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Ugh.

I’m feeling dichotomous (read “Bad attitude”).

I saw a special on TV about these new hangers that are made from 100% recycled paper. They are provided free-of-charge to dry cleaners who want to save money and save the planet by nixing their old wire hangers. I love the concept. It made me giddy at first. Then my No Free Lunches – Not Even for the Planet – Radar™ started tingling.

Right on time, came the catch. Someone is paying for those hangers to be manufactured, and they want something out of it. They want our eyeballs, and they want them in our bedrooms.

To pay for the cost of manufacturing, they are selling what used to be the open air inside the old wire hangers as ad space. Now, when you are browsing your dry cleaned wardrobe in the morning, you’ll be presented with coupon ads for various products from face cream to copy paper.

“This is a billboard in the bedroom.”, says the owner with spot-on huckster smarm in the NBC Nightly News story featured on their site. But it feels less greasy than the self-congratulatory expression on the face of Revlon’s VP of Marketing while he quoths “How I grew our business while helping to save the planet.” from the huge ad on the Hanger Network home page. That said, he has flawless skin and I can’t take that away from him.

Bad Attitude Alert: I’d rather spread carbon paste directly on the atmosphere if being green means letting marketers pry even further into the quiet moments of my life.

I wonder which came first in the concepting of the product: solving the problem of the un-green wire hanger, or solving the problem of the increasing irrelevance of traditional media. I love my DVR (read “TiVo” like tissue reads “Kleenex”) but I’m ready to go back to responding to traditional media if it will lessen the insidious creeping of marketing communication inching into every other corner of my life.

Despite my more negatively weighted comments, I am actually torn about it. I do like the Green move, but I don’t like the intrusive price. I’m about 72% sure I’ve got a bad attitude about this. So, talk to me about it. Am I full of buttermilk?

The Filene podcast

Trey and I spent last week in Madison, Wisconsin with The Filene Research Institute.

We were visiting because in the very near future, Filene is going to kick off a podcast (Update: The first podcast episode is live here). We were fortunate enough to help them get it going.

Filene is an idea factory and one of the major innovation catalysts in the credit union industry (for example: later this week they’re hosting a colloquium on ‘large-scale credit union collaboration’). Their podcast will make for a fascinating listen for anyone in the financial industry.

Also, George Hofheimer, Filene’s Chief Research Officer and the show’s host, has a first-rate radio voice.

Podcasting tools

In setting up the podcast, we integrated several tools that came together to make a nice little podcasting system. If you’re looking to get into podcasting yourself, here are a few tools/services we used in their setup:

Evoca -

Filene’s podcast will be interview-driven, and Evoca is the perfect tool for recording conversations and managing audio files on the web. Evoca integrates with both Skype and your standard phone line, and allows you to record conversations straight to the web.

You can manage the audio files with albums and control if a file is public or private. Evoca also generates an RSS feed of your public audio files.

Also, it’s really cheap – $5/month for a bucket of 200 minutes of collective recording time, which renews each month.

PrettyMay -

PrettyMay is a Skype plugin, also for recording conversations. We chose this as the primary recording tool and Evoca as the file management tool because PrettyMay kept the audio quality a little better.

The interface is very easy to use. You click “record call,” and go. It saves the calls as mp3s on your computer. It also manages recorded conversations by timestamping and labeling who you were talking to.

Audacity -

Audacity is very awesome open source (read: “free”) audio-editing software. It’s great for adding music, editing out any unwanted dialogue, splicing together text to make interviewees say things they didn’t really say, and generallypolishing up your show.

This site has tutorials of some of the most fundamental things you’ll need to know to use it.

Trey is a convict, or how the story ends

Also, Trey should have gone to jail this weekend.

Friday, on our way to the airport to go home, Trey was pulled over by a police officer for speeding. As Trey cursed and I snapped pictures with my Macbook’s built-in camera, the officer ran his information in the cop-car. We braced for the ticket. We were pleasantly surprised when he returned and said “I’m going to let you off without a citation.”

“Thank you so much,” said Trey.

“Well, the reason is – because of how fast you were going, I’m legally obligated to arrest you, and I’d rather not right now. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

I’d bet that’s the first time anyone has ever gotten out of a ticket by going way too fast.

This question recently came up in a conversation about a credit union website. So my simple question, in reply, is this:

What if instead of looking for zany animations, a website that plays rock music, or any other of the latest hippest coolest fads…what if the “wow factor” was that your credit union’s site was accessible and easy to use?

If you’re designing a site, or managing the process, ask yourself why your users are coming to your site. Make that experience as close to perfection as possible. Businesses who pay a mind to solid user-experience – scannable content, attractive design that looks consistent across browsers, simple navigation, copywriting that sounds like a human – these are the Wow Factor.

And here’s another question that tends to come up in tandem with the former: “What do young people want in a web site?” As a young person, I can say this: We are impatient. We want what we want, and we want it now. We do not want to have to wade through all the fluff that you think is “neat” to get to the bottomline.

I hereby rename the traditional “Wow Factor” the “Neat Factor.” Because that’s what happens, users will say “oh that’s neat,” and then go back to wanting your site to just work right, please.

Man! It’s been a while since we’ve updated the blog. I admittedly felt very sheepish when Trey and I were speaking in Pittsburgh yesterday and we said, “Don’t let your blog go over two or three weeks without updating.” It’s entirely too easy to be cognitively aware of an ideal, while at the same time being passively content with not hitting that ideal. Sometimes blogging and staying connected on a million social media sites can be a real energy-sucker.

But you know what? It’s completely worth it. This weekend is the perfect example of why.

I’m sitting in Seattle’s SeaTac airport waiting for Trey and Brandon to arrive. We’re here for BarCampBankSeattle. This is going to be a weekend of talking ideas with some of the most innovative people working in finance today. A good many of them are folks we’ve had relationships with over the past year, or longer, but have never met in person. One of my ongoing aspirations is to be the dumbest person in the room at any given time, and this weekend I can put a big fat gold star next to that goal.

This weekend, I plan on:

• Calling William Azaroff “The Waz” in person, and watching him flip me the bird
• Comparing Jason Knight to his caricature in American Way magazine
• Watching Tim McAlpine juggle something. And asking that he please co-present with his son at The Symposium
• Finally shaking hands with Robbie Wright
• Buying Jesse Robbins a drink or two before he presents
• Hanging out with Brad Garland and Mark McSpadden. Because although we all live in Dallas, we have to fly to Seattle to see each other.
• Investigating how Jim Bruene knows so much about everything
• Crossing my fingers that Shari Storm doesn’t go into labor in the middle of a roundtable discussion

I’m jazzed.

ps: The weekend was almost smarter – This morning I’d planned on hanging with Hee-Haw Marketer Paul McEnany and the rest of Dallas’ Likemind, but my idiot evil car blew up and I ended up at the Honda Service Center instead. Likemind is a group of marketers, bloggers, and social-media-ites who get together every month or so and caffeinated themselves. Next time.

Earlier this year we announced that we were open sourcing our CMS. Yes, we announced it in March. Yes, it is now almost July. Here’s an update on what’s happened since then and what we’re planning to do.

First, I want to clarify that we still plan on open sourcing our CMS. Our delay in getting it out there has nothing to do with us changing our minds.

When we were deciding whether to take the leap and open source our CMS, the question we kept asking ourselves was: If there was a CMS that was already out there that did what we wanted it to do, would we use it? We originally built our CMS because we couldn’t find an existing one that did what we wanted it to do – at least not an affordable one. But we’ve always been on the lookout for something that we could leverage instead of it all being custom.

Since we made that initial post announcing the open sourcing of our CMS we found a new platform which has a lot of the blogging functionality that our CMS didn’t have yet, is very flexible in terms of the design, is easy to customize and extend, and is fast. The flexibility in terms of the code has allowed us to integrate the important pieces of our current CMS into it.

We’re currently transitioning our existing functionality to this platform and will then open source core components of our CMS that integrate with the new platform. This will actually be easier for a CU to deploy and will provide more functionality.

We’re shooting for a late-summer deployment of our first site on this platform and will release the core components shortly after. If we haven’t given you real code by the Partnership Symposium in October then I give you permission to kick me in the ankle.