My latest column in Ad Age ("Zappos Shows How Employees Can Be Brand Builders") focused on employee advocacy. Can employees serve as a de facto advertising channel, I ask? The answer is yes, but it obviously requires some finesse, and the right level of commitment. To kick off my exploratory, I tee up Zappos.com as a case study: Every year Zappos.com, one of the fastest-growing e-commerce sites, publishes a "culture book." Three hundred pages in ...

Arsenal 3 (Van Persie pen 18, 41, Denilson 59) Newcastle 0 Premiership After the angry reaction to the Fulham defeat, Wenger must be delighted with the response. A comfortable dispatching of Twente was followed by an equally routine win over a side that have started the season well, and in Shay Given have a keeper with a history of foiling us. Early on, we created plenty without taking a deserved lead - Gallas missing a ...

What I think a lot of folks in the McCain camp failed to grasp is that disgruntled Hillary supporters aren't angry that a woman wasn't nominated. They're angry Hillary wasn't nominated. A grandstanding tactic like naming a pro-life, socially conservative female who just happens to be an ex-beauty pageant contestant isn't going to make Democratic women who were on the fence suddenly perk up and punch the 'McCain-Palin' chad in November. I wonder is Whitman ...

Arsenal 4 (Nasri 27, Gallas 52, Walcott 66, Bendtner 89) FC Twente 0 (Agg 6-0) Champions League Qualifier On a night where Liverpool showed how difficult Champions League qualifiers can be, FC Twente were casually dismissed in a game that should see the sometimes fragile confidence of the players rise again following Saturday’s debacle. No one is likely to benefit as much as Theo Walcott who, in my opinion, was superb, tearing their frankly hopeless ...

The big news for this release is following, but we’ve snuck a few other fixes in since last time: As reported on Blogger Buster (and elsewhere), the 3rd party Add Widget API was broken. It has been fixed. The new button style appears clickable in all browers. The Blog List widget can show thumbnails specified in Media RSS feeds. Atom feeds now include the blog’s description as the <subtitle> element.

There is a lot of worry surrounding Arsenal fans at the moment, centred around the perceived lack of depth of the squad, especially in midfield, and rightly so. Wenger’s words of praise for those he has are irrelevant - he knows as well as anyone that we’re light in the centre of the park but is moving to give the players confidence in case the next five days go badly. So with all the anxiety, ...

Or at least, it was his equivalent. Fulham 1 (Hangeland 21) Arsenal 0 Premiership That was painful to watch. We normally keep our transfer business quiet, but it says something that Wenger had admitted we need a central midfielder, and even the normally quiet Cesc is agreeing. Everyone knows it, and if they didn’t, they knew on their way home from Craven Cottage. Because let’s face it, that was a dreadful performance. Yes, Fulham should’ve ...

After a week with the iPhone, what’s great, what’s not: “David Alison provides an update about his iPhone after a week of living with it. There are some features he loves and some features he doesn’t. Advertisement: (Via MacMegasite.)

The next meeting of the System Center Virtual Users Group is on the calendar, and we have some first rate speakers ready to share their knowledge. We’re touching on some topics surrounded by considerable interest in the System Center community. Meeting and Registration Details Date: Thursday, September 4th Time: 7:00 p.m. Central Standard Time (1am GMT) Agenda 7:00PM-7:10PM: Introduction (Pete Zerger) 7:10PM-7:40PM: Steve Rachui (Microsoft) - Targeting in Operations Manager 2007 7:40PM-8:10PM: Cameron Fuller (MVP ...

Image via Wikipedia Would you like to Make money with Traffic Exchanges? Have you ever used traffic exchanges to promote a program or website without a lot of success? Well I know I sure have and for years I have been doing it all wrong. untill I read this new in depth report on How to make money with traffic Exchanges. Brace yourself for a brand new way to use traffic exchanges to make multiple ...

This month, I’ve been hacking Ruby for four years! I caught wind of Rails’ release a few weeks behind the curve, and when I tried to run it, I admit I didn’t get very far… but that was largely because I was a Microsoft VB/ASP developer, and since I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — ActiveRecord sounded like an April Fool’s joke on newbies — I assumed that it was too good to be ...

Charlsie sent me a link to sweet tea flavored vodka that’s being made by a distillery in South Carolina. I really, really want to try it. This would make an excellent house-warming gift for those of you inclined to buy such a thing… or, if anyone at the Firefly Distillery is paying attention, I’d be happy to have any extra bottles you might have laying around that you don’t need.

I’m really happy to say that the speaker talks are starting to go up. The first out of the gate is Obie’s ”Do The Hustle” which was a personal favourite if only to see the slide around the 13:54 mark. I’ll do my best to announce the videos here as they go up, and they will all be easily located at http://infoq.com/.... In other RubyFringe news, the #rubyfringe IRC channel is still alive and well, ...

This detailed tutorial describes how to create a Timed Script Two State Monitor in step-by-step detail, using sample scripts available for download from System Center Forum. The detailed steps provided and additional references and additional learning material on OpsMgr scripting make it easy to reuse this example with your custom scripts based on these examples. Download: How to Create a Script-based Two State Monitor NOTE: The intended audience is Operations Manager 2007 administrators with at ...

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I’ve posted a photo of this image before on my 365 blog, which is currently undergoing tweaking. I thought it might be nice to properly show the image and discuss it a bit. You always see people discussing megapixels on forums and what you can print to. People saying they have a 8mp camera and it does A3 nicely. Which is fine for family portraits and things but when a client asks you to produce ...

Looking at the iPhone SDK beta 4 API change log reveals that the following API calls have been removed from UIApplication.h: Removed -[UIApplication registerForRemoteNotificationsFromPublisher:] Removed -[UIApplication registeredRemoteNotificationPublishers] Removed -[UIApplication remoteNotificationSystemIdentifier] Removed -[UIApplication remoteNotificationsAreActive] Removed -[UIApplication unregisterForRemoteNotificationsFromPublisher:] Removed -[UIApplicationDelegate application:didReceiveRemoteNotificationFromPublisher:userInfo:] Removed UIApplication(UIRemoteNotifications) Also some properties have been removed from CLLocation: Removed CLLocation.course Removed CLLocation.speed Removed CLLocation.speedAvailable Removed CLLocationDirection Removed CLLocationSpeed Removed CLLocationManager.locationServicesApproved I haven’t installed the 2.1 beta yet but it appears that Apple is removing ...

I wanted to get up close and personal with the tiger. I got closer than this but he ate me. - via www.vanilladays.com RSS feed (c) 2008 Pete Carr -

We’ve added a few new features and things in today’s release: There’s a new look for the Blogger Dashboard, which we think you’ll find more attractive and functional. If you have a ton of blogs (as we do) try out the “hide” and “show all” links to help manage the list. Google Gadgets in your Layouts blog can now set their height automatically (if the gadget author supports it). Read more about adding Google Gadgets ...

Today’s release to Blogger in draft brings one new feature: Reactions, which are customizable one-click buttons below your posts. Read more on our announcement post, and try them out on this blog.We’ve added better show/hide controls and brought back the post count and Blogs of Note to the new dashboard, and published it to the main Blogger site.In case you missed it, we moved Google Gadgets and the gadget directory to the main Blogger site ...