I’m about to call it a night, but not before giving props to James Andrews of The Key Influencer and Lisa Price, owner of Carol’s Daughter, for pulling off something that I hope more businesses do: holding an online video forum for customers.
Carol’s Daughter is a line of hair and skin products primarily for women of color. James set up a session on ustream for customers and soon-to-be-customers to speak with Lisa about her business and her life. Lisa also has a Mother’s Day promotion going on at Carol’s Daughter TV.
The session was a wonderful way to put a voice and face to the woman behind the products. Also, in the Cluetrain vein, the session fomented two-way communication. Viewers could call in or type in their questions.
I called in and talked to Lisa, asking her a few questions about the availability of her products in Europe and for some hair tips. She was extremely gracious.
There were a couple of hiccups, like the mics being way too hot when folks laughed and we got started late. But other than that, the session was fab. Businesses, take note.
Also, I’ve got to send a shout out to Lynne Johnson. I wouldn’t have known about this unless she’d sent me the e-mail.
By way of Kathryn Corrick, I found out about searchme, a visual search engine with which you can see the actual web pages that come up during a search. I signed up for a beta invite and have been using it quite a bit over the past two days.
Not sure if the results equal Google, but I doubt anyone starts a new search engine with the intention of being a Google killer. The ability to actually see the pages is frightfully cool and I’m a big fan of the scrolling (think Piclens).
There are only two things I have issues with so far:
1. Setting the speed of “flip throughs” : I wish I could adjust the speed of sorting through the pages.
2. Browsing by placing mouse on either side of the screen: I would love to browse by doing this instead of using the scroll bar at the bottom. Does that make sense?
Other than that, I like what I see. If you’re interested in testing it out, sign up for an invite at the site.
Over at Online Journalism Blog Paul Bradshaw has listed ten ways OJ has changed over the past ten years. Bradshaw gives props to conversations between site authors and visitors (a la Cluetrain Manifesto), amateurs and A/V tools and their relatively low prices.
Bradshaw also highlights the importance of RSS feeds (I couldn’t agree more with this):
RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader - and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.
For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper - or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?
I know folks who don’t use RSS feeds. I don’t see how they can manage the web without them.
I’m playing around with seesmic. I try to explain it in the video. The quality isn’t great, but the fact that one can record videos directly on the site is a major selling point.
I need to explain the conversation line I screwed up in the vid: You can record a video (a statement or whatever) and people can post video replies to it. I’d loooove for some of the US presidential candidates to jump on board seesmic because of that alone!
The demo explains it a heck of a lot better than I can.
