Sad State

I stumbled across this video earlier today. Actually, it was one of the features in my daily Say No to Crack newsletter. I found it quite amusing, and representative of the way I feel about "the situation":

Say No to Crack!

Say no to the real crack, we all know that stuff is whack! But say "YES!" to saynotocrack.com. Bottom line, Say No to Crack is website about humor. Humor of all kinds. One of my favorite features of the site is its newsletter. Sent daily, the newsletter is a snapshot of some of the current features of the site, and are usually quite funny.

In yesterday's issue there was a very humorous feature, and I have to share it with you:


Boring Business Systems is an actual business located not too far from where I live. It's in Lakeland, Florida. The business is led by a man with the last name Boring, and that's what the company is named as well. What? That's just too funy! What's even funnier is that the url to their site is Boring.com.
Visit Say No to Crack today!

Giving Back to the Community

Often while I'm at work I enjoy listening to music on iTunes, or sometimes I'll even listen to one of my favorite podcasts or vlogs (for my very favorite click here). I also enjoy listening to television shows while I'm plugging away at my work. One show I've recently been hooked-on is The View. Each episode is typically uploaded to their site the same day of airing--typically in the late-afternoon--and you can watch it online (sans commercials).

Believe it or not my "liking" for the show has nothing to do with the recent controversy surrounding the show, Rosie O'Donnell's leaving, or the "spat" she had with Elisabeth. Actually, I believe I was listening to "the episode" the day it occurred. But that really has nothing to do with this post.

It was while streaming a recent episode I was...well, maybe inspired...by Elisabeth Hasselbeck to take action on a particular topic. On the show she mentioned you can have amber alerts sent to your mobile device free of charge. I was immediately intrigued, not only because of the nature of the topic but also because of the integration of technology into the situation. Basically, here's what happens:

If a child happens to go missing in your local area, you can sign-up to receive an alert to your mobile device, notifying you of details. It's all customizable at WirelessAmerAlerts.org. You can select up to five (5) zip codes for which you'd like to receive alerts, should a child ever go missing there.

While I'm certainly one of the last persons you would associate with wanting to help children (heh, heh) I definitely would, if something like this were at my disposal. So I went to the site and signed-up today, and here's the text message I received post-sign-up:

Now, never mind that my password is displayed. I'm pretty sure you can't do anything to my account without all of my information. While I'm certainly not anxious for a child to go missing, I will be interested to see what one of the mobile alerts looks like...and what sort of information it contains. When I do I will make sure and provide an update here.

If you have the chance you should sign-up for mobile amber alerts. It's free...and after all it promotes giving back to the community!

BREAKING NEWS!

In case you didn't know, THIS JUST IN:
Paris Hilton goes back to jail:

No...wait...the United States is at [a pointless] war:


Wait, Paris is going back to jail!

Hmph...I'm so confused!

New Comment Features

You might've noticed some new comment capabilities on my blog. I recently read about this fun new "tool" in my daily TechCrunch newsletter, called ClickComments. A service of Postreach, ClickComments consists of a number of buttons that are included on a blog which correlate to some common user-responses, such as "insightful," "entertaining," and "great find." It's incredibly simple to use, and that's the point. Users just click one or as many buttons that relate to their opinion of the post.

While not necessarily replacing the traditional comments feature on blogs (it's still there if a user feels compelled to leave a thorough comment), these new comment features allow users to engage with the blog author via comments without having to provide an e-mail address.

AN ADDED BONUS: All posts that have received ClickComments are then listed on the Postreach website, which is great because it means there's potential for incremental traffic, back to those sites using the service.

The Postreach site has a great tutorial video. Click here to view it.

I think it's pretty cool! I'd love to know what you think about ClickComments.

Silent but Not Gone

I am ashamed and a little disappointed that I've not been keeping up with my posts. I was on a roll there for a while, but things got thrown outta whack the past few weeks, primarily because of being so busy at work, then of course the Memorial Day holiday weekend. I'm doing my best, though, to rekindle my passion for blogging, and am going to try to post at least every-other-day.

So I'm not a fan of people who "repurpose" blogs, or more simply put taking content from one blog and posting it on another. I manage about six blogs relating to work, and even then I make an attempt to rewrite the copy--or spruce-it-up--in case some of the readers bleed over. Today, however, I'm completely guilty of doing the repurpose: I found a really cool video while doing some work on my company's YouTube page, and I was going to post it here on my blog, but I posted on the company blog first. I only hope you can fogive me.

Anyhow, the video is about Web 2.0. It's titled "The Machine is Us/ing Us" and it's been around for several months, so you may have already seen it. I hadn't, so I thought I'd share it: