Conference calls are be the frustrating and least fault-tolerant part of my day.
Here's a few tips that help me smooth the always rocky experience of conference calls:
- When you get on the call, announce yourself.
This cuts questions short about who arrived and who's missing and the seemingly inevitable carrying on. Depending on how formal you need to be, "Dylan here" and "Dylan Thomas, joining the call" both work. Worry less about interrupting than sneaking in, because they're probably waiting for you anyway. If you're late, just blame it on not being able to get in, no one will challenge that.
- Show up early (with your team). It saves time and makes you look good.
I've been known to call in 15 minutes before an important conference call. If you show up 5 minutes early, you have time to deal with all the kinks that come with conference calls, and potentially can alert others so you don't waste half an hour wrangling everyone because the wrong code was sent out. Also, this allows for some quick strategizing and informal talk with your colleagues. When your clients show up, they'll be pleasantly surprised that you're ready to roll and the positive momentum is on its way.
- Keep your on-demand conference call-in info in an email template, and in a note on your phone
No more digging through email, logging into sites, copy and pasting just because you need to resend the info to someone (or have forgotten it yourself). Gmail canned-messages serve the same purpose and have saved my bacon more than once.
While these practices seem obvious, most people don't use them. I hope this helps make your day a bit better and your calls more productive.
A note on providers:
If anyone could suggest a bulletproof conference call provider, please let me know. I've tried many, and finding one that doesn't randomly drop participants, lock people out, or get static-y right when you get to the important part is more difficult than it should be. It doesn't seem to matter whether they are free or cost thousands of dollars a month or whether it's landline or VOIP based.
I tend to cycle through conference call providers as their quality ebbs and flows. Don't be afraid to switch if your provider is no longer up to par.
My current favorite is Freeconferencecallhd.com. So far I've been impressed. It has the best call quality I've ever experience and I've yet to experience any weird call dropping, locking out, or other connection issues. It's also optimized for VOIP and lets you call in via Skype, which is a nice bonus, especially for international calls.
In some recent projects, the topic of wikis has come up, but many people are put off by the look of them. Most wikis that you'll encounter use a variation of the default template and look like Wikipedia, and while many wikis are well-served by this approach, it is far from the only option.
MediaWiki is an extremely themable, flexible, robust system if you want it to be. While it lacks the large and passionate theming community that Wordpress and other CMSes have, MediaWiki has a straightforward architecture and can be easily style, integrated, and personalized. The possibilities range from swapping colors to integrating the wiki into a larger site to building something so different looking, it is almost entirely unrecognizable as MediaWiki.
To demonstrate the possibilities, I went through every English site listed on Sites Using MediaWiki and pulled out the best examples of customization and transformation. This list excludes the simple color changes, focusing rather on the more radical total transformations, probably unrecognizable as MediaWiki and the clever and seemless integrations with an existing website.
Let me know if you find any other great uses of MediaWiki.
Barak (founder of Rassak) and I were discussing ways of promoting the discovery of content the other day and while we've always liked the flexibility and power of running our own blogs, we started wondering if there was a significant advantage to running a network hosted blog (like wordpress.com, posterous, or tumblr) because, as part of the network, there were "extra" opportunities of being found. The way I see it, networks provide a lot of targeted and serendipitous discoverability through the features that networks use to try promote themselves and make themselves sticky: - featured content
your content might be featured on their homepages, in emails, and in other ways. - network search
you won't show up in a wordpress.com search if you don't have a wordpress.com blog
- recommendations
you might also like...inline recommendations for blogs, posts, and users you may like provided by a widget on the page of a post you're reading
- post actions
you can follow users and blogs, like content, and repost content to your own blog, often with a single-click.
(Posterous = "My Subscriptions, Favorite", Tumblr = "Dashboard, Like, Reblog", Wordpress.com = "Subscribe, Like")
- massive link love
all of the above equate to lots of "systemic" links to your content without you ever lifting a finger - reliable search engine indexing
you can bet that networks do everything they can to make sure their content gets indexed, otherwise, they're toast
The big question is whether these advantages are significant enough to warrant the creative and technical restrictions of network hosted blogs. Does anyone have any anecdotes or data in this area? Or are we going to have to do an experiment?
Below are the cities where I spent at least one night in 2010 while I was not a resident there.
Domestic
- Benicia, CA
- Denver, CO
- Encinitas/San Diego, CA
- Jackson, WY
- Las Vegas, NV
- Monterey, CA
- Prescott, AZ
- Salt Lake City, UT
- San Francisco, CA
International
- Barcelona, Spain
- Madrid, Spain
I recently had a conversation with a creative director about SEO and the technical side of the web. As optimizing content for machines so that people can interact with it has become a necessity, he brought up how frustrated he was. He could move the human head and the human heart with ease, he said, but he couldn't begin to think about how to create for machines.
And that is when inspiration struck. I told him:
In order to think like a machine, think like the person asking the machine to do something.
You see, machines, designed by people, try their best to give people what they want. To design for a machine, you just have to understand how a person would ask that machine for what you want them to find.
Search engines are great example of this (and the one we happened to be talking about). If you were looking for Thai food in San Francisco you might search "thai food san francisco." If you're playing along at home, the #1 Google result is a page on Yelp with the title "Thai Food San Francisco" followed by CitySearch's "Best of San Francisco - Thai Food."
If you really understand people, figuring out how they will ask a question is a relatively straightforward matter.
Yesterday had 1001 items in my Gmail inbox. I had let it go way too far. I was starting to miss things.
In an hour, I deleted or archived 1600 message and brought my inbox down to 50 message (don't ask about the math).
I also unsubscribed from 25 email lists (quick tip: search "unsubscribe" and see what pops up).
The real annoyance was webapps that I couldn't stop getting email from, because they had no options, and no way to delete the account. Rather than contact support, like I used to do, to ask them to delete my account, I just changed the email on the account to unsubscribe@unsubscribe. That seemed to do the trick.
Sold December 10th, 2010.
It was a wonderful car, that served me well, but a rear-wheel drive muscle car just wasn't going to cut it in the Colorado ice and snow.
An event cascade refers a series of events or failures that all contribute to an outcome (usually a bad one). Plane crashes, for instance, require a long line of failures reinforcing and magnifying each other. Without any one of the failures, you don't end up with a crash, it requires an entire cascade of events.
I had one of those days that had the potential to spin out of control and crash, but through dumb luck each problem mostly resolved itself before the next one started, and by 10am, everything was peachy. It's not so often that crises are so considerate with their timing.
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No coffee...totally my fault.
At 6am, the garage door refused to open.
Torrential rain made the normally light traffic ridiculously heavy.These first two make me late for my first appointment of the day. (side bar: my passenger side window is half open because it slid off the tracks yesterday)
I hopped on the newly wrapped BigFix shuttle bus (which Rassak designed - photos ) to make sure everything was going smoothly.
As soon as we start moving, I realize I forgot my phone in the car.
Half way across town, I caught a cab back, but didn't have cash, so I made the cab swing though the drive-up ATM.
As I approach my car door, I can see my phone ringing...major production emergency, but disaster is avoided.
I arrive at the office and realize that since I've been driving my wife's car all week, my office key s on my other key ring. Luckily, my studio-mates are already there.
Below are the cities that I visited in 2009. One or more nights were spent in each place.
- Prescott, AZ
- Encinitas/San Diego, CA
- Monterey, CA
- Pasadena, CA
- San Francisco, CA
- Denver, CO
- Crystal Lake, IL
- Henderson, NV
- Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
- Sarah holding Callie so she doesn't get eaten by Milan, the German shepard
- Callie and Milan at the dog park
- Cutting the anniversary cake from VG's
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