Ensight - Jeremy Wright’s Personal Blog

Trying Out A New Form of Blogging

by Jeremy Wright on November 18th, 2007

As folk have probably noticed, my blogging style has changed pretty dramatically over the last year or so. From longer pieces 3-4 times per week to basically just republishing my Twitter feed.

Really, Twitter satisfies about 80% of my blogging “need”. I still braindump, I still point stuff out, I still socialize. But, Twitter isn’t exactly an ideal style of content to be republished on a blog.

Also, there’s still 20% of my blogging “itch” that isn’t being satisfied. So, I’m going to try and adopt Jason Calacanis’s simple list-style of blogging. I often don’t have enough to say for a full post, but have more than I’d want to say in a Tweet, so we’ll see if this can both allow me to blog more regularly and (hopefully) kickstart some longer-form piecesas well.

Here’s the first, and hopefully not last, try at this format:

1. Scoble’s started ranting on Apple for device breakage, marketing rubbish and fanboyism. He attempted to explain this by trumping on Apple’s “brand promise” that stuff should “just work”. Most fanboys took this to mean (and still are, in spite of multiple comments to the contrary from Robert) that he expected Macs to never break, never restart, etc. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone knows stuff breaks. It sucks, but you don’t rant about shit breaking. What Scoble’s ranting about is this “brand promise”. And the real “brand promise” isn’t that it “just works”. It’s Apple’s marketing tack, simply defined as: “We’re Better Than Windows”. Watch any Apple ad, and that’s the focus. And since people have very real issues with Windows (though Vista’s better, it still has issues) it’s a great spin. Problem is that, often, OS X ISN’T better than Windows. If Robert ran into a persistent blue screen on a Windows box he’d be frustrated and might vaguely blog about it (especially if he was at Microsoft still). But it’s expected. On a Mac it isn’t. Every mistake Apple makes that FEELS like a Windows/Microsoft mistake should, justifiably, have this reaction. Apple promises better but, too often, delivers worse.
2. b5media participated in the auctioning of AMP’d Mobile Canada’s assets (physical). Managed to pick up a half dozen laptops, a bunch of servers, tonnes of wiring, some datacenter gear, lots of paper, a bunch of stuff for bloggers. And a mannequin. Auction was fantastic, except that it was 8 hours long, heh.
3. A bunch of changes HR-wise recently, including a new COO and new VP Content. We haven’t announced these officially yet, but having both individuals in the office has been fantastic, as they both have a love for definition, process, clarity, etc, that will really help us excel in the future (even if doing documentation is painful).
4. My Scooter died last night. It may have been becuase I put Premium Gas in. I can’t think of any other reason. Might be my dumbassedness for not reading the manual, I simply assumed Premium > Regular Unleaded. It’s currently parked IN the OFFICE. Not sure how I’ll get it the 15 blocks to the Vespa Dealer.
5. Bought Assassin’s Creed yesterday. Very cool. The straddling of the current timeline and the past timeline is a little odd… And it’s a touch slow sometimes. But at the same time, the graphics are jaw-dropping, the gameplay is incredibly fluid and I’m having a bunch of fun. Only real complaint is that climbing buildings and such is really just a matter of holding RT + A + Up. Altair does the rest for you. Kinda wish climbing was more dynamic. As it is, I get very little satisfaction from climbing a massive tower, since I feel like I didn’t contribute at all.
6. Haven’t picked up Call of Duty 4 yet. Apparently the campaign’s a bit short, and I’m primarily a campaign guy. That and there are so many massive games coming out, that I just know I’ll miss a few. And since I haven’t picked up CoD4 yet, I probably won’t until it’s a Platinum Hits title (knowing me).
7. Some folk have asked if Blog World Expo was worthwhile for us. All told, b5 spent about 35K on BWE, which makes it our most expensive conference yet (Gnomedex being a close second, though that’s primarily because of the 20K sponsorship, BWE’s sponsorship was free cause we gave them 40K in free ads). However, given that the 35K included travel for 10 team members, building/buying/designing booth items, a whole whack of prizes, custom poker chips, new Swag, booth bunny/dealer/poker rentals, 2 parties, flying speakers out… It was pretty cost effective. So, was it worth it? We haven’t had a chance to get the video up from our day, yet, but that was worth about 10K to us. b5media’s visibility at the event was massive, and that visibility was probably worth (gotta love putting monetary value on soft value things!) another 10K. Meeting our bloggers was, of course, priceless. New potential business deals were done worth about 250K. Sealing the Know More Media deal (more on that in a bit) and announcing that was worth another 50K or so. And just having the team together for bonding and such was worth at least 15K. So all told we got about 400K in value from 30-40K in costs. Yeah, I like anything with returns of more than 500% ;-)
8. Know More Media. Here’s the press release on the deal. We’ve been quiet on this totally because everyone’s so busy. But here’s the gist. We’ve been talking about licensing our platform for about 6 months now. We have a few clients on the platform now (code named “Savity”). KMM is definitely the biggest move to the platform we’ll do this year. We’ve also been talking publicly about ad repping. We do this for almost a dozen clients already, and KMM is just the newest (and biggest). We’ll do more of both of these, and once we hit Beta we’ll release public info. The long and short is available from the press release, though: the platform includes base publishing (powered, proudly, by WordPress), syndication, feeds, metrics, network management tools, network metrics, publishing tools, etc, etc, etc. We are taking clients for this, but they’ll all be pre-launch (and get appropriate discounts) and thus are on pre-alpha software (ie: probably better than what they have now, but still “fun” to work with). We are currently not seeking new ad repping clients, but are happy to talk about future opportunities.

That’s probably enough for now…

Does this format work for me or for y’all readers that are still left? Lemme know. I kinda like it ;-) Not sure I’ll remember to do more, but positive / helpful feedback won’t hurt!

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POSTED IN: Blogging, Ensight News, b5media