May 15, 2006 | blog
Well its nice to see a little common sense prevail. Check out the news at TechWeb:
U.S. Dismisses Google Complaint, Says IE 7 Plays Fair
I’ve been following this silly attempt of Google’s for the past few weeks and it really disappointed me that they would sink to that level Google has brought some innovative products to market, and have injected a lot of excitement and attention to the ‘Web 2.0’ world. But their cry-baby routine about the defaul search settings in a browser that they don’t own simply sours my opinion of the cocmpany.
Hopefully they will not attempt anything more insulting, like litigation about this. There are so many other areas to focus on, and changing a default search setting in a browser is not going to make/break their search revenues.
Google does occasionally come across like the “big bad” Microsoft many people are concerned about. While I think MS has turned the corner on that behavior, I’m sure that some corners of the company may still harbor that “attack mode”, if you will.
At any rate, the current squabble is rediculous and is best settled by this US DOJ report.
May 13, 2006 | blog
Ok, here is a neat new service: BackupMyBlog
TechCrunch has the details on the new service that is currently in beta.  The BackupMyBlog service performs an automated backup of your blog once a day. The service will then email you a status report on the backup.
Great stuff, I’m trying it out on RickMahn.com to see how the service performs and evaluate the reporting features. Should be interesting, I’ve been looking for this type of service for awhile.
May 12, 2006 | blog
Today I found When Brands Collide on Own Your Brand, where Mike Wagner elaborates a bit on the subject of Personal Brand. In it, he discusses how the concept of personal brand is more important, and has more impact than in previous years.
Ever since I read this post on Personal Brands by Shel Israel, I’ve been seeing more and more discussion on the topic. Not that the concept is ‘new’, but that the impact in our society is/will be huge. The implications to businesses as employees with strong personal brands could affect the bottom line. As we move into the future, and blogging continues to grow, the audiences of those blogs will continue to grow.
In our daily lives we travel in small geographical circles that are very comfortable, very well-known to us. Most of us work with the same people every day, we go to the same places, see the same things. The physical audience in our daily lives is small and well known, we know who we can be upfront with, we know who we need to handle with ‘kid gloves’. We have the ability to see another’s face when we communicate with them, and see the impact our conversation has.
When we blog, we connect with people who have similar interests, but are geographically dispersed. And because of the revolution in communications technologies, we have an audience of hundreds of millions of people. Through tagging and searching, we find each other and start conversations. Since we can’t view each other during the conversation, we tend to be more honest and open in what we say and do. The ability to have clear honest communications is at the root of blogging – and as a side effect, you can learn a lot about the blogger.
Now take the concept of personal brand and figure in that massive audience. Can you see how personal brand (a person’s reputation) can now be built to have the name recognition of a corporate brand? In the blogosphere, there are already a number of people who are approaching this kind of recognition.
So for the rest of us Z-Listers the important part is to understand what your blog says about you. What power you hold in your hands when you post to your blog. You have a powerful tool to shape your career or your life, and that massive audience that we can write to, but how do you want to use it?
Technorati tags: naked-conversations, own-your-brand, personal-brand, shel-israel
May 12, 2006 | blog
Easton Ellsworth has posted an article over on Performancing about the three tools he uses to track his conversations & comments. He uses a combination of coComment, del.icio.us, and co.mments. Head on over and joint join the discussion.
May 10, 2006 | blog
Alright, I finally went and did it this past weekend. I’ve gone ahead with my idea of creating a snowmobiling focused blog, called Snowmoblog.
So I thought I didn’t have time to write on one blog, eh, well now there’ll be two to keep up. In all honesty, the idea keeps me going. Work sucks, and I needed a creative outlet that I have a great passion about. The fun part (I’m hoping) is to have that outlet and be able to talk about blogging, web, and technical related things here at RickMahn.com. If you are into snowmobiling, check it out over the next few weeks – its in a rough form right now, but it will start coming together as I work out the kinks.
Snowmoblog is powered by WordPress, and I’ve got a temporary 3-column theme that will work for now, though I’ll be working on a custom theme for that site as well as this one in my spare time. The hard part will be the graphics, as I’ve mentioned before, it is just outside my capabilities sometimes so I may need to outsource that part.
May 10, 2006 | blog
To all you crackberry users – infoSync World has reviewed the new T-Mobile BlackBerry 8700g. The 8700 series has a new, larger QVGA screen, includes EDGE data services for better wireless performance (I’ve seen up to 200kbps on my MDA), a refined user interface, and a new Intel XScale processor helps speed up the device.
