With little fanfare last week the Boston MBTA retired the Boeing Trolleys from the Green Line, on the heels of the final delivery of the new(?) Breda cars – which themselves are over 9 years late on delivery. These vehicles were considered one of the bigger public transportation screw ups in history (until the Bredas came along).
Interesting note on the old Boeing cars – they had over 1300 pieces in their door assemblies. Nothing like simplicity in engineering…
Via Andy Dickinson (if you want to find out about video in publishing, that’s where you go…)
Original diagram by Cheryl Colan is here.
Simple enough stuff…you could just as easily use YouTube for the vid hosting bit and plug it into your WordPress or other blog, although I’m not certain you could use VPIP.org to create different versions. I’m going to have to give this a try, but don’t get your hopes up, I have yet to do my inaugural podcast. As they say, I have a face for radio, and to up the ante one more, the voice for newspapers.
I’ve just been watching Matt McAlister’s vidcast on Yahoo Pipes. I’ve been trying to do similar things with rss aggregators for the past couple years, with some success. Notably, I had built a categorized feed aggregator for Reel-Time.com – which eventually fell down because we had so few real bloggers.
I’m thinking that Yahoo Pipes could be an interesting way to deliver timely niche content to a site. It allows you to analyze the content to some degree, hence you ought to be able to do a fine level analysis. Might be a help for businesses in niche sectors to increase their traffic without actually having write original content on a daily basis.
If you’ve got a need in this area, I’m interested in talking – a good test case is definitely called for here.
We had thick, heavy snow Friday into Saturday making a mess of things. Usually it would have been no big thing, I’d have worked Friday from home, occassionally running my aged Ariens snowblower around the driveway to keep up with the mess. This wasn’t usually, I had an important demo and had to trudge into Burlington, via the physical therapist’s office. No big problems on the way in.
I had every intent on getting back on the road at noon, but it didn’t happen. Too many things todo, so I didn’t end up beating feet until about 6pm. The entire drive, about 65 miles of it, was done at somewhere between 10-20 miles per hour. Over 4 hours driving in a truck that is utterly painful on my knee.
When I finally got out with the snow blower on Saturday, the snow was blue and heavily laden with the water it had sucked up over night. I managed to carve a path from the garage door down to the bottom of the driveway, then to clean the very bottom so I could get in and out, before moving back up to the top, where the primary auger started to make very strange noises. At first I thought I’d blown the belt, which isn’t tough to fix. When I checked, I found the previous owner had used a bolt to connect the auger to the axle, instead of a shear pin. The shear pin is designed to prevent the primary differential from getting torn up when you suck up your daughters skateboard, or a particularly tough piece of ice.
Circe Link from her 2005 tour of Japan – more at her site here…
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Driving down the road this morning and I noticed a mattress shop with signs up for their big promotion – they’re now “The Limber Liquidators.” Nice alliteration, but the truth is, they’ve made a serious blunder. After all I believe most of us would really like to be more limber, not less, and we’d certainly prefer not to make ourselves stiffer.
We all get meanings wrong from time to time. Let’s try to remember that consulting a $5.95 dictionary before spending big bucks on a campaign is time well spent. Also consider the other meanings of a word…do they run contrary to your message? Will you be the laughing stock of the ad world (and believe me, we all love to point out lunacy)?
Joanne Barnard singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at a practice for the 12-30-06 reunion of the Worcester music scene’s 70’s favorite Zonkaraz.
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Some sites are starting to see test ads showing up with such dramatic new features as italics and images in the text ads. While I may seem snarky, it’s the next step for the feature which we’ve almost universally learned to ignore. Really, when was the last time you clicked a Google Adsense Ad…really?
Read about the up coming changes here. And for the record, Google could probably learn a thing or two from the newspaper classifeds – where you pay for every litte bit…”want bold, that’s an extra…”
Another great post from John Whiteside…”Things that Amaze Me” – a quick list of all too common mistakes on the web.
- I often go to the web site of a retail store, and the store locator is hard to find.
- I often go to restaurant web sites and can’t find the hours of operation anywhere on the site.
- I do Google searches for restaurants, and can’t find the restaurant’s web site because all the top search results are dining guides, magazines, etc.
The list is astounding. I’ve seen a couple of good ones lately as well.
I urge those of you who haven’t done it to take a few minutes and do a critique of your website, as I discuss in this article on ExpertBusinessSource.com.
Okay, it’s been a wierd morning so far, so this is rather appropriate – Frank Zappa doing “Honey, Don’t You Want a Man Like Me” from 1978. It never ceases to amaze me how tight he and his band were…
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