There is no doubt that blogging is becoming an important and increasingly prevalent business tool. “In March 2008, Universal McCann published a report that indicated 184 million blogs worldwide were created, with 346 million people reading blogs globally” (from PR 2.0). As companies become convinced that blogs are more than just a passing phase and begin integrating them into organizational and marketing initiatives, professionals who are coming a little late to the blogosphere party may be worried about getting up to speed. Luckily, blogs in are incredibly simple, consisting of just a handful of basic components. Click on the image below to view an enlightening blog dissection.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, General, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Please take our first Quick Quiz! You must vote to see the results, so go for it!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

A smart article from Business Weekly’s Technology desk highlights the fact that “unsexy newsletters” are currently appearing as front runners in the fight for online advertising dollars. The article highlights some of my favorite daily eRags, Daily Candy and Thrillist, as being particularly profitable. These popular eNewsletters deliver short, fun content, typically focused on local events/businesses, right to my email inbox each morning. (I’d also like to give a shout out here to Ideal Bite and Flavorpill.)

We can learn a lot from these successful eNewsletters when looking to craft our companies’ eNewsletters. DailyCandy founder “Dany Levy” reminds her editors that “It’s a privilege to be in someone’s e-mail box.’” and I think that is a great way to think about it. As we prepare to launch ePiphany, Astek’s monthly Newsletter, some questions I’ve been asking myself are:

• Who is my audience?
• What kind of questions have I actually been asked that I could answer using this email? What kind of issues have my clients stated they are dealing with that I could help address?
• What kind of information/services would help my readers increase the efficiency of their work, alert them to something they have never heard of before?
• What would my audience consider fun and/or entertaining?
• How do we want to position Astek as a consulting company and how can I craft my content to reflect our brand?
• How can I promote Astek products and services in a tasteful and approachable way?
• How can we set ePiphany apart from the other emails they receive while remaining professional?

Hopefully when you receive your first issue of ePiphany, the answer to these questions will be self evident.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Entrepreneurship, General, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Now that there’s no way the Astek bump could artificially inflate the popularity of Brendan McNamara’s hilarious YouTube interview with NBA star Stephon Marbury, I feel obliged to brag on him a little bit. The story goes that he was driving by a bus stop in L.A. and saw Stephon waiting for a bus (eating at a restaurant in L.A. with Brendan is a special experience since he recognizes just about anyone he’s ever heard of). He ran home to grab his video gear and brought it back to the bus stop. This is the first episode of what ensued:

What I especially like is the way Brendan split “Me & Stephon” into multiple YouTube segments to give it an episodic feel. You could draw a straight line to chart the increased viewership of each episode over time, with Episode One weighing in at more than 40,000 views in the past week since it was posted. Go B!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media

I wrote recently about how easy it is to import your blog posts into Facebook. Though this still stands for those of you who write a blog by you and only you, for those of us who are a contributor to a blog with multiple authors, things get a little hairier. So I thought I would write out some simple to follow, step-by-step instructions.

If you follow my previous directions, the posts will come in with no authorship attributions, so it will appear as though you authored every post. In fact, it will show up in the news feed as “[Your Name] wrote [Blog Post Title]” even if you did not in fact write that particular blog post.

The Facebook import feature is so basic that there is really no way (that we found) to parse out an individual author. It took some doing, but we eventually figure out a way to import only the posts of a particular author into their Facebook profile using a service called FriendFeed.

Using FriendFeed (and some duct tape and a hammer) we followed the steps below to force a single author RSS feed we could use with Facebook.

1. Open a new FriendFeed account.
   • Skip the step asking you to “Find your friends“.
   • You should only use this FriendFeed (FF) account for the blog(s) you write that you want to import into Facebook. So if you’ve already got a FF account with a bunch of other stuff on it start a new one. If this is your first FF, start a second account if you want to use FF as it was originally intended.
2. Click ”Me“ in the left hand column (Red box in image below).




3. Click ”Blog (Green box in image above). You will come to this screen:



4. Enter your blog URL.

5. Select the box that says This blog has multiple authors.

6. Enter the ”author’s name“.
   • NOTE: For a Wordpress Blog, this should be the name the author uses to sign in to write posts. For instance, my display name on the Astek Blog is Katie Hawkey, but my sign-in name is khawkey. No data was imported when I used Katie Hawkey, but khawkey works perfectly. 

7. Click ”Import Blog“.

8. Click the ”Feed“ tab and you should see your posts and only your posts in the feed like this:



9. Repeat steps 3-8 to add any other blogs you write for that you wish to appear in Facebook.
   • Since you will be named as the author of the post by Facebook you should only import blog contributions that you write.

10. Look for the RSS feed symbol at the bottom of the screen next to ”Other ways to read this feed:” (marked in image above with a red rectangle).

11. Right click on this and copy the link/shortcut. 

12. Log into Facebook and go to: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import.

13. Copy your RSS feed link into the field.

14. The last 4 letters of the URL will be “=atom”. Change this to read “=xml”. 

15. Accept the user agreement and click “Start Importing”.

16. Accept the imports and you are all set!

One drawback of doing it this way is that you will only get the titles and dates of your posts imported. On the plus side, each post will be marked with your Blog name which should increase awareness of your blog and the single link will hopefully drive traffic to your blog. You may want to go into your profile and add a Notes tab if you don’t already have one.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, General, Social Media, Technology, Web

Another Microsoft headscratcher solved, thanks to another blog. But I only got past my sticking point with the help of a comment about halfway down a slew of comments on the post. So hopefully highlighting that helps someone else. Or if you’re still stuck, pour over the rest of the comments. Problems like these rarely have one neat solution for everybody. Here’s the text of the post reproduced:

Ever seen this error when debugging a web app in the VS.NET IDE:

Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. You do not have permissions to debug. Verify that you are a member of the ‘Debugger Users’ group on the sever.

Well, search the net and you’ll get 100s of hits talking about .NET debugging options, IIS configurations, permissions, admin access, etc…. In my case everything checked out and still no luck. Well here’s another cause of this error: adding http://localhost to your Trusted Sites list…. Yup that’s right. Sounds simple, but that’s what did it in my case….

And the comment which got me debugging again:

Just wanted to share an additional tidbit. After trying everything listed here without success, I tried moving localhost from the IE “trusted sites” zone to the “local intranet” zone – and voila! Not sure what the difference is, but it worked.

Note the remarkable similarity, yet frustratingly subtle difference between the solution to this problem, and the one I posted about here.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

Y’know, if/when I have some.  Anyway, this is a presentation on Siftables, “cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?”.  From TED.com.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Gadget, Technology

This slick electronic reader from Plastic Logic might give the Kindle a run for its money. Of course this won’t be in the U.S. for another year and we’re already seeing a new version of the Kindle. Basically, Plastic Logic tries to simulate a piece of letter paper rather than a book, and Amazon’s new Kindle model goes slimmer and lighter without losing the keyboard for annotation. Plastic Logic’s addition of a touch screen is also nice as we are all getting more used to that with GPS and phone devices. Color screens are not far off.

My hope for the E Ink technology years ago was to create a flexible page that you could roll up like a newspaper. The technology accommodates it, but we have yet to see any consumer products designed that way.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Gadget, Social Media, Technology, Web

I was happy to let this Facebook TOS thing boil over as I expected it would, but a lot of people have been asking what I think, so I thought I’d write it down for posterity.

This is another example of what I’m starting to call corporate democracy. Facebook is the innovator in social networking, which is what makes it fun and cool. But consider that it is still not a profitable enterprise. Therefore, they also have to innovate in the revenue category. They have stepped too far a few times (the most stark example was Beacon a couple years ago), and each time the community reacts quickly and honestly.

In this case, I joined the group along with thousands protesting the new terms. In a matter of days Facebook reverted back to the original terms. In my mind, this was a non-issue. 100,000 people click a button and effect change. If only it were that easy in the political system. But then again things aren’t usually that obvious with complex issues.

I’m sure Facebook will continue to try new avenues to gain additional control over user content and find revenue streams. If they step too far, the community will push them back. Facebook knows that the social networking space is fickle (Remember Friendster?) and they don’t want to lose members. I’m not saying don’t pay attention or don’t worry about it. Nor am I saying trust the corporation and don’t worry about your privacy (be sure to set your Facebook privacy settings appropriately). But I am confident in my trust of the well-balanced relationship Facebook currently has with its constituents.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Technology, Web

Okay, most of them are on MySpace, too. But I’m not over there much these days. Some great apps to check out in this round-up, including a Snood-equivalent time-sucker called Bubble Town, some gorgeous Facebook art, and a SUPER addictive word game called Twirl. Well, if you’re into words.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media, Technology, Web