A palindrome reads the same backwards as forward. This video reads the exact opposite backwards as forward. Not only does it read the opposite, the meaning is the exact opposite. This is only a 1 minute, 44 second video and it is brilliant. Make sure you read as well as listen…forward and backward.

This is a video that was submit ted in a contest by a 20-year old. The contest was titled “u @ 50″ by AARP. This video won second place. When they showed it, everyone in the room was awe-struck and broke into spontaneous applause. So simple and yet so brilliant.

This is something our leaders should watch (yes, I’m talking about you Scott Walker and those other governors in other states trying to pull the same thing).

What do you think?

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Izea is having a pilot program to help them spread the word about IZEA sites, products and services, create a stronger bond within our existing community, and provide provide product insight and assist in continuing innovation. They are looking for some people to give them a hand and want to know why we think we are a great fit for this position.  What do you get for doing all this for them?  Well, there is no hourly rate (darn!).  However, you will get a $1500 travel fee, Ted Murphy’s phone number with access to him, a blog makeover, the ability to try out new products before anyone else, recruiting bonuses, Postie Packs, etc.  As you can see, there are a ton of fringe benefits.

I wish I could say that I was one of the first members.  However, PPP started in July of 2006 and I joined up in September.  I had started my blog to keep in touch with my parents and friends in Green Bay, Wisconsin (I live in Illinois now).  In 2006, I only had my daughter, and she was growing up so fast.  However, as a stay at home mom, we really did need me to make some extra money.  Since 2004, I had been doing freelance work for various companies (creating websites and such).  That extra money paid for satellite TV, daily newspaper, internet access, etc.  It also allowed me to step out of my mommy roll and allowed me to be an adult again.  However, as anyone who works freelance will tell you, sometimes there is a lot of work out there — sometimes there isn’t.  I came across PPP on somebody’s blog (I don’t even know who) and signed up.  That was the beginning of this fantastic journey I have taken over the last 2 years with them.  My blog has went through my ups and downs of my family (there is a miscarriage and my son’s birth involved in there).  Currently, I am a work at home mom.  I still freelance, and now that I have 5 blogs under my belt, I consider myself a professional blogger.  I am lucky.  I make enough money to pay for the extras we need and want (see basement remodel), so I must be doing something right!

What do I know about marketing?  Well, one of the places I freelance for considers me their social media manager.  I have accounts at places like StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, etc to name a few.  I even have joined a new bookmarking service called tagfoot that is still in beta and requires an invite to join.  I promote all of my blogs using social media.   I belong to several social networking sites such as Facebook, Namyz, Ryze, LinkdIn, Twitter, SocialSpark, Entrecard, and several forums.  I even was a moderator for six months on the Izea forums!  I also belong to MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog.  I also moderate over at Chicago Moms Like Me (which is a social networking site for Chicagoland moms).  Here are my stats for this blog for since October 1st:

I was able to achieve these numbers due to social media.  I think I would be extremely helpful in recruiting a crew for several reasons.  I know a lot of posties just due to being here so long.  When my son was born, Amy ran a baby pool on the forums for me ( I can’t find the link due to the boards not letting me search that far back).   As a moderator, I had several posties tell Izea not to get rid of me as a moderator, so I get along great with the posties on the forums.  I know several of the posties personally like Robyn, Elizabeth, Corrin, Christine, Julie, Breezie, Drew — just to name a few.  I know I am missing a lot of people in that list, but it’s just a start.  I try to help when possible too — check out this thread on the forums about bluehost and hostgator for hosting.  I often get emails and tweets from people with questions, so I think I am considered a very approachable person which definitely makes recruiting much easier.

What events have I attended?  I was at Blogworld last year:

I also attended PostieCon and did a cake plow (that alone should score me some bonus points):

In January of this year, I attended the Social Networking Conference in Miami.  I actually ran into Ted there.  However, I didn’t bring my camera, so no pictures for that conference.  I worked a booth here also, so I do know how to do that.

In April, I attended the Sony Mommy Bloggers Event with Laura and Heather who also are posties:

In May, I went to Agency Bootcamp here in Chicago:

In August, I was invited to the Pampers Mommy Blogger Event:

I also attended Izeafest this year:

Also, I have been invited on October 23rd to attend the Epson and Sparkplugging Girls Night Out (pictures to come).  As you can see, I’ve attend several blogging events and conferences this year.

Three conference I would have loved to attend are SNSX, Blog World Expo, and BlogHer.  However, travel expenses for these three events were not in our budget this year (especially with the downturned economy).  I own a  laptop that follows me everywhere.  I actually use my laptop so much that many of the keys have the letter rubbed off them!  I do not have an aircard.  However, my husband tells me when my cell phone contract is up at the end of the month, he’d like to get an iphone (so any iphone advice is appreciated).  I have heard that you can use your iphone as a modem of sorts, so does that count?

I would love to have Ted’s ear.  There are several things that drive me completely insane with Izea, and I would love to hear what he has to say about them.  I have to be honest, I don’t think my actual resume is this long!

What do you think?  Should I be picked as an Izea Insider?

EDIT:  Here’s a pic from the Epson/Sparkplugging Event:

I was also asked to join the Social Media Club here in Chicago.  I missed last night’s meeting due to not having a babysitter, but will try attend other ones.

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I would like to say that I was sober for the entire time I was at Izeafest.  I ended up as the driver 2 out of the 3 nights, and I really don’t believe in drunk driving.  That being said I did do the IzeaHunt without anything alcohol in me.  We had to do a ton of wild and crazy things.  What was at stake?  A $100 gift card for Home Depot for all of us.  When money is on the line, well, you do crazy things.  Honestly I wish I would have brought some other outdoor clothing with.  My clothes were almost destroyed from this scavenger hunt.  It took several washings once I got home to get the shaving cream and chocolate sauce out!

For some reason, I cannot find my team photos on Flickr at all.  What I will do is show you some of the other teams instead.  You will see how crazy this really did get:

Ohh I take that back, I did find one and you can’t see me (yeah! — I’m in the blue shirt):

Ok, we had to do crazy things like take a picture with a 6’5″ person, make a human sundae, get pineapple and a potato, walk somebody else’s dog, etc.  There was 4 pages of things, and we only had about an hour to try and do as much as we could.  One of the more crazy things we had to do was find a toilet seat and bring it back.  I think Ted was the only one who was able to do that!  Unfortunately, my team did not win.  However, it was still a ton of fun!

After the hunt was over, we all took a break, sat down, talked, and ate some great food.  I was able to sit down and talk to Cass and Sean Jackson.  It was hard to believe that I was going to be hopping on a plane the next morning and heading back home (what I didn’t know at this time was that Chicago had gotten record levels of rain and my yard was literally a swimming pool.  The water in my yard was up to my knees!).  We were able to compare notes and just enjoy ourselves.

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See this picture? A lot of the time, it looked like this. I didn’t know that we needed to get auto insurance quotes before we left, but I won’t tell you how many times we got lost downtown, because everything was one way!  I also won’t  mention how many times we almost turned the wrong way on a one way street!  What a pain!  Next time, Ted, please give us directions to these places!!! There and back!

The theme for the evening was funny hats if you can’t tell from this picture of Heather and Ted. I don’t remember the name of the bar we were at, but the food was excellent, and I got to talk to many bloggers and Izea team members that evening.

We also got a bit silly afterwards:

If you can’t tell, it was a fun evening.

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I’ve been meaning to get this online, but you know how real life gets in the way!  LOL I do have to thank Christine for all the great pictures I am going to be using while I blog about this. I got to Orlando and found out that my camera had died. Right now, it is at Sony to get fixed!

Jeremy Schoemaker was our opening keynote speaker. He genuinely looked nervous to be up there. We were able to learn that in 4 short years he went from a nobody to a somebody.  He gave us a lot on insight into his life and how he got to be where he was and possibly what we need to do to get where he is.

Susie Gardner was up next. Her presentation was about content. As a person who has blogged for two years, I personally did not care for her presentation. It was geared towards the beginner blogger, and I have moved well beyond that. I felt like half of us in the room could have given that speech. However, I did talk to some beginning bloggers, and they found her presentation helpful and interesting.

We got to go to lunch from there. We ate at The Globe on Wall Street since it was the least busy. The food was excellent.  However, the service was slow.  Very Slow.  Though, I guess all the places were that way since some of the next speakers weren’t back in time for their presentations.  However, we didn’t know that and ended up almost running to get back in time!  I definitely did not need any weight loss pills for this trip. That walk/run back to the conference burned off my lunch no problem!  In the picture (which Drew took!) is Drew, his wife Allison, Heather, me, and Christine (and yes, in that order).

Next up was the big money bloggers panel and Drew got to moderate it.  We got to learn the tricks of how they all got where they are.  On the panel was John Chow, Neil Patel, Stephanie Agresta, and Jeremy Schoemaker.  This was a very interesting panel.  One of the questions was what was your biggest mistake or surprise.  The answer that surprised me the most was from John Chow — it was the lengths that Google went about scraping his site from their search engines.  He’s a nobody compared to Google, and they went after them the way they did!

Next up was the growing traffic panel with Tony Hung, Lea Alcantara, Brian Clark, Alex Schek, Steve Spalding, and Tamar Weinberg.  I’m going to tell you a funny story that you cannot repeat.  I was listening to these speakers and was seriously confused.  Finally, I leaned over to Christine and asked her what this had to do with what advertisers wanted.  She informed me that that was the next panel.  Whoops!  Needless to say, I didn’t get a whole lot out of this.  Being that I work freelance as a social media manager, I pretty much already knew what they were talking about.  However, what I didn’t like was that they really didn’t talk about all the networks out there.  You can get some really good traffic from sites like stumble, reddit, mixx, kirtsy, etc.  Its not all digg all the time.  I personally don’t get much traffic from there compared to the other sites.

The next panel was the “what advertisers want” panel.  It included Jon Buschlen, Katia Adams, Michael Brito, Sean Jackson, Michael Jenkins, and Randall Richards. It was nice to hear what advertisers were looking for. However, anyone who has done any paid blogging already knew what they had to say.  These were advertisers that “get it”.  Unfortuntely, there is a whole ton of advertisers out there who do not and want 20 links for $5 and can’t figure out why the bloggers won’t do their opps.

After that, we had Ted announcement.  This is when we learned about Cloud Shout, and we got our alpha keys for it!  It was an awesome presentation.  After that, we went to the hotel to get ready to go out!

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