Istock_000000245555small

It’s been a challenging week for me. The easy part was “outing” myself. That hard part was…I’ll come to that soon, see item #3. I’ll have a more contentive (content + substantive) post in the next few days.

  1. Not sure what to make of this. Not trying to show off. But this is an interesting analysis by iNDi Business Solutions of how Guy Kawasaki is kicking Kawasaki’s butt on the Internet. At the very least, it shows what one Guy with a big mouth and a blog can do. Perhaps I should complain to ICANN that Kawasaki Motors is squatting on a domain that I should rightly own. :-)
  2. The guys at Jajah have been busy. They just added a FireFox plug-in. With this plug-in, phone numbers that are on web pages are automatically detected and highlighted. When clicked, Jajah initiates a phone call from your phone—landline or mobile—to the desired destination.
  3. This was the hard part of the week. Call me clueless. Call me pathetic. But for the life of me, I cannot figure this out. All I want to write my blog entries (while offline) in a more or less WYSIWYG mode. You know, where bold looks bold; italics look italics; ordered lists look like ordered lists; bulleted lists look like bulleted lists; you create hyperlinks by selecting text and adding the URL; and there are automatic smart quotes and em dashes. Then I want to copy the text and paste it into TypePad as HTML without funky stuff happening.I spent hours this week trying to find something to do this. I don’t want to learn HTML—this is 2006, so on principle no one should have to learn HTML to do what I want to do. I have tried about ten different programs—all the obvious choices that VersionTracker reveals. Let’s just say that my experience could be a Clint Eastwood movie called, “The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy.”

    This posting, believe it or not, was done this way: drafted in TextEdit, saved as HTML, opened with TextEdit Plus (which is a fabulous little editor), cleaned up, pasted into TypePad, and posted. What the shiitake am I missing? As Steve Jobs would say, “There must be a better way.”

    I know that Word can save-as HTML, but have you seen the resulting file? It would make a posting like this look like War and Peace. For example, the sentence, “There must be a better way” has twenty one characters. The Word HTML file with only the “display information” (that is, less stuff) has 1,122 characters! As Bill Gates would say, “There must be our way.”

    Please send suggestions. I’m so desperate (and I’m so impressed with Parallels) that I would even consider a Windows application to do this. God forbid.

  4. Check out this great story about iStockphoto at Wired. It’s called “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” I love iStockphoto; it is a role model for every startup because it’s outside of Silicon Valley, and it took no outside capital. The picture that you see in almost every posting is from the company (did you think I already had a picture of a jarful of shiitake mushrooms?). If nothing else, “crowdsourcing” is a very clever term. Almost as clever as the new spin on “linkware” that you will learn about next week.