Over at Freds House, Gene is Hemoblogin. Gene and I started giving blood back in our campus days. And I’ve donated 8 or 9 gallons over the years – thanks to on-site blood drives for the first 15 years of my professional career. Unfortunately, I had an inconsistent test during blood screening and my blood can no longer be accepted for donation. So I’m hoping that some of you can make up for me. It’s the Gift of Life.

Maybe I’m missing something. But I just don’t understand the drive to use weblogs to solve all communication problems. Startup Skills.com sees weblogs as a competitive advantage that small businesses have over larger competitors. But isn’t that advantage another manifestation of small companies being nimbler, closer to customers and more responsive to customer needs? If you are going to be responsive, then a weblog gives you a platform to display it. But having a weblog isn’t going to make you responsive.

The problem with most corporate communication is that it is a one way message coming down from the mount. And I don’t think that having the CEO blog is going to change that. I want to see blogs from people who already interact with customers. How about having customer service blog on customer problems – what they are and how they solved. Or product marketing on how to apply the product effectively. Wouldn’t you like to see the right why to do laundry, where to put the rack in the oven for what, how to winterize and summerize your car, …

I’d like to welcome Management by Baseball to the Blog Roll. While my writing has primarily been about technology and sports, I am keenly interested in managment (product, people, or otherwise). However, I’ve taken the maxim:

Better to keep quiet and be thought a fool, then speak and remove all doubt.

to heart and kept my mouth shut. More power to Jeff and his thoughts on how business mirrors baseball.

One of the reasons that baseball is so compelling for managerial analysis is its transparency. We know how much everyone makes, and we know how everyone performs. We know when a team is more than the sum of its parts and we know when it’s less. And after the fat lady sings, we know that the story of how it came to be more or less is going to come out.

The Colts-Patriots AFC Championship game earned a 26.6 rating, becoming the highest rated TV program since the 2003 Super Bowl. And the Panther-Eagles NFC Championship game earned a 25.0 rating (down 8% from last year’s Bucs-Eagles game). Supporters of an NCAA Division 1 Football playoff should compare that to the Sugar Bowl’s 14.8 rating – the NCAA would get creamed going head-to-head against the NFL.

As a registered Republican, I usually don’t follow the Democratic primaries very closely. But this campaign has been different. Between the war in Iraq, the economic policies of Bush, and the energy of Dean; things are starting to pull me into the fray.

I consider myself a fiscally conservative Democrat – I think government needs to act to make lives better, but I don’t want to just throw money at the problem. I stereotype Republicans as thinking the free market is the solution and Democrats as thinking government spending is the solution. And since I’ve always felt that it was easier to get a Republican to do the right thing than to get a Democrat to stop spending, I found myself a registered Republican.

But I’m starting to view things differently. The Democratic Presidential candidates are starting to sound more fiscally responsible than President Bush. And having both the legislative and executive branches of government in Republican control isn’t as appealing as I thought it would be. This may be the year when I vote for a Democrat for President.

I was discussing the overseas outsourcing of IT with my Aunt, when she accused me of being a capitalist. I was taken aback by the accusation, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I think that I understand now.

I think that a capitalist believes that the free market is right. While I believe in the power and efficiency of a free market, I also believe that societal values are not always reflected in the results of a free market. For example, Americans are clearly willing to buy less fuel efficient cars. But since I believe that it is in America’s best interest to decrease our oil consumption, I accept government interference towards that end.

Returning to the topic of outsourcing, I’m not convinced that the benefit of lower prices outweighs the harm of lost jobs. But I am convinced that in trying to stop outsourcing the cure will be worse than the problem. The free market may not be right, but it is powerful. And we will pay a price to divert the free market from its path.

Successful companies improve their bottom line by increasing productivity and decreasing costs. Companies that cannot decrease costs by outsourcing are at a competitive disadvantage against companies that can. And eliminating outsourcing makes it easier for foreign companies to compete against us. I’m not willing to accept that penalty as the cost for saving domestic jobs.

My rules for better vacation photos with your digital camera:

1. Shoot early, shoot often – you can throw away the flubs later.
2. Capture people – you can buy a photo of any place or thing that you see. This is your one chance to get pictures of yourself, the people you travel with, and the people you meet at those places and with those things.
3. Remember that you’re on vacation – don’t spend so much time with your camera that you forget to enjoy yourself.

And my brother’s rule on vacation expense:

I’ve never come back from a vacation saying I spent too much. I’m going to keep on spending until I do.

[This should not be construed as a reason to spend like there is no tomorrow, but rather as a recognition that an upgrade from cheap to good or good to pretty good has an impressive enjoyment return on investment.]

Scoble posts about the impending end of film. More precisely, digital photography is rapidly marginalizing film, shrinking the areas where film makes sense. Just as analog audio survived the CD, I expect film to survive the digital camera. But with the marginalization comes an end to film’s research and development budget. Ten years ago, the film industry could afford to develop and promote the new APS format. I suspect that APS will be the film industry’s last, big thing.

Digital cameras are a better solution for the hoi polloi. The easiest way to take better pictures is to simply take a whole lot more. Even if your skill level remains constant, taking five times as many photos will increase your odds of shooting a keeper by a factor of five. And while I’ve never found the time to assemble a traditional photo album, I find it’s easy to assemble a digital photo album.

I suspect that some professionals and many artists will stick with film. The best film photos will be superior to the best digital photos for some time to come. And they’ll blow them up to much bigger sizes.

Mark “Markie Mark” Twain joins the Ideoplex household via the Danbury Animal Welfare Society. He’s been with us for a couple of weeks now and seems to be approaching a rappochement with Sam Stevens, tab extraordinaire.

Well, not me exactly – Take the First Step is one year old today. Having a weblog was harder than I thought – I underestimated both the time required to write an intelligent post and the difficulty of making an impression on the blogoverse. But my only real regret is that I didn’t start earlier.

When I started Take the First Step, I hadn’t really considered myself a good writer. But it turns out that while getting inspiration for a good post is hard, the actual writing isn’t – and it gets easier with practice. Over the past year, I’ve become much more adept at writing on demand.

I’ve learned by following blogs in my RSS aggregator. And while you don’t need to write a blog to consume their output, writing makes you an active member of the community rather than a passive observer.

I’ve also learned that old news really is old news. I used to archive RSS items in a link blog and in NewsGator. But I now believe that it’s more effective to search the right blogs when needed rather than keeping items around just in case. Or maybe I need a smarter archive capability in Outlook.