Free Burritos!

As if the free burritos to celebrate the grand opening of the 29th Street Chipotle was not enough, Chipotle is doing it again. Food Bank of the Rockies in conjunction with Chipotle is giving away a free burritos in exchange for a food donation at all 63 Colorado Chipotle locations on Tuesday, June 5th. There is no clear definition of what constitutes a food donation so I guess they are trusting that people won't try passing off leftovers. Read more.

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I did it!

I removed the Blogger NavBar from the template! I started to dig in to some of the other blogging solutions (typepad, wordpress) and quickly concluded that Blogger blows them away. From every angle Blogger has it covered; Functionality, usability, extendibility, and metrics are all part of the free service. In addition the interface is far more intuitive and easy to use than it’s competitors. Now that Feedburner is officially part of the Google family of products (as is Blogger) it seems to be the enterprise blogging force to be reckoned with.

The big stumbling block for Blogger was the branded navbar at the top of very page, now that that is a non-issue it seems like Blogger may be the blogging solution for SRG and our clients.

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Open Office 2007 Files in Office 2003

We're seeing a very small fraction of our clients using the new Micro$oft Office 2007 Suite of applications. The new applications have only been available for a few months and we don't have a pressing need to make the switch. It is usually best to wait until all the bugs are worked out before making the switch across our entire enterprise. As a comparative example, we did not start using Office 2003 across the board until 2005. It is a fair projection that out migration to Office 2007 will follow that same path.

In the meantime Micro$oft has released a compatibility kit to allow Office 2003 users to open Office 2007 files. Learn more and download the compatibility kit here.

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Customizing the Google Search Interface

Erin Murphy wrote:

>>A few months ago, TreeHugger Mark Ontkush wrote a post on his blog
EcoIron titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year. The
post lays out the following train of thought. "An all white web page
uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59
watts." Google, which has a white background and gets about " 200
million queries a day" could reduce global energy use by 750
Megawatt-hours a year by simply changing the color of its homepage to
black. (For more detailed calculations and assumptions check out the
original post here .)

In response to this post a black version of Google emerged called
Blackle.com. According to Blackle's homepage at publication time,
4,408.917 Watt hours have been saved by. The site encourages users to
"make a difference today [by] ... Blackling "energy saving tips" or
visit[ing] treehugger.com a great blog dedicated to environmental
awareness." Nice ideas. But how does the search measure up? Very well
indeed. Give it a whirl yourself and start saving energy one search at a
time. :: Blackle.com>>

Which inspired me to create SRGoogle.

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$100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed

The rumors are true Google will close the deal in a few weeks . . . read more.

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The life of an early adopter. . .

I've been experimenting with migrating my srg.com account to the Gmail interface. The benefits were aluring; 10GB of storage; complete cross-platform partiy; mobility; access anywhere; integrated calendaring, IM, and personal web pages. . .just to name a few. However, being on a Gmail island unto itself in the sea of srg.com MSExchange users definitely had it's challenges. I can see the benefit of using Google's Premier Edition across the company, but trying to make it play nicely with our existing MSExchange infrastructure was to challenging given the critical nature electronic messaging plays in our office environment.

The 2 biggest challenges I've found are mobility and calendaring. I have yet to find a way to have my phone receive gmail notifications in real time, and have gmails 'pushed' to my phone rather than having to manually check for gmails. The other main stumbling block was calendaring. There is no direct way to sync my Google calendar with Entourage. What I ended up doing was synching Entourage with iCal, then iCal with gCal. It seems roundabout and difficult, but it actually worked pretty seamlessly, until it stopped working. It was at this point I put my Google Premier Edition experiment on hold.

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Email Marketing Tools

If you're interested in bulk email marketing this article contains a wide range of options. Check it out...
http://www.idealware.org

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UGC Blog Tracking

Keith Wrote:
>>Another thing we need to look at is tracking for this consumer generated content as well since clients are asking about the list below.

- VML a unit of WPP Group has Seer, a computer program
- BuzzMetrics in New York - NielsenBuzzMetrics.com
- Visible Technology in Seattle is selling a computer program to help companies reply to criticism on blogs (WPP has invested in Visible Technology last year)>>

There are 2 local companies offering the same type of service:


http://www.collectiveintellect.com/

http://www.umbrialistens.com/

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Blog Control to Major Tom?

Does the internet need policing. Personally I think it does a good job of policing itself in most cases. Read this article and let us know what you think.

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How to deal with spillage on your laptop

This is an issue we see all to often. . .working way to early in the morning. . .during instead of after your first cup of morning coffee. Before you know it your Dell Latitude or MacBook Pro is swimming in a pool of java, cream, and sugar. What to do? Read this article.

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