I was catching up on one of my favorite bloggers, David Pogue of the New York Times. On his blog, Pogue’s Posts, you’ll see a lot of reviews of gadgets and commentary on tech news. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I watched a video he had up on the site that reviewed free cell phone voice-activated services. The video is funny and useful, and observing his geeky enthusiasm serves to remind you that he’s just a regular guy — like you or me.

It reminded me how often I am surprised to see the real live personality behind a blogger, a radio personality, or anything else where you usually don’t get to see the human on the other end. It’s usually a pleasant surprise.

Web media like blogs, and especially video, give us that human connection we all crave. I think this can be a place where a lot of websites fail miserably. In an attempt to appear professional and creditable, they take the human element out. But sites that do have that human element — say, a how-to video, or a blog with an active comment section — tend to make more of a real and lasting connection with users.

Is your site guilty of being sterile and cold? Here are some signs:

• You have no photos with people in them.
• Your site colors are all cool in tone.
• Your site is static with no interactivity.
• Your content focuses on your business and organization rather than your visitors wants and needs.
• You have no audio or video media.

If you suspect your site may be too cold, try any of the following:

• Add a video message, demo, or interview.
• Start weekly or monthly podcasts and make them easy to download from your homepage.
• Find professional and appropriate graphics that prominently feature people.
• Add an interactive element, such as user ratings or testimonials.
• Integrate a blog into part of your marketing strategy and keep the posts personable and down-to-earth.
• Incorporate some warmer colors into your site design.

Making your site “human” is easier than ever to do now. Have at it!

Video can’t do everything, but for specific things, it outshines any other medium on the web (text, pictures, audio, interactivity). Here are my top five:

1. Tutorials. There’s nothing better than an online how-to video. One of my favorite places to go for video tutorials is the DIY site Curbly.
2. Virtual Tours. We have a bunch of these over at Wonderfile that help a new user take a peek at what the product can do even before signing up. Within a minute, a visitor can usually tell how useful and easy to use a product is.
3. Interviews. Video the only way to capture the personalities of the interviewee and interviewer. Transcripts can’t capture pregnant silences or boisterous outbursts. Podcasts can’t capture gestures and facial expressions. Video wins for interviews, hands-down.
4. Product demonstrations. Think Guthy-Renker infomercials you see on early AM television. Apple does a great job of showing off products and what they can do in a short amount of time.
5. Viral Marketing. Nothing spreads faster than viral videos, particularly those that are funny. Check out the Will-It-Blend series and just try to NOT send it on to someone else.

By the turn of the twenty first century, it became essential that businesses have a website. Websites had faded from an optional marketing extra to an essential business tool, a company’s address in the virtual landscape.

Websites had faded from an optional marketing extra to an essential business tool

Now that websites are commonplace, a new, more specialized evolution of the website is becoming a business prerequisite: Blogs.

Once only pursued by prolific writers and angst-ridden teenagers, blogs have become a valuable marketing device, making them many companies front line weapon in the battle for customers.

Keep reading for my guide on how to turn your companies collective knowledge into a blog, and a blog into profits.

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In the past, it was pretty clear who you went to for developing and implementing a cross-media marketing campaign — the ad agency. You went to an interactive firm when you only needed web work, or you had to integrate complex web applications that traditional agencies could not effectively manage.

Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?

Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:

1. You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
2. You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example - the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
3. You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
4. You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
5. You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.

ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.

Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.

The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.

With gas prices soaring and no end in sight, many drivers are adopting new habits to help ease the pain. Lifehacker, The Consumerist and many other sites offer great millage stretching tips, but some of my favorites are not usually mentioned.

#1 - Order At The Counter
If you frequent fast-food joints, or anything with a drive through window, don’t idle in a long line of cars. Instead, park and order inside. It will probably take about the same amount of time, and you won’t be sitting in your car getting 0 MPG.

Keep reading for the rest of my tips.

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If you’re anything like me your daily digestion of web content can’t be contained in one browser tab. Between RSS feeds, work Intranets, gMail and other web applications, several tabs are needed, and flipping between them constantly becomes a carpal tunnel inducing nightmare.

The solution many choose is to setup a start page. Start pages are one page sites that aggregate data from many other web pages into a dashboard style display.

Google’s iGoogle is the most popular start page system, but I have started using a little known competitor that puts iGoogle to shame; Netvibes.

Keep reading for tips on setting up the ultimate start page and the secret to unlocking the start page’s hidden power.

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I just started reading a new book: “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a reluctant Businessman” by Yvon Chouinard, The founder of Patagonia.

The book is great. The concentration of the books content is the philosophy that Yvon holds and used for the development of his company. I could talk about the book and the specifics but you should just read the book. What’s most interesting to me is the idea of the philosophy and how he has put it into action.

There are a million seminars and books out there that give you the top 8 rules and the 5 most effective techniques to achieve “X”. The sad thing is most people take the seminar or read the book and then use what they learned once or twice, if at all, and then move on to the next popular thing. (I’m all for education and continuous learning, but this seems like waste of resources.) They never take the time to think about develop the foundation that they need (the beliefs, values, and ideals) so they can espouse the ideas through actions. Yvon’s admitted overwhelming management technique is “management by absence”. What I interpret from this is that day in and day out while he was out actually using and testing the equipment Patagonia creates he spent plenty of time thinking about and his ideas and building the foundation he needed to live and apply his philosophy in action.

The next time you read a current business or management book or attend a seminar, I challenge you to ask yourself afterward, “What foundation do I need to build to be able to apply this in action day in and day out?” Spend some time thinking about it over a few weeks before you dive into something else. Pick the three most important things that struck you as you read the book and let that be a filter that you use to view your world through. I find that this helps me build a foundation for which to apply and integrate new things into my daily behavior and actions.

Additional information:
You can purchase the book from Amazon or you can read an excerpt of the book at Outside Magazine’s website

Adobe’s new suite of design tools is fantastic, if you can get it installed. As I discovered today, if you have any CS3 trial software installed prior to doing your real installation there can be a few bumps in the road.

On my first attempt I was offered a rather puzzling reason for the software’s failure to install, as you can see from the picture above. It turns out the transition from trial to licensed software is so arduous Adobe has gone as far as to release tools to aid you in the process.

Perhaps I am too optimistic in thinking Adobe’s latest cutting edge software offerings would come equipped with equally impressive installers.

Oh well, maybe in CS4.

Are you guilty of writing florid, lengthy emails in your work life? It might be time to meditate on the five-sentences-or-less philosophy espoused in the signatures of some people’s emails. I’m not sure I can totally jump on this bandwagon, but maybe that’s just my love of my own words getting in the way.

The website appropriately details the philosophy in five sentences (not including the footer).

If you’re a believer, add it to your sig: http://five.sentenc.es/

Everything evolves, even Thanksgiving. This year a host of high-tech achievements are enhancing the experience of gorging on food and avoiding weird relatives.

Turducken - a chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey. Truly the pinnacle of bird-based meat dishes.

Turkey Deep Fryer - make your own deep fried turkey with this all-in-one system. Be careful though, heating a huge vat of flammable liquid to high temperatures can be dangerous.

Smoked Beer Can Turkey - this stroke of genius combines turkey, beer, and several scientific principles to infuse your meal with beer flavor.