Finishing up with my blogroll for this week:
From Andrew Lark, Tomcruiseisnuts.com I needed something light after the news of the bombings in London, and this fit the bill.
Another great post from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users – You’re emotional. Deal with it. She covers the surprising news (VBG) that decisions are most often based on emotions, not logic, regardless of how we choose to justify the decisions. Of course this won’t be a surprise to marketing folks and most women I know, but news like this just might rock the world of a few tech CEOs.
Tom Murphy has an excellent post that lists posts from PR bloggers on the right (and wrong) ways to pitch bloggers. The post that triggered his, from Anil Dash, on how not to pitch a blogger, closed with an admonition about my favorite peeve: PDFs. About four weeks ago, I ripped into someone (privately) who sent me a pitch about a book with at least 3 PDF attachments plus a huge graphic in the HTML email.
Get a simple website, people, post your information there, and include the links in your emails. If you don’t have the technical ability to do this, find someone who does, like a college student or fourth grader. The people getting your pitch — whatever it is — DO NOT want their email bogged down with tons of attachments that they DIDN’T ASK FOR!!!!! It doesn’t matter whether they are on dial up, broadband, corporate network or a blackberry. They don’t want ’em.
BONUS RESOURCE FOR US FOLKS: If you don’t have your own child to help you with this tech stuff, techstudents.net can help you find a college student to do this work for you.
Also from Tom Murphy, I learned about changes Gartner is making to the infamous Magic Quadrant and a new blog (new to me that is): Analyst Equity.
We’ll have to see how it plays out, but I don’t really see how these "changes" are going to make the whole Magic Quadrant process any less capricious. It still sounds like a "black box" where the analyst doing the Quadrant will decide the key elements based on his or her own opinions and biases, and the companies involved will have a devil of a time figuring it all out.