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Hey hey hey! As many of you might already know, my big sister Laura is leaving for a four month stint in Antarctica in a couple days. We are all getting together for a send off dinner tonight, which should be fun.
I just finished working on getting her blog, Laura on Ice, put together and I am hoping it gets some serious use over the coming months. I don't know about you, but the idea of being in Antarctica is totally fascinating to me.
Kristi and I went on a date tonight to the "Untitled" show at the Denver Art Museum. It happens every last Friday of each month, and it is a lot of fun. Here is the link to the information. And here are some photos:
See the rest of the pictures here.
Ok, I'll give Lilly a pass on Norway since she is only 23 months old.
Big ups to Jessica for the link.
I saw a website a while back and it came up recently in conversation...pictures from a motorcycle ride inside the dead zone of Chernobyl. Look at the site here to see some really creepy/interesting stuff.
Also, I saw that there was a video on YouTube as well (depressing stuff here)...
I'm writing this from the Hyatt on the Sunset Strip...having a fun time in Califronia. Went to a rainy wedding today, been visiting family and relaxing a bit too. Tonight, dinner ae Koi with Kristi and her family. Should be awesome :)
Via Yahoo News, you could almost buy Belgium on eBay. Very cool.
I read Jack and Suzy Welch's column in BusinessWeek recently and they discussed one of the toughest management dilemmas out there - managing creative people. It turns out the online version of the column is an Podcast (very cool BusinessWeek), which is even better than the article since you can really hear how tough the situation is for even two seasoned business professionals.
If you have to manage creatives, if you work with creatives, or you are a creative yourself, give a listen to the Velvet Hammer.
If you live in Poland and you want to mess with the president, please don’t call him a Kutas (penis). You see, one Polish search engine hacker decided to Google bomb Google in Poland to rank their president #1 for the word kutas, and he was put in jail for it. Ouch. Not so freedom of speechy, eh?
Luckily, us Americans get to sit back and watch our president make himself into a penis every time he talks, and no one has to go to jail – YAY!
Oh yeah, speaking of jail, you hear about OJ getting busted in Vegas? It goes to show, if you are famous you can kill whomever you want in LA and get away with it, but in Vegas you can’t get away with a darn thing.
(Thanks to Search Engine Land for the kutas story...thanks to OJ Simpson for being a total friggin' dumbass.)
I'm in, who's with me?
Thanks (surprisingly) to Seth Godin for pointing this out.
See, I wasn't lying...Danger Bird was in fact on CNN. Here is the video below - thanks to my hero Cassie for recording it for me. You rule C-BIZ!
Bank of America proved to the world that they care more about making money than winning customers today by announcing that they will be raising their non-customer ATM fees from $2 to $3, proving in one fell swoop that they are big fans of exorbitant fees. Sweet moves gents and ladies (I'm picturing the pen filled with bankers from that Washington Mutual commercial).
BofA's spokeswoman Betty Riess laid out their superior logic in the following statement:
"We really want to make our ATM network convenient for our customers," said Riess. "In order to maintain that, it is appropriate to charge people who aren't our customers for accessing our convenience."
There are so many things wrong with that quote.
People who aren't your customers, eh? Well, you've guaranteed that I'll never be one of your customers, so sweet job Betty.
Here is the story I saw on CNN. Hopefully Seth Godin will chime in on this bold move of marketing genius .
I figure creating a tourist tag line for your city isn't an easy thing to do, especially when your city isn't known for a whole lot. But as we were preparing for our trip to New Mexico, we were doing some research and ran across the least inspiring city motto ever. Ladies and gents, here it is...
It's a trip? Sounds like you'd say that while you shrug your shoulders. Like the kids are saying "we wanted to go to Disneyland" and dad says "hey, it's a trip!"
Maybe it has something to do with peyote.
Oh well, I guess it's better than "Albuquerque, it's just like a mini mall." Oh right, that's already taken.
Seth had an interesting post today about terrorism, the war and the role of marketing in the whole thing. Feel free to read it here.
If you aren't going to read it, I'll give you this quote from it and you can get this gist:
If you want moderate ideas to spread in a community, promote the people who are spreading those ideas. Make them heroes. Amplify their message and help it spread.
If you're down with the idea of becoming a hero for someone to amplify the positive messages from our country, you might want to start giving through an organization like Kiva.org. If you recall, I started making loans through Kiva a little while back, and it's been quite rewarding.
You can see my Kiva profile here.
I was looking through our photos from Siena, Italy tonight. You have to go...it is an amazing place. See the photos here.
If anyone wants to give Kristi and I a home in Italy, I promise we will live in it :)
One of the issues facing many geek marketers is that we have too many blogs/social networks/RSS feeds that we're publishing, and most people find it hard to keep track of all of them. A recent article from Steve Rubel has pointed out a way to combine all of our electronic outputs into a Tumblr "lifestream."
Tonight I decided to try to set one up, and 15 minutes later, the James Omdahl Lifestream was born. Currently the lifestream has my this blog, my work blog, as well as my Google Reader shared articles. I'm sure I'll add more to it soon...to me, this is very cool stuff. The best thing is that the lifestream is populated by RSS feeds, so I never have to directly post to it if I don't want to.
So if you want to see all of what I'm working on, keep an eye on my lifestream...
I can't tell you how bummed I am that my favorite business magazine, Business 2.0 is being killed by its parent Time, Inc.
Business 2.0 is the one magazine that I can effortlessly read cover to cover without even thinking about it. Their magazine is highly relevant, often on the leading edge of the tech world...usually finding new trends earlier than their big competitor, Fast Company.
I don't really agree with Time's decision to absorb the Business 2.0 staff into Fortune magazine, since trying to harness the talent at B2.0 into a stogy mag like Fortune isn't going to work.
Best of luck to the Business 2.0 staff, you all rock, and deserve to work for a publication that will showcase your skills, not slip you into a "tech section" between articles about investing in pork-bellies.
Here's the story from the New York Times.
We're in Albuquerque right now, getting ready to go to bed. Just put this video together to try out iMovie. Needless to say, we are having a good time :)
Welcome to Marketing Punk. I’m James Omdahl and I am a Denver, Colorado based online marketer and blogger. This blog is a compilation of the things that interest me online and offline. Topics will vary from blogging to search marketing to finding passion in your life to art to pretty much anything else that interests me. Thanks for visiting, come back often, and please take the time to leave a comment and let me know what you think about my posts.
