joshwmc on deviantART.

So as I was reading my news feed on Google Reader, some images from this guy (Joshwmc) popped up that blew my mind.  This guy does fan art around superhero movies, and it is extraordinarily realistic and good.

You need to check it out!

The website I work for, GenoNow.com, is a training site for working professionals. I have posted about it before. We are excited about some new content that is focused on the Wal-Mart Vendor community specifically. We have partnered with 8th & Walton, a vendor-training company located in Bentonville, AR to provide learning objects for professionals selling to Wal-Mart.

One of the latest developments coming out of Bentonville is Wal-Mart’s target customer segments moving on from here. Wal-Mart has identified three customer groups that are key to its success going forward; Price Value Shoppers, Brand Aspirationals, and Price Sensitive Affluents. Knowing who these shoppers are and how Wal-Mart defines them is key knowledge for vendors moving forward.

Our newest piece of content from 8th & Walton addresses that in great detail. This is important information that everyone who has a vendor relationship needs to be successful.

It’s also exciting for us because it marks a new strategic tack for GenoNow.com. We have always had training content that is targeted towards a wide audience. Now, we are starting to also bring focus on vertical markets. The first vertical market for us is the vendor community in Bentonville. This was borne out mainly because of where our company is located. It is a market that is immediately available to us, but we are looking for others.

Finding good training that is affordable and convenient to use is hard to find, and that is what GenoNow.com offers.

We are looking for trainers and content owners who are looking for a distribution channel for their training content. If this sounds like you, please contact me at mwilliams (((AT))) sviworld (((DOT))) com.

I was just looking at my url…www.murdog.com and it hit me, that is a pretty cool url. I wonder how many people have done a search on this url and found that they couldn’t buy it. I have had it since 1998, and in web years, that is an eternity. I know a number of people who have purchased web domains and have had to settle for a url that they didn’t like or wasn’t their first choice.

In fact, the company that I work for www.genonow.com had to settle on its domain, and it is a site designed to create revenue. The initial plan was to purchase www.geno.com but that belongs to some dude down in Florida who has yet to do anything with it. C’mon bro, do something with it or give it up. It would be nice to have it.

Anyway, I am glad that I decided to start building and maintaining a site so long ago…in fact, it is just now hitting me that this year marks the 10 year anniversary of MurDog.com. Wow, we need to celebrate that. Or, has it been longer. I may have had this domain since 1995 or 1996. I mean, I was married in 1998, and it seems as though I had the site for at least a year or two before I met my wife. Wow, what a dilemma. Now, I don’t know. Hmmm.

How would anyone figure that out? Do you have any ideas. I guess I should remember, but I have always had more important things to deal with other than the site. It has always been simply a hobby and thus somewhat of an afterthought. If you have any ideas about how to find out how old a site really is, let me know.

I just went to www.archive.org and did a search on my site and it has records of it since 1999, but I am pretty sure that I had it longer than that, but for what it’s worth, it is pretty funny to look at what the site looked like back then. It doesn’t load correctly, but you can see enough of the site to get an idea. Here’s a hint, click on some of the links… they still work… amazing

Internet personality Zefrank has started a new phenomenon for the Internets.  He has officially started The Color Wars.  Ze recounts his memories of summer camp where the entire camp was split by color lines…not the racial kind goofy, arbitrary rainbow type colors…gosh! (Always trying to pick a fight aren’t ya? Anyway, he has started the web version of the Color Wars, and I have officially aligned myself with the Blueteam.

These wars will be waged using Twitter and other sites like Flickr.  I don’t know what the different battles will be, and frankly, I don’t care…my blood runs blue… YOU HEAR BLUE!!!!…blue

I chose blue because firstly, it is my favorite color and secondly, it is the color of this here blog.  It would seem a little hinky to be in the redteam or yellowteam or verygreenteam and have a blue site.  It would be unseemly…and embarrassing, and I wouldn’t have it.

Go to The Color Wars site and Twitter and draw your own line in the sand.  You can join me on the blue team or you can spit in my eye and join up with another team.  Whatever man…whatever…

Long Live Big Blue

Hulu is officially open to the public. What does that mean? It means that you can watch all most of the shows from 2 of the 4 major television networks, Fox and NBC, and some movies from certain movie studios.

Most importantly, we have another compelling time sink to keep us from doing work while at work. Or, if you are like me and you grew up in an era when the tv was always on, here is a great way to get your noise on. I seem to work better in a noisy environment anyway.

I have heard two stories lately that have really made me start to reconsider a company that I used to have very positive thoughts towards. On a recent Security Now podcast with Leo LaPorte and Steve Gibson Steve spent the better part of the show talking about an alarming trend. Paypal, on some of the links on its page, routes users through an ad service called Double Click and then back to its site without the user knowing it. You need to listen to the podcast for a full explanation as to why this is very, very disturbing, but the short version is, it allows for Double Click to place third-party cookies on your system. This is a problem because it allows a third-party, a website that you aren’t expressly visiting to track you as you move from site to site. PayPal is allowing this in a transparent way that doesn’t alert you as the user of the site that it is happening. This is quite disturbing and as of yet, PayPal hasn’t given any explanation as to why they are doing it. Evil.

Next, I just read on Seth Godin’s Blog about his recent experience with PayPal where they sent him on a galactic goose chase when they inadvertently flagged his account for suspicious activity. Seth wanted to rectify the situation because the recent activity was all on the up-and-up but couldn’t when he found it impossible to get a hold of someone with the power to fix the problem.

PayPal used to be a glowing example of a trustworthy site that endeared itself to its users. Now, there is story after story of PayPal plunging down a black hole of bad service and mistreatment of its customers. Bad show PayPal, it is time to shape up, or another service will come around and turn your world upside down. In this post-industrial world where service is your only point of differentiation, you are jeopardizing your future for some short-term gains.

Another good company gone bad story is brewing over at Facebook. Recently Facebook released its new plan for monetizing its growing market share in the social-networking world. Supposedly, their new service was an opt-in ad service where your purchasing habits were automatically put into your activity stream. In other words, when you bought something online, Facebook would tell your friends about it if you said it was ok. That is all fine and good if indeed it was an opt-in service, but according to today’s Buzz Out Loud Podcast, it has come to light that the service was opt-out by default. That meant that Facebook and its partners tracked your online purchasing habits without your express permission. This is a huge mistake.

Facebook is in an industry where they could be supplanted very easily if its users became disenchanted. There are a number of other social-networking sites out there that are simply waiting for the next grand exodus to happen. If you don’t believe that it could happen, its happened before. Friendster was the first uber-popular social-networking site. It was supplanted by Myspace who was in turn supplanted by Facebook.

Facebook is the current Web 2.0 darling, but if the winds change they could very well be tomorrows Myspace. I expected more. Hmmm, maybe that was a mistake.

——–This Just In———

As I was scanning my feeds, I found this.  Apparently Robert Scoble feels the same way about Facebook that I do.

I am down in Little Rock about to embark on three fun-filled days recording segments for the corporate training site GenoNow.  I will be making product training episodes for Dillard’s Department Store.  These segments will be in their “walled garden”, and not for public consumption, but the exciting part is that it give Dillard’s a way to push this high-level product training all the way down to its employees.

Communication is always a tough thing in a large organization, anyone who has played the game Phone Booth can tell you that.  Not only do messages get tangled in translation, but it also costs a lot.  GenoNow answers that problem by making these videos to all interested a la YouTube.  Companies can put their private content in their own private area, and corporate trainers who are interested in a wider audience can put content on the site where it is visible by all visitors.

GenoNow has public facing content also.  With subjects ranging from Dressing for Success for women in the work place to managing change in an organization.  There is some free content available so you can see how it works, but we believe it can be a real life saver for the human resource manager looking for a cost-effective way to train an ever-spreading and diverse workforce.

If you are interested in what I am up to these days, you can check out our site.  It’s pretty exciting.  Who knew that there would ever be an Internet start-up in Arkansas, not exactly a hotbed for technology, but here we are.

I just downloaded a Firefox plug-in (Add-on) called ScribeFire and I am testing it right now. My blog is a Wordpress blog, and it has a pretty good editing interface that comes part and parcel with the software that is installed on my server.

I have been using Wordpress for the last 4 months and have been completely happy with the interface, but today, I was looking at Leo LaPorte’s Wakoopa software feed, and it said that he was using MarsEdit, a blog editing software package for the Mac, and it got me to wondering if there is software available for Windows, and lo and behold, here is software that integrates right into my favorite browser, Firefox.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Sights from Google Street View

A big shout out to Stan Schroeder at Mashable.com for coming up with a top 15 shots captured by Google’s brand new service, Google Street View. This is worth at least 5 minutes of your time.

Oooh I couldn’t be more excited. Adobe had a big announcement today to tell the world that the new version of their Creative Suite is ready to hit the street. It is kind of bittersweet because it costs so much to get in on the suite and even though it isn’t quite as expensive, it costs a ton to upgrade.

Adobe does a great job of making their updates just good enough to really get you licking your lips for the new version.

CS3 is the first full version from Adobe since they acquired Macromedia, the software company behind Flash.

As a creative director of a web start up and Organizational Development company, I make videos, layout books, design web graphics (Note the GenoNow Graphic in the top left corner..) I need just about every tool that Adobe makes. I am a jack of all trades because my job necessitates that. That means that I am going to have to go to bat for an upgrade in the near future.

Right now I have CS2, and I love it. I can’t wait to play with the newest version. I am going to have to do some more exploration to see what aspects of the new version drive me to open the old wallet.

One thing that I know is that they now have no less than 4 CS3 packages to choose from. Here are the four versions:

1. Design Premium - Which contains:
   InDesign
   Photoshop
   Illustrator
   Flash
   Dreamweaver
   Acrobat
2. Web Premium - Which contains:
   Dreamweaver
   Flash
   Photoshop
   Illustrator
   Fireworks
   Contribute
   Acrobat
3. Production Premium - Which contains
   After Effects
   Premiere
   Photoshop
   Flash
   Illustrator
   and Adobe’s replacement for Audition, Soundbooth
4. Master Collection - Which contains
   …EVERYTHING

Of course, there is a part of me that longs for the CS3’s Master Collection that has it all. But upon further inspection, there are a lot of things in the Production Premium collection that I won’t use. I use Sony’s Vegas, and I am very loyal to that platform. It is just down and dirty fast…I likes it. So, that eliminates Premiere. Well, then again, I would use everything else in that package. I don’t know what to do.
In the past there used to be two worlds of Adobe. The print/design world and the video world. Now, with the release of CS3, those lines are getting blurred. And for good reason. We are in an era of fast computers that allow designers and creative types to branch out and explore new mediums.

I feel just as comfortable in the video world as in the print world as in the web world. I am not a deep dive expert in any of those worlds, but I’ve got the chops to hang in all of them.

This all happened because computing power has risen to the point that we can now do all those things relatively inexpensively. There is going to be some hard thinking and selling in the future when it comes to this upgrade. I’ve got to start working on my pitch right now.

The good news is that no one is getting their hands on the new version until the end of April. I am sure it is going to be a little longer before I get my dirty little hands on an upgrade.