Where’s Your Contact Info?

Yesterday, in my professional capacity, I needed to contact a variety of bloggers directly. As I tried to navigate the blogs in question, I realized that one overlooked aspect of blog design is how/where to display contact information.

Openness is an inherent aspect of blogging; you’re putting your opinions, thoughts and knowledge for the world to judge, inspect and interpret… We include links to our twitter accounts, our linkedin profiles, even our pandora radio stations. (Side note: Yay for the power of threes!) Yet, bloggers as a whole seem hesitant to provide their e-mail addresses.

We strive for comments and interaction, so why do we close ourselves off from private correspondence? Is it because of spammers? Are we scared of people getting too close? Or is our e-mail information just simply getting overlooked as we focus on all the other (social media) links we know we must remember to include?

If spammers are the problem, I found this great site: http://aruntx.com/podcast/gogage/hosting.php, which allows you to enter in your gmail address to create an image that spammers can’t “read”.

I challenge anyone who has a blog to make a conscious effort to provide their contact information in an accessible manner. I’ll start:

I hope that if you don’t feel comfortable enough to leave me a comment here, you’ll send me a private note to let me know how I’m doing. :)

Where’s my sticker?

In 2004, I voted on Election Day in person. This time around, it’s the Absentee Ballot way. I wish they would include “I voted” stickers in the Absentee Ballot package so I could wear one proudly!

Before

Before

AFter

After

And, it's off!

And, it's off

Day 5

Today is day five of my new life in here in The District.

A few notes on my experience so far:

- Cabs are super expensive here. In Boston, cab fares are determined by the distance traveled (as well as the time spent in the cab), regardless of how many people are in the car. In DC, the meter starts pretty high anyway ($4.00 compared to Boston’s $2.00-ish?), but there’s also a surcharge per additional rider. We took cabs into Georgetown Saturday night and it was $8 just to get in!

- First day on the job I’m told that I’ll be learning how to use WordPress, Drupal, Convio (and Get Active), and Kintera content management systems as well as Google Adwords and Facebook Business Solutions. For a web technology freak like me, there’s nothing better!

- Last night, I had my first “city food shopping” experience. We didn’t bring a cart and so I literally could only buy what I could carry back. Andrea was pretty surprised that the Diet Coke cans made the cut, but hey, they’re a necessity!

changing the ranking system

Nielsen/NetRatings “will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.”

Competitive Advantage

In my capstone marketing strategies course, we spoke a lot about Southwest and its competitive advantages – its unique culture, its ability to differentiate itself and its foresight at having bought oil before prices went up. Well it seems that the oil has been used up and Southwest is finding that it must change those things – raising prices and getting rid of open seating – that made it different from all the other airlines. Is Southwest losing its competitive advantage – and its customers?

Speaking of ridiculous airline changes, I booked a flight with airtran and got charged a $5 “seat fee” each way. What’s up with that?