Today was spotted with conversations from friends who want to save the world but just don’t know how. They’ve followed the path–good schools, grades, and jobs–but haven’t felt they could make a difference. My advice for them: new media.

I’m not going to lie–I’d long stereotyped marketing, communications, and public relations as necessary evils, at best. They’re rarely attention-grabbing, not usually great writing, and brand awareness is about as far as most of them get. But my opinion has somewhat changed in the last few years, especially since I heard Seth Godin speak (and enjoyed Purple Cow). Godin’s creative approach to marketing made it fun for me…and the internet is what made it much more accessible and effective.

I’d always seen the internet as a place to find your voice and to be heard. I’d always seen web design and web development as the tools to get online and make an impact. However, understanding and applying the connectivity of the internet–its inherent community–is what can really make a change. If someone wants to make a difference, they ought to learn how to use the web to spread their message. Continue reading…

I keep updating my tools, profiles, and sites. Why do it–is it worth it? Is it helping my life or my business? What’s next?

Today I’ve decided to begin moving all my photos to Flickr (well, it’ll be some time). We’re launching a web application in the next few months. SET’s website redesign (with almost all new content) will be completed by year end.

In January of 2006 I moved to WordPress (from Blogger, and before that just HTML) for dancingwithwords.com, redid the layout, and launched technotheory.com (also WordPress). I also sorted through about five thousand photos from My Image Gallery and kept about a thousand, which were then migrated to Coppermine.

I can spare you from the discussion of how I made it to My Image Gallery from Dreamweaver’s photo pages and of my failed conversion to Greymatter and/or B2′s blogging software. And of course the moves from Friendster to Facebook, the trials and tribulations of MySpace, and the simultaneous development of relationships on LinkedIn.

This stuff takes a lot of time. Why do I do it?

My online participation is primarily for three reasons: self-expression, maintenance of relationships, and business. When I put up a website in ’95 and a blog in ’00, it was for self-expression (and having a technology project seemed like the thing to do). Over time it became a way of keeping in touch. In just the last year I’ve started to see business come out of it.

But is it really worth it?

Continue reading…

Rob Pegoraro wrote in today’s Post how Facebook is now becoming not only the home for personal interactions but business ones. He also raised an excellent point about how Facebook could theoretically allow us to divide which parts of our profile are exposed to our various contacts. While I think that might be one solution, it doesn’t truly address the issue, which is the ways in which our contacts from various settings are come together as we share more and varied information online.

While widespread social networking hadn’t gained steam when I was in school (P2P file-sharing was the big thing), after college I quickly jumped on the Friendster (now sinking) boat. And through inertia I eventually found myself on LinkedIn, Facebook, and (shiver) MySpace. It was easy when LinkedIn was the only business site, Facebook had nice privacy controls, and MySpace was the ugly step-child that you had to deal with because he worked the door. Now the lines have blurred.

For my friends that are reading this, you may find this a wake-up call. After all, it’s going to be a little while before the non-techies of the business-world really start using FaceBook–but it’s quite likely to happen. That means that all the photos, tags, notes, and bizarre status messages may be information you’ll have to second-guess before posting. Continue reading…

I sometimes let Kathy Sierra’s writing accumulate in my blog-reader, because I don’t want to just skim her entries. She’s my favorite writer online, and a huge inspiration both to my work and what difference a passionate individual can make. Reading what she’s been through, the way she’s been abused (serious death and sexual threats) as a blogger and as a woman, is just plain awful. Hurtful. Disgusting. While nothing could justify such treatment, the fact that she’s been subjected to it is just unfathomable to me. She’s making such a difference for so many people, in a field that’s not even personal (people have opinions about usability…but it’s not personal). This just hurts.

I thank people like Kate who are continually bringing attention to the continual violence against women, time and again. For raising issues to the light that are often glanced past. This sort of news needs to be in the media. And it needs to change people’s behavior.

I applaud Scoble’s stance on this and hope others will protest as well. If I had a way to, I would. Reading the comments on Kathy’s page shows that people are listening today. I just hope this can make a lasting difference.

You never know what it will be that captures the public eye, as pointed out in this Washington Post article about Chris Bliss’ juggling act. A video of Bliss’ juggling caught on through email and blogs, bringing him an insane amount of attention and potential gigs. The only problem was that he was no longer interested in juggling.

Perhaps many of us writers and businessmen are hoping for the one thing that will (favorably) capture the public’s eye and send us to quick fame. Things like the Million Dollar Homepage and the forehead guy have taken on a bizarre media following. However, the question, as addressed in the article, is whether the thing that garners attention is what we want attention for? We don’t want to be pegged forever as one-hit wonders (like a certain actor in Home Alone…).

As such I’m trying to temper my urge to write about every exciting thought that comes to my mind here. One of the articles will one-day spread, but I hope to leave thought-out posts here, rather than techno-rants. I could repeat what’s spreading around, but I’d rather not continue the tradition of the blog-as-echo-chamber effect.

Soon you’ll find some more articles, in particular on personal privacy and email management. In the mean time, I highly recommend 43folders Inbox Zero series and Inside the Marketing Mind’s advice on creating a proposal.

Woohoo! Now del.icio.us has private bookmarking available–the one critical feature I pointed out as missing in del.icio.us. Perhaps it’s because ma.gnolia had it all along… (from Lifehacker)

In this entry I discuss the fine line between convenience and sharing too much online. In particular, I’m following up to my entry on social bookmarking…something handy but potentially revealing. In the very end, I also point out how the same can apply to posting reviews on Amazon, using online support forums, and other seemingly innocuous online activities.

I began using del.icio.us and ma.gnolia to keep track of articles I’ve enjoyed. While in the past I had used browser bookmarks for pages to which I knew I’d return, these sites offered convenient ways to maintain a richly searchable history of what’s interested me over time. However, I immediately found myself debating how to describe my entries and which entries I tagged…

Let me first explain why I began using both del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. For a long time now I’ve consciously separated my business and personal activities online. I have different email addresses, websites, screennames, and now bookmark lists. Don’t get me wrong, someone can easily find the other me online, but I’d rather them search for it than dangle it under their nose.

Today I was reading a great article in the Washington Post on a religiously-charged topic. I was about to tag the article to my personal bookmark list, but realized Continue reading…

The Washington Post published an article today that reaffirms an idea I’ve been spreading for a while to my peers: blogs serve as an efficient and powerful tool for businesses to stay informed within their industry. The article primarily discussed the use of Nielsen BuzzMetrics to track trends, but it lent more credibility to the blogosphere as a whole.

One of the article’s interesting points was that blogs may offer the best gauge of customer sentiment given that they’re often “gut-level and spontaneous.” Why it is that HP needed blog-metrics to recognize this particular opinion is beyond me, but I’m glad something clued them in:

Hewlett-Packard, the computer and technology company, lately has picked up from cyberspace that customers really hate leaving their computers at shops for repairs; far better, the company learned, is having technicians repair the machines in homes. “What that makes us do is that when we think about investing more in that area, we say, yes, it’s positive to do that,” said Rickey Ono, business strategy manager for HP. “We drill into the individual comments and it helps to justify our expenditure on in-home repair.”

The article also served as fodder for a program I’m presenting at the Maryland State Bar Association’s Annual Meeting in June 2006, “Relax: It’s time to Outsmart your Peers with RSS.” I hope to offer some ideas to business professionals on how they can stay informed by better utilizing RSS and other technologies related to blogs. Continue reading…

I’d been slow to adopt del.icio.us, a free social bookmarking site that’s been popular for a couple years now. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, here’s more information on what del.icio.us is. Here’s why I told myself I didn’t need del.icio.us (I disagree now):

1. I have no needs for bookmarking beyond what’s provided by the web browser (addressed in recommendation 3 below)
2. Why would I want to share my links with others? (addressed in recommendations 5 & 6)
3. I have too much stuff to keep track of already, especially online (addressed in recommendation 7)

What I didn’t realize is that del.icio.us makes browsing more efficient and research more productive. Can it be distracting to find more things to click on? Sure, but the results are often better than just searching google.

Here’s why I recommend del.icio.us: Continue reading…