Reid Dossinger

I took a little time to browse through the AddThis documentation to see if there was any feature I was missing, and it turns out there was something that I had just been wondering about: adding in Google Analytics code to the end of the URL when someone uses AddThis to share a page on your site. There's documentation on the AddThis site for adding URL parameters , but here's how I modified it to incorporate the Analytics code. In the AddThis code where you call javascript that powers the widget (s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js), add this in: <script type="text/javascript"> var addthis_share = { url_transforms : { add: { utm_campaign: 'AddThis', utm_source: '{{code}}', utm_medium: 'share' } } } <script> The {{code}} will add in the service that was used to share (ie "delicious", "googlereader", etc) in a single word and in all lowercase letters. You're just adding in the st...

I was thrilled today to see this article  today calling for what I think it crucially necessary for Google Circles: a way for people to choose what content of different users that they see. The "follow" Circle is really useless without it, unless you're following a person who ONLY talks about one subject publicly. The way I think it should work is much like the way I have my different Twitter accounts set up: I have a personal account, which is just kind of a dumping ground for my random thoughts, including sports and politics; I have my professional account, where I talk mostly about tech, web services and business and is set up to be completely open, public and findable; and my music account. I mix up the content every now and then, getting personal on my professional and talking about music on my personal account, but I've found that the division works pretty well. But it's still three separate accounts, and while Tweetdeck makes it pretty easy to manag...

I saw an interesting line chart  recently that showed the number of telecommuters declining. The first thought is that this seems surprising. Technology is getting better and we can do more and more all the time on our mobile phones. Why would people be doing less telecommuting? I'm lucky enough that I can work from home occasionally, and usually try to do so once a week. The conveniences are largely to my personal life: it instantly saves me at least an hour and a half of the day by cutting out my commute, I can start my work day earlier, my home computer is faster than the one I have at home, and I can get small household chores done. It's really nice, a definite advantage, and I don't feel that there's any productivity loss. But I can also say that there are definitely ways that telecommuting still doesn't match the office experience. Here's three ways: Conference calls are still lacking and are no substitute for a conversation. I've said bef...