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Archive for the ‘Tips & Tricks’ Category

Radio Firefox With Jason Schramm

27 Jan 2006

Jason, the guy with whom I did the Blogiarism series on this blog and on his, has his own radio show at the very funky radio station called “Radio Firefox”. In his show on January 25th, he referred to me, to this website and to our collaboration on the blog plagiarism topic, which Randy Charles Morin defined in this context for the first time and referred to it as ‘blogiarism’. The first two episodes of his show are up and ready for download.

In his podcasts of the radio show, Jason points out handy tools and Grease monkey scripts to get things done in Firefox. He also talks about recent search engine related news and about a lot of other things that cross his mind once the red light is flashing above his broadcasting booth.

The episode in which I’m featured was all about Government request for search engine data, Corporate bloggers, Plagiarizing blogs, Google, Google News, Disney/Pixar Deal, Firefox Extensions.

Radio Firefox is a tech-oriented radio show, with a companion website that has podcasts and excerpts from the shows.

Subscribe to the podcast : here

The show isn’t available on the airwaves in Europe, but the podcasts are. Tune in here to get some !

 

Protecting Your Search Privacy

23 Jan 2006

SearchEngineWatch helps you cover your (local) search history with Harry Potter’s magic cloak. Too bad you actually can’t remove remotely stored information, but here’s five steps that help you deleting the local dirt pile and give you some insight in what’s happening with your information on the remote side:

1. Search Privacy On Your Own Computer
2. Search Privacy & Your ISP
3. Search Privacy & Your Search Engine
4. Search Privacy & Your Personalized Results
5. Search Privacy & Sites You Visit / Tracking Services

Interesting conclusion :

[...]most people probably think the conversations they have with search engines as being private. But to date, we don’t have any protected searcher-search engine relationship as we do with attorney-client privilege or between clergy and worshipper. Perhaps that needs to be enshrined in some way. But then again, others may feel that going out on to the public web and using publicly accessible search engines entitles no one to an expectation of privacy, or perhaps a more limited one.

Tune in to this article for more background information, follow the links at the bottom of the page.

 

French Maid TV, A Guide To Video Podcasting

09 Jan 2006

I’m still waiting for the second edition of their video podcast because the first one was really funny. Nevertheless, since I hadn’t blogged the first one yet I’ll do that now so y’all can wait with me. In their first episode, the French Maids showed the world how to video podcast. Laura, Eve and Natalie were quite entertaining when they were giving it a go, and that French accent and the background music made it sound a lot like ‘Allo, Allo’, a British comedy that ran on Flemish television a few years ago. (I believe the reruns are still quite popular)

The marketing of the fanware goes through cafepress but it’s not so extended yet. Perhaps in a next stage they will offer more things…

French Maids

Check out the video podcast, episode 1 (.mov, 11mb) – the websitethe bios.

 

Word Of Mouth Basic Training

30 Nov 2005

WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Training (WOMBAT) Blog kicked off on November 24th. They started the blog, along with the companion email newsletter and podcast series, to provide practical, hands-on advice about word of mouth marketing. And so they do.

How-To : Dealing With Negative Word of Mouth – 5 Tips from Ketchum’s Paul Rand

1. Know your detractor
2. Listen to your complaints
3. Have facts readily available
4. Maintain perspective
5. Activate your influencers

Read all about these 5 tips

"Digging up dirt on the bad guy will only land you in more hot water, Paul says. But with a thoughtful, honest approach, negative word of mouth can be counteracted quickly."

wombat

Visit [the WOMBAT blog] via [i-Wisdom]

 

12 Tips for Targeting Inactive Subscribers

30 Nov 2005

EmailLabs has 12 tips on what you can do to re-engage the inactive subscribers for your newsletters, panel or promotional marketing :

1. Use special offers
2. Survey subscribers
3. Allow profile updates
4. Understand their demographics/profile
5. Try different send dates/times
6. Modify the frequency
7. Create different content
8. Try different formats
9. Test different styles of subject lines
10. Monitor seed/proof lists
11. Send a postcard through regular mail
12. Move re-engaged to active status

Source & description for each tip : [EmailLabs]

Also read : 15 Tips For Improved Subject Lines.

 

Tuning Windows

27 Nov 2005

Just recently (in my last post to be exact) I needed to get a screencap of a movie that was running in my MediaPlayer. Every time I did it, I ended up with a black screen in Photoshop, so I needed to find a way to get around that. I used Google to find me a site that could help me and arrived at Darknet. They listed up how to screencap movies for RealPlayer, Windows MediaPlayer and Mac.

Capturing screen shots of a movie, a ‘how-to’ guide :

"For Windows Media Player, you have to disable Hardware Acceleration. You can do this in Windows Media Player 6.4 and later by clicking on View -> Options and moving the Hardware Acceleration slider to None. You can do this in Windows Media Player 7 by clicking on Tools -> Options, going to the Performance tab, moving the Hardware Acceleration slider to None, and restarting Windows Media Player. Now you may make take a screenshot by pressing the [ALT + PRNTSCRN] combination."

Remember to restore the settings after your copy-paste adventure. via [Darknet]
Philipp also did a blogpost on it, but I noticed it too late.

Next : In case you want to convert a video to DVD, VCD, SVCD, CVD or
AVI,DivX,Xvid, ASF and a lot of other formats, check out the guides from [Video-Help]. They have really good tutorials about it.

Next : "Do you use the Run feature in Windows XP? [...] tools and utilities that I bet you never knew you had that can be accessed through the Run feature."

Check out the 113 (!) options on [FixMyXP] and expand your XP knowledge.

Next : "Windows allocates resources according to its settings and manages devices accordingly. You can use the System tool in Control Panel to change performance options that control how programs use memory, including paging file size, or environment variables that tell your computer where to find some types of information."

From Microsoft’s Knowledge Base [id: 308417] :

How to set the performance options for your computer Win XP Home/Pro :

* How to manage processor time
* How to manage computer memory
* How to change the size of the virtual memory paging file
* How to optimize the memory usage
* How to change the visual effects

Next : Tuning Internet Explorer :

* One more way to fine tune Internet. Explorer load time
* Customize Internet. Explorer Title bar
* Further speedup broadband cable Internet connection

Highlight : Remove unnecessary Scheduled Tasks scan by Internet Explorer and make Internet Explorer Load faster :

[...] "trick is to open registry and navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\RemoteComputer\NameSpace and then looking for shared tasks ClassId key {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}. Simply delete it and get out of registry. No need to reboot. Launch Internet Explorer and see the difference."

From [XPTuneUp]

 

Ideas vs Opinions

13 Nov 2005

“The ideas that are being spread most often today aren’t ideas at all. They’re opinions. And we learned a long time ago that everyone is entitled to his opinion. But what if it’s not his opinion? What if the opinion belongs to someone else?” (quote Seth Godin)

Dustin Staiger says, in relation to Seth’s quote : “If you make a statement like that, then you believe there’s a difference between ideas and opinions.”

In another post about this issue, Dustin rethinks the relation between ideas and opinions like this : “Opinions aren’t always bad. In fact, they’re usually necessary. What we have to realize though, is opinions are steps back. Sometimes we need to step back from an idea, but common sense tells us we have to move forward again if we want progress.”

Maybe you’ve figured out a keen idea that looks really logical to you, because from your own point of view what you’ve created is logical and clear. But if someone else comments on this creation he shares an opinion with you, based on your creation/idea. He hasn’t thought of a new idea, you have made him think about yours. You’ve caused him to form an opinion.

Maybe his opinion wasn’t quite positive and it made you realize that there was a difference in interpretation. This (negative) opinion has set you back a few steps, because it became clear your idea needed some more modifications to become a clear and constructive universal idea that everybody would recognize in the way you meant it to be recognized. The opinion caused you to rethink the idea and recreate it so that it would be interpreted exactly the way you wanted it to.

Since common sense tells us we have to move forward to make progress, maybe being set back isn’t so bad after all. The setback will cause you to come up with a plan or with modifications to adjust the original idea and move forward again, so in fact opinions are triggering ideas.

Good teachers in college should always give honest opinions about your work, so that you’re forced to rethink a concept and come up with a new or modified idea. That’s why interaction is the key in a creative learning process, and not the reproducing of an existing idea from the syllabus. Good teachers will learn you how to take these steps forward, how to anticipate on opinions and create a productive view on existing ideas and opinions.

Dustin Staiger has lined up some of the differences between ideas and opinions. I couldn’t have done it better, so here’s what he came up with :

Ideas & Opinions

via [CustomerWorld]

 

Permission Marketing : Sending Out e-Mails

15 Oct 2005

So, you have this wonderful, new, very cool product or newsletter you want to send out to the world. How should you do that? How to prevent your message from getting lost in the bulk? How to avoid spam filters and junk-selectors from marking your email as ‘bad’? Or even better… how to find, select and invite potential buyers to join your list? All of these questions – and a lot more than just these -need a decent answer and some careful considerations in order to succeed in sending, launching or guiding a good opt-in email campaign.

“Studies have shown that the greater number of personalization elements to an email, the higher the response rates.

There’s a lot of things you have to keep in mind, and listing them all would take a lot of time and a lot of writing. Fortunately, somebody else [emailgarage.com] already has taken the time to put this online in the form of a ‘weekly tip’ to which I’ve subscribed a while ago. Here are some valuable links to their tip-archive, I hope you learn as much from it as I did

If you have found a newsletter format that is easy to read, grabs the reader’s attention and makes him click through to your site, that’s no reason to celebrate and lean back contentedly.

  1. Take your time
  2. What is the right frequency for e-mail?
  3. Focus on the first few lines
  4. Act before an e-mail address changes
  5. Tell the user what you’re planning to do with his personal information
  6. Make your e-mail list sign-up visible
  7. Thank your customers for their registration
  8. Explain the benefits of becoming an email subscriber
  9. Where to put the unsubscribe link
  10. Check for spam-like content and spam filter data
  11. Verify all links and check if images appear correctly
  12. Reinforce traditional branding with a consistent e-branding
  13. Never falsify the subject line
  14. Keep the number of mandatory fields as low as possible
  15. How to use a landing page
  16. Don’t sell, sell, sell
  17. Don’t design an email program without looking at the web site
  18. Use e-cards to update your database
  19. Test the layout of your newsletter with different email clients
  20. Defining Soft and Hard Bounces
  21. Apply the 5-30 rule
  22. Using a CMS to manage your HTML email templates
  23. Call to Action
  24. Make HTML and Plain Text Have Corresponding Content
  25. How to get people signing up for your email list?
  26. How to treat images in html emails?
  27. Email regularly
  28. Split lists to enable subject line testing
  29. How to obtain your email list?
  30. Offer something valuable
  31. Be careful using the word FREE
  32. Don’t send advertising
  33. The best time of the day to send out your campaign
  34. Get added to recipients’ address book
  35. Make sure your e-mail is consistent with your corporate image
  36. Six spam filter tips
  37. Don’t use email forms
  38. HTML vs. Plain Text
  39. Don’t forget the preview pane
  40. Plan your e-mail campaigns
  41. Focus on building the relationship
  42. Write good, clear and relevant copy
  43. Christmas, an opportunity to …
  44. Use customer data to personalize emails
  45. Test your e-mail on a small percentage of your opt-in list
  46. Offer multiple response mechanisms
  47. Get to the point
  48. Personalize your FROM field
  49. Make first URL & CTA visible without scrolling
  50. Don’t send B2B emails on weekends
  51. Keep subject lines short and hyperlinks plentiful
  52. Don’t send file attachments

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