Clear Ink

I asked Google Maps the quickest way of getting from Berkeley to Hawaii, and it suggested an interesting route of driving from Berkeley up to Seattle and then kayaking to Honolulu. Why drive, I thought, so here is the route from the Clear Ink office to Honolulu via foot and paddle...

As I was bidding my farewells to the friends I made on my latest family vacay in Russia, I pulled one of these, "Keep in touch, add me on Facebook!" .....whoops! As it turns out, not only did they know what I was talking about, but they have their own version of Facebook...

Ashton Kutcher now has more subscribers on Twitter than any US newspaper except USA Today and Wall Street Journal has for its paper news.He's closing fast on those two that one...

Cisco has replaced General Motors on the Dow 30 Industrials index, further symbolizing the rise of the well-clichéd "Information Superhighway" relative to industries based on actual superhighways...

Listening to the daily recession news reminds me of ordering a coffee at Starbucks. In the case of Starbucks, you start with the smallest (a tall) and end up with something akin to a trough of latte...

Thanks to active Twitterpaters @johnbattelle and @thepartycow, you can read about some new options Google is testing at "Google Blogoscoped". The post includes screenshots, and a link to this YouTube video of the options in action...

Thanks to Kevin Macguire's Innovation Diaries for a wonderful post about how to understand the motivations of Twitter junkies in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs...

I've been behind in my blogging, and I was worried that today's post might be moot before I wrote it. But logging into Facebook this morning, I see that the new interface is still there.It's been thoroughly thrashed by Facebook users, and I'm expecting it to go away soon, but you never know...

Just when you thought social networking had permeated virtually every aspect of our busy lives (personal and professional), an unexpected function for these social networking sites is discovered - disaster situations.Researchers have found that sites like Facebook and Twitter have become critical...

This has been a rich couple of days for a few ideas surrounding the state of digital marketing strategies and execution--and how they are viewed by the rest of the world...

In the nearly six years that I've been operating the Bananaslug search engine, I've tried to explain why you'd want to mess with Google's obviously finely-honed search results...

I don't usually post about other people's posts, but this was just too good to pass up. Especially because it directly implicates the work I was doing while at Clear Ink: developing CI's social media offerings...

Just for fun, and thanks to Nat Polish, here is a follow-up to the Snuggie post I made the other day. Hope this one brightens a storm-swept US!I'm being quite useful. This thing is a Thneed. A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need! It's a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat...

My thanks to @perry mizota for helping to sort this out for me. I Twitter, I Facebook, I Plaxo, I Linked in. I used to post everything to them at once using ping.fm (and thanks @steven_nelson for that tip)...

There is a great NY Times Article today ("Snuggie Rode Silly Ads On Way Over Rivals to Stardom"). It matters because it illustrates so much about marketing. Turns out that the original product, The Slanket, is twice the quality and twice the cost, but is getting killed...

To commemorate the 2010 federal budget announced today, I have installed a new feature at the Capitol Hill in Second Life. Using the APIs available from USASpending.gov, the Show Me the Money! piggy bank will shower $100 bills down on the Capitol Hill legislative chamber...

While I applaud the Obama administration’s creation of recovery.gov to allow more transparency about the effectiveness of stimulus dollars, it still isn’t there in terms of mashability...

After leaving my hometown of Boulder City, Nevada for the University of California at Santa Cruz, I came home for a holiday visit. An old classmate of mine asked where I'd been and I said I had moved to California. "California?" she snorted. "I've been to Bakersfield...

@philjohnson has written an article for Advertising Age which cites one of my favorite books, The Innovator's Dilemma, and applies its model to Twitter as the disruptive technology...

Thanks to Howard Sewell, we found a study that confirms lots of our own findings about B2B Technology online marketing overlaid with strategies and tactics useful at various points along the pathway to purchase. You can download a presentation of the findings here...

I was amused to see Dmitri Fadeyev's post today on "Nine Common Usability Mistakes". Don't get me wrong-it's a great post with links to other great posts. But I feel like I read the same things in 1998...

The Tonchidot Sekai camera was demonstrated this weekend in Tokyo. We've been following this technology because the implications are amazing...

I have mixed feelings about Yahoo!'s new plan to charge for search results via their API. On one hand, I am a fan and admirer of Carol Bartz, and her efforts to turn the financial fortunes of the company around are certainly evident here. And, there is value to the service for sure...

After years of working on health care business, I continue to be struck by how behind the times that community is when relating to the people who are the decision-makers for 70% of their revenue, women...

The WSJ featured today an article about "The Shorty Awards," an award contest for marketing via Twitter...

Now here's a well-thought, comprehensive overview of our industry today. Thanks to Rich LeFurgy for forwarding this...

Our famed Media and Analytics Director, Ingrid Nielsen, sent me this article by Steve Baldwin yesterday. It is about how Paid Search is not the same thing as traditional media or even online media planning/buying/tracking. However, the business model around these services is inherited and outdated...

If you're not a fan of Jack Myers, I hope this post will change your mind. The post addresses these questions: Marketers and media companies are troubled and faced with a conundrum. How do you deal with the realities of a depressed economy and falling sales...

Wired online magazine featured an amusing article on Monday, 1/19, titled "Scott Brown on Why Hollywood Needs a New Model for Storytelling."In the midst of what Brown calls a "multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture," the article illuminates the dwindling fate of the traditional...