Sprout Builder is Awesome

You really should check out Sprout Builder at sproutbuilder.com. It allows you to build widgets for a variety of platforms (including plain-old web pages) using Adobe’s Flex platform.

Check out this one I threw together for Startup Weekend Portland in about five minutes: (requires Facebook account):

http://apps.facebook.com/wildfire/fbhandler.ashx?mode=side_nav

Some more data integration (such as the ability to call web services, based on user input or a timer) would make this product unstoppable.

(h/t Krishnan, via Marina Martin)

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Tags: Sproutbuilder, Sprout Builder, Widgets

Startup Weekend Portland Announced

May 23-25, 2008.  I’m leaning heavily toward attending.

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Tags: StartupWeekend, Startup Weekend Portland

Google fires a shot across Facebook’s bow

Not that I would ever think that this line of thought would be spoon-fed to an analyst in order to throw some cold water on a competitor’s rising fortunes:

Eric Savitz of Barron’s Tech Trader Daily blog notes that the company’s CFO said Google’s “social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected.”

(h/t Mathew Ingram)

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Tags: Google, Facebook, Advertising

Borders Outside of the HTML Element Width

Web development would be so much easier if, when you apply a CSS border to an element, it went INSIDE of the declared width of the element, and not wrap around the outside. Or, alternatively, if it didn’t apply that border as a layout-affecting element, pushing other elements left or right.

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Tags: HTML, Border, CSS

Excellent Futuristic Font

Airstrip Four, by Xaviera Comics.  Available at UrbanFonts.com.

Twitter Down Again: 8:09 AM PDT

Hm.  I wonder if the outage has anything to do with the OMG-the-world-is-ending outage in the Middle East and South Asia.

Torturing Downed Cows for a Few Dollars More Profit

Yes, Seth Godin, corporations are harmless tribal shepherds, looking out for their flock of consumers. Fucking hell.

The culprits behind the latest torture and abuse are Westland Meat and Hallmark Meat Packing Company. Their CEO, Steve “Mendacity” Mendell, is trying to pull an Abu Ghraib and blame it all on two lowest-rung employees.  He does the usual “I’m saddened and sickened…” bullshit. Give me a break. As if the torture and abuse of animals isn’t institutionalized in modern factory farming.

Worst of all, from a public-policy perspective, is that this type of downer is EXACTLY the type of animal we’re trying to keep out of the food supply so as to prevent Mad Cow disease.  Except did you really think that factory farms would try their best to keep downers out of the food supply? You’re an idiot.

Steve Mendell: Today’s Worst Person In the World!

(h/t/ Keith Olbermann).

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Tags: Torture, Cows, Downed, Westland Meat, Hallmark Meat Packing Company, Steve Mendell

Brand Management is dead?

I disagree with this post by Seth Godin:

Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe. […] Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe. Jerry Garcia understood this. Do you?

My main problem with this is it ignores the power that instant interconnectedness give us.  I”m perfectly willing to pull out a credit card for a product designed in France, made in Mongolia, and which I’ve never physically seen before as long as it fills a need and enough anonymous recommenders make me feel good about the purchase.  So while the anonymous recommenders may be the “tribe” in Godin’s parlance, it might also be correct to describe them as “brand evangelists” (Oh, I’ll always use Amazon.com!)

It sounds like what Seth wants is the perfect, Platonic ideal of a communitarian corporate womb, where comforting Steve Jobs types coddle him with products, ask his input, connect him with his tribe-mates, and NEVER EVER break the trust relationship.

Sorry people, it doesn’t exist.  Capitalism is tough, ruthless, scary, and unpredictable.  If not exactly subject to the Law of the Jungle, it’s pretty close.  Customers flee, corporations do stupid fucking things, governments intrude, and we are always on, all the time, to adjust to the new day ahead, where your tribe of yesterday may be dissolved before you take your first bite of your morning bagel.

(h/t Nathan Kaiser)

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Tags: SethGodin, Tribe, Brand Management

3rd-Party Keep-Alive HTTP Module for IIS

This product from Xepient looks interesting.  And only 5 Euros!  Whatever that is in USD, it feels cheap.

Disable Keep-Alive in IIS 7.0

This technet article says that I should

1. Open IIS Manager and navigate to the level you want to manage.
2. In Features View, double-click HTTP Response Headers.
3. On the HTTP Response Headers page, in the Actions pane, click Set Common Headers.
4. In the Set Common HTTP Response Headers dialog box, select the Enable HTTP keep-alive check box and then click OK.

But I don’t see the “HTTP Response Headers” option in my web application configuration (see image below). What am I doing wrong?