Monthly Archives: July 2008

The Aaron Brazell Show: Episode 2: The Quest for Email Ninjahood

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Fun show tonight.

Jared Goralnick, the CEO of AwayFind joins guest co-host Jimmy Gardner, joined us to talk about email management and productivity much like I’ve been talking about in my Email Ninjahood series.

Later in the show, we enjoyed an open line surrounding a segment I’ve heard over at Ron Smith’s WBAL show occasionally. The segment was “Someone Had to Say It” and gave everyone a chance to gripe about things like friends wanting free consulting services, etc.

Listen to the Episode 2. Also, you can subscribe in iTunes.

If you like what you hear, consider reviewing the show on iTunes as well.

Also, congratulations to Shaun Farrell for winning the one year subscription to Shuttlebus from our friends over at Freshbooks. Congratulations and thanks for listening, Shaun.

The Aaron Brazell Show Tonight: Productivity and "Someone Had To Say It"

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It’s Saturday night and that means The Aaron Brazell Show is back. Last week, there were fireworks but tonight… there just might be more fireworks.

With Shel Israel and Robert Scoble interviewing Tim Ferris of the 4 Hour Work Week a few weeks ago, and my own quest for email ninjahood, I wanted to bring on Jared Goralnick of AwayFind to talk about productivity. As AwayFind is an “email productivity” service, it will probably largely revolve around that, but there are certainly all kinds of other methods to make sure you GTD (Get Things Done). Jared is going to be joining us from PodCamp Boston 3, so maybe an update on the cool happenings going on up in Beantown too.

In the second hour, it’s your time. Introducing, Someone Had to Say It, which is inspired by a similar segment done occasionally at a local radio station here in Baltimore, it’s your chance to bitch and moan about whatever ails you. It doesn’t matter how obscure it is. In fact, the more obscure the better because then we all learn something! I don’t want to hear about iPhones! :-)

Twitter users: include hashtag #abshow
FriendFeed users: Comment here
Utterz users: Respond to this and tag abshow.
Or email me: aaron@technosailor.com

Joining me to co-host the show is Jimmy Gardner of East Coast Blogging who always has something obscure, yet bitchy, to say. :-)

And of course, we’re giving away a one year subscription to Shuttlebus from our good friends at Freshbooks to one listener – that’s $168 value. You’ll have to listen to the show though as you don’t know when the giveaway is going to happen. Incidentally, we’ll be using the Privnote technology to do the giveaway so score one for them.

Listen in at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific. Preshow at 8:45 on Talkshoe. Or if you can’t be by a phone, call in to (724) 444-7444, Call ID 22406. Press *8 to request to talk if calling in from a phone.

Comments About Sarah Lacy, SXSW and the "Apology of the Century"

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Last night at the Twin Tech Party in DC, Sarah Lacy of Business Week and I had a chance to meet for the first time. What transpired has been spun unbelievably out of control by attendees of the party. Phrases like “Battle of the Titans”, the “Apology of the Century” and labels of me being her “arch-nemesis” have been bandied around.

I personally think it’s all a bit much and want to explain what happened last night with a brief history on what happened involving Sarah and I at SXSW.

Sarah had the opportunity to interview Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder at SXSW. This came within a few months of the Facebook Beacon advertising and privacy fiasco which we covered here. Zuck is not known for public access and this was one of those few times where many in the room had an opportunity to talk to him. It wasn’t really planned that the audience would talk all that much. Handlers ensured that, if rumors are to be believed.

In the heat of the moment, and admittedly some egging on by folks on Twitter who know that I’ll say anything, anywhere (sometimes without thinking through ramifications), I heckled Zuckerberg with “Beacon Sucks“, the first of what would be many heckles from the crowd in that keynote. Get that, though? I heckled Zuckerberg.

This heckle lives on in infamy and everywhere I go, people laugh about it. “Oh, you’re that guy?”

I admit, it was pretty funny and I benefitted from the wave of infamy that went with it. But I want to be clear, I heckled Zuckerberg, not Sarah Lacy. Later in the Keynote, the audience turned on Sarah, but that was not me.

Last night, I spoke with Sarah one on one about the incident. A Flickr photoset was dedicated to the encounter, which I find slightly amusing.

Picture 8.png

Sarah was genuinely interesting, but she was naturally a little defensive when we first began chatting about the incident. I hope that the message I was trying to convey made it through: I was heckling Mark, not Sarah, and though I don’t apologize for the content of the heckle (Beacon does suck and still does), I do apologize for the unprofessional conveying of that message.

Personally, I hope that the entire incident can be put behind us. I don’t mind if the Beacon Sucks heckling incident never gets brought up again, but I may be wishing too much. In case the message didn’t translate, ” I’m sorry, for my part, in making you uncomfortable on stage, Sarah. While it was not the best interview, my message was for Mark, and not you. Hopefully you can forgive me and next time we see each other, it will be easier to laugh about the whole thing.”

And by the way, the Twin Tech Party rocked.

Update: Though it’s difficult to hear, here is a video taken at the event of this alleged “apology of the century”.

Update 2: Sarah says, “I do” – Umm, as in, she forgives me. :)

Michelle Obama Writing For BlogHer

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Seems appropriate that this week is taking the shape of BlogHer week, since the gathering of women bloggers descends on San Francisco in 3… 2… 1…. NOW.

The big news this morning, of course, a day before the BlogHer conference kicks off, is that Michelle Obama has contributed her first article to the BlogHer.com. Entitled, “Let’s Talk”, is commentary on raising the Obama girls, and life on the campaign trail as a mother. It’s actually rather endearing.

However, I’m disappointed by the “stumping” nature of the post. If there is one thing I like about reading blogs instead of the paper is that the readers are able to escape the dry journalistic reporting style and find personality. While Mrs. Obama’s first post certainly carries personality, it borders a bit on frustrating for people who are tired of politics as usual.

At the risk of infuriating Obama supporters, lines like this remind me of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I’ve heard from mothers struggling to make ends meet because their salaries aren’t keeping up with the cost of groceries. But if they take a second job, they can’t afford the additional cost of childcare. Or the moms who are nervous about taking time from their jobs to care for a sick child. Or the moms-to-be who are scared of getting fired if the boss finds out they’re pregnant.

Still, though, this carries on the theme that we’ve been covering at Technosailor regarding the transparency of government and the use of the web. I’m encouraged to see the Obama campaign willing to engage Michelle with the massive women voting block. I’d like to see Cindy McCain offered (and take) the same kind of deal so the appearance of rubber-stamping a president doesn’t come into question.

Revolution vs. Thesis: The Premium Theme Cage Match

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Now that WordPress 2.6 has been released and you’ve got yourself upgraded (you have upgraded right?), you might as well take some time to spruce up that old dingy theme of yours and replace it with something attractive and practical.

If you can afford your own custom theme development, then by all means, do it. Nothing says professional like a completely unique theme that has been professionally designed with not only appearance, but functionality and practicality.

However, maybe you can’t afford a $3500 theme or maybe there is something that, out of the box does what you need.

While I won’t get into the merits of “premium themes” and if themes should ever be mass marketed AND paid products, I would like to do a compare and contrast on two separate premium themes by two very competent designers.

Revolution Theme

If you believe your WordPress powered blog is more than a blog, you probably want to check out Revolution Theme. Revolution currently has ten different variations designed with the intentions of various industries in mind. If you’re using WordPress more as a content management system and your business is in real estate, pro media, tourism, online magazine, sports, tech news or other corporate variety – Revolution might be the theme for you.

Brian Gardner, the creator of the Revolution Theme commented to me that he “developed the Revolution themes in order to take WordPress to a higher level ““ to stretch the capabilities, and to show that it can be used for so much more than a blogging platform.”

Indeed, we used the Revolution Pro Media theme over at The District of Corruption and found it to be very suitable for displaying all our content in a sexy way.

Revolution was not without its problems though.

For instance, the out of the box CSS is not compatible with Firefox 3 which handles the

1
float

property incorrectly. We were able to hack the CSS with a different solution. In addition, the video box on this particular theme assumes that video content is going to come from YouTube which is an incorrect assumption, in our opinion, with all the video formats available.

Also a problem with our use of the theme was the requirement for every post to have images attached to them via custom fields. We had to hack the theme files to not display images when no images are available.

Revolution Pro (which again is only one variant) offers few options for power users. It does offer a WordPress administrative page but jumps to vast conclusions that are probably not relevant to bigger publishers.

Picture 6.png

Revolution Theme is an incredible sexy and well designed theme from the code point of view. Semantics are paid attention to and the use of the WordPress API ensures that the theme will be compatible with WordPress for, likely, years to come. I would recommend that Brian does not rely on plugins to accomplish tasks. Include that code in the theme’s functions.php if the code is GPL and use an

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if( function_exixsts() )

check to find out if the extra code is needed.

The Revolution theme is available for as little as $79.95.

Thesis Theme

Unlike Revolution, Thesis comes in one variety. It is a good variety though. The brainchild behind the Thesis theme is Chris Pearson. Chris is never content just building a theme but making the theme as braindead simple for anyone to use in a wide variety of situations.

To that end, Thesis is mainly configurable directly from WordPress admin and I have yet to have to significantly modify the out of the box code base. Granted, I have not had the length of time with Thesis as I have with Revolution.

One of the things I get to do is maintain my church’s website, which was in desperate need of overhaul and maintenance. I did not want to spend tons of time on it as, let’s face it, I’m not paid to do so. ;-) Thesis allowed me to stand up new content, new organization and a completely different look and feel in less than an hour. There’s still work to be done, but Chris has done most of the work for me.

The key to this ease is the amazing configurability directly from WordPress admin. With the interface, I have granular control of my navigation elements, formatting of posts, ad and analytics software, etc.

Picture 7.png

Thesis does not allow me to modify some of the basic layout rendering to my heart’s content, however. Fortunately, I could write little plugins to do little things like apply different CSS to elements but, as robust as it is, more could be done.

The Thesis theme only comes with one variety and it is available for $89.95.

Comparison Chart

Revolution Thesis Winner
Ease of Deployment (1-10) 6 8 Thesis
Variations 10 1 Revolution
Plugin Dependencies Yes No Thesis
Price $79.95 $89.95 Revolution
Support Forum Blog + Forum Thesis
CSS Firefox 3 Incompat Support for custom CSS Thesis
CMS-Friendly Yes Kinda Revolution

Winner: Thesis 4-3.

Both are great and Chris and Brian should be commended for providing great resources.

Added: I forgot to mention one thing that I really wish theme authors would do more of. The Thesis theme has some of this but it could use more. Hooks, people! Add hooks everywhere in a theme.

The main reason for this is that people who want to modify the behavior of a theme can do so without editing the theme at all if there are hooks built into the theme.

BlogHer: Women on the Move (And With Money)

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There’s a wrinkle in the space-time continuum, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s a very powerful horde (plethora, group, pack?) of women who are average bloggers like most of us, who are suddenly very present in the social media space.

To be fair, they’ve been here but many people simply didn’t realize quite how influential they were. In some cases, the oblivion stemmed from a general obliviousness in the blogosphere where bloggers and social media aficionados simply never stepped foot outside of their sphere of influence. In other cases, if rhetoric is to be believed, the oblivion has been an intentional misogynistic mentality.

I don’t quite think it’s as nefarious as the latter, but I do think that women have been taken for granted and probably not given enough credit in a world that is largely powered by geek boys of all ages and types.

In case you missed the news this morning though, this group of women under the BlogHer umbrella, made a pretty bold statement about their mainstream appeal with a $5M series B funding and content syndication deal with NBC Universal. (Press Release)

The content syndication deal would involve BlogHer content, written by over 2200 bloggers, being syndicated across three women-oriented NBC properties, iVillage, BravoTV.com and Oxygen.com.

In addition to content syndication, NBC Universal and BlogHer will collaborate on joint advertising sales, a space currently dominated by Glam Media.

And of course, BlogHer has their annual BlogHer Conference happening this weekend in San Francisco. Festivities begin tomorrow night and continue through Saturday. If you can’t be in San Francisco, the BlogHer Second Life Conference is happening in conjunction. You know… if you don’t have a first life. ;-)

If there’s one thing this deal accentuates, it’s that women are a force to be reckoned with on the internet. While I may not like the insular nature of BlogHer, and the inability to address the fact that never having any man speak at the main conference is off-putting, aggressive and offensive to some, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the hard work the women behind the site have put into organizing, instructing, and educating many women bloggers and providing a venue for their voices to be heard. And they have underscoed that by getting NBC to sign on.

So congratulations, ladies. Your hard work has paid off.

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