Start of a New Chapter
As an FYI to the readers and listeners over here I wanted to share some news with you.
Last night I publicly announced my leaving of crayon. You can read all the details here.
As an FYI to the readers and listeners over here I wanted to share some news with you.
Last night I publicly announced my leaving of crayon. You can read all the details here.
Last month I was asked to take part in the Blog Bash put on by Chitika and I had a blast doing it! Well they took the 30 posts and have created a free eBook that you can download. Some great writing in there so take advantage of it.
Every year my good buddies over at the Boston Ad Club hold an online media auction. What’s cool about this is that everything is donated and you can score some pretty cool media buys for WAY under what they usually cost. All of the money goes to help fund the Ad Club and this is their big yearly fundraiser.
Because I like the team behind the organization and I love what they are trying to do by keeping the space educated on the changes in new media I’m HAPPY to pimp their stuff for them because it’s good for my readers and listeners.
The auction kicks off on May 17th at 9 am and if it’s like last year I’m sure new stuff will be added throughout the auction so it’s always good to stop back ever so often.
The site is at http://adclub.cmarket.com
It’s a win win as I see it. Media buyers and planners get access to some seriously discounted placements and a great organization gets money. Works for me!
Chris Brogan just did a post like this and I really like the idea of it so I figured it was a great idea.
I arrive in the city on Thursday morning and will be leaving early Saturday night. In between I’ve got meetings, hangouts and of course presentations.
So some vitals for me and what is going on:
I think those are the details I needed to share. You’ll know me because I’ll be the guy with a camera of some sort in my hands at all times!
And yes there is still time to get pictures of YOU playing on playground equipment in. E-mail them to me or post on Flickr and send me the URL. The more I have the more slides I’ve got to add to put them in. *grin*
Can’t wait to see a lot of you there!
Want to prove to the big publishing companies that we can make a difference. Want to buy a cool book and help an awesome writer and a good friend of mine in the process?
Then sometime today April 1st order a copy of Ancestor from Amazon. I know that Scott Sigler will be happy and so will I. Not a fan of this genre? Then order a copy and give it to a friend, away on your podcast or to your public library. The key is to order one. *grin*
I took part in a Podcast Listener Survey being done by an Emerson College student. I’m very interested in the results of it based on the questions I answered and I asked if I could pass the link on to others to fill out since we all know that a survey is only as good as the number of different voices are asked.
So, if interested take the survey here.
Today is the day! The day the New Media gets to show the music industry what we can do.
Buy the track “Mine Again” from Black Lab in the iTunes Music Store.
That’s all you have to do today.
Spend 99 cents and 2 minutes of your time to help a good cause.
PLEASE share this with everyone and let’s make this a success!
Thanks in advance for your help.

Today the big announcement of where C.C. Chapman is working or more importantly who he is working with comes out. We recorded a skype call so it’s a bit choppy in places, but it’s all about the content right?
If you guys think you’ve been frustrated not knowing where I’m working, how do you think I’ve felt?
I’ve got three damn cool podcasting partners in this journey that we’ve just started on and the other individuals in the company are total rockstars in their own right. I’m proud to work with every one of them and I can’t wait to see where this all takes us.
We want to talk to you. E-mail me. Or call the comment line at 206-309-4729. I want to talk to everyone about this and what we are doing. Find me and we’ll chat!
Yesterday I had the chance to be given a sneak peek at Penguin UK’s first steps in Second Life using Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash as the vehicle.
My first reaction was “is this it?”
Knowing the book I was expecting a lot more then just a HUD that would pop up pages of the book I could flip through or listen to some audio.
What I did like from a business perspective is that right there in the HUD I can click on a link to buy the book through a special page set up just for Second Life visitors. That is smart because it’ll let them know if the HUD is driving book sales or not.
After reading their press release I feel a bit better about all this because what they are trying to do is bring themselves and their library into Second Life. They hint at a virtual bookshelf of all their publications which I’m looking forward to seeing and hopefully adding to my office. If they do it right, I hope they make it so that new titles can be auto updated to it so that the bookshelf can grow with new titles.
A special thanks to Jeremy Neumann (in the pictufor giving me the sneak preview. I said to him that I was expecting something more and I loved his answer which was basically “hard to do more when all of Second Life really IS what Snow Crash was.” He is right, but it would be neat to see some custom avatars or even a small build dedicated to the book.
Kudos to yet another business dipping their toes in the virtual waters. From the sounds of it Penguin Publishing will be jumping in full blown.
A new report today released by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) focuses on US based entrepreneurship.
I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to these reports through my work at Babson College who put out the GEM reports in conjunction with the London Business School.
The highlights of this report are pretty interesting. Especially for anyone thinking about starting a business or interested in the trends of new business in America.
A new term that I had not heard before is an “HPE” or High-Potential Entrepreneur. The report found that in the US these are most predominantly young motivated by opportunity males from the upper income arena. They think differently then the general population and don’t believe they have any competitors. Nothing shocking there, but interesting that the study confirmed it.
The stat that I found most intriguing was that in the US the average amount of funding needed to start a business is $70,200. I’m happy to see that it isn’t in the millions of dollars as most people would expect. Also, it found that 67.9% of those initial funds come directly from the entrepreneur themselves.
You can download the full report or read the press release with highlights.
I’m headed into the Boundary Waters to spend a week of quality time with a canoe, nature and my father. I’ll be completely unplugged and off the grid.
This will be the longest time in forever that I’ve unjacked for a period of time such as this and I can’t wait. It rebalances you. At least it does for me.
Play nice and spread the good word.
MarketingMonger.com interviewed me this week as part of their goal of 1,000 interviews with marketing people. It was a lot of fun.
Thanks to my buddy Julien for sending them in my direction.
There has been quite a significant change over at PodShow.com. As you may know I am affiliated with PodShow, so I’ve seen what is behind the curtain and I think it’s going to be an interesting tool targeted directly at new listeners for podcasts.
I wanted to make sure that my Managing the Gray listeners has a jump start at reserving their space for PodShow+. I can’t talk about the details or when it will go live, but I can say it’s coming soon.
This weekend I had the privilege and the honor to be guest hosting Across the Sound with Joseph Jaffe.
We talked about a WHOLE bunch of different topics. We hit on music, the evolution of podcasting and of course some interesting winners and losers of the week.
Thank you Joseph for allowing me to come on the show and reach out to your listeners. I’ve been a fan and a listener of the show for a long time so I’m still smiling from this opportunity.
If you’ve found your way here, I’m betting that it is not by accident. Most likely we know each other so hello out there!
I’m getting everything set up, recorded and ready to go and very soon I’ll have the first podcast up. Until then swing on by Accident Hash or The U-Turn Cafe to get a little audio fun.