Archive for July, 2009


Car talk: How to lose (or gain) a customer in 10 minutes or less

This is a tale about customer loyalty, and just how easy it is for one person to screw it up. Car salesmen have a reputation for being slightly below pond scum on the evolutionary scale. I know this to be true, having encountered many sub-evolutionary beings while car shopping in Texas. The bar has been […]

I’m tweeting this: Twitter is this year’s hot marketing tool at San Diego Comicon

Based on media coverage alone, Twitter would appear to be mainstreaming to the tune of a MySpace or Facebook. In reality, the Twitterati remains a small but vocal segment of the Internet, identify trends and riding them for brief cycles. This week represents the motherload of all Twitter cycles, as the Twitterati descend upon San […]

Know the code: 5 quick tips to clean up your HTML (or why WYSIWYG tools are bad!)

Though I’m a writer/editor/consultant by trade, I’ve been coding HTML since I launched my first site in the mid-’90s. Back then, you had to know the code, which was constantly evolving. I still remember how cool it was when Netscape added background images (I think it was v0.91b). Nowadays, most people use tools that take […]

Why we’ve abandoned big banks: No service for small business and, oh yeah, many are in trouble

For years, we thought that most banks were about the same and the thing that distinguished them was how many ATMs they offered and whether they charged you for checks and other services. When we moved to Seattle in the mid-’90s, we amended that to include nice, local community involvement and customer service – largely […]