Blog: November 2005

Susannah joins faculty at Blogs ‘n’ Dogs

November 18, 2005

Susannah’s been asked to be a member of the faculty at the Blogs ‘n’ Dogs workshop presented by the Banff New Media Institute Accelerator program, to be held Dec. 4-7 near Calgary, Canada.

Participants spend most of their time learning about blogging, and some of their time learning about dog sledding.  Seriously!  Reminds me of that Steve Wright joke: “A while ago, I went skiing in England. It was a rare package: two weeks in England, one night in Connecticut, two weeks in England.”

The program is filling up quickly, but there’s room for a few more bloggers interested in refining their craft—what about you?  It’s not a business conference, which is nice—it’s more like a conference for doers than a conference for owners, if you know what I mean.  Here’s their description:

Participants will learn about the philosophies behind the blogosphere. Additionally, they’ll develop and refine their blog finding, reading and writing skills. We’ll also cover social bookmarking, tracking topics, social networking, and emerging practices in audio and video blogging.

Travis will be going, too.  Should be excellent fun.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:55 PM | Comments (4)

Lead Generation Tool for Alliance Enviro

November 15, 2005

Here’s a small project we’ve completed recently:

Alliance Enviro wanted to be able to develop in-state leads from their target market using their Web site.

They produced several white papers, and are marketing them offline and in search engines.

We produced the landing pages, and created a form that filters and additionally prequalifies the leads, whcih are then delivered automatically via email to the marketing department.

Not every lead is perfect, of course, but their results are very promising, and are targeted to an extent that is much higher than leads that come in through other means.

Posted by Travis Smith at 2:35 AM | Comments (0)

Troubles with Nexcess

November 14, 2005

If you’re one of our clients who uses Nexcess, our preferred and most often recommended Web hosting provider, you may have noticed that today was a very bad day for Nexcess.  Many or most sites hosted with Nexcess have been unreachable for much of Sunday, and that includes email as well as Web access.

We’re aware of this, and if we could do anything about it, we would be.  The problem is caused by an upgrade gone very, very wrong at one of the three ISPs that Nexcess uses, SAGO.

This has led several of our clients to ask if there’s something they should do, such as switch to another ISP.  Today, we recommend firmly that switching isn’t necessary—but we will watch to make sure that Nexcess doesn’t have additional problems.  Read More if you’d like additional background.

Read the entire item

Posted by Travis Smith at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)

Real Baking with Rose: General Mills’ First Blog

November 9, 2005

It’s hard to think of an activity older than baking, or a newer activity than blogging.  That’s why I’m so excited about the newest blog we’re launching: Real Baking with Rose.  It’s a blog about scratch baking by Rose Levy Beranbaum.  Rose is not only an expert baker, but she’s also got exactly what I think it takes to be a good blogger—an ability to write, a desire to share stories and an instinct to help people learn.

This is the first blog from the enormous food corporation General Mills, and (so far) they’ve done everything better than I could have hoped, especially for a first foray.

The blog is sponsored by Gold Medal flour, but, having been around for conversations between General Mills and Rose, I’ve been impressed by the total hands-off nature of the sponsorship.  When Rose asked if she ought to add Gold Medal flour to her “sites i like” section, General Mills immediately said, of course not, unless you like the site—that’s so refreshing!  General Mills’ awareness of the line between editorial and advertising was sharper than at some publications where I’ve worked *cough*VarietyLATimes*cough* and is a nice change from some of the blunders in corporate blogging we’ve seen elsewhere.

For Rose, blogging is a shift from the book writing she’s been doing, so we’ve been giving advice and training in addition to our technical and design work on the blog.  We’re also setting up a mailing list and will be doing some site promotion.

Not only is this going to turn out to be a popular blog on a hot (get it?) topic—the Washington Post has already written about it—but I’m going to get many new recipes for brownies and cookies.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Posted by Travis Smith at 10:54 AM | Comments (3)