Spark Minutes on the air for the week of 1/5/09

January 5th, 2009

Welcome! If you're new to the Spark Minute, you may want to subscribe to my feed or follow me on Twitter. Please also check out my other blog/podcast, Be the Voice. Thanks for visiting!

For those listeners of the Spark Minute on Green 960 or 910 KNEW in San Francisco, you’ve found the summary of all the follow up information and reports you heard on air for the week of 1/5/09.

Filed under: Bloggers, Computing, Search, Security, Spark Minute, Tech debate, Tips, Twitter-Tweets, Video, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Great online tools to manage the stress of flying

January 5th, 2009

Thanks to Direct Villas for this great post and tips on airline services. Make sure you read their post for complete descriptions, but here’s a summary of all the great tools.

How do I know if I bought my ticket at the right time? - We all know that the airlines like to play games with us constantly changing their prices for flights. Usually, those prices go up as it gets closer to the flight date, but that’s not always the case. Yapta, is a great service that will tell you if your flight has dropped in price, and if it has, how you can get a refund for the amount it dropped. Did you know that you can do that? You can, and you should.

Uggh, I’m at the airport and I forgot my passport - Don’t let that stupid mistake or another million others ruin your business trip or vacation. DontForgetYourToothBrush.Com allows you to create a customized reminder list for your trip. The program will then send you reminders just before your trip.

I don’t want to get a room for the night, I’ll just sleep at the airport - Which airports have the best sleeping facilities or lounges that allow you to crash? You’ll discover it all with SleepingInAirports.Com.

Get a seat with a view, not an odor - Have you ever sat in the last seat in the plane next to the bathroom? I have, and I tell you it’s no fun. Don’t make that mistake. Visit SeatExpert.Com to know where you want to be, and not be on your flight.

This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/5/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.

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Tracking the Israel Gaza Conflict via social media

January 5th, 2009

The days of local news and 24 hour news networks to be the first to break news is long over. Social media tools, especially Twitter, have trumped all media outlets becoming the leading sources for breaking news. And as we watch the conflict in Gaza unfold, any of us, thousands of miles away, can actually stay up to date with eyewitness accounts of what’s happening in the territory.

Mashable has a fantastic post outlining all the ways you can follow the conflict. Read the article to learn how to do it, and to tweak the settings to customize your specific news feed. But below is a summary of links that will deliver you all the social media news (and sometimes traditional media) of the ongoing conflict.

This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/5/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.

Filed under: Bloggers, Search, Spark Minute, Tech debate, Tips, Twitter-Tweets, Video, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Celebrities that Tweet (use Twitter) lead boring lives just like you!

January 5th, 2009

Today, I took a look at the site CelebrityTweet which is essentially a Twitter user that just follows celebrities. It appears their definition of a “celebrity” is someone who is famous before and outside of social media. There have become plenty of Twitter celebrities, but these people are actually true celebrities the way we used to define celebrities before the concept of Internet celebrity came about.

I would follow a specific celebrity I was truly interested in, but if you look at this collection of celebrity tweets, I’ve come to the realization that celebrities lead just as boring, or actually more boring lives than my friends lead. Go ahead and try the experiment yourself. Go to Twitter and look at your Twitter feed. And then open up another window and watch the feed of CelebrityTweet. Which one wins on the grounds of most interesting, most entertaining, and most useful?

I bet yours does. But that makes sense because you customized your Twitter list to your taste. Still, if you do want to peer into the mundane life of celebrities that Tweet, check out the list on the CelebrityTweet site (scan down to the lower left) and just selectively choose the celebrities you’re interested in following.

The New York Times today has a story about celebrities that use Twitter.

UPDATE: A bunch of celebrity Twitter accounts get hacked, providing the rest of us with some great 6th grade humor. Kind of surprised there were no fart jokes.

This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/5/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.

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Worst passwords EVER! Check to make sure yours aren’t on the list

January 5th, 2009

Mark Burnett’s 2005 book Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication has a table of the “Top 500 Worst Passwords Of All Time.” You better check this list to make sure that none of your passwords are on this list. According to Burnett:

“…Approximately one out of every nine people uses at least one password on the list shown in Table 9.1! And one out of every 50 people uses one of the top 20 worst passwords..”

Hackers know this list and use this list. Hundreds if not thousands of people have used each password on this list. If your password is on this list, change it.

This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/5/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.

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Bush’s expansive memory threatens the National Security Archive

January 5th, 2009

Turns out the Bush administration has been cranking out more data and knowledge than we’ve been led to believe. The administration claims it has close to 100 terabytes of information which includes love emails between Bush and Cheney to hysterical videos of White House dog Barney “pretending” to push the button.

Oh Barney, you mangy mutt. Will you ever learn? (shakes head)

This all according to the New York Times which says this volume of data is threatening the National Archives. I don’t believe either. I don’t believe they’ve amassed 100 TB of data nor do I believe the volume is threatening the National Archives. A hundred terabytes of data (100 one TB drives) can fit in a closet. The National Archive has many closets. Clean one out and stick the legend of Bush’s eight years in there.

Do you know how much can FIT onto 100 TB of data? A single TB of data can hold about 400 hours of DV quality video. If it’s just filled with video, they could jam as many as 40,000 hours of video, or about 13 hours a day which means they could literally record almost every single waking hour of the President for every single day of his presidency.

I know it includes a lot of other stuff, most of it not video, like email, which doesn’t take up nearly as much space, and it’s more than just the President. Still, I don’t think we have anything to worry about. Storage is insanely cheap. If the National Archives don’t know what to do, they should talk to Turner Entertainment as they’ve been storing terabytes of data on holographic disks for years.

This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/5/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.

Filed under: Computing, Security, Spark Minute, Tech debate, Video | No Comments »

Hanging with Andy Ihnatko at a coffee shop in San Francisco

January 4th, 2009

Once a year Andy Ihnatko and I reconnect when he comes out for MacWorld. I’ve actually known Andy since we were both in 7th grade, as we grew up in the same town in Massachusetts. After we had dinner with my wife, Joy, we hit a coffee shop and made this silly video. Enjoy, it’s about 8 minutes.


David Spark and Andy Ihnatko in a coffee shop in San Francisco from dspark on Vimeo.

When I got home to upload my videos, I noticed that Andy had recorded this video when I stepped away from the table to go to the bathroom. He’s complaining about me, because heck, that’s what I would do to him. It’s just one minute. Watch to the very end. :)



Andy Ihnatko Complains about Me from dspark on Vimeo.

Filed under: Bloggers, San Francisco, Video | No Comments »

My top blog posts for 2008

January 2nd, 2009

On television, when they make a best of the year clip show, it’s just a lame ploy to get more viewers with some old content. Who says the blogosphere can’t learn something from television? Here’s my lame ploy. :)

In no particular order, here are my top ten blog posts (or sometimes clusters on a given topic) for 2008.

  1. I just sent 325 personal video holiday greetings-How I did it and I just sent 325 personal video holiday greetings-The Response. I started this experiment in 2007 and wrote about it in 2008. I repeated the experiment again this year with an update entitled, “I just sent 555 personalized video holiday greeting cards-How I did it.”
  2. Twelve great tales of de-friending. This was a post I wrote for Mashable that was probably my most read post of the year. I followed it up with a couple more posts, The awkwardness of de-friending and When technology tells us we have no friends. ABC Radio caught the story and I was interviewed by Curtis Sliwa on the subject.
  3. Biggest mistakes by social media gurus. Another popular post for Mashable that brought the social media elite back to earth when they admitted their foibles. Joseph Jaffe interviewed me on the subject for his JaffeJuice podcast.
  4. Sixteen great Twitter moments. Another successful post I wrote for Mashable. The idea to write the post came to me when Twitter saved me $150.
  5. Any problems you’re hiding will eventually blow up in your face - Be the Voice podcast. One of my first “Be the Voice” interviews with industry analyst Charlene Li.
  6. The Social Media Fallacy. A Slideshare presentation that busts the myth of social media. It’s not about the Twitter and Facebook and other social media tools, it’s about creating the content that people want to share.
  7. I’ve annoyed a journalist. Amusing live video streaming incident that blew up privately, and way out of proportion. Both of us involved agreed to conceal the identity of the other and we’ve patched things up.
  8. VIDEO: Interview with George Carlin’s last opening act, Rob Paravonian. Rob’s an old friend of mine from my Chicago stand up comedy days. We had scheduled a dinner in San Francisco, and then days before he arrived, George Carlin died. I interviewed him about working with Carlin as his opening act.
  9. Side-by-side comparison: Flip Video Ultra vs. Flip Mino. I’m a huge fan of the Flip. Ironically, the new Mino (at the time, now there’s the Mino HD) appeared to deliver poorer quality than the older version, the Flip Ultra. I heard an inside story that the videos in this post caused the engineers at Pure Digital to redesign the Flip Mino.
  10. My podcast listening lineup. I’m a huge consumer of podcasts, and people always ask what I’m listening to, so I thought I’d put it together in this post.
  11. The worst product demonstration I’ve ever seen. It’s always amazing when negative stories do so well. Had I written “The best product demonstration I’ve ever seen,” I don’t think anyone would have read it.
  12. Who’s funnier? David Spark or David Sparks?. I stumbled across this similarly named comedian and Jerry Seinfeld look alike and asked readers to put their “Last Comic Standing” vote for who’s the funniest.
  13. How to deal with rough crowds: A stand-up comic’s advice for Sarah Lacy. The Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg incident at SXSW was a seminal Twitter moment. The bloggersphere was on fire. I took a different stand, and offered some advice from my years as a stand up on how to deal with rough crowds.

Filed under: Advertising, Audio, Be the Voice Podcast, Bloggers, Comedy, Products, San Francisco, Tech debate, Tips, Twitter-Tweets, Video, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

I just sent 555 personalized video holiday greeting cards-How I did it

December 27th, 2008

Last year I got the idea to send personalized holiday video greeting cards (see I just sent 325 personal video holiday greetings-How I did it). The response was so overwhelmingly positive (see I just sent 325 personal video holiday greetings-The Response) that I decided to do it again.

Do you really have that much free time?

No, I don’t have that much free time, but December was a really weird month as many of my clients simply couldn’t make decisions on anything. So it was really hard to get projects to move forward and forget trying to get new business. Everyone was completely shaken up over the economy.

Instead of hounding my clients or trying to stir up new business, I decided it was a good idea to just work on building some good will. I had so much success last year with the video messages and it really helped kick start 2008 so I decided to do it again.

How long did it take me to record and send 555 personalized videos?

I figured over a period of 2 1/2 weeks (you HAVE to spread this project out) it took me somewhere between 45 to 55 hours worth of work. That was almost four times as much time as I spent last year. But that includes a lot of other stuff that doesn’t include the recording of videos. Such as managing the spreadsheet of recipients, finding updated email addresses for people, updating my contact database, and my mailing list. Plus, I responded to many of the people who responded to the video.

What did people say when they received the video?

I got many similar responses as I did last year, but I would say you could categorize this year’s responses in two groups. Here’s a sampling of responses in those two groups:

Thank you so much for the personal touch

One of these days I’ll figure out how to use a Web cam

Of the hundreds of video messages I sent out, I only received about ten personal Web video responses back. Ironically, many of the “I can’t get my Web cam to work” responses came from some very techy people, many of whom are in the business of producing Web video.

Some Twitter responses

A few people broadcasted their sentiments to their followers on Twitter.

Close with a joke

My favorite response was from a comedian friend of mine in LA.

Was it worth it?

Ultimately, the purpose of this effort is to spread good will to my friends, colleagues, and people I have done business with/want to do business with. While I believe the above responses indicates that I successfully spread good will, I won’t know about how it helped business until the end of 2009. Here’s what one friend said:

I hope he’s right. I’ve already got a follow up list set for January to restart conversations with many people.

While this project did take a long time, I can definitely say all the hours I’ve spent communicating with people over the year has never generated the positive results as this project does. So related to all that other communications, it’s very effective.

An update on tactics to send personalized videos

This article is to update last year’s experience. I’ll explain why I sent so many more, what I learned from last year, and what I did differently this year. Please read last year’s “how to” and “response” article first. I’m not going to repeat the information that already resides in those two pieces. All this information is an update to what happened differently this year.

Here’s a summary of what I learned and did differently.

Better management of my list of recipients

Last year I began just looking at my Facebook friends and started selectively sending videos to certain people. At the time I had about 600 Facebook friends and I had far more people in my contact database. Yet, I just chose to use the Facebook list as the list to work with and unfortunately realized after the fact that I missed a lot of important clients. I did use TokBox for many other people who weren’t connected on Facebook. But the problem was I used that initial Facebook friend list as my core list and I relied on my memory to include everyone else.

In just one year, my Facebook list has doubled to about 1200, but I decided to use my mailing list (about 1700) as an initial base because that’s the most definitive list of people I still communicate with. Some are on Facebook and some are not.

I exported the list from my mailing list program, Campaign Monitor, into Excel and selected the people I would send messages to. I had four columns ordered alphabetically by last name. First column was the person’s name, second was email address, third was the service I used (Facebook video or TokBox), fourth was the response.

My criteria for picking people to receive personalized video holiday greetings

This is a dangerous decision because I know I’ve definitely excluded people. There were plenty of good friends and colleagues I wanted to reach, but there really is so much I could do. I should note that if anyone was insulted, they didn’t send me a personalized holiday card. Mass mailed e-card’s don’t count, nor do they have any impact. And believe it or not, I didn’t send any personal videos to my own family. I talk to them so much already.

Here was my criteria for sending a personalized holiday video card:

Things I said differently in the videos this year

I actually didn’t change anything. It worked well for me last year, so why mess with a good thing? See Step 4 from last year’s post about how I did it for a list of what I included in each video.

The huge increase in sent videos

I almost doubled (from 325 to 555) the number of personalized videos. This is just a function of business going well, and all the networking I’ve done over the past year.

Victim of being the first

I have a mailing list for which I send out mass mailed emails. On those messages, I get about a 30% open rate. But for these personalized video messages, I wanted a 100% open rate. Like with any personal email, you want the recipient to open and read it. We’re not so concerned with 100% open rate on mass mailed emails.

The problem is that most holiday cards are mass mailed. It’s not strange for people to assume that a video message from me would be mass mailed. Seriously, why would David Spark send me a personalized video message?

I had to try to convince people that the message I was sending was not mass mailed. That it was specially made just for them. I used the same personalization tactics (e.g. name in the subject line) as I did last year. Still, I fear some of the messages were not seen as evidenced by these responses:

One of the great advantages of using TokBox for video messages is that the program sends you an email to let you know if someone has seen a message. Facebook doesn’t offer that kind of alert. But if the person was a heavy Facebook user (I could tell that by clicking over to their profile page and seeing if they had recent activity on their wall), then I preferred to use Facebook because I figured the chances were higher that they would actually see the video than from an application (TokBox) they had never heard of.

At the end of the project, I went through all the people who I had sent TokBox videos to who hadn’t seen the video and sent them two messages. One was a follow up message that let them know that I had sent them a personal video message and did they get a chance to see it. And then the second one was the personalized video message forwarded again. With that two message follow up combination, I got almost 100% successful opens and responses.

Lastly, this year I also used a macro text tool called Texter (only works on Windows) to autofill in common phrases I had in subjects lines and in the body text. This tool actually has been invaluable to me all year as it autofills phone numbers, addresses, Web addresses, and other items I type over and over again.

Please, I look forward to your comments and suggestions of how you’ve sent personalized greeting cards. I share my successes and failures over the past two years with this project in hopes that others start this tactic as well. The holidays is a time of good will, but I’ve never felt that with mass mailed greetings. I like it when people tell me specifically that they’ve appreciated my business, work, or friendship over the past year.

Filed under: Advertising, Tips, Twitter-Tweets, Uncategorized, Video, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Talking Twitter with Curtis Sliwa on ABC Radio

December 24th, 2008

Last night I talked about Twitter with Curtis Sliwa of ABC Radio and founder of the Guardian Angels. What sparked the discussion was the story of the guy who escaped from the Denver plane crash and started Twittering. Sliwa wanted to know why someone would turn to Twitter first in a great time of need. Listen and let me know what you think (Time: 11:00 minutes).

Curtis Sliwa, WABC, NYC by Malyousif

Here’s my other interview with Curtis where we talk about de-friending.

Filed under: Audio, Tech debate, Twitter-Tweets | No Comments »

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