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	<title>Monster&#039;s Blog &#187; Michael A. Charles</title>
	<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com</link>
	<description>Online reputation management with the StepRep Spokesmonster.</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:39:25 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>This is what the Daily Deal Platform 3S website could&#8217;ve looked like.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Up till now, people who wanted to learn about our group buying platform had to make do with the rather scanty information provided on the VendAsta corporate site. A while back we decided that Daily Deal Platform 3S deserved its own website.
It took us forever to come up with an illustration for the main page. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/12/daily-deal-platform-3s-site-could-have-looked-like/</link>
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		<title>From here to Whakatane.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I don&#8217;t know much about New Zealand. What little I know comes from Flight of the Conchords and the early movies of Peter Jackson, so my appreciation of Kiwi culture leans heavily toward novelty songs and zombie babies.
Last week I got the opportunity to learn a little more. We have a new partner for our [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/11/from-here-to-whakatane/</link>
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		<title>Licensing music for your online ad &#8211; how much will it cost?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Recently I created an animated ad for a local group-buying website. My company built the website in partnership with a local yellow page publisher.
As I finished the rough draft of the animation, I didn&#8217;t worry too much about the soundtrack. I figured our partners would want to make some changes to the voiceover copy. I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/11/licensing-music-for-your-online-ad/</link>
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		<title>KFC&#8217;s Double Down &#8211; the pickled punk sandwich.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A couple weeks ago, Jordan proposed that we all skip work one Friday afternoon and take in a showing of The Social Network. VendAsta bought our tickets and popcorn and we all had a lot of fun.
Yesterday, Jordan initiated a less wholesome group excursion:
Scott and I are gonna go to KFC to try the new [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/10/kfcs-pickled-punk-sandwich/</link>
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		<title>A group rotoscoping experiment.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As you may have heard, VendAsta has developed a group buying platform. (I&#8217;ve talked about it quite a bit over on the corporate blog.) The premise behind group buying sites is that when consumers combine their buying power, they can get substantial discounts from local businesses.
Here&#8217;s a cartoon we made for our first partner, DirectWest, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/09/group-rotoscoping-experiment/</link>
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		<title>StepRep and the secret plot for world domination.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Hooo-ah. Just got back from bushwhacking through the far-right fringes of online conspiracy-theorizing.
It all started with StepRep. A while back, as part of our Great Dog Food Experiment, I &#8220;adopted&#8221; a used bookstore called the Book Bin, in Salem, Oregon. I created an account for the Book Bin and started monitoring their reputation using StepRep. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/08/steprep-and-the-secret-plot/</link>
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		<title>Ads that pretend to be art.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A few days ago Jason Kottke linked to this list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever, a whole month&#8217;s supply of first-class procrastination material. It&#8217;s an excellent resource, though predictably heavy on stuff from the last twenty years or so: the late David Foster Wallace gets six (well-deserved) entries, while Tom Wolfe gets only two, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/07/ads-that-pretend-to-be-art/</link>
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		<title>Rethinking the Weebles.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[What do you think about the Weebles?

That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve taken to calling the little faceless creatures who currently dwell on the main page of StepRep:

The Weebles have been there ever since the site was redesigned back in February. Given the many permutations the main page has gone through since StepRep launched back in January 2009, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/07/rethinking-the-weebles/</link>
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		<title>Edmund Burke, Agile thinker.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[When visitors find out that we follow the Agile software development process here at VendAsta, they invariably ask, &#8220;What would the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke think of Agile?&#8221;
When this question comes up, we laugh and quickly change the subject to David Hume, with whom we feel on firmer ground. But I&#8217;ve been reading Burke [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/06/edmund-burke-agile-thinker/</link>
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		<title>Questionable taste and superior smell.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Before Christmas I started working on this idea for a MashedIn ad. I wasn&#8217;t trying to be tasteless. I&#8217;d recently read an article that talked about dogs&#8217; amazing sense of smell &#8211; possibly this review in the New York Times of Alexandra Horowitz&#8217;s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know &#8211; and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.spokesmonster.com/2010/06/questionable-taste-and-superior-smell/</link>
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