Embarrassing typo On Eric Schmidt's business card teaches us these valuable lessons

Eric Schmidt, "Chariman of the Executive Committee and CEO of Google. FORTUNE magazine highlights this.

"Chariman." Yea, right.

It's easy to consign this typo to carelessness.

Of course that is an appropriate indictment. But rather than chortle about this rather big "duh," I'd rather point to some teachable best-practices we can learn from this.

The answer is that in an era where an increasing amount of Web-based content is created in and by third-party software, plug-ins, blog authorship tools and widgets- rather than only by Web page authoring software- every one of these objects needs to have a spellchecker.

I'm talking about everything from calendar authoring to blogging tools. Some of the utilities I have mentioned have built-in spellcheckers while others do not. In too many cases, the downloadable third-party spellcheck app is a pain to insert, at least iteratively.

That's lesson one.

But tools can only take us so far.

Lesson two: if you have spellcheck tools and are creating any type of content, do a spellcheck.

Your "chariman" should insist on nothing less.

Posted by Russell Shaw, 26th February 2007