I am at an event called the Mind of Moms Summit in Northwest Arkansas. Rockfish Interactive and some other sponsoring partners have brought in some influential Moms that blog to talk to brand people. The idea is to share how social media can make or break brands and how to engage with shoppers around brands.

Other than the social media thing, I am not the target market, but it is extremely interesting. I love hearing about how companies are engaging in a conversation with their customers. This is so important because more and more we are going to find that conventional marketing will grow less and less effective.

I tweeted recently that “I don’t watch commercials. I pay no attention to online ads. I do care about what my friends love. (if they are sincere).” If brands don’t engage in conversation with their customers, customers will eventually begin to lose interest unless you have a truly remarkable product, and most products aren’t.

You need to go to search.twitter.com and search #mindofmoms to join in the conversation.

Today may be a banner day in finding the perfect todo list option for me and my iPhone. Enter Google Chrome. For those of you who haven’t heard, Google has released a browser called Chrome.  It is clean, fast, and has some very interesting features that are growing more and more compelling to me all the time.

Google Chrome gives you the option of creating virtual applications out of online applications.  In reality, it is pretty simple, Google Chrome will open an online app in its own window that has the forward, back, URL, and other standard browser buttons removed.  It makes online apps feel more like apps that live on your harddrive.

Here is how Chrome and Toodledo have collided to give me a more interesting and integrated todo option. Toodledo has a very clean interface for the iPhone but their standard interface leaves a little to be desired. The great thing about Toodledo’s iPhone interface is that you can access it in a standard browser on your PC or Mac.  Here is where my head exploded…

I opened the iPhone interface of Toodledo in Google Chrome and turned it into a virtual app.  The Chrome virtual apps remember how they were sized and where they were in the window when you last closed them.

Long story short, I now have a todo widget that lives on the far left part of my workspace that stays out of the way that is always synced on my iPhone.  In other words, it is possible to use chrome to create iPhone app widgets that have their own window and live on your computer.

So, unless you have been living under a rock, or you haven’t jumped on the Internets for the past 24 hours then you no doubt know about Google Chrome, Google’s brand new browser.

If you are a fan of clean, functional design that gets out of the way of the task at hand then you might have just found your new browser of choice.  It has it’s limitations, but man, does it have its strengths. I don’t have the time to do an exhaustive rundown of all it can do, and really, there have been a million stories written on the ‘nets that do that.

I just want to talk about one feature that blew my mind a little. But before that I do want to do just a little background on how Chrome came to be.  It is one of those programs that I LOVE, because it is built well after the fact, but profits from its ability to learn from what came before.

God bless the pioneers.  They have the toughest life.  It is exciting to be the first to survey a new land, but also, unfortunately, as a pioneer one has to address the inevitable questions and issues that arise.  With little experience and even less time, new ways to handle problems are devised.  Over time, people come to accept those schemas as, well, how they are done.

It is much the same for the person or team charged with creating a new genre of program. This happened with video edting software, something that I deal with on a daily basis.  When editing video was first introduced on the computer, computers were woefully underpowered to handle the task. The teams that designed the first editors were very crafty and clever in getting them to work at all.  Their craftiness and cleverness along with established workflows in the old-fashioned linear editing world established some schemas that stuck.  As computers got faster, the old way of doing video editing persisted which left silly, superfluous steps that slowed down the creative process.

Along comes Sonic Foundry who looked at the whole process of editing video and streamlined the process down to its essentials and thus speeding up the editing process immensely.  The product was called Vegas Video. The name later changed to Vegas and then Sonic Foundry’s whole line of products was purchased by Sony, but that is another story. 

The same thing has happened here with Chrome. Google had the luxury of being able to soberly assess the successes and failures of browsers as they stand today without the pesky hassle of keeping legacy features that only matter to a few.

Google Chrome from the ground up to function, and function acceptionally well on the Internet as it stands today, an Internet filled with applications. Which, brings me to the function that blew my mind a little and drove me to write this lengthy entry.

When you are using an online app such as Gmail, or Google Docs, click the button near the top right side of the Chrome window that looks like a sheet of paper.  That opens a menu where you can create an application shortcut. It is pretty simple actually.  All it does is hide all the browser buttons and makes the online app more like an app that is native to your hard drive. Not only that, it also creates a shortcut that will open that online app directly, thus eliminating the multi-step process of opening the browser, clicking in the address bar, typing an address, and then finally arriving at the online app.  Now, click one shortcut and boom…done!

Simple I know, but my mind was blown a little. Cloud computing became a little more real for me today.

Turbo = Super Fast Blogging…Maybe

WordPress has an update today that adds a new feature called Turbo. Turbo is WordPress’ brand name for its Google Gears integration. I just updated my software and noticed the new link in the top right-hand corner of my screen. When you click on Turbo, it opens a window that lets you know that you will need Google Gears in order to enable Turbo. I downloaded Gears and then enabled it.

The popup window also touted a speed increase after enabling Turbo. So far, I haven’t really noticed a speed increase, but to be fair I have only been using it for a few minutes.

Google Gears is Google’s app that allows users to take their computer offline and still be able to use their online apps. In other words, you can still get to your Gmail when you take your lappy on a plane with no wi-fi. Google Gears works in the background saving the necessary files to enable offline functionality.

Obviously, if a large portion of your page is pre-downloaded, you should see a speed boost. Again, so far… not so much, but it is still early.

Other Additions

A welcome addition to WordPress is the ability to see all the revisions that have been made to an entry. This is particularly handy if you share a blog with someone and you want to see what they have added to you entry.

Also, just under the Save and Publish buttons there is a new Word count feature that will let you know if you need to spend a little more time on your entry in order for it to get to an impressive, unreadable length that will convince your readers to skip your blog. Handy.

It is now possible to add a caption to images. This is an incredibly handy thing. Now if you have a somewhat cryptic image that needs a little explanation, you are in luck. Now you can put a caption at the bottom of the image and your readers will never be confused ever again…ever.

Another new feature of WordPress in 2.6 is a little, red speech bubble that now lives above the link to Plugins letting you know how many plugins you have installed. I have 13. Super.

It doesn’t just stop there, if you go into the plugins management area, it is now a lot easier to manage your plugins. The interface is now a lot more ajaxy and draggy and droppy which makes it much easier to manage the plugins that make your blog so special.

Since draggy and droppy is so cool, WordPress has updated its media gallery to allow drag and drop functionality allowing you to better manage the content uploaded to your blog.

And finally, keeping with the drag and drop theme I’ve got going, the Press it linklet has been updated to make quoting blogs and other websites much easier.

All in all, it isn’t quite the continental shift type of change that we saw with the release of 2.5, but this update does bring a lot of good functionality that will make your blogging a little easier.

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…).

Adobe has just released a brand new online word processing application called Buzzword. You can find it at buzzword.acrobat.com. It is a very nice and clean looking interface that fades into the background as you create. That is nice, and it gives you some handy stats as you write. In the bottom left hand corner of the screen, it keeps you up to date on how many words you have type so far, something handy for those columnists who have to come in around 500 words every time. It also keeps you up to date on how many misspellings you have in your document. Something that is quite handy for those of us who are copying and pasting content written by others.

One thing I did notice which I thought was pretty strange. Even though Buzzword is housed at acrobat.com, you can’t save your document as a .pdf. What the…? Come on Adobe! Ridiculous.

My biggest fear for the product is that it may be a little to late to make a big difference. I don’t use online document creation much, but when I do, I use Google Docs. Not so much that it is the absolute best online document creation experience, but rather that they were first, and all my online documents are already there.

Good luck Adobe.

The following is copied and pasted from what I wrote using Adobe’s new online word processor offering, Buzzword.

Hello there you slick little interface. I just wish that I didn’t have such a backlog of documents in Google Docs. You see, this interface is quite slick, but I am not in this world. Flash is getting better and better, but it is so hard to shake those bad feelings I have accrued since the advent of Flash. There were so many sites that used Flash badly. You could use the back button, you couldn’t see the history, and for some reason, the fonts were rendered poorly which led to a ton of illegible, unnavigable sites. Yuck.

In comes Web 2.0 where we go back to standards and get back a lot of the functionality lost just prior to the big web bust of 2001. But, there is a problem a brewin’. With more and more money being funneled into Web 2.0 projects, the market is more and more palatable to larger companies who aren’t as passionate about web standards.

Are we going to go back to an era where tools such as Flash and Flex are used losing the ground yet again that was gained back over the past 3 to 4 years?

Buzzword looks nice, and maybe this rant belongs somewhere else. But is it nice try but too late?

One thing that I am noticing about this tool. There is a word counter and as of this word, I had typed 235 words. Wow that is an eye opener. I figured I had typed much more than that. I wouldn’t work out too good at a newspaper. Writing is like pulling teeth for me, and I realize it is the same for a lot of other people, but the finished product isn’t valuable enough to me to endure the pain on a daily basis.

I like being creative, but just in other ways. Blogging is only a hobby, and one that I don’t believe I will ever pursue much further than that.

What do you know, I was right! Admittedly, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to read the tea leaves on this one, but on the latest version of Tekzilla, Veronica Belmont is indeed introduced as the new co-host. As in my earlier prediction post, I still say that the addition of Belmont is exactly what that show needs.

Veronica’s name is now added to a growing list of Internet Hotties who have moved on from their original post. At the top of the list is Amanda Congdon who was the host of RocketBoom, one of podcasting’s earliest hits. She left to go on to bigger and better things. …haven’t heard from her in a while. Maybe it was a bad move.

I don’t see a similar fate for Belmont. Revision3 is fairly established and is getting stronger and stronger each month. It is capitalizing on the audience left behind after the death of TechTV. That is a big audience when compared to the audiences gathered by other Internet ventures. Add to that the growing interest borne out of the web 2.0 era, and it looks pretty sweet for Rev3.

She is leaving behind Jason Calacanis after a fairly short run on Mahalo Daily. I wonder if there is a reason other than the grind of putting together a daily video podcast with a very small team? Also, there is the question of who will take Belmont’s place on Mahalo Daily?

Revision3 looks like a fun place to work.

Good luck Veronica, break a leg!

Ok, I don’t have any, and I mean any, inside info on this, but while watching the latest Tekzilla video podcast, Patrick and Roger gave some hints about the fact that they had “maybe” found a new co-host for the show. The co-host position was left vacant when Jessica Corben left to go and start two new shows on the network, popSiren and The Digg Reel.

In the meantime, Veronica Belmont has done a couple of guest appearances on the show, and did a great job. Veronica got her start on a CNET podcast, Buzz Out Loud with Tom Merritt and Molly Wood as the producer. Early on she chimed in sporadically, but over time she became more and more involved until she was for all intents and purposes the third host.

Jason Calacanis, ex-Weblogs, inc, ex-AOL, and present grand poobah at the human powered search engine Mahalo, snatched Belmont up to host a new video podcast called Mahalo Daily. Mahalo Daily had a predictably bumpy start but matured quickly to become a very enjoyable daily vidcast.

Recently on guest appearances Veronica has announced that she was moving on from Mahalo Daily to a new and secret project.

Mark my words, Veronica Belmont will be the next co-host on Tekzilla, making yet another addition to the now very formidable Revision3 team. She will be a great co-host because she is fun to watch and she almost always has interesting insights that add a much needed female influence on the show. I have missed Jessica Corben but I look forward to Veronica Belmont.

By the way. Now that Revision3 has matured, I officially no longer miss TechTV.

South by Southwest is three conferences all rolled into one. First there is South by Southwest Interactive. It is focused on web and web development. It is the biggest geek party on earth. Mouth-breathers, neck beard-ers, and the socially inept let their hair down for a week of partying and passing out business cards. If you are a web startup…you have to be there. I wish I could have gone. Judging by all the twitters and blog entries, it was a lot of fun.

SXSWi lasts for a week. After that the South by Southwest turns into a music and film festival. The people there are a lot more mainstream, and the contrast in the atmosphere is quite funny. Justine Ezarik has been there during both phases of the festival and did a man on the street that is entertaining.

To listen to the Web 2.0 crowd, you would think that everyone is into this, but apparently that couldn’t be further from the truth.

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.