Month: October 2006

Most excellent example of comments in a blog I have ever seen

Jack Slocum’s Blog » WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI

My post over the weekend about missing some vital Lenovo mentions in the comments of blogs that I track yielded some excellent suggestions from faithful readers about various plug-ins and options to gain better insights into the sentiments of peanut gallery. Rick Klau at Feedburner, Mitch Ratcliffe at BuzzLogic, and Chris Murray, ex-of-CXO all chimed in with good pointers.

Then I find this baby. Jack Slocum took advantage of Yahoo’s open architecture and built a comment tool for WordPress that is to blogs what David Foster Wallace is to footnotes. Check out the expandable nav bar on the left. The ability to drop a comment on a specific point in a blog post. I am totally freaked and want it.

 

Dan Lyons is blogging

About Dan Lyons « Floating Point

This is old-home week in Blogistan as two ex-PC Week reporters — first Rob O’Regan and now Dan Lyons — fire up wordpress.com blogs and start doing their thing. Dan and I were buddies in high school, worked together at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune where he was renowned for his demented coverage of the hillbillies of southern New Hampshire (Ernie the Tire King of Atkinson, etc.), then we worked together at PC Week on the business desk under Susan Carlson (Susan: “This is a really big story.” Dan: “So I’ll use really big words.”) and eventually Forbes, where I recruited Dan in and he promptly pissed off the ex-CEO of Lotus, setting off a magnificent firestorm. I left, he stayed. Read his novel “Dog Days” for the funniest description of office life I have ever read.

“Dan Lyons is a senior editor at Forbes magazine, covering enterprise computing and consumer electronics. He is also the author, last fall, of the much-maligned Forbes cover article, “Attack of the Blogs.” Now he’s blogging. Funny old world, isn’t it?”

MANNinCHINA: North Korea…to go or not to go?

MANNinCHINA: North Korea…to go or not to go?

Michael Mann is living dangerously. A round of golf in North Korea the week they light off a nuclear test? No thanks.

“Over the weekend, a couple of friends here in Beijing told me about a trip to North Korea, planned for the last weekend in October. Basically, it’s a golf/sight-seeing trip with a “business” twist.

“As soon as I heard about it I immediately said “I’m in.” How many chances does one get to go to North Korea? I’m not afraid to go…what’s the worst that could happen? Well, I guess there are plenty of bad things that could happen to a US citizen in North Korea…but what are the chances of them happening?”

Rob O’Regan is blogging — Magnosticism

About Me « Magnosticism

And it’s about time too … I knew Rob way back when at PC Week, worked with him at McKinsey, and again at CXO Media where he was the editor-in-chief of the remarkable CMO Magazine.  The demise of CMO was a tragedy in publishing, and Rob stepped into my shoes when I left IDG for Lenovo in January, soldiering on.

Anyway, goodbye to all that and welcome to blogging to one of the best reporters and editors I’ve ever had the honor to work with. From his about page:

“Rob O’Regan is an editorial consultant with more than 20 years of experience writing about business and technology. He previously served as online general manager with CXO Media, overseeing the Web operations of four web properties: CIO.com, CSOonline.com, CMOmagazine.com and darwinmag.com. Before taking over the online operations at CXO Media, O’Regan was the founding Editor in Chief of CMO, a critically acclaimed monthly magazine targeted at senior marketing executives. The publication received numerous awards during O’Regan’s tenure, including the American Society of Business Publication Editors’ Magazine of the Year award in 2005. He was also named one of Min magazine’s “21 Most Intriguing People” in 2005.”

Blog Business Summit — I’m considering attending

Blog Business Summit

I’m not a conference fan, but this one, on John Bell’s recommendation, may take me to Seattle in a few weeks. Anybody attended?

Columbus Day Weekend Perfection — This week

Up at dawn to catch a magnificent sunrise over Nantucket Sound, then out into the bays aboard my scull for an hour’s pull around Grand Island through acres of feeding fish.

Once ashore, grab daughter home for the weekend from school, rig a pair of rods, and head back out to land two bluefish and three striped bass. Then back ashore, to the grocery store for burgers and dogs, load up a cooler, and take the family and dogs to the island for an afternoon of mid-October bliss under bluebird skies and 60 degree breezes.

Now, blog a bit, shower, then off to catch Scorcese’s latest.

This week is a North Carolina week. Monday working from home, Tuesday through Thursday doing the face-time thing in the Triangle de Research, then home again on Friday.

Proactive Support — Something from the comments

In my ongoing efforts to bolster Lenovo’s reputation among customers and prospective customers by fixing blogged problems and beefs about our products, our services, and our purchase/delivery process, I have built up a homemade, but very effective “listening post” using Technorati searches on “Lenovo” and “ThinkPad” RSS’d into Bloglines. That’s backed up by BuzzMetrics and BuzzLogic, and so far has been very effective at identifying cries of pain and unhappiness out there in Blogistan.

A week ago Friday, while shopping at my favorite Asian grocery store in Boston (Super 88) my cellphone rang. An unhappy customer had ordered a ThinkPad and was getting mixed signals about the delivery time. This is a common but difficult situation for Lenovo, one that the company is focused on fixing, but for now, remains a crucial pain point in our customer satisfaction.

I took the customer’s information, passed it onto our customer satisfaction team, and by the end of this week the customer had the product in his hands.

Then, this morning, as I ran my daily scan of Lenovo and Thinkpad hits, I found this post on Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations. That post led me to the original Shel post about his issues with his ThinkPad last May, where I posted my cell phone in the comments in reply to another reader’s plea for some way to bypass the usual machinery and get to me directly. Here’s Shel’s post:

“It’s ironic.  Despite my publicly proclaimed faith in my Lenovo Thinkpad, I’ve been feeling this angst in my belly as one, techcentric CEO after another these days shows off their new Mac Pros.  When using the Parallel Software, it runs OSX and Windows pretty close to seamlessly.

But two events have occurred today that will stop me from straying from my Thinkpad monogamy. First, Manish  Hira left a comment here, showing that he too received a new computer after registering complaints about the one he had and the support that at first he was not getting.”

I followed the link in Shel’s current post to this old one from June. There, the user, who apparently found my cell phone number while googling for some relief from Lenovo, had posted about his order and his dissatisfaction. That comment did not get detected by my usual scans. Shel even posted:

“Hey, Dave Churbuck! If you still read this blog, it sounds like a great time to jump in!”

Fortunately, the user took the time to cal me and was taken care of, and then was decent enough to post a comment with Shel noting his satisfaction, but I am very concerned that whatever blog search I deploy is not going to be looking at comments. I know I can subscribe to comments from a specific blog, but I need insights into random comment threads, not just hot ones like Shel’s.

I’ll take this up with the folks at BuzzLogic, which I’ve been beta-testing. Comment search is the next challenge and I hope they can meet it. Any suggestions from those more experienced in blog search, please weigh in.

Dave the ThinkCap Stalker

So over at Design Matters, Lenovo’s first and only official blog, we ran a poll using the WordPress Democracy plug-in. Wild success. Over 800 votes, tons of comments, all over the question of which TrackPoint cap do you prefer? The cap is the red rubber thing in the middle of the ThinkPad keyboard which is the signature design point for the otherwise black and rectangular notebook. I love the things from an usability point of view, and have grown accustomed over the years to the rough “classic” version of the cap which has the texture of rough sandpaper.

There are other versions of the cap — smooth, pebbled, and with a rim. So we asked the simple question of the Design blog’s readers: “Which one do you prefer?”

Anyway, I carry a supply of spares in my backpack and hand them out to ThinkPad users I run into at airports, on the plane, in the park, at the Starbuck’s etc. I include my business card as well so the people don’t think I am like one of those deaf-mute pencil people at the airport.

Yesterday I was in NYC’s Bryant Park enjoying the sunshine when I saw a guy pounding away on a T43. So I unzip the back pack, pull out a bag of replacement caps, walk over, hand it to him with my card and he does a classic New Yorker and tells me to “F-Off.”
I can’t blame him. Any approach out of the blue in NYC is generally a prelude to a panhandle, a religious discussion, and an otherwise unpleasant situation. The guy looks at the little bag — like there were drugs in it — then he looks at my card. Then he looks at the dirty trackpoint cap on his machine, and it dawned on him that the ThinkPad Fairy just landed.

“Aren’t you in China?” he asked.

“Looks like Bryant Park to me,” I replied.

My colleague Matt Kohut spent a day in airport terminals up and down the East Coast last summer doing the same thing. He reported the hardest part of handing stuff out was approaching women, all of whom thought he was hitting on them.

R.W. Apple, Jr. — RIP

Sad news that Johnny Apple, legendary New York Times reporter, passed away at 71.

I admired his political writing back in the day when I aspired to cover Congress and was sitting in the Massachusetts State House press room for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, still idealistic about daily journalism and the possibilities after Woodward and Bernstein energized the profession during Watergate. Alas, I was more interested in elections than legislation and made the move to tech journalism.

Apple was characterized by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail as the single most connected reporter covering the Iowa caucuses, a reporter so attuned to the local political machines that other reporters went to him for insights and predictions. The Times obituary, which is magnificent as only the Times can do for one of their own, notes that many felt Apple deserved the Pulitzer for his coverage of the 1976 elections, especially his local knowledge during Iowa.

Apple was the best food and drink writer going. Not since A.J. Liebling’s writing about being a gourmand in Paris — Between Meals — has any journalist displayed as much passion and gusto for living well. Apple came close. The man travelled with his own personal pepper grinder.