General | Martin Crockett

10 Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution

November 15, 2008 | In General

This is article from 2004 is still essential reading, something many individuals and companies I’ve worked with recently could take advice from.

Don’t check your email all the time.
Don’t use “reply to all” when responding to email.
Write informative subject lines for your email messages.
Create a special email address for personal messages and newsletters.
Write short.
Avoid IM (instant messaging) unless real-time interaction will truly add value to the communication.
Answer common customer questions on your website using clear and concise language.
User test your intranet.
Don’t circulate internal email to all employees.
Establish a company culture in which it’s okay not to respond to email immediately.

[Link]
Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com

MPEG Streamclip, video converter for Mac & Windows

November 3, 2008 | In General, Tech Lifestyle

This is a great, great piece of software. I recently used this to convert a large number of .AVIs I took on my Canon PowerShot SD1000. The AVIs always crash Finder Preview and don’t import into iMovie.
This killer app solves the problems. Convert to .MOV and you’re done.

http://www.squared5.com/

MPEG Streamclip is a powerful high-quality video converter, player, editor for MPEG, QuickTime, transport streams, iPod. And now it is a DivX editor and encoding machine, and even a stream and YouTube downloader.

You can use MPEG Streamclip to: open most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; play them at full screen; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Toast 6, 7, 8, and use them with many other applications or devices.
Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, TOD, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, …

Up the OXO Tower?

January 30, 2008 | In General

It seems the team at london-eating.co.uk have finally gotten wind of the innuendo left in the reviews of the OXO Tower Brasserie and done some manual pruning of the comments. Fortunately, some clever folks have kept copies of some of the posts.

It’s surprising how long this went undetected for. Best part of two years? Nothing like the Digg effect to get some attention!

Innuendo-filter, anyone?

london-eating.co.uk
The Register
Digg
Sevitz.com
The Laconic from Trip Advisor.