Of course the TOS is longer than the tweet

Peter Kafka noted that Wal-Mart's corporate page linking to various Twitter accounts includes a Terms of Use down at the bottom that is a lot longer than 140 characters. Kafka:

That long, long, long slug of text? That’s 3,692 words, and 23,105 characters–the equivalent of 160 Tweets.

Here's an excerpt:

This site is provided as a service to our customers. Please review the following basic rules that govern your use of our Site (the "Agreement"). Please note that your use of our Site constitutes your unconditional agreement to follow and be bound by these Terms and Conditions. Although you may "bookmark" a particular portion of this Site and thereby bypass this Agreement, your use of this Site still binds you to the terms. walmartstores.com reserves the right to update or modify these Terms and Conditions at any time without prior notice. Your use of the walmartstores.com Web site following any such change constitutes your unconditional agreement to follow and be bound by the Terms and Conditions as changed. For this reason, we encourage you to review these Terms and Conditions whenever you use this Web site.

Technically the "Terms of Use" apply to walmartstores.com, and the individual Twitter accounts are in a separate domain. Not that I'm necessarily encouraged to review a TOS whenever I visit a site.

More relevant to the Twitter accounts are the Twitter discussion guidelines, a much shorter document that is also linked to from the Wal-Mart Twitter page. Here's an excerpt from THAT page:

* While many of our 2.2 million associates around the world are using Twitter and other social networks, all official Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Twitter users will be identified on this landing page and will have a link back to this page from their Twitter profile.

* Unless otherwise noted, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. approved Twitter users will follow the following naming conventions of “business unit + name/category.” For example, “walmartradio,” “samsclubrobert,” and “walmartgames.”

* We won’t reply to off topic @replies. Personal attacks and foul language = FAIL. Adding to the discussion = WIN.

* @replies should contribute to the dialogue. Please support any claims with links to sources whenever possible. We love opinions. We love it even more when you back them up.

Note that the Wal-Mart people understand the environment (note the use of FAIL and WIN), and that they offer information to help distinguish between official Wal-Mart accounts and unofficial ones.

They have to. Around the same time that Peter Kafka was counting words in a Terms of Service agreement, Francine Hardaway was noting that large companies have to watch what they say in the social media environment. Here's a taste:

[L]arge companies, especially public companies, are still guided by SEC regulations. This leads the CEOs of many publicly traded companies to fear social media, which can be a valuable marketing and customer service tool, and shy away from it.

And here's another:

IR is perilously close to marketing, and a perilously small part of any enterprise. The PR/IR people are the “controlled” bloggers and tweeters, who have absorbed the caveats and best practices of social media, and can probably (if they are good) get away with a fairly wide social media presence without running afould of rules.

It’s when we get into the employee guidelines for social media that we can get into trouble in the enterprise. Every company now needs policy guidelines as to what an employee can and cannot say on a social media platform....

And for those who think that Fortune 500 companies are being too timid, just type "domino's pizza youtube" into your search engine of choice. Clearly not an official communication from Domino's Pizza, yet the company had to defend itself anyway.

Another PubSubHubbub test

Follow up to my July 10 post.

I think I just realized why it's taking seven minutes for my Empoprise-BI (and other blog) posts to show up in FriendFeed, despite the fact that I've configured the PubSubHubbub protocol to work with my FeedBurner feeds.

FriendFeed doesn't KNOW about my FeedBurner feeds. (See this FriendFeed thread.)

Well, it does now...at least for this blog.

Let's try this again.

Empoprise-BI News - 19 July 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

It's July, which means that it's summer in my hemisphere, but the business keeps piling on.

Behind the Scenes

I'm happy with the new lamps that I got on Saturday. Yes, I know that I announced the whole operation light exchange on my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog, but it does have more general business ramifications as firms potentially shift their production toward these types of light fixtures.

Special Features

Remember the Facebook page that I created for the Empoprise-BI blog (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-BI/98783891478)? Well, I recently announced that I created a Facebook page for my Empoprise-MU blog (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-MU/213885425013). If you're on Facebook, I encourage you to become a fan of both pages so that you can keep up with my blogging activities, even in the midst of a Mafia Wars game or a Farm Town game or whatever.

Speaking of Facebook, if you're in awe of the wonderful things that Facebook has introduced, and the way in which other services' new offerings can be compared to Facebook's new offerings, check Rob Diana's post. Is FriendFeed in danger of becoming the Xerox PARC - a group that comes up with great ideas but can't benefit from them?

Upcoming

In future posts I'll look at why terms of service are so long, why employees should be kept happy, and other scintillating topics.

OK, techies, I found Guy Kawasaki at Family Christian

He wrote an endorsement for Tim Stevens' Pop Goes the Church: Should the Church Engage Pop Culture?

Or maybe the endorsement was ghost-written by one of Kawasaki's tweeters... :)

Number 1 bestseller at Family Christian?

Well, I guess "Michael at Wembley" wouldn't have been a bestseller at Family Christian under any circumstances...

Go back in time - Apollo 11 radiocast live now

If you go to http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_radio/, you should be able to hear what was going on with Apollo 11 exactly forty years ago.

H/T @KalaMana, who retweeted this @NASA tweet. NASA subsequently provided additional detail:

@revokat Apollo 11 audio begins at 7:32 am ET/11:32 am GMT July 16, continues through mission end at 12:51 pm ET July 24

Again, the link is http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_radio/.

When analysts pull a Jim Bakker

This will not come as a shock to you, but it's good to remember that when business experts make predictions about the future, sometimes they get them wrong. I refer to this as "pulling a Jim Bakker," based upon the title of the preacher's autobiography, I Was Wrong.

One recent example of a Jim Bakker was committed by Richard Greenfield, who admitted his error on the revenue potential for the movie "Up":

“Dead wrong” is how Richard Greenfield of Pali Research put his related analysis in a research note. “The recent success of Pixar’s ‘Up’ (well ahead of our forecasts) has renewed investor confidence in Disney’s creative capabilities,” he added. “Up” has so far sold $265.9 million in tickets in North America and $35.4 million overseas, where it has only begun to arrive in theaters.

But Mr. Greenfield stuck with his sell recommendation for the company’s stock, saying he believed the next 12 to 18 months would be “substantially more difficult for Disney than investors are currently anticipating.” He listed industrywide troubles with broadcast television and difficulty cutting more costs in the theme park unit.

An expansively Compaq branding

In a previous post, I noted that many of us still recognize the "Compaq" brand name today. This is despite the fact that Compaq Computer Corporation ceased to be a separate entity in 2002.

Now normally when Company A buys Company B, there is a transition period until Company B's name is retired to the dustbin of history. I live in southern California, and when Wells Fargo Bank acquired Crocker National Bank in 1986, I recall that Wells Fargo suddenly began airing a number of commercials that trumpeted both Henry Wells and Charles Crocker. But after a brief period, those commercials stopped, and the name of Charles Crocker was never publicly uttered by Wells Fargo again.

Again, I live in southern California, so I'm familiar with Kragen Auto Parts. In other areas, the brand that is used is Checker Auto Parts. But one morning while driving to work, I heard a commercial for "Kragen O'Reilly Auto Parts." Sure enough, there's been an acquisition:

July 11, 2008 marked a historic day in the automotive aftermarket industry, as O’Reilly Auto Parts, based in Springfield, Missouri, successfully completed the highly anticipated acquisition of Phoenix-based CSK Auto. The combination of O’Reilly’s midwestern and southeastern foothold, along with CSK’s dominance in the western United States, will create a stronger, more competitive company that benefits not only the do-it-yourself customer, but also the professional installer.

Notice that a year has passed between the acquisition and the time that a consumer such as me heard about the rebranding. This is an interesting case, since it's a combination of two separate auto companies in two separate regions. Presumably some cost savings will be achieved in central office issues, but the merger itself shouldn't result in Crocker-like closures of outlets. But I wouldn't be surprised if the name "Kragen" (and related names such as "Checker") completely disappeared from the market within a couple of years, while O'Reilly the name becomes dominant.

But a similar thing didn't happen with the Compaq computer name. As it turns out, Compaq was a pretty good acquirer of companies before Compaq got acquired itself. At one point I worked for a company that was the Compaq poster child, since we used UNIX computers from the old Digital Computer Corporation, plus Tandem computers from another Compaq acquisition, as well as the personal computers for which Compaq had originally become famous.

Hewlett-Packard subsequently acquired Compaq, which led to an interesting situation since both companies manufactured Wintel-like personal computers. Did this mean that the "Compaq" brand would immediately disappear into the dustbin of history? In this case, it didn't. Here's what was said in 2002:

Hewlett-Packard hosted a conference call for journalists and analysts Friday morning, shedding light on what businesses and consumers can expect as the company merges with Compaq. The call was hosted by Duane E. Zitzner, president of HP's Personal Systems Group, who frequently referred to the merging companies as "HP Newco."

Nice little distinction, which communicated to everyone that Compaq wasn't just going to be a subsidiary of HP, but was going to be combined with HP to create a newer, greater entity. But then Zitzner got into branding:

Questions about how HP will handle business and consumer branding in the wake of the merger have been swirling around, recently. The answers aren't simple. Both the Hewlett-Packard brand and the Compaq brand will be carried forward, in a two-tiered strategy. "There is a value proposition for both the HP and Compaq brands," said HP spokesperson Jim McDonald. The two-tiered branding strategy was compared by HP executives to the Toyota/Lexus branding approach, but in response to a question about whether Compaq would be positioned as a low-end brand and HP a high-end brand, HP executives said "not necessarily."...

Compaq will be the brand for business desktops and notebooks. Thus HP's long-standing Omnibook line of notebooks will become Compaq-branded. But in workstations, where HP has had a strong presence for many years, the HP brand will go forward. IA32 workstations as well as upcoming Itanium workstations and workstations based on Intel's McKinley chip will carry the HP brand.

In the consumer and retail arenas, both the HP and Compaq brands will stay in place for certain product lines because of "varying brand equity throughout the world," according to Zitzner. Thus the Compaq Presario line will stay as it is, and HP's Pavilion line will also remain. In the handheld computing space, though, HP's Jornada devices and Compaq's iPaq PDAs will morph into HP iPaq devices. Wireless product lines will carry the HP brand. Got all that?

Uh, yeah. But if you want to know how the brand strategy works today, pay a visit to http://www.compaq.com/. This does NOT take you to the black and white hp.com website, but to a separate, red-tinged site with the Compaq brand name.



Now if you click on any of the links you'll end up at shopping.hp.com, but obviously Hewlett Packard has concluded, even seven years later, that there's still life in the Compaq brand.

Hard Disk FAIL

For those who have followed the story on FriendFeed and elsewhere.

An expansively Compaq architecture

In response to Jake Kuramoto's original "it just works" post, I briefly noted that there is a reason why Apple products "just work" while other products don't. Despite our love of open this and open that, Apple is pretty much a closed shop. In my response, I compared Apple to the popular alternative, and in the process stated the following:

In essence, the reason that Windows sucks is because IBM built its original PC on an open, easy-to-duplicate architecture, using an operating system that they didn't exclusively control. The sin of open systems?

However, in a follow-up post, Jake noted that I didn't get the facts quite right, at least on the hardware end:

I don’t agree entirely with John that the PC architecture was open; IBM didn’t open its architecture; it was legally reverse-engineered. Maybe it was accidentally open or improperly closed.

Here's how the writers of Wikipedia frame the issue:

The origins of this platform came with the decision by IBM in 1980 to market a low-cost single-user computer as quickly as possible in response to Apple Computer's success in the burgeoning market....The only proprietary component of the PC was the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System)....

The original "clones" of the IBM Personal Computer were created without IBM's participation or approval. Columbia closely modeled the IBM PC and produced the first "compatible" PC (i.e., more or less compatible to the IBM PC standard) in June 1982 closely followed by Eagle Computer. Compaq Computer Corp. announced its first IBM PC compatible a few months later in November 1982—the Compaq Portable. The Compaq was the first sewing machine-sized portable computer that was essentially 100% PC-compatible. The company could not directly copy the BIOS as a result of the court decision in Apple v. Franklin, but it could reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS and then write its own BIOS using clean room design.

Of the three computers mentioned by the Wikipedia writers, the one name that is still recognizable today (this recognition will probably be the topic of a future post) is Compaq. Paul Dixon provided additional insight into Comapq's process:

Programmers who had read the BIOS were known as dirty and others were known as clean. Dirty programmers were banned from working on the BIOS, but could work on the other big project which was BASIC.

Functionality of the IBM BIOS was not determined by looking at IBM code - this was banned. In fact, functionality was determined by a process known as "black boxing", which involved treating the BIOS as a black box and feeding every possible input to it and recoding the output.

For example, the keyboard driver was written by Steve Flannigan who had written the code for Silent 700 terminals at TI. He produced what appeared to be a fully compatible set of routines, but was told by someone that his code was only 50% of the size of IBM's. Compaq never found out why IBM's code was so much bigger, and no incompatibilities were ever attributed to this section of the BIOS, but hours were spent in trying to find additional functionality.

No one in Compaq ever declared that the BIOS was 100% compatible. The figure was a moving target, keeping a systems engineering department on their toes for years.

Whatever the true percentage - and nobody will ever really know unless IBM buys HP or vice versa - it was clear that the Compaq BIOS "just worked" and that this, coupled with the ability to purchase the "MS-DOS" (as opposed to "PC-DOS") operating system from Microsoft, was enough to get Compaq into the game. And to land Compaq in the Fortune 500 by 1986. But success was not always assured, as the New York Times noted in 1984:

WHEN I.B.M. recently announced it was introducing a portable personal computer, many pundits on Wall Street declared the death of companies manufacturing I.B.M. PC-compatible computers. Stock prices of corporations like Compaq plunged to what would have been considered bargain-basement prices if the shares had not been priced at a premium to begin with.

Now that I.B.M. has a portable of its own, are these companies that grew up as clones of Big Blue by offering a portable I.B.M.-like machine really finished after only a couple of years of skyrocketing success? Will such computers as the Chameleon, the Compaq, Columbia, Corona and Hyperion vaporize into the smoke of last year's best sellers as the Osborne did? Chances are they will not.

Certainly, some firms will fail, an inevitablility in the computer business. But, on the whole, PC-compatible computers, under another name, should be around for quite some time. The reasons are price and innovation.

This is obviously just a small part of the PC architecture story, and a small part of the stories of IBM and Compaq, but I'm happy to correct my previous error regarding the openness of the IBM PC architecture.

As to why we still recognize the Compaq name today, that's the topic of another post.

Where do you develop your ideas? Or, is Chris Myles all wet?

There are a number of examples of how a prototype product was developed to meet a specific need, and then it was subsequently discovered that the prototype may have more universal appeal. The Post-It Notes/church choir story comes to mind.

I recently ran across another story, in which someone developed a geolocation application that tied textual items to locations on a map. You can see it here. Mark Krynsky explained how this application came to be:

Chris Myles embarked on a sailing trip that lasted 5 1/2 years, spanning 32,800+ miles, where he visited 24 countries, and spent 160 nights at sea. He wanted a way to be able to share his adventure including maps, photos, videos, and blogging easier, so he decided to develop his own app. Blurbits is the result of his effort.

Interesting way to get an idea for an application. I mean, consider that Myles could have instead chosen to do this...

A "universal" economy

Not too long ago I offered a comment at Dave Winer's Scripting News blog, in which I noted that Sarah Palin appeals to the anti-Washington crowd that distrusts any elites, where they are liberal elites (New York Times, Washington Post) or conservative elites (Fox News Channel). In some corners of the anti-Washington movement, people are convinced that there is a great conspiracy to implement the New World Order, and Rupert Murdoch is as much a part of it as the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well, I'm sure that the conspiracy theorists are having a field day with the July 7 announcement of Pope Benedict XVI:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a “true world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good.”...

More than two years in the making, “Caritas in Veritate,” or “Charity in Truth,” is Benedict’s third encyclical since he became pope in 2005. Filled with terms like “globalization,” “market economy,” “outsourcing,” “labor unions” and “alternative energy,” it is not surprising that the Italian media reported that the Vatican was having difficulty translating the 144-page document into Latin.

One American Roman Catholic theologian detected what would set off the alarm bells in his country:

John Sniegocki, a professor of Christian ethics at Xavier University in Cincinnati, said one of the most controversial elements of the encyclical, at least for some Americans, would be the call for international institutions to play a role in regulating the economy.

“One of the things he’s saying is that the global economy is escaping the power of individual states to regulate it,” Mr. Sniegocki said. He said the encyclical also contained elements “very critical” of how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “have required cuts in social spending in the third world.”

It then quotes from the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak:

“I like limited government. I would much prefer to have many limited governments than one overriding authority.”

Of course, Pope Benedict is the head of a "universal" church that strongly believes in one overriding authority in religious matters. In that respect, it's not surprising that the Pope is comfortable with a similar arrangement in the secular political sphere.

However, I personally agree with the sentiments of William Pitt the Elder, who said:

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.

And even if the Palin supporters are unfamiliar with the quote, or with the more famous quote from Lord Acton, they would probably agree with the sentiment also.

Empoprise-BI News - 12 July 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

If it's business-related and newsworthy, or not, you'll find it here.

Behind the Scenes

You probably caught my announcement of the Empoprise-BI fan page on Facebook, allowing Facebook members to become fans of their fave business blog. Or not. I'm still considering rolling this out for my other blogs, but in my personal case it answers a need to make this material available via Facebook without overwhelming my Facebook friends with every stray business thought that I put to the electronic paper.

Special Features

I have on occasion discussed the Facebook application "Farm Town" on this blog, although I still have a post in me that talks about Farm Town's brilliant monetization strategy. But if you want more thorough coverage of all things Farm Town, check out Farm Town Weekly. For example, this post talks about some of the new features introduced this past week, such as new crops. I'm growing some cotton, myself.

Upcoming

You'll soon see a mini-series of sorts..."an expansively Compaq architecture" and "an expansively Compaq branding" having to do with various aspects of the former computer company.

My first PubSubHubbub test

Eddie Awad and Mark Krynsky are Facebook friends, and I noticed that they were sharing items about PubSubHubbub and real-time blog feeds. So I investigated. From Google:

Today we're happy to announce initial support in FeedBurner for the PubSubHubbub protocol. 'Hubbub is an open specification in draft for web-scale publish and subscribe. The protocol can be used to transform any existing Atom and RSS feed on the web into a real-time stream.

Google then provided these instructions to Feedburner and AdSense users:

As of right now, burned feeds with the PingShot service enabled are automatically enhanced with the PubSubHubbub protocol. We'll add the required discovery elements to these feeds and notify a Google-run Hub, running on App Engine, of publish events. We also convert any pings we receive into 'Hubbub events. That means for many of our publishers out there, your existing feeds are available as real-time streams right now. Like, immediately. This very moment.

If you are a publisher and are not already using our PingShot service, turning it on is easy. From feedburner.google.com, visit the Publicize tab for your feed, select PingShot, and click the [Activate] button at the bottom of the page. From your AdSense account, go to Manage Ads, then click View Feed Stats link, and do the same thing. That's it.

As of now, I did the Feedburner step - I apparently didn't need to do the AdSense step, because it was already done. I think.

The proof is in the pudding, since I will check the service provided by this ex-Googler, who was also raving about PubSubHubbub:

FriendFeed also added support for the technology, so if you have a FeedBurner feed, your updates should show up in FriendFeed within seconds rather than minutes after the feed updates.

Well, we're about to find out.

[UPDATE 1:22 PM - AS I NOTED IN THE COMMENTS TO THIS FRIENDFEED THREAD, THIS POST TOOK SEVEN MINUTES TO SHOW UP IN FRIENDFEED. FOR A JUST-INTRODUCED TECHNOLOGY, NOT BAD. PRESUMABLY THIS WILL BE REFINED AS TIME PASSES.]

NIEM 2.1

How do government entities exchange data? In some cases, they do it via XML-formatted text that complies with the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). If you're not aware of NIEM, here's an explanation (warning: written in government-marketing-speak):

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) is a Federal, State, Local and Tribal interagency initiative providing a foundation for seamless information exchange. NIEM is a framework to:

* Bring stakeholders and Communities of Interest together to identify information sharing requirements in day-to-day operational and emergency situations;
* Develop standards, a common lexicon and an on-line repository of information exchange package documents to support information sharing;
* Provide technical tools to support development, discovery, dissemination and re-use of exchange documents; and
* Provide training, technical assistance and implementation support services for enterprise-wide information exchange.

More here, including a reference to NIEM's roots in GJXDM and its compliance with HSPD-5, but I figure I've thrown enough acronyms at you for one day.

And a new version of NIEM is coming out - NIEM 2.1. Summary information is available in the July 2009 NIEM newsletter:

NIEM 2.1 incorporates many improvements in the current model, including new domains and minor edits to existing domains. The release of NIEM 2.1 does not affect the shared core of common data elements.

New Domains and Updates

* NIEM 2.1 will feature three new domains:
o The Maritime domain will be sponsored by the U.S. Navy as the executive agent for the Maritime Domain Awareness and will include the harmonized content from the Maritime Information Exchange Model 1.0 (MIEM).
o The Family Services domain will be a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Administration on Children and Families, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
o The Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) domain will be sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Domestic Nuclear Detection.

* Updates will be made to existing domains, including:
o Improvement on the structure for an offense in the Justice domain.
o The Infrastructure Protection domain will provide a complete taxonomy of infrastructure categories. This should prove widely reusable by developers in many lines of business.
o The Emergency Management domain will tighten its linkage to the EDXL messaging standards. It also incorporates the results of a successful pilot at the Richmond, Virginia, emergency dispatch center, enabling the reuse of exchanges with private alarm companies.

* General improvements have been made to all domains in the model:
o Harmonization that has reduced many overlapping or duplicate data elements between domains.
o No more missing definitions! All elements in the 2.1 release have a clear, plain-English definition, making it easier to find and reuse individual elements in the model.

The release will go through several iterations (alpha, beta, etc.), and should be out by the fall if all goes well.

All the fat cats are staying at home. Ecstatic now?

You'll recall that I previously wrote about how we are successfully countering the excesses of "junkets" - and throwing a lot of people out of work as a result. The New York Times lists more evidence of this:

[O]ne group of hospitality professionals is literally watching its livelihood go down the drain as corporate events are pared to the bone — the corporate event planners hired by companies to book and coordinate meetings.

“One hundred percent of my revenues are made on commission,” said Stephanie Edwards, a partner at Conference Consultants Worldwide. “I would say when we got our first-quarter results, they showed a 40 percent cut in revenue.”...

[I]f a meeting for 2,000 is suddenly scaled back to half that, or if a four-night booking is halved to become a two-night event, the amount of money people like Ms. Edwards earn automatically drops by 50 percent, even though the work they do does not change.

More here. Wonder how many people got out of tobacco and oil and into hotel investments?

Back to the "smaller" issue - more than size matters (iamaKey)

Last Friday, I published a post entitled Is Smaller Truly Better? in which I wondered whether devices such as iPods were getting to be TOO small. If you missed it, here's an excerpt:

At some point, the devices get TOO small. Now you're not going to lose a boom box, and you'd have to have a pretty messy room to lose a Walkman. But an iPod nano? They get lost all the time....

So in essence, you have a poorly designed product that easily falls out of your pockets and gets lost in plane seats and in the snow. Yes, I know that people admire the aesthetics of the device, but how useful are the aesthetics if you can't find the danged thing?

However, I made one error (only one?) in my analysis - I only accounted for the size of the device, but didn't account for other factors.

Many of us have memory sticks that we use to transport relatively small amounts of data from one device to another. But Louis Gray links to a March jkOnTheRun review of a product from LaCie called iamaKey. This is a very small USB flash drive, available in 4 GB and 8 GB sizes.

Now if you use the logic from my July 3 post, a very small USB drive would be the worst thing that you'd want to have, since it would be harder to lose a very small USB drive than it would be to lose a somewhat small USB drive. But in this case it would be harder to lose because the very small USB drive because...iamaKey is a key. As in "put it on a keychain" key.

Of course, Gray notes:

Of course, if I lose my keys, that's a different issue altogether, so I'll try and avoid that.

But still, the iamaKey example indicates that small is not necessarily bad, as long as the product is designed in such a way as to prevent loss. iamaKey can be put on a keychain. Certain products can come with bands and other items to attach them to some large device, or even to your person.

So perhaps the iPod Touch needs some type of strap to attach it to your forehead. Good idea, as long as the strap is not a closed proprietary solution.

P.S. The last link above goes to a discussion that I started on the AppsLab blog regarding the admiration of open source fans for the Apple closed proprietary solutions. While exploring the blog for weird vibes, I ran across this Jake Kuramoto post which, ironically, read in part:

Ever lose a business card? Those suckers are small, and I’m constantly fishing them out from under my desk.

Wanna check the beta of the Empoprise-BI Facebook page?

So anyways, I was reading in FriendFeed and found this item, shared by LANjackal, that linked to a makeuseof post entitled "How To Promote Your Blog Using Facebook Pages."

I have been reluctant to stream all of the Empoprises content into my personal Facebook page, since many of my friends would probably be uninterested in it. But a fan page suddenly struck me as the ideal solution. Makeuseof obviously felt the same:

One of the more effective ways of promoting your blog is to use a site everyone either loves or hates - Facebook. The social networking site allows you to create a page to promote your blog or business - and it’s completely free....

By having a Facebook page for your blog, you can set up your RSS feed so your new posts appear on your fan page. Facebook members can then become a “fan” of your posts and comment on your posts inside Facebook.

In short, you can:

* create a mini community of loyal blog readers inside Facebook.
* encourage them to click through to your blog and sign up for the proper RSS feed.

So anyways, I figured I'd set a Facebook page up, using the handy-dandy instructions in the makeuseof post. As is usual in such situation, I'm using Empoprise-BI as the guinea pig. I've set up a page for Empoprise-BI, and eventually will roll it out to some or all of my other blogs.

I followed the makeuseof instructions, and even though I ran into an error right before confirming my blog import, I was able to recover and set up the page.

At present I've done the bare minimum, so I'm referring to the page as a beta. I plan to check some other pages to see what's possible, then take my page from there. I also welcome your suggestions.

Oh, and the page? It's at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-BI/98783891478

Ghost towns are not special to the Inland Empire

I live in the Inland Empire of California, which is a cross between a suburb and an exurb of Los Angeles. As such, business and population ebbs and flows like the ocean tides that are some distance away from the IE; in bad times, residential and commercial areas become abandoned, becoming like a ghost town. I wrote about this in my Inland Empire blog last year:

When Peter H. King wrote [his Los Angeles Times piece], I began thinking about the ocean, and how the tides roll in, then roll out, then roll in, then roll out again. (Even King uses the words "sea change" to describe the phenomenon.)

The Inquisitr notes that this problem is not isolated to the Inland Empire:

Since the real estate market began tanking in the US, tales of modern “ghost towns” have buzzed through the media intermittently. Subdivisions and McMansions lay abandoned and often unfinished, a sadly silent illustration of a country full of homes no one can afford to live in.

More here, although a New York Times reference to "the ruins of the second gilded age" may be a bit of an overstatement.

P.S. Yes, there's a musical reference in the title. Geddit?

P.P.S. This post is a test of sorts. More later.

Of course Wal-Mart wants mandatory health insurance with cost controls - here's why

Back on June 25 I wrote a post detailing Wal-Mart's efforts in the health clinic area. After I wrote that post, Wal-Mart made the health-related news again. The New York Times reported:

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, joined hands with a major labor union...to endorse the idea of requiring large companies to provide health insurance to their workers, a move that gives a boost to President Obama as he is pushing for health legislation on Capitol Hill.

But there was a condition to Wal-Mart's endorsement:

“We’re for an employer mandate, but we believe that it has to be accompanied by these measures that are really going to deliver on the savings,” said Leslie A. Dach, Wal-Mart’s top lobbyist, who met with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the proposal. “If any business is going to be asked to take on an employer mandate, to face changes in the tax laws, there should be some sense that the promise of the bill to reduce health costs will actually occur.”

Now while reaction to Wal-Mart's statement, including that of Outside the Beltway, concentrates on Wal-Mart the employer, you can only really understand Wal-Mart's stance when you remember that they are a low-cost health care provider.

I've already talked about the low-cost clinics, and we all know that Wal-Mart provides low-cost prescriptions.

So think about it - mandatory employer-sponsored health care, coupled with cost restrictions, could be a huge windfall for Wal-Mart.
Let's face it, health care is a growing industry, whether you're in a boom or a bust cycle. (Or at least it will be a growing industry until the baby boomers all die.) I'd love to see what Wal-Mart's health-related business plans are BEYOND prescription drugs and clinics. Sam's Hospital, perhaps?