What Ven Thinks!

I was reading this post, Akismet Gives Me A Lesson In Customer Service, at Blogs With Wings this morning and it made me smile. I, too, had a great experience with customer service yesterday and it was an excellent reminder of how important it is to respond quickly to the needs and wants of your customers, big and small.

I use a couple different hosting companies for the various websites I own, but my primary hosting provider and the one that this site is hosted on is Total Choice Hosting. I’ve been with this company since 2004 and will probably continue to stay with them for a long, long time. Why?

Well, for one, they provide good hosting services at reasonable prices and, two, they provide great customer service.

Are they perfect? No, not always. My experience with them yesterday proved that.

Have you ever read something or been told something that sucked the life right out of your dreams?

I seem to get that a lot, especially from well-meaning friends and family members who think they’re sparing me a lot of wasted time and hard work. Or maybe they think a little disappointment up front will hurt a lot less than a big failure down the line. Whatever the reason, I get sick of hearing it.

Something else I get sick of hearing about is niches, especially from bloggers who encourage you to pick a niche, just not their niche.

I recently came across this post, Blogging About Blogging: Fair Warning, where the author linked to and commented on another post, Stop Blogging About Blogging Already. The point of both posts was to discourage new bloggers from blogging about blogging, a niche they claim is

Have you ever tried to read a book and been stopped, not by poor content, but by poor editing?

That’s the problem I’ve had with reading Blogging for Fame and Fortune by Jason R. Rich. I’m about halfway through chapter 4 out of 14 chapters and I just can’t seem to get into it. I’ve leafed through it quite a bit and there appears to be some great information there. I just can’t read it. There are too many spelling and grammar errors. I’ve found as many as four of them on a single page.

The name of the publisher is Entrepreneur Press. I’ve looked at their website and they seem to have a variety of books

I tried Seesmic Desktop alongside of TweetDeck for a short period of time and it didn’t take long for me to realize that Seesmic Desktop and TweetDeck are shadows of each other. If you look at the two clients side-by-side, you can barely tell the difference. Seesmic looks a lot like TweetDeck and has most of the same features. Each client also has features the other lacks, which makes it very hard to chose between them. Even as I write this review, I find myself once again waffling between the two clients. Sometimes, TweetDeck works better for me, but at other times, Seesmic is the better fit.

These are some of the features Seesmic Desktop has in common with TweetDeck:

• Handles multiple Twitter accounts.
• Support for multiple URL shortening services.
• In program profile viewer with the ability to follow, unfollow,

Of all the Twitter clients I tried, Digsy was the one that almost stole me away from using TweetDeck, which is surprising considering Digsby was the most lacking in features of all the clients I tried. I used Digsby for several months before making the switch to TweetDeck and still alternated back and forth between the two for while after that. Even now, there are days when I’m tempted to use Digsby just to get a break from the annoying TweetDeck chirp.

Here are a few of the benefits of using Digsby:

• Handles multiple accounts for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn
• Ability to open separate columns for each account, resize them, and move them to any position on the screen.
• Completely customizable appearance with skins.
• Ability to customize the notification sounds (big, big, BIG plus for me).
• Can be used for instant