• The Viral Garden -- Why is Plurk a big deal? -- Having a threaded conversation for text messages on my Treo is something of which I’ve always been a big fan. It probably has a lot to do with why I, sometimes, would rather exchange a few texts instead of having an actual phone conversation.

• Chris Brogan -- Five Tools I Use for Listening -- Great tips with helpful explanations for getting yourself plugged in.

• Conversation Agent -- How to Read the Groundswell and Increase Your Business Success Threefold -- Groundswell…participate & learn.

• A New Marketing -- We Are In The Business Of Reasons -- Sometimes “Just Do It” is not enough.

• Copyblogger -- 13 Emotion-Based Headlines That Work -- Use emotional triggers to persuade your readers.

• Web Strategy by Jeremiah -- The Opportunities and Challenges of Corporate, Team, and Personal Blogs -- Explaining three types of brand blogs along with some of their strengths & weaknesses.

• PRstore -- B2B, B2C, B2Whatever -- Who says all business decisions are made rationally?

• Techno//Marketer -- The influence of digital -- Be prepared for a lot of good information & analysis from the Digital Influence Index Study conducted by Fleishman-Hillard & Harris Interactive.

• Mooney Thinks -- Explore the Tag Galaxy -- Loads of fun & potential mega time waster. I suggest using the keywords beach & sunset to start.

• And I leave you with this moving video…

If you still have some time to kill; vote for Chase Utley & Jimmy Rollins to start in this year’s All Star Game. I would love to throw Ryan Howard’s name in there, but dude strikes out too much. That average needs to be closer to .250 than .200.

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Seth Godin’s post Avoiding the Passion Pop Gulf could not have illustrated my thoughts any better.  All too often, I see businesses getting stuck in the middle.  They seem paralyzed by indecision, as if all available options are the best.  Without capable decision makers providing clear direction you end up settling.  By chance, you may end up achieving a modicum of success, but you will just be another consideration among a plethora of options.

When you compromise your goals, you end up with an incoherent plan & many confused people executing it.  There is no strategy or your strategy is not sound; that is no way to compete.  Don’t make me quote Sun Tzu again!

If you want to be all things to all people, you run the risk of being nothing to no one.

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• Freshly grounded and brewed a cup of coffee
• Drank it – Trader Joe’s Volcano; recommended although it’s not in my top 10
• Exchanged a few texts with Pfluger, confirming that skipping an alumni golf outing was wise (temperature at 7:30 am tee time was below freezing) – no chalepa ta kala today
• Flipped my iPod on shuffle
• Received an entirely too positive-sounding text from Hammer, who went
• Adjusted the size of my new RSS button
• Ate the last of the taco pizza
• Discovered the fancy AJAX thinger that enabled in-page navigation and live search for this site did weird things in Firefox. And by weird things I mean no page resolved and it looped endlessly.
  • 79% of my traffic uses Firefox (thank you, Google Analytics), but view fully 1.5 and 2 pages less per visit than Internet Explorer and Safari users respectively.
  • IE users spend a minute and a half longer on this site than Firefox users.
  • I’ve removed this functionality, replaced it with the standard archivery (yes, I just made up a word) and am now curious to see if Firefox users begin to view more pages per visit and spend more time.

Makes sense to try and improve the experience for my largest audience, wouldn’t you say? Big ups to my usability, analytics, development, & QA teams.

Opportunities for improvement are everywhere. Identify, act/change, measure, record, repeat…agility is the key. But first, you must do something.

It’s now 12:34 pm and time for me to do something else…

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