All I ask for is a frickin’ rotating chair.

As of the other night, yours truly is now a contributor* to a hilarious site for people who secretly (or-not-so-secretly) hate their jobs, Office Evil.

My first contribution is currently the featured MadLib on the home page. It’s a memo from your boss. He/she saw what you were doing on those social networks on company time and NOT very happy about it. Fill in the blanks to find out exactly why you’re in deep.

*Disclaimer: Potential future employers – Please do not interpret this the wrong way. Though I currently work for myself, anybody can tell you that I’m a workaholic, love what I do, and always go above and beyond. This is only for fun, and came about randomly. Don’t hold expressing my creative juices against me.

Little things like this make me love technology even more.

Yesterday my pal Robin of InnerMedia Coaching & Consulting and I took a field trip to Ann Arbor for one of the LA2M Marketing Meetings, whose speaker that day just happened to be one of my favorite people in all of Metro Detroit, the lovely, smart, and talented Ms. Shauna Nicholson, marketing manager for Biznet Internet Solutions in Wixom. She was leading a discussion on viral marketing.

Though I did RSVP on LA2M’s Facebook event page, I forgot to actually tell Shauna I was going to be there, and forgot to check to see if there was an official hashtag for the event. (I hadn’t been to one of these events before so I wasn’t sure.)

Robin and I were sitting at the far end of the room from Shauna. It was pretty packed, and there was a big table full of people in between us. I didn’t really want to get up just to ask her that, so what did I do?

I sent her a text message from across the noisy room:

is there a hashtag for this? #la2m?

I saw that she was just putting away her iPhone so I nudged Robin and said, “Watch this. . .”

Shauna suddenly looked at her phone, looked up, looked all the way down the long table of people and gave me an affirming nod.

I turned to Robin and said, “See? This is yet another reason I love technology!”

A nice alternative to Google Reader (for Mac users, anyway)

I know that according to some of you, I may be committing blasphemy when I say this,  but . . .

I’m not a fan of Google Reader.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it. I know it’s the most popular RSS reader, yada yada yada . . . but I prefer something else. It’s this awesome little freeware program called Shrook.

Why do I like it so much?

Well, for starters, you don’t need a browser to read your feeds. Sometimes, I have so many browsers and tabs open that I really don’t want any more. So Shrook puts all your feeds into one nice, neat little multifunctional package.

You can easily organize your groups by creating groups on the far-left panel and then just dragging and dropping. For example, you could have groups of feeds for Social Media, Favorites, News, Writing, Local, whatever. You can get as creative as you want, and yes, one feed can belong to more than one group.

But, if you really want to see the actual page that the entry you’re reading is on, a push of a button and suddenly you’ve got a mini-browser right inside of your application:

So now I can read Chris Brogan and look at his smiling face without opening yet another browser tab. A click of the same button and the mini-browser function collapses and you’re back with the XML.

Another favorite feature I have is the flag option, which is indicated by those diagonal red lines next to some of the entries above. I flag items in all sorts of feeds, usually as reference points of things I know I’ll need to return to in the future. (I know Google Reader has that option, too, but I like it better in this app.)

Shrook also can synchronize with the web, so that if you’re without your computer and in a computer lab at school or something and still want to read your favorite feeds, you can login to Shrook.com and read them there, so you’ve got the flexibility and portability of Google Reader, as well.

Something else that I think is cool about it is that you can subscribe to podcast feeds with Shrook, and when it finds a new podcast, it will download it, add it to iTunes for you, and when you sync your iPod, Shrook will grab the text from the podcast and that will appear on your iPod’s screen for you, with links to the audio and everything.

Other fun features about Shrook, from its site:

Instant Notifications – Built-in support for Growl

Spotlight support – Shrook items appear in Spotlight search results.

No Browser Required – View webpages directly in Shrook.

Smart Groups – Define almost any combination of rules to pick out items you want, all updated in real time.

Scrapbooks – Save individual items to look at later.

Blogging Integration – Use external blog editors directly from Shrook

Real-time search – Enter a word into Shrook’s search box, and the list of channels or items instantly reduces to those matching the search.

Secure access – Shrook provides access to private channels via HTTPS encryption (including self-signed) and password protection. Passwords are stored securely in your Keychain. It also shares credentials with Safari, so if you log in there you can read private channels in Shrook.

Channel Guide – Shrook comes with an integrated channel guide to help you find new channels. It’s loaded from the web, so it’s always up to date.

Quick subscription – Shrook supports feed: links, which allow you to add a channel to Shrook just by clicking a link on a web page.

Sadly, this fun little application is only for Mac, so if you’re a PC person you don’t get to play. But for my Mac user friends, I highly recommend you give Shrook a spin. When I first tried it I was skeptical to say the least, but now I love it and wouldn’t use anything else.

Twitter: Not just for the birds.

This is the first of many presentations I’ll be doing for my Toastmasters club and elsewhere. Normally I wouldn’t start with Twitter but I’ve got a couple people in my club who keep asking me about it, so ask and they shall receive.

Let me know your thoughts.

Q&A with Graham Wallington of WildEarth.tv

(Below is Part 2 of the WildEarth.tv case study, an interview with founder Graham Wallington. The first part of the WildEarth.tv case study can be found here.)

In a webinar last week with Hubspot and on their Inbound Marketing Blog, David Meerman Scott emphasized, among other points, the importance of giving up control of your message if you want your ideas to spread. It’s no coincidence that Graham stresses the very same — I think these guys are onto something here. (Any bold emphasis below is mine.)

Your web site says that you came up with the concept of WildEarth.tv ten years ago at the Djuma Game Reserve. Tell us a little about your background and what your connection was to the Djuma Reserve at that time.

Yes, in 1998 I decided to try and set up a LIVE webcam at a waterhole in the African wilderness and with the help of Paul Clifford and the permission of my good friends Jurie and Pippa Moolman (the owners of Djuma), we installed a 30 second refreshing JPEG webcam at Djuma. We called the company AfriCam and this was the beginning of a phenomenon that just grew and grew. From the very early days, the viewers of this LIVE wildlife content wanted to communicate with each other, but in those early days the only social tools available were message boards and chat rooms. To this day there are still people following our broadcasts that were there on the very first day back in September 1998.
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