which you can configure to display popular stories from the user-edited website. This would be a nice addition to website that covers a specific topic for which Digg has a category, like the 2008 election or the environment (or Xbox or 1337 haxors). Here’s a widget with the five most recently popular stories about the election:
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