A special thanks has to go out to Daniel Burka at Revision3 for uncovering this little gem. It was so cool that I had to reblog it. It is a site built by a guy who does Simpson’s style fan art. It has been a long time since I have enjoyed browsing a blog as much as I enjoyed this one. If you are a fan of The Simpsons or super-heroes, then you are a geek, and you have to check this one out… it’s called Springfield Punx.

I just started using the social music site last.fm. You can check out my page! They have a journal/blogging system on the site that allows you to post entries about your thoughts on music. I posted something there, and I was afraid that the post would just disappear into the ether so I am going to post it here too!

I have heard about this site for years now and I haven’t felt like jumping in, but now.. it is a Friday, and I just bought Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, and music is on my mind so now is as good a time as any to jump in and do some social music.

Shuffle on iTunes

I have iTunes set to shuffle on a playlist I call Super Mix. I put all the albums I love in there and turn on shuffle. Sometimes I have this creepy feeling that iTunes shuffle has a personality and makes weird picks. Today, iTunes is in love with Coldplay. It won’t stop playing them. I hit the next track button and then it gets stuck on The Cure. I am trying to get to the magic number of tracks on last.fm so that I can see trends in my listening and all the other fun stuff this site does and I want the trends to be correct. iTunes, quit screwing me.

New Coldplay

The latest Coldplay album is a departure from its first three albums. Where the first ones were sparse and patient in bringing the full band to bear. This album is adventurous and more in your face. It has a definite flavor of 80’s new wave and is deliciously english. I am still in that strange honeymoon phase with this album, and it is a bit of an acquired taste. I am only now starting my third listen and the songs (itunes just played another Coldplay song… what the…) are starting to grow on me.

It seems very evident that Coldplay has a lot more money to throw at an album because every song is crammed with instruments, like I said earlier. A real departure from the sparse patient sound of their earlier albums, Parachutes, A Rush of Blood to the Head, and X&Y.

I am interested to see whether or not this new album will grow on me as their first three have (iTunes just played another The Cure song… this is weird…).

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

Finally there is a way to keep your online and offline calendar in sync. This is a big deal if you are like me and have had to enter calendar items manually in two places. What a drag. Google announced today that it has released a little tool that will check your Outlook calendar and synchronize it with your Google calendar. Hip hip hooray!

UPDATE:———————-

I just downloaded the Google Caledar updating tool, and it works great! It is extremely simple. You download it and it ends up in your system tray. Once it is there you can right-click on the icon and go into the options and specify how often you want it to check for updates.

I have been waiting a long time for this. I have a smart phone that doesn’t sync to Google, but I want to use Google calendar and now I can. Thank you Google!

There is a newish trend called Alternate Reality Games. It is an elaborate game that goes on in the real world but is heavily supplemented by an online component. Companies such as 42 Entertainment design websites and blogs that help the players engage in this alternate reality. These sites establish the fictional narrative and give clues to the players. These clues can lead to other websites or real places around the world. Players engage in this engrossing game in an interesting way. Alternate Reality gaming is a mashup of online gaming and real world role playing.

If it sounds geeky, it probably is, but it is interesting.

There is a new Alternate Reality game that is being sponsored by McDonalds that seems to be related to the upcoming Olympics. It is about a young woman name Ariadne who recently woke up in a corn field in South Africa with amnesia. She has a tattoo on her arm in esperanto that means “find the lost ring”. It is your job as the player of the game to help her find her identity among other things that have yet to be revealed.

Apparently, there are more characters who have yet to be revealed. It is believed that this game will continue until the Beijing Summer Games in August.

This may not be something that you would ever want to do, but it is still interesting. It could be very fun. Imagine having a limitless budget and the ability to travel anywhere. It could be your very own personal Amazing Race.

I have started using the new service from Google that allows you to “host” Google Apps on your domain. I started the process of getting it all hooked up on Thursday of this week and so far it has been pretty cool. It was pretty simple. I went to the Google Apps page and signed up. I filled out the online form and that was pretty much it. I had to post some HTML in a specific folder on my site, but doing that was trivially easy. The HTML let Google know with certainty that I was the owner of the domain.

The Killer Apps

Once you have Google Apps set up on your domain,iIt allows you to share a family calendar, or a shared calendar with all those using your domain which, right now, seems like the killer app. Keeping up with all the things your family is up to is a real chore, and having a simple powerful calendar that everyone shares for free is incredibly handy.

I set Megan up with an account, and she immediately filled the calendar up with all our family’s upcoming plans. Super handy.

In addition to a family calendar Google Apps also gives you Google docs. I haven’t found a killer use for this yet, but it allows you to create documents that are available for everyone in your family. I can see where this could be very handy for a business domain, but in the family world, it seems to be fairly limited in usefulness.

If that weren’t enough, it also includes a built in start page based on iGoogle. It lets you set up a personal start page with a ton of different widgets that connect you to the information you need. I don’t use a start page much now that I have started using Google reader to keep up with the news that I am interested in, but I still like it. All the users on your domain that you set up with Google Apps also get a start page of their own.

I was hoping that there would be the option of having a common iGoogle start page that everyone on the domain could use. It could be a great place to communicate, but so far I haven’t found that option if it exists.

My Email Dilemma

It also comes with integrated email which means that my MurDog.com email addresses can go through Google’s Gmail interface which is incredibly handy. Right now however, I can’t get that running. In order for it to work, you have to update the MX records on the DNS server to point towards Google’s mail servers. I know that is pretty technical, but it should be a pretty simple thing if you can get access to it. The Google site has great instructions that make it pretty simple to make the changes.

I have a problem. My hosting service provider, www.thehostgroup.com doesn’t give me access to the MX settings. Or, if it does, I can’t find them. It is enough for me to start thinking about finding better hosting for this site. Having a personal email address that leverages the power of Gmail is an exciting prospect. I have sent a message to my provider in hopes of getting this resolved, but so far I haven’t heard anything from them.

One of the bad parts of having a personal email address that I have to manage is spam. It is a huge problem. I turned off my personal email address years ago because of spam. If I could get this Google apps thing to work then I would have Google’s horsepower behind spam control. It would be a huge help.

If I can’t get the email thing resolved, I might have to look at another provider for my web site hosting.

MurDog.com is just a personal site, and I don’t get any revenue from it so low-cost hosting is a necessity. If I can find a provider that is inexpensive, and allows me to host this WordPress blog I might be interested in switching.

For now, I will wait and see what The Host Group does.

Other than that, it is a pretty cool option from Google that should only get better.

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.

15 iGoogle Gadgets for Web Worker Productivity « Web Worker Daily

Here is a great list of gadgets for your iGoogle page that actually will help you get things done.

I just started using Google Notebook today. I don’t really know what it does yet, but it has that twinge of cool to it. You need to check it out at www.google.com/notebook. If you already have a gmail account, then you are in.

It really starts getting cool when you download the browser plugin that allows you to take notes no matter where you are on the net.

Again, I am not quite sure why yet, but I feel like this is cool for some reason, and I wanted to blog about it.