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This is a handy tool I just found: www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com

It checks to see if a site is up from another location.  Built by Alex Payne of Twitter.

I have been remiss in not noting the launch in March of Carmen and Britt‘s new business – Words in Our World (WOW!). They are now e-commerce entrepreneurs! Their product is a very cool set of 100 word labels for every day objects found in the home or classroom that builds a foundation for literacy for pre-schoolers. Basically it’s tags for everything in your house that is of interest to your kid, from “Art” to “Bathroom” to “Closet” to “Toilet Paper.” They are available in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hebrew, American Sign Languge (finger-spelling) and Japanese. This is a fabulous product.

So I’ve only been involved on the periphery of this – they chose Yahoo as their eCommerce provider to start with for ease of launch. I endorsed this, lest I get tagged to do a lot of stuff outside my core competency. Now that the storefront is opened and they actually want to market they’ve been advised by a friend of a friend that they need to put together a Social Media Marketing Plan. This marketer sent Carmen a Social Media Press Release template (SMPR) and advised her to fill it out and then she would be happy to assist further. Carmen looked at it quizzically (what my friend Paula calls the “spaniel look”) and handed it to me, with a request to explain it. So here-in lies my research notes..

Here is an SMPR about SMPRs . It is the brainchild of Todd Defren, a principal at SHIFT Communications in San Francisco and author of the PR Squared blog.

Here’s the SMPR template Release Note in Todd’s Blog.

It is basically a template for building a very Web 2.0-friendly press release that includes the usual stuff, plus RSS links and other resources for the Web 2.0 savvy journalist or marketer. I don’t think Carmen and Britt are prepared to churn out PR or other content sufficient to justify an RSS feed just yet. When they do they will have outgrown Yahoo, but that’s a topic for another post.

One thing I found very savvy that will be useful right away for WOW!, is the purpose-built del.icio.us page. Basically you set-up a del.icio.us account and add links to content that is relevant to your purpose – be it a company, product, organization, cause, etc. Here’s are two posts about this from PRsquared: Todd’s original description, and a subsequent post on how to do it right vs lame (my description, not his; I am not tactful enough to do communications). WOW! could build a Delicious page that links to online content that supports their product (educational journals, product reviews, favorable comments in parent forums, etc.). Here’s an example of a purpose-built del.icio.us page

Memo to self – need to do this for Yu Ying.

I don’t know that WOW! will build much buzz in the blogosphere soon, so the technorati and digg components of the SMPR template seem out of the realm of effectiveness, but the idea is pretty cool. The key point is WOW! needs to do a modern, web2.0-savvy press release.

I think the other thing WOW! needs to tackle is creating a Facebook presence. Like it or not, you’re not marketing virally if you’re not in the social network-space.

Read a post in Techcrunch by Michael Arrington that asserts a notion that has been nagging at me – namely that the “Big 4″ Internet companies (MS, AOL, Google and Yahoo) are exploiting the buzz of Open ID without providing any real value to the Internet community. They have all set themselves up as ID providers, which is relatively easy and binds the users to them somewhat, but for the most part none of them are providing services as a relying party, allowing the user to authenticate via another service provider. As the article states, this is all gain and no pain for them. Unless more services are willing to rely on Open ID there’s not a lot of motivation for the netizen to adopt it.

A web architect working for me here at TWPC just clued me onto Alfresco Enterprise Content Management, an open source web-based ECM / DMS solution. Alfresco was founded by guys who launched Documentum, which now belongs to EMC. This looks like it could be a cool solution for us here in our intranet, and may also be useful for Yu Ying (although I prefer a hosted solution).

Saw this article that highlighted 6 killer blackberry apps. Some are more of interest to me than others:

Viigo RSS reader

Beyond 411

Worldmate Live would probably be really helpful for the road warrior. Not so sure if I need it.

I already use and dig Google Maps for Blackberry. The Facebook and Twitter Apps are not so interesting to me.

This is a downer – S3 was down for a few hours last Friday. I want to be a true believer, but this is scary.

Got a note in my email about an interesting article in CIO about Workday. This is an HRMS SaaS vendor that was started by Peoplesoft founders Dave Duffield and former vice chairman Aneel Bhusri. I think this is another example of inevitable march of all business computing into the cloud.

My work team’s primary raison d’etre is the management of a Peoplesoft HR Management System. Although it is outsourced to a very large IT Global Services provider, we find the lion’s share of our energy devoted to the care and feeding of these systems, and the tactical management of upgrades and other infrastructure issues. The amount of time we spend on storage and processing capacity planning and management alone is a major time-suck, and don’t even ask about patches, upgrades and disaster recovery. SaaS just seems like such a better way to go for the customer.

So Carmen heard about “some cool Open Source education software” called Moodle, and asked me if we could use it somehow for Yu Ying. Turns out it is an LMS that claims to be pretty feature rich. While I don’t see much application for use with the young kids when we first launch the school, it might have some use for Chinese classes for parents.

So the boss dropped me a note yesterday with a heads-up that Yahoo just announced they are going to support OpenID. Essentially, if you have a Yahoo account, you now have an OpenID. This is great news, since it will triple the number of people who have an OpenID.

Federated Identity for the masses. I can’t say that I expected Yahoo to be the player who would make this happen, but this is pretty cool.

For the record – I blogged about Open ID before Yuvi. It’s not very often I get the drop on him about cool tech.

Yuvi gave me the heads-up about this new PC terminal server technology from NComputing. Seems they are having real impact in schools from Bangladesh to North Carolina. Basically, you install their software on a workstation or server class PC, then use their little access terminals to provide a virtual PC console on each user’s desk. Cost is $70 -200 per user which is cheap, and each access terminal uses 5% of the power of an average PC. It should be more manageable too.

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