Summer Interns

Posted on by

Our summer interns are packing up and heading back to school. One of their final tasks was to prepare a presentation on what they learned working for Learfield. The interns working in our Dallas office created a Powerpoint presentation which was, I’m sure, very… nice.

The Jeff City crew asked my advice and I told them Powerpoint is for losers. I suggested they produce a video and loned them my camcorder. I forgot to give them a mic so the sound is not all that it might be but their creativity and humor comes through loud and clear. Ladies and gentlemen… Coleman, Corey and Tyler.

Cassette tapes and overnight DVD’s

Posted on by

The news division of our company is in the process of launching a new radio network called Living the Country Life. It’s part of a joint venture with Meredith Publishing, which created the magazine and TV show (of the same name).

We’re producing a series of daily radio features and our affiliate relations guys will attempt to get the new programs on as many stations as possible. Toward that end, we’ve produced demos, so radio stations can hear what the programs sound like. I’m getting to the point, hang on.

One of the producers popped in this morning and asked how quickly I could create a web page where they could post the demos (MP3 files) for stations to download/listen?

A few years ago, I would have parked the files on an FTP server or cobbled together something in FrontPage. A few more years ago, and we would have been mailing out CD’s (or cassette tapes!).

This morning it took about 15 minutes to pull together a nice little blog on Typepad. Our affiliate relations folks can now just email  a link to a prospective affiliate. Such a site could easily become a cornerstone of our affiliate clearance effort. Fast, inexpensive, and no programming skills necessary.

I found a similar application for one our clients.

Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri has a 10 minute video on Shaken Baby Syndrome. You can order the DVD (for free, I believe) from their website, but what can you do with it then? Show it to your club or organization, I suppose. But why not make it easy for anyone with a web browser to watch the video.

So I put it up on Google Video and embedded the Flash player on their website and a world-wide audience is now just a click away.

This kind of stuff was damned hard or impossible, just a few years ago. And now, anyone can do this stuff. This is the real power of the web.

Gnomedex 2007

Posted on by

This year’s Gnomedex is billed as "The Blogosphere’s Conference." Speakers include: Guy Kawasaki, Cali Lewis, one of the JibJab guys, Justin Kan (Justin.tv), Jason Calcanis, and others. If you don’t recognize these names, it’s unlikely you’d enjoy the conference. But I look forward to it all year. This is my Indy 500/Super Bowl/World Series, minus the crowds (It’s a small conference, limited to about 300 attendees.)

For the first four or five years of the conference, I took vacation and paid my own expenses. But the Enlightened Management of Learfield now sees the value of this conference, so it’s work related and reimbursed.

Oooh, look! Goosebumps!

Vacations not for everyone

Posted on by

I don’t much care for what most people would call a “vacation.” And –once upon a time– felt a bit of guilt about it. Barb likes to travel so she and her sister frequently vacation together, so it works.

I discovered last week that I am not alone. The story (Yahoo! News) quoted a couple of people who share my lack of enthusiasm for The Vacation.

Nancy Kirk doesn’t consider them worth the effort. So instead of taking vacations, Kirk, 60, who owns an antique quilt and fabric business in Omaha, Neb., works down time into her everyday life — from taking an afternoon nap if she feels like it to occasionally tacking a day onto a business trip for sightseeing.

Jared Wadley, a senior public relations specialist at the University of Michigan news service in Ann Arbor, said he wasn’t interested in vacations even as a child. He not a workaholic, he says, but instead paces himself so that leisure is part of his day-to-day life.

“You have to look at why people take vacations. They want to get away from the office, but I enjoy my work so I don’t want to get away from it.”

There you go. I have three weeks of paid vacation but struggle to take it all. I think I would much prefer stretching those 21 days out into long weekends. If you add in the naturally occurring three-day-weekends… almost every other week would be a short one. Sound good?

Hide your iPod in a gutted Zune case

Posted on by

Hideapod“You made a smart choice in choosing an iPod. And now you can protect it from theft and still enjoy using it in public with the new Hide-a-Pod anti-theft case.

It’s really very simple. Just tell us what iPod model you want to protect and we provide a gutted and hinged Zune with our custom molded iPod casing adapter.”

And they “only use brown Zunes for the maximum anti-theft protection.” Ouch.