When Mike wrote about James Karl Buck’s use of Twitter this week to alert his friends when he was arrested in Egypt for photographing a demonstration, I wondered if my little hometown paper would pick up the story.  Today, they did, with a good article by Mike Musgrove.  It’s another example of the benefit of being able to make your friends aware of what’s going on in your life right now whenever you want or need to. 

Then again, it also hints to some concerns about documenting your day to day life.  Does your company have a list of keywords it searches for in a Twitter feed before it makes a hiring decision?  If so, do they take things out of context or really try to understand the situation?

Nick at Web Designer Wall worked with our designers at Viget to tell the story of how our new blogs came to be.  Great post!

I find two things get me into a rut when it comes to writing blog posts:

1. Under-Consuming - if I’m not reading sites & other blogs, keeping up with twitter, and talking with co-workers about what’s going on, I don’t feel qualified / justified to produce my own posts.
2. Over-Consuming - if, on the other hand, I find myself consuming massive amounts of ideas and input from others, I tend to feel overwhelmed with thoughts and unable to keep up with consumption, much less able to process the ideas and provide appropriate added insights.

Recently, I’ve been doing both.  First, my new baby boy threw me off my normal consumption habits.  Then, at SXSW, I was pummeled with inspiring ideas and communication.  Throughout it all, of course, I’ve been busy as ever at work.  So now I’m inching my way back into a routine as best I can …

Late last year, we had the idea to launch a blog for each of the “Labs” at Viget – strategy, design, development, and marketing.  Early this year, as we sat down to do it, we decided we should relaunch viget.com as well, and put it all on ExpressionEngine.  Last week, we launched it all, just in time for SXSWi (I am writing this from Austin, in fact), and the response so far has been great (thanks, everyone!). 

I wrote a longer post about our blog plan on the redesign FourLabs (i.e., “all about Viget”) blog — I welcome any thoughts or feedback you have on the concept …

A big congrats to Samantha, the newest member of the Viget family (until Monday, when David starts).  It was just announced that she is a SXSW Web Awards Finalist for the Blog category.  Last year was my first SXSW experience, when Squidoo won for the Community category, and it was a blast.  The Blog award recognizes:

Sites that revolutionize the power of publishing by providing regularly updated content of a personal or professional nature.

Her blog, Bad Ass Ideas, is one that I followed well before she applied at Viget.  Of all her posts, this one is my favorite. 

Samantha’s recognition is much deserved, and I have a lot of respect for her commitment to sharing her knowledge and insights with the community.   It’s something we really believe in at Viget (which will be even more apparent in the coming weeks as our company-wide blogging plans are revealed).

Speaking of community, it will be great to have the DC web community represented (the Library of Congress blog is also a finalist) at SXSW.  We’ll have six folks from Viget there, and I know a lot of other local web people will be making the trip.  I dare say Samantha can count on some rowdy cheers at the awards ceremony …

The guys at Business Destiny put up a copy of the radio show I appeared on last weekend along with Geoff Livingston and Hart Rossman.  The focus was on Web 2.0 and it’s impact on business, in part to talk up the New New Internet conference.  Considering I’d been up until 2:30 am the night before hosting Startup Weekend and then was on air at 8 am without having had any coffee (don’t ask), I’m just happy I didn’t doze off mid-show. 

Luckily the Tears for Fears transition music kept me going.  Nice choice, John!

The Era of Conversation event is happening in DC on October 4th, hosted by the Direct Marketing Association of Washington (DMAW).  I’ll be giving a talk about “building individual relationships and readers” in the tactical “Organizational Blogging & RSS” portion of the event.  From DMAW:

It’s too late to talk AT your customers and donors. The New Media Conversation involves talking WITH them. Blogs, social networks, wikis, user-generated video, and other web 2.0 interactions have put organizations in the listener’s chair. Meanwhile, companies, non-profits, and political organizations are scrambling to understand and embrace the two-way dimension in one-to-one communications [Don’t be discouraged. YOU can do this — and you WILL profit from the experience!]

Start with the basics. This unique “Era of Conversation” event discloses the underlying principles and tools of conversational communications (keynotes). Then, sessions hammer brass tacks into some of the more popular social media tactics (track 1), and spotlight real live case studies with [shock!] actual results (track 2). 

Hope to see you there.  If you have any specifics you’d like me to cover in my talk, leave a comment or email me — or just show up and heckle.

Seth, intro’d as “the #1 marketing guru in the United States” (which he politely disputes,) posted this 6 minute video on his blog today.

It’s a quick summary of a lot of the themes he talks about on his blog and in his books including the recent history of marketing — a great way to get to know Seth and how he thinks. Some points:

• Old marketing (i.e., “yelling at people”) doesn’t work on TV, and, contrary to the hopes of marketers when the Internet arrived as a marketing platform 10 years ago, works even less online. Traditional Web advertising fails because ads are too easy to ignore.
• Getting permission to connect with potential customers is the key to successful marketing today and in the future.
• Web 2.0 is a lot about how customers can “market” (positively or negatively) on behalf of companies over the web — most of the results for product searches are for web pages not built by the product company.
• The key here is that the product / service needs to be truly remarkable so that people will be inspired to talk about it.
• Marketing for the next couple years will be all about empowering your biggest fans / customers to talk about your business.
• Web 4.0 will be when “the Net just gets smart” and — with permission — knows what you’re doing at all times and can therefore manage your life better.  His example: your flight is delayed and it not alerts you, but reschedules all of your meetings on your behalf. 
• Social networks grow fast and often die fast because “the party gets so popular that no one wants to go to it anymore.”  The key to success is balancing scarcity such that the right people are in the network, but enough activity so that these “right” people can find each other.
• He notes that blogging — not pounding the networks in Facebook and LinkedIn — is the best way to build credibility and foster this kind of discussion.
• Seth ends with words like “authentic,” “transparency,” and “reputation” — without these, none of this stuff works.

TechCrunch and VentureBeat both posted today about Glam Media trying to raise $200 million in private financing.  Matt from VentureBeat politely mentions their pending Google deal and a rumored valuation of $600 million.

Arrington, though, outright asks “Is Glam A Sham?” and suggests the entire basis of their fundraising efforts is inaccurate and “complete nonsense,” disputing figures from their private placement document and criticising their SEO strategy.  He even makes them pay for distributing that private placement doc “a little too liberally” by embedding it in his post and referencing it as he breaks it down.

Way to go, Mike.

“This is a perfect example of that information being used to mislead the public and potential investors.”

Regardless of whether he’s right or not, this is just the kind of blogging that’s needed to keep things in check these days.  Arrington is shining light on what would be a major deal, and doing some logical (and very public) analysis.  Any potential investor worth their salt should be asking the same questions. 

Now, Glam has an opportunity to very publicly respond and clarify their position.  If they can do that successfully, no harm done.  They’ll proceed with a lot of questions already answered, and their fundraising should go that much more smoothly.  If they can’t, well, then it’s their fault for putting it out in the first place.

This kind of highly-visible discussion and debate wasn’t around 7-8 years ago.  Knowing you might get called out encourages honesty and discourages deception.  Transparency is a good thing. 

If the claims you make about your business were suddenly very publicly called into question, could you defend them?

I was one of the lucky 100 TechCrunch readers who got to try a Moo StickerBook for free.  No gimmick here — I just clicked on the link, uploaded a few photos, gave them my address, and I was done.  They arrived today.  They’re normally only $10 (plus shipping), but  seeing as I’m a sucker for free stuff, I have to admit that the promo was the only reason I gave them a shot.

Do they serve a purpose?  Not really.  But they’d no doubt make a nice little gift — 90 different little custom sticker photos.  They amused my wife and kids.

In addition to some photos I uploaded the Viget logo as well.  Turned out nicely.  I could see why people might want to stick their logo all over everything.

So why did Moo give away 100 StickerBooks for free on the day they launched?  Was it a good promotion?  They probably figured that TechCrunch readers are the type to write blog posts about products they like.  Hmm … What do they know?

I’m a huge Gilbert Arenas fan.  He’s talented, super hard working, and plays with a chip on his shoulder.  He’s probably the NBA’s most prominent blogger.   He’s also a bit nuts.

This bit from his blog got some laughs from my friends at EarthEcho:

There Are No Such Thing as Shark Attacks

I know this is random, but I just want to clear this up for people out there.

There are these things called shark attacks, but there is no such thing as a shark attack. I have never seen a real shark attack.

I know you’re making a weird face as you’re reading this. OK people, a shark attack is not what we see on TV and what people portray it as.

We’re humans. We live on land.

Sharks live in water.

So if you’re swimming in the water and a shark bites you, that’s called trespassing. That is called trespassing. That is not a shark attack.

A shark attack is if you’re chilling at home, sitting on your couch, and a shark comes in and bites you; now that’s a shark attack. Now, if you’re chilling in the water, that is called invasion of space. So I have never heard of a shark attack.

When I see on the news where it’s like, “There have been 10 shark attacks,” I’m like, “Hey, for real?! They’re just running around? Sharks are walking now, huh! We live on the land, we don’t live underwater.”

I don’t know where he comes up with this stuff.

Update: Andy’s comment points us to Dan’s D.C. Sports Blog (which then points us to Gilbertology) which explains exactly where he comes up with this stuff.