I’ve split this site into two, a personal one and a professional one. Spaceninja.com will remain my professional blog, with an emphasis on front-end web production. I’ve set up a new blog on ScottVandehey.com that I will be using for more personal posts about Zoe and non-web-development topics. Thanks for your patience.
It’s safe to say that no one at Pop Art was ever really happy with Community Server. We selected it as a platform for a variety of reasons, some of which turned out to be based on faulty assumptions. Once we finally made the decision to switch to WordPress, the conversion was a huge pain, but ultimately worth the effort. Continue reading
This morning, Annie told me about a Motrin ad that a bunch of mom-bloggers were angry about because it was critical of babywearing. She was really upset about it, and convinced that it was an intentional slam on mothers. Since I work in marketing, and Annie majored in Sociology, we tend to have conversations like this where Annie says advertising is evil, and I try to defend it.
In this case, I told her that I doubted it was anything intentional, and that it was probably a case of design-by-committee. Still, I asked her to send me the link so I could check the video out, and figured it would be a good conversation starter at work. Once I watched the video, though, I was startled by how bad it was. I could easily see why people were offended, and as I dug around online to find the details, what emerged was a fascinating story about a big company whose attempt to brand with their target audience backfired badly, and forced them to cancel an entire ad campaign.
To make a long story short (check out this Advertising Age article for all the gory details), the video was posted on Motrin’s website a few weeks ago. Last weekend, at the end of International Babywearing Week, an incredible combination of outraged blog posts, Twitter users, and YouTube replies led to the entire site being pulled offline on Sunday. It was put back up on Monday with an apology.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote this self-professed sequel to The Cluetrain Manifesto, focusing on blogging in the business world. As you might expect if you’ve ever read Scoble’s blog, the book clearly advocates blogging for companies, but they also point out some of the most common pitfalls and reasons not to blog (such as if you have something to hide). If you’re already a blogger, most of this will seem self-evident, but if you’re trying to craft a blogging policy for your company, or convince your CEO to blog, this book can be a huge help. In fact, I’m about to submit a blogging policy proposal to our company’s president based largely on what this has to say, and I’m loaning him the book, too. (If this book were a college course, it would be 200 level, with Cluetrain Manifesto as recommended reading.)
I first got online in the early 90s. While some of my friends were goofing around on BBS‘s, I was using my dad’s Compuserve account to post icons I had designed for Windows 3.1. Later on, in 1995, I had dial-up Internet access at home, and a friend had shown me Joe the Circle, one of the first webcomics. This really kick-started my interest in web design, and I had a website on Geocities that year. The idea for Yellow Number Five was born around this time. I graduated high school in 1996, and my early website (which was already coded by hand) moved to Xoom, and then later to my first ISP, SpiritOne, when I started working at Egghead.