If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone know? For some reason I’ve felt our most gifted Web designers and content providers for 2009 were being recognized deep in some kind of forest during the recent South by Southwest Web Awards in Austin and, since, have fallen even further off the radar. This post is an attempt to honor their work and build a little more buzz for these guys — they deserve it.
We have two winners this year from Texas. Let’s start with them.
For some reason, I thought blogging was a little like ReTweeting — if you posted links back to the original post, you could recycle others’ content and help the original author extend their reach. It’s also (or can be) a lazy way of generating material but I somehow thought, with full transparency, it was an acceptable practice when not overused.
My first mistake was in missing the distinction between individually-authored blogs and those created by for-profit entities. The second was not asking the post’s original author or publisher for permission to reprint. Said publisher in this case, EnvatoNetwork contacted me and pointed out these missteps in a very gracious way. I am grateful for the education and share it with you here, along with some of those myths.
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Looking for nomads and wanderers — is that the same thing? — who might know where this photo was taken. If so, 1st person to post a comment here gets recognition on Twitter, no increase in fortune at all, and my eternal gratitude.
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. . . and so should you.
Plenty of you are quite adept at blogging, at the whole SEO piece, and at the graphic niceties as well. Me, I’m new to cyberspace and am still learning.
Along comes Darren Rowse, online author of ProBlogger, How You Can Make Money Blogging. Twice before (in 2007 and 2005) Darren’s offered a month-long course in better blogging, and this time I’ve signed up.
Did I mention that it’s free?
My best advice to House of Blues Houston (in the previous post) and any service organization attempting to thrive in rough economic times is to examine, in detail, the Zappos model, found in the links below:
Houston: we have a problem.
Or, at least, House of Blues has one and, from my sense of the culture, it may extend beyond my own hometown. In a little over two hours on Thursday, I watched HoB Houston squander an opportunity to provide some 90 to 100 communicators and marketers with a WOW! experience in customer service.
Each of those patrons has reach and influence to steer a boatload of corporate and non-profit business to the venue. Was this an isolated incident? Perhaps.
Since the article I posted here last week, I came across this newer one by Erica Douglass on the Small Biz Tools website. She presents a not-uncommon, and costly, failure-to-back up scenario then describes her own system in some detail.
If backups are an issue for your small business, check out my previous post for additional ideas.
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. . . SXSW to most of us, or “South By . . .” for the really cool.
The joy of my first SXSWi’09 has been the meeting of Lions in the social media world. People whose commitment to excellence is beyond a doubt — and the paradigm I’m drawn to. There’s a mystique to the conference, but a bit of hype as well. Of all the panels I’ve attended, only two or three have actually told me something new I didn’t know. [Maybe I underestimated my present level and chose "freshman" classes when sophomore or junior would have been more helpful.]
A number of panelists and moderators wasted my time, trying to show the room how “with it” they were, or taking forever to actually cut to the chase with their content. To belabor the point here would be for me to do the same.
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Is there ever a convenient time to lose your data or re-load all your software? In slow times we might have more time for our own troubleshooting and recovery, but less money for paid assistance when those efforts are unsuccessful.
Christine Noble, with Marnoble Computer Sales and Service here in Houston, was educating me today about why a full system backup plan is even more important in the present environment. The piece many of us forget about, even the semi-faithful backer-uppers, is to also back up our backups. Here’s what I found out about that.
→ No CommentsTags:backups·disaster planning·file hosting·file storage
What’s on your Blogroll or Favorites list? Mine here, with a few exceptions, consists of links to friends’ and colleagues’ better work. There are tons of other blogs I subscribe to, via Bloglines. Rather than list them for you, I’ve found a great article that both lists and describes many of the same ones I’ve come to enjoy. SO, here ‘ya go, thanks to Abhijeet Mukherjee, one of the great writers who contribute to Freelance Folder.
Note: these blogs are not all about freelance writing or writing for the web. What they have in common is they’re all really well-written.
Elaine W Krause, Communications Outsourcing. Value-driven technical and business content.