Appearance on the Mediasphere: Blogging Network, Advertising Networks and the Economy

February 3, 2009

I had an opportunity to appear on the Mediasphere show with Jim Turner. I shared my thoughts on the future of online advertising and advertising networks, a topic that came up again this past weekend with the announcement that Pajamas Media, a conservative political blog and advertising, was closing their ad network.

Take a listen.

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Avoiding the Tunnel

February 3, 2009

Sir Isaac Newton was a noted genius among geniuses. Most of his lifework is seen culminating in the Law of Gravity and the development of Calculus. This, however, was not his life quest. History tells us that Newton was more concerned with proving that lead could be turned into gold (it can’t) and that the Christian understanding of the Trinity was a falsehood. Stories of Newton describe a neurotic man that would often not get out of bed for hours and sometimes forget to eat as he tossed his thoughts around in his head. The story says that calculus was developed as a result of his frustration with mathematics and a will to “force” the universe to bend to his own thinking.

One wonders if his genius wasn’t a little by accident.

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Be Nimble, Be Quick, Grow

December 4, 2008

Last night I spent the evening rubbing shoulders with some of the best and brightest traditional (and some online) marketers in the Capital Wasteland Region at a holiday party (There are many of them this time of year, are there not?).

As I stood there talking with a frequent reader of this blog, who also happened to work at Potomac Tech Wire, we got to discussing lessons learned from various times in our careers. I remember distinctly one of these moments from my days at b5media, which challenged me to remember that even though you think you know your job, career, industry or environment… you really don’t.

It was a Thursday night, like any other Thursday night. My son was in bed and my wife and I were dlipping around channels. One of our favorite shows, The Unit had just gone off at 10pm when all of the sudden, my Blackberry started buzzing. Annoyed, I glanced at it and saw alerts pouring in that the b5media servers were going down.

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Sucks to be a Blog Network These Days

October 4, 2008

Having come from the blog space, I have a mostly unique understanding of the difficulties encountered when running a content business. There is always a war between traffic and community, profitability and loss, long term projections and short term realities. It’s not an easy business.

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Feed Subscriptions Are So Important

August 4, 2008

When I left b5media, I had established a base of over 1300 feed subscribers on this blog. I was proud of that because, let’s face it, if you aren’t a news site breaking news all the time, people are not as inclined to subscribe to a feed.

The feed at that time was hosted via FeedBurner with whom the network had an enterprise account with. As a member blog of b5media, and one of the folks that tested and pushed FeedBurner on the network, my blog was one of the first hosted under their CNAME policy. The CNAME policy allowed us to brand feeds with b5media (http://feeds.b5media.com as opposed to http://feeds.feedburner.com).

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Landed On My Feet

June 23, 2008

Adjustment ongoing, however I’ve shown enough promise at this very new role for me that last week I traveled out to Lijit World Headquarters in Boulder, Colorado – a place once described as 50 square miles surrounded by reality – and met the entire team. In addition to a pleasant few days in the mountains and thin air, I was pleased to walk away with a full-time gig. Business Development Manager.

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Update on Me, b5media, Future Plans

May 1, 2008

I hesitate to write this because it’s somewhat personal, and this blog has become anything but a personal blog. However, I’m going to write it anyway because people understand that, though there’s multiple writers here, this blog is largely still associated with me. And frankly, I’ve been asked a million times what is next.

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Solving the WordPress Traffic Overload Problem

April 10, 2008

Anyone who’s been around WordPress for a “Digg effect” or other massive influx of traffic knows that it can be a real problem. From a technical standpoint, the problem is that PHP is entirely loaded into memory for every pageload. That includes the 99% of PHP that is not being used to actually render the [...]

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Technosailor Maintenance Today

April 3, 2008

To give everyone a head’s up, at some point today, this blog will go into “maintenance mode” while I move to a different server. While Technosailor has been a part of the b5media network, I also announced my departure from b5 last week and so the blog is moving to a colocated server at Defender [...]

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Departing b5media

March 26, 2008

About two and a half years ago, I embarked on a journey of a lifetime. It was a breakthrough journey that took me from working in a cubicle at Northrop Grumman to living my dream building an internet startup. At some point, we took funding. I recruited Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith and the rest [...]

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Funny WordPress Plugin Sneaks In

March 5, 2008

One of the annoyances we have at b5media is when people spell our company name wrong. We’ve even had our own people spell the name wrong. So annoying. :-)
Somewhere along the line last year, this universal plugin snuck into our build. I don’t know where it came from or who wrote it. (whistles) It solves [...]

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