Ah, how to say things and not burn bridges. Especially with someone who’s a great guy, shared a lot and bought lunch to boot. This ’tis a challenge. Especially when there’s a great lesson to share. Once we had these things called Chambers of Commerce and these things called Economic Development Corporations. That world always looked to me like an insular little club. But, interesting things have been happening in that world. There’s a trend to merge the two and shift the focus. Here, instead of a focus on membership building (that insular little club), they’re going to focus on community development. They want to develop the area –schools, downtown area, etc– so it’s an attractive place for people to come. If business owners and entrepreneurs want to live here, you don’t have to do big campaigns to attract each big name business to town. They’ll come on their own. And it jives with what a lot of smart people (think The Creative Class) have been saying.   Messages A few hours after lunch, he forwarded an email to me (and everyone else on his email list), pushing a particular candidate for President. He’s not just anybody. He runs a third of their organization and he sent the email from his official, I run a third of the organization, email address. He’s one of their public faces; a public face that just watered down the organization’s message of developing (our) community with him-bad-and-wrong/vote-my-way. In the world of politics, they talk … Continue reading Zendra —Ice Queen of the North— for Mayor →

I’ve been joking that Saturday Night Live is going to do a fake Colorado Ad Campaign: “Wildfires, Six Foot Lizards and Batman Villains Live: Come Live the Adventure”. The reason that hoke’s even worth trying is that every one of those items had the reach they did because of Social Media. That there is “Social Media” isn’t news. What is news is that networks built on Social Networks are literally overthrowing old school governments, companies and ways of solving problems. Waldo Canyon Fire burned an area larger than Manhattan. Before it was out, it was already the most expensive natural disaster in Colorado history. It’s out, but unless the tourists return, the long term damage is going to be far higher. Someone’s six foot tropical lizard chewed through it’s leash and escape. It’s where abouts are still unknown. And, now, up the road in a Denver suburb, a man who described himself as “The Joker”, now charged with 142 different counts, showed up a movie premier, leaving 12 dead. Two of the three events were national and international news. That’s nothing new. What’s new is that many people found about them via social media before they hit traditional news services. The hashtag #WaldoCanyonFire on Twitter was the center of the action around the Waldo Canyon Fire. For the self-described Joker’s #AuroraShooting, it was Reddit. With our dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousand followers, friends and readers, everyone is a journalist. We can instantly break into our follower’s (and some friend’s) … Continue reading Beyond Social Journalism →

For many people, disaster stories are told in stats. For them, Waldo Canyon Fire has burned over 18,000 acres —an area larger than Manhattan— destroyed 346 homes, damaged 50 and killed 2 people. In direct costs, that becomes numbers like  $110M (the value of the homes lost) and $13M (the cost to fight it through Tuesday). Then you add in everything lost in those homes, the cost to rebuild Flying W Ranch as well as the trails and other things that this area is known for, and the direct costs are going to be much much higher. Today, I spent time at the Waldo Canyon Disaster Recovery Center. I heard an entirely new side to this fire. Marge and her family own a Days Inn in Manitou Springs. When Manitou Springs was evacuated, they had to refund every one of their customers. Now, even though Manitou Springs is open and the city wasn’t damaged by fire, the tourists haven’t returned. After three years in business, they were about to expand the hotel. Instead, today, she spent a lot of time shaking her head and staring into space. Another person I met this afternoon was Nan. Fifteen years ago she and her husband bought the Pantry restaurant in Green Mountain Falls. The Pantry has been there for sixty years. They’ve been able to re-open but the number of customers each day is far less than half of what it normally is this time of year. From there, their stories were almost … Continue reading The Undertoe from Waldo Canyon Fire →

Over the weekend, a wildfire started right outside our city. By Sunday, it had been declared the top wildfire priority in the country. On Tuesday, it broke out of Queen’s Canyon and hit 65 mph winds and exploded. One official at the press conference the next morning said “I’ve seen many fires and I’ve never seen a fire do this.” It burned Historic Flying W Ranch to the ground, surged into residential areas and another 25,000 people were evacuated in hours. An unofficial count based on an aerial survey put the number of lost homes Wednesday at over 300. Yesterday afternoon, infuriated officials finally released a preliminary count of lost homes at 346. And, they announced that, with a lot of help, they’d finally achieved 10% containment and were starting to make progress. That’s essentially the story you get via the news outlets that are covering the story. There’s always more to the story. At yesterday’s 4pm press conference, officials praised people that had invited evacuees, complete strangers, into their homes. We had shelters that opened without sleeping bags and had them within hours. People have donated tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the main local food bank. A group of designers came together, designed t-shirts, put them up for sale to support victims. By yesterday, they had passed $100,000. Much of it was organized via Twitter. Twitter has been the center of grass roots organizing to help victims of the fire and get news out. Members of … Continue reading Tweeting a Fire Storm of Epic Proportions →

When I talk about blogging for eDao, I actually think of it as Blogging/Educating. One reason for that is that I’ve find that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Which brings me to Kickstarter. I’m going to start using Kickstarter to fund projects. For eDao, I’m going to do a project for XC, our writing/editing/publishing/anywhere tool. Outside eDao, I plan to do projects to pay for the marketing of a number of books (two including a novel that I’m editing and two that I’m writing). Over the coming week, I’m going to blog about what I learn. I may flesh that out and turn it into a full fledged book: How to Design a Business/Project/Dream and fund it with Kickstarter. It will definitely need a more awe inspiring title. Stay tuned. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

High-end book readers (e.g. Kindle Fire and the Nook equivalent)n as well as the latest iPhones have high-resolution screens; often around 240dpi. Traditional computers and laptops are usually 100dpi (or a little less). DPI means how many pixels are displayed per inch and 240dpi is in the ballpark of what you’d use for print. Translation: if the only thing that existed were tablets and high-end phones, you could use much higher resolution, much crisper images for sites. The difference between pictures in a magazine (oooh ahhh) and those on a website would be much lower. That hasn’t mattered much until now. Yesterday Apple added the same type of high resolution screen to one of their laptops. Apple calls the high resolution screens ‘Retina Displays’ and the new laptop model (surprise) the Macbook Pro with Retina Display. If history is any guide, Apple will expand it across their product line over the next year or so and the PC market will follow. A few years out and most new computers will have the same high resolution screens as Apple’s new laptop. My expectation is that over the next 6-12 months, our industry will develop a series of best practices on how to design websites around higher resolution images without leaving those with current displays behind. I suspect a lot of the industry will wait to adopt them: “hey, the guy paying my bills doesn’t have one yet, why should I do any extra work?” Which is exactly the wrong approach. It’s … Continue reading Bigger, Prettier →

Computer security isn’t part of what we sell but it’s part of what we have to know to do our job. Over the last few weeks, there’s been a raft of new information about Stuxnet (aka the computer virus that attacked Iran’s nuclear program) and Flame (an industrial strength spy virus that likewise targeted Iran’s nuclear program). My suspicion from the beginning was that Stuxnet was created by either the Israeli or US government. It turns out it was created over the Obama and Bush administrations with significant Israeli government help. Stuxnet was code-named Olympic Games (and referred to as the bug) and it was introduced into Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility by an unwitting Iranian. One source was quoted as saying “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.” The New Times noted that President Obama “was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade.” Flame is a separate effort from Olympic Games and more complex and virus companies say they’ve found copies of it in their automated detection systems going back several years (Stuxnet’s code has been available publically since ’10). It has the ability to rewrite Windows (even the latest most hardened versions) to use the Windows Update process to protect … Continue reading Stuxnet and Flame update →

We have a few traditions around here. We recently restarted one: Inspiration. When we meet for the eDao game each week, someone brings inspiration. This week, I volunteered to do it. And then realized shortly before we were going to begin that I didn’t have anything ready. Oops. But, wait! I could do what any good CEO would do. Use somebody else’s lines! I could Google my way there. Hmmm… what to troll the great inter-tubes for? CEO Inspiration sounded so… inspid. Tweak. Tune. Ah! “Twisted CEO Inspiration.” That sounded promising. So thus typeth Tim into the great search engine beast. The beast promptly informed me that it couldn’t find those three words together anywhere. With all of us monkeys typing away at all of our typewriters, it’s amazing that we haven’t already created every possible short phrase possible. There are only a few million million million combinations after all. And it’s a shame. The world really needs a little more “Twisted CEO Inspiration”. And as soon as Google finds this blog entry, it will have it. Of course, that means I have to invent some. I hit an absolutely brilliant blog entry recently that started like this: It has been vulgarly claimed that prostitution is the oldest profession. Wrong! It’s lexicography. Here’s proof: As we have learned, perhaps in elementary school, a word isn’t a word unless it’s in the dictionary. If it’s not a word, you can’t use it. Therefore, you need the dictionary before you can utter … Continue reading Twisted CEO Inspiration →