Tag Archives ⇒ email

Can social networking tools free us from email?

July 3, 2008
· Martin Kelley

The NYTimes has a piece by an IBM employ­ee who has large­ly freed him­self from email by con­scious­ly using what­ev­er social net­work­ing tool would be bet­ter at mov­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for­ward, whether it’s IM, wikis, or even (gasp!) the tele­phone. This line stood out for me:

I have had con­tin­u­ing sup­port from my man­age­ment in this effort, because I’ve been able to prove how much more I can accom­plish by answer­ing a ques­tion, and post­ing it on a blog, for exam­ple, than I can by answer­ing the same ques­tion over and over. I still help peo­ple, but in a more open and col­lab­o­ra­tive fash­ion. Oth­er peo­ple can join in the dis­cus­sions — maybe they will have a bet­ter idea than mine. 

This is exact­ly how I try to describe the blog­ging phi­los­o­phy in the busi­ness world. Don’t think of the blog as anoth­er chore that needs to be added to your already over­whelmed to-do list. Instead, think about it as anoth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool so it becomes a seam­less part of your ongo­ing work. This will no only help work flow, but help give your blog an hon­esty and approach­a­bil­i­ty it would­n’t have if you thought of it as sim­ply anoth­er mar­ket­ing piece.

Superstar? Aw shucks!

July 1, 2008
· Martin Kelley

And a shout-out back to Hit­Tail folks who linked to my arti­cle on Adword shenani­gans by nam­ing me a super­star! Every­one Loves Hit­Tail: Hit­Tail Helps Super­star Blog­ger Mar­tin Kel­ley Save Mon­ey. Is it get­ting hot in here?

I will say that these guys are real­ly good track­ers. I some­times think if I said “hit­tail” in my sleep I’d awake to an email thank­ing me for the men­tion. I’m always sur­prised at how many com­pa­nies don’t fol­low their own pub­lic com­men­tary on them across the inter­net, but Hit­tail cer­tain­ly does.

Floating on Clouds

April 26, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Last week­end I found myself with the sce­nario no solo web design­er wants to be faced with: a dead lap­top. It was eigh­teen months old and while it was from Hewlett Packard, a rep­utable com­pa­ny, it’s always had prob­lems over over­heat­ing. Like a lot of mod­ern lap­top mak­ers, HP tried to pack as much proces­sor pow­er as they could into a sleek design that would turn eyes on the store shelf. They actu­al­ly do offer some free repairs for a list of half a dozen mal­adies caused by over­heat­ing but not for my par­tic­u­lar symp­toms. When I have a free after­noon, a big pot of cof­fee and lots of music queued up I’ll give them a call and see if I can talk them into fix­ing it.

Once upon a time hav­ing a sud­den­ly dead com­put­er in the mid­dle of a bunch of big projects would have been dis­as­ter. But over the last few years I’ve been putting more and more of my data “in the cloud,” that is: with soft­ware ser­vices that store it for me.

Email in the Cloud

I used to be a die-hard Thun­der­bird fan. This is Fire­fox’s cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care trans­fer­ring years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours build­ing huge nest­ed list of fold­ers to orga­nize archived mes­sages. About a year ago Thun­der­bird ate about three months of recent mes­sages, some quite cru­cial. At that time I start­ed using Google’s Gmail as back­up. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP serv­er and leave it there with­out delet­ing it. I set Thun­der­bird to leave it there for week. The result was that both mes­sages would be picked up by both services.

After becom­ing famil­iar with Gmail I start­ed using it more and more. I love that it does­n’t have fold­ers: you sim­ple put all emails into a sin­gle “Archive” and let Google’s search func­tion find them when you need them​.You can set up fil­ters, which act as saved search­es, and I have these set up for active clients.

Why I’m hap­py now: I can log into Gmail from any machine any­where. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.

Project Man­age­ment in the Cloud

I use the fab­u­lous Remem­ber the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and crit­i­cal to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any com­put­er. While mess­ing around set­ting up back­up com­put­ers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.

An addi­tion­al advan­tage to using Remem­ber the Milk and Gmail togeth­er is the abil­i­ty to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved “fil­ter” search gets its own URL. If there’s an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remem­ber the Mail task. Each task has a option­al field for URLs so I put the the email’s Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don’t have to think about it (part of the Get­ting Things Done strat­e­gy). Two weeks lat­er RTM tells me it’s time to act on that email and I fol­low the link direct­ly there, do what­ev­er action I need to do and mark it com­plete in RTM.

Project Notes in the Cloud

I long ago start­ed keep­ing notes for indi­vid­ual projects in the most excel­lent Back­pack ser­vice. You can store notes, emails, pic­tures and just about any­thing in Back­pack and have it avail­able from any com­put­er. You can eas­i­ly share notes with oth­ers, a fea­ture I fre­quent­ly use to cre­ate client cheat­sheets for using the sites I’ve built. Now that I use Gmail and it’s URL fea­ture, I put a link to the clien­t’s Gmail his­to­ry right on top of each page. Very cool!

Anoth­er life saver is that I splurge for the upgrad­ed account that gives me secure serv­er access and I keep my pass­word lists in Back­pack. There’s a slight secu­ri­ty risk but it’s prob­a­bly small­er than keep­ing it on a lap­top that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my ser­vices from a new machine. 

Keep­ing the Mon­ey Flow­ing from Clouds

The lat­est Web 2.0 love of my life is Fresh­books, a ser­vice that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts togeth­er great invoic­es you can mail to them. I’m so much more pro­fes­sion­al because of them (no more hand writ­ten invoic­es in Word!) and when it’s billing time I can quick­ly see how many unbilled hours I’ve worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoic­es right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead com­put­er, pro­vid­ing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.

Oth­ers

Cal­en­dar: I always go back and forth between lov­ing Google Cal­en­dar and the cal­en­dar built into Back­pack. Because I can nev­er make up my mind I’ve used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they’re both synced to one anoth­er. I can now use whichev­er is most con­ve­nient (or whichev­er I’m more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.

Pho­tos: Most of the pho­tos I’ve tak­en over the past four years are still sit­ting on my dead lap­top wait­ing for me to find a way to get them off of the hard dri­ve. As trag­ic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite pho­tos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do every­thing I can to get those lost pho­tos but the worst case sce­nario is that I will be stuck with “only” those 900.

Your Exam­ples?

I’d love to hear how oth­ers are using “the cloud” as real-time backup.

On shoestrings and keepin’ on

May 30, 2007
· Martin Kelley

There’s some inter­est­ing follow-up on the Cindy Shee­han “res­ig­na­tion” (see yes­ter­day’s post). One fel­low I cor­re­spond­ed with years ago gave a dona­tion then sent an email urg­ing us not to fall into despair. It’s hard.
Go beyond Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty fronts like MoveOne and you’ll find the most of the peace move­ment is a ridicu­lous­ly shoe­string oper­a­tion. Nonviolence.org’s four month “ChipIn” fundrais­ing cam­paign raised $50 per month but the sac­ri­fice isn’t just short-term – just try apply­ing for a main­stream job with a resume chock full of social change work!
Michael Westmoreland-White over on the Lev­ellers blog talks about “keep­ing going through the despair”:http://levellers.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/needed-for-long-haul-peacemaking-a-spirituality-of-nonviolence/:
bq. This is a cau­tion­ary tale for the rest of us, includ­ing myself. Out­rage, right­eous indig­na­tion, anger, pub­lic grief, are all valid reac­tions to war and human rights abus­es, but they will get us only so far. They may strain mar­riages and fam­i­ly life. They may lead to speech and action that is not in the spir­it of non­vi­o­lence and active peace­mak­ing. And, since impe­ri­al­ist mil­i­tarism is a sys­tem (bib­li­cal­ly speak­ing, a Pow­er), it will resist change for the good. Work for jus­tice and peace over the long haul requires spir­i­tu­al dis­ci­pline, requires deep roots in a spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of non­vi­o­lence, includ­ing cul­ti­vat­ing the virtue of patience.
Michael’s answer is specif­i­cal­ly Chris­t­ian but I think his advice to step back and attend to the roots of our activism is wise despite one’s motivations.
Shee­han’s retire­ment did­n’t stop her from “talk­ing with Amy Good­man on Democ­ra­cy Now this morning”:http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/30/1343232. She talks about cash-starved peace activists and con­trasts them with the tens of mil­lions pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates are rais­ing, most of which will go to big media TV net­works for ads. Shee­han says we need more than just an anti­war movement:
bq. Like, end­ing the Viet­nam War was major, but peo­ple left the move­ment. It was an anti­war move­ment. They didn’t stay com­mit­ted to true and last­ing peace. And that’s what we real­ly have to do.
More Cindy Shee­han read­ing across the blo­gos­phere avail­able via “Google”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=cindy+sheehan&btnG=Search+Blogs and “Technorati”:http://technorati.com/tag/cindy+sheehan.
And for those look­ing for a lit­tle good news check out the brand new site for the “Glob­al Net­work for Nonviolence”:http://gn-nonviolence.org/. I designed it for them as part of my “free­lance design work”:http://www.martinkelley.com but it’s been a joy and a lot of fun to be work­ing more close­ly with a good group of inter­na­tion­al activists again. Their “non­vi­o­lence links”:http://gn-nonviolence.org/links.php page includes sites for some real­ly com­mit­ted grass­roots peace­mak­ers. This long-term peace work may not give us head­lines in the New York Times but it’s touched mil­lions over the years. If human­i­ty is ever going to grow into the kind of cul­ture of peace Shee­han dreams of then we’ll need a lot more won­der­ful projects like these.

On job hunting and the blogging future in Metro Philadelphia

November 29, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I’ve been qui­et on the blogs late­ly, focus­ing on job search­es rather than rant­i­ng. I thought I’d take a lit­tle time off to talk about my lit­tle cor­ner of the career mar­ket. I’ve been apply­ing for a lot of web design and edit­ing jobs but the most inter­est­ing ones have com­bined these togeth­er in cre­ative ways. My qual­i­fi­ca­tions for these jobs are more the inde­pen­dent sites I’ve put togeth­er — notably Quak​erQuak​er​.org—than my paid work for Friends.

For exam­ple: one inter­est­ing job gets repost­ed every few weeks on Craigslist. It’s geared toward adding next-generation inter­ac­tive con­tent to the web­site of a con­sor­tium of sub­ur­ban news­pa­pers (appli­cants are asked to be “com­fort­able with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube…,” etc.). The qual­i­fi­ca­tions and vision are right up my alley but I’m still wait­ing to hear any­thing about the appli­ca­tion I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they’re con­tin­u­ing to post revised descrip­tions to Craigslist. Yes­ter­day’s ver­sion dropped the “con­ver­gence” lin­go and also dropped the pro­ject­ed salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actu­al­ly got through to an inter­view for a fab­u­lous job that con­sist­ed of putting togeth­er a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty site to fea­ture the lesser-known and quirky busi­ness­es of Philadel­phia. I had a great inter­view, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard noth­ing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up com­mu­ni­ca­tions went unan­swered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talk­ing about and emailed that the site did launch, just qui­et­ly. It looks good.

Cor­po­rate blog­ging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years polit­i­cal cam­paigns have come to con­sid­er blog­gers as an essen­tial tool in get­ting their mes­sage out. User-generated con­tent has become essen­tial feed­back and pub­lic­i­ty mech­a­nisms. My expe­ri­ence from the Quak­er world is that blog­gers are con­sti­tut­ing a new kind of lead­er­ship, one that’s both more out­go­ing but also thought­ful and vision­ary (I should post about this some­time soon). Blogs encour­age open­ness and trans­paren­cy and will sure­ly affect orga­ni­za­tion­al pol­i­tics more and more in the near future. Smart com­pa­nies and non­prof­its that want to grow in size and influ­ence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is lit­tle suc­cor to the present. In the Philadel­phia met­ro­pol­i­tan area it seems that the rare employ­er that’s think­ing in these terms have have a lot of back and forths try­ing to work out the job descrip­tion. Well, I only need one enlight­ened employ­er! It’s time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

Site redesign

August 30, 2006
· Martin Kelley

As will be obvi­ous to any­one see­ing this, the Quak­er­Ran­ter has been seri­ous­ly redesigned and moved off the Non​vi​o​lence​.org serv­er. I plan to talk about the tech­ni­cal under­pin­nings soon on “MartinKelley.com”:martinkelley.com. In the mean­time “email me”:mailto:martink@martinkelley.com if there’s any hor­ri­fy­ing glitches.
h3. Update, 9/1/06:
My vis­i­tor logs picked up a very inter­est­ing new Google entry for my site that high­lights the pow­er of key­words and tags that are run­ning on this new site. More over on Mar​tinkel​ley​.com in the immod­est­ly titled post “I am the King of Folksonomy”:http://www.martinkelley.com/blog/2006/09/i_am_the_king_of_folksonomy.php.

Marketing and Publicizing Your Site

August 8, 2006
· Martin Kelley

“Build it and they will come” is not a very good web strategy.
Instead, think “if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did
I spend $3000?” There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a
site. But there are ways to make sure they do.

Much of web mar­ket­ing fol­lows the rules of any oth­er mode of
pub­lic­i­ty: iden­ti­fy an audi­ence, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle
and keep in touch with your cus­tomers and their needs. A sucess­ful web
cam­paign uti­lizes print mail­ings, man­u­fac­tured buzz, gen­uine word of
mouth and email. Finances can lim­it the options avail­able but everyone
can do something.

One of the most excit­ing aspects of the inter­net is that the most
pop­u­lar sites are usu­al­ly those that have some­thing inter­est­ing to
offer vis­i­tors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little
guys can com­pete with giant cor­po­ra­tions. A good strat­e­gy involves
find­ing a niche and build­ing a com­mu­ni­ty around it. Per­son­al­i­ty and idio­syn­cra­cy are actu­al­ly com­pet­i­tive advantages!

It would be cru­el of me to just drop off a com­plet­ed web­site at the
end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers
do that, but I’m more inter­est­ed in build­ing sites that are used. I can
work with you on all aspects of pub­lic­i­ty, from design to launch and
beyond to ana­lyz­ing vis­i­tor pat­terns to learn how we can serve them better.

Making sites sticky

We don’t want some­one to vis­it your site once, click on a few links
and then dis­ap­pear for­ev­er. We want to give your vis­i­tors rea­sons to
come back fre­quent­ly, a qual­i­ty we call “sticky” in web par­lance. Is
your site a use­ful ref­er­ence site? Can we get vis­i­tors to sign up for
email updates? Is there a com­mu­ni­ty of users around your site?

Making sites search engine friendly

Google. We all want Google to vis­it our sites. One of the biggest
scams out there are the com­pa­nies that will reg­is­ter your site for only
$300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their
com­pet­i­tive advan­tage by includ­ing the whole web and there’s no reason
you need to pay any­one to get the atten­tion of the big search engines. 

The most impor­tant way to bring Google to your site is to build it
with your audi­ence in mind. What are the key­words you want peo­ple to
find you with? Your town name? Your busi­ness? Some spe­cif­ic qual­i­ty of
your work? I can build the site from the ground up to high­light those
phras­es. Here too, being a niche play­er is an advantage. 

I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine start­ed attract­ing four times the vis­its after its pro­gram­mer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get vis­i­tors search­ing for
the odd­est things. We can actu­al­ly tell when vis­i­tors come from search
engines and we can even tell what they’re search­ing for! Google
appar­ent­ly thinks I know “how to flat­ten used sod” and am the guy to
ask if you won­der “do amish women wear bras.” I can make sure your impor­tant search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!

Call for Tom Fox memorials

March 17, 2006
· Martin Kelley

John Paul Stephens has asked if I could help com­pile a list of online trib­utes to our Tom Fox, the fall­en Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er for FreetheCaptivesNow.org’sTom Fox Memo­ri­als page. I’ve start­ed a list, now up on Quak​erQuak​er​.org, that I’ll keep up for a few months. Any read­ers who know of some­thing that should be includ­ed should either email me at martink-at-nonviolence-dot-org or tag it “for:martin_kelley” in Del​.icio​.us. Thanks. Here’s my list so far:

h3. See also:
* “FreetheCaptivesNow.org”:http://freethecaptivesnow.org/
* “Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er Watch”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/christian_peacemaker_teams/ over at Quak​erquak​er​.org
* “My posts on the Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er witness”:/martink/cpt
* “A real­ly nice page on Tom over at Elec­tron­ic Iraq”:http://electroniciraq.net/news/2302.shtml