Andy Boyer

Month: April 2012

  • Why Doesn’t Google Buy Delicious?

    So, I need an easy way to grab a url, and drag it to one of my groups. Google needs a reason to make me use Google Plus.  This seems like a no-brainer.

    Currently, I use my Delicious Button in my Bookmarks to keep track of links.  But how much more useful would that be if I could also share it and choose what circle to drop it in from that button? I could see a link and ship it to my Relaborate circle, or my softball circle, or soccer circle, or even my personal circle.

    It seems like Google+ isn’t going to win in the short term on the “status update battle.”  So, maybe they could win on the “indexing links battle.”  That seems more in line with what Google is good at anyway.

  • Congrats to a Few Biz Plan Competitors

    Since I graduated from the UW’s MBA Program back in 2006, I’ve been proud that I continue to have the opportunity to be a judge in the annual Business Plan Competition.  It’s truly inspiring to me to see what comes out of the minds of young entrepreneurs, especially those whose excitement has not yet been polluted.

    This year is especially exciting though.  For the 1st time, I knew a little about three of the companies that made it through to the round of 32 before they received their Golden ticket.  (No, I was not allowed to judge these companies.)

    So, before they prepare for their Investment Round battle in a few weeks, I want to congratulate the three teams that I’ve been able to get to know a little bit.

    1. Flash Volunteer offers a set of mobile and social tools to create, discover, track and easily share volunteer service events via a variety of integrated channels.
    2. GroBox aims to make it super easy to grow your own fruits and vegetables in a small amount of space.
    3. Splitpen is a creative online outlet for ordinary people of all abilities to come together and co-write stories with multiple plot lines, sub-plots and endings.

    Good luck to all three teams (and the other 29 of course), and we’ll see you in a few weeks.

  • So, What’s With All the Silence

    If I was Alannis Morisette, I’d use the word “ironic” to describe the lonely state of poor AndyBoyer.com.  But since I actually understand the definition of the word irony, we’ll won’t give another English major a bloody forehead.

    After all, I work for social media firm, am part of a start-up developing a product that makes it EASIER for people to blog, just taught a UW class where I forced students to turn in their assignments on a blog, and now teach a UW class where groups are building socialmedia campaigns for causes – and blog about them.

    If there is anyone on the planet who should have an active blog, it’s me.

    And yet, here we have what we have.  A lonely, neglected outpost, where 622 former blog posts sit patiently on an island, waiting for the next boat of posts to arrive.  Waiting for anything that will bring more visitors, more people who missed reading them when they were originally published 1, 2, 5 years ago.  Just sitting here…waiting.

    I mean, there was activity here.  We used to rail on Clay Bennett here.  We had goals of coming up on search engines for the term “Nick Licata.”  The blog may not have had aim, or a real direction, or heck, even a long-term goal.  But at least we had consistent content.  And every once in a while, it was funny.

    So what’s the deal?

    Well I have new respect for all the professional bloggers out there publishing non-stop.  How do you guys do it? I write all day, and then I get home and see more stuff I have to write, and then I finally look at my notes of stuff I want to blog about, sit down at my laptop ready to hack away, and ask myself, “I DVR’d Mad Men didn’t I?”

    I’m going to partially blame Twitter for this.  Before, if someone like the Mariners wanted to do something incredibly stupid that I wanted to take issue with, I needed to come over to my little .com outpost here and raise my tin cup disguised as a bull horn and start shouting.  Now, I can condense that thought into 140 characters and shoot it out via the FailWhale Telegraph and get immediate gratification with a Retweet or response.

    So yes, I’m blaming my blogging drought on a combination of lack of time, excess writing, and Twitter.  And Yuniesky Betancourt.  I’m not sure why, but I think it’s his fault somehow.

    But fear not.  I still have had plenty of issues that I want to vent about, including but not limited to:

    • The Washington State Republican Party selling my email address to Rick Santorum’s campaign.
    • The U.S. not qualifying for the Olympics in soccer.
    • The real meaning of Lost (the TV show). (I finally watched it on Netflix – another reason I didn’t have time to blog.)
    • Yahoo’s ridiculous patent suits and why that desperate attempt at maintaining relevance could have screwed a lot of people not responsible for Yahoo’s gross business negligence.
    • The Maloof (Malouf?) Brothers.
    • And more.

    Soon, this little piece of online real estate will become interesting again.  Hang tight.