by David Burn | Sep 14, 2004 | Digital culture
Noted blogger, Troutgirl was fired recently from her software engineering job at Friendster. The firing offense? Inflammatory comments made on her blog. The problem is her comments were far from flagrant, nor were they revealing of company secrets. Without delving in to what she said in detail, it had to do with the Friendster user experience and how she and her team aimed to improve it with a move to Hypertext Preprocessor, or PHP.
In July, I was on a job interview in Bend, Oregon. The owner of this small ad firm said he enjoyed reading my blog. He said he was happy to know my political leanings, as well. This made sense to me, since once a person joins a small firm, he or she becomes part of the corporate family, not just another employee. I am also aware that certain persons in my last two jobs read my blog from time to time. This fact has led me to state my opinions about work matters very carefully, if at all.
The question I have now is, does one’s blog ever prevent a firm from hiring? It’s quite possible, for blogs can flatten a corporate hierarchy, and who wants a free-speaking pyramid toppler on staff? But it’s not like you can hide your blog. A quick Google search takes care of that. So, be honest and be yourself, especially in the interview stage. If you try to project another you, a more hirable or more likable you, you will end up getting a job at a firm that does not share your values.
by David Burn | Aug 13, 2004 | Advertising, Digital culture
I’ve been saying for awhile now how blogs can and will transform marketing on the Web. Coudal Partners, a small advertising and design firm in Chicago, has brought the corporate blog to new levels of sophistication. This is the way an agency’s site needs to look today. Stale brochureware buys you nada. Letting people in, sharing ideas freely, that’s the route, and Jim Coudal and his partners have taken this high road by storm. It’s great to see.
Read my article, New Tactics | New Tools for more.
by David Burn | Jul 21, 2004 | Digital culture, Music
Yesterday, I helped my buddy, Weez, take his One Love Music radio program worldwide, with a technical assist from Live 365. For over a decade Weez has been on the air in Vail and Aspen, building a solid following for Reggae in those communities. Now the irie vibrations can be felt well downstream (with a high-speed Internet connection).
Click the Lion for fresh beats
by David Burn | Jul 12, 2004 | Advertising, Digital culture
Ad persons with blogs more popular than my own are using their media properties to find work, among other things. I like the idea, although I do not know how many potential buyers of creative services exist among my readership here.
Perhaps, a broadening of my job description is in order. In my last two agency jobs I began to shift my focus away from winning a Lion or Pencil (not that I was in position to be so honored) and toward the development of new areas I believe have the potential to remake the agency services game. Specifically, I’m talking about the potential in Internet radio, Wikis, and blogs as tools that can help marketers define and develop a truer branded voice.
It’s been said for every Gold Pencil earned, you can add 20 grand to your salary. Thus, the lingering allure.
by David Burn | Jun 15, 2004 | Digital culture
When I logged on to my free Web-based e-mail account today, I was pleasantly shocked to see that Yahoo expanded my inbox storage to 100 megs from 6 megs (a gigantic leap forward). And the size limit for a single e-mail is now 10 megs, perfect for song files, photos, and book-length PDFs. Thanks Yahoo.
p.s. Here’s the Wired article explaining Yahoo’s motivation.
by David Burn | May 29, 2004 | Digital culture
Wired is running an interesting piece on Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker, Gizmodo, Fleshbot, and Wonkette. Of the four, Wonkette strikes me as most entertaining. Denton found Nebraska native, Ana Marie Cox, a.k.a. The Antic Muse, a self-described “failed journalist” to tackle the gossip beat in Washington, D.C.
Cox seems up to the task, as Wonkette recently outed Jessica Cutler, a Capitol Hill vixen and author of the now defunt blog, Washingtonienne. Cutler used the blog to detail her sexual conquests. She provided lurid notes on the daily shuffling of her deck of men, including the kinky acts she would sometimes perform for them for money. Upon being discovered, she was, needless to say, dismissed from her Senate job for “improper use of Congressional computers.”
Cox and Cutler (on right) looking suspicious, maybe even scandalous.
by David Burn | May 13, 2004 | Digital culture
I like to give credit where credit is due. There are a lot of cheats and incompetents doing business out there. And there are also decent, fair, smart people in business. As Whizhost disintegrated, an enterprising hosting company mined their customer list and also managed to get the Whizhost domain name servers forwarding to their own DNS—I assume they paid the defunct firm for that right. Anyway, the people at SB Hosting have been helpful and their robust offerings, new control panel (including Fantastico), and consistent uptime are impressive. With Whizhost my sites were down at least once a day, sometimes for a minute or two, sometimes for much longer. You get what you pay for, and Whizhost was a bargain basement buy. In fact, they did business with no physical address—only a private postal box in Miami and no working phone number. Can anyone say class action lawsuit?
My personal bottom line…It feels good to finally join the real world of Web hosting.
by David Burn | May 11, 2004 | Digital culture
Burnin’ ~ A Blog went down about ten days ago, along with 13 Web sites I host for clients, family, and friends. Whizhost, my former hosting provider pulled the plug on their servers and no data has been recovered, by me or by any of their thousands of outraged former customers. Since I hard code my sites, I’ve been able to rebuild almost everything from scratch. Sadly, this is not the case with my blog, where the content management software resides on the server. I do have about 90% of my entries backed up in a Word doc, but all the formatting (hyperlinks, time stamps, categories, etc.) is gone, as are my most recent entires that I had yet to back up. Naturally, I’m pissed about the situation, but it’s a lesson learned. Lesson one: choose your suppliers wisely. Lesson two: always have a current backup of everything on hand.
by David Burn | Dec 9, 2003 | Chicago, Digital culture
Chicago Bloggers is a marvelous Web site. The site charts bloggers based on each blogger’s specific location in the public transportation grid of greater Chicagoland. Bloggers list their blog not by content type, but by CTA stop or Metra stop. Thus, one can hear what the neighbors are blogging on about. Or one might make an inquiry into the “blog tones” of a certain neighborhood, and see how they differ from one another.
by David Burn | Nov 1, 2003 | Digital culture
My peer-to-peer file sharing experience has been pretty limited. I do acquire and share various sound files, mostly all legal (since the bands I enjoy promote live concert taping and file sharing among fans), and I have had friends rip and burn expensive software for me, but yesterday I took the next step and downloaded Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, complete with license number, via Lime Wire’s peer-to-peer software and file sharing community.
If I’m a Macromedia employee or shareholder I’m pissed. Unless I can adjust to a new way of thinking about transactions in this shifty hypertext environment. If I can see file-sharers as early adopters of my product and key to creating buzz and value-added technical troubleshooting to boot. Then, I might be okay with these “free” transactions.
