tech cocktail | Direct Marketing Observations

Sometimes I come across websites that seem to make sense for one reason or another. At least they did when I bookmarked them. Then I go back and wonder why. Some ring a bell at the time and others are downright headscratchers. Has that ever happened to you? They must have had some sort of real world relavance. Nevertheless, while trying to streamline the hundreds of blogs and sites that I have accumulated, I came across these.

CrunchBase is the free directory of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit.

The tagline for Liferemix is “Great writing about great lives…”

Perhaps I should read more of what Steve Pavlina is pushing given these interesting times in our lives?

How can you not learn something from the Harvard Business Blogs?

I like the premise of Tech Cocktail ” to help amplify the technology signal in under served markets and have fun doing it.”

At The Consumerist, where the shopper bites back, you get your fair share of horror stories from the customers perspective.

Here’s a podcast audio player widget from personal life media

Here’s a a social microblogging service similar to Twitter when I was pissed at them, built on open source tools and open standards. Allows users to send text-based posts up to 140 characters …called Identi.ca

But then I found the love again with Twitter and was curious as to just how popular I was and Twittercounter does just that…

Roomatic is similar to Summize

PostSecret is so cool, the books are awsome and so is this site. We all have a post-secret, and if you think you don’t, you’re full of it.

Finding signal in the noise with the most popular stories over the last 8 hours on RSSmeme

and who doesn’t want to Get Slightly Famous?

OK, so there, this should get you through to the weekend. Who knows? If you had to share one bookmark or site of your own what would it be? Tell me, as my Indian programming counterparts used to say on a regular basis.

Social media…….social media…. I was reading Geoff Livingston’s latest post and he had a clip on there from Tech Cocktail in which he, David Armano, Frank Gruber and Danielle Wiley opened with a “what is social media” intro.. Which got me wondering, ranting, or just pondering first a) am I too close to the subject and b) c) d) e) and f) and g) are below…

This is what I wrote to Geoff..

Let’s talk about what social media is not. In fact, what if the term social media was banned from our lexicon, what would we call it then? Is it an accurate term to use? Have we trounced on it too much? Or is it still this mystical nirvana like state that marketers, advertisers, agencies, and corporations are all chasing? Are they chasing the dragon? Are we forcing them to chase the dragon? Is it elusive? Are we making it that way? Can we dumb it down? Does it need to be?

It’s not really a rant per se, more of just “lots more questions” from maybe a different point of view. Some might say that social media is merely the flavor of the moment for marketers and PR people. Uhh no, it’s where we are headed, and we can choose to integrate and embolden and implement or we can get steamrolled by the ones who decided to embrace it from the get-go. Who is the person that said “a computer in every home will never happen, it just doesn’t make sense…” Who would like to step up and say, social media is nothing but another internet phase…a fancy web based app…go ahead and throw the first stone.

Here’s a link to the Vid