State of the Media 09-09-09

I am watching the President of the United States give a speech to Congress on the LA Times website.

I am watching a live video speech by a bi-racial leader of the free world on the website of a newspaper on a link that I found via Twitter.

I am talking to people in real time using less than 140 characters about a speech I am watching on the website of a major newspaper.

You would think with all this ability to communicate through various media in real time, somehow people would be able to come to a consensus on health care reform.

You would think.

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The Goal: One Blog Post Per Day in September

As a tune up for National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo, coming in November), I am trying a more modest writing goal this month: one blog post per day, every day.

People call this NaBloPoMo. And while NaNoWriMo is an annual November event only, NaBloPoMo is really pretty much any month you feel like trying it.

The first three days of the month have gone smoothly. Today was a little tricky because it’s my b-day, but I still made a sliver of time to put together this post.

(I am not doing all my posts on one blog–I will be spreading the love to the various blogs to which I contribute on Identity Theory as well.)

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Identity Theory Featured in Vermont Alt-Weekly

Margot Harrison wrote a nice article about my work at Identity Theory in this week’s Seven Days (that’s the alt weekly here in Vermont, for those of you outsiders).

The conclusion? “With content ranging from John Cusack’s views of torture to a wickedly satirical short story about a marketing consultant, IT defies demographic niches, and proves that you can do serious reading on a screen.”

Check it out over at: Burlington Resident Explores Identity Theory in His High-Profile E-Journal

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New WordPress Theme Coming Soon

I hope to finally get a custom look going for this site within the next week or two, despite being swamped with other web work this month.

The plan is to create a WordPress “child theme” based on an open-source framework like Thematic.

Read More »

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Digital Media Strategy and Design Links of the Day: August 3rd

“Mastering CSS, Part 1: Styling Design Elements” at Smashing Magazine

“20 Kick-Ass WordPress Theme Frameworks For Rapid Theme Development” at Codefusion Lab (which ironically is hosted on Blogspot)

“15 Killer Hacks for WordPress that Are Extremely Useful” at wpbeginner

And here’s an article on Twitter SEO targeted to job seekers

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New Identity Theory “Issue” Features Tom Grimes, Chat Room Fiction, Gary Lutz

Over at Identity Theory, we tend to avoid regular publishing schedules, but I’ve recently been experimenting with a weekly “issue” system for putting new articles online.

This week’s issue features:

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On the Institute of Social and Economic Development Website Redesign Project

Fluency Integrated Consulting has completed the first phase of a website redesign for the Institute of Social and Economic Development (ISED), a D.C.-based organization that works on sustainable economic development projects throughout the globe.

ISED’s old site, built using ColdFusion, was years out of date, visually unappealing, and had a major lack of focus and interactivity.

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Twittering Away My Blogging Time

I have been using Twitter for Identity Theory (@identitytheory) and Fluency (@FluencyBTV), which is taking up the time I’d have otherwise spent on this blog.

Usability is really important to creating web content, and Twitter’s interface for creating content is about as easy as it gets. No worries about formatting whatsoever, and brevity is encouraged. Therefore, it’s much easier for me to send a tweet than post to this blog.

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My Kato Kaelin Ask.com Commercial Appearance

About six years ago, I made a hideously ugly mock “fan” website about Kato Kaelin called “Can I Get a Witness?”

The page featured several banal quotes from O.J.’s famous houseguest as well as a “Kato vs. Plato” section.

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Good Fences Make Good Blog Posts, or “Obama and the Age of Anger Fatigue”

George Bush and Dick Cheney

Bush and Cheney are no longer there to help me come up with easy blog posts...or are they?

As much as I’d like to be freezing in Chicago with the literati right now, I’m instead shockingly not freezing in Burlington, where a spring-like, mid-February rain gave me a free winter carwash this afternoon.

Coming up with ideas to post to a non-themed blog is difficult because of the complete lack of “topic fences.” You’d think I could just find something that makes me really angry and write about that. But I don’t know what to be mad about right now. I simply don’t feel significantly peeved about anything in the world. It used to be much easier to come up with stuff to get riled up about because I could just type “George W. Bush” into Google News and instantly feel completely incensed. But now he’s gone, and he’s taken my anger with him.

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