The Buzz

In my regular rounds around the blogosphere I couldn't help but get stuck on a comment from a post a few weeks ago on Dead 2.0. I quoteth:

StikiPad seems extremely stuck on their technology, and their consumer benefits are, well, lacking. They use ‘write a book‘ as an example, and something tells me they don’t have and never will have a single author take them up on that challenge.

Stuck on our technology? Lacking consumer benefits? My goodness.. are we talking about the same service here?

Being grouped in the Web 2.0 buzz we take a lot of compliments, but also get our share of harsh criticisms. Ultimately we've learned to seed out the negativity and try to focus on the improvements (if any are even brought up). The quote above wouldn't bother me so much if we didn't have quite a few authors (including some diehard old-school beta users) preparing their books using their StikiPad's. After all, we have a few features geared specifically towards these users (Word Count and Syntax Highlighting to name a few).

Herein lies my honest question to you: are you writing a book using StikiPad, and if so, how has the process been?

Are you a Rails developer? If so, I'm sure you've heard of Rails Day 2006. And if, by chance, you've been hiding in your basement plotting world domination and simply haven't heard, we strongly urge you to gather your closest friends and get ready to register for one helluva competition. Mark it on your calendar - June 17th be the day!

There's simply no better community than the Rails community when it comes to competitions getting developers to make brand new applications to make life easier for all of us. As developers ourselves, we're committed to helping others when we can, and Rails Day is a great reason to dust off your programming skills and grab 2 of your closest friends for a downright good time.

Among the many cool prizes (and many more which will be announced soon), we're sponsoring 5 half-year Power User accounts and an iTunes gift certificate for one of the winning teams. We're very much looking forward to seeing what everyone creates.. good luck!

Just a quick note about a little piece we did over at Sproutit's Big Act. The direct link to the article is here, and you can read all about using wikis for your business and how we use our own StikiPad to manage our business on the inside.

Special thanks to Charles and the guys at Sproutit for letting us in on their blog for the day!

We've been doing a number of interviews around town in the past few weeks and thought that maybe some of our users would like to get to know a bit more about us.

Earlier this month we did an interview with Brad over at Stranova, a bi-weekly business strategy podcast. You can download the podcast here, and be sure to check out Stranova for some other great interviews (and, for the record, I don't normally sound like Sean Connery like I do in that interview - damn microphone!).

Also, Ken over at One Degree was kind enough to post our 5 question interview earlier today. You can read the whole interview here and take a look at other companies that have been interviewed in the 5 questions section of One Degree.

If yourself or someone you know would like some questions answered by us, feel free to e-mail us and give us a heads-up - help spread the word about StikiPad!

So, you may have already noticed that the script.aculo.us wiki made the switch over to StikiPad engine a few weeks back. The script.aculo.us wiki hosts all the demos and documentation for the AJAX effects that are included in such projects as Ruby on Rails. Since StikiPad is written in Rails, we use the script.aculo.us effects throughout to help deliver information to you. It's been great to work with Thomas over the past few weeks - we greatly appreciate all the hard work he and his team have done for the Rails community (and it's an honour to have them using StikiPad)!

On a complete aside, having recently made the transition from Windows -> Mac one of the greatest features that I use daily is the automatic spell checking that's performed throughout OS X. For example, see honour up there - yea, that should be honor. And colour? Yea, should be color. You can take the boy out of Canada, but you can't take the Canadian out of the boy. Right, eh?

Adrants: MP3 Usage Reduces Teen Radio Listenership by Almost Half

A recent study by Bridge Ratings & Research found just eight percent of radio listeners who have owned an MP3 player for more than six months listen to radio less. While those who have recently bought an MP3 player do, certainly listen to less radio as they get comfortable with their new music source, the study suggest MP3 is not a radio killer. However, for the 12-18 demo, it may be. After owning an MP3 player for six months, 45 percent 12-18 year olds listen to radio less.

I haven't listened to the radio since I bought my first iPod, way back in 2001. No, seriously. I drive a lot too — 6 hours every other weekend, for the last three years. Why? The advertisements drove me away. The same thing is happening on TV as well. The Apprentice season finale was absolute crap (much like every episode after the first season). I didn't count the number of times they broke away for commercial, but it felt like every 5 minutes Donald decided to take an advertising break. It's to the point now that the only advertising driven show I will watch is "The Big Idea" with Donny Deutsch and even then I mute the ads and go back to the computer.

The 30 second spot isn't dead, but damn — use your imagination a little. Find a creative director and tell a story, don't just pitch your product. Show me the benefits, don't just tell me. TV is a visual medium, use it! There for awhile a real estate company in Oklahoma City, OK kept running this spot with the broker standing outside screaming her pitch. I'm not kidding, she was literally screaming. That was one of the most annoying ads I've ever heard. How much business did that company lose because of a piss poor spot? There's another one that runs for lasick eye surgery, starting out with this big ... a few seconds pass by ... ... a little more time ... . Geez, I'm glad you found a soundclip you like but is it really necessary to use that to draw my attention to the screen?

Instead of standing outside her office, what if the broker actually showed some of the houses her office has sold? One of her angles was that they would sell "any house for any reason" and she talked specifically about annoying neighbors. Neighbors that painted their house bright pink. She is painting a picture using words, when the medium is visual. How asinine is that and aren't pictures worth a thousand words anyways?

For the lasick spot, why not show the difference in before and after surgery. Start out with a blurry screen and focus in slowly, showing the gradual change and difference that the surgery can make. Show me, don't tell me.

A tip of the hat to the guys at Rethink(IP), when was the last time someone rethought TV? From where I sit, there is a huge gap between what consumers are demanding these days and TV spots are delivering. I want quality, funny and interesting stories. Dramatic visuals that show me how your company can help me. I want news that is relevant to me. Hey, sounds like what Google did for internet advertising.

So when will we have targeted television spots? Yes, I know that spots are "targeted" to the supposed demographics of shows, but why not target it to *me* instead of the "demographic" that someone in an office dreamed up targeting. I have no idea if Tivo ever tried it, but I would definitely be willing to watch ads that have relevant context to my viewing habits. I want to know about concerts, events, buzz worthy news, local entrepreneurs, interesting new products and cool shows. I'll gladly watch those spots.

Watching TV these days is like visiting portals in the late '90's with flashing banners and the blink tag.