Back from The Gilded Age. We just returned from Newport, Rhode Island for April Vacation Week 2009, which I hope explains my brief cyber-absence. Sorry for not giving you the usual heads-up. Newport is known for its mansions from the Gilded Age, most of which were built around 1900. Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans - those cats. We spent two days touring several of these incredible mansions, kept in their original state by the Newport Preservation Society. The wealth of these families during this period of American History when there was no Personal Income Tax was unimaginable. (Personal Income Tax enacted in 1913 radically changed the status quo and was the beginning of the end of these family empires.) The tours were illuminating and transported you back to another time. I thought I’d have a ton of mansion pics for you, but photos were prohibited. I did take a bunch of photos of the Cliff Walk on the Newport shoreline. Lots of seaside mansions and images of the Atlantic in April.
Content Spew. We do produce a lot of blog content, don’t we? And yet we’re still broke. Go figure. But hey, there’s hope. This Copyblogger post provides tips on using our content to better market our brand. #31 You don’t have to call it a blog just because you created it in [BlogEngine.NET]. #34 Review everything. #36 Find 7 things your product has in common with Paris Hilton… Hm, that’s a good one. Sueetie is like Paris Hilton because, #1 It’s flexible?
Post Content Spew: Cleanup in Aisle Four. More Copyblogger content for you in “Three Content Marketing Essentials.” The points are rudimentary, Watson, but always worth a re-read. Solve problems your audience cares about in an entertaining way, for instance. Use content to build trusting relationships over time is another. I like the reminder of Paul Newman’s philosophy, “Always take your work seriously; never take yourself seriously.”
Sueet numbers. Even if you’re not a Sueetie Enthusiast, you have to like these numbers. Forrester predicts huge growth for social media marketing. And according to CNET, the percentage of deployed Open Source software grows while proprietary software declines. Finally, just because everyone tweets and nobody blogs anymore, the number of blog readers is supposed to continue to grow by 50% each year through 2013 based on an eMarketer forecast.
Reasonable? I'd like to meet a reasonable man. That’s a quote from “Being There.” Rand speaks the line to Eve when she first tells him about Chauncey. It’s tangential to this link topic, but it came to mind so I had to use it. One more Being There quote for you, “Well - you wait right here, I'll go get Warren!” Oh yeah, the link. I discovered two useful sites this week. First is SurveyPirate, which I encountered when taking a ScrewTurn Wiki survey. The second is SlideShare, which Charlene Li mentioned in a “Future of Social Networks” podcast I listened to while on vacation. Here are the slides of her O'Reilly Media Graphing Social Patterns presentation on SlideShare. Not as cool as Chauncey Gardener, but pretty cool. “Yes, I’ve been on TV!”
Being There in the Gilded Age of Vermont sidebar. Did you know that “Being There” was filmed in The Biltmore Mansion at Asheville, North Carolina and that architect Richard Morris Hunt was the architect of several Newport mansions, including The Breakers? For Vermont Bonus Points, did you know that Richard Morris Hunt was born and raised in Brattleboro, Vermont? Circular, dude!
Star Trek icons! This post announcing Iconfactory’s free Star Trek desktop icons reminded me of the time when I had a fun desktop. A fun Dave Burke Desktop was last seen in 1994 when I was enjoying the OS/2 Warp Desktop with the Homer Simpson icon collection. Man, I loved OS/2 Warp. At least the Simpsons are still around. In my small way I continue to keep OS/2 Warp alive. I see my OS/2 Warp box once each year at Christmas time because I keep Christmas Tree ornaments in it…very special ornaments.
The New Frugality. This is the cover for the April 27th Time Magazine. It reminds me of an excellent post with the superior title of “How to Survive the Recession Like It’s 1933.” 16 very good points to consider, but the one that sticks with me is #16 Pretend that you are worse off than you are. That’s a mighty mindset for fiscal discipline. ‘Nuff said.
Been standing in this line for a Zune Phone since 2:00 AM! AT&T moved into Vermont, buying out Unicel, my cell phone carrier. I can actually buy an iPhone now! But no, I’m going to hold onto my RAZR until the ZUNE PHONE is available! Yeeeeaaaah, baby!