Watercolor fritteries

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Veritable Quandary

Veritable Quandary website

Location: West side of the river, downtown

Price to fill up two people (minus booze): $80-$90

Once again–what is it with European restaurants and priciness?–this is NOT budget fare, but I have to mention this place. I was driving a colleague from work back to her hotel one stormy evening. Unwisely, she depended on my sense of navigation to find the place, but I can get lost circling my own block. After 30 or 40 minutes of fruitless hunting, frustrated, soggy and hungry, we saw a warm glow from a distant restaurant, Veritable Quandary. We decided to slosh on inside for a fortifying burger.

Surprise–if there’s a burger in this joint somebody smothered it in truffles and served it with a nice mid-century French cognac. In fact, Veritable Quandary is a topflight continental restaurant with an imaginative (and tasty) menu and pupil-dilating prices. So much for the burger, but the food was delicious.

What I liked best, though, was the service–quiet, graceful and above all friendly to underdressed, soaking wet plebes like us. The restaurant itself wasn’t your usual overprecious ain’t-we-so-classy expensive restaurant decor, but more Portland-meets-Monmartre and settles in for a beignet. We’d stumbled onto serious cuisine that didn’t take itself seriously, and that was probably the most delicious dish of all.

Since writing this, I’ve been told that VQ actually DOES have a burger. It’s not smothered in truffles, but apparently it does offer aoli instead of mayo…I’ll bet it’s pretty tasty.

Mother’s Bistro and Bar

• Mother’s website
• Location: Downtown near Pioneer Square (sorta)
• Cost to fill up two people: $15-$25

Since I first wrote this, I’ve discovered the Mother’s website (I swear they didn’t have one back then…) and they even have a chef’s blog, so as far as technology they appear to be up on their stuff. They also make a pretty good brunch.

I’m not sure they serve anything for breakfast that doesn’t add to your cholesterol count by just looking at it, but it sure is good. They commit the cardinal sin of popular restaurants as far as I’m concerned, i.e., placing the tables so close together that you must inhale to let the guy behind you sit down.

If you’re in the area, it’s definitely worth a try. I’ve had the Belgian waffle with fruit, and the sausage/cheese scramble. Both were delicious and absolutely not diet food.

Keith Wood takes great pictures

Working with a photographer right now, Keith Wood, and really impressed by his ability to capture humanity in a rectangular frame.

Keith mostly shoots industrial and corporate images for annual reports, advertising, sales literature, that sort of thing, and his work has taken him all over the world. This shot, for example, was taken a mile under New Guinea, in a miners’ lunchroom.

Click on the photo and you’ll see many more examples of his work.

Do it yourselfing…bigtime

Spent last Saturday tiling one of the bathroom floors in my sister’s new house. Spent Sunday discovering whole new ways to describe ’stiff and creaky.”

For those of you keeping track, my sister and brother-in-law are building a house up in the mountains well north of Vancouver, Washington. They bought the land long ago–gorgeous views of mountains and forests and deer and bear and probably Sasquatch if you wait around long enough.

My sister was in charge of designing the home, about a two-year process that involved befriending a member of the British royal family. They broke ground last year and the house–a three-story Georgianish brick home with a huge basement–has become an impressive sight. This is a still from video footage I shot about 6 weeks ago, right after they’d gotten all the different types of brickwork finished.

The thing to really understand about this house, though, is that they are not “having it built,” they are BUILDING it themselves. Brother-in-law Jerald, who does construction management in his dayjob, farms out some jobs to subcontractors and hires some day labor occasionally, but mostly it’s constructed by Jerald, my nephew Morgan and others in the family.

BTW, taking twice as long to design the house as to build it is apparently paying off–it’s gorgeous, lots of lovely detail that you’d expect to see in a far larger and more expensive property (a la Sarah Susanka, my favorite architect and author of the Not So Big House books and website).

They’re at the point where cabinetry, flooring and wall colors are going in, and I’m starting to plan some of the clerestory windows and other glass details I’ll be making as my part. I also promised (with Mom) to help with some of the tiling, and that time has come.

Suzanne (my sister), managed to salvage a load of creamy French limestone tile, complete with fossil shells and fish, that she’s putting in her daughters’ bathroom and in a few other places. Mom and I agreed to tile the bath floor with the limestone, and midway through the job I’m thinking I should have asked to roof the bloody house instead.

French limestone is wonderful, but it also stains like crazy and is soft and brittle. It’s also not perfectly even and it’s in 16×16 tiles, which means that getting it level is occasionally an issue. So far, not bad, but it’s slow, heavy going, the water source (and therefore the heavy buckets of mortar and thinset) are down a couple flights of stairs and outside.

OTOH, what’s really nice about this is that, by the time this house is finished–assuming there are no spouse-i-cides or divorces–it will contain contributions and collaborations from many friends and family members. What a wonderful thing to be surrounded by those memories every day.

BTW…after several hours of debate over how to position the tile, what spacing to use for grout lines, etc…this is what it looked like after the first day. Hopefully we’ll finish the tile setting tomorrow. Couple days later, we’ll grout.

Cheers–

–cynthia

3 (well, 4) BIG Web mistakes

Our real business finished, the client and I settled in for a bit of a chat. She asked what I thought were the NEW three worst mistakes a business could make with its Web strategy?

I pointed out that we’d come a long way if the old mistakes–not having a Web presence that’s more than a “brochure site,” relying on e-mail as your chief source of two-way communications with customers, forcing visitors to invest (with money or personal information) before they saw useful content, not having a content strategy in the first place, had fallen off the list. (I’m not so sure they’re not just about as pervasive now as they were three years ago). But between us we came up with a new list:

1. Separating online marketing from offline marketing. It’s still common to have Web marketing managed separately from “real” marketing, i.e., there’s a Web team and there’s a product marketing and/or marcom team (and probably also a PR team and a branding team and a customer support team if the company’s big enough, but that’s another story). The problem with separate marketing teams is that they tend to communicate but not integrate.

These days, if you’re not building a central communications strategy that hits events, online, press, traditional avenues, CRM, etc., you’re missing huge opportunities for reinforcement and extension. Yet integrated communications is still a buzzword, not a reality, as far as I’m concerned.

2. Stopping your online strategy at (or before) SEM. Search engine marketing is incredibly important, especially for businesses that are still establishing a brand or venturing into new areas. But it’s just the first step in a comprehensive online plan.

You need to at least pay lip service to SEM and if you’re smart you’ll use it to niche-market to the best and tightest customer segment profiles you can make. But there’s no point in advertising that you’ve got the right soup cans if there isn’t a great soup inside.

If you don’t capitalize on SEM with a richly interactive site, wise investments in social media and effective content, and the development of strong online customer relationships, you’re wasting your company’s time (and money).

3. Web isolationism. New Web tactics are moving us from “If you build it, they will come,” to “If you distribute it, they will buy.” Getting people to a monolithic corporate website is no longer the primary objective; getting them to see (and share) your message is.

I hesitate to call this “Web 2.0;” that term has been ‘way overused. Web user behavior over the last 15 years or so can generally be divided into three phases–Direct, Search, Share. Early on, in “Direct,” a directory site such as Yahoo was the first stop in a Web excursion. Users browsed a list of “best” websites, read the reviews and chose to visit a site on the list. They rarely ventured into the wild and woolly Web on their own. The goal of most marketeers–if they thought about it–was to get into those “best of” site reviews.

As more organizations began using the Web as a primary method of communication (and as search engines got better) we moved to “Search” phase. Directories weren’t specific enough; Web sessions now started with a search query. Users visited more sites, perhaps the top 5 or even 10 search results. Search engine marketing–getting into those top 5 results and driving (and holding) people to your website–became a crucial part of a Web marketing strategy.

In the last year or so we’ve seen the Web begin a slow and sometimes painful transition to the Share phase. Instead of sticking the message on the corporate Website and waiting for customers to come read it, you do the Web equivalent of putting your message in a bottle…lots and lots of bottles.

Own the content sources, freely distribute the content and the tools to use that content and let them proliferate virally across the Web. Users don’t have to visit your website to get your message; they can bring a feed of your content directly into their home page and be exposed to it on a daily basis. What’s more, they can share it, people you’ve never even heard of can share it…and you can start tailoring specific messages (and products) to very, very specific audiences.

If you’ve got a Google, Yahoo or MSN home page, you’re already sharing messages from 10, 50 or a couple of hundred sites. You have an at-a-glance view of what’s going on in your favorite sites, and visit them only if the feed is compelling enough to invest in a drilldown.

So the goal now becomes to get high in those feedstreams and make the messages you feed into user home pages (and mashups and any other site that uses feeds) compelling enough to drive more sharing (and in turn traffic). It’s kinda hard to explain that to a CFO who’s been beaten over the head with “more visitors, more time on site,” for years.

4. Web analytics=pageviews (not). She asked for three but we came up with a fourth: Ignoring the power of Web analytics. Many businesses track basic webstats. Some actually measure clickstreams and search engine queries and falloffs and entry/exit points. Too many, however, regard this stuff as a point of validation, not action.

Correlate analytics with good CRM data, treat your website as an evolutionary communications system, and all of a sudden you’ve got a living, breathing marketing engine. Each page on your site becomes a live focus group for product testing, messaging refinement, competitive analysis. I don’t think I’ve seen more than a couple of dozen sites that actually do that.

So that’s our list…what’s yours?

–cynthia

Wild blue yonder

Planning a trip this summer? You may want to walk. Drive. Boat. Take a train. ANYthing but fly.

So far this summer air travel has pretty much been a recipe for disaster. Crashes are up, service is down. (Don’t believe me on that last? Check USA Today’s passenger ratings, or JD Power & Associates’ 2007 North American Airline Satisfaction Study.) I know that once-glamorous airlines have become the steerage version of a Greyhound bus, but this week air travel’s woes seem to be reaching new heights.

Yesterday a computer blew at United Airlines, paralyzing its flights for several hours and causing schedule delays for thousands of travelers that will likely reverberate for a couple more days.

Then there are the poor passengers on Continental Flight 71 who spent the hours between Amsterdam and Newark literally sitting in sewage when the toilets overflowed. It seemed someone stuffed latex gloves down the john, and for the next seven hours more than 200 passengers fumed (or were fumed, take your pick) while the flight attendants asked them to wait until the plane landed.

The problem started early; Flight 71 detoured to Shannon in Ireland to fix it once, the effort was deemed successful and the flight allowed to proceed. Oops.

Continental, by the way, is the highest-ranked airlines in JD Power’s study.

Jeez. What gives?

Say it to my face, why dontcha?

Just read a summary of the Yale Web defamation case on Reuters this morning: Two law students are suing Autoadmit.com for what they say is a two-year campaign of threats and lies designed to derail their law careers. In the process they’re asking to issue subpoenas to uncover the identities of 28 anonymous posters.

This isn’t the first time this kind of suit has been attempted; what makes it newsworthy is that it looks as if the plaintiffs will be successful in uncovering their accused attackers. If that happens, the implications for Web anonymity become, well, interesting. Internet free speech proponents insist this will have a chilling effect on other anonymous posts and should therefore not be allowed; government/law enforcement groups are saying it’s about time.

Eugene Volokh (Volokh Conspiracy) has a nice summation of the legal merits of the case, and is essentially saying that there’s enough real meat (as opposed to nastiness) in the postings to probably justify suits against individual (now-anonymous) posters.

Personally, I’ve never figured that “freedom of speech” equates to “freedom from responsibility for my speech,” which seems to be the popular misconception. Defamation, slander and libel laws are already on the books; Web anonymity doesn’t make someone exempt from those laws. I can understand the value of preservation of anonymity for whistleblowers, dissidents in repressive regimes, etc.

I don’t think gossip belongs in that category, and it’s hard to file a lawsuit against “anonymous.” I suspect that the courts will support uncovering the identities of the posters so they can be sued. The alternative is to force board operators to take responsibility for what their visitors are posting, and that would have a much bigger (and farther-reaching) impact on social media.

Most media organizations go to great lengths to minimize libel and defamation suits. Now, with bloggers and commenters of today’s “Web 2.0″ rapidly becoming a key news source (and given the growing number of blogsuits (lawsuits against bloggers)), I suspect we’ll see our free and easy blogpress taking on the attributes of “major media,” pretty quickly.

BTW…interesting aside. Reuters had a typo in its original posting, referring to the defending site as “AudoAdmit.com.” Do a search for that and compare it to a search for “AutoAdmit.com” and you’ll see how much of our news these days is a straight lift from Reuters. Oh for the days of original reporting!

Tilly’s Gelato

• Tilly’s Gelato’s website

• Location: Beaverton

• Price for dual gelatos with a cookie: About $8

The northwest suburbs around Portland (Beaverton, northern Hillsboro, etc.) may be many things, but a treasure trove of restaurants? Naaaaah. This is the home of MacDonalds, Olive Garden, Denny’s, Cheesecake Factory and all those other whitebread chains that are OK for a meal, but not exactly what I’d call “dining.”

Which is why I drove past Tilly’s for a year or so without stopping in. Then one day, late for a family potluck and needing a contribution, I rushed in, asked what was good on the gelato menu and got a jaw-dropping revelation: This is REAL gelato, made fresh every day, by folks who like to experiment. It’s also right in the heart of boring whitebread suburbia. Wow. Go figure.

I hesitate to say “it’s all good,” because the soups and sandwiches are but standard fare…but it’s hard to go far wrong with their gelato. The roasted almond is a revelation, the lemon is probably my favorite, and folks who are into chocolate ice cream say that anything chocolate is good but particularly try the chocolate hazelnut.

The real fun, though, is seeing what the Tilly’s folk do with “found” comestibles, such as the delicious raspberry swirly-whatever when raspberries are in season, fresh peach…etc.

Definitely worth a look if you’re in the area.

Tip: Don’t be afraid to ask for a taste of anything intriguing–they don’t mind. I’ve been known to taste four or five before settling on my choice.

Tip #2: The hand-packed gelato costs more than the ready-packed cartons…but there generally aren’t many available. Resign yourself to paying extra and waiting a bit.

Timewasters I

If you haven’t got much to do and have often thought of getting literal on the old “I’ll rearrange your face” threat, try monoface.com. You can either fast-shuffle through a few hundred thousand different noses, mouths, ears, hairlines and (independent) eyes, or make click-by-click changes. If they had a way to upload your own face into the system it’d be a neat surrogate plastic surgery thing.

It’s old but still good–Make your own snowflake (Make-a-Flake) is a test of the limits of the software as much as anything else.

Colourlovers is kinda cool–it’s a site for designers to promote favorite palettes and try to change the fashionsense of the world. You can build your own palette, based on…whatever…or you can vote on other peoples’ palettes. The palette above is mostly my favorite at the moment…but I’m not quite happy with that teal.

Then there’s this stuff, that’s supposed to be attention-directing tools that help you build a lifemap. I have to admit, though, that I may have misunderstood the title. After spending a few minutes trying to figure out what to click where when, I found my attention directed elsewhere.

Bored.com offers “send e-mail to your future,” which lets you compose a time capsule e-mail to yourself and set it for delivery somewhere in the future. This of course presumes that you’ll still have the same e-mail address in, say, 2020 (although you can sign up for an account and periodically return to update your address if you’re that interested…)

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