The time has finally come for South by Southwest (SXSW) 2011 Hordes of technorati, cinephiles, and music fans are descending on Austin like a pilgrimage to Mecca, only instead of the Kaaba Stone, SXSW attendees will have the AT&T Convention … Continue reading →
It’s rare that I cross-post to my personal blog, but some occasions call for extreme measures. Please check out the following: In Memoriam — Alan Nathan Yost (1972 – 2010).
Linchpin is an impassioned plea to release the artist inside, free yourself from being a cog in the industrial machine, deliver great work, and be indispensable. While it’s inspirational at times, and thought-provoking, I ultimately found it overly idealistic and unrealistic about the world of business. Continue reading →
The big day has finally come: the pitch.
You and your team have been working feverishly for a week pulling together your response to the RFP. Digital strategy, audience research, creative execution, and a business case for significant future growth. You did your competitive research, understood the landscape, and developed a strong story about a 3-to-5-year arc of business growth. You hone your story, removing extraneous detail, crafting a presentation that will fit in your slim one-hour slot. And then you’re ready, finally. Continue reading →
Discourse around social media has become depressing. It’s less about debate and more about mudslinging and hyperbole. Continue reading →
Amber Naslund wrote a piece today about why she believes the social media “industry” has a credibility problem. In it, she decries four basic failures of people who claim to be experts in social media (direct quotes):
- We talk too much about the value of our time rather than putting it to good use
- We cannibalize our own
- We’re intolerant of missteps
- We talk about conversation, but we focus a great deal on the tools. And, on ourselves
Continue reading →
In a bygone era, courageous men moved logs by the thousands with rivers, crossing vast distances and enduring enormous risks. One of the perils of the trade was the log jam, when topography and conditions conspired to bring the flow of logs to a halt. In these situations, the solution was to find the key log, the one log that, when released, would break up the entire jam. Continue reading →
Wordpress (WP) has enjoyed a great deal of success over the last several years. It’s a wildly popular publishing platform that’s gone from being just a tool for bloggers to a publishing system used by more traditional publishing sites (e.g., the Wall Street Journal magazine). In its most recent upgrade (version 3.0), a number of significant feature enhancements have pushed it further down the road towards become a more full-featured web content management system (CMS), garnering acclaim from many looking for Wordpress to evolve. Continue reading →
"Abundance creates more problems than scarcity." Clay Shirky
A lot has changed since the early days of web design, when tools were scarce and skills were in high demand. Design tools, platforms and patterns have become ubiquitous (and often free). Does this spell the end for digital design agencies? Continue reading →
So you finally decided to get your blog up and running on a self-hosted version of Wordpress, the amazingly popular blogging platform. You’ve seen plenty of sites using Wordpress, and maybe even heard about themes, the powerful system that lets you customize how your site looks and behaves. You can choose from a wide variety of free themes, many of which have different content, layouts, and appearances. The problem is that straight out of the box, these themes look like, well, themes. They’ve got a personality, but it’s not yours. Continue reading →
