A Night in the Life of Guy Kawasaki Plus Cool Stuff Friday

It’s 10:30 pm, and I’m sitting on a baggage cart on the tarmac of the Monterey, California airport. My U. S. Airways flight was set to depart and then an engine warning light went on—this was two hours ago. The reason we’re all on the tarmac is that a fire alarm went off, so we had to evacuate the terminal.

Still, this is better than the last time I flew on U. S. Airways. That time the one of the plane’s engines died, and we made an “unscheduled stop” in Kansas City and then had to wait four hours for another plane to fly in. What’s all of the got to do with this entry? Nothing except that I’ve had two hours to compile a short list of cool stuff.

It’s been one of those days. This afternoon I spoke for my buddies at Cisco. Just before the speech, I discovered that the recently dry-cleaned pants that I packed were my son’s, not mine, so I had to give the speech wearing jeans. One high point: Reggie Jackson was on the flight too, but he left after two hours of waiting. He was giving out autographs—though he didn’t ask me for mine. :-) If I get to Las Vegas anytime soon, I’m speaking for the Entrepeneurs’ Organization.

• “25 Tools to Compile an In-Depth Dossier on a Competitors’ Site.” This article contains description and links for you to scope out your competition’s web site. It covers topics such as ownership, traffic, links, trademarks, and browser compatibility.

• “The Web Entrepreneur’s Customer Service Toolbox: 100 Hacks and Resources.” This is a compilation of useful tools and services to maintain a high-level of customer service. These tools help you keep in touch, run meetings, do accounting, provide support, and solicit feedback.

• MeVu. This site enables you to create a page of links to all your web presences. This means that people can go to one location for your profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn; pictures in Flickr and PhotoBucket; videos in YouTube; and musings in multiple blogs. Here is a sample.

• Catalog Choice. This is a not-for-profit that helps you reduce the amount of tree-killing, dump-filling, money-wasting catalogs that you receive (19 billion catalogs are printed each year in the U. S.). You denote which catalogs are coming to you, and Catalog Choice tells the companies to back off. It’s a free service.

• Best Book Combo. The site searches the catalogs of AbeBooks.com, Amazon.com, BetterWorld.com, and Alibris.com and determines the best total price (that is, including shipping and handling) of a book. For example, the AbeBooks price for The Art of the Start was $17.54 compared to Amazon.com’s $18.20.

Incidentally, this is a stock photo, not the MRY terminal, from iStockphoto by “Sparky2000.”

Comments

[Roy Blumenthal]

Hi Guy...

I'm joining the clamour for your bringing back full feed RSS.

I realllllly don't visit websites in order to read blogs. I use Google Reader. And your blog has just emasculated itself! It's impossible to even get a SENSE of the story from the feeble two lines you're offering.

And even if I GOT the sens of the post, I skim the thing before reading it anyway.

Please bring back the full feed.

I've had three blogs in my 'have-to-read' folder... yours, Seth's, Scoble's. Now when I go to yours, I see two lines of nothing.

I'm keen to know if you're just performing an experiment. Are you trying to see if people unsubscribe? Are you trying to generate advertising traffic on your site? I can't make any sense of your decision. Is it in error? Has a setting clicked over by mistake?

Please change it. I WANT to read your blog.

Blue skies
love
Roy

[Joe Friend]

I'll second the request for full posts in your RSS feeds.

[Robert John Ed]

Guy-

I dislike visiting websites. That's why I use an RSS. Why did you change to this format?

I probably won't ever visit your website to read an article unless it's VERY noteworthy, whereas before I read everything you wrote.

If you continue to post as such, I'm probably going to unsubscribe. Please keep in mind that this isn't meant as a threat or hostile, more just a notice as a reader.

Thanks, and take care!

[Robyn Tippins]

I've yet to enjoy a US Air flight. I'm currently enjoying United the most, of all the airlines. I travel too much to really like any airline. Unfortunately, the more you use airlines, the more horror stories you collect.

While I hate it that you are stuck in lala-land, I have to say it was to my benefit. I opened up each of these in tabs, and bookmarked all but one. Very useful :)

[Hans]

Hey Guy,

I'm very surprised you recommend Best Book Combo. There are tons of much better book price comparisons. I personally like a lot bookfinder.com. You can search many more shops and calculate shipping costs to every country in the world.

Also, I agree with Markus, can you bring back full content to the feed?

Thanks!

[Lee Hunter]

The Mevu link has an extra "http".

[russ]

Thanks. I always learn something new on your blog. And one time I even got a free book out of it! That that was awesome!!!!

[Markus]

Guy, would you please bring back full post content to the RSS feed? More often than not I catch up on my reading while I'm offline, and I would hate to miss out on you blog. Thanks!

[Ada]

As always great resources and interesting info!

Best Regards, Ada

[Samantha]

Interesting Story

[Erin Blaskie]

I don't think it would be a US Airways flight without at least one interesting story... :)

Sincerely,

Erin Blaskie
Business Services, ETC
http://www.bsetc.ca