I really don't like getting email from companies, why would I attend something like this? Because I've had customers ask for it, and understanding how to do it right will benefit customers and business.

Some Facts

It takes, on average, 5-10 communications with a company before a customer will buy your product.

It is 6 times more expensive to get a new customer than to retain a customer, and return customers spend 67% more. After 10 purchases a customer has referred up to 7 people.

1.4 billion people use email on the world. 87% of consumers online time is spent reading emails.

What is Email Marketing

Email marketing is not SPAM. It is delivering professional communication, to an interested audience who has asked to receive your email, that contains information they find valuable.

Building trust means setting expectations (how many, when, what), matching expectations, abiding by SPAM laws (include physical address and opt-out), and gaining permission.

Making the Connection

Build your list where you connect. During sales call, at events and meetings, in email signatures, and on the web site.

On a sign-up page, include your logo and branding, describe your email content, ask about their interest, ask for additional information.

Keep email very short. You have 11-20 seconds of time once a person opens the email. Make sure you get to the point quickly. Put a strong call to action. "Order now and get 10% off", "Click here for more information", "Forward this to your friend if you found this interesting".

Frequency and Delivery

Create a master schedule. Must send at least 4 times a year or else you are irrelevant. Monthly is good, sometimes daily is important depending.

Day of the week and time is important. Tuesday & Wednesday are generally optimal, between 10am to 3pm, but for something like a night club or weekend getaway Friday might be best.

Getting Email Opened

Must come from the right name. 60% of folks decide on the from name alone if they will open. The from address should be familiar as well.

The subject line is really important. Clever, tricks, and funny subject don't work. The subject should be 5-8 words (30-40 characters) that incorporate the immediate benefits. Magazine covers are good things to look at for examples. Make sure there are no spam words.

One tip is to write the subject line last.

Tracking and Reporting

Tracking is important to learn about the audience. Find out who opened, who unsubscribed, clicked through. Watch trends, see how many are opening, how many are clicking.

Q/A

Use color cop for matching colors and finding good color schemes.

Don't use images for critical pieces of information because they get blocked.

Many have suggested the right way for urban dwellers to road bike is to load up the car and drive out to the country where a good riding routes are every direction you ride. This doesn't work for me. I can't carve out 20 extra minutes each way to drive out of the city to a more rural setting and ride from there. If I've got an hour or two to ride I want to be on the bike for that entire time. This means I'm constantly on the hunting for a nice route from my house in Malden.

The route I mapped yesterday, and rode early this morning, heads directly north from Malden. The ride up Fellsway East and then Main Street through Melrose and Wakefield isn't too bad (way better than going north on Route 28 where you dangerously ride in the gutter while delivery trucks race by). Not a ton of crazy traffic or intersections in the first few miles, but the ride really opens up around mile 8 when I cross into Reading. Miles 8 through 20 are what I'm looking for; rolling hills, not too much traffic, wide enough road to let me ride near the white line and not over on the shoulder, beautiful trees, lawns, fields, rivers, etc. After mile 20 you're back to Main Street where things get less perfect for the rest of the route.

No flats today also adds to the goodness of the experience. I had to stop a few times to check my map, but all-in-all it was a great route and ride. We'll see what kind of variants come up through the summer.

There are a few things I got into the habit with CVS, and want to see when using git. Here's a growing list of things I'm discovering in git to help with my coding workflow.

Show files that haven't been added to version control

I used to get this information with the CVS update command, where it would say "I know nothing about..."

With git:

git ls-files -o .


And to only show files *after* the ignore rules have applied:


git ls-files --exclude-standard -o .


I've created an alias for this command so it's easy to quickly see without having to remember the option syntax:


alias git-new-files='git ls-files --exclude-standard -o .'


Show names of files that have been updated but not committed

Information that was available from CVS update where it would mark it with "M" to note that the file was modified.

With git:

git diff --name-only .


I suppose there are shortcuts for these, my git skills will grow stronger.

Propagating this photo around to appropriate places.

It's been an incredible 4+ years working at OpenAir (which was acquired by NetSuite in 2008).

I have loved working on the product; designing features, collaborating with product folks and other engineers, and coding/testing features and fixes. I have also loved working on production issues; building out the infrastructure, helping scale the application, pushing out releases early on Saturday mornings, refining the release process, being the MySQL go-to guy, and even some physical work carrying of servers between cages.

More than all of the techy stuff, I've loved working with good folks. As a remote employee on a virtual engineering team there was definitely less regular face-to-face interaction than I'd had in previous jobs, yet there was still a great team feeling and spirit of collaboration. And I can't say enough good about the many folks throughout the rest of the company that I got to work with over the years. Perhaps I'll cross paths with some of these folks in the future, but for now it's farewell and best wishes.

:(

1. Select an object or group (or target a layer in the Layers panel).
2. Choose Effect > Stylize > Add Arrowheads.

There's a bunch of choices, and a sizing number for scale.

Thanks Adobe docs, saved me a bunch of future time because I had been doing it manually.

Four years ago I left Tufts University and transitioned to a considerably more closed environment. Still working in the great open source stack, but not a lot of company interest or encouragement to be actively involved in open information exchange about technical matters surrounding the use of open source software. I suspect this is the case with many businesses; publicly documenting technical issues or solutions to interesting technical problems doesn't always align right with the company vision and culture.

I guess the lack of being able to speak openly has also curbed the amount of time listening. I find myself wondering "what's going on in open source software these days."

I see Jeremy is still talking about it. There's still an Open Source Convention (last time I attended was in 2007). Looks like there's still an Open Source Business Conference as well, but doesn't seem like it's as high profile as it was back in the early 2000s. OSBC makes me think about Matt Asay who still appears to be writing The Open Road (not that I agree him).

I've all but lost touch with the MySQL community (last conference attended was also 2007). Does the same great community still exist, or has the Sun acquisition, departure of Marten Mikos and others, Drizzle fork, formation of MontyAB, and acquisition by Oracle put what was there under the MySQL umbrella to rest? Brian Aker recently documented what's happened with MySQL employees, Planet MySQL seems surprisingly alive with active from both familiar and new folks.

These were some of the most prominent sources of open source news, but the list goes on.

I'm sure *something* has changed, open source software can't be in the exact same position it was 4 years ago. I'm curious to understand what has happened. A few weeks back I introduced the RSS aggregator back into my daily activity, which has been good. Putting a few of these in to start seeing more about where things are.

It's hard to believe a week has gone by, but it's our last night in Barbados. Has been an awesome trip, we feel very fortunate to be able to come for a week to unthaw and unwind. We're all feeling sad to have to go, but looking forward to getting back to "normal" life.

Heidi's posted several photo albums of our trip:
Barbados West Coast
Exploring Coral Reef
Barbados South and East

Here's a quick breakdown of our daily activities:

• Arrive
• Secure car
• Learn to drive on left, and look the correct direction for oncoming traffic when turning
• Drive across island
• Find condo
• Swim in pool
• Explore grocery store food options, secure food for week

• Swim at Fitt's Village Esplanade beach until lunch
• Swim in condo pool after lunch
• Drive to high peak in center of island, tour Gun Hill Signal and climb on the Lion carved from stone
• Swim in pool (again)

• Spend day at Folkstone Marine Reserve; swim, snorkel, dig in sand, read, eat lunch, play at playground, eat ice cream, buy souvenirs, etc
• Swim in pool

• Morning submarine ride
• Lunch and afternoon in Bridgetown
• Swim in pool

• Spend day at Crane Beach, 3 of us get stung by jellyfish but sand, water, and waves too good to resist and everyone continues to swim
• Swim in pool
• Late night Island observatory visit to overlook the city, see the night sky and look through telescope

• Pack up and load car early, hit Oistins for lunch
• Wade in Oistins Beach
• Move to new house (inland, more local flavor)
• Swim in pool
• Back to Oistins for dinner

• Church with the locals
• Sunday drive to Bathsheba for lunch, watch surfers, walk on the beach

• Up early to pack
• Swim in pool
• Off to airport

For example, last year in Ireland I shot ~4 hours of footage over a week in April. Just before the holidays (yes, in December) I worked at that footage for two weeks and turned it into a 36 minute DVD of our trip using Final Cut on my Mac.

For our February trip this year (currently underway), I decided to take another approach. I had gotten my hands on an Owle bubo, a new device to wrap around your iPhone 3GS and notch up the video capabilities (better lens, microphone, and stability). For the past few days now I've been carrying that around and shooting footage like I normally would with our video camera.

Why OWLE bubo?

Charging
I charge each night while syncing, or use the Apple wall charger in the morning before we go. This stuff I have readily available on all trips/vacations so no extra stuff to bring along.

Video capture/upload
Each night I sync to iTunes on my MacBook, downloading the day's footage (using one of these awesome super short iStubz 7cm sync cables). This puts the video clips right into iTunes, ready to export or use directly in iMovie.

Carrying
The OWLE bubo's narrow body slips into the small pouch on my backpack (I've also stuck it in one of the side pockets in my cargo pants/shorts, a bit bulky in there but works in a pinch). As easy as any camera I've used as far as toting it along (plus it looks cooler than a touristy video camera).

Startup
If you leave the iPhone in video shoot mode, the time to get "booted up" and shoot video is pretty quick, makes it easy to go from off to active recording pretty quick.

Video Quality
I'll be able to speak more confidently about this once we get home and I can watch the video on something better than the laptop, but the clips look pretty good when playing in iMovie or directly in the QuickTime player. I know it's not going to compare to the 3CCD camera I've used in the past, but based on what I'm seeing I won't be suprised if it's close enough to still make a great vacation video.

I've gotten some questions about the bubo as we've been traveling and I've been using it to grab footage of our daily excursions. I am definitely advocating it, pointing out what makes it such a handy little device. Like I said, I don't know for sure about the video quality when it makes it's way onto the big screen, and the iPhone struggles/fails in low-light situations, but for quick, convenient video shooting it has been a great companion.

Unfortunately the whole story will take some time to unfold because historically it's always taken a few months until I get around to putting together the video footage and burning to DVD. Perhaps in the interest of finishing this post I can expedite that a bit.

And yes, Caribbean water is really as blue as the TV, brochures, and magazines show.

One that stood out to me was Gentry Underwood, who's talking about how there were two players in origins of computer interaction design, the human and the computer. Now the computer is actually a gateway between humans, so computer interaction design has a different challenge.

The presentation was thought provoking, and is already available online. And how cool is this, Gentry has a Keynote integration that tweets parts of his talk as he gives his talk.

My favorite part was where Gentry talked about the complexities of human interactions and how social software makes that even more complex, particularly because social software changes the social landscape. He then points out that traditional software development model of linear progression through requirements, development, iteration, and final delivery, but that in social software the software itself changes the requirements of the software, so there's no way to know up front what a person or group would need. So the formula for application development becomes a circle between research and development which never ends.

Scott talks about his years as a writer and speaker in technology over the years and how things have changed. He attended an internet conference here at the Javits center in 1997 where the main thrust of the expo hall was improvements and workarounds to dial up technologies.

While some technology changes, there are three timeless technologies:
- Speaking
- Writing
- Booths (putting up a sign and talking about what you're doing)

Years from now the greatest technology advances will still result in a person speaking about them publicly, people writing about them, and people gathering to discuss and explain.

You can be authentic in any media. Our failures to connect will never be solved by technology alone.

When people are talking past each other in any medium it isn't a technology problem, it's a communication problem. Example, responding to an email without reading the whole thing or retweeting generically without reading. Neither are genuine communication.

When you're talking to vendors, ask them what's the best story you've ever heard about your product?

It's hard to explain in one sentence what Google Wave is. The Google video says it's what email would have been like if it had been invented in 2009 instead of the late 1960s.

Wave is ambitious, forward thinking, and built for power users. Wave is email reinvented, real-time document collaboration, and a gadget/bot-driven multi tool. Wave is also a development platform.

When does it work best? In small groups for collaborative writing to have non-linear conversations.

Talks about #SwineFlu. Baratunde became the swine flu on twitter going after people, talking about travels around the world. Hilarious.

Talks about #HowBlackAreYou, #WorldsThinnestBooks, #UnseenPrequels, and #RejectedPalinTitles.

Goes through a bunch of other hashtags and the significance of the conversations going on around those hashtags.

very.
funny.

Hakon was first at CERN, the physics laboratory. He got to work with Tim Burners Lee, and has a picture of the office Tim worked in and the public terminal where the "World Wide Web" was first usable. CERN broke the group off and Hakon went to Italy and Tim went to MIT.

CSS was first proposed in 1994, first specs approved in 1996. Version 2 became a recommended version by W3C in 1998. CSS wasn't really usable until 2001. In 2009, CSS 2.1 is a candidate recommendation, there are many CSS3 drafts and CSS3 is implemented in at least 2 browsers right now.

[I've heard two separate recommendations for the CSS zen garden, been there before but should check it out in more detail]

Hakom suggests that we need a new, easy name for the new standards coming. He suggests:

HTML5 + CSS3 = WEB8

CSS1 was basic styling. CSS2 adds text-shadow.

Demo of CSS3

Includes the addition of web fonts. Doesn't work in IE, but most everything else from the last year supports this.

Colors have improved. Use rgba to set transparency background: rgba(255,0,0,.05);. Can also use the opacity keyword.

Media queries allow you to have different CSS applied for different browser properties. Really powerful example of how as you resize the browser window to very narrow, the elements on the screen change.


@media all and (min-width: 600px) and (max-width: 800px)


Box changes allow you to have a border-radius. Can have different horizontal and vertical radius, which lets you create any combination of different rounding on each of the corners of a box. Also can have box-shadow, with control over the color and fuzziness. You can combine these radius and shadow to make buttons with shadows.

Transitions allow you to set transitions between different states. If you're doing something like "hover", you can set a transition-duration attribute that lets you control how much time to take when changing from one state to another.

Hakon does a little demo of having built the Apple logo entirely in CSS. Really impressive, including shadows, rounded corners, hovering.

There's a bunch of @page stuff to let HTML documents be rendered for print. There is an ::after selector, within which you can use the target-counter to programmatically have page numbers, bullet numbers, etc automatically generated.