As many of you know Kristi and I are on our way to Italy...but we had a slight setback and we got stuck in Washington D.C. for a day. It seems that United sent us on a flight in a plane that was unable to fly through clouds because it was not properly maintained...you know, since planes never have to fly through clouds. After having to land in Chicago to get one of those fncy planes that can actually fly through clouds, we ended up in D.C. about two hours after our flight took off.

We are making the best of it and I'm hoping that we will be in Rome soon...our flight leaves at 6 pm est. Wish us luck!

Posted by James at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The History Channel’s Modern Marvels has covered some of the most important marvels of our world…but this episode covers the most important marvels of them all:

Posted by James at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I ran across a story on MarketingVOX that looked promising. The headline – ad:tech: Group to Strike for Creativity. The premise – a group called No More Landing Pages is going to “strike” at ad:tech in San Francisco for the end of the use of landing pages. Sounded kind of interesting…a bit convoluted, but interesting. I clicked through to the No More Landing Pages site and guess what I found? The No More Landing Pages LANDING PAGE!

Ok, so it’s not a landing page, it’s a blog. But if the key to being successful without landing pages is “be passionate, not complacent,” I think the no more landing page revolution is doomed. Reading the seven blog posts on the page really left me confused. We can all wax poetically about a problem…but can you give a solution? And before you give us a solution, what do you consider a landing page? Give examples my friends. Then solve all of our landing page problems.

I’m curious to know more…kinda…

Posted by James at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

And this is what it looked like from my desk at work...

Posted by James at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

These are my parent's dogs. I dig them the most...

(there is no sound on this video clip)

Posted by James at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click through to see this hilarious video...

Posted by James at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve always appreciated graffiti art. Not the pointless tagging stuff that has been way to prominent on the Denver streets as of late, but the real neat looking artistic stuff. Unfortunately, I was not born with the ability to paint anything other that shades of white onto sheets of drywall.

So I was awfully excited when I found the Graffiti Creator. It lets you become a killer graffiti artist right on your laptop. The site can be a bit buggy, but it’s easier to deal with the bugs that it is dealing with an evening locked down in county. Give it a try…

Posted by James at 07:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two items this evening.

The first may seem a bit out of character, but my experiences in life tend to align fairly closely with what is discussed in this (yes the site is cheesy). Laugh if you want, but if you are an open-minded person, you might want to take the time to watch/read it. Your choice.

Second, kids rule…and parents that appreciate them rule even more. May I present exhibit A. (Thanks to Mz. Pocket for the link).

Posted by James at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got my new digital camera yesterday...a very lovely Canon SD750 with a black eye. I've just started messing with it...and I'm pretty excited about its coolness. Actually, it makes me do this -

It's nice having a digital camera to compliment my $20 wonder.

Posted by James at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As everyone is aware, there was an extremely violent and senseless shooting today in Blacksburg, Virginia. I am saddened by the tragedy, as I’m sure everyone is…but that’s not what I want to post about tonight. Tonight I want to post about the balance between advertising and news.

I think we can all remember the days after 9/11…when every TV station was focused on the attack and the aftermath. For days, no one advertised. The focus was on the tragedy, and nothing else. Today was similar in that programs like NBC Nightly News ran with minimal commercial interruption. It’s the right thing to do for viewers and advertisers, and I commend NBC for doing it.

But these days more and more of us are turning to the Internet for our information, and when we do, we run into one place where the Internet is falling behind when it comes to knowing when to advertise. You see, many of the news web sites out there have advertising on them…and usually the advertising is controlled by separate business units. Today, I went to the CNN.com web site as events were unfolding in Virginia, and I decided to watch the “Pipeline” on CNN’s site. The Pipline is a live feed that has live content and breaking news. As I fired up the feed, I was surprised to see that I was about to start my 3-minute Pipeline preview feed.

Now imagine that. I’m just a guy sitting at work wondering what is going on. But what if I was a family member, or friend of a Virgina Tech student? Is it ok to limit the information I get because I am not a subscriber? I don’t think so. CNN should have opened up the “Pipeline” to everyone at that point…not kept it behind their subscription wall.

Even worse, CNN had a lot of content about the shooting on their site. They also were asking for people who had footage of the shootings to upload it to CNN’s site. One such piece of footage was being promoted on the CNN home page. I clicked on the footage and was shocked to see a pre-roll advertisement run before the images of a school building and the sound of gunshots.

I think a day like this should demonstrate to CNN that they need to be able to quickly shut off their money-making business to do what they are supposed to do…report the damn news.

[Note: It looks like CNN has finally removed the pre-rolls from the Virginia footage.]

Posted by James at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by James at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tom Peter’s book Re-Imagine! introduced me to the “brand you” concept – and it has stuck with me since I read it. If you want to learn about “brand you” thinking (and you should), you can read this Fast Company article from August 2007.

I started thinking about “brand you” again this week when I saw this classic example of bad personal branding. When you click through, scroll down to this person’s profile.

My question for you – are you projecting your personal brand, in one way or another, like this person? If so, you might want to try to reposition your brand…I know I’m trying.

Posted by James at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to Autoblog for making me aware of is particular awesomeness. See more of the race on YouTube.

Posted by James at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday Night Live has seen better days, but Andy Samberg has become a bit of a stand out on the show. This weekend I saw his Blizzard Man skit, and I love it. Check it out here...

Posted by James at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last Saturday I had nothing to do so I took a walk at about 10:00PM through the Uptown area of Denver. I brought my Holga camera to get some pictures of the almost full moon and the city at night. (See all the pictures on Flickr here.) I gotta pat myself on the back for a couple of these shots – I think they are pretty cool…even thought the pictures turning out was mainly luck…

Posted by James at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Matt McGee, over at Search Engine Land, wrote a fantastic post about why small businesses need to get on the social media bandwagon. The way I look at it, Matt’s got a point. There are a lot of industries out there where a small business doesn’t have much of a chance of succeeding at search engine optimization (or pay-per-click for that matter) because massive companies dominate the premium space on search engines (think real estate or insurance).

Social media rewards people who are willing to take the time to make a contribution to their community and elevates people who are experts in their fields. The thing that small businesses can do more effectively than big ones is communicate on a personal level.

If you’re running a small business, and you want to promote your business online, make sure you read and understand this article. It could drastically change your approach to marketing, and maybe even save you some time and money…

Posted by James at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Business 2.0’s Gear section featured these little PicoPads in its most recent issue. Basically, PicoPads are little pads of sticky-note paper, with a small pen, in a small sleeve that is small enough to fit into a credit card slot in your wallet. Awesome idea. Awesome execution. And if the $4 price is too much for you, I bet you could make your own version for even cheaper (especially if you steal the sticky notes and pen from work.)

Check out PicoPads here.

Posted by James at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s my latest round of Holga shots. There are some good ones, and some not so great ones…I left some out because they were totally out of focus. The whole set can be seen here.

Oh yes, and here’s the woman I love, loving me back.

Posted by James at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First off, the PBS web site rules. It amazes me to look at our local TV station’s web sites and compare them to the PBS site. I mean, local news stations have ad revenue to keep them going, but for some reason they all end up looking like a high school kid’s computer class project. A perfect example is the always changing, always annoying and often unusable 9 News web site. What the hell happened there guys?

Where was I…oh yeah, the PBS site rules. Not only is it a joy to look at but they actually provide full length shows for people to watch on the site – for free. And that makes me very happy, because one of my favorite shows on TV is Frontline. Recently Frontline had an amazing episode in their News War series called “What’s Happening to News.” If you want to see an well done program that talks about how the Internet has affected the news and how the newspaper industry is falling apart, watch this program (click on the "Part Three" tab).

Posted by James at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)