Just a quick note to fill readers in on what’s been happening lately. We are in the process of setting up a new office/desk/closet for our online company KMR Enterprises. I’ll be taking pictures and maybe even a short video of the transformation of “the space” over the next couple weeks. We’re moving some of this business out of the office in our house and into an actual place of business in town.

Why?

The main reason is it’s time for a little bit of a change. The status quo gets boring and I like to experiment, demo and try new things as I’m sure many readers already know. This will present some new challenges.

I like being closer to the public and the public doesn’t visit our home. Also, I’m going to be doing some (local mostly) computer and web work for the town where we live. I would like to try building a good business portal website for the businesses in our town and help some of the other local business gain more web-related exposure as well as our established offline business. I’ve been doing this over 10 years and want to see if I can lend other businesses in town some of this experience.

Also going to move the Hmmcast to a bi-monthly instead of weekly schedule for awhile so Hmmcast #26 will be next Friday and cover two weeks worth of posts here. This is more a time-saving thing, because I want to use some of this time for other activities. My apologies for the last Hmmcast audio (thanks again for the head’s up, Will) that had some static problems. We’ve replaced the sound card and tested and all is working well again. I have a good interview with B5 Media CEO Jeremy Wright which I’ll be posting later today. Also have a couple more interviews lined up for coming weeks, so the Hmm Interview area will be delivering some new audio to fill in for the Hmmcast being every other week.

We’re also having to deal with some time consuming stuff with our offline business. Some good, some not so good. Since that is actually our primary business, the online stuff has been taking a bit of a backseat lately. I’ve been trying to keep up with my RSS reading however and the following are some quick thoughts on what’s happened over the last few days.

- Xbox Live Pipeline is a snazzy web interface for the Xbox Live Marketplace, but man, kill the sounds already. Worse than a game of hyper Pong.
- Google Spreadsheets and the artist formely known as Writely have now been combined into Google Docs & Spreadsheets [thanks read/write web]
- PC World PC Retail Mag thinks¹ that the #1 selling gift this holiday season will be the Nintendo Wii. This prediction sounds pretty solid because there aren’t going to be enough PS3 to go around and unless Microsoft slashes the Xbox 360 price and adds HD-DVD the Wii could be the cabbage patch doll of 2006.
- John Chow shares his list of the 10 best Wordpress plugins. Browsing through it, we’ve tried and use only two of the plugins, but some of the others look very interesting, including the dynamic digg this plugin. I think the optimal title plugin would be handy for those who use Google Analytics because it pushes the title of the blog to the back of the post title and would make it easier to track in the stats. I’m going to try that one and the related posts plugins out and maybe the digg one too. Thanks John.
- Text-Link-Ads have released a blog juice badge. Hmm scores 6.7 out of 10 (I think). We’ve started testing them out here at Hmm so interested advertisers can buy a text link in the RSS feed (also pictured to the right). Seems pretty affordable for advertisres at $80/month. We didn’t set that rate, text-link-ads did and they take 50% of the money for the backend (too much in my opinion, especially considering I could write my own rotator to do this, but then they also provide an advertiser matchmaking service of sorts which I don’t have). I like that you can rotate in your own ads, which we are already doing. Thatedeguy swears by these ads. Let me know what you think of them in the comments. I think if they are rotated enough they’ll be alright and I don’t find them intrusive as a single text ad link. I’m curious what you think. At this point it’s a limited time experiment and it’s only in the RSS feeds.
- Verballs are furry creatures that light up and move when Skype calls come in. Think Gremlins and Skype. Windows only via Popgadget.

1. 11/26/08 7:04am PST: pcretailmag–; dead link: http://www.pcretailmag.com/newsitem.php?id=24502 - no cache found, originally described as “PC World” which is a mistake, strikethru and changed to PC Retail Mag [↩]

Did this post make you go hmm?

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