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

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…

Yep that thing on the bottom is what we used to call a mouse. With “Minority Report” type technology quickly advancing, we’ll probably look back and laugh at the Magic Mouse too…

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

However, this may be more of a moral victory than anything as IE7 users are still migrating to IE8 (and quickly). Fully expect IE8 to be the browser king. But, this may be one small digital footprint for the non-IE world… one giant leap for the Internet user.

Internet Explorer still remains the world’s most popular browser. But, if trends continue, maybe one day the web developer community will rejoice at either A) Internet Explorer being relegated to a small piece of the browser user pie or B) they actually become standards compliant. I’d venture to guess at which one might occur first, but after a lifetime of betting on the Wolfpack, I’ll let this one play its course.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

Social Gator is an aggregator of your social network feeds. The widget will display, in chronological order, your status updates from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr with support for more feeds on the way.

Search for Social Gator on Wordpress or in the Plugins section of the Administration panel of your website. Or follow <a href=”http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-gator/” target=”_blank”>this link</a>.

But this concept – sharing your most recent status – isn’t new. In fact, there’s a deep evolution of this concept that goes way back to the Egyptians.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled and painted onto walls were one of the earliest examples of documenting the status update but in a macro way. The scribes of the time intended to document history and built a monuments to serve as a way of telling future generations what they were doing at that time. Whether it was building pyramids in Giza, the opening of the Sphinx, etc., they used walls and chisels to give us their status update. This trend continued with the Greeks and the Romans, but instead of walls, paper begun to surface. Manuscripts were authored and history was documented. The Gutenberg Press certainly revolutionized this idea and begun to mass produce the status update.

But these status updates were still being distributed in a macro perspective – whether it was Thomas Payne’s Common Sense or the publication of national newspapers breaking news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Internet, however, would turn this concept upside down – and make it personal.

For the first time, mass communication became firmly entrenched in the hands of the individual. In the early 1990s, Usenet and message boards became  popular. Thus it became a primary means of telling people where you were and what you were doing. 1994 brought about online diaries and those who shared their lives in this medium were called online diarists, journalists, and journalers. The term, web log, was first coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The shorter and now maninstream version of web log first appeared in 1999 as a joke by Peter Merholz, who separated the phrase into we blog on the sidebar of his blog, peterme.com. Thus the blog was born.

But the status update (a microblog) became a separate concept altogether. People begun to share the very basic, and perhaps most vapid points of their lives. Away messages on chat programs like AIM became a great medium to share the all important where you are and what you’re doing tidbit of information. 2004 brought about Facebook and the status update soon followed. Twitter jumped on board as a service completely devoted to the concept of a microblog.

Now, with iPhones, Blackberries, and other smart phones, you have apps like Loopt and Foursquare that will remove the need to have to tell people where you are as your phone already knows and can pinpoint close points of interest around you. What would the ancient Egyptians done with something like that? They probably wouldn’t have had the time or desire to build the lasting monuments to human achievement that they did…

But, there is a rather new topic as to what happens to your electronic identity once you pass on? Blogs, email accounts, facebook, myspace, and twitter accounts… where do they go? Better yet, if some super advanced species happens upon an Earth in ruins, will we be forever immortalized in some hard drive sectors somewhere? This would be the equivalent of archaeologists uncovering old Egyptian scripts and learning about their ancient culture. The one thing that I know I would not want representative of our times is if this advanced being opens up a MySpace profile and immediately has to look for the pause button to stop the bleeding from the ears known as Nickelback… But I digress.

Several popular online services have protocols in place that protect the deceased. For example, GMail will allow access to the next-of-kin upon the submission of a death certificate and other means of proof of identity. More here.

Facebook has a bit of a different procedure in that they will not delete a deceased person’s account, but they will memorialize that person’s profile (use this form to issue a request). They remove status updates but allow wall posts from friends only.

MySpace will not allow the next of kin to edit or delete, but they will remove a deceased person’s profile upon an email request to accountcare@support.myspace.com. I wonder what would happen if I sent an email requesting that the soon-to-be-deceased MySpace be removed?

So that’s that. If it’s your desire to have your online identity taken down upon your death, be sure to leave a note with all the passwords in a safe place. Better yet, leave your next-of-kin’s email address as your alternate so they may be able to use the forgotten password forms to access your account. But, please please please, take down those Nickelback autoplay widgets… really, it’s an embarrassment to society and I’d hate for an alien to uncover your profile first…

The tendency in tough times is to shut off marketing. But bad times actually are the best time to promote a business, says Grace Ueng, founder and CEO of Cary-based Savvy Marketing Group.

This is the tendency. Revenue is down. Profit is down. So a very natural instinct for many small business owners is to go lean and come out of the recession alive and on the other side. But if you can stomach the opportunity to go against this instinct, you can come out of the recession better than you were when it started.

The Cereal Wars of the 1920s and 1930s

Looking back to history brings a glaring example of how to weather an economic storm. In the 1920s, Post and Kellogg had entered the breakfast conversation and were looking to make a splash against oatmeal and cream of wheat as breakfast of choice. However, the products the cold cereal companies offered were not viewed as a real alternative to the more popular warm cereals. As the 1920s drew to an end and the depression began, the two cold cereal companies took separate paths. Post took the instinctive route – shrunk into a ball, stopped marketing and advertising as a way to reduce overhead, and decided to weather the storm. On the other hand, Kellogg saw the storm and bravely stepped into it – they doubled their advertising budget and aggressively positioned themselves into the somewhat new radio market.

What Kellogg did was actively advertise their best-selling product – Rice Krispies – in a new and inventive way. It was during the early 30s that the still famous characters of Snap, Crackle, and Pop appeared. Even as the depression worsened and hit bottom in 1933, Kellogg saw profit increase to the tune of 30% and had established itself as the industry leader and has maintained that position ever since. (Hang Tough – The New Yorker Magazine).

But that was the 1930s… lets fast forward to the last big recession.

In a study of 600 business-to-business companies, McGraw-Hill Research found that businesses that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-1982 recession, averaged higher sales growth during the recession and in the three years following. By 1985, sales of aggressive recession advertisers (those that either maintained or increased spending) had risen 256% over those that cut-back on advertising. (Innovating Through Recession)

Spend it wisely

So it makes sense to advertise. Study after study confirms this. But when it comes to spending scarce marketing dollars, the tendency may be to go back to your tried – and somewhat true – methods, be it direct mail, radio, newspaper, or yellow pages. Not that spending money in these areas is necessarily wrong, but because marketing dollars are scarce, you may want to look to another area that requires less overhead – the Internet.

When using traditional marketing methods, you are often targeting a large group of people of which only a subset – sometimes a small subset – may be actually interested in your product. If you’re airing a radio commercial advertising your landscaping business it very well may be the case that 10% of the listeners are actually interested in your product. So, essentially, you’re wasting 90% of your marketing dollars by blindly broadcasting a message across a medium.

Enter the game changer – the Internet. The Internet allows us to know much more about an audience than we have ever been able to know before. With the miracles of modern technology, we can microtarget and customize the reach of your marketing campaign according to those who may be most likely to positively respond – and hopefully with money. With a traditional method such as direct mail, you can microtarget, but to a much lesser extent. In the case of our landscaper, he may target wealthy neighborhoods who may be more apt to use his services with a direct mail campaign. But with the Internet, that same landscaper can intercept a person actively looking for landscaping services! In this way, we’re not wasting marketing dollars on homeowners who may already have a landscaper. Additionally, the landscaper can still target the same neighborhood but use the Internet to only advertise to those who are looking for landscaping services.

What the Internet allows us to do is bypass a reflex that we as consumers have developed since the dawn of advertising – and that is to naturally object to being advertised to. We hate commercials. Period. We hate them on the radio, on the TV, billboards, junk mail, etc. But if we can disguise an advertisement as being helpful information, then we can get around that reflex altogether. The Internet is about conversation. If we can engage in that conversation – and offer up our services at the same time – we’re talking conversion rates that are much more favorable than any other type of marketing there is.

So if you can muster the strength to overcome the go lean method, be sure to spend your marketing dollars wisely.

To date, Favre has passed for 1925 yards, 68% completion, 16 touchdowns to a scarce 3 interceptions and has posted a quarterback rating of 106.0. His average fantasy pick was 110! Talk about a steal…

Of course, much of his success can easily be attributed to Adrian Peterson. Favre himself has stated that he’s never played with a guy like Adrian (and few have, really). So this turn in events has caused us to rethink some things and restate our initial post.

It seems that Favre is hitting on all cylinders. Like Firefox, he’s add-on friendly (plays well in a variety of teams), is not the most popular of NFL quarterbacks (the Manning brothers or Tom Brady probably take that crown while the dastardly IE still has an overwhelming amount of browser marketshare), and he never crashes (his streak of starts is amazing… and this may be the one place he does differ from Firefox).

And thus, we apologize to Brett (we know you read this blog).

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!

You may be asking yourself: What exactly do I get if I win. Simply put, you get one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine more ways to reach your target audience with a free website (worth, you guessed it, $1999). Here’s your chance to connect our art and engineering prowess with your business genius to put together a product that will attract and connect with your potential customers.

So usher in the egg nog, Christmas music, and festive decorations and get your typing fingers ready to submit your chance to win!