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One of the big technological leaps that made the personal computer possible was the disc drive.  Al Shugart, founder of Seagate, a key innovator in disc drives, passed away on Dec. 13 due to complications from heart surgery, according to Business Week.

Shugart’s influence went far beyond Seagate, however. His freewheeling, engineers-come-first philosophy helped propel the drive industry to a truly remarkable pace for innovation. Indeed, while even nontechies are conversant with “Moore’s Law,”—the idea that computer chips get more powerful at regular intervals—the storage capacity of a single drive has been increasing far faster than the processing power of microprocessors for many years.

Read the full article, including tales of his legendary antics here. 

Thanks to David Fumento for the pointer to the story.

Without a doubt this is one of the best posts I’ve read in a long time.  Mary Schmidt discusses situational excellence.  I remember in one of my first jobs out of college, Roy Catignani explaining to me “Keep your eyes on the cheese.”  I’ve seen many a project hamstrung by issues that had little or no real impact on the project or the end deliverable. 

Remember, in web projects 80% is a good rule of thumb – if you’ve got 80%, the other 20% probably is not noticable to anyone but you.  Pick the last 20% up after go live.

A list from Mary that’s worthy of reciting at the beginning of every project meeting:

Before you go and spend a gazillion dollars on something slick (commercial, brochure, logo, slogan, artificially induced “viral” marketing) – ask yourself:

1. Is our (and/or our CEO’s) definition of “excellent” the same as our customers?

2. Do our customers care? (Or, are we blowing dollars on our own ego strokes?)

3. Will they even notice? (A pantone shade never closed a deal.)

4. Can the dollars better be spent on walking the talk, versus coming up with “better” talk? Example: That BoA YouTube singer.

Open E (Live @ The Tabernacle)

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by John

Blog tagging is when one blogger posts on an issue and tags (“you’re it”) other bloggers to have them post on a theme.  This one is “5 Things You Don’t Know About Me.”  Think of a blog chain letter.

1. My now defunct “Fishing New England” website used what has become a standard blog format…in 1995.  So I can argue with some validity to have been one of the first blogger.
2. I once owned a company that sold Women’s Fashion Accessiories – primarily a thing called a Scarf Tube – which we were able to sell in great numbers through QVC Network. (Note: the picture isn’t our product, but ours was similar.)  They were a QC nightmare – they tended to snag on silk – hence we had to do 150% QC – every product checked once, half of them checked twice.  The business ended when my ex-wife and I split up – she did sales, I did production and that’s like gasoline and matches for a relationship.  My experience is probably the stuff of a full article for the future.
3. I hate licorice, but love baklava.
4. I’m into SciFi, my favorites over the past couple years are “Battlestar Galactica”, “Blade” (the series), “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and “Babylon 5”.  I’m also partial to the Fox series “House.”
5. I’ve got a technolthriller you’ve never read.  Maybe I’ll pdf it and send it to one of the vanity presses so you can…although the new movie “Blood Diamonds” might steal it’s thunder.  The title of my manuscript is “Blue Ice.”

A couple random things:

1. I used to tape Grateful Dead shows.
2. I was first mate on a charter boat in Milazzo, Sicily.
3. I was for a time a certified nuclear grade air balance technician.
4. My grandfather was a life-long Linotype operator.  I work for the company that developed the system that killed the Linotype.
5. My parents first date was at a Dave Brubeck concert at Dad’s frat at the University of Pennsylvania, where they had to sit under the piano.  I was able to relate the story to Brubeck himself when I met him while going to school at the University of Vermont.

(edit: Matthew points out quite correctly that it’s chain mail – not a nice thing to do to friends.  As he says: ” If you want to know something new about me, it’s that I really object to chain letters. “) 

So if you blog and feel like picking up the topic, which is great (I love to talk about me!) then feel free…

I get a lot of email.  Probably 50 a day minimum that I actually need to read.  The problem is those are sprinkled in over 700 emails that come to me at my various addresses.  That means that under 10% of my mail is actually the stuff I’m looking for.

Gmail (for my personal stuff) keeps up fairly well. Relatively few false positives (where something important gets delivered to the spam bucket).  The corporate email is a nightmare.  I currently have 1596 in my junk folder, 441 in another spam folder, and 478 in my suspect folder.  This after I cleaned it out on Friday.  In the past I’ve crashed my machine when deleting the email – frequently.

Why complain now?  It’s gotten to the point that with both SpamBayes and the corporate filter, plus my local rules, I’m filtering out close to 80% of my mail.  That means I’m getting more and more stuff sent to the wrong folder.  In fact I missed an important meeting this morning because a whole thread of email had gone to spam.

I’m an old school kind of webmaster – that means that I have webmaster@ email addresses for the domains I am responsible for.  Valueable stuff comes to those accounts.

In the future, my email will only get worse. The “real” stuff will become a smaller subset of the stuff getting pushed through and I can expect more lost opportunity due to important messages getting trashed. 

I’d be glad to hear ideas on this.  I’m fresh out, but for the first time, I can see a day when I turn off the corporate email or send it all to gmail and let Google sort it out.

Both David Churbuck and Rob O’Regan have are right on my wavelength this morning.  It must be something in the air.

Churbuck has an excellent list reflecting the lesson’s he’s learned in 11 months at Lenovo (as he terms it, a $14 billion start up).  All of them key ideas, but here are two that really stick with me.

Interactive/Digital marketing feels hotter to me in 2006 than Online Journalism did in 1994 in terms of potential impact and disruptive impact.

Yup, we’re still figuring this thing out.  There’s very much a wild west feel, and I’m often struck by the “give it a try and we’ll see what we get” attitudes that I’m hearing.  The problem is that we’re all looking for numbers to justify what we’re doing, yet anyone with a passing understanding can see that for the most part, our metrics are severely flawed.  I see this getting worse – as I read my copy of Online Media, Marketing and Analytics this morning I was struck by how many single point of light solutions are coming.  One for tracking online video, another for mobile video blogs, etc.  I don’t know anyone who’s got the time in the SMB world to watch 30 different tracking applications. 

(more…)

Okay, I’ve given Edelman enough grief over the past few months that I am glad to be able to post this.  They’ve been running a campaign for Walmart which they’re calling internally “Candidate Walmart” – which is being run as a political campaign – right down to the win big or lose it all nature.  From the Wall Street Journal:

If Mr. Scott, the chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., seems like he’s running for office, it’s no accident. For the last 15 months, the Edelman public-relations firm, led by seasoned political operatives, has been directing a campaign it calls “Candidate Wal-Mart.” The goal: Rescue the battered image of the world’s largest retailer.

The truth is we don’t always realize that business is always a win or lose proposition.  I could get cute and start talking about how they’ve been hamstrung with a candidate that’s been rather disfunctional, but that’s just too easy.

The thing to look at is that the approach may just be correct for new marketing. This is all about engagement and relevance, but even better, it is about public opinion and swaying it to the positive side. The call to action is to simply “like” Walmart.   Read more about the campaign on PotomacFlacks.com and on Force For Good.

Related post: Mary Schmidt (two links today…) writes on why Walmart is down this holiday season.

Mary Schmidt posted today about corporations that abandon their websites.  A truly prescient post, one all of us in corporate marketing should read…twice.

My Bottom Line Perspective: Marketing, advertising and PR aren’t dead in their present incarnations (yet). But, all three are changing radically in both definition and execution. The successful companies in the Intention Economy will be the ones who realize marketing is everything you do – not just a department, glossy brochure, or goofy advertising campaign. Who needs hard copy slicks and dead wood media ads when you have millions already looking for (and finding) you? Will you be ready when they do? Can you communicate (and thus compete) effectively?

I’m fighting just this battle right now, and frankly, I’m not sure at all of the outcome.  Although it takes me minutes to tweak a corporate site, it can take weeks and even months to get new campaigns approved, or to get the ball rolling on a bit of obvious pr.  Frankly, the whole thing is tiring, and it makes one wonder if the effort is even worth it.

I could rant on for several pages on the issue, but I’ll summarize: inaction due to process can hamstring your marketing efforts.  Failure to devote resources to getting the message out internally as well as externally can cripple – never forget that you’ve got to first sell your staff, as even the lowliest employee is a marketing resource.  Speed and action make you active, rather than reactive.  If all your marketing is being driven by external issues, rather than directed from inside, you’ve lost control.

When was the last time you substantively updated your site?  Is your website’s message really the message you are trying to convey?  Or is your message “no one is home, please turn out the lights!”

This one’s a request from Jill…

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Bane of retired tech writers and farmers alike – the gopher.