Thanks for the thoughts

...for all of you who have read my post on Sonya, visited the ChipIn page or seen my notes on Facebook about her and have expressed your well wishes...thank you. I plan to head up and see Sonya very soon and I will pass along all of your good energy.

Thank you Deb Huffman for donating! You are a bright star, and you were the first to step up to the plate and put your money where your heart is.

You can read some of the story here or you can watch.
This aired on CBS last week.



It's pretty amazing what people can do, and it's wonderful for Son, Jeff and the kids to have their house! BUT there is so much more struggle ahead. I want these kids, who will grow up in Oldtown, Maine, (loving and hating its smallness at times) to know that they can further their education and dream big dreams even in small towns, even in the face of struggle.

Please help me start their scholarship fund, donate what you can today.

I need your help to help others

This is personal. My younger cousin Sonya has four young children and she has late stage breast cancer.

I grew up hanging out at her childhood home on the lake in Maine during summer vacations. Down stairs you'd find us drinking Tab and singing to Kool & The Gang - (Joanna), Dexys Midnight Runners (Come on Eileen) and of course we did our share of Blondie and Rick Springfield among many others. We both were so going to famous one day. :o)

Sonya and I have another thing in common, both our moms have survived breast cancer. My Aunt Rita got to set the example by going first. Rita is about as strong as any woman I've ever known; she made her way through the challenge with little complaint and lots of humor. My Mom was diagnosed several years after her sister and followed the example well. Mom and Auntie have been cancer free for years now, so when I learned that Sonya was diagnosed I wasn't completely surprised. Cancer is not a stranger to us.

Sonya was diagnosed while her last child was still in diapers. She has been fighting breast cancer for the past few years now and she's just not catching any breaks. If motherhood wasn't hard enough, she's got to pack in as much mothering as she can into every moment because she has to. I'm a mom too, and I know she worries.

The local paper and TV news have run a story about her this past Mother's Day, some folks have come together to help her family get a home. Please take a moment to meet her and to hear her story. Then contribute to my fundraiser for Sonya - I have set a goal of $400,000.00 that I hope to attain in four rounds of fundraising. Ultimately that's 100K for each of her four kids - so that she and her husband wont have to worry about their education amongst all the other financial burdens they are facing. I want to/need to do this soon, so my goal date for the first round ($100K) is my birthday. For my birthday this year I want to fund four $25k scholarships and provide a little peace of mind, I hope that you will help.

Meet Sonya
The last quarter of the video on this link has an interview with Sonya.

Other ways to help
Check out Sonya's page on ChipIn.

There's absolutely NO reason for this

I've come across this type of message a few times recently, from any number of different web sites. (This one is from a company touting themselves as the "Leader in Media and Marketing Relationship Management") It makes me nuts!!!

Ok, I'm using Safari. Fine. It's version 3, and it's more standards-compliant than that IE atrocity. So, I have no tolerance for your inability to support and test on it. Also, I've got Flash 9.0 r11, so there's no reason to complain about a missing plugin, either. Unless, of course, you're too lazy or not clever enough to write proper detection code.

Get it right, people. No person using the web should be subjected to this.

Serena software goes Mashup TV

I was consulting on a project and needed to evaluate the Serena software solution for a company. These guys are going to be reaping the rewards of success. Their website design just nails the target market and the usability is dead on; see, try, and buy, talk about keeping it simple. And while great design and navigation are worth the effort, it's the video content that sends this one out of park! Serena has created a video collection they call Mashup TV. They have a sense of humor, because they know we (those who surf and buy and work online) do too. Watch the parody of the Product Manager and Engineering Director bashing it out about priorities and bandwith...



From Mashup TV you can watch Michael Parker's Chalk Talk. Michael is the product manager who belongs in front of all your prospects, listen to him explain what a Business Mashup is, and more importantly why you should care. This is a value proposition statement that might be lost among all the cluttered content of another internet day if he were not right there, talking to you, and white boarding with you



Serena has all the bases covered: video to communicate their strategic value proposition, video to develop a community of users, video testimonials that serve as a personable relatable reference that is just what your next client needs to get on board. Are you using video yet?

World Usability Day 2007 - Boston

I spent most of the day today as a volunteer for the World Usability Day events in Boston. If you've never been to one of these, it's worth dropping in next year. There are a number of interactive exhibits (the museum visitors participate), and many of us practitioners from the region provide free, hour-long evaluations of web sites or software for local non-profit or charitable groups.

I made a short (12 second!) video of the setup.

Usability vs. revenue? Nope. Usability = revenue.

Over at BeyondVC, Ed Sim wrote

It is this battle between usability (simple and clean) vs. revenue (balance between getting what you want vs. being cluttered) that is constantly fought behind the scenes.

It's interesting that there's a perception that making a site usable is separate from doing revenue generating activities (like adding banner ads or splash entry pages, as was pointed out at Forbes.com. Even more interesting was the idea that there exists in many companies a battle between the two.

I'm not really surprized. But, I do know that there are more and more "enlightened" sites out there. They understand that usability is directly tied to revenue. Usability goes up, revenue goes up. And the other way around. Adding a few banner ads might get you some small short term revenue gains, but if you upset your paying customers, they're gonna go somewhere else (unless of course, your site is devoted to banner-ad seeking customers). There might be a few web sites that people will continue to go to even when they're hard to use, but yours probably isn't one of them.

There's lots of good examples out there, like 37signals. Take a look. Then make sure that your usability effort isn't competing with your revenue.

PodCamp Boston 2007

Engaging the audience with audio. It's big and it's picking up players everyday. By now you'll know that the Aleuromedia team has an enthusiasm and passion for video as a major communication medium. We believe that video has value in everything from internal corporate messages and corporate culture pieces, to relaying what might have traditionally been a white paper with greater detail and cognition, to dynamic product demos using video, flash and screencasting tools.

That said, our desire to bridge communication gaps and to increase the efficiency with which we share information endears us to audio tools. The goal is to communicate with each other the way we are most inclined to receive it.

Podcasts are great for sharing information because they are so efficient. We can relay lots of material, in small doses, and with great frequency using podcasts. Who could deny that it is faster and easier to tell someone your story than it is to document it? Bigger still, it is more relate able to hear someone share their story. The pace of their words, the inflection, the tenor and diction all have meaning we are already prepared to process and these keys provide us with so much more than our interpretation of the written word. Check out Chris Brogan's blog to hear what I mean.

Whatever you think Podcast are, prepare yourself to learn how much more energy they conduct, check out PodCamp Boston 2007.

Screencasts to social networks and fundraising.

I LOVE the internet!

Kenny ran into this great article on the Non-Profit Times about screencasting. The author Beth Kantor did a great job of going "101" on the topic. It was very cool timing because I've been working with some non-profits and non-profit solution providers to give them insight about New Media and Social Networking. Helping these organization understand what social technologies can mean to fundraising, event, and constituent management, for example using Facebook to work a community based event, or using Inner Circle to connect and stay abreast of what your donors are doing.

Well I liked Beth writing enough that I went to her blog and found that she is infact managing a fundraising campaign for Leng Sopharath. Beth is using Facebook, flickr, ChipIn and her blog, among many other social technologies to coordinate and communicate her fundraising efforts and mission. Kudos Beth! The name of Beth's blog is "How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media", you should check it out.

Screencasts are expected!

In the PC World Community Voices blog, Phil Shapiro writes:

If a company has gone to the trouble of designing a software program, but hasn't taken the trouble to create a screencast about the program, then they are apt to lose me as a customer. Seeing is believing.

I am so happy to read this! The screencast is an essential tool for all software sellers. The ability for a potential customer to see your software in action before a purchase shouldn't be an afterthought, it should be a requirement for a product launch. I hope more and more savvy customers start expecting - and demanding - them!

I also found part 1 of a nice article on screencasting. It's written by Beth Kanter, and it's a well written primer for folks doing their own screencasts.

Baby steps...the presenters used YouTube video clips

In the past week or more I have attended a few informational events. It's great to see and hear what people are doing, especially when they are passionate about their work. The biggest disappointment for me has been something I feel almost personally, like I'm just not getting the word out and helping enough people step outside the trap of business communication norms. "Step away from the PowerPoint templates people, everything is going to be okay."

I've watched time, and time again, individual and corporate representatives swing at lobbed serves and miss (or marginally return). The people in attendance to most of these sessions have paid to be there. They want to be educated and engaged; in all respects a captive audience. In each session I've watched slide shows with bulleted lists; some suffered the "too many words" demise while others struggled with just enough words but no compelling reason to look at the material.

What's interesting though is that I am seeing evidence that we are taking baby steps in the right direction. At least twice in the this last stretch of events a presenter used a YouTube video clip. Each time they achieved focused attention and great responses to those moments in their presentations.

I can't help feeling that these presenters could have captivated us all, I mean really hit the ball out of park, if they would just allow themselves to move out of the PowerPoint Time Warp. ("It's just a jump to the left, And then a step to the right.")