Unnecessary email wastes time and productivity. We all know this. What are we doing about it? According to Folio’s Dylan Stableford, publishing giant Nielsen disabled Outlook’s “Reply to All” functionality to “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency.”

Read the e-mail message, sent out by Nielsen’s CIO, Andrew Cawood — and then read the scathing comments. Fascinating. What do you think about this?

By the way, at our company, we have the opposite problem. Too often, employees inappropriately use “Reply” instead of “Reply to All,” and suddenly cut their team or committee out of an important discussion thread, leaving everyone wondering what’s going on, if an action was taken, etc.

There’s no way you can keep an OS/2 Warp enthusiast down… and if you’re one of them, you’ll be pleased to learn that:

The Board of Directors of Warpstock Corporation is pleased to announce that Warpstock 2009 will be held Friday through Sunday noon, August 7th – 9th, at the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We hope to have cost details shortly and open Warpstock 2009 for registration.

The picture is from the Warpstock 2008 event, held in Santa Cruz, Calif.

What attendees said about our first SPTechCon, the SharePoint Technology Conference, held in San Francisco. The next one’s coming up in Boston, June 22-24.

SPTechCon from BZ Media on Vimeo.

Video credits:
Videography, Ted Bahr
Postproduction, Lisa Magrane

Retro technology at its finest!

Blue Marble Announces Support for over 800 Ancient Units of Measure

Gardiner, Maine – April 1, 2009 – Blue Marble Geographics announces support for over 800 units of measure from antiquity in the latest version of Blue Marble software. Blue Marble’s geospatial data manipulation and conversion solutions are used worldwide by thousands of GIS analysts at software companies, universities, oil and gas companies, civil engineering, surveying, technology, enterprise GIS groups, government and military organizations.

Modern surveyors often reminisce about the ancient days where measurement was more of an art than a science. To help return some traditional methods to the modern world, Blue Marble now supports over 800 ancient units of measure! Whether you are surveying an Ancient Egyptian burial site, or building a modern sewage treatment plant, knowing that one šsp = .8 drt can mean the difference between doing a good job, and doing a great job. New support for cubits, for example, is quite extensive and is customizable to virtually anyone’s “arm’s length”. No more confusion between surveyors of different shapes and sizes.

Constance Noring, Vice President of Measurement at Blue Marble Geographics, could not be more excited about these new additions. “I’ve had surveyors call and thank me about this feature, and we haven’t even released it yet. Now they can convert all of their CAD data from feet to cubits with the simple click of a button! Talk about job security, with a tool like this no one will want your job once you get done with the data!”

About Blue Marble Geographics: Blue Marble Geographics of Gardiner, Maine is a leading developer and provider of geographic software products that provide sensible solutions for users and developers of geographic data. Blue Marble has been writing GIS software tools and solutions for over 15 years and currently serves hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Learn more at www.bluemarblegeo.com.

Developers are staying away from technology conferences. Maybe they’re going to fewer events, or sending smaller teams to must-attend conferences. Maybe they’re only going to conferences that are within driving distance, or are attending “free” vendor-sponsored marketing events instead of educational forums. No matter what, the decline of our leading events is a loss for everyone.

I love going to technology conferences. While online communications and phone chat are great for learning about new technologies and trends, there’s nothing like the mass face-to-face experience of a conference to keep me in looped into the software development industry.

Still, there’s no denying that conferences are expensive, in terms of tuition, travel, room, food, and time out of the office. If you have control over your own travel schedule and budget, like I do, the economy means making hard choices. If your manager has control of your travel, you’ll have to work hard to make your case. If you work for a big company, there’s a good chance that a full or partial ban on technology conferences is in effect.

Consider Microsoft’s TechEd, one of the must-attend events. Last year, TechEd had split into two separate weeks, one for developers, another for IT professionals like systems administrators. This year, TechEd is back to a single week – May 11-15 in Los Angeles. Today, we learned that Microsoft is expecting TechEd to be even smaller than we thought, as described in this exhibitor communiqué:

Tech·Ed is not immune to the impacts of limited budgets available for business travel and professional development activities (such as events) resulting from the financial pressures of today’s economic environment. On average, industry event attendance is currently trending 30%-40% lower than anticipated. Tech·Ed North America currently expects an audience of approximately 6,000, including attendees, Press staff, Microsoft staff, speakers, and booth staff, so please plan accordingly for booth staff and any marketing collateral or giveaways.

The drop-off is bigger than the Microsoft market, of course. Last week, I attended EclipseCon, the annual gathering from the Eclipse Foundation. Its attendance dropped from about 1,300 last year to about 800 this year. A few weeks earlier, SD West did so poorly that TechWeb shut down the entire family of events, including SD West, SD Best Practices and Architecture & Design World.

I dread to see what this year’s JavaOne, June 2-5 in San Francisco, will look like.

Tell me about your conference plans. Are you going to fewer events this year — or none? Do you have corporate restrictions on attending conferences? How is this affecting your professional skills development and sense of involvement in the software development industry?

The 86 Rules of Boozing are pretty darned funny. The rule listed as the blog title is #69.

#67 is, “Never ask a bartender ‘what’s good tonight?’ They do not fly in the scotch fresh from the coast every morning.”

Yes, this is old, but who cares? Read and enjoy!!

You’ve got to trust your community to do the right thing – but also make it easy to clean up after people if they misbehave.

That’s a major point that I took away from Tuesday’s opening keynote from EclipseCon. The speakers were Jeff Atwood, famous for his Coding Horror blog, and Clay Shirky, author of the insightful book, Here Comes Everybody, about the power of social groups in public life.

The topic was “The Social Mind: Designing like groups matter,” and Jeff and Clay found patterns in the success from their creation of StackOverflow, a user community for developers, and as well as successful communities like SlashDot and Wikipedia.

You should read Clay’s book, subscribe to Jeff’s blog, and visit StackOverflow. But before you do that, here are four best practices that Jeff and Clay offered regarding creating a successful community site – the headings are theirs, but the descriptions are mine.

1. Radically lower the bar for participation. Don’t make prospective community members jump through hoops to participate, or demonstrate specific expertise. Look at what makes Wikipedia successful – that it has contributions from the small number of experts who really care about a specific subject, and also smaller contributions from the huge number of people who have a smaller commitment. Anyone can start a Wikipedia page; anyone can change a page; anyone can add to a topic or correct a mistake. Make everyone welcome and let everyone participate, as much as you can.

2. Trusting (some of) your users. While you want a lot of participation, not all participants are equal. Some folks contribute more, some are more dedicated, some add a huge amount of value. Other folks contribute less. How do you know who is more valuable, more trustworthy? Find ways to let the community decide, whether it’s through rankings, karma points, or whatever. And then, provide the means for those with more trust to lead the community.

3. Life is the world’s biggest MMORPG. Successful massively multiplayer online role-playing games mimic real life. People work hard if they can see that they’re making progress… and if they have goals to achieve. Those goals might be to slay dragons, win karma points, or to accumulate gold pieces, or whatever. Build those mechanisms into your system, to encourage and reward behavior that you’d like to see in your community.

4. Bad stuff happens. Some people paint beautiful murals, and others spray obnoxious graffiti. That happens in the real world, and happens online too, as you can see by the abusive comments left on many online communities. The more general the community, the more people just like to go by and spray graffiti. Accept that this will happen, but also make sure you have ways to delete community-destroying nuisances quickly. Look at how easily Wikipedia contributors can ‘revert’ malicious content. In the virtual world, you can make it easier to delete graffiti than to create it.

Jeff and Clay suggest starting small, and getting really good at what you do – and then letting the community grow in a scalable, sustainable way. Think about how Google, or eBay, or Facebook started. That’s the recipe for success in a community, both in the real world and online.

The strangest thing… a big truck pulled up outside the office, and tried to deliver a 500-pound palette with an industrial-grade bandsaw on it.

The trucking company’s bill of lading showed that this was an order from Amazon.com to be delivered to me. But I didn’t order a bandsaw, and it’s hard to imagine that someone would send me one. (It’s not Father’s Day, is it?)

We (me and the truck driver) discovered that Amazon’s shipping label on the palette itself has a different name and delivery address — in a different state. Same bill of lading number, however.

We were shaking our heads on this one. Why is my name/address on the bill of lading?

I refused delivery, of course. But now I’m having (sort of) buyer’s remorse. It might be fun to have a free industrial-strength bandsaw.

Is there a full moon or something?

In today’s off-topic press release department, two noteworthy entries came in. You can read them both on my new “Stop-the-PResses” blog.

The first is from Unilever, and involves a computer game designed to promote a new product:

The “Bake It To Believe It!” Cooking & Baking game marks the launch of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!® Cooking & Baking sticks, which taste and bake like butter with 50% less saturated fat. The game gives cooking enthusiasts an opportunity to hone their skills in the kitchen. Visitors can experiment virtually with delicious recipes from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!®, while putting their cooking and baking skills to the ultimate test.

The second is from Digital Playground, and is about a new Blu-ray movie for an over-21 audience:

Everybody knows that bad girls have more fun, and the Digital Playground girls are the baddest on the block. “Digital Playground’s Bad Girls” is the latest kinky gonzo from acclaimed director Robby D. Contract stars Stoya, Gabriella Fox, and Shay Jordan are naughty and begging to be punished. In her first released B/G/G, Stoya learns that two is always better than one when it comes to guys. Kelly Summer and Serena del Rio join in the hot, deviant fun in this must-have new offering.

The prurient question, of course, is what would happen if these two companies joined forces?

Ted “call him Dante” Bahr is back, and describes the advertising sales cycle in terms that every salesperson can relate to. Here’s the first of “the seven layers of approval hell”:

First Level: Customer agrees with your proposal, is excited, but needs the price lowered. With that negotiation settled, both parties are ready to go.

As you expect, things “descend” from there.

Read the rest here!

Grrr! I’m in the middle of reinstalling Parallels Desktop 3 on my MacBook Pro, and I’m not happy about it.

I use Parallel 3 on my Mac so that I can run Internet Explorer under Windows. Every so often — such as when doing remote admin to a few Windows servers under my control — IE is the only game in town.

Also, Outlook Web Access has more features on IE than under any other browser. I don’t like that Microsoft stacked the deck that way, but since I sometimes must use OWA, that’s how it goes.

On those rare occasions when I need IE, I’ve been satisfied with Parallels 3. Since November or so, I’ve been using build 5626, without a care in the world.

Yesterday, the auto-update feature of Parallels 3 said that a new build was available, 5634. Being a good boy, I downloaded the new build and launched the installer.

And it deleted my Parallels installation. Poof. Gone.

Turns out that I’m not the only one, see this thread on the company’s support forum. So far, no official response. This sucks, people!!!

Thus, I’m wasting time downloading the previous build, 5626, so that I can reinstall it. (You can find it here.) Grrrr!

This message appears to be sent from Amazon, but it’s a phishing scam that’s trying to steal your Amazon account login. Don’t fall for it! The links in the three copies of this message that I received go to szm.sk, a hijacked Web server in Slovakia. However, there may be other versions as well.

From: “Amazon Merchant Notification
Date: March 16, 2009 12:30:46 PM PDT
Subject: Amazon Listing Created – Apple iPod touch 32 GB (2nd Generation)

Dear Amazon Member ,

Thank you for listing your product at Amazon.com. Your listing will be available for purchase on our site within minutes. However, it may take up to 15 minutes for the listing to appear in your open listings area within Your Seller Account. Please do not re-list the product if you do not see the open listing immediately. Your listing will remain listed until it is purchased or for 60 days, whichever comes first.

Here are the details of your listing:

Product Name: Apple iPod touch 32 GB (2nd Generation)

Quantity remaining: 5
Total quantity sold: 0
Buyer’s price: $340.00
Amazon commission (if sold): (Standard Shipping) $28.69
Standard Shipping credit (if sold): $4.99
Condition: New
Comments: Apple iPod touch 32 GB (2nd Generation)
Listing ID: 0315EBGOXC0

When your listing appears, you will see it linked from the page where Amazon.com sells the same item: [fake link here]

Amazon.com will contact you by e-mail as soon as someone buys and pays for your item(s) successfully. This e-mail, commonly referred to as the “Sold – Ship Now!” e-mail, is your indication that we have processed payment from the buyer so you can get your shipment under way. You are expected to ship within two business days. You should also always check for new orders by logging into your seller account at [fake link here].

**********************************************************
SELLER TIPS
*Always ship within 2 business days of purchase. (That’s required!)
*Secure good shipping rates: [fake link here]
*Communicate with buyers when you ship your items–it helps them anticipate the delivery time.
**********************************************************

Thank you for selling with Amazon.com.

Amazon Services
(This message was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to it.

This afternoon, I received a pitch from a public-relations professional, who was inquiring about a special report listed on the SD Times editorial calendar. (I’m sure that Sylvia got the info out of a stupid media directory, since if she had actually looked at the SD Times editorial calendar she’d have noticed that I’m not the listed editorial contact.)

What was noteworthy is that Sylvia used the phrase “editorial opportunity” in her pitch more often than usual — once in the subject line, and then five separate times in the message body.

“Editorial opportunity” is a phrase that disturbs many journalists and editors. PR professionals who have a journalism or editorial background understand this, and don’t use that phrase.

But many other PR people don’t understand why the phrase “editorial opportunity” raises hackles.

For the benefit of the many PR people who read my blog, here is my response to Sylvia (expanded to be more explanatory than the original response):

Hi, Sylvia,

I’ll pass along a comment: The phrase “editorial opportunity,” while commonly used by PR and marcom professionals, sets a journalist’s teeth on edge. It’s like fingernails on a blackboard. Yes, you see a story that we’re working on as an “editorial opportunity” to promote your client to our readership. However, we don’t see it as an “opportunity” at all.

We don’t view journalism as being about creating “opportunities” for vendors to pitch their wares or get out their marketing messages. When writing magazine and newspaper stories, journalists and editors work for their readers. We don’t work for vendors and their PR agencies. That distinction is important to us.

While we might do a story on, say, [client’s technology], we do not consider that story to therefore be an “editorial opportunity” for [client name] or any of the other vendors in that space. That’s not why we’re writing it.

In fact, we try to hard to ensure that we are not creating an “editorial opportunity” because that implies that we’re sellouts who are colluding with vendors to help market their products.

Because we feel strongly about this, your use of the phrase “editorial opportunity” may cause us to give a negative response to your pitch. You see, if we provide a positive response to such a pitch, we are, by implication, agreeing that our stories are indeed “editorial opportunities” for your clients, and that we’re a de facto part of their marketing team. We don’t want to do that.

Thus, my advice is that “editorial opportunity” is not a phrase you should ever use in pitches to journalists and editors. Instead, please refer to what we’re doing as “stories.”

Best, -Alan Z

“Not Like You,” newly out in paperback, is a book that every teenage girl should read. Parents, you can read it too. (It’s also okay to read it if you don’t have a teenage daughter.)

To quote from the book’s “official description”:

An emotionally complex novel for mature teens about first love, mother-daughter bonds, and the search for independence.

“Starting a new chapter” is how Kayla’s mother, Marilyn, has always referred to their abrupt moves—five in the past two years. But what Kayla hates even more than moving is Marilyn’s drinking. It once landed Kayla in foster care, so she’ll do whatever it takes to keep her mother from falling apart again. Just until she turns eighteen, less than three years away.

Now Marilyn has moved them to New Mexico, and promised, yet again, to quit booze for good. Kayla knows better than to believe her, but something about this move does feel different. Kayla is putting down roots, earning money as a dog walker, and spending time with Remy, a twenty-four-year-old musician. He’s her refuge from Marilyn’s daily struggle to stay sober. And after years of taking care of her mother, Kayla is starting to think of herself and who she wants to be. She knows for sure who she doesn’t want to be. But is she willing to do whatever it takes to create her own life—even if it means leaving her mother behind?

Sharply honest and beautifully written, Deborah Davis’s powerful novel is about loving someone else enough to stay with her through anything—and loving yourself enough to let her go.

I’ve known the author, Deborah Davis, for, gosh, 25 years now. Her books, beginning with her delightful young-children’s story, “The Secret of the Seal,” are emotional and wonderful. Authentic. I’m proud to be her friend… unlike me, Deborah is a real writer.

Her other books — for adolescents and their parents — are “You Look Too Young to Be a Mom” (about teen motherhood) and “My Brother Has AIDS.”

Get them. Read them. Pass them on.