the tindog coffeehouse

Michael Dell cares about you. OK, maybe not. But he does care about his company’s online reputation, so much so that he’s going all “Web 2.0″ to try and fix it.

The company has been logging on, reaching out to potential customers, and trying – sometimes awkwardly – to listen to them. And it’s using social media to do so. That’s right, Web 2.0 isn’t just for college sophomores anymore. Apparently you can use it to patch up a $37 billion PC business too. …

It has a squad of 42 employees who spend their workdays engaging with the communities on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. What is this Team Web 2.0 learning? One important nugget: that potential customers spend 99% of their time on the web doing research and just 1% actually buying. So the company has tried to dial down the hard sell and become – or at least appear to become – more helpful.

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Last week I started playing NCAA Football 09 on the Wii, pitting the Texas Longhorns against their opponent for the week, which was Florida Atlantic. The Wii score was 55-0, Longhorns, and the real score was 52-10.

Not bad.

This week the Horns head to El Paso to take on UTEP. Just another non-conference road game for UT (or not), but the game of the century for the Miners. While most predictions for the game give the Horns at least 50 points, the Magic 8-Ball Wii says they’ll only score 33 to UTEP’s 10.

But then again, the Wii doesn’t have the “Q” Package.

Hook ‘Em, Horns!

Real Score: 42-13. Again, pretty close, particularly since the score as of about 13 minutes left in the game was still 35-13. I wonder, though, how accurate it’ll be when they get into the harder conference games. We’ll see…

The new web browser from Google, Chrome:

The electronic game from the ’80s, Simon:

Hmm…

On July 31st I made a decision to monitor by bandwidth consumption for the month of August to see how many bits I downloaded and uploaded. The experiment was in direct response to the decision of several ISPs who are now imposing usage limits, including New York ISP Frontier Communications’ paltry 5 GB cap.

I installed DU Meter on my home computer and then just used it as I normally would. The results were pretty surprising.

The total usage for the month came to 21.4 GB, using a whopping 4.3 GB the first day alone.

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