The Bouv has been asked to answer 3 questions about his day-to-day life at CurrentMarketing.

The Bouv Abides.

1: What's the most interesting tool you use to do your job?

This may seem funny at first, but as Geek In Charge around here, I'm not going to say the programming editor I use or my favorite browser. I'm not going to say it's the command line of the nice UNIX soul behind my Mac OS X workstation.

No, the most interesting and useful tool I use is Mac OS X's Spaces program. Not all you Macheads even know about this feature of OS X 10.5, but it is the application that I most often use throughout the day. Spaces allows you to have multiple desktops to help organize your other applications into functional groups.

For instance, I have one area for browsers, mail and instant messaging. I have another for my programming tools (editors, terminals and sftp windows) and a third desktop for iTunes or other multimedia apps. And the coolest one is Desktop 4 where I can run Windows Vista full screen.

Just take a look:

I can push Control + 1 thru 4 on my keyboard to cycle through my desktops to get to any area I need. If I click on an app on my dock that is already open in one of those desktops, it automatically moves me over to that area. Spaces really is the most interesting and useful tool I use to keep productive daily.

2: What website do you visit most often?

Why, UnderCurrent of course! I mean it's the blog of Louisville's Leading Interactive Marketing Agency!

3: What website do you REALLY visit most often?

Google without a doubt. I have a customized Google home page that feeds in my personal Google mail account, my Google Reader list, and my Remember The Milk todo list. 3 websites for the price of 1. I could put more on there but I don't want it to be cluttered.

Microsoft has had a lot of press lately, and none of it very good. First, they were sued for certifying computer components as "Vista Capable" when they were clearly not; next, they announced the closing of the MSN music store, thereby orphaning thousands of legitimately purchased songs; then they were publicly told to speak to the hand by Yahoo; and now it's rumored that MS will install filtering software as a part of a future update that will not only scan your Zune (OK, maybe not your Zune, but the Zunes of the 12 people who have actually purchased one) for "unauthorized" content, but then delete any music or movies not purchased from the Zune store. One has to wonder, what in the world is going on over there?

Granted, Microsoft is not hurting. They still print money in their headquarters in Redmond, WA. But when you're fined by the EU for anti-trust violations, caught gaming your sales numbers and being dismissed as irrelevant by Motley Fool, it might be time to think about some fresh leadership. Bill Gates was wise to split when he did; perhaps he saw the writing on the wall. In any case, it is upon Steve Ballmer's shoulders that the blame for the morass that Microsoft has become will fall.

Microsoft is a gigantic ship, widely perceived as unsinkable. However, as we learned from watching Titanic for the 152nd time over the weekend, we know that there is no such thing. How much longer until Ballmer walks the plank? And at what point is he going to throw up his hands and say, "What the hell?! I'm a billionaire for God's sake, I don't need this!" My prediction is that within the year, Steve Ballmer will either have engineered a hostile takeover of Yahoo and mounted Jerry Yang's head on his wall, or Bill Gates will be back in the CEO's hyperbaric chamber in Redmond, cruelly plotting the overthrow of free software.

I’m antsy so I turn my divided attention to trusty Google. I vaguely remember telling myself earlier that I have to check out this Twitter of which everyone speaks so highly. I was on a search engine kick and instead of going to this unknown site, decided to see if Twitter came up when I searched “social networks”. Truly, this was the test to see if I should trudge on. Google gets back to me fast with some answers…

“Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Top 10 Most Beautiful Social Networks, Social Netw…Wait what?!? Top 10 Most Beautiful Social Networks?!?”

I quickly stumble back up the page to read this absurd title again and to further feed my curiosity - I click…

As if it’s not bad enough that in every gossip magazine, on every entertainment show and every red carpet, there’s a list of beautiful people just waiting to hear how beautiful they are now; we are passing this beauty judgment onto social networking sites? Oddly enough, I can pass up those beautiful people and their Photoshopped faces but beautiful social networks? I had to see for myself.
Everyone has an opinion and reason about their loyalties to various social networking sites. Strange as it seems, our reasons for having biases are often the same. “It’s neat, clean and easy to use.” The criterion for making the Mashable list has to do exactly with that! And guess what folks, although mentioned, Twitter didn’t make the cut.

I am still skeptical. So for the next few days I’ll be challenging this list by joining networks and scoping out the beauties for myself. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I am not taking another’s answer as my own. I’ll get back to you on this one…

We have a unique culture at CurrentMarketing. It can be rather difficult to communicate the specifics of this culture to potential, and new, employees.

That's why we're creating an internal wiki.

Our website illustrates the personality of our work, our relationship with our clients and the professional side of our people to the outside world. Our traffic system is the 1's and 0's behind the smooth operation of the agency.

The wiki is a totally different animal - accessible only to those in the CM club. It's the headquarters of information more along the lines of stories from our past company trips (the wiki doesn't observe the cone of silence, unfortunately), who's who in CM lore and the unabashed history of how CM rose to its position as the Leading Interactive Agency in Louisville.

Of course, the wiki is entirely composed by CurrentMarketing employees, which is what makes it such a special body of work. We have to be careful about our blog lest any innocent ears stumble upon it. But, if you have access to the wiki, your innocence is virtually lost anyhow because you've already come into contact with the likes of Dennis Bonifer, Rob Womack and Kati Parrish. Once you've seen that Nam-style action, you're done. You may as well succumb and read the wiki ... but only if you're in the club.

The newest social networking site has premiered - ncludr.com!

I already have profiles on so many of these type of sites, but this is one more I will add. How can I resist a marketing pitch that claims that the site is "the most awesomest ultimate social network ever?"

I love the capabilities the site touts:
"Upload photos or publish notes, get the latest news from your friends, post videos on your profile, tag your friends, use privacy settings to control who sees your info -- NOT WITH nclüdr!"

As if all of that wasn't enough, the home page features testimonials from PeeWee Herman and Mr. Wizard (apparently raised from the dead). I drilled down to sign up and whose testimonials should I see, but Rudy Giuliani and Mr. T!?! Can you think of any other website that features both America's Mayor AND Bad Attitude Baracus?!? AND a tile ad for a company that will help me lower my funeral costs? I can't think of even one.

As you probably assumed, I just had to click on the FAQ page...and, boy am glad I did! I stumbled upon an ad for a Virus Detection software that promises a Premium Gouda Cheese Wheel! WOW! These guys are already generating "revenue" through advertising on the site, which is not really hard to understand since everyone in the world has already signed up!

Speaking of, the sign up was a snap using ncludr's Personal Profile Generator V2.01. It was only 3 questions long and quickly told me who I am. Facebook has never once given me this level of self-discovery. Right off the bat, I had 12.3 billion friends! I only have about 30 on Facebook!

Check it out - you won't be sorry! ncludr.com

Are you tired of missing "The Office" every week... well not anymore thanks to Hulu.com. Now you can watch it when you want to, where you want to. Hulu was created by NBC and Fox to deliver their content free, but with an advertising catch: with a 20 minute clip you get about a minute to a minute and half of advertising (one 30 sec spot and two 15 sec spots in something I watched).

With the user sitting in front of the computer, visiting a sponsor's website would be as simple as the click of a mouse. I've been watching alot of shows on Hulu.com and I don't know about you, but lately I've been wanting some thick bacon from Chili's.

Although you may be saying "Why didn't they do this earlier?" well a few companies had, even now Hulu is still competing with companies such as Brightcove which allows companies to join their network and get a personal channel.

The really neat thing about Hulu though is they even offer the ability to select clips of a video to embed on your website, blog, etc. Who wouldn't want to see Peter from Family Guy fight a Giant Chicken!

Of course last but definitely not least: HD movies(720p)! It's mostly just previews for now, but this will definitely be the biggest hit of the site if users meet all the requirements.

All I have to say is so long broadcast, hello digital!

Well, Hulu officially launched yesterday after many months in beta. Better late than never? The "video online" market is fairly crowded right now, but Hulu does bring the powerhouses of NBC and Fox under one umbrella, not to mention many other smaller channels as well (like Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, and Oxygen). In the last year and a half all the broadcast networks have really ramped up their online video presence.

The Wall Street Journal posits that Hulu is coming out as a competitor to YouTube. Does anyone else out there have an issue with this? The bread and butter of YouTube is not shows (though they are pirated on there, or show up in snippets only), but UGC -- User Generated Content! Hell, its one of the biggest successes of the Web 2.0 "amateur created" internet fad we're all wrapped up in. YouTube is popular because it shows cats tackling babies, old ladies punching other old ladies in the face and of course The Evolution of Dance video.

Now, Hulu does have a good shot at doing this better than its competitors. Its archives are ripe with much wanted older episodes of popular shows (*cough* Simpsons *cough). And the ads that it is serving can be targeted towards the end-user (I get to choose what type of ads I see) and big companies are going to eat that up. Especially since ads in video is still experimental for marketers and there is a lot of drool over the expected ROI.

That is until someone makes a site that rips the content, strips the ads and reposts everything free of annoyance. The legality of this is of course obvious, but that hasn't exactly stopped people from posting shows online already, has it? If anything Hulu might be making it easier. Now all a site needs to do take the videos and keep the ads there, but put in "jump points" to allow the user to choose to skip the ads. They're there, but the user decides to skip them and jump to the next point in the real show -- definitely doable.

HuluDVR.com upcoming? Totally predicting that.

Yesterday morning Gary Gygax passed away, so I'm a bit nerd-sad at the moment. Like many other computer geeks, growing up I was into roleplaying games and Gary Gygax was an icon as the Father of Dungeons & Dragons. Though it was in person, sitting around with some pencils, paper and dice was our social networking back then. Later when the internet was picking up, but before the label of "Web 2.0" was slapped on it, to have "online friends" was still seen as anti-social.

And now everyone and their mom has a Facebook or MySpace page. If you don't, you're the odd one out now. The irony is particularly interesting because the nerds, geeks and dweebs of 15-25 years ago are now leading the technology behind Web 2.0, social media and all things "hip" about the Internet right now.

If anything, I'm more anti-social now than I used to be -- except for the fact that I interact with more people online now than I ever do in person. I've put down the d20s (those are twenty sided dice for you non-initiated) for now, but I'll always be a roleplaying nerd at heart.

Recently, I completed a project in Flash that required all of the graphic elements to be rendered as vector shapes. I decided to use ActionScript only to draw every interface element. Why? Well, as our French friends say, "For the challenge!" There are practical reasons too involving control over look and feel of the page and other esoteric issues, but that is for another post.

What's important is that I developed a burning desire to add Apple gel-type buttons to my interface (I like the way they look, so sue me), and I searched online for ways to create these buttons using vector tools. I found many links like this and this and this, but none addressed creating the buttons using the Flash Drawing API. So I studied each tutorial, absorbed the process, then automated it. And I will show you how I did it.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I came across some neat advanced search techniques that you can use in Google’s search and here are a few of my favorites:

inurl:<keyword> this will only return websites the keyword in the url

allinurl:<keywords> this is the same but allows multiple keywords

Along with these there are a few operators that you can use also:

+<keyword> this will return all pages that include the keyword only.

Example: Louisville +interactive agency will return only Louisville agencies that have interactive describing their agency.

-<keyword> this will return all pages that don’t include the keyword.

Example: Louisville –interactive agency would return all agencies that don’t have interactive describing their agency.

Here are a couple of links if you are interested in learning more neat tips and tricks for optimizing your searching in Google:

Google Search Operators

Google Query Tips