I’ve installed the new textile 2.6 plugin for Wordpress.

If you’re not familiar with textile, it’s a great, simple way to format html:

• first-level bullet list: * first-level bullet list

  • second-level bullet list: ** second-level bullet list
    • third-level bullet list: *** third-level bullet list

1. first-level numbered list: # first-level numbered list
   1. second-level numbered list: ## second-level numbered list
      1. third-level numbered list: ### third-level numbered list

Bold text: *Bold*
Italicize text: _Italicize_
Add a link: “link”:url

This isn’t working in the comments, unfortunately.

(More on Dean Allan’s textile page)

I’m in the midst of coming up with blogging guidelines for our new blog, so I’m attuned to both practical how-to’s and official boundaries that corporations have set for employee blogging.

Debbie Weil has a category devoted to this

And Toby over at Diva Marketing Blog, has collected a list of links to blogging guidelines & suggestions at specific corporations.

They include Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto, along with corporate-ese policies and guidelines from the likes of IBM, (pdf warning) Yahoo (pdf warning—is there a theme here?), Feedster, Plaxo Groove and Sun. The EFF’s legal guide for bloggers is worth pointing to about basic legal concerns like trade secrets, copyright, libel & slander.

I’m categorizing these and others that I’ve found as meta-blogging

Surfing Debbie Weil’s site , I came across a couple of informative blogging case studies she’s written:

QuickBooks Online (casestudy) is a collaboration of all the QB Online team members. Some interesting stats:

• Of the 90 QBO staffers, only 6 post regularly
• Of 35,000 QBO customers, 500-600 read it regularly

Also, their customers participate more in their forum than comment on their blog. Not all that surprising as blogs are more broadcast-oriented relative to forums, but makes me wonder whether we should add a forum to our new customer communications site.

ACCAbuzz (casestudy) – Kevin Holland, the VP of Member Services & Communications at ACCA (one of our partner associations) started a blog to be a “daily newsletter on steroids” that supplements his weekly email newsletters, quarterly print mag and other communication efforts.

The DARPA Grand Challenge finals are going to be held this Saturday (10/8/2005).

Autonomous vehicles racing up to 175 miles over the Mojave desert for a $2mm purse.

Here’s a listing of the teams, and there are some fun ones:

• The Blue Team from Stanford with their off-road motorcycle Ghostrider (they already have won the prize for the best videos of any of the contestants)
• The Terramax—a repurposed monster earthmover
• Local northern Virginia-based, Team Ensco with what looks like a Paris-Dakar racer.

Man, my inner tinkerer, hacker, software guy wants to try this one out. The subsystem map is half-formed already :-)

It’d be cool to build modular technology that could be added to any vehicle at all to meet the challenge.

One way or the other, I’m looking forward to watching it unfold starting this Saturday.

Reading up on the presenters at the DEMO fall conference, the combination of two of them struck me.

U3 “transforms USB flash drives from simple storage devices into … a ‘personal workspace.’ This is not relegated to only data and files, but also software applications and settings.” Outlook, Winamp, Firefox, all installed on the USB drive. Online backups of the drive are available. They license their technology to OEM’s including Sandisk, Memorex, Verbatim

Streamload is a file uploading and sharing service that includes 10GB of storage for its free account and 4.3 exabytes (4.3 billion GB) of storage for every other level of paid account. They have some “value-added” applications on top of the storage for things such as video sharing, mp3 sharing and photo sharing, including sharing all of these via email. As useful as those potentially are, I’m more interested in the raw storage that’s available. (Note to self – compare to xdrive, iomega istorage, and ibackup)

The combination of the online storage w/ the portable personal environment is really appealing to me. If they worked as advertised, I’d be very tempted to ditch my laptop in favor of a streamload client installed on a U3 drive.