It appears as if the first point-release of OS X has fixed my biggest gripe about Tiger: Mail.app 2.0 no longer breaks attachments to Windows users. This issue is far from resolved, though. We’re back to Mail.app 1.0 in Jaguar days: you have to add your attachments to the end of your message or your text gets split. You’ll end up with your Windows friends seeing email from you in pieces: The message window will display the first part of your message, and attached to it will be your attachment, and another attachment that contains the bottom half of your email, like a signature file, for example. If you make sure that your attachments are at the very bottom of your message, no such split occurs. This is an improvement, don’t get me wrong. In 10.4.0, attachments would get split up into component parts and renamed to something bizarre that leads your recipients the believe that you’re proffering viruses. So, for this reason alone, 10.4.1 is a must-have update for Mail.app users who wish to communicate with the other 95% of the connected world. Spotlight I love Spotlight. I use it as a complete replacement for QuickSilver, which I also loved, but was too kludgy for to get used to quick launches. But I was searching for a folder that I hadn’t opened in some time the other day. The title of the folder was “00 Work in Progress” and no matter how many characters I’d drop into Spotlight, it wouldn’t show. I started looking for other stuff… music, pictures, everything. Nada. Only the files and folders that I’d opened manually since first installing Tiger were indexed. Oh, and Applications were indexed, too, so I’d never noticed anything funny about app launches. Crusing around MacOSXhints.com I found this little beauty. Opened my Terminal window and typed:

sudo mdutil -E /

It took about 30 minutes to reindex and appears to now have everything I need in there. I’m still wondering about iPhoto images, though, as keyword searches aren’t coming up accurately. This hint may fix it. Still, as much as I love Spotlight again, there are a few things about it that are bugging me. I didn’t know they were bugging me until I installed the newly released MSN Desktop Search for Windows at work. While Spotlight has this great invisible feel to it, I’m always left wondering if it’s really looking out for me… if it has my best interests at heart. With MSN, you right click on the suspiciously Spotlight-looking magnifying glass in the system tray and click “Indexing Status” to get a pop-up telling you not only that you’re in the middle of an index, but of exactly what files are being indexed at that moment, how many files have been indexed in that session, and how many are left. You have a snooze button to free up resources if you have work to do, close to get rid of the window, and an “Index Now” button to update the index volume. “Index Now”. That there is quite a novelty, and it’s something Apple should have considered in their implementation. I have a number of recent switchers to think about and as newbies, when Spotlight doesn’t do what it says, they’re not going to be able to figure out the Terminal workaround on their own. It’ll just be broken. Anyhow, 10.4.1 was worth it. Spotlight is fixed. I think that does it for all my initial Tiger install gripes, and I can finally get back to thinking about Star Wars: ROTS.

I’ve been doing a ton of reading on buzz — and the art of it — lately. It’s been an interesting journey for me because I’m really tragically connected to cost-per-lead marketing and our word of mouth sources are tough to categorize. I’m on the record as a bona fide hater of word of mouth, as a matter of cold hard fact, as it’s been so very in the way of all my other marketing projects over the past two years. Color me transformed. Three months ago, the entire organization reorganized. The big(tm) budget I managed for our region was centralized to our corporate marketing office, leaving me a whole lot more time for tiddly winks, cross words, melancholy and porn, natch. Somewhere in there, I started listening more intently to buzz marketing folks and their points are making crystal clear sense to me now more than ever. One of them says that the amount of buzz your product or service generates is directly related to the amount of new information your producing about it. Take Apple, for example: over the past three OS releases, they always produce a list of “X new features”. In Tiger, it’s 200. In Panther, I think it was 150. In both releases, enormous buzz. I proofed a brochure the other day from our corporate relations team. It was pretty, as most of their material is. But it shows a distinct ignorance to what’s going on in the market. The copy listed exactly the same verbiage we’ve been using for over a year. The standard copy we used to rely on in yearly cycles is growing stale faster than ever, and our word of mouth buzz is falling even faster than that. I wrote an email to the team with suggestions. I doubt changes will be made, but here’s hoping. The tragedy of the commons in this case is that we’re so huge as an organization now that we’ve forgotten how to put our ears to the ground to hear the hooves rumbling behind us. In most cases, and here’s the bigger tragedy, when we do finally get the ears down, the rumbling has already passed. Challenge: How to re-engage a monolithic organization with fantasies of decentralization in grass roots buzz generation?

Armstrong Williams Column Axed by TMS: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000749251

OK, so it turns out that someone else was pissed about this Williams thing. Good on ya’ Tribune Media Service.

USATODAY.com – Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-06-williams-whitehouse_x.htm

Well, this is excellent. Not only does Armstrong Williams take the $240k from the Bush administration to promote one of their bass-ackward policies on his newsbroadcast, he publicly advocates that other black conservative broadcasters do the same.

Note: when asked to comment, Ketchum PR, the government’s PR counsel, referred questions to the Department of Education. Let me say that again: The voice of this issue did a hand-off. Hot potato, indeed.

I have such a difficult time with this sort of thing, mostly because I deal with the pay-to-play ad/editorial environment every day. And that is, of course, where the slippery slope began; editorial desks implicitly refusing editorial space on organizations with no advertising history. It’s a very short leap from there to Williams’ slap in the face of public policy media.

Somehow, and I’ll say it’s probably due to the ever-increasing competition for advertising and editorial space in fixed-format media, ad history became the bar or standard by which editorial participation was measured. Williams blatant disregard for this ethical boundary is proof that we’ve come to the next age of media hucksterism: the Advertorial is the standard, and it’s more OK than not anymore.

So, there I was, picking up some DVD cases for my collection, and I decided to stop into my lovely neighborhood VerizonWireless store to check on the availability of the Treo 650. I was chatting with the manager, who now says that VW is SKIPPING the Treo 650, in favor of the 700, which she says is already in early testing with Verizon.

Lies? Damned Lies? Speculation?

I’ll talk more about this later, but I wanted to make sure I remembered to do it. Good thoughts over at Johnnie Moore’s.

[later…]

I appreciate what Johnnie’s talking about here, nay, I’m in bed with it. What a luxury it would be to take my own organization and completely dismantle the marketing organization in favor of sensible marketing and branding. What a luxury it would be to experiment with taking an entire marketing and advertising budget and applying it to “customer experience.” What a luxury it would be to manage to achieve acceptance of such a plan to implement.

Here’s one of many nods to the iPod’s proclivity to lure the unsuspecting music lover to purchase a Mac:

Music To Apple’s Ears

It seems Apple Computer’s (AAPL) iPod music player may be doing what years of marketing have been unable to do: persuade PC owners to jump to the Mac. On Nov. 22, Piper Jaffray (PJC) put out a report suggesting that 700,000 or so iPod lovers either have or plan to buy a Mac in the next year, and that 1.2 million more will do so in 2006. The report, which set a target price of $100, sent Apple shares up 11%, to $61.35 — a four-year-high. But don’t look for Apple to make a serious run at Microsoft’s PC market share. Even with new buyers, Apple will still have less than 3% of the PC market, says Piper Jaffray.

I don’t like the way the writer phrased that first line, “… what years of marketing have been unable to do…” Years of marketing? Unable to do? It’s the rabid and fanatical marketing engine, manifested in tipping point user dynamics, smart market choices, and athletic reaction time to external forces coupled with those brilliant products. The iPod is a strategic piece of a far larger puzzle that just so happens to be one path to the same end.

BusinessWeek on the iPod

I’m glad Microsoft decided to take on blogging, because Blogger was really too complicated, what with all the colors and lines and delicious buttons. At least Spaces is full of colors, lines, delicious buttons and content filtering. (As if I don’t get enough of this at work.)

And now, Xeni has performed a highly scientific test on their content filtering scamscheme with some predictable surprising results!

MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs