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Technosailor

Web Technology and Real Life Merge

5 Things I Learned from Nuclear WinterYesterday

Nuclear Winter. It’s the time period after a holocaust that can last for hundreds of years, making the surrounding landscape around ground zero uninhabitable due to radiation.

It is the death of life and the birth of a new holocaustic life. We’ve never actually had an actual nuclear winter on a global scale, though the threat is there as more and more nuclear weapons proliferate the globe. Many science fiction stories have been built around the concept of a nuclear holocaust and life after.

Although it’s a dark time, sometimes proverbial nuclear winters are necessary. They are the times when you throw away everything you know and begin from scratch. A chance at a new life. A rebirth. It’s a time to correct all that is wrong and hopefully get on the right path over the long haul. Economists call it “corrections”. Historians call it the “end of an era” or the “decline of an Empire” - depending on the context. I just cleared out all of my feeds from Google Reader and will begin rebuilding from scratch.

As someone who is not experienced in an actual nuclear winter, let me describe a few things that I’ve learned from proverbial “nuclear winter”

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Working the RoomYesterday

I love Gary Vaynerchuk. He is possibly my favorite person in social media. It could be his New York style, or his common sense, practical content.

Gary gets it. He gets it in a way that very few other people, even in social media get it. I believe this stems from a lack of pretentiousness that drives him. He is who he is, and he’s focused solely on “the hustle” - the drive to build his brand and make money.

When Gary puts out a video, people listen. Because he knows what he is talking about.

We’ve talked a lot about brands and marketing here. I’ve talked about the trust and transparency factor. How if your customers can relate to you, because you’re transparent, they are going to do more business with you. How if your customers don’t trust you, your brand is worthless because you don’t control the value of your brand - they do!

Gary points out in one of his recent videos that brands of the past succeeded on “presentations” - that is ads, and marketing. They went where the eyeballs were. No one ever got to engage with the brand other than to buy the product. But, he argues, brands of tomorrow will succeed by “working the room” and talking to their customers because social media has changed the game.

Enjoy some Garyvee!

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There and Back Again: Top 10 Blogs to ExploreNovember 18

I was asked by the Editor of blogs.com to join an ongoing project where they poll some of the top bloggers (Marc Canter, Chris Anderson of Wired, Marc Andressen of Ning, etc). Somehow, I got on that list of bloggers.

The point was to provide Top 10 blogs for their readers to read… sometimes on a special topic, other times more generalized. Blogs.com published this Top 10 List yesterday.

For those who have not adopted RSS reading and subscribing yet, consider opening a free Google Reader account and begin subscribing to blogs like these and mine  - you never have to remember to go visit a site then; Reader just automatically shows you new content when they appear.

Without further adieu (and in no particular order):

Read Write Web - a tech news analysis site. They do less reporting of the news and more hard hitting “what’s it mean to me” kind of writing. Also, maybe my chief competitor.

Chris Brogan - Well connected, and all about helping people understand the nature of online relationships and community.

Fred Wilson - an extremely savvy inv

10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7November 18

The saga of cheatsheets and reference sheets continues with this outline of the hot new WordPress 2.7 which will be released soon. Like WordPress 2.5, this is a radical release. Like WordPress 2.5, the bulk of the changes affect the WordPress admin. Unlike WordPress 2.5, however, this is not merely an update of the backend but a complete rebuilding.

Termed “Crazyhorse” at the beginning of the cycle, the WordPress admin is the result of complete thinking outside the box, research and user testing. The concept began as “Let’s throw everything away that we assume to be proper and correct and see what we can come up with when we have no preset conditions”.

The result is a semantically, aesthetically and structurally different WordPress than you’ve ever known before. This is not your grandma’s WordPress!

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The first thing you will notice when you login to WordPress 2.7 for the first

I Love Social Networking, But . . .November 18

As the song goes, it don’t pay my bills. So I signed on with a startup that does. Hopefully, I can do both (time permitting). But talk about two different worlds . . . Hardware, not software. Distinctly un-social (for now). Government, not commercial. Business, not consumer. And funded, not — well, self-funded.

I’m working in semiconductors again (you may recall I cut my teeth there)– and very next-generation. And managing programs for a company working (for now) on government contracts may not sound sexy. . . but the work we’re doing is awesome in every sense. Eons away from the silicon chips found in laptops and phones, what we build is for big power switching. We’re talking big.

And did I mention that it’s well funded? Primarily through SBIR grants, a thought-provoking (read: nondilutive) alternative to VC funding — even in good times — if you’ve got some unique IP.

In times like these, it seems like a godsend.

But my reorientation was (still is, in fact) intense. It’s the main reason for my blogging hiatus. Coming up to speed on nearly a dozen programs. Managing them using MSFT Project . . . which threw me back onto Windows XP . . . o