TrenchMice is Facebook for the workplace

When I clicked over to TrenchMice this evening I could hardly believe what I'd been missing. This site enables registered users to post reviews of their companies and their managers. And that's just the beginning.

Bronze membership at TrenchMice is free; Gold and Silver levels provide "super anonymous" posting capabilities (hmm...so how anonymous is Bronze?) plus advanced search features and the ability to reply to posts about yourself before they are published (hmm again...are we talking about paying for "protection" from other users?).

Certainly, TrenchMice promises to be highly entertaining as well as potentially informative. I predict we'll be hearing a great deal about this Seattle-based start-up in coming months.

Writer reads

My office is a neat, well-organized place -- papers filed, desk cleared, cords coiled -- with one exception.

The books.

They're everywhere. On bookshelves. In boxes. On the floor.

While preparing to do some book reviewing for January Magazine I was forced to go through the piles to locate the novels I'm reviewing and referencing.

It was discouraging to realize that only a dozen of the books were memorable, and only half of those were memorable for good reasons. The outstanding book among them was The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter. Inventive, light-footed, and thoroughly charming, it's a novel about an Ann Arbor writer whose late-night wanderings lead him to a fellow insomniac who has a treasure trove of bittersweet stories. And I liked Simple As Snow by Gregory Galloway, slightly edgier in tone, about love and coming of age in a small town that reverberates with echoes of Columbine. (Parental guidance: If you have teenagers, this book will make you crazy.)

Ad agency ads

Advertising agencies are famous for demonstrating their production skills with elaborate insider jokes. The corporate site for Kruskopf Coontz does it better than most. After you've enjoyed their intro, go to Fun Stuff>BS Central>(2) Viral to check out their proposal to improve on the viral marketing using a contagious scheme of their very own.

Follow that lemming

I came across a blog entry today written by a fellow who had apparently just heard about the latest power-of-positive-thinking book, The Secret.

The blogger starts off a tad skeptical about the book, but quickly reassures himself "There must be some validity to the ideas in it or people wouldn't be talking about it so often."

Proof that human thinking processes haven't evolved too far from those of our furry little cousins, the lemmings.

Keeping web visitors happy

I recently wrote a blog entry for a client about how a company can make the best of an email mistake. The recommendation was to quickly send follow-up email offering customers a discount or benefit to make up for any inconvenience they may have experienced. The idea is not only to calm the minority who may have been affected by the mistake, but to make a good impression on the majority -- particularly the ones who take advantage of the freebie or discount.

Now I'm wondering if a similar marketing mechanism might be applied when a site has an unscheduled or poorly timed outage.

Today I went to log in to my Linked In account and, for the first time, ran into their upgrade/maintenance page. The friendly tone of the writing, and the amusing image, really took the edge off my initial frustration. (A striking contrast with the curt maintenance notice at my bank's website -- which I seem to encounter one in every four times I try to log on.)

Imagine if Linked In had gone just one step more are said something like "Are you a Linked In member? Come back in a bit, log in to your account, and use this code to get a free 1-month upgrade to our premium account level. Thanks for your patience!"

Ooh, that would be nice.

Austin has its limits

If you're feeling bad about missing out on South by Southwest Interactive, the tech extension of the SXSW music confab in Austin, read this travelogue by Todd Levin.

You'll feel better. In fact, you'll feel positively relieved that you didn't attend — and run the risk of having Levin write about you.

On a roll?

Yesterday a Biznik colleague asked me asked me how things were going and I replied, mentioning that I haven't been doing much networking within the group because I've discovered the best clients for my web writing services are mid-size (50 -100 employee) businesses, not small ones.

It's just a year since I left Apple to put together a freelance webwriting business, and I've discovered quite a bit. I've had some great contract gigs, and some disappointing ones. Because I'm underwriting 2006 and 2007 from my Apple savings, I still have the luxury of picking and choosing my contracts, focusing on people and areas I like or new opportunities I want to explore.

I check several freelance and contract listings daily, and have learned to recognize the lousy pieces of work. It's easy to spot the obvious ones -- the advertiser has no idea what he or she wants, or expects to get writing work for peanuts. But some of the least desirable pieces of work (for me, at least) are the ones where the job description has been written by someone in an HR department: The ad's about two pages long, sternly describes the job duties in a long list of jargon-laden bullet points, asks you to submit a resume that goes back to your summer jobs during college, and requires that candidates have "min. two years experience" working with a piece of web-publishing software that most bloggers could master in 15 minutes. My blood runs cold at the thought of interviewing with, much less working for, this type of organization.

Late yesterday afternoon I spotted a job posting, five sentences long, in which the head of a Seattle-area company was looking for an experienced web content writer. The ad clearly defined the work. I replied (in five sentences and some hyperlinks).

I'll report later in the week about what happened next.

Remember fact-checking?

In the late 1970s I co-authored an article for Psychology Today magazine that was rigorously fact-checked by someone at the publication. Every person I had interviewed was called, the spelling of their names confirmed, and their ages and other identifying information verified. Dates and sequences of events (we were writing about the aftermath of the war in Vietnam) were checked as well.

Print magazines are still known for their rigorous fact-checking, or at least some spot-checking; most require writers to submit contact information on all sources. Webzines, by contrast, follow the newspaper tradition of minimal fact-checking. As this Slate article explains the system, "writers are responsible for the accuracy of their pieces, editors do their best to backstop them, and more often than anybody will admit, copy editors save all of us from embarrassment with their last-second interventions."

Slate, however, has a self-appointed fact-checker who's been sending in corrections to the website since 2000. I'm proud to say that the fact-checker, profiled by Slate last week, is my cousin RM "Auros" Harman.