Alec Saunders SquawkBox

That was a heartbreaker.  There was no score in the first, and third, but Buffalo went up 2 to 1 in the second.  Ryan Miller took an amazing 44 shots, letting just one in.  Ray Emery had a comparatively easier time of it, with just 17 shots on goal.  The Sens played hard tonight, but couldn’t beat Miller.  The silver lining, if any, is that the rest of the Buffalo team couldn’t keep Ottawa from shooting on the goal, and sooner or later, Miller has to become fallible. 

Go Sens Go!

I don’t get it. 

The world’s buzzing over Dave Winer’s new toy, share.opml.org, which is a site for sharing your reading list with others. Mike Arrington, Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, and a bunch of other folks are gaga over this thing.   In a nutshell, you can upload your blogroll (in OPML format, hence the name), publish it, and then use a variety of other tools to find out what it is that others like yourself are reading.

So I tried it.  I uploaded my blogroll (exported from Bloglines), and gave it a drive.

Here’s the thing.  I don’t have any trouble finding content, nor does sharing my reading list with someone else (although I do publish it) really do anything for me.   My problem isn’t finding more stuff to read.  My problem is wading through the morass of stuff that comes my way to find the one or two nuggets that are really topical.  My blogroll is large, but I don’t actually read it all regularly.  I suspect most people are like me, in that regard.  What I would find useful is something that helps me find relevant new content – content related to what I actually read. 

Am I missing something?

I stumbled across Febeke Okafor’s Technology VoIP blog this morning.  Febeke is an engineering grad student at Carleton University, so not only have I found a new VoIP blog, but it’s an Ottawa VoIP blog. 

His current post is a poll on whether or not voice will be free, and prior to that he published a 4 page paper on P2P communications.  Good stuff!

If you plan to read him on a regular basis, and you’re NOT already a Firefox user, read the feed.  If you hit the site with IE, he’s placed an extremely annoying pop-up with a Firefox paid political announcement warning you about the perils of IE that you have to click through in order to reach the content.  It’s a bush league blot on what is otherwise an excellent blog.

Paul Jardine writes about Value Based Pricing this morning, and links to Dean Bubley’s prior post on the topic.  He makes the argument that for marginal applications like SMS and voice, flat rate pricing is the only sensible way to go. In general, I agree.  However, I am currently back to usage based pricing for my home line, instead of flat rate.  Why?  At $.02/minute, NuFone is costing me far less than Vonage’s flat rate plan did.  I switched when i installed PhoneGnome.  NuFone is a prepaid system, which I charged up with a PayPal transaction.  Since October 12, 2005, I have spent $21.76 for long distance.

My opinion — voice will soon be an un-metered commodity. 

"Out of Box Experience" (OOBE) is a term that usability researchers use to describe the first experience a customer has using your product.  Good, or bad, it’s what often determines whether, or how long, your product gets used.  So it’s got to be good.

Wendy has written some practical advice on evaluating your own OOBE with a marketing slant.  She rolls up the customer experience beginning to use the product, with feature set, and channels to ask whether or not the product you build is wanted, easy to acquire and easy to use.

Interestingly enough, we’ve just gone through the same process at iotum.  Our Asterisk integration kit has been a popular download, but not yet widely deployed by those downloading.  We built it for a generic Linux/Asterisk distribution, which creates more work than many people downloading had anticipated.  By zeroing in on a few of the more popular distributions (like Asterisk@Home) we hope to correct that.