Today we launched Thom Goolsby’s online State Senate Campaign! Thom’s website certainly ranks among the better of the State Senate Campaign websites and I’d venture to say that it’s better than a good portion of the US House Campaign websites as well. Of course, my opinion is clearly biased!

We wish Thom Goolsby the best of luck as he looks to represent New Hanover County in 2011.

A Viable Tablet

Rumor has it that Apple will be announcing the iSlate later this month. Speculation is that it will feature a 10″ touchscreen and look like an enlarged iPhone. That’s all well and good, but I’ve gotten no indication to actually what this machine will actually do.

On the other hand, The Microsoft Courier, still not a confirmed product, has some quite interesting “leaked” videos available. The feature set in this utility make it a must buy for me. That is, if Apple doesn’t beat them to the punch.

Solution to Web Fonts – More Realistically Hoeffler-Jones Foundry to Typekit

I’ve written signiciantly about the web font problem. Playing it safe, many developers will choose to use one of the 6 or 7 standard web fonts to ensure that their site renders in all browsers across all platforms. The result is mundane and ugly websites. Alternatives include capturing images of specialized fonts – but that’s not good for actual copy, using a replacement utility like sIFR or Cufon – but that results in ugly code and requires the use of javascript or flash to render, or using a commercial service like Typekit – which provides a lot of quality fonts, but you’re still limited.

I don’t see a solution coming this year, but I’d settle with the Hoeffler-Jones Foundry signing on with Typekit.

Total Decommission and Destruction of IE6

Ok, this isn’t realistic at all, but one can dream…

Chrome OS

The Cloud is sexy. The Cloud is in. The next thing to move to it is, well, the entire operating system of a computer. Imagine only needing to buy shells of computers: a display and a box with a motherboard, network card, video card, and sound card. Maybe some RAM, but drastically less than what we need now. And then being able to boot that computer up and pulling your applications, your documents, your music, everything from computers in the sky. Then go to the local library and boot up their shell computer and have it pull the exact same information to that computer as well. The possibilities seem absolutely endless, until your RoadRunner service gets bogged down with all the network traffic and opening Microsoft Word feels like pulling up The New York Times with a 56K modem…

Tethering to AT&T

I don’t care how many commercials you put up featuring Luke Wilson – and besides, the commercials aren’t convincing at all… we iPhone owners know that AT&T certainly is not the best service available. AT&T needs to pony up on promises it has long forgotten. GIVE US TETHERING!

Smart Phone Video Conferencing

Maybe with the next generation iPhone – or with the Google Nexus One – we’ll get a decent video conferencing handset. Rumors for the next iPhone say that the camera has been put on the front of the device, not the back specifically for this purpose. I would imagine that there would either need to be 2 cameras (one for photos on the back of the camera so you can see what you’re shooting) and one on the front for video conferencing, or have the camera be dual use and flippable from front to back.

Wordpress 3.0

We’re up to 2.9.1 and hopefully, 3.0 takes Wordpress into full bona-fide CMS as opposed to simply a blogging platform. Developers like us (because we’re smart) can make Wordpress do what we want it to do anyway, but it’d be nice for most of those features to be done natively as opposed to custom developing or finding unsupported plugins to do the trick.

Timeline View for Facebook

Looking at status messages of years back – make that months back – no, days back can sometimes take forever clicking more posts over and over and over again until you find what you need… I’d like an archive view to come to Facebook if for no other reason that just because I want to be able to increase the efficiency of my Internet stalking

Google Tasks 2.0

I love Google but their Tasks service is lacking. I want tasks built into GMail and Calendars, have alerts on days that tasks are due and I want that syncable to smartphones. That’s not too much to ask!

Increased HTML5 Support

This would be nice. But I have a feeling that we’ll never fully be able to move to HTML5 until certain browsers are done away with…

A lot of pomp and circumstance went into the release of Apple’s new Magic Mouse. I’m a sucker for Apple’s products (and at times, gimmicks) so I bought one. Personally, I love it. Half of that is because the Mighty Mouse was pretty weak stuff so the Magic Mouse was leaps and bounds ahead of it’s predecessor, at least relatively. It still doesn’t offer as many hand gestures as the MacBook Pro’s Trackpad, but it does a decent job.

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Well… kind of. For the first time, Firefox 3.5 has more users than any one version of competing browsers.

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O3 is happy to announce that our Wordpress widget – Social Gator – has hit the Wordpress Plugin Repository!

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The status update – where are you and what are you doing. Today, we live our lives online with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, photo sharing services like Shutterfly and Picasa, and, most recently, with mobile phone apps that now remove the need to type out exactly where you are – it already knows.

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We’ve all seen terrible movies like White Noise before where the basic premise is that unsettled souls exist all around us and communicate through various disturbances in electronic communication. Yes, their plot line is that my great-great-grandfather can talk to me through my Kitchenaid Mixer. Sure.

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The News & Observer is reporting that bad economic times are the best time to promote a business. This concept is something that we here at O3 Strategies are keenly aware.

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I wanted to post a follow up to August’s post title “Brett Favre the IE6 of football.” Well how wrong were we?!

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We’re starting a new tradition at O3 Strategies and the beneficiary will be you! This year, we’re redefining who Santa Claus is. He won’t have to worry about fitting his rotund frame down your chimney as he will be able to connect your chimney to the world via the miracles of modern technology.

If you’re interested (and why wouldn’t you be?) then head on over to our Holiday Website Giveaway Entry Form and fill it out. Don’t stop there, send this to your friends and family who own or operate businesses and let them have a shot at it too. Entry is completely free!

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Google announces its first series of testers amid tons of pop and circumstance. Apparently, Google Wave is supposed to transform the way we communicate. But so far, only 100,000 people get to actually check it out. If you’re like me, you’re stuck watching those hour long videos that Google posted earlier this year on what Google Wave actually sets out to do. But the videos are dry and academic. So to give you a taste of what it’s supposed to be, check out this video that dissects Google Wave.

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Crate & Barrel, besides being one of my favorite stores, has a new shopping cart system that is quite good. In fact, it’s probably one of the best shopping cart systems I’ve seen on the Internet. Read more »

How did we obtain somewhat trivial information that was nonetheless pertinent to everyday life? Without Google, Wikipedia, and other new age intelligence devices, how did we get by?

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Brett Favre is a Viking, pending a physical.

Once considered perhaps the greatest current version, this faulty, quirky, and bug prone passer has become the entity that just won’t go away.

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In reference to my complete ditch of Microsoft Outlook, I must say that life in the cloud isn’t always, well, sunny. Sometimes, it’s downright… cloudy… This morning, I’m making reservations for a business dinner and I pull up my trusty Google Calendar… only to see this:

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This post is Part I in a series I’ll be doing on Google Analytics. Today, we’ll center on who visits your site and where they came from.

There is certainly power in knowing. When dealing with a website, a statement couldn’t be more true. Knowing who is visiting your website, what pages they’re clicking, the paths they’re taking to get there, and generally what they’re doing on your site can be absolutely invaluable when fine tuning to turn your virtual reality into real money.

Today, we’re going to look at the most popular website analytics package out there in Google Analytics. We’ll do a step-by-step approach to help you understand the terminology, what it means, and finally what you should do about it.

We’re going to do a case study on the most visited site we have in our profile: StateFansNation.com

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Outlook. By far the best e-mail client out there, but saying that is like saying you’re the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs. Not much. I’ve used it because it’s basically been the defacto standard since the proliferation of e-mail.

Hi, I’m Brian, and I’m an Outlookaholic.

Today, I have good news. If you follow this easy 5 step program, you too can be rid of Outlook and all fo the headaches that come along with it.

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Marketing has forever changed with the advent of the Internet. It’s rewritten all of the standard rules and practices of the industry. The Internet is this generation’s Great Equalizer: now more than ever small businesses are given the same tools and the same latitude as the big guys to go after the same customers.

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Any person in the web design and developent industry has a set of tools that he or she cannot live without. The same goes for me. I have a bookmark folder on my Firefox Toolbar which is my goto when thinking, creating, testing, or deploying. This seguay’s perfectly into my first tool of the trade:

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O3 Strategies is pleased to announce the release of the new website for National Art Interiors + Design.

The website, BillionDollarLie.com, has been launched on the back of O3 technology. The website is an addition to State Representative David Lewis’s campaign to stop tax increases in North Carolina on what Lewis alleges is nothing but lying. BillionDollarLie.com is equipped with a petition to House Speaker Hackney for visitors of the site to sign. The website will be the main Internet portal for the distribution of his television ad which will begin airing this week.

The World Wide Web has become more and more able to handle more and more tasks since it’s earlier incarnations. With a click of a mouse, the Internet has become much more than a tool to display hypertext… it’s become its own development platform. No longer is it just a text and image renderer, rather it’s a device that has limitless potential to solve tasks from the everyday to the much more involved. And it’s all done with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari (in that order).

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I recently came across a pretty amazing online app that did not make my Top 10 list but nontheless may very well make the next Top 10. In a nutshell, Protoshare is a web-based wireframe application with a dash of collaboration. We’ve quickly adopted it to become our goto when it comes to site planning and organization.

The collaboration feature of Protoshare make this application worth the money. Protoshare easily outclasses their competition with notation tools and the ability to export to HTML so you can actually “click” through the rough draft of a website. With packages starting at $29/mo, the value Protoshare brings far outweights its cost.

www.protoshare.com

The word blog has had many meanings since it entered the everyday nomentclature in the early 2000s. Blogs can be quite different in style and substance: family blogs, personal blogs, sports blogs, food blogs, crazy (literally) people blogs, and finally professional and corporate blogs.

For the corporate world, blogs can have an underlying importance that many small business owners don’t know. Sure they’re useful for educating your client base or providing a format for information distribution, but well written, regularly updated blogs receive another benefit that could mean money: search engine rankings.

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Web applications, or software as a service (SaaS) has certainly revolutionized the way people use the Internet. During the youth years of Al Gore’s fantastic invention, the Internet was a hodgepodge of miscellaneous information compiled in a way that most closely resmbles the setup of your local TJ Max store. That is, everything was thrown about in a huge mess with little regard to organization or style.

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