Quick Flight Notes

I'm in New Jersey, staying with John C. Havens of About.com's guide to podcasting. He asked me if I wanted to work with him on a freelance project that had come his way and I agreed, so here I am.

This means I rushed around town all day running errands because I knew I'd be out of communication for most of tomorrow. So I get to the airport and I have 80 unchecked messages in my inbox. I answer those, and now I logon to my account and find I have 30 more responses in the 4 hours I've been away from my machine.

Egad. If this is busy for me, I can only imagine what the Jeff Pulvers and Andrew Barons of the world are greeted by when they click their "Mail" icon...

******

Meanwhile, I saw a fantastic example of customer service in action today. I went to Quizno's in the Pittsburgh International Airport food concourse and ordered a vegetarian sub (which is not on their menu, but they have the ingredients to make it; interestingly, it IS on their register keypad...).

While waiting for the sandwich to come through the mini-oven, the girl who adds the post-oven toppings dropped my order sheet on the floor. She stared down at it, perplexed. She was wearing plastic gloves, and she knew that picking up the paper would mean she'd need to throw the gloves away and get a new pair.

So she TURNED THE ORDER SLIP OVER WITH HER FEET, which was not an easy task -- many failed attempts preceded her success -- and read it (accurately) off the floor.

Now THAT'S finding a creative solution to a simple yet vexing problem...

PS The sub was excellent.

SplashCast and Growing Goodness

I stumbled across SplashCast today -- can't recall how I found it, actually -- but I'm intrigued.

I haven't fully prowled around the site yet, but at first blush, it looks to be a template of sorts for creating your own content channels.

One example they use is Growing Goodness, a channel devoted to videos about farmer's markets and their related healthy foods communities. While you may or may not be down with the farmer's market angle itself, you have to admit, an aggregator that pulls from user-generated content throughout the web and builds a cohesive, multi-faceted look at a highly-targeted niche has some real value.

Information surfers could stay on the channel for a very long time.

Advertisers could appeal to an audience almost guaranteed to be in a buying mood. (Like farmer's market vegetables? Perhaps you'd be interested in handmade vegetable steamers, or would be inclined to donate to Habitat for Humanity, etc.)

I know I make entertainment video, but seeing the success of highly-targeted (and often informative) niche-based content has me seriously considering numerous other directions and properties in addition to STBD.

(As though I don't have enough else going on...)

So: what other uses do you see for SplashCast?