Reid Dossinger

I can't overstate the important of the embeddable Like button, whether it's the Facebook button (it usually is), or some other type of combination. In this day and age where content is mostly free, it's a way of paying the content creators; of saying "I appreciate this, give me more of it." It's crucial. But the Like button is confusing. Content creators want the Facebook Like button, because it's really the only kind of button that could potentially bring in new traffic. But why does it have to be just one or the other? What we need is a button that can tap into multiple places or none of them at the same time. It's ridiculous for blogs to have reaction buttons AND a Facebook like button.  There's a lot of API stuff that would have to happen for that to work. But can't a guy wish?

Picture it: the year 2000 on the beginning of the slide down the rough side the dot-com bubble. My boss, an obnoxious but insightful-in-retrospect Brit forwarded me a bunch of emails between a client and our company's IT team and tasked me with "cleaning up the emails" for the client. After a rough, confused start in which the technical team basically refused to help me because they thought the project was stupid, my boss said, "Listen, just throw the emails into a Word document, put in a table of contents, format it a bit and we'll send that to them and see what they think."  It can't possibly be that easy , I thought. And yet, it was. The client was thrilled with version one and we were back in their good graces. It made no sense to me, but I was happy to be done. It wasn't until I was on the client end that I realized what had happened with that project: the client's technical questions had been answered in emails, but in order to refer to t...

Let's just get this out of the way first: I get excited by new Google Analytics features. Happy now? I'm a big geek. Lets move on. It came out of the blue today to hear that Google Analytics was going to release "version five" (I didn't even know that there were versions) and was about to start testing. The official Analytics blog gave no details, but the  Analytics Talk blog did . Among the new features: New layout on the dashboard and more data crunching available in the widgets Updated custom reports (though I've never used custom reports, so this just got a "meh" from me. If you have a suggestion for a useful custom report, comment away) New visualizations, including motion charts within the reports and a term cloud visualization which seems like it may either be really useful or totally worthless Renaming and reorganization of many of the metrics, which seems to be to encourage low-to-medium users as well as just logical, inevitable changes...

You may have already noticed or read that Facebook changed the way you post comments on threads on their site. Basically, they took away the submit button, meaning that when you hit return, it posts your comment. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me in that it seems that Facebook is trying to limit conversation, rather than encouraging it. Whatever the rationale, a few friends of mine and I had a big thread of experimentation and found that: You can include carriage returns by hitting Shive+Enter You can now tag friends in comments using the @ symbol and typing the name. That wasn't an option before You can now edit comments by clicking on the x, but only for a brief time after you've posted the comment, apparently. If you click the x immediately after leaving the comment, the comment box goes back to edit mode, but I waited ten seconds and clicking the x only gave me the option to delete. It also seems pretty buggy, so it's surprising that it's been...

I'd always liked the idea of Google's Chrome's ability to sync (and, essentially, back up) bookmarks, preferences and applications across multiple installations of Chrome...but I could never get it to work. The preferences said that everything was backed up, but man...it was so not. I thought I'd give it another try again, and this time it worked. I don't know if it was just this fix or this combined with a fix in the browser by Google, but here's what I did: Turned off sync in the Google dashboard Turned off sync on both installations of Chrome that I wanted to sync (one Mac and one Windows) On my netbook (Windows), I deleted all the bookmarks I had there and closed Chrome On my main computer (Mac), I turned sync back on and let it finish. On my netbook, I turned sync back on and let it finish. ....and that did it. About time, too.

The personal blog that I've kept since 2003 has always had a serious personality split. It took on tech posts (especially beginner how-tos) and the music I'd been listening to, both of which could find a larger audience...if it wasn't for the fact that it was jumbled up with each other AND with the personal blog type stuff that had a, uh, extremely limited audience. I would constantly want to promote the music and tech posts, but would stop short because it conflicted with wanting to keep the personal posts for just me and my friends. The easy answer, of course, was to split things off. My music blog (which I still kick myself for not starting years earlier) has been going for almost three years now and I write tech in various different places. But since I split things off, the personal part has barely been updated, and I missed it.   I considered just retiring the Wordpress site and just letting Tumblr be my dumping ground, but being a sentimental guy, I couldn't ju...

I just spent the last few days in "New" York, in my second straight year (a personal record!) at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference, which combines the worlds of publishing and tech. I also had a couple of great meals and my first pickleback (and, unfortunately, my second), but that's another story. This year felt pretty long on theory and short on practical examples and takeaways, but much of the theory did end up being pretty inspiring. Here's a few quickshot thoughts on the conference: The future of ebooks is...totally uncertain It seemed that at least once every hour, someone pondered the future of the ebook. Yet no one really has a good answer for it. It's obvious that we're still in the early days (which I also felt last year), that standards are still being debated and grasped at, but that we're still a ways away from organized steps forward. This is my opinion, and it seemed something that no one else wanted to say, but it seems clear t...