Jason Clarke

Congrats to my friend Tom Biro for landing a great new gig with MWW. Biro, one of the ‘bloggiest’ people I know, is now Director, New Media Strategies for the New Jersey-based PR firm. Here’s his announcement.

I first ‘met’ Tom via our mutual friend, Bob Cox, and since have had the pleasure of working with him on various Media Bloggers Association projects.

I was glad to have finally met Tom in person at BlogNashville this past May, where I regret not thanking him in person for introducing me to several interesting people. He also got me going on LinkedIn (the social networking site he thanks in part for his new job) and is due a large share of credit for finally getting me off my anti-RSS-reading high horse.

In Biro’s new position, he’ll be directing MWW’s blog strategies, and in that area he’s no slouch. Almost every day of the week, you can find him blogging at AdJab, The Media Drop, or Tom Biro’s spot.

Back in January, I published a lengthy interview with him on his then-new blog, as well as RSS reading, online advertising, and more.

Best of luck to you, Tom.

To be honest, I think it’s getting past time for somebody to infuse some much-needed skepticism into Malcolm Gladwell’s writing.

As much as I love and respect Gladwell’s writing- his book, The Tipping Point, is one of my all-time favorites- he’s coasted far too long on an overwhelmingly unchecked public image. Call me cynical, but I believe that few, if any, public figures should enjoy a 100% approval rating.

It’s curious, then, that along comes Mickey Kaus to inject a healthy arched eyebrow towards Gladwell’s latest New Yorker article, subtitled The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.

Kaus doesn’t trash Gladwell- he just raises some interesting arguments that suggest Gladwell’s tendency to sometimes avoid mentioning counter-arguments hinders his points. Kaus’ sharpest criticsm:

Like many New Yorker policy articles, Gladwell’s reads like a lecture to an isolated, ill-informed and somewhat gullible group of highly literate children. They are cheap dates. They won’t think of the obvious objections. They won’t demand that you “play Notre Dame,” as my boss Charles Peters used to say, and take on the best arguments for the other side. They just need to be given a bit of intellectual entertainment and pointed off in a comforting anti-Bush direction.

Interestingly, Gladwell’s healthcare article isn’t getting flack from Kaus only- here’s the IceRocket blog search results for the article’s URL.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve swapped out my Technorati search results link on each post over to an IceRocket search results function.

There’s more to it: I’m also dropping my 10+ Technorati RSS feeds (Customized RSS feeds of my blog’s name, my name, and other topics of interest as they flow into Technorati). In favor, I’ll be replacing all these feeds with feeds on the same subjects, except these will be sourced from IceRocket’s search results.

The trial is on: Over the next few days, I’ll be keeping an eye on IceRocket’s search results and closely monitoring (like Wolf Blitzer) the results. I’ll report back soon.

Not having much experience with their data, I will say that the company is off to a great start PR-wise though: In my previous post, Blake Rhodes, IceRocket CEO, left a comment thanking me for trying out the service.

How did he find this site? Well, I’m just guessing here, but I checked my referral logs and noticed a recent visitor came in from http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=Icerocket…that’s circumstantial evidence suggesting that perhaps Mr. Rhodes was using his own service to track word about his service. The owner of a company who uses his own tool- that’s always a good sign!

In keeping with my recent rail against Technorati, I just updated the part of this site that automatically linked Technorati search results from the post (it was right over to the left there, under “Comments”).

Now, I’m linking you to results from Icerocket, a search engine. It’s just a trial, so let me know your thoughts on Icerocket’s blog search results.

Another note: Last week I was asking for help setting up Orb. I did get Orb running, but I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it yet. It’s pretty far down on the list of “things to do to be totally moved in to our new house (a novel-length list).”

Considering the serious amount of blogjuice generated by Jeff Jarvis’ 520-part Dell Hell series is generating in (and out!) of the blogosphere, I thought it only fair to relate two extremely positive customer service experiences I’ve had lately, starting with most recent and going back through earlier this summer. Then, I’ll talk a bit about some ideas that can be gleaned from the experiences.

Positive experience #1: CafePress and being flexible in special circumstances

Date: August, 2005
Company: CafePress
Rating: 5 stars

At nearly the last minute, I decided to order a custom-made BBQ apron for my son’s 2nd birthday party. I jumped on to CafePress, created the apron effortlessly and with much help thanks to their excellent online creation and ordering tools. Prepping my image was equally as easy thanks to their superb templates and image-creating documentation. To get the apron in time, I opted to pay $18 for next day shipping.

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Want to win a copy of Undeclared on DVD? Check out my other blog, Network Landscape.

Last week, I reached the breaking point with Technorati and abandoned the service I called my “Web service of the year” for 2004.

This week, Jason Kottke reaches the breaking point and says So Long, Technorati himself.

Help! I’m wondering if any Orb users out there can give me a hand with tech support issue. I’ve got Orb installed on my Windows XP pro machine, but each time it attemps to log on it gives me a maddening error- saying “Orb cannot retrieve your login information.”

I’ve already tried restarting Orb, uninstalling and then re-installing to no avail, and I know my account info is correct because I’m able to log into my.orb.com with no difficulties.

Any Orb users out there got any ideas on what the issue could be? Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Dear Blogosphere,

Please, please, please, STOP using the word “mashups”. It’s a stupid, ugly word, much dumber and lamer than the word “blog.”

And you’re using it way, way, way, too much.

Check out Billy Bragg’s album, Don’t Try This At Home. It’s amazing.