Small Initiatives

Anyone else had issues getting into LinkedIn the past few days? I've received a couple of invitations I wanted to act on this week, and both times, from two separate places, with access to other sites working fine, I've been unable to get there.
That includes attempts in the past few minutes (writing this Friday afternoon at 2:55 p.m. Eastern time).

Maybe I should be thankful, but LI is the only social network I've ever felt met any practical expectations.

A Slashdot post points to an online discussion with Khoi Vinh, design guru at NYTimes.com, in which Vinh is asked how the team there maintains visual consistency. His answer, in part:

CNET reports the folks at AT&T (I was about to say "the eggheads" or "the boffins," but the spokesman quoted is from legislative affairs) claim the Internet will hit its capacity by 2010 if big bucks aren't invested in infrastructure.

Yikes. My home town, Harrisburg, Illinois, is flooded. The nearby, mighty Middle Fork Saline River jumped its banks following a two-day soaking.

Check the coverage from the local paper, The Daily Register (for which, not coincidentally, members of my family toiled through three generations).

I've said all along that debit card cash rebate programs are the way to go. During my tenure as a regional market manager for Teachers Credit Union I was part of the creative team behind its Debit Card Rebate program. Now at seven years old, the program has continued to grow in popularity.

I confess to high service standards and expectations for any industry. For those service managers who believe mediocrity is the best one can expect, I clearly state my position. There's something about a little process called payment for services I believe entitles me to expect something in return. This removes all doubts related to shared comments about service failure experiences, also known as the "every unhappy customer tells at least 10 others" rule. Today I'm an unhappy customer. Let me explain.

If video killed the radio star, I may soon have to claim responsibility for killing Internet radio.

At 2 p.m. Monday, Mel Taylor, webcasting from the Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference and Connections in Orlando, will interview me about the conference, the world of newspaper-based interactive media and who-knows-what-else.

Recession? What recession?

OK, let me snap out of my Pollyanna moment there. Times are extraordinarily tough in the newspaper industry, but we at Scripps still believe we have much to gain from growing investment in Internet services and products. As such, we're hiring in the Interactive Newspapers Group.

Please follow the instructions for applying to any of the following jobs, which is another way of saying please don't contact me directly. I'll just slow things down for you and the hiring managers.

At their worst, I'll admit, open-source software communities can breed flame wars, ugly breakups and needlessly forked development roadmaps. But at their best, you have to admit, open-source crowds share ideas, solve practical problems and tip hats at each others' successes.

Witness the Drupal community's post congratulating the developers of Joomla -- arguably Drupal's biggest competitor for mindshare -- on their new release.

Advocates of Web standards now warn that a heavily used technique for switching between standards-based browser rendering and, well, everything else -- called the DOCTYPE switch -- is broken.

OK, so that last sentence is meaningless to you if you don't work often in Web design or development. Even more meaningless would be any attempt I make to explain it for general audiences.

So, my advice: