social media

Six Degrees from Disaster

April 17, 2007

Massacre at VA Tech – Malaysian Students Safe read a headline I spotted via Google News this morning. Naturally, it came from Malaysia’s Straits Times newspaper. It’s facile to say that the global is local and the local is global. But there’s more to this particular phenomenon. When we hear about horror anywhere in the [...]

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Il Popolo della Rete – Italy’s Internet People

April 15, 2007

Four years ago, I wrote about the difficulties of making friends with Italians. I already had online (and offline) friends in Italy, but most of them were expats. I have Italian colleagues with whom I get along well at the office, but we don’t socialize outside (quite the opposite of my experience in American companies). [...]

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A Whole New Me

November 23, 2006

Look at the upper left right corner of any page on my site, you’ll see something new: I’m a cartoon! I’m not quite sure where I got the idea (although, admittedly, a number of bloggers are doing it). Since the unifying theme of this site is me, it makes sense to use myself as a [...]

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Communicating with Your Customers

October 25, 2006

Someone anonymous claiming to be an Apple employee launched a blog (now vanished) to discuss his/her thoughts on Apple’s communications with its customers. This was big news in the blogosphere, because Apple is notoriously secretive and uncommunicative. The only Apple product I own is an iPod (I had a Mac SE 15 years ago, my [...]

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Young Lives Online

July 26, 2006

A recent New York Times article discussed how some American companies, before employing young people just out of college, are looking at how they present themselves in online communities such as MySpace and Facebook. Not surprisingly, many kids in high school and college use these “protected” online spaces to try on personas, indulging in the [...]

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KidSpace: Public Places Where Kids Can Be Kids

May 13, 2006

If I believe what I read in the media (and some bloggers), American parents are getting hysterical about MySpace. For those not in the know (if you’re over 25 but don’t have a teenage child, that likely includes you), MySpace is an online community with tens of millions of members, most of them adolescents and [...]

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About the Newsletter

April 2, 2003

[My] newsletter began shortly after I resigned from Roxio, the software company, in July, 2001. At the time I was the editor of two email newsletters (one for Windows, one for Macintosh) with a combined list of 180,000 subscribers, intended to help people to get the most out of their software. I used to write [...]

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Fanmail (I’m Blushing)

August 16, 2001

8 Nov 1997 – There are heaps of useful information on the Adaptec web site, though if you start out at the main home page it’s hard to find the CD-R/CD-RW stuff. If you want to look at it, try this URL: http://www.adaptec.com/support/cdrec [link no longer works] It gives you rundowns (not always complete or [...]

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EMail Encounters: Anecdotes of a Professional Life Online

August 16, 2001

I’ve spent probably half of my working life answering email. And therein lie a number of tales… Some people were convinced I had to be mailbot, because I answered so quickly. As I told them: “If we had a mailbot this good, we’d be selling that instead of CD-R!” The Unexpected Response It seems that [...]

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Discussion List: Early Experiences in Online Customer Communications

August 16, 2001

“People want to discuss your product or service online. If you don’t give them a way to do it, someone else will.” User to User Support by Derek M. Powazek – on WebTechniques The Adaptec discussion list was created in about 1996 as a way for users of Adaptec CD-R software to help each other. [...]

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Out on the Usenet: Supporting a Company in an Online Public Forum

July 30, 2001

My presence in online public discussion groups dates back to the CompuServe forums I frequented starting around 1993, where I helped customers with Incat’s CD-R software, and CD-R technology in general. I was eventually invited to start a section specifically for Incat software. Then a friendly user wrote me: “Hey, you should be out on [...]

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Newsletters: Customers Love ‘Em – If You Do Them Right

July 28, 2001

Begun in 1998, the newsletters I wrote/edited for Adaptec and (later) Roxio covered technical, how-to, product news, and other information of interest to CD-R users. I initially did all the writing myself, then hired other writers as the topics became too varied and the schedule too punishing for one person to handle (and I had [...]

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Subscriber Comments About the Adaptec Discussion List

July 17, 2001

In response to complaints of censorship on the discussion list, Stan (a long time Adaptec/Roxio List recipient) wrote: Adaptec/Roxio has always ‘paid the freight’ for their own, honestly identified “moderated” <news group> & openly controlled forum. “Their” newsgroup exists as a wise, long term business decision to: 1) Cultivate real world user feed back – [...]

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The End of an Era

July 13, 2001

Yesterday I said goodbye to the subscribers of the Roxio newsletters. And the email  came pouring in. Sure, I’ve heard from people about the newsletters before. I always knew I was doing something right there. But (in spite of my considerable ego) I didn’t expect the warmth and kindness of some of the messages I [...]

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