I’m not a doctor but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.   That being said I did work for a large cell phone carrier and visited a testing lab where all the engineers used hands free sets with phones they were testing.  Understandable since they get in demo phones for testing and until they do, they have no idea what the radiation levels are being emitted.

Now I’m not going to argue if cell phones are safe or not.  There are plenty of new articles out there like this one from The Street,  but I did find this useful CNET site that does describe the cell phone radiation levels and what they mean as well has list currently manufactured cell phones and their radiation levels.

In a nutshell, I think I will use my bluetooth until all this is sorted out.

This weekend a local wine store opened in town and my wife and I decided to spend time on main street and check it out.   It was a nice store in a historic building with a good selection of wine.

I notice a buddy of mine who is an area wine rep was helping the new store owner by doing some tastings in the back of the store.   Great guy and very knowledgable.   Never got to talk to him as he was helping another couple.

We browsed the store for probably 15 minutes to see if he would free up.  As we perused the wine there were some unique selections that we studied.   We might have even bought a few of these unique bottles but nobody helped us.   I am assuming the other two other folks were the owner and employee or partner.  Not once did they greet us, welcome us to the shop, or asked if we had questions.  Nor did they seem busy as they just hung out at the cash register talking to each other.

Now this might be a bit obvious but if a person comes in your shop they are likely there to buy.   If you do not help said customer out or out right ignore your potential customers, how do you plan to sell the wine?   If I wanted to be ignored and not talk about wine I could have gone to the local super market.

When your a specialty shop your advantage of the mass market such as a super market is expertise in the product.   People go to these specialty stores to learn more about the product and enjoy the experience.

As a business owner you should always ask yourself:

• Are you ignoring your customers?  What can I do to increase interaction?
• What is your competitive difference the market place?
• How can you exploit that to your advantage?

I was reading Whitney Hoffman’s article on the Difference Between Listening and Hearing and it got me to thinking about all the conversations I have had last week, last year and all my life where the conversation was frustrated by neither one of us listening.   I would say X and they would hear Y and then I react to Y and they start talking about Z.   Very frustrating.

I have played a lot of poker and chess in my lifetime.   I like to think several moves ahead and reading people is important to know how they react to such moves.   My father is a classic conversationalist.   He can steer a conversation and take you down a path without you knowing it.   As a teenager it was a bit unnerving because the topics would change to a subject I would rather not talk about and find myself in the middle of the conversation without knowing how I got there.

Conversations come in many forms today with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.   Filtering information has become specialized features of these sites and value-add software such as TweetDeck.    Tools make online conversations much easier and person to person it has become harder.    Especially when some folks solely rely on their email accounts.  You can tell a person something but if it isn’t in a email form then the conversation didn’t exist for them.      And what about a more flamboyant conversation online?   Well, Google Wave is about to wash upon us like a tsunami.  I think this problem is just going to get worse where personal communication becomes harder and harder.  Where the computer and email has just about put the death knell on writing letters to a friend and cursive writing, we now have instant conversations via email, Twitter and Facebook.

But what about in person?   I am in the middle of reading    Just Listen by Mark Goulston M.D. (no I do not get any referral fees from Amazon, I live in North Carolina) and he talks about the difficult conversations were people are not listening.    I find it an excellent book for anyone that finds themselves in difficult non-listening conversations be it your teenagers or your boss.   I won’t go through the techniques here since I am only half-way through the book and Mark does need to make a living so buy his book!

That brings me to Whitney’s article of a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about plagiarism and I had to laugh.   About a month ago I found a presentation with Seth Godin at a change conference where Seth talked got an advance book of The Tipping Point by Gladwell and it inspired him to write a book on the subject and give it away for free.   Of course he sent Gladwell a copy of the book and asked permission to publish it since it was on the same subject Gladwell was writing about.  Gladwell not only approved but wrote the forward to the book!  I recommend you check out Seth’s presentation. It is a great talk on is approach to publishing and marketing that is quite unique and I think can be applied to many businesses and not just publishing.

Organizing

It isn’t easy to clean up my internet mess!   All the social media sites, the blog, the email accounts, rss reader!    Here is a couple of tips to help you clean up!

Blog clean up

This blog has been updated with the latest WordPress.  I originally used an installer my hosting company provided but it was always out of date. I worried about migrating to a new installation of WordPress but found the export utility to run flawlessly on a test site I use.   I am happy to report it works perfectly!

Next I made sure I was signed up on WordPress’s site to receive an API key so I can integrate Akismet plugin to combat spam in the comments.   Everyday there is some bot trying to post about buying drugs online or linking some other phishing site.   Thank the heavens for this plugin!  Filters out the spam so I do not have to go through all the bogus posts myself.   Imagine if you didn’t have a spam filter on you email?   Yeah, it is the same problem with comment system on a blog!

I have also found a new template via WordPress Theme Review that reviews themes for search engine optimization (SEO).   This was highly rated so I figured to give it a try.   I do like the layout but may change the colors.   What do you think of it?

Next I tackled adding Feed Burner to the site.   I found out that Google has acquired Feed Burner and my account with GMail was an old business account.   Didn’t seem clean to have people subscribe to the blog and see an old business account.   So, I had to create a new gmail account and sign up for Feed Burner.   The problem was my WordPress plugin for Feed Burner was updated but I would not see the site use the new URL for my feed.   I found out it was the permalinks feature that wasn’t allowing the system to be updated.   I had to turn this off to get it updated correctly.  Once it was fixed I could turn permalinks back on for the site.

Next was adding Google Analytics to the website.   This was relatively easy by signing up for analytics and inserting a bit of code in the WordPress theme.  Google Analytics gives great detail on where people are finding my site, where they are coming from, what day and time they are coming as well as keywords used from search engines.   Invaluable to track the progress and success of the site.

RSS Reader

I read voraciously!   I found that Google Reader allows me to read many blog feeds in an easy to use interface.   Switching email accounts I was worried I would loose my list of blogs that I follow.  Google has setup The Data Liberation Front that shows how to import and export from any of Google’s applications to other applications.   It was pretty painless to move from my old account to the new account.

I periodically clean up the sites that I read if I find they are no longer active or their posts are no longer an interest to me.   I am back down to 81 feeds that I read (ok, skim) and you can see the ones that have interested me through my shared items.

Twitter

I have not been using Twitter very much because I found that when you have a lot of followers it is hard to keep up what is going on in the world.   Twitter recently updated their system to create lists.  I find that pretty useful, however I found an application that helps Twitter shine and that is Tweet Deck.   This little desktop gem will work on all OS’s that support Adobe Air.   You can setup columns based on users or even search terms.   They also have an iPhone app that is excellent.

Next for Twitter I changed my generic ho-hum background.   I found that Twit Backs can generate a custom background with all your information about you via a web interface.  You can see the results on my Twitter page.  Let me know what you think?

Bookmarking

I have been a long time user of Delicious but I had an account that was an old alias of mine.   Trying to be consistent I created a new account on Delicious with my name and was able to easilly export from my old account to the new account without any problems.   If you want to see what interests me you can see my links on my Delicious.com/geoffcorey

Anyone else have any internet cleanup tips?