that canadian girl

Category: Web & Technology

  • The Twitter backlash begins: Welcome to a world of pain and spam

    A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.

    The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.

    Such a pain, Twitter spam takes over my inbox

    To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

    I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.

    What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.

    Anyone got a better idea?

  • Google launches Big Table (but I beat them to it by nearly a year!)

    Whatever, Google. Big Table isn’t all that, I had that idea a year ago, launched it, got the tshirt and moved on.

    Want proof? Here’s me and my Big Table hanging out together last summer.

  • Gary Vaynerchuk: Tech World 2008 = Hip Hop 1985

    Gary Vaynerchuk, for those who don’t yet know him, is the guy behind, in front and all around Wine Library TV. He’s a raving looney, a totally loveable geek but most of all, a rough diamond of community relations amongst the world of overly polished marketing bullshit. He says things as they are and has marked me enough during SXSWi this year that I’ve got a couple of things he’s said up on my board of inspirational quotes in the office. (Thank you Gary, genuinely!)

    He also agreed with me that making your own wine is a bad idea, mmmkay dad?

    PS – I want my own WLTV sweatband bracelet thinger!

  • SXSWi 2008: "The Future of Corporate Blogs" panel notes

    These aren’t the tidiest notes, and I even failed on jotting down exactly who was speaking but there are a few useful points in there… Thanks to Lionel for the insight on how Dell dealt with feedback in the early days.

    The Future of Corporate Blogs
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  • SXSWi 2008: "Creative Collaboration: Designers and Developers working together"

    I wasn’t so hot on this panel, found there was a lot of navel-gazing and not enough direction. Also, I don’t know what world these guys live in but do they not also have to contend with marketing, business dev, crazy bosses with wild ideas? There was no discussion about how to integrate the real-life demands into collaborative processes. Nice people, but rubbish panel.

    Creative Collaboration: Designers and Developers working together
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  • SXSWi 2008: "Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing" panel notes

    For this panel, I ditched the laptop and only used pen and paper so my notes are less than clear. In fact, I’m lucky if I can read my own handwriting, but the highlights for me were finally meeting the lovely Tara Hunt, a fellow Canadian expat and inspirational blogger.

    My notes might be a bit garbled but sue me, I was too busy listening.

    “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing” panel notes
    Panel: Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh McLeod, David Parmet
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  • SXSWi 2008: "What teens want online and on their phones" panel notes

    The notes from this panel are pretty thorough – it was one of the first panels I attended and I was pretty enthusiastic with the typing. Interesting findings, but the main takeaway for me is that these kids are clever and pretty discerning, we need to give them a whole lot more credit than we (or I) currently do!

    “What teens like online and on their phones”
    Panel of teens from age 11-17, based in the Austin area and of different levels of interest in technology, music, etc…
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  • SXSWi 2008: "Cognitive Seduction 4.0: 20 ways to woo our users" panel notes

    Cognitive Seduction 4.0: 20 ways to woo our users
    Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

    For this panel, I’ll admit my notes were a bit patchy and I relied on a few other ppl’s notes to improve them. I was too mesmerised by Kathy’s talk to worry so much about notes. But read on anyways…

    I’ve also borrowed a few of Kathy’s images to illustrate for those who weren’t so lucky as to attend. They’re completely her copyright, ownership and what not. (They rock!)
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  • SXSWi 2008: "A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe?" panel notes

    Since I attended SXSW last week, I thought it’d be the right thing to do to share my notes from panels. They’re incomplete, I’ve probably interpreted some statements wrongly, there are probably plenty of typos. But I felt I’d be a complete shmuck if I didn’t do the community thang and shared my notes.

    So if you’re not interested, apologies about the next few posts, which will each summarise a panel. At the end, I’ll try to add links to other (better) coverage of the same panels to give the bigger picture. If you’ve taken notes or have something to add (like videos!), just leave a comment and I’ll include it in my post.

    First off, the “A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe?” panel notes…
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  • Hippie 2.0: Reflecting upon SXSW 2008

    South by SouthWest is over. Well, the interactive bit is anyways. Music is clearly still going strong, as I witnessed walking down 6th Street and lucking out on seeing Simian Mobile Disco at La Zona Rosa with a few of the geeks still left in town.

    Reflecting upon the past week, it’s comforting to see a clear sense of community amongst the geeks. Topics that kept reoccurring were ones of social capital, change and collaboration. The jaded half of me couldn’t help but snicker. Is this hippie 2.0* or something?

    Don’t get me wrong, I find this “Let’s hug, love and help each other” attitude immensely endearing and refreshing, but I can’t help but be tickled by some of the more naive ideas that were exchanged over the course of the week. Not every single one of our ideas will live on past the panels, not every one of our harebrained startup ideas will become the next Facebook and not every suggestion is revolutionary. But it doesn’t matter, it’s motivating to be surrounded by people with faith in their ideas and seemingly endless energy to turn them into reality.

    So if it’s up to me, I’ll be attending SXSWi again next year. The panels may not all have been oh-so-fabulous, but regardless, meeting so many new people is an injection of energy, if nothing else.

    I now need to somehow make sense of this creative energy and communicate it to my team at work. I’m not sure I can express it in words. Maybe I need a Kumbaya 2.0 to express my feelings?

    [* I seemingly didn’t coin the word, as it comes up on the Interweb in a different context, but I think it’s terribly fitting here as well.]