inluminent

Wow, talk about a great marketing move.:
Arial Software is giving away Campaign FREE permission email marketing software as a marketing tool… I downloaded my free copy today and will be testing it out, as I’m looking for an easy, inexpensive way to publish a quarterly newsletter at the office… I’ll report my [...]

From Iunctura Daily, preserved here, because their archives are protected by a member’s only access prompt, and there’s no obvious way to register:
Even before your sales presentation or first customer interaction, you need to know exactly what prospects expect to receive from your product or service. Ý It is naive to assume your sales people [...]

John Gruber takes issue with Microsoft, and Outlook, and the virus issues allowed by Microsoft, in his latest article “Good Times“:
We, as a society, have decided that indoor plumbing should be held to high standards of reliability and maintenance. And somehow weíve been convinced that indoor computing should not.
And in the follow up “Dynomite!“:
Complexity [...]

Udder Insanity [via Crazy Links a new favorite read of mine]

Josh’s Hacking Log: Affected not Infected makes a great argument about the Sobig worm and how much further MS has to come in fixing their security issues…
On a personal note, my company’s home-grown spam/virus blocker has done a great job of stopping the worm/virus from infecting my computer at the office, but I can [...]

In So much for branding Seth comments on an article about how irrelevant branding can be in today’s over-advertised world in which “17 top CEOs shared their elevator pitches, but few understood them”.

Inc.com: Pricing New Products
The subhead gives it away on this article: “Companies habitually charge less than they could for new offerings. It’s a terrible habit.”
I did that this week, I’m sure. It’s sad, but it’s easy to do. As a Sales Manager and Product Development guy, I build a product, and then want [...]

Dave: How to Name a Product. Five steps to naming a product… definitely worth a look if you’re the kind of person that gets dragged into product naming meetings or brain-storming sessions. I’ve failed miserably at naming products in the past…

Apple is a failure. Or so says Scoble. Chuq’s got a nice anti-Scoble statement:
…if being with the “market share leader” is what’s important, then enjoy McDonalds and Burger King. Me, I had a wonderful piece of salmon last night at this place called Gardinos. It must be an absolute failure, it’s tiny, only about [...]

Here is a great article entitled “Markets” by Doc Searls that really ought to be read by advertisers, marketers and the general public:
There also is a problem with conceiving broadcast service–especially the commercial variety–as a “marketplace”. Its customers and consumers are different populations. The customers of commercial broadcasting are advertisers, not viewers and listeners. In [...]

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been interviewing candidates for an open position in my organization. I’ve learned a lot as this is my first time to really hire someone into an organization. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions for those looking for a job and interviewing right now:
1. Make sure [...]

Speed up OS X’s Mail.app by rebuilding Address Book
A friend of mine from Apple tipped me off to a cheap-and-easy way of improving the performance of Mail.app, the mailer built into OS X. I’ve found that every time I send a message, Mail freezes up and the statusbar says, “Adding recipients to Address Book.” Turns [...]

I saw an ad for Tinderbox on the sidebar of my website as I was re-reading an article I wrote. I clicked the ad and just downloaded the application (again - I played with it once for about 10 minutes before I got tired of it the first time). (So, AdWords has worked [...]

I just read this article about Email publishing, and have to agree with Chris Pirillo’s thoughts:
If the world was a perfect place, e-mail publishing would still be a viable model for getting the word out. But marketers and morons (two groups that are far from mutually exclusive) have flooded the space with noise. So now, [...]

overheard at:

AOL Time Warner Moves to Eliminate AOL From Name
In a surprising twist, management of America Online has been lobbying AOL Chairman Richard Parsons to drop AOL from the corporate name, arguing that the online service’s brand name is being hurt by the identification of the corporate woes with the service.
[as spotted in the FastCompany blog]
See [...]

In case you didn’t notice, I finally did a little housekeeping with my URL structure (after writing about it many, many times). Thanks in large part to a bunch of articles I’ve read recently about URLs, and an excellent conversion tutorial from Olivier Travers (which is where almost all of my tricks came from), [...]

The Seven Deadly Sins of Web Writing. Good Points:
Deadly sin number 1: I think I’m God
Deadly sin number 2: I go on and on and on …
Deadly sin number 3: I canít spell and Iíve awful grammar
Deadly sin number 4: Iím locked in a print view of the world
Deadly sin number 5: Iím not [...]

from apennyfor.com:
Another Potential Essential
Fast Company has started a blog. I had heard a rumor that they were working on this. It has been online since Monday and I like it so far. A number of different people from the magazine are contributing.
Check it out at http://blog.fastcompany.com/.
Already added to my blogroll and my [...]

Did you know that on Windows unscrupulous marketers can make Notepad (the text editor included with Windows) open and display a message using javascript or other forms of auto-execution in IE? Did you know they can make Notepad open specific files on the hard-drive of that unsuspecting PC? They can. While [...]

Looks like there’s a new read from XPlane today:
Selling to the VP of NO: Secrets of the Selling Stars.
In a highly visual book that can be read under an hour, Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE, constructs a simple road map to selling success. Far from rocket science, it contains simple, proven methods to help you [...]

“Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ‘em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

Petie got a Macintosh.
And he made a movie about it.
Scariest iMovie I’ve ever seen I think. [via them]

I just hate getting sick in the middle of summer, but invariably, I seem to always get sick mid-way though each summer. I almost never have a cold in the winter, but for the past three or four years I can could on getting the flu in late July or early August, when the [...]

And so I share with you a choice phrase from the defense of the work fuck:
“It would be far fetched to argue that the Fuck family has not made its way into mainstream society.” [see page 2]
This argument that the right to use the word “fuck” is a constitutional right is truly hilarious.

“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” –Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Good point to remember if you’re in sales or a leadership/management role.

“Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.”
– Eddie Cantor