Seattle.BloggersPub

Great column by Neal Peirce in today’s Seattle Times. He cites some depressing statistics:1980, 64.4 percent of us drove to work alone; in 2000 it was 75.7 percent, according to the Transportation Research Board’s recent Commuting in America survey by…

Things have been insanely busy for me the last month or so. With family in town, some looming deadlines and the holidays kicking up I’ve had little time to write. Which sucks because I’ve got lots to say, as usual. (Last year I was blogging every damn day for Lifehacker. I miss the outlet, forced as it may have been.) In any case and in very poor substitute, I thought I’d take a quick minute to post some details of some future evens I’m attending and/or participating in.

There is an article in the New York Times about private cell phone numbers. I’ve never been super secret about my cell phone number. I’ve posted it here once, but I don’t have it listed on the contact page ala Robert Scoble. But I do like the idea of psudeo-numbers so I signed up with […]

Um, how cool would it be if Tim and I had our own photo booth in our loft?metadata:none!

Now that we’ve released TeamDirection Project, it’s time to answer the elephant in the room: How does TeamDirection Project compare to Microsoft Project?

Well, we do pair a task grid on the left with a gantt chart on the right. And I personally think TeamDirection Project is much prettier. But really, our focus is on the small to medium business, 5 - 50 employees, that would like an easy way to structure, schedule and share projects in a team environment.

When you don’t have limitless resources, you need the right tool for the job. You can’t give everyone a scalpel and expect surgery to be successful. You don’t give everyone the tiller and expect docking to be smooth. Any non-trivial project requires a group of people to interact, do their part and communicate their issues as efficiently as possible.

That’s what TeamDirection brings.

Microsoft Project is a great product. You can plan canals, nuclear reactors and hospitals with it. You have an array of tools at your disposal: resource pools, 10 or more working shifts per day, PERT and WBS structures, critical path analysis and a gazillion more features a skilled project manager wants, and might even need.

We think that’s great. But the ability to level resources, find critical paths and adjust level of effort is lost on the person who is just making an image for the website. They only need to report when they’re done, attach the image for people to see and comment how it synthesizes Bauhaus post-modernism and consumer durable gooods.

TeamDirection bridges these two worlds. It lets the project manager have all the power, and it lets the team members execute their tasks, see and connect with their team members online to resolve issues and report progress.

One product can’t make everyone happy. But one product can bridge the divide between planning and execution, allow users the tools that fit their needs and focus on sharing information– among the team, and with just a little bit of direction.

TeamDirection.

I just saw over on Dave Coletta’s blog that Virtual Ubiquity is hiring a Flex developer. I talked with these guys at MAX this year, and I can tell you that if you get this job, you’ll be working on one of the best Flex applications out there. Their app was shown in the keynote […]

For those of you who don’t regularly check out the web design section of my site (I don’t know why you would) or who aren’t big Coldplay fans, I should point out my newest web design, Bernie’s Coldplay Site v3:

Since I’ve written a bit about the new design in the web design section and over at the site itself, I won’t go into great detail here.

I should point out, though, that this is the first web design I’ve been a part of that required little-to-no browser-specific tweaking, thanks to the existence of IE7. The only tweaking I needed to make was to some image padding and the margins/padding around the various heading elements (e.g. <h1>), since IE7 still acts a little differently than Firefox and Opera do. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my use of margin: auto; and the box model in general were interpreted identically by all three browsers.

Overall, I’m really proud of this design because it’s one of those designs that came together nicely without a whole lot of premeditation. I think it may be my favorite web design I’ve come up with so far. I’d love to hear what you think, though, so let me know (and no, you won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t like it).

Does anyone out there have experience including YouTube videos as enclosures in their RSS feed?

Every now and then I post YouTube videos to various sites and would love to update my feed generation scripts to convert them to enclosures in my feeds.

The URL of the YouTube video) and type (application/x-shockwave-flash) attributes is easy, but how do I figure out the correct length in bytes? Can I just put something arbitrary in there and hope that most feed readers are smart enough to grab the content correctly anyway?

I suppose I could do some experimentation, but just ’cause it works or doesn’t work in Bloglines doesn’t necessarily mean it works or doesn’t work in other feed readers.

I’d love to get some advice from anyone who’s gone down this path before. Please leave a comment or contact me if comments aren’t your cup of tea. Thanks!

Beet.tv has an interview wtih David Hallerman, an analyst with eMarketer about the advertising market. As he notes, we’re still in the infant stage of video advertising, but he’s also correct when he says paid search is just direct marketing. It’s targeted and efficient direct marketing, but oatmeal is just oatmeal until you put something interesting in it.

Interactive Video […]

As a counterpoint to our celebrations about density, we can look to the astonishingly bad development that is taking place on Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine corridor, as chronicled by Erica Barnett in this week’s The Stranger. Read it. She observes all…