I just spent 20 minutes chatting with my project manager about client-related work, but it wasn't technically billable. Yet, during that unbillable time, I came up with an idea that I'll present to my client on a call tomorrow. Can I bill those 20 minutes to the project budget? When we opened our mouths to have that conversation, it wasn't our intention to do "billable" work. We were simply staying in touch on the progress of the project, and my PM just wanted to let me know that he agreed with the POV I provided to the client on an... Continue reading

Reading my Twitter stream and the many blogs that are in my RSS reader, it's become painfully obvious that the general command and valuation of written English is on a downward spiral. This morning, I read this wonderfully concise and sarcastic post by Alicia Jay about why proofreading doesn't matter. While I agree with the points that Jay makes, it got me thinking about some of the rockstar bloggers that I am forced by peer pressure to read. Their posts are full of spelling and grammatical errors, and sometimes even malapropisms, but that hasn't affected their rockstar standings. How could... Continue reading

More and more newspapers are finally starting to see the writing on the wall about their future survival in our brave new digital world. Some have even begun their struggle to re-define and re-invent themselves, for better and for worse. Rupert Murdoch seems hell bent on re-tracing the same unproductive, not to say destructive, path that the major music labels. Newsday, a Long Island daily, tried the Murdoch route by putting up a paywall. The result: After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site. Others are thinking through the potential of applying the iTunes model to the news... Continue reading

Social media seems inherently the ultimate pulpit for the self-important. While a site like TweetingTooHard.com invites us to out the self-important, most of the tweets are so mundane, they're forgiveable. Twitter critics like to deprecate navel-gazing tweets about breakfast foods and sundry itches, and while such esoterica of the flotsam of life might not be of "real value" to society and the economy, they too are forgiveable. They're forgiveable because they are, ultimately, harmless. What I find more disturbing are the tweets I see from self-inflating types who brag about busy-ness. Some of these folks' to-do list per tweet would... Continue reading

In doing some client-related research last week, I approached eMarketer to find out if they had relevant data sets for me and about their pricing structure. Predictably, their business model continues to be based on the large enterprise model, not unlike the blockbuster model that drives the movie and book industries. The all-you-can-eat buffet pricing structure at eMarketer serves their mental model, but it serves neither their potential customers' needs nor eMarketer's business needs. In their undated Harvard Business Review article, Rethinking Marketing, Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman, and Gaurav Bhalla commented on the fact that many firms are still... Continue reading

For the past week or so, I've been getting irritated by Mafia Wars updates in my Facebook stream because, apparently, my having blocked the app in my settings did not, in fact, stop this spam stream. Curious, I started digging and came across this November 2009 article in TechCrunch: How to Spam Facebook Like a Pro, an exposé of online social network scam schemes, tricking unwary players into parting with their cash. What the article doesn’t discuss, however, is the way these games spam the players’ social networks in the hopes of luring new victims. Since tis the season for... Continue reading

Today, I said goodbye to the blog I've maintained on and off for the past two years at beyondthebuzz.wordpress.com. Wordpress has been very good to me. It's just that I wanted nicer themes and the potential for customization, none of which Wordpress allows me to do easily. Having to find a host and install my blog, map the new domain that I just set up, and mess with the Thesis theme (which I like but requires an amount of work and time that I don't really have)...well, I'm afraid I just couldn't face it. So here I am at TypePad,... Continue reading