It’s Sunday night and I’m going to diverge just a bit from my normal topics - just a bit. I spend a significant amount of time doing research and work on the computer and on the internet. I’m not getting any younger and I’m learning that I have to spend extra attention to keeping myself healthy.

This means that I’m running several times a week. I’m taking vitamins. I’m trying to cut back on Coke Zero and more. I learned the hard way last year that spending too much time sitting, drinking cafeine (Coke Zero) and popping claritin to keep my allergies in check it a very very bad combination. I’ll spare you the details, just trust me and don’t mix the three to excess.

Now Claritin was a wonder drug for me. It allowed me to calm my sinuses down for a couple years and the break from constant allergy and sinus attacks has allowed me to live and breathe easier. That said, I can’t take claritin like vitamins and so I’m getting even more proactive. I’ve put in the hypo alergenic filters in the heater/aircondition. I’ve got a Dyson vacuum ~ the animal version for picking up dog hair as my business partner is part dauchsund part golden retriever and hair happens with dogs. (Not to mention that with 2 adults and 3 kids in the house, there’s a lot of dust.)

I’m not Howard Hughes by a long shot, but adding one of those ionic air filters is a good extra touch. My grand parents picked one of these up a couple years ago from a TV add. They raived and raived about it, but honestly I did the stupid grandson thing and ignored their well intentioned advice (I don’t do that much actually, but on occassion I revert back to some early period in my life when I didn’t consider the wisdom of my elders.) My parents picked up a air filter/fan shaped like the ionic filter my grandparents had, but it cost about $50.

Thing of it is it didn’t do much and I started to learn that the ionic breeze was worth the money. (Think my grandparents paid about $300 back then.) Fortunately, for me they have come down in price and now I’ve got one more edge arming me to stay healthy and keep productive. Working as a consultant and freelance writer means that if I’m sick, there’s no benefits to cover me and no sick days. I just don’t make any forward progress, so staying healthy is all that much more important.

You might say that I even learned a little from the wisdom of my elders and got the pro version, Ionic Pro.

Page Popularity for Site: 2% [?]

NASA has selected two firms to build a commercial cargo service to the international space station.  SpaceX and Rocketplane of El Segundo and Oklahoma City respectively could see the contract grow to $1 billion if Congress and NASA agree that the companies can shuttle astronauts to and from the space station in addition to their other cargo.

NASA is hoping to turn over the mundane work of space freight to private enterprises so that NASA can focus on more complicated ambitions like space stations on the moon and a trip to Mars and finding dark matter.

On the lighter side there is no word on whether or not Dennis Hopper will be approached to a spokesman reminiscent of William Shatner’s Priceline work.  And in general there is a lot of potential for bad puns with this idea from the redefinition of what it means to be an ‘over the road’ driver to new boasts by space truckers about the ‘real long haul.’

No matter what, I’m sure in a few years we will hear about complaints that space truckers are being forced to work to many hours and not allowed to get enough sleep while they are away from the cab of the space ship. . .

Page Popularity for Site: 3% [?]

I reviewed a company today, Davison Design that offers support in reviewing ideas that might be developed, patented and licensed under a brand name. They offer for a fee services to walk you through the process, help develop your idea and make it marketable get patents under way if appropriate and work to set up a business agreement to get the product to market.

As an information maven, myself and many of my readers think of, learn of and develop many many ideas. Typically, we are the gather’s of this information as the theory goes. To actualize our concepts we need to similarly gather or marshall the proper resources to make the concept a reality, enter Davison Design.

In the current landscape of the business world it is very easy to outsource components of a business and build a business model like an adolescent would build a castle with legos. However, it takes a lot of know how about the best processes of running the business components to insure that things are not only done correct, but also to insure that things are done in a manner that realizes their maximum potential.

Many business models like this have been setup on the web to cover shopping carts and online stores and more, the concept of building out a business and putting the knowledge to work takes moves one degree further out of the box.

Here is an excerpt of their 12 step approach to this process.

I’m going to continue my review after I get some information from the company next. I’ll keep you posted on how this process goes, and will outline some alternative options in upcoming articles from tracking down manufacturers by yourself to walking through the patent process.

Page Popularity for Site: 2% [?]

The Aptera is a concept two person car that weighs less than 1000lbs and will seat 2 people. Its got three weels and no bumpers, but it gets 330 miles per gallon, which is about 309 miles per gallon more than the average American vehicle.

The big question is whether or not Americans can change their driving habits if they are forced to change (force coming from unaffordable gas prices). Today, many Americans drive around alone in cars or SUV’s that get 21mpg on average. They don’t typically car pool and more often than not they commute to work without the kids in the car.

Now many do cart the kids around for various events and occassions but the daily commute is often kid free. Since America has not solid mass transit options in most cities and towns, the likely option to solve the current energy crisis is to utilize a hybrid vehicle. Many of these hybrids are small cars and they only seat 1 or 2 people, which would require family trips, even to a soccer game or day care in a different vehicle.

So can Americans start to utilize the concept of buying a commuter car, and saving their SUV or mini van for nights and weekends?

Can you see yourself driving an Aptera to work? Often times people have to envision themselves in a vehicle before they will consider making the purchase. Americans might contemplate a Harley to save gas over a hybrid, but a hybrid will keep them dry on a rainy day and warm when its cold out. How does it handle on ice? Well that’s probably a different problem.

Page Popularity for Site: 3% [?]

I ran across Podcasting site today that offers some interesting marketing podcast.

I listened to several podcasts.  The first was a podcast on Generating Revenue with RSS, with the Founder of Pheedo’s, Bill Flitter.  Pheedo’s looks at RSS advertising from a sponsorship model.  An advertiser might sponsor a certain number feeds for a certain amount of time.  Bill creates an analogy comparing rss to newsletter models.  RSS advertising does not see click through rates like those seen on websites, but they do see rates that are much higher than email newsletters.  Plus, there are certain segments where the click through rate on rss advertising works better.

Then I listened to a show with Art Hall, VP of Customer Care Operations at Netbank.  The show talks about constructing a successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy.  Netbank uses their CRM program in conjunction with interaction surveys of customers.  Art correctly identifies the three components People, Process and Technology and then adds a fourth component.  That fourth component is business strategy to manage end-to-end customer relationship from the outside experience into the organization.  It seems that Art has caught on to a key concept of focussing on the starting point of the value chain, the customer, and walking with the customer into the company evaluating their movements utilizing CRM methodologies and tools, the People, Process & Technology.

I think its important to note that too many companies attempt to implement CRM without understanding their Processes or without training or retraining their people.  They mistakenly rely on the technology to solve problems that have resulted from the lack of processes or from broken processes or from people that are not working together in a systematic function.

Page Popularity for Site: 3% [?]

Google did a very nice thing by setting up a wireless umbrella over its hometwon in Silicon Valley, but lets face it, there aren’t too many people in Silicon valley hurting for an internet connection.

This is more PR than it is charitable good works.

Google gets some good press, and they probably benefit on the employee morale survey as their people will be able to access the internet easier when they are out of the office.  Plus, visitors to Google will get to experience Google’s generosity before they walk into a meeting.

Its not going to help people that are fighting with their cable provider or DSL provider over bad service.  Its not going to help small towns get access to the internet and its not really going to help the internet challenged.

Now if Google would like to spread some of that goodwill around the country, outside of California even that would be more interesting, but as it stands its kind of like the US Congress passing a law allowing free parking for all government officials in the Nations capital.

Page Popularity for Site: 2% [?]

I have been test driving a new Web 2.0 firefox add in called Trailfire. Its a rather unique tool that might just give the phenomena of Digg and Slashdot a run for their money.

It has been described that Digg offers no editorial control yet comes up with good stories, but the comments of posters are rarely quality material.

Similarly, Slashdot offers up very strict editorial control, receives excellent comments but the stories get much less attention as the focus is on the comments.

Trailfire seems to come in at a tangent to these older technologies (Digg is sometimes described as a 2.0 technology itself) and offer a simple interface and simple output that prevents some of the problems of both.

How it Works
A user can surf the web at leisrure and while looking at a website or article of interest can hit a Trailfire comment button from which a little box pops up (looks like a post it note) and the user can comment on the article, providing a ‘Trail’ Title to group the comment on the article to a collection of comments on a similar topic.
You can see one of my trails here: (when you click on the link it will take you to the actual article and website I looked at and a pop up post it like note will pop up to the right with my comment inside.)
Airline Reactions to recent Terror
Once there the stick it note also offers small navigation buttons that allow you to toggle through the ‘trail’ of articles that I commented on within this heading.

Now why do I think this can best Digg or Slashdot?  Well for one thing, it keeps the comment close to the original content.  Both Digg and Slashdot requires users to submit articles, which may or may not be something close to a primary source.  They both have processes to slow down abuse, but its very possible to have a submission of a blog article based on a blog article based on a blog article based on a news story.  Hence, the result that many people don’t always make it to the actual article and get hung up on the comments.

Another great thing about this is that viewers can follow the trail of a commentator that they choose to follow without childish comments, flames, curse words and off beat arguments breaking out amongst a community of people that don’t have much to do all day long.

There are some useful subsciption options with this as well.  I think this is the area that Trailfire has the greatest room for improvement.  I’d very much like to be able to feed the headlines and the comments I’ve posted to my website in summary form, kind of like the tool that feedburner offers for news and blog feeds.  Currently Trailfire is halfway there offering an embedded link that will walk you down the trail, but I’d prefer to see a map or outline of where I’m going first.

Never the less, the tool has made a great and very useful start and I’m going to have some fun working and following this new technology!

Page Popularity for Site: 2% [?]

Time and again, NASA pops up as an example of an agency that has lost or mis-managed knowledge. There is an urban legend that NASA lost the notes and information used to create the final designs of many of the rockets of the Apollo program. Many of the original draft notes were on paper, which has not been preserved well, and worse many of the early drafts went through multiple hands-on real time revisions that were never documented at all. Many of the engineers from the period have retired or passed away and the knowledge they developed from the apollo program is now lost to the ages.

Last week, it was reported that a mock up of Skylab that had been held at a space museum in Alabama was recovered from a parking lot where it had been stored under shrink wrap for several years. The shrink wrap had been donated by the Army, but over the years fell apart until birds and teenagers had their way with the replica of SkyLab. Now volunteers are working to restore this vestige of the Apollo program built from spare parts.

Massive Library Fine?
So now it comes as little surprise that the National Archives who held the original tapes of the lunar landing has no record of receiving the tapes back from NASA after NASA checked them out back in the 1970’s.

The tapes were special in that they were filmed at 10 frames per second so that the video could be transmitted from space to a specially built TV that could play that format. This TV was then filmed by live television and transmitted around the world. NASA was preparing to scrap the now antique machinery capable of replaying the tapes, and when they went looking for the Apollo 11 tapes, there were no tapes to be found???

Conspiracy heyday
The loss of knowledge in the tapes has fueled the fire of conspiracy theorists that claim that the lunar landing was a staged hoax. The tapes were magnetic and can decay if not stored correctly so tracking them down is a time sensitive issue.

For more on this story see One Giant Mystery for Mankind

Page Popularity for Site: 3% [?]

Last fall I had to scramble to have a home Security system installed. After getting some death threats at work, I raced home, hit the internet, went through Google and came up with the top picks and contacted them to come out and provide an estimate once I got back to town after hiding outside of town for a few days.

Now you may ask why I was getting death threats from work? Well, long story short and without releasing any juicy details that will come out in the book, I was an accountant for a company that learned they were not covered under Sarbanes-Oxley and rather than bring the books into compliance as I and my fellow accountant were proposing, they decided to threaten us instead and hope that we went away. (In case you didn’t know it there’s a loop hole in Sarbanes-Oxley big enough to drive a freighter full of goods from China through it 24 hours a day 7 days a week 52 weeks a year.)

Long story short we didn’t go away until they fired us, and now their stock trades as a penny stock and their auditors have questioned their ability to remain as a going concern. Its amazing how some people will avoid doing good business and make a fortune as they try and squeeze a buck or two out of a company by cutting corners or worse.

So I learned my lesson last year, when I got back into town after hiding out for a few days, I met with a security consultant and bought an alarm.

Very expensive, if I hadn’t been scared for the life of my kids (who were threatened too) I may have researched the topic more or even haggled more. Lesson Learned: haggle when you have time and your loved ones aren’t being threatened by goons on the otherside of the planet.

So these days I keep my eye out whenever security systems pop up, I already have my system, but would recommend that everyone else don’t make a rash purchase while you are Under the Gun!

Home Security Systems offers home security information and might be one more source you can check out as you start your search. Google is a good source also, but sometimes you need to get at trusted information that doesn’t show up on the top ten list of a google search.

Page Popularity for Site: 3% [?]