Author Archives: Michelle Lentz

16 May

Get Your Message Out: Pingercast Messaging

by Michelle Lentz
I like to post something light on Fridays, something fun. But “the Internets” are all abuzz about the data portability-Facebook-Google kerfluffle. That’s just not light or fun – nor is it something I feel prepared to voice my opinions on just yet. 

So I dug through my archive of press releases and came up with Pinger/Pingercast Messaging. This is definitely fun.

Pinger itself seems to be a social network via voice messaging, all accessed through your mobile phone. So take that technology and apply it to publicity and you have Pingercast. I have a friend with a great band in New York City. If he signed up for Pingercast, he could then broadcast voice messages to all his fans and friends, via their mobile phone.

The first thing you do after signing up is to create a custom widget for your site. It’s HTML code, so you can drop it on MySpace or any other location, I assume, that accepts HTML (so probably not Facebook). When people visit your site, they can choose to sign up for news sent to their phone. In Your Voice. This is a great personal branding statement, I think. Whether you’re a struggling musician, a well-known blogger, or just Joe wanting to keep up with Joe’s family, it’s a more personal way to connect with others than blast emails or SMS. Here’s a shot of Indina Menzel’s Pingercast box from her MySpace page (she’s a Broadway star):

To send a Pingercast, you just upload a .Wav or .Mp3 file to the Pingercast site or you can call a phone number to make a recording. With a few steps, anyone can set up a subscription widget to gather names and numbers of their fan base or friends, record messages and send them to subscribers’ mobile phones. Fans can then easily reply and even forward messages to propel your message onward.

Once your message has been sent, Pinger provides metrics to track how many people joined, listened, forwarded, or replied. Your fans pay for minutes, I assume, if applicable in their wireless plan.

Right now, Pingercast is in beta, which means its currently free and they want your feedback. If you’re interested, whether to communicate with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry or to broadcast to your fans, it’s a nifty add-on to your site.

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If you have any news, apps, gadgets, or trends you want to hear about, let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net or via Twitter.

15 May

Dear Twitter:

Dear Twitter:

Since Brian is in Spain, I thought I’d write you the latest letter.

We really do love you, and because of that, we’re sad when you’re down. Really down apparently.

Perhaps you need to make some internal changes – but if you do, could you notify your users of potential outages? These surprise outages aren’t very fun.

Thanks,

Michelle
writetechnology

15 May

Acquisitions: CBS and Ask.com Go Shopping

by Michelle Lentz 

Is it always like this and I just haven’t been paying attention? Here are two more acquisitions that strike me as noteworthy.

CBS Acquires C|Net for $1.8 Billion
I’ve always liked C|Net. With sites like Download.com and some decent news and blogs, it’s always been friendly and approachable technology, and they do have quite an extensive network of sites. For CBS, this is probably a no-brainer. When you first look at this, you wonder what on earth the two companies have in common. Then you realize – CBS has an unimpressive web presence. Why build their own when they can just buy one? While I see the benefit for CBS, I wonder what the folks at C|Net are really thinking. What does this do to C|Net and their vision, as well as their management?

Ask.com Acquires Reference Sites: Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, Reference.com
Ask.com has purchased three big reference sites, hoping to “make more money showing ads to people looking for answers to basic questions.”

This is all part of Ask.com’s quest to um, topple Google, I suppose. Ask has realized that mroe than 30% of searches on their own site are for reference material. Access to these additional sites provides those users with more, and better, options.

Ask plans to plant some of its search engine results on the reference
sites in an effort to expose its technology to an even wider audience.
…

Some of the material from Dictionary.com and other newly acquired
reference sites will be featured at the top of Ask’s search results
page devoted to “smart answers.”

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If you have any tech trends, news, or apps you’d like to know more about, let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net or via Twitter.

15 May

Fire Up Your Blogging with ScribeFire

by Michelle Lentz 

I’ve been using ScribeFire for about a week now, and I positively love it. To be succinct, it lets me blog within Firefox, on whatever page I’m citing.

ScribeFire is a Firefox extension. You can easily set up all of your blogs in ScribeFire. I currently have it set up to post to my four Typepad blogs and Bub.blicio.us on WordPress. ScribeFire also supports LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, Performancing, Jeeran, Tumblr, and MySpace. In addition, it supports custom blogging platforms hosted on your own server, including WordPress, Moveable Type, Drupal, TextPatter, Roller, Blogger, and any software that implements the MetaWeblog API.

When I’m ready to blog I can select ScribeFire from the Tools menu, click F8, or just click the icon in the status bar.

The ScribeFire panel displays at the bottom of your browser. You can adjust the size by pulling up or down on the top. The main toolbar displays the WYSIWYG things we all love, from font styles to hyperlinks. When you click the hyperlink button, it automatically fills in the URL of your current displayed tab. You can fill in whatever you want, but I found this to be a handy trick.

There are two extremely nifty buttons on the toolbar: Flickr and YouTube.

14 May

Plaxo Acquired By Comcast

by Michelle Lentz

This news broke while I was out and about earlier this evening. It’s one of the downsides to being in a different time zone from California. Plaxo was acquired by Comcast for an undisclosed price (although rumors have it between $150 -$170 million.)

I have issues with Plaxo. I only recently got around to signing up for it, only to discover that everyone possible in my address book had been hit by a “Join Plaxo” email from me. I suppose that’s why I joined – I was tired of getting those emails myself and decided to check out what was spamming me so often. (It’s probably good I don’t do that with all spam.) I was amazingly irritated when I realized that my 435 contacts had all received an email. In fact, I’m still irritated about it.

Granted, I like that my contacts and calendar are now synch-able, online, and accessible from anywhere. That’s a nifty feature. But I’ve yet to warm to their lifestreaming application, Pulse. There are several other lifestreaming apps out there I prefer (although truly, none of them completely fits the bill just yet). I haven’t counted Pulse out just yet, it’s just not my current favorite either.

According to Plaxo, this deal is going to be great for Comcast and Plaxo consumers:

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

…

Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making “social media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or
in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended.

So, what about current Plaxo members? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue, but will continue to evolve and improve. In addition, both of our services benefit from “network effect,” which is to say that the more people who use them, the more useful they become.

Plaxo currently provides the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (which hasn’t yet launched). Plaxo also hosts all of the address book contacts for Comcast webmail.

It will be interesting to see if this agreement affects Plaxo’s involvement in data portability initiatives or if the influx of money really does work to improve Plaxo.

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If you have any tech news, apps, or gadgets you’d like to know more about, send them my way at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net or via Twitter.

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