tombiro.com

It’s almost 2010 (wow!), and here’s my links you need to click for the day. Enjoy!

• Congrats to Ben and Abbi Wagner on the news of Abbi’s pregnancy. Of course, Ben writes it up in his news-guy style, keeping you waiting until the end, even if you did look at the photo first.
• After Dave busted on me for my top 25-played tracks that were born in the year of our lord 2009, I just had to link to this. Rex points to what last.fm sez are the most unwanted scrobbles – that is, the ones most deleted from last.fm users’ scrobble lists – for 2009. Let’s just say you’re probably not going to be surprised.
• For those of you that aren’t so into the cult of the blog, this post from Wil Wheaton is a perfect example of why it’s awesome that they exist in the first place. Just replace Mr. Wheaton (or don’t, if TNG does it for you) with a musician, actor, politician of your choice, and imagine that they were side-commenting their own career or history, and you’ll see what I mean.
• A couple of weeks back, Twitter released a list of the Top Twitter Trends of 2009. Those of you who get annoyed at my non-100% support of hashtags for all things on Twitter will note that beyond the hashtag-specific category, only 7 made the charts, overall, with real-text taking the cake for the most part. Again, this isn’t to say that they don’t work, only that the “average” user tends to stick to talking in actual words. Just sayin’.
• Check out Brand New’s Best and Worst Identities for 2009 here.
• Did you know that you could use multiple aliases for a given email address on your iPhone? But yes, you can. Here’s the solution for this very request, via Gruber.

Here’s a cache of stuff of interest that I’ve come across in the last 24/48/72 that you might dig on…

• Over at A VC, Fred Wilson explains the communication of change when it comes to business, specifically regarding a CEO and a board or other investors. For the most part, that can be translated to other things, especially for those of you who work in the PR field.
• Costa Tsiokos shares a list of types of corporate blogs, and has one example of a good blog gone… well, curious.
• If you aren’t up on the whole snafu surrounding some Domino’s employees that apparently went on their own and “showed off” some obnoxious behavior on the Web story, then now’s probably a safe time to catch up. Consumerist, as always, has the low down on who has failed to be employed any longer.
• Woo hoo, FOX’s “24″ is coming to NYC, Gothamist et al are reporting

So, I’m sitting on the flight home from Houston after going to this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas. I flew in and out of IAH as it was easier than the connections out there, and I couldn’t get on the direct that does run, in case you were wondering.

So since I was supposed to land approximately 25 minutes ago, and I’m 1,533 items behind on my RSS feeds, and have about a dozen items flagged to blog or do something with, you’ll probably see some randomly off-timed postings over the next few days, but I’m trying really hard to get back in the swing of things.

Okay, not like it’s been a surprise or anything, as I’ve not been a regular poster on one of the bigger blogs I’d written on over the years, but I “officially” closed The Media Drop today, about five years and a week since its debut.

It’s been a long time coming, I’ve had a zillion conversations with people about what to do with it and how to handle the sorta conflict of working in public relations, talking to media people all day long, while working for a media company. Tricky, right? In any case, it was a total blast while it lasted, was one of the cooler things I’ve been able to do on the Web to date (unless you want to count my “Look! it’s Enrico Palazzo!” quote on the Internet Pizza Server back in 1995, while still in college), and I’ll definitely miss it.

Will it be back? You never know. I’m not taking it “down,” if you will, and am obviously working on a ton of projects that some of you are already aware of, so that’s where it’s at. Just thought some of you might like to know in case you’re still holding out hope in your RSS reader that TMD will be back in action – alas, it isn’t in the cards.

Tonight in the elevator, while leaving the office, I mentioned to a colleague that I’d started following him on Twitter. He mentioned having read my blog a bit, and that I hadn’t posted much, and busted my you-know-what on not posting much of any import. Whether he was kidding or not isn’t the point, it’s that he’s kinda right. I’ve been so up-and-all-over for the last few months, and have been flagging items to blog about and having conversations on Twitter, Facebook, etc., and not here – where I like to have them. So if anything, I’m trying to put a good face on ‘09, and post a lot more regularly. I’d love to get back to the 1-2 posts per day, but if I ever get this and some of my other projects back off the ground, it’ll be at least that often but over those sites. In any case, here’s to getting back to “normal” here on tombiro.com.

Just added the nifty tag cloud at the bottom of this page – replacing the original code for the categories (which I don’t use anymore) – with some help from WordPress Guy’s quick tutorial on the subject. Dropping the code in and just inserting a “50″ for the number of tags I wanted to show (rather than all of them), as I thought that was a good number.

Working on some more updates here, and on a few of my other projects (finally), so you’ll have to put up with Tom a little bit more than you might be used to of late…

Okay, aside from the SEO game that my headline is trying to play here, I’d like to take a moment and congratulate Chris Thilk, my former team member at MWW Group and fellow writer from the days of AdJab, on accepting a new gig with Spout, where he’ll be the director of marketing. This is a really awesome move for Chris and I’m psyched for him, as he’s going to be working wall to wall on something he loves — movies.

Mid-July was the first time since 2005 or thereabouts that I haven’t been working “with” Chris in some fashion, and I’m sure I’ll go into some sort of mental recession about it in the coming months, but for now, I’ll just wish him good luck and all that stuff.

A few days ago, I read this amazing post by Brian Clark over at copyblogger about what inspires him. It’s one part trauma, one part love(s) of his life, and one part wake-up-call, and it all adds up to a pretty amazing story about how copyblogger came to be.

So, I don’t think I blogged this anywhere, but figured it might be a wise idea to do nonetheless. A couple of weeks ago, I pretty much formally left Weblogs, Inc., where I’d been the founding editor for AdJab, an idea that Jason Calacanis brought to my attention back in August/September of 2004. While AJ had its ups and downs, and ultimately pal Chris Thilk took the reins as my day gig and other projects were chewing up my online interests and time, it was a blast to get started. Additionally, being able to work from time to time on other Weblogs, Inc. sites and get to review some huge shows at TV Squad and be recognized for doing so was obviously beneficial for me from a professional perspective and helped me grow my ability to write and cover a lot of different areas online.

All that said, the coolest thing that came out of working at WIN was the team. All the bloggers that I wrote alongside, picked the brains of, or got to meet in person have had some impact on where I stand today, whether it’s at my day gig in public relations and new media or the various places I’m writing online. Some people offered great tips on how to do things like manage certain people’s expectations, others brought different ways of actually drafting content or handling the world of “getting things done,” and others were – are – rockstars in their own right that continue to teach me things about the online world, and I really appreciate all of it.

While I can’t say I was pleased with the unceremonious way in which AdJab was shown the door, these things happen. I can see how AOL didn’t see the natural fit into the consumer-driven sites they were building elsewhere, but I think they were unfortunately governed by what hurts a lot of people’s understanding of the world of new media, which is sheer volume and numbers. If AdJab had been simply pulling in the attention of consumers and consumers alone, things would have been different. However, it made it into the groupthink and regular reads for many marketing and advertising readers, journalists, and bloggers, and was a great cross-pollination spot for other WIN sites, as all the companies and brands written about elsewhere did advertising or marketing in some way, shape, or form. So, while Chris and I might have completely different thoughts on how things should have worked out in the long run for AJ, we’ve moved on, and we both live and learn.

I wanted to toss this up on my blog because it’s been sitting in my MarsEdit for entirely too long, and I wanted to give a great big round of applause (or as loud as I could on my own) to those folks from WIN and beyond that were of a huge help for me online, many of which have become friends online and off. Good luck to those of you at Weblogs, Inc. and wherever you’re cropping up these days, as we all seem to have eight or fifteen projects going, and I’m sure I’ll see you all around.

Cheers!

Just changed my email tagline from the lengthy-ass one with my email address(es), blog link(s), and so on and so forth, and dropped it down to a much easier list of blogs that I write at, and my email republishing disclaimer, and that’s it. Caught it from Wil Wheaton, who I’m on a few mailing lists with, and thought it was a much nicer thing to add at the end of your emails.

For those of you who don’t know about the disclaimer item, I’ve found that it’s really helpful, whether you’re a blogger, journalist, or are just concerned about how people might do something with your email missives once you’ve fired them off. Here it is:

this email is: [ ] publishable [ ] ask first [ ] private

Obviously you can tweak accordingly, but that’s the basic gist.