Are you as sick as I am of distracting, noisy, movement-filled websites and online ads? You’ve seen the ones I’m talking about:

The video ad that plays automatically when you visit a site. The tacky ad with the belly fat jiggling next to stories about tragedy in Haiti. Ads that suddenly expand, taking up half your screen until they finish and return to their original tiny size.

Those ads do little more than guarantee I’ll never purchase the product or service advertised in such an intrusive, annoying way. Apparently the authors of the Readability bookmarklet, Arc90, share my sentiments. If you do, too, you’re going to like this simple little tech tool.

Readability strips away all the clutter on a page and leaves only the main article you want to read, formatted according to a few preferences you set beforehand (font size and style, for instance). It lives in your browser’s toolbar and when you want to use it, you just click it and voila – jiggling belly fat and dancing mortgagees are gone!

Here’s a very short video that shows Readability in action:

[Can't see the embedded video? Click here to view it on the web.]

Get your own free copy of Readability here.

A while back I reviewed InterMediate, case management software built especially for mediators. If the review sparked your interest in the software for your private practice or community mediation center, but the price was too steep, it may be time to reconsider.

I’ve just received this notice from Colin MacGregor, creator of InterMediate:

I’m pleased to announce a large reduction in the price of interMediate software for both non-profit organizations and individuals working in mediation.

The attached PDF file is a new price list in which the cost of a software licence reduces as follows:
1 user, reduced by 80% from $1,000 to $200
2 users, reduced by 78% from $1,800 to $400
3 users, reduced by 75% from $2,400 to $600
4 users, reduced by 71% from $2,800 to $800
5 users, reduced by 67% from $3,000 to $1,000

The reductions apply to both new license purchases and new users added to existing licenses. The price of each additional user license is now $200 (up to no more than 10 users).

There’s no change to the interMediate support subscription which continues to include future versions of interMediate and FileMaker Pro software with its future upgrades. For FileMaker Pro this saves $299 per computer at the outset, and a further $179 per computer for upgrades every 16 months or thereabouts.

Since it was introduced at the end of 1995, interMediate has grown to become an extremely capable and versatile system for mediation of any type. It has proved successful for users who have achieved substantial benefits in productivity and quality of service. Its role as a case management system has broadened to include invoicing, mediator team management, customer relationship management and low cost marketing to find new case referrers.

The new pricing enables interMediate to save more than it costs from the outset for license purchasers as well as for renters. It also makes interMediate accessible for individual mediators as well as for mediation organisations. To find out more about interMediate, please reply to this email or visit www.resolutesystems.co.uk.

Kind regards,
Colin

If you’re still reading my blog and others via your email inbox or by checking periodically to see if there are any new articles, there’s a better way: Using an RSS reader, also known as a “feed reader.”

RSS readers gather (“aggregate” in RSS jargon) new articles from your favorite blogs automatically for you and post them to a single web page (or in some cases into software on your computer, if that’s your preference) for reading whenever you have the time. I scan my favorite blogs over coffee for about 15 minutes every morning, as part of my business day startup ritual.

I’ve put together a 4-minute video that shows you how to use Google Reader, my RSS reader of choice, to sign up for and read blogs easily:

Watch Tammy’s video on subscribing to blogs with Google Reader

Want more info on RSS? Here are two of my past posts on the topic:

• What the heck is RSS?
• A video that explains RSS

Happy feed reading,

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

Beware. If you follow this link to the Visual Thesaurus, be prepared to get lost for many minutes in a joyful labyrinth of words.

I first discovered the Visual Thesaurus when I was on the mediation faculty at Woodbury Institute; the college gave access to the Thesaurus to all of us. Now it’s a tool I can’t live without when I’m writing copy for my website or print materials; creating titles for conflict resolution trainings, seminars and other programs; and writing blog posts and articles.

Here’s what makes the Visual Thesaurus special: It helps you discover related words interactively. So, if you type in “conflict,” you’ll get the results below. Then you can click on any one of the resulting words to dig deeper. That’s why it’s so captivating; if you enjoy words, each click opens another world of possibilities.

Access to the Visual Thesaurus is $39.95 for the desktop version (both PC and Mac) or $19.95 per year for the web-based version. You can give it a spin for free and I encourage you to head over there and play.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

$620,000,000 per year. That’s the amount of money the New York Times‘ David Pogue estimates Verizon alone make from its customers by forcing callers to listen to the required 15-second instructions for leaving a voicemail.

We’ve all heard it: “To leave a message, press 1. To page this person, press 2…” Oh, and in case you’re suddenly struck with amnesia while on the phone, these same rote instructions also remind you to hang up when you’re done leaving your message. Gah!

That’s three hours of your life per year…gone. Listening to instructions you don’t need.

Pogue is so ticked off by the forced airtime-eating “scam” (his term), he’s started a movement, Take Back the Beep:

Do we really need to be told to hang up when we’re finished!? Would anyone, ever, want to “send a numeric page?” Who still carries a pager, for heaven’s sake? Or what about “leave a callback number?” We can SEE the callback number right on our phones!

Second, we’re PAYING for these messages. These little 15-second waits add up–bigtime. If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year, just sitting there listening to the same message over and over again every year.

Pogue’s put together an article with instructions for complaining to your cell carrier and the FCC, complete with language you can use to add your voice to the groundswell. I just did it and it took all of 2 minutes. Two minutes once vs. three hours annually. No brainer.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

Are voicemail’s days numbered?

Recent articles in both the New York Times (You’ve got voicemail, but do you care?) and Slate (You have no new messages – ever) suggest they may be. The argument against voicemail generally goes like this:

• Voicemail user interfaces are clunky – why should we have to navigate a menu to get our voicemail in the 21st century?
• Voicemail isn’t skimmable – we have to listen to the entire message to make sure we hear all the important stuff.
• Voicemail commands aren’t uniform so we have to listen all the way through or guess at the correct command – “Is it 9 to delete on the home phone but 7 to delete on the office phone or vice versa?”
• There are better options. More and more of them all the time.

I rarely listen to voicemail anymore, frankly. Calls that come in to my business and mobile phones are automatically transcribed and sent both to my email inbox and as text messages to my iPhone. I may eliminate the email inbox version soon, since text messages more than do the trick. And if there’s something I do need to hear (e.g., the transcription’s unclear), I can always dial in and listen.

I use a combination of Jott and Google Voice to make this possible, and there are other well-regarded options like YouMail and PhoneTag.

So what do you think? Why do you love or dislike voicemail?

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.