The answer: ceviche. Ceviche is a South American cold fish dish, “cooked” by using an acid to denature the proteins in a meat as opposed to using heat. It’s light, very refreshing, tasty, healthy, and very cheap to make. I first learned about it at the ETC2010 conference from the Chilean embassy and fell in love with it immediately.

If you switch out some ingredients, it’s also incredibly portable. For fun, to see if I could make it work, I contacted Heidi over at True Lemon (disclosure: they’re a Blue Sky Factory email marketing client) and asked whether True Lemon’s acidity matched that of a real lemon. The answer? Yes, so True Lemon is substituted in this recipe for portability. Most of the ingredients can be prepared ahead of time and put in a zip-top bag.

Here’s what you’ll need:

5 packets of True Lemon
5 packets of True Lime
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp sugar
Black pepper to taste
1 tbsp cilantro – home-dried from fresh is best
1 plastic bag
1 piece of fish, preferably a mild white fish like tilapia, haddock, or sea bass
5/8 cup of water
1 plastic knife

Everything except the fish and water can be put in the plastic bag and packed in your luggage. That said, you might occasionally get some questions from security, but it’s okay to let them sniff the contents. The salt, pepper, and sugar you can probably source on site, along with a plastic knife.

When you get to your destination, find your local grocery store and hit the frozen fish section. Buy your fish frozen, because for this application, you want fish as germ-free as possible, and deeply frozen fish is less likely to have nasties than the fish counter. The citrus juice will kill off most nasties, but not as thoroughly as applying heat, so the fewer you start with, the better.

Thaw the fish by putting it in your hotel room sink with some warm water. Cut it up into little tiny pieces. Any knife will do – a little plastic one, a pair of scissors from the front desk (washed, of course), etc. Put the fish and water in the bag. If you’re not sure how much 5/8 cup of water is, it’s about a third of a coffee mug’s worth. You don’t have to be perfectly precise with this. It’s also a full to the brim shot glass.

Throw everything in the plastic bag and toss around.

Let this sit for a couple of hours in the refrigerator. No in-room fridge? No problem. Get the ice bucket, put your zip-top bag in the bottom, and put some ice on top of it.

The dish is done when the fish has turned white as if cooked:

Put it in the serving vessel of your choice – perhaps that empty shot glass – and enjoy!

Now, obviously, you can substitute real ingredients for the portable ones. You can use the juice of freshly squeezed lemons and limes (5/8 cup total), use fresh cilantro, add in some onion or garlic, etc. but if you’re in a hotel room, the last thing you want to try to do is cut citrus with a plastic fast food knife and attempt to do serious culinary work, hence the True Lemon. If you’re at home with a full kitchen at your fingertips, you can modify this recipe to your heart’s content. Perhaps another time I’ll post up a full, at-home recipe.

Ceviche is easy to prepare, requires no heat, and is really tasty. Try it sometime.

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First, you have to have an idea of what to re-run. Fire up your statistics package of choice. I’ll be using Google Analytics. Now, go to Content > Top Content. In the filter, type in the earliest year that you’ve got content for – in my example below, I typed in /2007/. Now look at the top content data you see. You’re looking at content for that year that search engines and visitors to your site still consider relevant today.

This is very important. Don’t use the data from way back then as a starting point because what was important and hot then may not be now. Use today’s data set (last 30 days) but filter on your post dates. I should add that if your URL structure doesn’t include the date in it, I have no idea how you’d do this. You’d have to know which of your older stuff was still popular.

Take a look at the list. Which stuff is evergreen, which stuff is still popular long after other content has gone to content heaven, in terms of audience interest?

Find a couple of these pages and pop them open in your editor. Re-read them, re-edit them, spruce them up, make any relevant updates to them, add links to your newer content that might have reference the older content, and then make a new summary post on your blog about the older pages you’re going back to.

Now, you may be saying, why shouldn’t I just copy and paste into a new blog post, so that it appears as brand-new content on my site? Those of you who mentally replied, “because older pages have valuable inbound links you want to keep”, pat yourselves on the back. Go back and spruce up, but leave the old URLs alone so that any existing links don’t break. You’ll also revive older comments and discussions if you leave the existing post alone and just shine a spotlight on it.

Remember this above all else when it comes to old content: it’s old to you, and probably you alone. In the ever-increasingly hypernetworked world we live in where new friends find us all the time, what you think is old content (assuming it’s not time-sensitive, like news, obviously) is brand new and fresh to them. Help them find your best stuff, no matter when it was written.

Here’s my old stuff highlight for now: How to build a video or camera stabilization rig for about $7. Still good after all these years, and for the very few of you who have been reading me for that long, did you remember this post existed, or was it just as much a refresher for you as it is new content to the newer friends reading it for the first time?

Good luck in dusting your old stuff off, and I look forward to reading what I’ve missed.

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You may also have noticed that there’s a deeply redundant piece at the bottom of every blog post:

I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, Chris, that’s redundant. And it’s redundant, too. Why do that? Do you think people are so blind or stupid that they don’t notice the obvious, user-experience focused, carefully placed call to action widget at the top of the page?

Not at all. Only very smart people read my blog. The stupid people are all at YouTube right now, watching endless selections of crotch kick videos and videos of kittens. No, the real reason I put that block of code at the end of every blog post despite its redundancy is simply this: my decor does not travel with my blog posts.

Exhibit one: Google Reader.

No part of my theme makes it into Google Reader. None of it. But that lovely block of redundant code makes it into Reader just fine. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, yes, but what’s the point? People are already subscribed to your blog if they’re reading it in Reader. That’s even more redundant!

That would indeed be the case except for one thing: the Share button built into reader that automatically shares the post – with subscription buttons – to the friends and followers of others. When the calls to action go with the post, they go into the Shared Items, too, for others to see and act on.

Exhibit two: Google Buzz.

Now we’re really getting into the thick of it. When you Buzz a blog post (or share it in Reader, which likely auto-buzzes it), you’re stripping the post of ANY context. Someone in Reader might think, hey, I’m reading someone else’s Shared Items, and since this is mostly blogs, this is probably a blog I can subscribe to. When you’re using Google Buzz, you’re sharing all kinds of stuff in there from many different sources. There’s no intuitive leap whatsoever to subscribe to items people are Buzzing…

… unless you embed the subscription calls to action right in your blog post, so they go with the Buzz, too.

So how do I do this? It’s stupid simple but manual. Make some nice buttons for yourself. If you’re too lazy to make buttons, use some of the Crystal Clear icons from Wikimedia. They’re free. Then just code up some really simple HTML and store it in a text file on your computer. If you’re more sophisticated, use macro software like TextExpander for the Mac or Texter for the PC and wire in that block of code so that when you’re done with a blog post, you just hit your macro and it auto-pastes the code right in for you:

I just type çß?† into the blog post and bam! Instant block of code that’s ready to deliver calls to action wherever this post ends up.

Do you have to do this? Not at all. But if your work is getting any distribution in things like Buzz, Google Reader, Feedburner, etc., then people are consuming your content without having any way to get back to you and sign up for more. That’s your loss and their loss, too. Putting together a simple block of HTML for every blog post with a few buttons takes just a few minutes, and it can help you build your audience every time someone shares your material. Try it!

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Savvy auction house marketers know exactly what goods and commodities are needed for each holiday and have them up for auction the moment the holidays begin, often at ludicrous markups. For example, for the Feast of Winter Veil, small eggs used to cook gingerbread cookies and egg nog, normally for sale for 50 silver (think 50 cents), rocket up in price by crafty salesmen to 9-15 gold each (think $9-$15) for a few days until the laggards in the market realize the holiday’s on and start undercutting prices.

Here’s the funny thing: the in-game calendar is published months ahead of the actual events, in the game and on Blizzard Entertainment’s web site. Every player of the game is given in-game notices in major cities about the impending holiday. There’s plenty of time to stock up the goods you need to sell…

… but few ever do. Few are willing to plan that far ahead, to farm the eggs or deeprock salt ahead of time and be ready for the doors to burst open the moment the holiday starts. As a result, those few who look at the calendar and plan accordingly reap huge profits.

So what does this have to do with blogging? The same applies in the blogosphere as in Azeroth. Google Calendar has a holidays calendar for every nation in the world. It lets you see all the major holidays you could possibly want, for your country or others, for different religions, for just about anything that you can stick on a calendar and call a holiday.

The power bloggers can look at the calendar and decide in advance, like an editorial calendar, what should happen in the lead up to the holidays on the calendar. Do you blog about marketing? You know when Valentine’s Day is – work out now what things you want to blog about as that holiday approaches. Do you blog about history? Seems like everyone’s got a holiday about them.

Having your blog posts published in advance of the holidays ensures that search engines can index your content. Having a decent social network ensures that you can move the needle in real-time search on the day before and day of the holiday. Having time to plan ahead lets you come up with creative memes that can stick well ahead of time – you can even beta test memes and hashtags to your current followers to see who says “heh, that’s clever” or the equivalent reaction you’re looking for.

You’ve got the calendar in front of you. The holidays on it are not a secret by any means, but know that most everyone in blogging and social media is probably going to wing it at best on the holiday. Farm your small eggs and deeprock salt now so that in 2010, you can profit handsomely when the times are right.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit some rock elementals for deeprock salt. We sold out this year, so I’ve got a year to farm for next Winter Veil.

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If we’ve worked together in my work at Edvisors, you’ll likely get an update as to whom you’ll be working with next. If we’ve collaborated in the past, I hope to do so again, especially as there are several opportunities I’m looking at for my next move that promise increased collaboration and exploration. I’ll still remain connected to financial aid here and there; for example, I’ll still be presenting at College Goal Sunday at the end of the month.

As this transition progresses, a few things are on my mind:

• Six and a half years is a lot of unwinding. To the extent that your marketing or media product/service/system can make transitioning roles easier, faster, cleaner, and less painful, please always plan for those eventualities when you’re designing product or slinging code. I’m running into an issue now where Google Analytics does not let you transfer analytics from one account to another; the workaround is to remove access for a certain user on a site by site basis, but this is obviously much less than ideal.
• Sorting out and separating personal from professional is harder than ever, because professional things can easily bleed over into personal and vice versa. Amber Naslund pointed this out recently in a post about boundaries. Where do you, the person, and your work begin and end? The catchphrase in social media last year was “be human”, but there’s also the quandary of when the human and the company need to part ways, who gets what in the divorce? I’m approaching by area of focus. Work I did that relates to Edvisors’ core mission is clearly theirs. I’m fairly certain they don’t want my Warcraft videos or coffee roasting techniques guides.
• A corollary is to explore, but keep your home base strong, sage advice from Chris Brogan. Six and a half years ago, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and social media weren’t more than vague ideas in someone’s mind. Now, having a personal brand that incorporates what you do professionally but isn’t married to your professional life is more important than ever. Companies change. People change. Markets and economies change. Life changes. If you aren’t doing at least a little work to ensure that you exist outside of your work, then the day will come when your work will vanish – and you’ll have that much more trouble getting resettled. Invest at least a little time in yourself and your reputation now to provide for unforeseen contingencies later.

I’m eager and excited about the fresh starts ahead. There’s so much opportunity, so many different ways we can make a difference together. I’m ever thankful and grateful for everyone who subscribes to this blog, who listens to Marketing Over Coffee, who has stayed in touch on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn over the years. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.

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Using the hashtag #the5, I’ll let you know about 5 things that caught my eye in the morning news. It might be marketing, search, social media, amusing silly fun, or heck, even big World of Warcraft news (you can bet Cataclysm will make #the5 on launch day). Whatever’s interesting and of note in the morning reading, it’ll get tagged #the5.

Obviously, this would be a great deal more interesting if you participated, too. Yes, there’s Google Reader shared items. Yes, there’s all different ways of sharing stuff. #the5 is just a more casual way of doing it, and it’s focused on the start of the workday, interesting things that catch your mind and eye before the day gets busy. It might be a photo, a tweet, a video, whatever.

I look forward to seeing what catches your eye as you start your day.

Each day I’ll also link up to Twitter Search to see what you are putting in YOUR version of #the5.

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I am always shocked and honored to see so many people enjoying what I’ve had to share over the years. This year was no different, and I want to thank you by taking a look at what YOU thought were the most important posts on my blog this year.

The data, of course, is derived from Google Analytics. If you want to make your own Top 10 list, go read this post on Marketing Over Coffee. Sure, other posts from other years were more popular, but here’s what’s been the top of your list this year:

10. Top 10 Follow Friday Tips for Twitter, April 3

9. I was on a boat called PAB09, June 22

8. Will social media burn conferences to the ground?, July 2

7. Advanced Social Media Course is live!, November 4

6. What’s all the stuff in the early morning tweet about?, February 5

5. 5 tips for dominating local search, July 27

4. In your last hour, what would you write?, September 11

3. Arguing against your limitations, August 11

2. How to back up your Wordpress blog in 60 seconds, May 16

1. Turning your Kindle into the best newsstand ever, May 4

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My wife just started to read the book and cautions that it starts out with violence and sex in that order, a decent helping of profanity, and the murder of an authority figure – all in Chapter 1. If it were a movie and this were the script, you’re starting out with a hard R rating, so be aware of that if you find such content to not be your thing.

Full disclosure: JC sent me a dead tree edition of his book as blogola. Be sure to read my full disclosures page for more.

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Yep. My rear passenger window has been shattered, blown into a thousand pieces by some blunt force. My first reaction, of course, is more than a bit of profanity, followed by my checking out the car to see if anything inside is missing. I’m carrying my laptop, DSLR, video camera, lenses, iPods, etc. on my person so I know they can’t be missing. (yes, when I go to work, I look like a digital sherpa) The car’s GPS is built into the frame, so it’s not like you can just reach in and take it.

What in the world made someone want to bust into my car, when there was nothing obvious to take?

Then I notice something really odd. I’m standing in glass. A lot of glass.

This makes no sense to me. Why is there glass all over the concrete, when smashing in the window should put the glass all inside the car, or mostly inside the car?

I wait for a bit while building security investigate, records the incident, and notify the local police. Incidentally, the police dispatch said, “We’re really kind of busy now. We’ll take the information but we don’t have any officers to spare…”

So I look around a bit and then notice what is missing from my car. In fact, it’s missing from the car, but not by much. 10 feet away, next to another car, is my gym bag.

Suddenly it makes sense. Smash in the window, grab the bag, and as you pull it out, it pulls the rest of the window out, spewing glass all over the concrete like crystalline vomit.

By now I’m more intrigued than anything. Everything valuable is on me, and being the overly cautious financial sort (working in financial aid does that to you), I know insurance will cover everything with no deductible. So I wander over to my bag, noticing that my workout clothes are strewn about on the parking lot concrete.

Whoever broke the window and took the bag was looking for something in it. A Rolex? Jewelry? Drugs? Who knows? I have none of those things because again, I’m a nerd and all my valued possessions are devices which are usually on me.

After all is said and done, I end up laughing most of the way home, the mental image of a petty crook doing a furtive smash & grab, frantically crouched down between vehicles, rifling through workout clothes, possibly holding their nose the entire time, only to come away with lingering gym bag odor and not much else. Sucker!

There is an important lesson here, of course, and that is even the perception of valuables is enough to motivate a desperate thief. I’d guess he or she has had enough success in the past with the same tactic that it was a risk worth taking in our parking garage. For the future, I’ll keep my workout bag in the trunk, and if you find yourself in similar circumstances, you might want to do the same. The economy’s continued pressures on everyone means that desperation will only increase.

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I was going to say it’s easy as pie, but if you’ve ever tried to bake a pie, it’s not necessarily easy. Whoever thought that expression up clearly did not take into account the lack of pastry skill that most of us have. So, we’ll make subscribing and sharing easy first, and then make pie easy.

Easy subscribing

If you want to get my blog via email subscription:

If you want to get my blog in Google reader:

If you know what you’re doing with RSS:

Easy sharing

Easy pie

Ingredients:

1 ready made, ready to serve pie shell
1 8 oz. container of Kool Whip
2 regular sized containers of fruit-containing yogurt

Mix the Kool Whip and yogurt together in a bowl. Scoop contents into a pie shell. Refrigerate for an hour. Serve.

See? Easy pie.

Photo credit: netefekt. Note that yogurt pie looks nothing like the one in the picture. That’s difficult pie.

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In 2006, Ze Frank talked about brand as emotional aftertaste. He gave the examples of Grandma’s cookies (as a generic brand) that elicits an emotional reaction, and then old people’s cookies (as an even more generic brand). Which would you rather eat?

If you haven’t watched the episode, it’s brilliant.

Second example. I could talk about comfort food generically, but there’s a funny thing about people. The more detail you give into your own experiences, the more others can relate to them. There’s a dish my grandmother used to make, a Czech ham and noodle casserole called flicky (pronounced fleech-key). Nana would make it in a deep casserole dish, and it was always an amazing dinner. The noodles at the very top of the dish would get golden brown, crispy on the edges, and the ham & noodles inside would be deliciously creamy, served steaming hot. It was a cardiologist’s nightmare, I’m sure, because it was made with ham, eggs, cream, real butter, and egg noodles, but if there was ever a comfort food dish that you’d want on a cold, rainy November afternoon in Queens, New York, it was Nana’s flicky.

Reading that, did any of your own experiences, your own favorite comfort foods spring to mind? Did you think back to your own past, to the things that reassure you and comfort you? I’d guess at least a little bit yes.

The phenomenon of specificity reaching a wide audience and eliciting responses is something from esoteric mind science traditions. That’s how the highest level teachings are transmitted – through storytelling that elicits memories and original experiences in your own mind, which have the most weight and power to influence you. Nothing is more powerful or persuasive than your own mind.

If you’re looking to reach people, to influence them through your writing, through your stories, there’s no better way than to tell your own story as deeply and as humanly as you can, sharing your experiences good and bad. When you do, you’ll find that you and your audience have so much more in common than you think.

Oh, and I intentionally left out two ingredients from Nana’s flicky. Anyone familiar with Czech cuisine can probably guess what they are, but for everyone else, sorry. That’s a true family secret

Photo credit: Vegan Feast

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By Koshyk.

This is a photo of Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, a Sikh site. I love the light in this picture.

I look forward to seeing your Week With A View entries.

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Here’s how in one screenshot:

Click to see this full size.

Other blog platforms should be just as easy. If you’ve ever lost a blog, you know how much of it – especially comments – is unrecoverable and permanently lost.

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First, this thing is small and cute. Nice design, feels solid.

It’s a combo iPod dock and 2 port USB hub and flash card reader.

That’s it in a nutshell, right?

Not quite. Because this thing purports to be a hub of sorts for your desktop, I thought I’d beat the crap out of it, so to speak.

So I loaded it up. Order my iPod to resync everything. Put a card with 900 images in it. Connected my USB external hard drive and started playing a Matthew Ebel concert in DV quality on it.

How’d it do? I was surprised. I was expecting it to choke, and it didn’t. The video throughput from the external hard drive remained consistent, and iPhoto and the iPod both did fine.

For a consumer device, that’s pretty damn amazing. No choking, no failing, just doing what it’s supposed to. It’s not the sexiest thing in the world, but it passed a throughput test like a champ. Nice work, Griffin. I’ll be carrying this on the road with me a lot.

One criticism: two USB ports? That’s it? There’s enough room on the back for two more. Come on, four port powered hub!

If you want to buy one of these, Amazon has them for about $40. Disclosure: paid affiliate link for the Student Loan Network.

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This morning started off thinking about Bloomberg’s wonderful but hideously expensive terminal, and how it gives you insight and also a dashboard to instantly know what’s going on in the markets. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a Bloomberg for social media? Sure enough, a platform exists to manage all your social media in one place, and that’s iGoogle.

Click on the photo for a larger version.

Take a look at what we’ve got here.

Facebook, GMail, and Google Finance on the left, because if I’m doing this for a purpose, for, say, the Student Loan Network, it’s more than just conversation, it’s also understanding what’s happening in the bigger picture. Thus we see a public portfolio of companies in the student loan sector and broader market stuff. Not only does this keep on top of things for my client (the company I work for) but it also gives me the ability to be current when I participate in social networks.

In the middle, a mashup of Yahoo Pipes culling from Twitter Search on specific topics and keywords relevant to the industry. This can be anything at all, but for this, it’s all financial aid stuff, so I can stay on the pulse of financial aid as reported by customers and consumers. Below that, Feedburner for the podcast and customized Compete analytics to monitor what’s happening on my sites and my competitors’ sites.

On the right, Twitter replies to see if anyone needs my attention, and Digg to see what’s buzzy in the world. Obviously, swap this out for Reddit, Stumbleupon, Yahoo Buzz, or whatever your buzz-watcher of choice is.

This, incidentally, is social media with a purpose, highly focused for one specific task – being a financial aid expert in social media. It’s most assuredly not a fishbowl setup where I watch social media for social media’s sake.

Try it for your own vertical and niche, and see if it works for you!

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People badly confuse vision, strategy, and tactics. Here’s a primer on how to achieve clarity so that the next time you’re asked for a strategy or need to develop a vision, you can do so with confidence.

Let’s talk in terms of a road trip.

Vision

Why are we going on a road trip at all?

If you don’t know why you’re in business, if you don’t know why you get up in the morning every day, you don’t have vision. You don’t have a reason, you can’t answer the question of why. Why bother?

When the alarm rings at 4:55 AM every weekday, I get up and go to the Student Loan Network with the overarching reason of going to help someone get an education. I believe in education. I believe that education on the whole makes things better, makes society better, and in true enlightened self interest, makes my world better. Smarter people around me means better conversation, better ideas, better friends. Smarter coworkers and colleagues means higher paid colleagues and my share of the tax burden decreases proportionally the smarter and more talented everyone else is.

If you can’t answer why your company exists (besides make money), then you have no vision. You’ll give up because there’s no reason to go.

Strategy

So you’re going on a road trip. Great! Where are you going?

Strategy is knowing the destination. Knowing where you want to go, knowing what the goal is. Strategy is having defined, achievable goals that are in alignment with your vision.

If my vision is to help someone get a better education, my strategy is to develop trusted relationships with that someone so that we mutually benefit. I vend products and services that I believe in, that will legitimately help my customer achieve a better education, and I am compensated in return. If I say I want to build one million trusted relationships with customers to help them afford an education, that’s a strategy. That’s where I’m going.

If you can’t answer where your company is going, then you have no strategy. You’ll give up because driving in circles is boring.

Tactics

We know why we’re in the van. We know where we want to go. Does anyone have a map to get there?

Tactics is knowing how to get there, how to get to our destination, how to achieve on a turn by turn basis the mission of getting the van to the end point. I need a map.

If my strategy is to build one million trusted relationships with customers, then I need allies. I need to develop relationships with influencers and force multipliers who can help me share things like the Financial Aid Podcast. I need tools like Blue Sky Factory’s Publicaster email service, I need techniques like search engine optimization, I need great products and services that are worth talking about so that others are so inspired that they want to talk about them without my goading them to.

Tactics are like maps in another key aspect: if I want to get to Waltham, Massachusetts from Quincy, Massachusetts, I can take I-93 to I-95. I can take I-90 to I-95. I can take Route 3N. I can take a whole bunch of side roads. Tactics can be flexible – you can take different routes as long as you ultimately get to your destination.

If you can’t answer how your company is going to actually get to the destination, then you have no tactics. You’ll give up because you’ll be lost without a map.

Let’s review:

Vision: Why are we even getting in the van?
Strategy: Where are we going?
Tactics: How are we going to get there?

Finally, a couple of key mistakes I’ve seen especially in social media.

“It’s all about the community!” Wrong. That’s like saying, “Put more people in the van!” So what? Now you have a van full of people. Do you know why they are there at all? Do you know where you’re going? Or are you just in a van with a bunch of people hoping someone else drives ahead of you and you can tag along?

“It’s all about driving traffic to our shiny 2.0 widgety trendsetting flexible scalable social media hub!” Wrong. That’s like saying, “Drive the van faster!” So what? You’re driving the van really fast. Do you have any idea where the van is actually going? Drive the van faster is both useless and dangerous, especially if faster means into a telephone pole.

“It’s all about being remarkable!” Wrong. You’ve got a nice van. A really nice van. A tricked out van. So what? The product is not the marketing. Yes, absolutely, taking a road trip in a nice luxury limo will be a lot more pleasant than taking a road trip in a beaten up Yugo. But if you don’t know where you’re going, you have no map, and you don’t know why, all you have is a nice van, and while it’s remarkable, you’re still not going anywhere.

Remember: why? where? how? and you’ll know vision, strategy, and tactics.

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Image via Wikipedia

My CEO, Joe Cronin, had a very interesting question as a follow up to the recent post on social media leaders.

At what point do you need to go back and relearn the fundamentals? Things have changed so much in the last 10 years – the fundamentals are completely different. Anyone who learned them 5+ years ago is now doing things wrong – fundamentally, right??? They would have to be re-trained in new fundamentals???

Yes and no. The fundamentals, the basics, always remain the same. The tools that we use to implement them change routinely and regularly, which is why it’s so important to read lots of blogs, participate on Twitter, and stay connected to your community – without that connection, you don’t have the eyes and ears of the group working for mutual benefit.

I liken this to the martial arts. As a white belt, you learn a few basic techniques, you learn how to not get punched in the head, how to fall to the ground safely, and other core basics. As you advance up the ranks, you learn more techniques, newer techniques, more complicated techniques that require more skill, but the core principles remain the same – don’t get hurt. Even at the master levels of martial arts, the same fundamental basics are at work, just expressed differently than a white belt.

The same is true in social media. You may just be getting started understanding your community through tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., but the core basics of social media – community, connection, communication – remain the same. No matter what hot network you sign up for, no matter what the shiny object du jour is, the basics remain the same.

You do need to constantly learn and gain competency in the tools you use to manage your social media community, of course. Applying ideas for promoting something on MySpace even from three months ago don’t work now, because the site changes constantly. The MP3 encoder you used for your podcast in 2005 should have evolved into something better for 2008. The basic underlying principle remains the same, however.

If you understand the principles of social media, if you have underlying goals, metrics, and strategies, then no matter what tools come along, you’ll be able to apply your skills to the new stuff and make it effective for you as soon as you learn the tool. It’s a lot like driving a car. Once you understand the basics, it doesn’t matter whether you get behind the wheel of a Prius or a Ferrari – you can still get from point A to point B.

A hat tip and a pile of links for my CEO as thanks for the great question.

+ Online Education Directory at Edvisors.com
+ Private student loans at AlternativeStudentLoan.com
+ Free scholarships at ScholarshipPoints.com

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Want to make your blog or podcast more effective? Hijack an RSS scraper!

Definition: an RSS scraper is any web site that copies your RSS feed – your blog posts, your podcast show notes, etc. – and presents it on their site to appear to be original content.

Instead of worrying about RSS scrapers repurposing your content, turn the tables on them and turn them into billboards for you. A few simple tips to get you started:

1. Copy your blog post title into your post, and link back to the post or your blog’s homepage. Any scraper that repurposes the HTML will automatically provide a link back to the original. This is important because some scrapers copy only an excerpt of your posts.
2. Use a plugin like aLinks to automatically create links to important keywords for you. For me, things like my employer, the Student Loan Network, my show, the Financial Aid Podcast, and my other online adventures are all things I want to have links to, but occasionally I forget. aLinks will link them up automatically, ensuring that RSS scrapers get piles of links to replicate, too.
3. Add buttons to the bottom of every post containing action items. These buttons will in turn link back to things you want people to do, so when RSS scrapers replicate them, a person who clicks on the button to subscribe will get sent to your RSS feed, not the scraper’s. You can see this in action at the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing Over Coffee. It’s important that this goes into the body of the post, not your blog’s template, because it’s the post contents that scrapers typically re-use.
4. Include a text reminder as well, with your domain name in the text, such as, Get this and other articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com – and of course, link it up.

As much as content creators hate RSS scrapers, especially when our content is repurposed to sell ads on someone else’s site, these scrapers are a reality that we can’t easily change. Instead of lamenting their existence, we can hijack them as best as we can to get their readers back to our stuff.

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During our drive to Podcasters Across Borders, Chris Brogan and I discussed an awful lot of things (14 hours in the car will do that) and one of those things is expertise. From my perspective, expertise follows a very distinct, well defined pattern that is measurable and obvious. If you’re marketing yourself as an expert, or you’re a business or marketer looking to hire an expert, perhaps this framework will help.

In the martial arts, there are complementary ideas of apprentice, practitioner, and master practitioner, as well as form, variation, and freedom. Even George Lucas copies this to a degree with the Padawan, Jedi Knight, and Jedi Master.

Apprentice / Beginner / Padawan

At the beginning of any journey, we begin with form. Adherence to form is essential to learn how to use the tools, techniques, and basics of whatever it is we’re studying, whether it’s martial arts, social media, plumbing, etc. We learn form from our teachers, who are the absolute authorities in our journey. Deviation from form is discouraged because it can lead to distraction, ultimately causing you to learn less effectively. This is the stage when the apprentice learns how to hammer nails, stoke fires, roll dough, write blog posts, etc., all under the care of a master instructor who guides the apprentice through early hazards.

Journeyman / Practitioner / Jedi Knight

In the middle of a journey, we practice variation. We now know the basics of our tools and have achieved competence with them. We can build a basic house, we can forge a sword, we can submit a story to Digg and get it to be relatively popular. At this point in our journey, we start examining variations on form to discover principle. A house doesn’t always have to be four square walls and a roof to provide effective shelter. A sword strike doesn’t always have to be on a cardinal angle. A tool like Twitter doesn’t just have to be used for presence and conversation.

Our teachers change as well, from absolute authorities to puzzlers and riddlers. They set up conditions for us to begin making our own discoveries, rather than just hand us knowledge on a plate for us to faithfully consume. Our teachers and masters inspire us to find the resources in ourselves, to experiment, accepting that we’ll screw up and break things from time to time. A sword blade will crack in the forge, a video will render wrong, a cake will fall – all of these are normal as we vary from form.

This is the most dangerous part of the journey, the point at which we can fall prey to our own Dark Side of the Force, in believing that we’re better than we actually are. Our teachers will also set us up for minor failures to remind us that we still have limits, that variation too far from the form has consequences. We’ve all seen that person who declares themselves an expert at this point, too early in their journey.

Master / Expert / Jedi Master

As we reach legitimate mastery, we leave form behind. The principles themselves remain timeless, but we no longer need variation to discover them, as we know them by heart, by practice, by long experience. A master carpenter can build a house just by eye, discarding the need for rulers and blueprints. A master baker doesn’t even bother to measure, yet the bread always turns out perfectly. A social media expert generates impressive real world results – money raised, sales made, lives saved – using whatever tools are appropriate, free of dogmatic handcuffs that say a blog must only be used in this fashion, or Twitter can only be used in that way. If the tool doesn’t exist, the expert simply crafts it themselves.

Our teachers reveal a wonderful and horrifying truth at this point in our journey, that they are fellow explorers along the path. There’s even a certification in Japanese martial arts, called menkyo kaiden, which isn’t just a way of saying that you’re great at something, but that your teacher has run out of things to teach you. You’ve learned as much as they know, and now you and your teacher are fellow explorers, making discoveries and sharing them together. You’re fellow explorers along the path, and while your teacher will always have an honored place in your life, they’re no longer responsible for your development and care. You stand on your own two feet.

Here’s the thing about true mastery, true expertise. It takes years upon years to get there, more years by many than social media has even existed. Podcasting has been around for 4 years or so. Blogging has been around for 10 years or so. Other disciplines like carpentry, martial arts, etc. have been around for millennia. For someone to appoint themselves an expert, a master in a discipline less than a decade old is puffery, plain and simple. There are certainly plenty of people who are very talented at what they do. There are also a lot of people who are peddling snake oil, promoting their latest goods with impressive sales pitches and not much to back them up.

Are there experts, masters in social media? I’d have to say no, not right now. There are leaders, pioneers, explorers, folks who are at the front of the trail, clearing the way and stumbling onto all the hazards. Eventually, if they stay the course, those people will become masters in their own right, but right now we’re all still learning variation, still discovering the principles of social media as the platform evolves.

You can always tell who is a pioneer. They’re the ones with the arrows in them.

How do you tell the difference between a legitimate leader and someone who’s just trying to make some money off of you? Look, as we have for centuries, at the results they produce. If you’re thinking about hiring someone to help you out with social media, see what other results they’ve produced. Have they run campaigns with real world results? Have they made impressive sales, saved lives, changed lives, made a difference?

Where’s Yoda when you need him?

In the next blog post, I’ll talk about another peculiarity of social media – what to do if you have no master teacher to help you.

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Submit your blog or podcast show notes to Amazon’s Kindle directory. They offer 30% rev share on your blog if they choose it for inclusion – and since you’re blogging ANYWAY, you may as well get some incremental revenue if you’re chosen to be worthy of inclusion!

Apply here.

Compensation terms:

6. Subscription Royalties. For each calendar month during the Term, provided you are not in breach of your obligations under this Agreement, we will pay you royalties (“Publisher Royalties”) equal to thirty percent (30%) of Subscription sales revenues actually received by us from sales of Subscriptions to your Publications during the month, net of any bad debt, credits and returns. Subscription sales revenues means only amounts actually received by us for the sale of Subscriptions to your Publications and excludes any fees paid for any product or service other than a Subscription, even if sold together with or required to make use of any Subscription. If we sell a Subscription together with any other content subscription at one undistinguished price (the “Single Price”), Subscription sales revenues for such sale will be allocated on a pro rata basis based on the then-current stand-alone retail price for each individual title included as part of such sale (after taking into account any discounts accorded each participating title in the Single Price sale).

7. Payment Terms. All payments will be due as of the date ninety (90) days following each calendar month of the Term or portion thereof in which Publisher Royalties have accrued. We will, concurrently with payment, provide statements providing detail regarding the amounts of Subscription sales revenue for your Publications collected during the applicable months. All payments shall be made in U.S. dollars. If Publisher is unable to accept Electronic Funds Transfer (“EFT”) payments, we will pay by check, but we will charge a fee of $8.00 per check and will issue checks only if the amount payable is at least $100; if Publisher needs to be paid by check we will accrue and withhold payments until the total amount due is at least $100. All statements shall be conclusive, final and binding, unless Publisher gives Amazon written notice stating the specific basis for objection within six (6) months after the date rendered. You shall not maintain any action or proceeding against us with respect to any such statement unless you commence that action or suit within six (6) months following the date that you provide Amazon with the written notice referred to in the immediately preceding sentence. Any such action or proceeding shall be limited to a determination of the amount of monies, if any, payable by Amazon to you for the accounting periods in question, and your sole remedy shall be the recovery of those monies with no interest thereon.

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Seth Godin is a National Treasure For His Amazon Kindle Idea

From his most recent blog post:

What happens to reading habits when you can buy all the books you want for $40 a month? What happens to book consumption when books become social objects, commented upon by you and your participating friends or network? The conversations surrounding books are often a prime driver behind book sales (“You haven’t read it yet?) and the conversation-enabled Kindle takes that to a whole new level.

Imagine what our nation – our WORLD – could be like if you had all you could read for $40/month? Imagine what would happen to literacy if books became as cheap and as prevalent as every other form of media?

Answer: hard to say, but having a world swamped with good reading is a problem I’d like to have.

We’re seeing this happen with eBooks to a degree already. eBooks have a near zero manufacturing and distribution cost, which means you can make a lot more of them for the same money as a regular book. Imagine if a forward-thinking college professor simply aggregated all the eBooks from a particular industry as a course’s textbooks – no books to buy, no trees to kill, just knowledge.

Food for thought: a recent study in Britain (whose URL eludes me) showed that placing things in a buying position in a cafeteria increased sales of whatever it was that was in the buying position. Junk food sold as well as healthy food, so a cafeteria manager swapped out fried whatever one day for fresh fruits and vegetables, and saw the fresh, healthy food sell as fast as the fried stuff had in the days before.

Imagine if we could get free or low cost eBooks to be as widely available and as convenient as a song on iTunes. Put books in the buying position, and consumers might just buy ‘em because they are there and priced right. The societal benefit of increased literacy and increased consumption of knowledge would be vast and far-reaching.

Seth Godin, I hope Amazon reconsiders your offer, and I hope someday to read every book you publish for $40/month.

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A post by Chris Brogan inspired me to put a widget on my blog here describing what blogola I’ve received lately, as a way of disclosing potential conflicts of interest. You’ll see it on the side, under the photos.

Blogola is a portmanteau of blog and payola, the practice of paying off DJs at radio stations by record companies to spin certain records. Blogola is stuff people have sent me for evaluation and, I would imagine, recommendation.

If you’d like to send me blogola, that’s fine, but be aware it will be fully disclosed and a positive review is not at all guaranteed. If your product or service sucks, you will know about it. Just ask Snapple.

I reserve the right to “re-gift” any blogola. If you’re not okay with that, please don’t send it. (no, I won’t re-gift opened food) I also keep whatever you send, so if you’re not okay with that, again, please don’t send it.

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Hat tip to Mashable – I found the Zemanta plugin for Wordpress, which is just astonishing. It suggests contextually relevant content from around the web for your blog, all in a useful little sidebar.
Let’s say I’m blogging about Sallie Mae, my archrival. Just by putting those words in my post, their corporate logo and various content on the web appears in the sidebar. Or JP Morgan Chase. Or Citibank.

Add a couple more clicks, and you’re adding blog posts, too. Got an Amazon book recommendation, like Made to Stick by the Heath brothers? Zemanta will let you build links with your affiliate ID with just a couple of clicks.

DAMN cool.

So this morning I sit very carefully at my desk, ensuring that I don’t work on any systems vital to the company, because two hours of sleep makes you exceptionally prone to critical mistakes – you know, the “hey, did I just format the hard drive of our web server?” kind. Making sure that on my docket for the day is nothing mission critical.

However, extreme fatigue does have its merits. I tend to think a lot more creatively and non-linearly when I’m over-tired, because my brain just operates differently in a low-sleep state. Sometimes really neat ideas that I’d never create fully rested come out, and I jot those down. When I’m rested, they can be refined and tuned up, but the raw materials are still good.

That’s the other important thing – overly fatigued essentially brings with it a variant of attention deficit and short term memory loss, so if you have good ideas, it’s super important to be near an input device – phone, keyboard, notepad, etc. – because those ideas will vanish FAST.

Some thoughts on a Wednesday morning.

Profound knowledge, as defined by Anthony Robbins, is knowledge that is quickly and easily transmitted, but life-altering. Once you get it, you can never go back to being the person you used to be. One of my favorite examples of profound knowledge is the rule of thirds in photography.

Look at your viewfinder on your digital camera. Imagine a tic-tac-toe grid on it. Line up your pictures to put the subjects at the intersections of the lines.

Instantly, your photography changes – once you understand the concept, you can’t ever go back to the person you were just moments ago. That’s profound knowledge.

The quotes page is a place where I store the pieces as I find them.

Also check out today’s Financial Aid Podcast 6 page easy guide (trust me, it’s mostly white space) to all the new legislation that President Bush signed into law today. More loopholes than you can shake a stick at, but at least it’ll keep the lights on and the coffee brewing for student lending.

In the world of an information economy, information is effectively free. This, of course, has broad implications for anyone generating intellectual property, such as writers, musicians, and media makers.

Effectively free means this: it is possible to mass produce and mass distribute information at near zero cost, laws and artificial scarcity notwithstanding. If you create a piece of music and record it, once the music is in an MP3 file, the distribution cost is near zero.

If you write a book and the book is released digitally in a PDF, the distribution cost is near zero.

Yes, lawyers can serve cease & desist and lawsuits, but once released, the information tends to remain free, if not necessarily in legally approved distribution channels.

In a world where information is effectively free, where does value come from?

Look to Google and Search Engine Optimization for the answer. In the world of SEO, there are catalogs upon catalogs of tricks you can do to achieve higher rankings when someone Googles for a search term related to your site. How does Google value things in a world where information is free?

By measuring things that are not free.

Google values, for example, domain names. A domain name for any kind of sustained campaign costs money. It is not free, and therefore Google assigns it more weight than, say, what you name individual files on your web site.

Google values inbound links from sites not under your control. Why? Because it takes effort and time – of which money is a proxy for – to establish a lot of inbound links. Inbound links from certain top level domains such as .gov and .edu have more value than inbound links from domains such as .com, .net, and .org, because .gov and .edu domain names are restricted, and the content managers of sites bearing those domains tend to be more selective about who they link to.

Google devalues things that are free, easy, things that require little effort and no commitment. Long strings of file names and directory names carry less value these days than in the early days of search engine optimization.

What things in your world are of value that cannot be digitally replicated? For musicians, their core skill is not the music, the data. It’s the ability to create and perform music, and so the digital files, the recordings of the music may be free, but the performance of concerts are not, nor can the live concert experience be replicated. The sale of a CD is almost a souvenir, a proxy for having been at the live concert event.

For artists, a digital photo can be replicated, but a personalized, autographed print cannot be, at least not easily, quickly, or cheaply.

For people in new media, while the creation of media itself is easily replicated, the community cannot be, as recently discussed in the sale of Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron’s Twitter account. Community and word of mouth are fundamentally built on trust, which is a non-tangible, non-replicable resource. That’s why, as technology and information continue to blossom, things built on assets that are not free, easy, or fast will continue to grow in value – trust, sincerity, honesty, authenticity, experience, emotion.

This is why conferences are so expensive – you can’t replicate face time with digital intermediation. Even with video chat, you’re still not getting the full experience.

If you’re trying to figure out whether a new media outlet, deal, opportunity, or platform is worth your time, effort, and money, evaluate its value based on things you can’t digitally reproduce. You will quickly find what’s worth paying for.

Thoughts:

• It’s sugary.
• It tastes nothing like water, and a lot like Gatorade when you make it from the powder with more water than you should per scoop.
• In looking at the ingredients, the first two ingredients are water and sugar.

Is it good? I suppose if you’re a Powerade/Gatorade drinker, you’ll probably like some of the flavors. Personally, I’m more of a Red Bull/Rock Star fan than Gatorade for sugary drinks, on the premise that if I’m going to suffer the consequences of extra empty calories, I’d better get damn jittery from it, too. If Snapple made a “Closest Legal Alternative to Meth in Fruity Flavors” I’d give that a try, if for no other reason than the product name alone.

As for the antioxidant water? I’m going to stick to regular water now.

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Here’s what you do: find a “hidden gem” blog, someone who you think is writing good stuff, but who has only one or two comments per post. Write a blog post telling us just a little bit about that site, why you like it, who should become a regular reader, etc. Make sure there are TWO links in the post: one to that new site so we can find it, and one back to [chrisbrogan.com].

Actually, despite having published over 1,400 blog posts and 760+ audio podcast episodes, the vast majority of my posts on FinancialAidPodcast.com get zero – yes, zero – comments. I’ve debated for a long time why this might be. Comments are enabled, no registration required, etc. so it’s not necessarily barrier to entry. I think it might be the case that for my audience, it’s perceived as an “expert” blog and therefore audience members are reluctant to contribute, treating it more like an information source than a discussion.

The desired audience is fairly inclusive – students, parents, families, financial aid professionals, and anyone who likes:

• Free stuff
• Job hunting tips
• Personal finance
• and of course, help paying for college

So, Chris Brogan, send over the commenting hordes!

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Consider the bubbles we’ve had:

• Defense spending
• S&L
• Dot-com
• Real estate

Each bubble larger than the last.

It’s like… like the United States has been bar hopping, and the real estate bubble was the final bar before last call. Then someone stood up and yelled “Drinks are on me!” only we don’t know who. Doesn’t matter, drinks are on someone, so drink up!

The credit crisis is the hangover for 37 years of excessive drinking at the fiat currency bar. As the song goes, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here…

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I already take a multivitamin supplement and drink plenty of juice and water (and coffee). Regular exercise is in the mix, too. I can’t take Airborne because I’m allergic to sucralose (nasty swelling rash) – what other tips and tricks do you suggest to fend off travel crud?

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Nope.

Now you can. Go to LinkedIn, make sure you have a public profile set up with a good URL, and then instead of choosing My Blog or My Company, choose Other.

Cha-ching! Link text in your profile from a prominent, trusted domain.

Speaking of which, are we connected on LinkedIn? If not, connect here:

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That said, the show must go on – but how? When donor pools dry up, how do non-profits weather downturns? Here are 5 ideas.

1. Batten down the hatches. Just as every other American individual and business MUST do, non-profits need to be ruthless about cutting costs. Got a photocopier in the office? Unplug it, and ask that people use a scanner and email instead. Enforce 100% lights out at the end of the workday to cut power costs. Reduce or eliminate as many consumable as possible – belt tightening is the rule.

2. Hit up donors sooner rather than later. It’s customary in the non-profit world to ask donations and contributions around the holiday season, but as the economy trends downward, you need to ask now, while there’s still disposable cash. Pick a reason, any reason, to ask for donations. Hitch up to minor but relevant holidays, or an aspect of those holidays, or heck, just manufacture your own holiday, but ask.

3. Increase focus on microdonations. The Internet gives non-profits greater reach at lower cost, more so than ever in history. Leverage that power to focus on building your house list, your potential donor base. This requires some serious heavy lifting in marketing, but as long as you have capable staff, you’re trading time and energy marketing online versus expensive offline marketing. Learn how to find your donors online, and learn how to get small donations from LOTS of people. Be sure to investigate any and all payment options and find the lowest per-transaction costs. Amazon and Google Checkout both offer 100% pass-through of contributions.

4. Build buzz. You’re already doing good work – now get off your duff and start marketing the heck out of your works. The more awareness you can spread about your work, the easier it will be to get critical general operating funds out of donors. Look carefully at how you market your works, and make friends in the PR and marketing fields so that you can ask their advice before launching any kind of campaign.

5. Mind your money. Wherever you’ve got your money parked, be SURE it is safe. If you have general operating funds in anything other than an FDIC insured account, your organization is at risk from a legion of predicted bank failures. Make sure you’re playing it super-safe with the cash this year – know where it is, and know that it’s insured.

With luck, talent, and intelligence, operationally efficient and forward-thinking non-profits should do very well in 2008 as the rest of the pack is slaughtered by the economic sharks in the water. With fewer competitors for donors’ money, the most lean and aggressive non-profits can potentially earn some big donor market share. Good luck!

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A theme that has cropped up in discussion lately about PodCamp is this:

Where do the veterans go to learn new stuff?

PodCamp, BarCamp, NewBCamp, BootCamp – there are so many conferences, sessions, and opportunities for new folks, from Zero to Podcasting at PodCamp Toronto to all of NewBCamp/BootCamp, and it’s heartening to see the new media community welcoming with open arms anyone who wants to learn. New media’s future hinges on the continued generosity of the community, and I hope PodCamp especially continues to be one of the welcome wagons.

That said, where do the veterans go to take their game to the next level? Where can they turn?

To be honest, there isn’t anything for them, not because of a lack of desire, but because being on the frontier means you’re responsible for your own training, your own innovation. You can get together with friends and share what you’ve created, but by and large, innovation is your responsibility.

Sure, I think it would be fantastic to have a 400-level track at PodCamps, and PodCamp organizers would do well to remember that all levels of skill welcome means all levels, including the occasional rocket scientist/trail blazer, or else that occasional rocket scientist has a diminished incentive to contribute.

But beyond that, the innovators are on their own. In the martial arts, one of my teachers, Ken Savage (of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center), compares our head teacher, Mark Davis (of the Boston Martial Arts Center) to a trailblazer at the head of our line, machete in hand, cutting a path so we don’t have to.

Being a trailblazer can mean recognition, thanks, and even fame, but it also means you’re the first guy or gal to step on the snakes, scorpions, and other delights the jungle has in store for you. Veterans of new media need to remember that as well – if you want to continue being a leader, the path never gets easier. Same scorpions, different day.

Where do I personally go to learn? I look at tons of different sources for idea components. For example, I got a thank you email from someone on LinkedIn that had a great idea component in it, something that I’m going to combine with a few other ideas and make even better. New ideas, new insights are all around, if only we’re paying enough attention to grab them as they whiz by. Ideas come from arbitrage – I’ve often quoted Mark Davis’ signature expression, study something old to learn something new. Finally, ideas come from just trying something, watching it flop, finding the parts that did work, and refining it until it does work.

As Thomas Edison said, “I haven’t failed 10,000 times. I have just found 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb.”

Where do YOU get your ideas? Where do YOU go to learn?

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Good try, gang.

Look, a lot has already been said about blogger outreach by better minds than mine.

Here’s where this campaign really fell flat.

First, please, please, please if you’re going to do outreach, at least BCC your list. I’d actually prefer that you “go pro” and use a mailing list service like Blue Sky Factory to manage your mailings, so that you have comprehensive blacklist and other filtering at your fingertips. On those occasions when I need to do outreach, I set up a segmentation that says, “Never, ever send this email to the same address twice”.

Second, put an obvious, functional opt-out in the email.

Third, if you’re going to pitch me, PITCH me. Show me why you deserve an ounce of my time or attention. The email I got had a relatively decent subject line, but a really poor payload. This company wants to promote their musicians to me. Fine and good, I love promoting musicians (like Rich Palmer, Matthew Ebel, Anji Bee, Rebecca Loebe, Black Lab, Natalie Gelman, Rayko KRB, and countless others) and I love hearing new, independent music, but the pitch in this message was about as exciting as getting my grocery bill via email, which is to say not at all. (perhaps you have exciting groceries? I do not)

What would make an effective pitch to me? Well, you could send me a link to an MP3 ( <= free MP3! ) so that I could hear what you have to offer – that’d be a start. Tell me WHY your musicians are so good, and whether or not musicians like to be compared to others, tell me at least who they kind of sound like – for example, Matthew Ebel sounds like the love child of Billy Joel and Ben Folds with a dash of William Shatner from time to time, and an ounce or two of John Mayer.

Marketing music is difficult under the best circumstances, and lord knows I’ve made more than my share of missteps. At least maybe this list of basics will help music marketers who WANT to do outreach be a little more effective.

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Here’s today’s Christopher Penn morning paper. (PDF, 292 kb)

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Combine that with crass commercialism and an attempt to raid your wallet through your heart by major corporations (check the stocks of 1-800-FLOWERS today – ticker: FLWS, FTD ticker: FTD, Red Envelope ticker: REDE) and you have a day I’m not wildly thrilled about.

So let’s rearrange the day of showing love a bit.

Figure out what you’d spend on an average Valentine’s Day among flowers, gifts, dinner, cards, and the other corporate subsidies pop culture asks you to buy. Total all that up, and then make a contribution to your significant other’s favorite charity instead, in their name. If you’re going to spend money today, spend it on something that will show true love – a contribution to an organization that will serve the greater good.

There’s no shortage of charities to choose from, and tons of good causes. Check out Charity Navigator to find efficiency ratings of various charities, to see how your money is used and what percentage of each dollar goes to actually help the people or causes you donated to help. Every non-profit charity with 501(c)(3) status is also required to disclose its IRS 990, so you can inspect for yourself how they use their money.

Make Valentine’s Day about love – love not only for your significant other, but about love for your world, your community, and the greater good. As my teacher Stephen K. Hayes says, there is no greater way to serve yourself and make yourself happier than to help others.

Got a charity you want to promote? Post a link to it in the comments! 

Photo credit: Sister72

Financial Aid Podcast Community Question: Where do you get your beer money?

We’ve talked in the past about Metcalfe’s Law, the idea that in a network, every new member of the network not only derives value from the network, but makes the network as a whole more valuable; the classic example cited is the fax machine. Every fax machine sold increases the value of existing fax machines.

Blogging is one of those Metcalfe applications. Consider this: you’ve got a blog with a decent theme, and on that blog, chances are you have a blogroll or list of friends, sites, and links. (and if you don’t, you might want to consider it) On here, the blogroll is on the right-most navigation bar. The navigation of your blog probably also contains links to other things you care about, such as causes, friends, and even your own stuff on other sites.

Here’s the neat part. Every time I write a blog post, Wordpress creates a new page, with a new URL. On that new page, there are a whole pile of links to other pages on this site and on the blog roll. Every blog post makes preceding blog posts more valuable, and as a bonus, every blog post creates an entirely new page with outbound links to everyone in my blogroll. They all benefit every time I blog. I benefit every time I blog. Blogging is self-reinforcing, and that is one of the features that makes it such a powerful tool.

1. http://www.2centsworth.podshow.com
2. http://www.10minutelessons.com
3. http://www.24stgeorge.com
4. http://www.42minus71.org
5. http://www.88mm.net
6. http://www.abiteofsanity.com
7. http://www.abstrakone.com
8. http://www.abuddhistpodcast.com
9. http://www.aconnector.com
10. http://www.adamcrowe.com
11. http://www.adultchildbio.blogspot.com
12. http://www.afroginthevalley.wordpress.com
13. http://www.aguy.podshow.com
14. http://www.AmateurTraveler.com
15. http://www.amber.tangerinecs.com
16. http://www.amediacirc.us
17. http://www.amystevensonline.com
18. http://www.anjibee.com
19. http://www.answers-for-freelancers.com
20. http://www.artfilmtalk.com
21. http://www.asymmetricbizcult.com
22. http://www.audioattitude.com
23. http://www.audioconnell.com
24. http://www.avahosting.biz
25. http://www.avenuedesignstudios.com
26. http://www.ayearatthewheel.com
27. http://www.babytimeshow.com
28. http://www.backofthebuspodcast.com
29. http://www.baldguyshow.net
30. http://www.barefeetstudios.com
31. http://www.bbluesman.com
32. http://www.behindthebuzz.com
33. http://www.beingamberrhea.com
34. http://www.benjaminbloom.net
35. http://www.beth.typepad.com
36. http://www.biographypodcast.blogspot.com
37. http://www.blademultimedia.com
38. http://www.blog.blubrry.com
39. http://www.blog.cruxmatter.net
40. http://www.blog.ellybabes.com
41. http://www.blog.morgaine-lefaye.net
42. http://www.blog.neilcford.com
43. http://www.blog.roam4free.ie
44. http://www.blog.tartan.pnohosting.ca
45. http://www.blog.zemote.com
46. http://www.bloggerandpodcaster.com
47. http://www.bloggingforbusinessbook.com
48. http://www.blogometer.com
49. http://www.bobgoyetche.com
50. http://www.bostonmediamakers.wordpress.com
51. http://www.brainjam.se
52. http://www.briandigital.com
53. http://www.britneymason.com
54. http://www.bryper.com
55. http://www.BUCKETpodcast.com
56. http://www.callme.jangl.com
57. http://www.carlieflossberg.blogspot.com
58. http://www.carruthk.blogspot.com
59. http://www.catholicjukebox.com
60. http://www.cc-chapman.com
61. http://www.ccadenhead.net
62. http://www.cearum.com
63. http://www.charlotteann.wordpress.com
64. http://www.chelpixie.com
65. http://www.chelpixie.wordpress.com
66. http://www.chrisbrogan..com
67. http://www.chrisbrogan.com
68. http://www.chrishambly.com
69. http://www.christinagreene.com
70. http://www.christopherspenn.com
71. http://www.chrisvanpatten.com
72. http://www.citiizenscoop.co.uk
73. http://www.closetgeekshow.com
74. http://www.cmaccess.net
75. http://www.colorado-bob.blogspot.com
76. http://www.comcast.net
77. http://www.comedy4cast.com
78. http://www.conniebensen.com
79. http://www.conradslater.com
80. http://www.coverville.com
81. http://www.craigcunningham.com
82. http://www.creepysleepy.com
83. http://www.cross-mediaentertainment.com
84. http://www.culinarypodcastnetwork.com
85. http://www.danesecooper.blogs.com
86. http://www.danielho.ca
87. http://www.danieljohnsonjr.com
88. http://www.dave-lucas.blogspot.com
89. http://www.davemadethat.com
90. http://www.davemadethis.com
91. http://www.davidfinch.typepad.com
92. http://www.davidlamorte.com
93. http://www.davidsfinch.com
94. http://www.dayngrzone.blogspot.com
95. http://www.ddraig-goch.blogspot.com
96. http://www.decisionvelocity.mattcharron.com
97. http://www.delarue.net
98. http://www.derrickkwa.blogspot.com
99. http://www.deys.ca
100. http://www.divasdiary.wordpress.com
101. http://www.dougdobbins.com
102. http://www.doughaslam.wordpress.com
103. http://www.doyouknowclarence.com
104. http://www.drinksareonme.net
105. http://www.ductapeguy.net
106. http://www.eaonpritchard.blogspot.com
107. http://www.eaonpritchard.com
108. http://www.EdRobertsBlog.com
109. http://www.education.lkrdesign.com
110. http://www.eventsmedia.blogspot.com
111. http://www.exposay.net
112. http://www.fearlesscooking.tv
113. http://www.financialaidpodcast.com
114. http://www.fixionmedia.com
115. http://www.flacklife.blogspot.com
116. http://www.fleetstreetpr.com
117. http://www.fmstudio.com
118. http://www.fogview.com
119. http://www.fruitbat.wordpress.com
120. http://www.fullofsecrets.com
121. http://www.geeknewscentral.com
122. http://www.gentillygirl.com
123. http://www.gildedfork.com
124. http://www.gischeleman.com
125. http://www.glitchnyc.com
126. http://www.glo_soft@rediffmail.com
127. http://www.gnmhealth.com
128. http://www.googlesystem.blogspot.com
129. http://www.grasshopperfactory.com
130. http://www.grassshackroad.com
131. http://www.grinandgrumble.com
132. http://www.gypsybandito.com
133. http://www.harddrivelife.com
134. http://www.hawaiistories.com
135. http://www.hughmcguire.net
136. http://www.hyperlinkguerrilla.com
137. http://www.idreamincolors.com
138. http://www.ifnotnow.net
139. http://www.imakethings.com
140. http://www.infocult.typepad.com
141. http://www.inkndoodles.com
142. http://www.innovationcreation.us
143. http://www.inoveryourhead.net
144. http://www.insomniaradio.net
145. http://www.intralog.nl
146. http://www.ismckenzie.com
147. http://www.jackhodgson.com
148. http://www.jaffejuice.com
149. http://www.jakobdk.com
150. http://www.jaymoonah.com
151. http://www.jeffcaylor.com
152. http://www.jeffcutler.com
153. http://www.jeffmcneill.com
154. http://www.jennifernavarrete.com
155. http://www.jenpirante.blogspot.com
156. http://www.jeremyvaught.com
157. http://www.jerryharrington.net
158. http://www.jerseyjamcast.blogspot.com
159. http://www.jerseytoddshow.com
160. http://www.JibberJobber.com
161. http://www.johnfederico.brandbrains.net
162. http://www.jonnygoldstein.com
163. http://www.justindraeger.wordpress.com
164. http://www.justinkownacki.blogspot.com
165. http://www.justinrussell.com
166. http://www.kcardoza.com
167. http://www.keeeeez.com
168. http://www.kennedy-spaien.com
169. http://www.killerintuition.com
170. http://www.kino-eye.com
171. http://www.knowmore.com
172. http://www.labsji.wordpress.com
173. http://www.ldpodcast.com
174. http://www.ldpodcast.wordpress.com
175. http://www.leesabarnes.com
176. http://www.Lenedgerly
177. http://www.LenEdgerly.com
178. http://www.LessonsInViolenceEvasion.com
179. http://www.levdir.deviantart.com
180. http://www.librariesbuildcommunities.org
181. http://www.lifespringonline.com
182. http://www.linkedin.com
183. http://www.lisaamorao.wordpress.com
184. http://www.lofistl.com
185. http://www.logos.blip.tv
186. http://www.LookingOutTheWindow.com
187. http://www.loopipes.wordpress.com
188. http://www.loosechange911.com
189. http://www.Lx7.ca
190. http://www.lynetteradio.com
191. http://www.macbikegeek.wordpress.com
192. http://www.macqueen.com
193. http://www.managingthegray.com
194. http://www.markblevis.com
195. http://www.marketingovercoffee.com
196. http://www.marketingprofs.com
197. http://www.martinstabe.com
198. http://www.matthewebel.com
199. http://www.mattsearles.com
200. http://www.maxkaizen.com
201. http://www.mcalearmarketing.com
202. http://www.mcandre.wordpress.com
203. http://www.me.dm
204. http://www.mediajoltz.com
205. http://www.metrohair.blogspot.com
206. http://www.midvaleschool.blogspot.com
207. http://www.mikebellina.com
208. http://www.mikeshotdish.com
209. http://www.mikewills.name
210. http://www.minutetech.blogspot.com
211. http://www.mobasoft.com
212. http://www.MoneyPowerWisdom.com
213. http://www.murphyssaloon.com
214. http://www.musicface.com
215. http://www.myeastbayagent.com
216. http://www.myspace.com
217. http://www.myvestafoundation.org
218. http://www.nantekoto.com
219. http://www.NatalieGelman.com
220. http://www.neilgorman.org
221. http://www.NewCommRoad.com
222. http://www.newmediava.com
223. http://www.neworleansvfp.ning.com
224. http://www.ngo2point0.com
225. http://www.noebie.com
226. http://www.normanhuelsman.com
227. http://www.notsoup.com
228. http://www.odmcast.com
229. http://www.pardonthedisruption.com
230. http://www.personalbrandingblog.com
231. http://www.peteraudioconnell.com
232. http://www.photography.ca
233. http://www.pierromarie.wordpress.com
234. http://www.plannineprint.com
235. http://www.podcampboston.org
236. http://www.podcampchi.com
237. http://www.podcampcityonline.info
238. http://www.podcampnyc.org
239. http://www.podcastfresh.com
240. http://www.podcasthotel.com
241. http://www.podcasting.ie
242. http://www.podcastingnews.com
243. http://www.podcastmike.com
244. http://www.PodcastPickle.com
245. http://www.podcastusermagazine.com
246. http://www.podonomics.com
247. http://www.polymorphous.net
248. http://www.pravdam.com
249. http://www.procrasticast.com
250. http://www.ps3.thepodcastnetwork.com
251. http://www.pulverblog.pulver.com
252. http://www.purplestripe.com
253. http://www.quebecbalado.com
254. http://www.RADIO.NakedBrainStudios.com
255. http://www.ranablog.com
256. http://www.rawvoice.com
257. http://www.reachingforlucidity.blogspot.com
258. http://www.reachingforlucidity.com
259. http://www.realestatecafe.blogs.com
260. http://www.redmonk.com
261. http://www.ReelSolid.TV
262. http://www.remarkablepalate.blogspot.com
263. http://www.remarkablymark.blogspot.com
264. http://www.rexblog.com
265. http://www.richpalmer.com
266. http://www.richsouth.pluggedinmac.com
267. http://www.rickmahn.com
268. http://www.rluxemburg.com
269. http://www.robhatch.com
270. http://www.robsuarez.com
271. http://www.rockandrollgeek.com
272. http://www.ronaldlewis.com
273. http://www.roninmarketeer.com
274. http://www.ruttersramblings.com
275. http://www.ryze.com
276. http://www.savemanessa.wordpress.com
277. http://www.schoolofpodcasting.com
278. http://www.scobleizer.com
279. http://www.scottmonty.com
280. http://www.scottsigler.net
281. http://www.shainemata.net
282. http://www.shashi.name
283. http://www.shelbinator.com
284. http://www.SKYDIVERGIRLS.com
285. http://www.skyelemmon.com
286. http://www.slbizreview.com
287. http://www.smallbizsurvival.com
288. http://www.socialcapital.wordpress.com
289. http://www.socialham.com
290. http://www.socialmediaguy.com
291. http://www.socialset.net
292. http://www.somethingtobedesired.com
293. http://www.sooz.com
294. http://www.spaetzel.com
295. http://www.spartasuccess.com
296. http://www.spirited786.blogspot.com
297. http://www.sriram-krishnan.com
298. http://www.stevegarfield.com
299. http://www.steverunner.com
300. http://www.steves2cents.blogspot.com
301. http://www.strengthradio.com
302. http://www.sufficientthrust.com
303. http://www.superflippy.net
304. http://www.superspud.com
305. http://www.synchronis.tv
306. http://www.tartanstories.com
307. http://www.tastyblogsnack.com
308. http://www.tautoko.info
309. http://www.teachingforthefuture.com
310. http://www.techchris.com
311. http://www.techmgr.net
312. http://www.techwag.com
313. http://www.theadvertisinglunatic.com
314. http://www.theconnectedworld.net
315. http://www.TheDivaRockin.com
316. http://www.theengagingbrand.com
317. http://www.thehotiron.com
318. http://www.thekillerattitude.com
319. http://www.themilitiagroup.com
320. http://www.themshow.com
321. http://www.themudthebloodthebeer.com
322. http://www.theobstructionist.com
323. http://www.thesanitycheck.com
324. http://www.thescenezine.com
325. http://www.thetrendjunkie.com
326. http://www.thevesuviusgroup.com
327. http://www.thewavingcat.com
328. http://www.thewritingonthewal.net
329. http://www.thinkfuture.com
330. http://www.thinknola.com
331. http://www.thrumygreeneyes.wordpress.com
332. http://www.tommyvallier.com
333. http://www.trafcom.typepad.com
334. http://www.trafcomnews.com
335. http://www.TruffleMedia.com
336. http://www.truthseekerscast.com
337. http://www.tubemogul.com
338. http://www.twistimage.com
339. http://www.twitter.com
340. http://www.twitterforum.com
341. http://www.twitterhacks.com
342. http://www.untwistedvortex.com
343. http://www.vaspersthegrate.blogspot.com
344. http://www.vibrantmind.typepad.com
345. http://www.virtualthirst.com
346. http://www.votethevid.com
347. http://www.whoisjonray.com
348. http://www.wickedgoodpodcast.com
349. http://www.wickedpixiemedia.com
350. http://www.wickedsmartwoman.wordpress.com
351. http://www.wiser-rocker.com
352. http://www.wordpress.suzemuse.com
353. http://www.wordsushi.com
354. http://www.worldofbernie.com
355. http://www.ww.grassshackroad.com
356. http://www.www,mothpod.com
357. http://www.xanga.com
358. http://www.yourstorys.com
359. http://www.zaldor.com
360. http://www.zillowblog.com

Thanks again, everyone!

The first impression I have of Chris Brogan is from a presentation at BarCamp Boston. Actually, the first impression was watching him try to record a presentation by holding an iRiver 1 inch from a speaker cabinet, but beyond that, he did a great presentation on building content networks. One of the takeaway moments of that presentation was when he took a copy of the Boston Globe he’d stolen from his neighbor’s driveway and tore it up in front of the crowd into individual articles. He handed out an article to each person and said, “This is blogging.”

Each person’s blog is, in this model, a newspaper column. People don’t pay to read individual newspaper columnists, in his presentation, people pay for the newspaper, and the ads in the Boston Globe are no different than AdWords or banner ads, really.

What Google Reader does with its shared items and shared items of friends is no less than let you publish your own newspaper. You incorporate the authors you read and like into your own reading, which is your field reporting staff, and then hand-pick all the best stuff out for your friends and the world. That’s the distilled newspaper, YOUR newspaper, the newspaper that you’d gladly pay for if someone actually published it for you. It’s your news.

Your Google Reader Shared Items is every bit a part of your personal brand and worldview as any other form of media you publish. Some people might call it reblogging or lazy man’s blogging, but the reality is that it’s as much work to edit a newspaper as it is to write for one, and Google Reader Shared Items is a newspaper with you as the editor. What you choose to share reflects on your personal brand and what you think is important in the world. Want to check out a new employee? See what’s in their Shared Items. Want to see what’s on your boss’ mind? You know which newsstand to hit.

What’s in the headlines of Your Daily News?

photo courtesy of Mr. Brogan’s Flickr feed. 

It’s absolutely no secret that the US economy is headed to hell in a handbag, and honestly, it’s overdue. We’ve spent the last 20 years inflating one bubble after another – defense in the 80s, tech in the 90s, real estate in this decade – and the time for another correction has come. That said, while I believe that many of the large financial institutions need to get their houses in order and take their knocks, I also desire no harm to come to my family, friends, and community. Here are some thoughts about how to weather the storm and even prosper during it.

First and foremost, get your own house in order. Figure out exactly where you are financially, and do your best to clean house. Cut down discretionary expenses as much as you can without turning to a miserable quality of life. You -must- have three months’ mandatory expense funding set aside, or as close to it as you can. That will give you a cushion of three months to figure out next steps in the case of job loss.

Having a strong personal network is more important than ever. Not just a strong network, but a large one, one in which you participate and try to help as many people as you can and ask them to do the same. With so many social networks and digital communities, this is easier than ever. A strong network will provide you with information you’ll need to make decisions, and will also provide you with leads if you need a job, etc. as long as you bring as much or more value to the people in your network. The key is to get building as fast as possible. Reconnect with old friends, establish new friends. Attend conferences and other meetups, such as PodCamp, BarCamp, MacCamp, etc. that are free or low cost. Look for opportunities to help others.

I strongly recommend Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone, as a good guide on network building.

Build a strong personal brand. Having a personal brand that’s established, clear, and unambiguous gives you the advantage of being memorable. If you can speak confidently about something you’re an expert in, you’re heads and shoulders above most people who can barely put together two words about themselves. That will translate into more opportunities for you. Be clear about yourself, about your goals, and about your passions, and you will build presence.

I strongly recommend Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation blog for more reading on personal brand.

A downturn is also a crowd thinner – if you’re able to weather the storm, once it’s over you’ll find the playing field emptier than normal. Strategically speaking, as competitors go bust during a downturn, if you’re able to weather it, you’ll pick up marketshare and when business trends upwards again, you’ll be in a much stronger position.

What things will you do to weather the economic downturn?

2008 is going to be an interesting year. Economically, it’s going to be a rough ride. You know this, and so does everyone else.

Oddly enough, this is kind of comforting. I wish for peace, health, happiness, and prosperity for all my friend, but a dose of economic sourness for the world as a whole is a needed thing to restore balance after the past few years of excess. I also firmly and wholly believe in my friends and their abilities to the extent that in rough times, their abilities and capabilities will shine through.

When it’s noon, everything looks bright.

When it’s midnight, you will see who really shines on their own.

I believe in you, my friends. Let’s shine!

I did a few small things here and there on MySpace to aid in the search, but what I thought was most interesting was the contrast between the “Dig a Tech Girl/Guy” debate yesterday and finding a lost person today.

How many people who ardently twittered about the hot guy/hot gal of social media equally ardently twittered to help make a real impact in the life of someone in our new media community? How many people brought the discussion of ways and ideas to help Chris Wilson out in the forefront of conversation?

Which mattered more – who’s a hottie, or who’s in need of help?

To those of you who embraced Chris Wilson’s plea for help as a cause worth promoting, thank you from a fellow new media professional who also cares, and from someone who believes that the power we wield in new media MUST be used to make a difference. Your support, great or small, ALWAYS makes a difference.

If you want to continue helping, Chris Wilson has a blog with updates at SaveManessa.wordpress.com. I’ve got a MySpace page at MySpace.com/savemanessa – please contribute what assistance you can, be it awareness or feet on the ground.

To those of you who embraced the hot guy/hot girl contest promotion but not the help-a-friend-in-need…

This afternoon, there was a healthy discussion on Twitter about the perception of women in technology and whether lowest-common-denominator entertainment, be it Dig a Tech Girl or Clash of the Choirs, demeaned women by focusing on physical attributes as the key measurement of their worth. This is not a debate for this blog post, and plenty of others can argue the merits far better than me.

What this is a blog post about is a reflection of something Julien Smith said at our PodCamp Boston 2 session: we live in the age of the attention economy. With so many channels of media, with so many things competing for the same 24 hours, anything you want to promote has to be marketed for the attention economy.

Whether a woman’s appearance is a factor at all in her worth is not the heart of the debate. The true heart is the attention economy, and the reality is that appearances garner attention very quickly, if fleetingly. That’s human nature, the way we’re wired and the way societies build on top of those fundamentals. If you want to capture attention, market with any strong emotion. It just so happens that physical attractiveness is the easiest, lowest cost, and lowest mental processing load factor on which you can compete for attention.

If there can be a solution to the issue of using attractiveness and surface traits for marketing purposes, it has to be that the stakeholders who want to foment change MUST deliver competing content that is more compelling, more powerful, more engaging, more attention-grabbing and attention-holding than lowest common denominator content. If you want lofty social values to eclipse boobies, then you’d better package and market those values in a way that makes them highly desirable content to consume.

I had this discussion recently with a teacher of mine, discussing how to combat negative comments and slander on the internet. My final point was that if you don’t like some of the content online, you can either struggle in vain to have it removed or changed, or you can flood the internet with the content that YOU want to have distributed, making it more compelling than the garbage, and let the garbage just wither from lack of attention.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If you want to displace lowest common denominator entertainment, have something ready to take its place. The beauty of new media is that to get more of what YOU want, all you have to do is create it.

For those of you who may not know, Bertucci’s is an italian-style restaurant chain of mostly pizza and pasta here in the US. Their hallmarks have traditionally been brick-oven roasted everything, but one of their lesser acknowledged trademarks is a delicious pasta sauce that goes well on just about any plain carbohydrate.

I’ve been trying to replicate its characteristics, which are:

• Sweet without being sugary
• Savory without being hearty (hearty = beef stew, french onion soup, etc.)
• Tangy without being acidic
• Bright, vivid red

Over the past three years, I’ve asked personal chefs and experts, as well as my overlord, Google, and no one’s had a satisfactory answer. I’ve tried to achieve sweet, but that leads to sugary more often than not. Tangy meant everything from vinegars to citrus juices, and it always came out like acid. Savory usually ended up with lots of carmelized vegetables in it – tasty, but not the goal.

Well, tonight was the accidental breakthrough. Here’s what seems to be the closest thing to a clone recipe.

1. Start with a large can of crushed tomatoes. Buy good quality, and buy canned, as canned tomatoes are actually fresher than anything you’re going to get at the store during the off-season. Obviously, if you have access to perfectly ripe tomatoes that are locally grown, go for it, but there’s no such creature in Boston in late November that’s natural. Open the can and toss in 2 teaspoons of sugar and a quarter teaspoon of salt. Stir, then let it sit for as long as you can. Ideally, if you can prep the can in the morning for that evening’s dinner, awesome. Even just 5 minutes is better than nothing, though.

2. In a non-stick saucepan (the non-stick is important!) add four tablespoons of the tomatoes (try to make it mostly chunks) plus a quarter teaspoon of garlic, and a teaspoon of olive oil. Start over 33% heat (on my stove, there are numbers 1 – 6, and I did this at 2, 6 being hottest) and cook until the water is driven off from the tomatoes. Stir a lot.

3. When the water is gone and the tomatoes are pasty, turn up the heat until the garlic mixed with the tomatoes changes color and darkens a little. It’s more than okay at this point if the fringes of tomato residue on the sides of the pan get toasty. Stir a lot, scraping the sides of the saucepan to get any toasty residue back towards the bottom.

4. When the garlic changes color to a darker shade OR the tomatoes are appreciably darker – whichever comes first, throw the rest of the can in. Stir like crazy. Add a quarter teaspoon cracked black pepper and a quarter teaspoon of sweet basil, dried.

5. Crank up the heat to 100% until the stirred pasta sauce boils, then turn it down to 50%; most of the water in the can will surface to the top. Cook with the lid mostly on (letting vapor escape) for 15 minutes.

At the end of the process, you’ll have a tomato sauce that tastes remarkably like Bertucci’s, close enough ideally to dissuade you from dropping $15$20 for a meal that costs a lot less to prepare at home.

One last secret of Bertucci’s is that the pasta is cooked al dente, or somewhat chewy. Whatever the directions are on the box of pasta, chop about a minute off the cooking time and you’ll have roughly al dente pasta. Al dente is important for two reasons: first, the pasta is a different texture, not mushy, and second, there’s still a fair amount of water in the pasta sauce. Cooking it al dente will let the pasta absorb a good portion of that water when it’s mixed together.

What I do typically is take the pasta as it reaches al dente, drain it, toss it in a large bowl, throw all the sauce on top of it, and stir for 5 minutes with a big spoon. This lets the pasta absorb excess water from the sauce and ensures that it’s evenly coated.

Give this a try and let me know how it works for you!

Also see this blog post about 5 easy ways to win at pasta for more pasta tips.

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com

I’ve been on the road a heck of a lot lately, getting to meet lots of interesting people, talking about new media. Ever since September, it’s been go-go-go and I’m grateful for a pause until spring. In order:

- NASFAA
- Podcasters Across Borders
- PodCamp Philly
- Emerson College
- Bentley College
- NASFAA private engagement
- PodCamp Boston
- MASFAA
- SREB GoAlliance

There have been a surprising number of commonalities during the trips; at each location, I’ve had the opportunity to speak publicly about new media – podcasting, blogging, social networks, and much more. Some of the commonalities of the audiences:

1. At least 50% of the audience has no real mental framework to even begin assessing the worth of new media. They know the buzzwords from mainstream media, but are unsure of how all the pieces fit together.

2. Virtually 100% of the audience is very, very, very interested in new media in one or more aspects. SREB brought me in principally to speak about social networks. MASFAA brought me in to talk about podcasting. The desire and interest to learn more about new media is very strong and growing.

3. Analogies to existing mental frameworks are critical to understanding how to explain new media channels to people new to the world of new media. Some of the explanations I’ve used:

- Blogs are newspaper columns written by columnists… without the rest of the newspaper. Hat tip to Chris Brogan for the seed idea on this one.
- Audio podcasts are downloadable internet radio shows.
- Video podcasts are downloadable internet TV shows.
- Social networks are a cross between virtual conferences and virtual water coolers.

When put in at least a semblance of a mental framework, it’s been my experience that audiences are more easily able to change aspects of an existing idea rather than try to form a completely new one. Downloadable internet radio isn’t quite right (it ignores RSS, subscription mechanisms, etc.) but it’s close enough that people can make adjustments to their internal pictures and sounds rather than create new ones.

4. People have no idea regional new media communities exist. For example, SREB brought me into Atlanta to speak, but there’s a huge blog and podcast community here – heck, there was a PodCamp here, so the community exists. I would love to be able to travel to each of the cities I have been to this past year and help them sign up for a PodCamp; because each city has had one (Atlanta, Boston, DC). That, I think, would go a long way towards not only making PodCamps more local, but also getting new media producers connected more tightly with their communities.

Travel will pick up in the spring again, but for now I’m happy for a couple of months of hibernation and family-only travel. Thanks to everyone who requested me as a public speaker at all the recent events lately – I am grateful for the chances to serve your communities.

One of my fondest memories of PodCamp Boston 2 was sitting at lunch on Sunday talking with one of my martial arts instructors, Dennis Mahoney, about profound knowledge and Sisyphus vs. stairs. I’m constantly in search of profound knowledge, which, as Anthony Robbins defines it, is knowledge that once you understand it, makes an immediate impact and difference in your life.

Sisyphus, for those who slept through mythology, was a king punished for trickery by the gods to a hellish fate: push a large rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down, and be forced to repeat that task for eternity.

Most people’s lives can be described as Sisyphean. They wake up, go to work, come home, drink and watch TV, fall asleep, and repeat the next day until one day when they don’t wake up any more. Many activities are the same – working out, for example, is Sisyphean. You benefit as long as you keep pushing, but the moment you stop, the boulder starts to roll down hill.

Stepping up is different. Profound knowledge enables stepping up. Once you understand something, once you grasp profound knowledge, you can’t go back to the person you used to be. You are forever changed, forever better, and nothing except extreme forgetfulness can ever force you to step back.

The example I cite often is the rule of thirds in photography. Look through your camera viewfinder, draw a tic-tac-toe grid on it, and position your subjects at the intersections of the vertical and horizontal lines. Immediately, anyone who doesn’t understand this technique will take better photographs if they practice it. There’s of course still tons to learn, from lighting to composition to aperture, etc. but just this one piece of profound knowledge changes you forever, and you can’t go back.

What are you doing in life that is Sisyphean, and how can you convert more of your life from pushing boulders to stepping up, making breakthroughs? What profound knowledge have you acquired in your life that you can share here in the comments?

Moral hazard refers to the prospect that a party insulated from risk (such as through insurance) will be less concerned about the negative consequences of the risk than they otherwise might be; for example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking the car even though locking the car is a simple risk reduction strategy. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution in a transaction does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency or incentive to act less carefully than would otherwise be the case, leaving another party in the transaction to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions.

Moral hazard goes by another common name – rewarding behaviors with an outcome that’s opposite the goals you want to achieve. See also mixed messages, mixed signals, and rewarding stupidity. The most prominent example of moral hazard I can think of is an electorate that was tired of the Iraq war re-electing the president, thereby reinforcing behaviors it didn’t want.

I mention this because a number of times during this past weekend, the topic of giver’s gain came up. Give to get, give, etc., and the only caution I would mention is to keep moral hazard in mind. Give to get, but make sure that you’re doing so for the right reasons and not providing an incentive for unwanted behaviors.

… with Tim Bourquin’s Podcast Expo coming up, I’ve gotten no less than six emails in the past week (names withheld to protect the guilty) asking me either what I thought of the ADM and APOMP, ADM vs. APOMP, etc., both as a podcaster and as that PodCamp guy along with Mr. Brogan.

Short version: I’m waiting to see. Until I get a chance to study what these two organizations are doing, I can’t offer a valid opinion. I do think podcasting needs standards, but I also think podcasting needs to move away from the pageviews/downloads mindset and towards metrics that count – funded student loans for me, maybe speaking gigs for Mitch Joel, maybe Webinar opportunities for Bryan Person, etc. At the end of the day, whose name will be on the paycheck or accounts receivables?

Ultimately, if podcasting is to be a valid vehicle for business, it needs to have more than just eyeballs as a metric. The last time folks tried that was 1999, and we all know how that ended.

Frankly, I really worry when the TSA doesn’t pull me aside and search all my belongings. If I were a TSA employee and saw the stuff I carry when I travel, I’d probably request a background check and fingerprints.

On my most recent trip to PodCamp Philly, my luggage contained:

• A 750 GB external hard drive plus firewire cables and AC adapter
• A Logitech MM50 media player plus cabling, case, and remote
• Two sets of headphones, one noise cancelling, plus battery chargers for them
• A Nikon D40 plus USB cables and battery charger
• A Sanyo VPC CG65 plus cables and battery charger
• A MacBook Pro plus cabling
• A 5 GB iPod plus dock cable, AC adapter, and USB
• An M-Audio Microtrack plus adapter and charger
• An Audio Technica PRO/24 condenser mic plus cabling and batteries
• A Samson C01U large diaphragm condenser mic plus cabling
• An Airport Express wireless access point plus Ethernet cable
• Several Ethernet cables
• Lots of USB to mini-USB cables
• A Nokia N91 phone plus data cable, car charger, and desktop charger
• Two USB card readers plus cabling
• A Plantronic bluetooth headset plus charger

I worry when security looks at all of that in the X-Ray (because I don’t check the luggage – it’s all a carry-on) machine and doesn’t wonder what the heck I’m doing. And all of that, by the way, weighs only 38 pounds.

Lots of folks today remembering, looking back at September 11, 2001, six years ago. Remembering what was.

Remember also who you were and how much you’ve changed, what powers you have now that were unthinkable back then.

In 2001, there was no podcasting. Blogging was relatively limited.

In 2001, there was no Twitter, and IM presence was silo’ed heavily.

In 2001, there was no Flickr. No YouTube. No Blip.tv. No TubeMogul.

In 2001, there was no Facebook. No MySpace.

The reach, the powers, the abilities you have as a digitally connected human being six years later VASTLY eclipse what you could do in 2001. You have at your fingertips more tools, more methods, more strategies for communicating and sharing with your world than ever before, more ways to tell your story and experience the stories of others.

You have the power to change the world.

Fundamentalism, be it neoconservative ideology, radical Islam, or Jerry Falwell (how’s the temperature down there, buddy?) requires an absence of knowledge. It requires an absence of differing points of view, a willful deprivation of any information that does not conform to a single party line. Now more than ever you have the ability to engage those around you and share your knowledge, share your stories, and in doing so chip away at fundamentalism.

If you lament 9/11 and what has happened since, commit ever more strongly to using the tools of new media to make the world and your community a better place. Only together, through our direct connections to each other and to the world around us, can we defuse the potency of fundamentalism.

How do you get started?

As my good friend Chris Brogan says, “Just press record.”

Last year, 19 close friends and colleagues contributed $2,010 towards leukemia and lymphoma research. This year, my wife and I are walking again in the Boston Common to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Research program. What’s being researched? This caught my eye:

Multiple myeloma is a lethal malignancy for which cure remains elusive. Stem cell transplantation results in improved disease free survival but ultimately fails to prevent recurrence. A promising area of research is the use of cancer vaccines to educate the immune system to target and eliminate tumor cells. Studies demonstrate that the immune system is particularly sensitive to cancer vaccines following stem cell transplantation. We have developed a novel tumor vaccine involving the fusion of potent immune stimulating cells known as dendritic cells (DC) with a patient’s own tumor cells. The vaccine presents a wide array of tumor proteins to the immune system. Laboratory studies have shown that DC/myeloma fusions stimulate lymphocytes to recognize and kill myeloma cells.

A lot of the time, pleas for donations and contributions go the human route – here’s little Johnny who needs to be saved, please open your hearts and wallets. I call Bravo Sierra on that – it’s nice, but this shows you how your money is being used.

If you’re not biotech minded, cancer researchers are looking at treating cancer like the flu or any other communicable disease, using the body’s own immune system to fight tumors, rather than just pump someone full of drugs and hope it takes. How cool is that? Going with nature and natural defense mechanisms rather than trying to sidestep them.

Please continue to support innovative research (which will in turn save little Johnny) like this with your generous contribution to Light the Night by clicking here.

So, in no particular order:

• John Buckley
• Linda Mills
• Simon Toon
• Phil Campbell
• Dean Whitbread

If you’re in the UK and are free 1 September and 2 September, stop on by PodCamp UK and celebrate the day after Blog Day 2007!

Tags: blogday blogday2007

John Wall, host of the M Show and co-host of the best marketing podcast ever made in a Dunkin Donuts, tagged me for Jeff Pulver’s blog day. Since it’s been weighing on my mind lately, here are 5 finance and economics blogs that you should read:

1. Calculated Risk. A blog talking about economics and what’s going on behind the scenes of the world’s economy.

2. Financial Armageddon. Naysayers and pessimism prevail, but if you aren’t reading, you aren’t getting the whole story behind derivatives and hedge funds. These guys pegged The Street for major upheaval way before CNBC.

3. Housing Panic. Keep up on the latest housing bubble news, snark included.

4. The Oil Drum. Thinking about oil? Worried about energy? Thinking about the future? Start here.

5. Freakonomics, the Blog. Economists outside economics makes for fun reading.

I’d also recommend strongly that you plug Bloomberg on the Economy into your MP3 player of choice as soon as possible. And if you can watch Jim Cramer, you should.

Five Bloggers to participate:

Jon Rudy
Donna Papacosta
Bryan Person
Julien Smith
Julia Roy

Tag: blogday2007

Christopher Alexander, in his seminal work, The Timeless Way of Building, makes the point that how we use a space defines the space. Put a bunch of benches in rows in a long rectangular room with a pulpit up front and you have a church. Put a bench on a lawn in the middle of some greenery and you have a park. You’ll get variations, of course, but the function defines the space.

So it goes with social networks, and how you use them. Facebook is a social space, used to develop and grow community, but the odds of you getting data out of it are very, very small. They rigidly enforce the walled garden on data, so for managing contacts and relationships in the sense of a CRM, Facebook wasn’t built for that. LinkedIn is both a resume manager and a CRM of sorts. You can push and pull data from LinkedIn with great ease, but its interactive capabilities for things like discussions, polls, and community activities are very poor.

To force LinkedIn to become a community or Facebook to become a CRM would be futile – each has its purpose, and you need both, at least from my perspective as an online marketer. If you have a list of email addresses and incomplete contact information, nothing will help verify and clean that list faster than LinkedIn – but if you want to create forums for the people on that list to have a conversation, Facebook is the place. If you want to market music or media online, MySpace for all its flaws is still the best place to be, as I’m discovering marketing my Student Loan Radio music podcast.

And if you, like me, are tasked with doing it all for a company or organization, you’d better have a flag planted in the soil at each place, and have appropriate media deliverables for each.

1. I have almost as much audio as video, disk space wise. I listen to lots of audio.

2. I have actually paid for some of Apple’s games, silly as they are. Nothing kills off 3 minutes in line at a store like Zuma or Bejeweled. I’m tempted to buy the billiards one next.

3. I listen to LOTS of motion picture scores and soundtracks. I have The Crow, Batman Begins, Superman, Star Wars, and anything else that sounds like John Williams.

4. I listen to LOTS of motivation/inspiration stuff too. I have Tom Hopkins sales training, Tony Robbins, Richard Bandler, and those sorts of folks.

5. I have an entire album of Tibetan music from Lama Tashi of the Drepung Loseling Monastery. It’s interesting.

6. I own tons of podsafe music, albums that I’ve either bought or been sent. Just about anything that Matthew Ebel has published (willingly or not – I have some rehearsal outtakes in there), Rayko KRB, Anji Bee, Rich Palmer, Rebecca Loebe, Michelle Cummings, Black Lab, iscintilla, Uncle Seth, Rob Costlow, and tons of concerts and things I’ve recorded over the years.

7. Almost all the video I have is stuff I’ve transcoded from iMovie, stuff I’ve made. I don’t watch many video podcasts because I don’t have time. I can listen on the commute, but not watch.

8. Every six months or so, I dump all my subscriptions to podcasts. Delete them. I then re-add any that I can remember. If I can’t remember it, chances are I wasn’t listening to it anyway.

On this twist of 8 things, tell me 8 things about your media collection, Steve Garfield, CC Chapman, Matthew Ebel, Michelle Wolverton, Chris Brogan, Jeff Pulver, and Karen Cardoza.

• Kodak DX6490
• Canon SD450
• Nikon Coolpix L2
• JVC PV-GS120
• Sharp something or other
• Sanyo VPC-CG65
• Nokia N91

On the bright side, they all work. One of these days, I’ll open a used camera store or something.

How much fully functional but not often used stuff do you have laying around?

SELECT DISTINCT `comment_author` , `comment_author_url`
FROM wp_comments
ORDER BY `comment_author` ASC

I stuffed the output into Excel, did a little cleanup, and here we are. Thanks to everyone who has participated in the past few months to make this blog what it is.

Updated: The DoFollow Plugin is also enabled. Google Juice for everyone!

• Aaron Burcell
• abstrakONE.com :: Jason Tucker – Web Developer, Designer, Systems Administrator – Personal website of a geek dad
• Adam Broitman
• Adri
• AJ – BaldGuyShow
• Alan Gutierrez
• Alex Williams
• Amber
• Amber
• Amy
• Andrew Pennebaker
• Andy Kaufman
• AndyCast Andy
• anji bee
• Annette sandberg
• Auto Twit(ter)? « mon petit web – chindogu
• Ava CoOrganizer of Podcamp City Online.info
• Ava of Avahosting
• Ava of Avahosting
• Be a Lover / Be a Hater
• Becky McCray
• Bengt
• Bernie Goldbach
• Bill Cammack
• Bill Deys
• bill streeter
• Blogging, podcasting, twittering etc as Superhero Power : Cross-Media/Transmedia Entertainment
• Bob Goyetche
• Bringing Social Media to the Masses– or Vice-Versa « Gischeleman’s Blog
• Britney Mason
• Britneymason
• Bryan Alexander
• Bryan Person, Bryper.com
• Bryce Moore
• Bryce Moore, A Bite of Sanity
• BUCKET Corey
• Bum Rush the Charts Post-Factum: Who are your faveorite indy musicians? « Gischeleman’s Blog
• C.C.
• C.C. Chapman
• C.C. Chapman
• Carin DeMayo Wall
• Char
• Char
• Charles Cadenhead
• Chef Mark
• Chef Mark
• chelpixie
• Chip Griffin
• Chris
• Chris (Amateur Traveler podcast)
• Chris Brogan…
• Chris Hambly
• Christopher Johnston
• Christopher Penn Observes Stockholm
• Christopher S. Penn
• Christopher S. Penn ?Ǭª Blog Archive ?Ǭª How to make custom Twitter groups « A Frog in the Valley Internet Stream Pulse
• Clarence
• Clarence
• Clinton
• Clinton
• COLORADO BOB
• Community Matters « Parent’s Eye View
• conradslater
• Courtney
• Craig A. Cunningham
• Dale Cruse
• Dan
• Dan Gorgone
• Dan Schawbel
• Danese Cooper
• Dani
• Daniel Ho
• Daniel Johnson Jr
• Daniel Johnson, Jr.
• Daniel Johnson, Jr.
• Daniele Rossi
• danielho.ca
• Dave Delaney
• Dave Jackson
• Dave LaMorte
• David Finch
• David G from Zillow.com
• David Jacobs
• David Tames
• DHP
• Donna Papacosta
• Doug Dobbins
• Doug Haslam
• Driving Podshow’s Limo « Audio Attitude
• eaon pritchard
• Ed Roberts
• Ed Roberts
• Eric Skiff
• feed.benjaminbloom.net
• Franklin McMahon
• Fruit Flavored C.C.
• GentillyGirl
• George Leite
• Getting Social Media to the Masses « Gischeleman’s Blog
• Getting the Most Out of Twitter « Ian’s Messy Desk
• Gordon Soderberg
• How to Be a Star in a YouTube World
• Jason @ Insomnia Radio
• Jason Jarrett
• Jason White, CSCS
• Jasper Borgman
• Jay Moonah
• Jay Moonah from Uncle Seth
• Jeff Pulver
• Jen Pirante
• Jeremy Vaught
• Jerry Harrington
• Jersey Todd
• JMCampbell
• Joe
• Joe
• john blue
• John C. Havens
• John R. Carman
• John Wall
• John Wall
• JohnC
• Joyce Bettencourt aka Rhiannon Chatnoir
• julien
• Justin Kownacki
• Justin Kownacki
• Justin Simonsen
• Karen (aka MrsB)
• Karen aka MrsB
• kathryn Jones
• Kelle Sparta
• Kevin Kennedy-Spaien
• Kevin Kennedy-Spaien
• Kfir Pravda
• Land of the Loopipes Blog Tag: 7 Songs I’m Into Right Now «
• Land of the Loopipes Want Me To Watch Internet TV? Get It Where I Want To Watch. «
• Leesa Barnes
• Leesa Barnes
• Les Zaldor
• Lynette Radio
• Marcus
• Mark
• mark
• Mark – Playstation 3 Show
• Mark – tartanstories.com
• Mark Forman
• Mark Forman
• Mark Forman’s Getting a Leg Up : Good News and Bad News
• Marko
• MaryHelen
• Matt Charron
• Matt Searles
• Matthew Ebel
• Michael Bailey
• Michael Wentworth
• Michelle / Chel
• Michelle / chelpixie
• Michelle / chelpixie
• Michelle / chelpixie
• Michelle Wolverton / chel pixie
• Mike Bellina
• Mike Maddaloni
• mike mcallen
• Mike Wills
• Mike Wills
• Mitch Joel
• Morning Thoughts
• Natalie
• Neil
• Neil Ford
• New Podcast Up: PRobecast #13: Military PR, Extending the Conversation, Disclosure on Blogs « Gischeleman’s Blog
• Next Meeting: Sunday July 1st « Boston Media Makers
• Nico
• PAB 2007: Ready, set, go!
• Pat Phelan
• Peter O’Connell
• Phillip
• Phillip (aka PhillyMac)
• Phillip Molly Malone
• Podcast Mike
• PRobecast 25: Social Media PR, Grammar Vandal, and more « Gischeleman’s Blog
• Real Estate New Media Style
• Real life and Second Life… « pixie dust and tantrums…
• Reflecting and Looking Forward
• Rich Palmer
• Rich South
• Rob
• Rob Suarez
• Rob Suarez
• Rob Usdin
• Ron
• Ryan Thomas
• Scott Sigler
• Sean McGaughey
• sean percival
• Shane Robinson
• Shelly Brisbin
• Shifting Frames of Reference « Parent’s Eye View
• Skye Lemmon
• Sooz
• sriram
• Steve
• Steve Coulson
• steve garfield
• Steve Runner
• SuzyiMac
• Tasty Blog Snack – Pulver/Twitter Camp
• Ted Demopoulos
• The Diva’s Diary: Life, Love, and Lust. Blog Tag: 7 Songs that I Love «
• The Right Tool for the Job
• TheDiva
• themilitiagroup
• Todd Cochrane
• Todd Cochrane
• Tom Newman
• Tom Newman (Fogview Podcast)
• Troy Rutter
• Twitter as ‘Everywhere Messaging’ proof point? at Matt MacQueen
• Twitter Tipps und Tools – Johannes Kleske – tautoko weblog
• Twitter Forum
• Twitter::Living life aloud, visible « Joy Of Innovation
• vaspers
• vaspers the grate
• Vergel Evans
• Vinny aka Bernie
• Weekend links « Media,Technology,and Rebel Filmmaking
• Whitney
• Wonder Twin Powers Activate
• Zack “The Mothman” Daggy
• [RL] there is a way to influence the world, what’s yours? « pixie dust and tantrums…

Manual tag: podcampboston2007

Enter the Famecast contest. With an arduous voting process and an interface that, to put it mildly, blows chunks, it’s amazing anyone uses that thing. The prize, however, for artists is a trip to Austin, TX (expenses paid) to win a shot at $10,000. Chel took it upon herself to help Natalie’s placement in the contest, and thanks to a lot of elbow grease and some guerrilla marketing tactics (legitimate ones, no scripts or anything underhanded, and certainly nothing to disqualify the artist she was representing), Natalie Gelman is headed to Austin, TX as a finalist in the Famecast contest.

I consider that to be a diploma of sorts. No worthless piece of paper to frame and hang on the wall – Chel’s graduation from ninja marketing school is pure result, which is all we care about.

Happy graduation!

Statistics tell me almost 150 people visited this blog yesterday. After today, we should have 150 NEW listeners in podcasting.

Go bring some independence.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If my day job podcast, the Financial Aid Podcast, were to win an award, cool. More stuff for the resume, etc. As a prize, you know what I would want?

A PR Newswire US ENT-N1 press release, a promo on every nominated show, AND $500 in Google Adwords credits that I could use to build new audience. Here’s the thing I don’t like about the Podcast Awards – and believe me, it’s no dig on Todd Cochrane or the Podcast Connect folks, who do a great job with the awards – but the Podcast Awards are a fishbowl decoration.

What do I mean? To quote PodCamp co-founder and partner Chris Brogan, they’re an internal thing to the podcasting community, news inside the fishbowl, inside the echo chamber. Show the award to anyone deep inside the podcasting community, and they’ll know of it at the least (particularly if they’re friends of the winner on MySpace and got the same bulletin 6 times in 30 minutes). Show the award to the average passerby on Fifth Avenue or Ghirardelli Square or Faneuil Hall, and they’ll look at you very, very blankly, and probably mutter something polite as they run away from you.

What would be cool is if the Podcast Awards, or an award like it, had some of the values that I think are so essential to new media built right into them, the same values we try to build into PodCamp – transparency, openness, and most of all, outreach to people who are just getting into podcasting or are thinking about jumping in. What would that look like?

Well, for starters, nominees would need to provide a data set to the awards committee – statistics for a minimum of 3 months from two different, unaffiliated data sources. They could be Libsyn stats combined with Feedburner numbers, or Blubrry info combined with Podshow PDN info, or Apache weblogs and Kiptronic data. Whatever the numbers are you’d submit as an award participant, you’d agree to have them published publicly, because transparency is the key to fairness.

What would the judges be looking for?

- Largest audience. That’s a good metric. Measure a 30 day running average based on downloads per unique IP address.
- Most improved audience. A show that went from 10 listeners/viewers to 10,000 listeners in 3 months would be a huge gain. Again, downloads per unique IP address.
- Most diverse audience. Take a look at your web logs. I’d bet you that you don’t have a giant long tail of referrers in it. Suppose a show had referring site links – inbound links – from over 10,000 different web sites? That’d be some definite outreach (for the record, Bum Rush the Charts had about 13,000 referring sites at peak).
- One subjective award to the person or persons who’ve done the most to bring in new listeners to the podcasting community – not to your show, but to podcasting in general.

As part of the award acceptance, the winners would need to provide details on how they achieved their accomplishments, and suggestions for others to help them grow their audiences, too.

Podcasting is practically self-selling – free, legal music, infinite choice in subject matter (and quality), unique perspectives on issues, and everything under the sun. More variety than Clear Channel’s swill, and it keeps the ol’ iPod fresh instead of shuffling the same library over and over again. However, podcasting needs to get people involved into at least one show – and then the listener will likely get curious about what ELSE is available. But you have to get them exposed to that one show first.

Outreach. Distribution. These are what podcasting is missing right now in a systematic fashion, and these are our Dip (Seth Godin, thank you) that we must overcome in order to make this podcasting phenomenon more than a passing fad.

So what do you say? Should we have the Podcasting Outreach Awards?

I read your blog and listen to your podcast and thought you’d be great in answering this question:

What do you tell a company that is scared to blog or do any new media because of the possibility of bad comments and bad press? I have a friend in an agency who says that the number one response from big companies about new media is: “we can’t control it, what about the bad comments.” He used the example of Apple hating its blog because of all the negative comments and GM and how their commercial backfired.

I wanted to get your opinions as to what you would say if someone asked you this question?

Good question, and a tough one if a company is not already in the new media space. I’d say this – a company that wants to participate in new media has to be a lot like a company that’s ready to go public on the stock market. You have to do your due diligence internally, decide how much information can be made public, and if you have skeletons in the closet, either resolve them or reveal them up front so that it won’t come back to bite you later on.

The reality is that every company has done something to tick off at least one customer, and that customer has the same power voice online as the company itself does. The real question is – if that company encounters negative press online, is it ready, is it prepared to engage and discuss? If you just sit on your hands and do nothing, you’ve effectively surrendered to the negative blog comments and conversation online. Mitch Joel often cites the Kryptonite Lock example as a company that could have joined the conversation but sat it out, and lost millions of dollars in the process.

Think carefully about how a company can turn negatives into positives, or at least provide an alternate perspective. In GM’s case, they could and should have highlighted very publicly some of the great examples customers had turned in, PLUS highlighted some of the best “negative” videos, along with a senior executive explaining what environmental research they’re doing to mitigate the damage their giant SUVs do, be it advances in hybrid technology, fuel cells, batteries, etc.

If a company has NOTHING positive going on inside, then of course, it’s best to stay out of the conversation. If you’re an employee at a company which has no redeeming value to society, you probably should think about a job elsewhere, anyway.

Bottom line: you will get bad press no matter what. You will get good press, too. If you’re not already participating in the conversation, when the bad times come, you’re going to get stomped.

One of the slides in my presentation about derivative thinking is the black box slide. You don’t care what’s in the box – you know what comes in and what goes out, and that’s all that matters. The contents of the box, as long as they work reliably, can be invisible or opaque.

This is the essence of an API. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You do know that reliably, when you put beef in the machine, burger comes out. You know that when you hit send on your end, data appears at the destination location, but what happens in between here and there isn’t important.

Black box API thinking is one of the skills that I promote. You don’t care what something does, you just care that it does it. Then you start bonding things together, a bit like Legos from our childhood. Building block by building block, you assemble the pieces together in different combinations to yield powerful tools.

So when I say I want a project lead, this isn’t a job. It’s not a technology (though it could be). I want someone to volunteer their blog, a sliver of their focus, a fraction of their time, and some of their interviewing skills to finding out whether the existing social media tools, when harnessed and dashboarded, might make some kind of formidable tool in the world of drawing attention, establishing a relationship, and then driving part of the relationship’s actions towards an outcome.

When you have a pile of tools, examine what they do, learn what they do singularly, and then start plugging one into another to derive greater powers. Plug Feedblitz into Wordpress, plug MySQLAdmin into both of those, then plug MySQLAdmin to LinkedIn to get a cleaned list of people. Suddenly, each individual tool’s powers are magnified.

The thing Chris is looking for isn’t a technology or even a project lead. He’s looking for someone who can combine tools into great powers.

What tools in your toolbox do you have that can be bonded together to make even more powerful tools?

“Seems to me that this is a classic long tail play. The long and simple of it.”

The context of the comment led me to write this quick blog post. The Long Tail is a great play if you’re an aggregator. If you own the network, if you own all the content or the distribution channels, if you own the database, the Long Tail is a payday because it’s one person to a million items over and over, instead of ten thousand people to one item.

The Long Tail is, as Seth Godin proclaims somewhat loudly and quite correctly in his new book, The Dip, a death sentence for the individual. There is only one you, and only 24 hours in your day. If you try to create as much content as possible to capture a Long Tail-esque traffic surge to your properties, you’re going to die tired.

The Short Head – be #1 at SOMETHING – is the only place where the individual truly prospers, unless you’re in charge of the network. If you’re Osama bin Laden, the Long Tail works for you because there’s an unending supply of angry young men who are more than willing to die for the cause, but there’s still only one bin Laden. Lots of deputies may run the franchises, but there’s only one CEO.

To answer Kfir’s question – why aren’t more people watching? Simple (reminder, simple != easy) Long Tail quagmire: with a million channels on, how can you even find something to watch? Who is the Short Head of TV Guides for Internet video that can connect the average TV viewer with new media? When that guide becomes available and is easy to use, integrated with the living room instead of the desktop, Kfir’s mom will probably tune in.

1. Lets you see who has gone before you and how long the chain is.
2. Gives inbound link love to those before you
3. Incentivizes you to preserve the rule so that people you tag link back to you in future generations

The last time we saw this kind of link generation was with the 2000 Bloggers project, and that brought lots of link love to everyone involved. This is a classic network effect – every person who fully participates brings added value to all the other participants, and encourages future participation, just like the purchase of every fax machine makes previous buyers’ purchases more valuable.

Finally, a benefit to those social scientists among us – this lets you create trees and maps with greater ease.

The next time you play a game of blog tag, will you preserve the chain?

Likewise, when planning a word of mouth campaign, assess the ground. Is it dry, ready for even the slightest spark to start a blaze, or will you be waging an uphill battle? I’d venture to say that Bum Rush the Charts tapped into the general anti-RIAA, anti-music industry sentiment especially virulent in the world of podcasting, but much more widespread. The ground was ripe for a fire, and the campaign would have likely been successful to a greater or lesser degree no matter who was in charge of it.

That raises an additional question: how long before the forest regrows, dries, and is ready for another fire? Some people are calling out for a second run immediately, but my intuitive sense is that, just as after a forest fire, the tinder has been spent and regrowth needs to take place, even if just for the sake of another fire.

That said, let’s look at the components to this forest fire – spark, tinder, dry ground, high winds, and no firefighters. The spark was Mark Nemcoff and Mike Yusi’s iTunes takeover announcement on the February 16, 2007 episode of Pacific Coast Hellway. This was the burst of energy that got it all started. Whatever else BRTC became as it evolved and grew, it started with genuine passion and energy from its founders.

The tinder was my role in the process, taking the spark and the first flames and finding a way to add to them, a way to make the fire hotter. I did not start the fire, but the addition of a charitable outlet made the initial fire burn hotter and made it easier to catch. If you were on the fence about whether to support the campaign, the tinder might have pushed you over. If you were already passionate about the campaign, this turned the dial up to 11.

We’ve covered the dry ground – the recording industry’s inability to communicate effectively with its customers or treat them as anything except potential criminals.

Next came the high winds. A fire can burn hot and bright, but without wind, it may stay localized. What happened with Bum Rush the Charts was simply this: an awful lot of people – Connectors – picked up the cause and spread the fire to their audiences, spread the fire by many different vehicles. Press releases, emails, IMs, Twitter, blog posts, podcasts, word of mouth at the checkout line – the new media community took the flames and added high winds to spread the fire quickly and furiously. Before long, the blaze had spread worldwide, and in some places burned even hotter and brighter than in its birthplace. This step was the most crucial – spreading the fire far and wide ensured that even in places where it might have flagged, the overall energy and momentum kept increasing.

The last factor was the lack of firefighters. Absolutely, there were negative comments and negative momentum, particularly in social news outlets, but this did little to nothing to dampen the blazes already burning. The only thing that brought the fire to an end was running out of fuel, having reached its maximum range, and by the time that limit was reached, the campaign had achieved some incredible results.

So, what’s the road map of this analogy? Passion has to start the fire in a place favorable and receptive to starting the fire. Ideally, you find ways to magnify the scope and appeal of your social campaign, and then once done, you set it free, letting others take ownership of it and spreading it to their audiences. Finally, you build enough momentum that even naysayers are overwhelmed.

If you’re missing any one of these ingredients, you may not get the results you want. What would make future movements even more successful? Well, add to the steps here. Instead of one spark to start the fire, many sparks – get community involvement early on, and you’ll have that many more blazes. Give lots of tinder from different sources to make the fires insanely hot. Help others find a way to plug in their altruistic or community-focused projects to increase the power of the benefit. Give the winds more than just hot air – give them gasoline and matches, too! Help fire spreaders become fire starters, not just relying on word of mouth already existing, but give them the tools and the power to start or enhance fires. Get things burning so hot that firefighters don’t even attempt to step in – they just quarantine the area and wait for the fire to burn out.

I’m glad the police are involved. I’d encourage anyone with any information to contact the Boulder, Colorado police.

Boulder Police Department
1805 33rd Street
Boulder, CO 80301
303-441-3300

I hope any legal professionals at the top of their game offer pro bono assistance to Kathy and help her litigate the parties responsible into oblivion. Nothing says “zip it” like a $12M lawsuit.

Want to DO something? Encourage others to learn about and develop effective tools for dealing with the threat of violence. Go read the Gift of Fear by Gavin deBecker, one of the finest books in the genre, masterfully written, then gift it to someone you know who needs to read it. There’s a sequel if you’re a parent titled Protecting the Gift, also a great read.

Offer assistance and outreach in your community. Learn and teach self protection skills. Create a neighborhood watch in your community. For every Kathy Sierra, there are millions of women whose voices are equally threatened or worse, but don’t have the readership or “A-List” status that she does to give her voice. If you’ve got a truly solid constitution and the ability to keep it together under the worst strain, volunteer at a battered women’s shelter.

Online, take a stand against incivility. Be willing to step up and call bullshit on a keyboard kommando. Most of all, learn the tools of new media and the ability to influence crowds, and help guide people toward or away from online destinations which foster hatred. We will likely never get rid of hatred or violence, but we don’t have to subsidize web sites that encourage hate with our traffic. In the end, money and influence are powerful weapons that we have at our disposal. Use them.

Aidan, if you read this, please remember this simple thing: independent music is the best thing there is, and music from an RIAA record label may cause your mom and dad to get sued and then you’ll be living homeless on the streets, and that would be sad. The only surefire way to protect yourself is to never listen to music from any RIAA label or artist, no matter how cool the other kids at school think they are. Share with them the music YOU will learn about in this blog tag game.

• Natives of the New Dawn, Good Day
• Matthew Ebel, Every Color
• Laura Clapp, Let It Rain
• Rob Costlow, I Do
• Munk, I Am (acoustic)
• David Spak, Amazing Grace
• Douglas Spotted Eagle, America the Beautiful

People I tag: C.C. Chapman, Eric Skiff, Ed Roberts, Karen Cardoza, and pretty much all of my Twitter followers. The rules – please link back to Aidan, Chris Brogan, and this post.

US Rock #11
US Overall #99
Canada Rock #10
Canada Overall #53

Netherlands Rock # 2
Sweden Rock #7
Germany Rock #12
Germany #73 Overall

Holland #15 Overall
Norway #55 Overall
Norway Rock #10

First, I would have liked to have had more transparency from the beginning. As I say often, transparency is the currency of trust. While Black Lab was a fine choice for the campaign, I would have liked to have seen more community involvement from the beginning in the selection of the band. However, that’s what I get for coming late to the party. That said, Black Lab was a good choice, and the band was certainly more than generous in their scholarship fund commitment.

Lesson: transparency pays off. The more transparent you are upfront, the less suspicion can be cast.

Second, I have the distinct sensation that podcasting is still inside of an echo chamber of sorts. When you look at the traffic stats from BRTC, you can see that there was a massive push at 9 AM ET, peaking at 10 AM ET, and then declining throughout the day. I had thought there’d be a second spike after work, when people got home, but traffic remained on the decline throughout the day. We got a lot of people to make a great push initially, but we tapped out our reach relatively early on. That tells me that we did a great job of reaching our audience, but our audience may be ourselves – the movement didn’t exhibit any exponential characteristics, as you’d normally see from a chain reaction of word of mouth. I think we would have been more successful by also sharing techniques for building audience.

Lesson: allot more lead time for a campaign like this and share more tools with the community for growing the reach of individual podcaster audiences prior to the campaign. Make the campaign benefit everyone who participates.

Third, time shifting can work against us for a small window. Podcasting and blogging are founded on RSS and the ability to consume content when you, the audience member, wants to consume it, not on the schedule of the content creator. While this is a good thing, it also makes coordinating the reaction of an audience much more difficult in a short period of time. Podcasts and blogs lack the immediacy of email, IM, and Twitter.

Lesson: build a mailing list early and emphasize it throughout the campaign to deliver better results on the day, OR expand the window of time in which action can be taken from a day to a week to better allow people to act on their schedule.

Fourth, we did not anticipate the strength of the global market. BRTC performed the best in countries that frankly, we didn’t expect it to. Looking at the initial returns, BRTC outperformed expectations in the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany, dominating the charts in those countries. It’s all too easy to forget that the Internet truly is global, and our reach might not be as great as we would like right now, but no one can deny its ability to cross borders.

Lesson: plan for the international community to participate and encourage them to do so.

Fifth, I think we had too many incongruent messages. There were essentially three main messages of BRTC – “stick it to the man/RIAA/record labels”, “raise money for charity”, and “show the power of new media”. While I think we did a decent job of tying them all together, in the beginning it was fragmented, and that may have hurt initial acceptance and uptake of the campaign.

Lesson: plan campaigns from the outset. Define a message or even multiple, congruent messages, but agree on what needs to be communicated.

Sixth, one of the things that I think hurt uptake in the more conservative parts of the country was the edgier aspect of the campaign. While the song was quite pleasant, the album art was decidedly not family friendly, and some of the initial language on the Bum Rush the Charts blog was also unquestionably not family friendly and not work safe. Also, the initial message of “kicking old media where it hurts” (albeit in much less friendly language) may have restricted traditional media coverage of the event.

Lesson: to ensure maximum audience participation, plan for family friendly/safe for work from the outset. No need to dive full-on into political correctness, but at least strive to reach the broadest audience possible, old and new media alike.

Now, after reading this, you’re probably thinking, wow, Chris, you must have thought Bum Rush the Charts was a complete failure, a complete disaster. Not so, not so at all. In fact, I think for an effort like this, it was a fantastic success. Consider this. How much does a record label spend to get a new single on the charts in one country? How much would it cost to launch a worldwide campaign to do the same? New media may not have achieved as much reach as I would have liked, but there’s no question that the campaign “moved the needle” and achieved very impressive results across the world.

More importantly, the campaign raised some money. While I’ve said before that you can’t shop your way to a better world, this was clearly a case of piggybacking for a greater good. Mark Nemcoff and Mike Yusi were going to run with Bum Rush the Charts (they are the founders) no matter what, and the fact that they were generous enough to let me piggyback on their event to raise some money for college scholarships speaks volumes to their characters. Even if only one person bought the track, that’d be 45 cents that someone wouldn’t need to take out of their own pockets to pay for college, and for that, whoever we draw for the scholarship will owe a debt of gratitude to Mark and Mike.

Finally, look at the incredible amount of press about the event despite an effective budget of $800 (for two press releases) plus the time and labor of those involved. Worldwide top 100 charts in Rock? Worldwide top 100 charts overall in select countries? For $800 plus labor? You can’t beat that return on investment. No, Bum Rush the Charts was a great first experiment to test the reach of new media, and with the lessons learned from our first collective efforts, it’s only going to get better from here on out.

Thank you to everyone who joined in.

First, a huge thank you to everyone who’s participating. That’s awesome. That said, I’ve found so far that audio promos in podcasts are great for building awareness, but you need at least a month’s time ahead of a word of mouth campaign, because podcasting by nature is time-shifted. It’s a lousy medium for getting a message out in force in a small window of time.

Behind the scenes, Bum Rush the Charts has had the help of a bunch of different tools. We’ve issued two press releases, one through Black Lab and one through the Student Loan Network. We’ve also been using several distribution email lists. Despite the fact that email is pre Web-1.0, it’s still a major player, at least for this campaign; the bulletins we’ve published via email to folks have had very good open rates.

We’ve leveraged Feedburner not only for feed management, but also for site statistics. As we’ve seen in the past, Digg and Reddit bring in a lot of traffic, but the quality of traffic is relatively low – few people sign up for the email notices or subscribe to the RSS feed out of the thousands who stop by.

MySpace has been a major player in the campaign, at least for touching base with bloggers and podcasters. Every time I log into the BRTC profile, there’s betweeen 20 and 50 people requesting friendship, leaving comments, etc.

Most importantly, we’ve gotten a LOT of buy-in from fellow new media professionals, and even buy-in from more traditional media outlets, which is pretty incredible. The CBC, BBC, San Jose Mercury News, and even Billboard Magazine have picked up BRTC from various sources and leads, and have been promoting it as well. The real power of this campaign is that it’s brought together people from all the different groups in podcasting and new media.

Time will tell whether we can convert buzz into buy, conversation into conversion. I sincerely hope we can. Hopefully this time next week I’ll be writing more about how Bum Rush the Charts was a successful campaign and that we’re sending a bunch of kids to college for free.

• Another post on the Financial Aid Podcast…
• Another post on the Financial Aid Podcast …

The answer is, the latter. Whitespace creates the distinct phrase with nothing interrupting it. Now, do I have definitive proof that this makes a difference? No. The one thing I do have proof of is that the whitespace makes it easier for me as a human to highlight that phrase and search on it.

Just a little something to think about. Please excuse me while I go back to bed …

Enjoy the pipe.

• Subscribe to your Twitter feed in Google Reader. This will give you nicely readable archives that don’t suffer from whatever weird Ajax bug the regular Twitter pages have.
• In Yahoo pipes, set up a pipe for the public feed and filter on a keyword like PodCamp, SXSW, VON, etc.
• Subscribe to THAT feed in Google Reader and you have a pulse-monitor of near-realtime discussion from the cutting edge folks about your keyword.
• Share your Twitters in your Google Reader shared feed. Using tags in your shared items, you can specify, for example, Twitterstream.
• Use a filter in Yahoo Pipes on your Google Reader shared feed, filtering the content of the id field for your tag – instantly, you have a shared “best of Twitter” page and feed.
• Use a plugin like Feed Wordpress to auto-blog things in your best of Twitter feed.

What innovative ways can YOU make use of what you do on Twitter?

Updated with bonuses:

• Start by putting your Twitter RSS feed into Feedburner – this will give you a good, clean feed.
• Set up Feedburner’s Pingshot and other services as appropriate, including applying Creative Commons licenses.
• Twitter RSS does NOT hyperlink stuff, so if you want your Twitter posts to have appropriately linked URLs, you’ll need to use a Regex replace filter in Yahoo Pipes prior to publishing the RSS.
• Stuck wanting to blog, but have blogger’s block? Pick a random Twitter and use that as your topic and blog post title.

A couple of excerpts:

I’m perpetually aware that I’m in debt, and therefore, it colors my mood quite drastically. At this stage, it’s impossible to tell if I’m frequently depressed because I’m in debt, or if I’m in debt because I’m frequently depressed.

Like attracts like. So, by that rationale — explains The Secret — the way out of debt, depression, boredom or other general dissatisfaction with life is simply to think positive. After all, if we’re endlessly focused on our debt — or that project that’s never done, or that relationship that’s forever on the rocks — all we’re doing is reinforcing our current negative emotions about the situation, and therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised when we encounter more of the same. Subconsciously, “we asked for it.” New Age or Common Sense? Part of me rejects this theory outright. Why? Because, at its base, it seems too easy. Granted, maintaining a positive frame of mind during the most trying of circumstances is anything BUT easy, but if attracting wealth, health and contentment into your life is as easy as wishing for it and then steadfastly sticking to that mindframe… Does anyone else see where my doubts are justified?

And yet… in the bigger picture, it does also seem to make absolute common sense. Let’s say there’s a guy at a party. He’s got great energy, he’s kind, he’s attentive, he listens when you speak and he remembers people’s names. He’s a charmer, but his charm is natural, not falsified: he’s having a good life. No worries. No stress. He’s not bringing you down. Who wouldn’t want to be around that guy? And, because that guy can essentially have his pick of people to associate with — after all, he’s a hot social commodity — wouldn’t he also want to be around people whose association provides him with what he needs? So he surrounds himself with positive people, fellow listeners, people who take action.

My teacher’s teacher in the martial arts, Stephen K. Hayes, has a very well thought out and documented approach to dealing with this kind of situation. Justin’s right to say that positive thinking, while a good first step, is not enough. It’s a start, but it requires more than just thinking happy thoughts and trying to be cheerful, because ultimately, on the inside, if you’re not taking action to address the issues, the cheerfulness is a facade that’s easily penetrated.

The rough plan goes like this. What do you want to achieve? What’s your goal, and how do you measure that goal? For example, if you want to have more money, how much more and by when? Set a goal that’s concrete – “I will have $500,000 net after tax income by December 31, 2008″ – so that the goal is achievable and can be broken into milestones.

Ask yourself this – what things externally might stand in your way or slow you down from achieving your goals? Maybe it’s a lack of resources – if your goal is to produce a great internet TV series, maybe the old clunker PC you have isn’t enough. If your goal is to earn more money, maybe your boss isn’t willing to give you a raise or change your compensation to a performance-based plan.

Next – what things do you need to do externally to achieve those goals? It could be building your personal network or getting a raise at work. If your goal is a happier relationship, it could be programming reminders for anniversaries and other occasions into your calendar so that you don’t ever forget them. What are the workarounds for the external blocks?

After you know what you need to do and what things could stand in your way externally, you have to tackle the internal. What things internally could stop you from achieving your goals? Maybe you procrastinate. Maybe you feel selfish or shy or unworthy of success. Whatever things inside you that stand in your way, catalog them.

What things can you do, what steps can you take, to achieve your goals? If you’re a procrastinator, how can you alter your habits to change into a do-er? If you’re neglectful in a relationship or careless, what things can you do to be more mindful?

Once you know what stands in your way internally and externally, and you’ve got lists of things you can take action on to overcome obstacles and move towards your goal, put together a master plan. Maybe even get out a calendar and start marking down milestones. If your goal is increased income, have dates along the way that will help measure the achievements you want to make, the contacts you need to have, and so forth. If your goal is more productivity at work, mark down on the calendar when things need to be done and give yourself some extra time up front so that you can achieve ahead of schedule.

Then do it.

Achieving your goals – whether it’s to afford a $1.50 cup of coffee or to have a happy marriage, or whatever the case – can be done as long as another human being has done it. At the end of the day, we all have the same human potential for greatness. Stephen K. Hayes said it best: “An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done. For you to achieve any kind of success, execution is everything. Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your goal.”

And Justin, next time you’re in town, the first cup of coffee’s on me.

• AdiumX – nice multi-protocol chat (update: with iChat’s support for Jabber, I use iChat now)
• Audacity – great editor for audio when you’re not using Garageband
• Audio Hijack Pro ($) – record Skype calls and any system audio
• BBEdit ($) – best damn text editor there is
• Camino – a better browser than Safari
• Chax – iChat extender
• Conversation – decent IRC client if you use IRC
• CoRD – open source remote desktop client if you use MS Terminal Services
• Cyberduck – great FTP/SFTP client
• Disk Inventory X – find out where your free disk space went
• ecto ($) – do a lot of blogging on lots of blogs? Ecto is a great client.
• Firefox and Flock – for testing and extensions
• gDisk – turn your GMail account into a disk
• Gizmo Project – competitor to Skype
• Gleam – free Flickr uploader for photos
• Google Earth – the world
• Google Notifier – menubar GMail and GCal notifications
• Google Sketchup – 3D software if you like that kind of thing
• Growl – system-wide notifications
• Handbrake – DVD ripper par excellence
• iClip ($) – multi-clipboard tool
• iStumbler – find WiFi access points on the go
• Levelator – for leveled audio
• mAC3Dec – rip any media file with audio into AIFF for use in Garageband
• MacGPG – encryption
• NeoOffice – OpenOffice port
• QuickSpace X – fast MySpace links to common profile tools
• Second Life – for the world that isn’t your world
• Senuti – pull stuff off your iPod
• Skitch – fast, easy to use screenshot maker
• Skype – VoIP client
• Snapz Pro X ($) – screen grabber that can also make screencasts
• Spanning Sync – sync your Google Calendar to iCal and back
• SpyderX – MySpace friend manager
• Stuffit Expander – slices, dices, julienne fries, and decompresses
• Tea Timer – desktop countdown clock
• Transmission – Lean and mean BitTorrent client – can download Rocketboom HD in seconds
• TweetDeck – for Twitter power use
• VisualHub ($) – convert just about anything to anything in video
• VLC – best video player ever
• XCast – kind of neat podcast manager
• XCode – the 900 lb. gorilla of development tools

What tools on the Mac do you use every day that you can’t live with? Post them here!

To anyone marketing to me: if you use the word exclusive with me, you’re an idiot. Seriously. I don’t feel special when you send me something that is exclusive. I feel like you just want to get me away from the people whose opinions I trust in the vain hopes that you might catch me on an off day to buy/promote/consume whatever stupid product or service you have. Exclusive in a word-of-mouth world means you DON’T want me to talk about your stuff, and probably means it’s not worth talking about anyway.

To anyone marketing to me: if you want to get my attention, send me an INCLUSIVE invitation. Tell me that whatever promotion you’re running is licensed under Creative Commons and that I can do with it as I please as long as I don’t try to make money off of you. Tell me that I’m free to ask my friends and colleagues what they think of your service, and if it’s a seminar, function, etc., tell me that I can bring friends with me – or bring the seminar to them. Tell me that I’m free to record and share the experiences I have with you and your brand, and if I say something negative about my experience, fix it so that everyone can have a better experience with you. If you understand social media, if you understand the power of word of mouth, all of this will not be news. In fact, it will be boring.

My hope is that one day I am boring and irrelevant when it comes to how to inclusively market to people.

A conference, probably. A dry, boring conference where people discuss academic topics that, unless you’re passionate about the field, you might not enjoy. Symposium brings images of people standing at a lecturn with 300 slide PowerPoint decks and 90 minutes to speak, followed by 30 minutes of question and answer.

Imagine my surprise when someone suggested I go look up what Symposium meant in Ancient Greece, where the term originated.

From Wikipedia: Symposium originally referred to a drinking party (the Greek verb sympotein means “to drink together”) … Symposia were usually held in the men’s quarters of the household. Singly or in pairs, the men would recline on couches arrayed against the walls of the room. Food, wine (usually mixed with water and served by nude young men), and entertainment was provided, and depending on the occasion could include games, songs, flute-girls, slaves performing various acts, and hired entertainments. What are called flute-girls today were actually prostitutes or courtesans who played the aulos, a Greek woodwind instrument most similar to an oboe, hired to play for and consort with the symposiasts while they drank and conversed. Symposiasts could also compete in rhetorical contests, for which reason the term symposium has come to refer to any event where multiple speeches are made.

Heaven help the next person who suggests a Podcasting Symposium. If it’s the Ancient Greek style, it’ll make a heck of a video podcast.

Bring on the Symposium!

What is Twitter? Ultimately, Twitter is length limited asynchronous multicast IM. Some people have referred to it as web-based chat. You have instantaneous communication to a group of people in a short form message. As I like to do these days, what things looking back can be used to look forwards?

Twitter reminds me most of another medium where message length was important, where brevity was at a premium. Far back, before the days of IM, before the days of the publicly accessible Internet, there was the telegram. Western Union, known to most younger generations as that money transfer service, was one of the largest telegraphy companies of its day.

What can you do in 140 characters or less? Well, Jack Hodgson and I exchanged weather reports yesterday. If you know anything about aviation, there’s a data format called METAR that compresses weather conditions and a forecast into a very tight sequence of characters. Here, for example, is a weather for Boston, MA.

KBOS 021454Z 09022G27KT 3SM -RA BR OVC008 03/03 A2976 RMK AO2 PK WND 09031/1430 TWR VIS 4 PRESFR SLP078 P0018 60048 T00330033 56050

Decoded, it reads:

Location………..: KBOS
Day of month…….: 02
Time……………: 14:54 UTC
Wind……………: true direction = 090 degrees; speed = 22 knots with gusts of 27 knots
Weather…………: light rain
Weather…………: mist
Cloud coverage…..: overcast (8 oktas) at 800 feet above aerodrome level
Temperature……..: 03 degrees Celsius
Dewpoint………..: 03 degrees Celsius

Another gentleman named Derek Rose found a telegram in his attic, a message that was encoded and only 133 characters long, from his grandfather to his grandmother, but couldn’t read it.

OEANRSDRETCUGVTEKYXDFSBDEWWYTHAHH
EHNEOEOEINMREULNSDRLVHLDMDAEYWIHE
EBYHWUBCVAAUDDMIRTWLIEAOMEEOETRSA
DAEERREOINSEAERRYSRIAOHOANUACIATIU

The story of it, and what the messages say, is a fascinating read.

140 characters may not seem like a lot, but you can compress an awful lot into 140 characters. Even if you can’t write anything out fully, you can use a cipher to “compress” your messages, as travelers did at the turn of the last century to save money on telegrams (since you paid by the word). An example cited on Retrogram is:

Minder Retrim

Which when run against the cipher book expanded to:

Has the SS Massachusetts arrived, or have you heard of her being spoken? We feel uneasy at absence of news of her. Have other ships from same quarter arrived yet?

On ko chi shin. Study something old to learn something new. Telegrams and telegraphy were used for decades to transmit information in a tightly compressed format. Twitter can leverage many of the ideas from the 20th century into the 21st. Sports scores, stock market updates, encrypted codes displayed in the open – anything that was done back then with a telegraph you can Twitter today.

Twitter away! Your thoughts in the comments here and at C.C.’s blog post if you please.

So, the short version is that PodCamp NYC needs a wi-fi solution (and the RIAA are a bunch of boobs). Some options being explored are things like a permanent dedicated line from a fixed wireless vendor, but I KNOW there are other solutions out there. There was an episode of Geek Brief TV a while back when Cali had a Wi-Fi access point with an EVDO card slot that she used as their permanent wireless solution at home. If I remember correctly, it delivered close to 1 Mbps downstream. I think she said the solution was about $300; a few of those floating around and you’d have coverage. It wouldn’t be OC-3 quality, but it’d be better than going dark.

At BarCamp Boston, a takeaway from that event was that if you give a bunch of geeks a solution, they tend to point out the flaws in it, but if you give them a problem to solve, they LOVE taking ownership and making it WORK.

So, how can YOU help to solve the blackout at PodCamp NYC?

Your show is you. You are not your show.

Your show is you. Unless you’re podcasting with someone else or a team, as in the case of the many couplecasts out there, or shows like Scriggity that have a team behind them, your show is you. You provide the visual, verbal, and textual personality behind your show, and without you, there really wouldn’t be a show, or certainly, the community that currently enjoys your show might have their appreciation be altered or decline without you. Some shows have made the transition successfully to new personalities, such as Rocketboom, but for the most part, if a host discontinues podcasting, the show simply fades away.

You are not your show. There are a multitude of topics I’d love to be able to bring to the Financial Aid Podcast if it were a personal show, but it’s not. I refrain, because of the divisiveness of it, from discussing politics in any great depth. Religion, taxes, belief systems of any kind, food, recipes, and so forth – all have little or nothing to do with financial aid except as analogies and metaphors, and all are things that at one point or another, I’ve wished I could post something about, but couldn’t because the Financial Aid Podcast wasn’t the right forum for it.

That’s what this site is. Don’t get me wrong – the Financial Aid Podcast will continue to be my flagship media focus in virtually every way, but when I want to go off topic, here is where I’ll be. For example, I think the George Foreman Grill is a lousy grill. It really is. What it’s good at is making grilled sandwiches, panini, etc., but as a grill, it has a hard time with anything thicker than a slice of bread.

The idea behind this site came from two sources – Mitch Joel for encouraging me to create a digital identity independent of the podcast, and C.C. Chapman, who already manages several distinct digital identities, and whose template I’m more or less copying.