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Amazon, You Rock!

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Amazon, I’d still totally make out with you. Seriously. If you are a regular reader here, you may remember a post I wrote last year about Frustration Free Packaging. Basically, they got rid of the annoying clamshells and twisty ties, and all you have to do is open a box. Brilliant, isn’t it? I thought so and wrote a post about it. That lead to an interview with the New York Times. That was pretty cool but not as cool as what I woke up to this morning.

Amazon screenshot

That’s me!!!!! So welcome new traffic!!!! And well, I am super excited. I think I need to write more posts about making out with my favorite companies (Hello Best Buy! Hello Toy Companies! LOL).

In all seriousness, I love Amazon. I order from them a lot (umm like last week) and I still think this is a genius idea. I love that they are watching what their customers are saying about them and that they linked to me! Happy Monday!

Tags: amazon, Amazon.com, Best Buy, business, government, Graphic Design, Metro Areas, New York, New York City Metro, New York Times, Organizations, Traditional, United States
Posted in Blogging/Internet | 32 Comments »

My IZEAfest interview with Azim Jamal

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I was asked to be part of a really great interview series that Azim Jamal is doing in conjunction with his book: The Power of Giving: How Giving back Enriches us All. The interviews he did were about how bloggers give back. They ended up doing over 50 interviews with bloggers.

How do you give back?

Posted in Blogging/Internet | 5 Comments »

Izeafest ‘09 Day 1

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’ve been trying to get this post up for a while, but real life seems to get in the way. How would I describe Izeafest? Awesome comes to mind. The best one yet does too (and I’ve been to every single one of these). It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. Nothing irritates me more when I know more than the speakers on panels (which is one of my beefs about BlogHer). I pay a lot of money to go to conferences, and I want to learn — not just be told what I already know (or be given bad information). *off soap box*

Izeafest started off with a trip to Busch Gardens for Howl-O-Scream. Interesting is the best word I can use for it. We got to go through some haunted houses and ride some awesome roller coasters. I even got to do my souvenir shopping (which is so much better than airport shopping). We got back pretty late and went to bed.

Day one of Izeafest started off with me handing out Crocs and T-shirts and helping out the Izea crew. I missed the beginning of Ted’s keynote speech, but what I caught was good. It was about personal branding, and how you need to carefully pick your image. Next, there was 5 minutes of fame with Murray Newlands. This was about how he has gotten where he is. I’ll be honest — I could listen to him talk all day long (I’m a sucker for an accent. Also, on a sidenote, I got to hang out with Murray quite a bit and he’s one of the nicest people I’ve met). Brian Clark was our next speaker. His talk was about how design and content really do matter. Next, we had lunch. I have to admit that this was some of the best conference food too. Granted you don’t pick a conference based on what they serve for food, but the food was yummy. The afternoon started with Sarah Austin and Julia Roy for a session called Screen Gems. If you watched Twitter during this session, it was brutal. I basically got out of this session that you need to be 23, have perky boobs, and be cute if you want to do video. It was so bad that I actually walked out early and got a cookie. The sad thing is that I’ve heard how smart these two women are, and they just did a terrible job (Though I think Julia did see the twitter stream, because she started to try and answer things towards the end). I actually dubbed this session “2 girls and a video” and sadly everyone knew which session I was referring to. Next, another 5 minutes of fame with Xshot which is a product I love. The next session was on SEO and I loved it. Michael Gray and Rae Hoffman were the speakers, and they took sites from the audience to dissect. I was a chicken. There was no way I was submitting my site. Rae gave us ladies a good show of how a woman can give a great presentation. My only complaint is that they did a ton of business sites and no personal blogs. As a mom blogger, am I even shooting for SEO? Sarah Evans was next with Twitter and businesses, and why they need to be on Twitter. We closed out the first day with Lucretia Pruitt, David Binkowski, Chris Heuer, Wendy Piersall, and Warren Whitlock. This, by far, was one of the best panels I’ve ever seen. I could have listened to them all day. They really brought everything down to where most bloggers are right now and gave us some concrete ways to get better.

After the first day, we were able to all meet up at the IceBar and hang. It was very cool. Pun intended. LOL

Some karaoke took place too (no, I didn’t do it). This is Ted Murphy and Jeremy Wright singing the Backstreet Boys. The sad thing is that they knew most of the words without watching the screen:

We closed out the night in my friend Heather’s room with a little afterparty:

Tags: Brian Clark, Chris Heuer, izea, Jeremy Wright, Julia Roy, Michael Gray, Ted Murphy, Twitter
Posted in Blogging/Internet | 4 Comments »

The Muddy Fractured Web

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

This is a sponsored guest post written by Chris Brogan on behalf of Trust Agents. Post powered by Sponzai

This is a jumble of techie thoughts, and won’t necessarily appeal to everyone. Just the same, it’s on my mind.

I was thinking about an old article that quoted Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, where he talked about how he organized his site to have obvious syntax. He said, that once you get the hang of it, it became very easy to use the site, even from a browser window. Example: If I want to read any pages saved with the tag “chrisbrogan”, I can search http://delicious.com/tag/chrisbrogan . Now, replace my name with whatever else you want to search up on the address bar of your browser, and you pretty much know how to surf through Delicious without any effort.

For the record, Craigslist.org is like this. I can navigate it simply and from the address bar, and I understand what I’m searching out.

The entire concept of the URL, the uniform resource LOCATOR, was that we’d have a way to find resources (or web pages, or files, or whatever information) by way of coordinates that wouldn’t change.

Twitter introduced the need for URL shortening services. They were around before, but Twitter made them necessary. Now, they’re practically a business unto themselves.

And I’m thinking about projects like Glue and now Sidewiki (Google’s little “stick a wiki against any website but only if you’re using this application to see it” project). They’ve obfuscated the clarity of web pages. Okay, I get the notion of annotating the web. I understand the premise behind having ways to see things in our own way out in the wild web, but I think it messes up the point.

People had some real mixed emotions about Seth Godin’s Brands in Public project, but I couldn’t see the fuss. Seth just organized a bunch of information that was out there, and gave brands the opportunity to buy into his effort. The brands could’ve done all the work themselves. Seth saved them a step. The project, however, doesn’t create two webs. It just revisits this information in another format.

The splintering of commentary and conversations problem (how services like FriendFeed and Twitter and Facebook scatter our conversations all over the web instead of consolidating them) is real, and yet, it’s a matter of views. We’re interacting with data where we consume it, which is sensible enough. The missing tech, actually, is just the ability to get those comments all corralled and easy to respond to in some way (and many companies are trying to make that easier).

So where does this take us?

First, I think abstraction is here to stay. I don’t think we’ll have simple URLs to remember for all things (wish it were, but it’s not). I think the trend of shorteners that supposedly add value is here for a while, too. I think the fractured conversation is here to stay.

Now, will this impact business? Not exactly. Instead, it will require us to pick our battles, to determine just how splintered and muddy we want to get to catch up every drop of conversational/business goodness, and it will require us to keep futurists and sages on speed dial (how quaint a term is that?).

Funny thing is: many will never even know this war is even being waged.

Tags: Chris Brogan, Facebook, FriendFeed, google, Joshua Schachter, Seth Godin, Social network, Twitter
Posted in Blogging/Internet | No Comments »

Texting While Driving PSA

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Have you seen this video yet? It’s the newest PSA to show teenagers (and adults too for that matter) what can happen when you aren’t paying attention when you are driving. I personally think it’s a great video (though it did make me cry — especially when the little girl is crying out “why aren’t mommy and daddy waking up”). I just hope people get the point. This can and does happen every day. People are saying that it’s too graphic. I think it’s the only way to get through sometimes.