Thumb drives

Damn the man.

At work, our IT team is a bit stringent on what we have on our Macs. As an associate editorial director, it's deemed that I wouldn't need something like Audacity or Handbrake. They have administrative locks on our machines so I can't go download these gems, but I've managed to get around it using my trusty thumb drive.

The nice thing about running apps off a thumb drive is that you never have to worry about installing things onto the work desktop and getting flagged. Generally, I carry Portable Firefox preferences, the above mentioned Audacity, a few little games and the ohh so helpful KillBox on my drive (a Scandisk Micro Cruiser).

In all, I've learned that I'd much rather just take a thumb drive with me than a laptop. I don't have to pull the thumb drive out of my bag at airport security checks, don't get hassled by Campbell-Ewald's IT team and I still get to be the annoying tech geek at the office.

What about you guys? Any portable apps you're fond of? Do you use your portable drive? Oh, this particular post was inspired by a comment string for a poll on thumb drives over at Lifehacker. Click the link to check it out. As a side note, probably no blog tomorrow until late. I'm in Chicago all day for a creative presentation to Chevy .

I wish...

Google Maps would have done my Google Streetview on a day when the corner of my lawn wasn't dead.


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That is all.

On Online Persona Managment

What happens when you Google yourself? If you click that link, you'll see what came up when I did it. Thankfully, my personal Web page hits the top of the organic listings. I chalk it up to proper meta tags, title tags and clean code. I've also gone out of my way to try to properly manage my online persona.

Admittedly, as a young twenty-something in the Internet age, not everything that you'll find my name attached to is necessarily something I'd want everyone, let alone potential clients, vendors or employers to see. Now that I'm a late twenty-something, with a considerable amount of material that I either wrote in my newspaper days or that I was responsible for coding in my Web editing days, I have a nice body of work with my name attached to it.

So, when prospective employers Google my name, mostly the good stuff shows up. Sure, my foodie profiles pop close to the top, but I don't necessarily see them as detrimental to my reputation.

Lifehacker, recently posted a feature on managing your online reputation. While I think it misses out on a few social network identities that are an absolute must to grab, I think the post is informative and has a lot of good suggestions.

As a side note, I was an early adopter of Twitter, abandoned it, and have since come back. After I left, someone who I won't name, assumed my identity and did some pretty good damage. A lesson learned. I've since grabbed it back, if only to manage it. I'm still not sold on Twitter yet.

Yikes...

Thanks to Marc for bringing my post template problem to my attention. Seems as if I'm having a CSS error in the permalinks on my blog posts. I'm working on the issue. I've fixed both the permalink problem and the menu error in getting back to the blog from permalink posts. Sorry for the error. It's been a while since I've redesigned.

On staying relevant in a "Free" economy

This week's Advertising Age features an interesting interview with Chris Anderson, who is probably best known for his work with Wired, but is also known for his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

I was particularly drawn to some of Anderson's classifications of different kinds of free. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

When you think about it, there really are three kinds of free. There's the free we've known forever, which is the King Gillette razor-and-blade model, which is a form of cross-subsidy. A spin-off of that model is the media model, where the product is free because it's subsidized by the advertiser. That's called a three-party market -- the publisher, the advertiser and the consumer who gets everything for free.

The second kind of free is this weird kind of the free that's never existed before, simply because cost goes to nothing. Moore's Law said processing would get cheaper every year, but there are corollaries for bandwidth and storage. As the price gets closer and closer to zero, you can eventually just treat it as free.

Hotmail started with a tiny amount of storage for free and then you had to pay for the rest. By 2000 to 2002, you were getting more. Then Gmail said, "We're going to give away one gigabyte for free," and revolutionized the market. Yahoo said, "We'll give them infinite storage. We'll use that to reinforce people's connection with Yahoo and make the money somewhere else, maybe banner ads on Yahoo News, maybe just the information you get from people's user behavior that allows you to charge more for ads."

The third model of free is the gift economy. This is what used to be called freaky, Berkeley, hippy-commune stuff and now is the basis for Wikipedia, the blogosphere, Craigslist. There is a real economy out there that is motivated by nonmonentary consideration such as reputation, attention, expression -- all the social incentives that are turning out to be incredibly effective in getting people to do things for free. Before we didn't have a platform on which they could work.

Interestingly enough, Wired is also free to the first 10,000 on an e-mail list and is dedicated to how the future is "free" as well.

The Long Tail is something that's consistently brought up in presentations to our digital clients at work. One of our EVPs of Planning recently blogged about how he believes Barak Obama to be the first successful "Long Tail Candidate," by hitting on a massive niche area of campaign donors. This targeting has allowed Obama to continue to flourish while other candidates war chests have become a bit tapped out.

All interesting discussions really, and it presents a big challenge for marketers and traditional ad people alike. How can we really gain traction when more and more people want things for free? In my opinion, a lot of it comes back to content. People are willing to pay for something if they believe it to be a quality product. Just look at Radiohead and the success it had with allowing its fans to purchase "In Rainbows" digitally for any price they chose. It was an interesting exercise, and while it wasn't the first band to try it, Radiohead was by far the most successful.

Radiohead's success doesn't necessarily come from the fact they make good records (I believe a lot of their stuff between "OK Computer" and "In Rainbows" was absolute crap). The band is successful as well because they have people waiving their flag and attesting to their quality despite critical bashing from time to time.

I'll blog more on "The Long Tail" and freeconomy later. I'm just getting going on my initial research into this realm. What do you think of the Free Economy? I'm curious.

As a side note: thanks to all of you for the well wishes and great feedback on the redesign. You're great friends and colleagues.

xo - Eizans

Pleasant surprises

I'm doing something today that I normally don't do. I'm sitting my bed, past 7 a.m. I've been puttering around on the computer and spending time with the dog, drinking coffee and catching up on sites I once used to frequent.

I was pleasantly surprised when Rafiki tensed up and got defensive at the edge of our bed. That usually means the mail has arrived or Vita is home. This time it was the later. Vita got home several hours early from call and we've been spending a nice cool sunny morning in bed... chatting, listening to iTunes and picking songs for the wedding. I don't have enough mornings like this anymore and it's nice to have the opportunity to spend time in bed with my lady, even if I know she'll be passed out a good chunk of the morning coming off surgical call.

I've already received a few emails from my digital-inclined friends about the redesign. I'm happy to report that the bulk have all been praise, while others were very constructive. Admittedly, Version 1.0 was looking really dated and was difficult to read at times due to its width in the center column. I'm happier with the new design. It's growing on me, but I'm not totally sold on the header image yet.

On a reading and link front, check out this feature in PingMag. It's about a photographer's adventures on an Alaskan fishing boat.

Some nice images and a pretty good little interview.



It's also a good reminder that Michigan isn't the coldest place on earth right now. Grab your coffee and your girl... it's a good morning to stay in bed.

Re-launched and re-dedicated

Well - I'm officially redesigned, streamlined and back with Danieleizans.com 2.0. For the most part, I'm really happy with it. I have a little work to do with the sidebar on this page. I've had a bit of difficulty removing the need for unordered lists within Blogger's template rules. Once I tweak it a little more everything should be up to speed.

What I do like about the site, is the redesigned navigation, the absence of the sub-pages and the direct linking to portfolio items. I've done away with a PDF version of my resume. I'm still trying to decide if I'll put that back up or not. I also incorporated two color links to maintain better usability. I'm curious to know your thoughts. Let me know.

In other news, I'll get back to talking about articles, things I come across and work related stuff.

I'm ready to get back into the swing of things, with a redesigned site. Thanks for the patience gang.

Blog template redesign

Is in progress... this is my holding design for the moment. Thanks google/blogger.

Danieleizans.com 2.0 update #3

Good morning.

I'd like to report that my redesign is largely finished. It has been temporarily delayed thanks to work-related content and a Web site I'm developing for a dear friend.

At any rate, I'll launch the redesign sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning. I now have the pain in the ass of working the redesign into the blog template. Basically, what you'll get is still a dark site with light type, but I've reworked the navigation a bit, made links more intuitive and basically streamlined the wordy graphs that once introduced each section.

All in all, I think it will be a more user friendly experience and eliminate the problems I had updating some pages in the past.

Look for my emergence, and return to at least 4 times a week blogging on Sunday.

Thanks for the patience, the e-mails and well... for being you.

Redesign coming along

My redesign has been coming along quite well. Part of what has been slowing things down has been the fact that the last time I updated my portfolio section was some time in 2006. I've completed quite a bit of work since then that I'm actually quite proud of. Therefore, figuring out a way to organize everything has been a little challenging.

I've been surfing around and looking at different photographer and ad exec portfolio pages. And while they're very nice, flashy and pretty, they're not me. Warning: Life rant ahead.

I've always thought of myself as a linear creative. I LOVE really nice clean lines, basic gradients and colors and subtle background patterns.

I'm not sure where this grew from. I always dated artists (until Molly and Vita), and most of them liked crazy patterns, bright colors and bigger, bubbly type. For some reason, I always like to paint myself into the background. I don't like to pop too much with my online presence.

K... Back to redesign.

If it's really possible, the site is getting smaller. By smaller I mean more compact. Somehow, I've managed to increase font size (a common complaint of the current design) and still make things more compact. I'll chalk it up to the fact that I've been doing wireframes and skinning for Chevy I guess.

More later. I have a few articles to sift through and three magazines to plan before 11 a.m.

Danieleizans.com 2.0 - yo.

Hi.

Last night, I began redesigning the site. I couldn't sleep, and was feeling a bit off, but I did get the general look, feel, colors and layout of danieleizans.com 2.0. I really like it. I don't think it will be as clunky as some of the areas are here, and it certainly shows off how I've grown as a designer.

But never fear - it's still simple, standards compliant and CSS based.

I should have it done by the weekend if I continue my planned pace.

More later.

"Shooting out car tires sounds like loads of fun..."

On the iPod "Too Drunk To Fuck" - Nouvelle Vague

As you can tell by now, I make a whole lot of promises on my blog that I seldom keep. It's more than a month later, and still no new site, still no new musings, and still - no blogging consistently. I'm not going to pretend I can get back to daily blogging, but I will pretend that I'm going to rededicate my time to my own web space. These damn MySpace accounts, my new relationship with Facebook and a host of new projects at Work, have had me slammed. I have a new title - Associate Editorial Director. Yeah, I don't know what it's supposed to mean either.

More later. Yes, I promise.