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Hey Mary Gardner, I heard you are getting into Twitter July 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Career, Friends, Twitter, Orlando Business Journal , 2 comments

Shout-outs to Mary Gardner, who happens to be my manager’s wife. She is a very cool lady and someone you should all get to know. Here’s an excerpt of her blog where she recounts our meeting over lunch today with most of the PHP Team and a couple of project managers:

The Charisma Coach!: Hanging out with the Techies

They’re programmers who have a personal interest in social media as well as doing it for their jobs.

For me, it was so much easier hanging with them for an hour than reading a techie magazine, and easier to pick up on the language. They gave me content for an upcoming business article and ideas for others.

Hanging with those outside your own industry can give your own creativity a boost and sharpen your own knowledge about something that might be out of your comfort zone but that is interesting.

I told her she MUST go to BlogOrlando and add me on twitter as well as Eric and the other twitter folks at the table. For her it makes lots of sense, she is in the life coaching and professional speaking fields, and she wants to build a personal brand around celebrities with causes. I think she will find some great resources and utility through twitter, so Mary, hoping you have Google Alerts turned on, sign up; or if you saw the “new blog post” link in Twitter, good for you!

Either way, welcome to the Dark Side, Mary. I look forward to your update in my daily (OMG, they mean daily) Orlando Business Journal update.

Falling in Love 5 Seconds at a Time April 25, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Twitter, Love , add a comment

As a follow-up to my last post, I will give the additional point that on Twitter your 5 minutes are reduced to something more like 5 seconds

Falling in Love 5 Minutes at a Time

Posted by Ryan in : Blogging, Podcasts, Quotes, Puppets, Trends, BarCamp, BlogOrlando, Friends, Twitter , add a comment

A few years ago at the second Orlando Puppet Festival, I was trying to sell Heather Henson on the idea of my podcasting about the festival becoming official. Needless to say, she’s super-busy running the festival, and we don’t have time to get into all the ins and outs of podcasting, so she asks me to give her a sample. The next time I see Heather I hand her a CD, and she’s grateful for the ability to time-shift her decision-making process.

The following day I see her, she’s a bit frustrated with me, because she says “I put this in my car and nothing happened, you gave me a bad CD!” Oops! Not the case, in fact it was a collection of every podcast I’d released to date - totaling around 80 hours of audio, or about enough to fill 60 regular CDs. “They’re MP3’s” I said, “Normally you’d have to spend hours downloading them all, and I’ve saved you the trouble!” Heather retorts, “But how do I know where to start?” She didn’t like having the entire library of congress and no card catalog (OK, not the ENTIRE library, but still…).

This brings me to an interesting point I haven’t dwelled much on in the past year and a half. How do we begin to introduce people to something like, let’s say Lady Raptastic, which has more than 80 hour-long episodes by itself, not to mention all the other shows Mark Baratelli produces. I suppose the old adage “You’re only as good as your last [whatever]” may come into play here, but that’s just not how it is with blogs and most podcasts.

I was having a conversation with someone at BarCamp about this very subject. She was getting into blogging based on a few pokes by her friends, and she was worried about writing something relevant. I told her “The magic of blogging doesn’t happen in an instant, you sort of fall in love 5 minutes at a time.”

I don’t really know where else to go from here, but suffice it to say there will likely be a “part 2″ of this post, and perhaps more. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d especially like to see what the 200+ attendees of BlogOrlando have to say about the subject.

Steve Jobs Never Finished College, Speaks at Graduation January 27, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Career, Links, Video, Trends, Entrepreneurship, Storytelling, Twitter , 2 comments

via johl’s ramen soup

Several of my teachers at UCF used to say “Fail early and often”. Failing early and often requires you to stay hungry and foolish like the back of the Whole Earth Catalog said. Both statements belong someplace where you can see them, like in your cubicle or near the door to your house. Maybe that’s a good use for the “Hello, Dolly” plugin that comes with every Wordpress install. Now you can share those quotes with yourself and your blog readers. Also check out @iheartquotes on twitter. I think I found that because of Alex’s fun and useful Twitterholic.

Also about the video:
As always, Steve has prepared every moment of this presentation to the exact second when people will clap and he takes a sip from his water. I also really like how they show the graduates who have no respect for what they’re wearing at all, because it’s just gotten ridiculous to wear a gown to a party anymore, and they know it. The final message “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” is not how I would put it, but if you know what’s behind it, then it works.

Johl (whose tumbalog I nabbed this from) is friends with Johannes from monochrom, and I’ll believe those kids are all hungry and foolish, and they’ve certainly found what they love to do.