The white-coat gang at Hammock Labs are playing with Facebook pages. If you’re a Facebookian (Facebooker?) and care to play along, please “fan” Hammock or SmallBusiness.com (or both). As the lab rats have already discovered there’s no button that says, “fan,” here’s their first discovered recommendation: “Tell someone to add your page to their list of product and services — don’t tell them to “fan you.”

Also: I can assure you that no animals were harmed and no lead was used in the creation of the still rather wet-paint (and sparse) pages.

As a follow-up to my post yesterday about our office OS X upgrade, I thought I’d share this photo of Hammock’s head hackololgist, Patrick Ragsdale, being attacked by roaming packs of Leopards this morning. You can read @MeaganG’s post about it on Hammorati, the company weblog. Also, when he regains consciousness, Patrick will be blogging on his weblog, ScriptAlias, about geekier aspects of installing Leopard and Leopard Server in a 25-employee business environment .

I hate to sound braggadocious, but can’t help myself from giving a shout-out congratulations to the Hammock Publishing corporate spelling bee team for annihilating the competition in tonight’s 14th Annual Corporate Spelling Bee, benefiting the Nashville Adult Literacy Council.

Fittingly, they went ahead on the word annihilate and won on the word braggadocio.*

A perennial power-house in the competition, this is the second time the team has brought home the first-place trophy — a very big one, as I recall. Nearly as intimidating as this year’s Titans O-Line are these Team Hammock spelling ninjas: Jamie (2-Cs-in-Zucchini) Roberts, Megan (MeganG) Goodchild and Bill (The Spellinator) Hudgins.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I have never come close to making the team.

*corrected from an earlier version.

There’s a nice story about ‘office environmental branding’ in today’s Tennessean that features Hammock Publishing’s space. The online version of the story doesn’t include photos (later: oops, correction), so I created a Flickr set to accompany it. The work was done by Advent Marketing Results, which I just discovered has a website called LobbyMakeover.com, that features our lobby. It’s amazing what one learns by surfing around the web. I didn’t know we had a famous lobby. Now I do. If you’d ever like to drop by and see it, please feel welcomed.

Don’t know how I missed Laura Creekmore’s major pub in today’s Tennessean. Besides moderating the East Nashville listserv and blogging about food, she’s head of Internetology at Hammock. From that photo on Tennessean.com, you can see she’s the one with clutter-free desk.

Here’s a great story about how blogs work in mysterious ways. It’s about a dog named Thunder who needed a home and how a Nashville blogger “meat-up” back in December at which we were each encouraged to bring some pet food to donate to the Nashville Humane Society led to one thing that led to another. Actually, it started a long time before that, but I’ll let Wonderdawg and the commenters on his blog tell that part.

Technorati Tags: blogging, nashville

Dell blogger Lionel Menchaca linked to my earlier response to Robert Scoble’s question about why Apple doesn’t get the negative PR Dell gets.

Quote:

“We’ve created a team to find customers needing assistance in the blogosphere, entered Second Life, recently re-vamped the Dell Community Forum and have plans to offer more options for customers to provide feedback at CES and beyond. We are making efforts to be more forthcoming. We entered the blogosphere in part to take on negative issues. Will we make more mistakes along the way? Sure, but we are listening and learning as we go. In fact, the blog is all about those conversations, and it’s why I’m recognizing this debate that goes on about and around us.”

Impressive. I’m glad I pointed out in my earlier post that we have several Dells in the office and at least one employee who loves hers. (photos to come.)

Technorati Tags: business blog, cluetrain, dell

From one of his classmates (Lewis) comes a link to the news that Blair Stilwell was on a team of Vanderbilt Owen School of Management students who won the recent “International Case Competition” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Blair was the original director of rexblog hackology which I’d like to believe helped prepare him for his role in his team’s development of “a plan that maximized production of raw vegetable oil and biodiesel and called for an aggressive construction schedule to build several raw vegetable oil and biodiesel plants to gain market advantage.”

As I always told Blair: There’s no business like lard business.

Congratulations.

First, let me say emphatically, those were NOT stripper poles — they were stabilization poles of the type one finds on a subway car. It was a moving bus. They were for safety purposes. Okay, with that actionable item aside, let me admit that when a famous “night life blogger” attends your office party as the date of one of your employees, you begin to prepare yourself for the reviews. Thanks, Mr. Roboto. I guess. One thing I know for certain, the response is “no way” to Mr. Robtoto’s parting suggestion: “Next year, I fully expect Rex to sell admission tickets to the party.”

For a more sedate version, see my earlier post and Flickr set.

Update: A public response to the private e-mail a friend just sent: No, this is not what I mean when I say our company has expanded our focus to include “social media.”

Last night, some really incredible folks gave me some extremely creative, fun and thoughtful items to commemorate Hammock Publishing’s 15th anniversary. One of the items relates to this blog and, frankly, it amazes me: A poster that chronicles the history of the rexblog. One of our staff editors, Lena Basha, did something I’m sure no one has done or will ever do again, including me. She re-read the entire rexblog, picking out highlight blurbs. She then designed the poster below (PDF version). Speaking of Lena, we have this saying around the office that she originated. The last part of the saying (I can’t repeat the first part) is very true for me: I have the best job in the world. And it’s all because of the people I get to work with everyday.

Before the returns start coming in, I wanted to post the average of all predictions made by Hammock Publishing employees regarding the party split during the next session of congress.

Average Prediction (All employees)
Senate: 50-50
House: Republicans-213, Democrats-221

My prediction
Senate R-51, D-49
House R 215, D-220

Technorati Tags: politics

The dresser-uppers (or is that dressers-upper?) at Hammock Publishing.