Conversation with Allaire Diamond

My friend Allaire is finishing up her graduate degree at the University of Vermont where she studies non-timber uses for forests. All the foraging, crafting and other uses for land that don’t involve chainsaws. Meghan, Allaire and myself were having a tea and conversation hang out and came up with some thoughts on combining technology and social networks to help connect people to their landscape. Sort of a localism for rural environments and field observation.It’s these sort of conversations that really get me going; synthesizing two or three disciplines to see what sort of meaning and overlap occurs.

Strategy development for media property in a post-television world

I’ve been working a lot on putting all the ducks in a row for a children’s media property. Assembling all the revenue streams, operations pipelines and marketing strategy for making a business (as opposed to straight licensing to a television network). It’s a lot of fun to work on this and you’ll definitely be hearing more about it over time. I’m not withholding details to be “hush hush,” I just want to have something more solid to show off later.

Hanging out and listening

I attended a well-organized (thanks Nicole!) Tweetup where I got to talk to former co-workers, new and old #BTV twitterati and have a good time. Tweetups are fun because in many ways, the participants have so little in common: they all use an internet-enabled publishing tool. But they might be non-profit workers, PR workers, artists, general business folks, education employees etc. So there’s lots of room for mixing up ideas.

I also made it to a Last Monday Interactive event and heard the full rundown on Vermont Film Incentive and how it didn’t make it through the legislature this year. Getting ideas and insight into the process is always eye-opening. I also got to grill a great Etsy shop-owner for ideas that I’ll be using with the childrens media property.

I had a slew of one-on-one meetings, lunches and coffee dates with area tech-heads and marketers. It was a great work for socializing with the weather getting nice around here.

Helping out

I was given the opportunity to present at the Burlington Women’s Small Business Program again this year. My topic was internet marketing and I start them out at the very beginning (you need to buy a domain name and get some web hosting) and then go as far as I can. I’ll be parsing out the slides and presentation and putting it here over the next few weeks. Speaking to that group is always fun because each of the participants has a different business and focus. Hearing how they solve problems and what questions they ask helps me remember what it’s like for people who don’t have their head in the code all the time.

Reading

I plowed through Guy Kawasaki‘s “Art of the Start” (for some of the pitching activities I’m involved in) and it was great. I’m probably going to be referring back to that frequently. Funny story about how I obtained the book. I went to Borders on Church Street to get it and at the checkout they did the usual “Do you have your Borders Rewards Card?” to which I said “No but I know my email address” and they took that and then when I asked about the discount was informed that they don’t give the discount unless I can remember the exact amount the discount was for. What’s the point of me being in the rewards program if I don’t get the rewards? I checked the book out of the library.

I’m also reading Osinga’s book about the strategic theory of John Boyd. Anyone who has talked with me for long knows how much I love the OODA loop. It’s great to have a dissertation on how the theory was put together, exploring the finer details.

I’ve long languished under the nice but generic Kubrick. In a massive case of cobbler’s son has no shoes, I’ve just never made the time to create a theme for n0d3. Well, I finally decided to just give in and download one of the billions of excellent free themes out there. I chose Grid Focus.

Since I tend to be wordy in my blog posts, the theme had to have decent typography. While I’m not a fan of sans-serif faces for lots of text, Grid Focus does have a nice tight length and handles the multitudes of heading levels I like to use. Perhaps I’ll work on getting a serif face to look nice for the body copy later. The basic grid which is the errr focus of this theme got me.

So while the cobbler may not have time to make shoes for his son, at least his son can go about wearing something good in the meanwhile.

Next up, I’m going to completely re-organize my taxonomy. This includes going back through all my existing posts and re-categorizing them. Don’t expect this to happen overnight.

I took the first day job I’ve had in over 8 years. I did the puppet opera. And I wrapped up my Animation class at Burlington College. I’ll try to be more regular from here out.

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