There's Something About Harry

Darth Vader Gets a Surprise

2010-09-08T18:28:00.001-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h9Nv8UFD4I

Harry’s Looking for a New Hair Style – Maybe

2008-12-08T00:14:00.001-05:00

That title about sums up my state of mind this weekend. I’m thinking about getting a new hairstyle. I used to change my hairstyles like I changed my sun glasses.

These days, I’m typically less concerned.

However, I am feeling the need for change. I’m changing a number of other things in my life, business and work right now. Mostly doing upgrades and improvements in a number of areas. So as a possible natural progression, I’m thinking about changing . . . upgrading my hair style.

Now, in the past when I made choices about changing my hairstyle, I knew exactly what I was doing, and did it.

Right now, I’m still in the concept stage of things. Plus, my trusted hair dresser, Mark Lehew, lives about 800 miles away in Boca Raton.

That means if I do make a change, I either need to fly down to South Florida, smoke some cigars and have a few beers with Mark while I get my hair cut, or I’ve got to find a new hair dresser.

That raises a number of thorny issues, as I have rotten luck finding good hair stylists or barbers, Mark happens to be both, which is kind of rare.

So anyway, I’m looking through some site with sample hairstyles. Kind of like the Zohan book, but online and supposedly current. ;)

So here are some of the images that are either close to where I am right now in style (hence an easier transition) and / or things that look doable or something for me right now.

The image above is probably a little old for me, and the least change from where I am right now. Plus, my hair is not that coarse.

My hair is this thin, but I’m definitely not that young any more. I could probably make my hair look like that for about 5 minutes, but definitely wouldn’t keep it that calm for much longer.

I could probably pull this one off, but my hair would be permanently tangled after a month and I might as well go with dread locks after that. Don’t think so.

So this is just my hair style when I have just woken up or on a windy day. Guess the upside to this hair style is that you don’t have to shave because you hide your facial hair with the head on the top of your head. I’ll call this the werewolf comb over.

If I cut about 7 inches off my hair, this is basically what I’d have now. I can grow facial hair in this pattern in about well, . . . . I’d just have to shave a bit tomorrow.

This would just be waking up, spraying a bunch of hairspray in my hair as is and then putting on a decent suit and tie that I’d only wear once.

Then we move into shorter hair styles (not short, just shorter)

I could maybe do that, but my hair doesn’t have that much body to it, so I’d have to spend a lot (time) on product.

I’ve done this one before, wasn’t really my cup of tea. Went much shorter after this one.

I just wanted to share that one. Its either Austin Powers turned into a werewolf or the wolf man has turned dandy.

OK, so all in all this was helpful in confirming something that anyone could learn from watching Zohan.

Grilled Fish do not belong in your bum!

Well, that’s an obvious lesson, but what I really meant to say was that you can’t find a hair style in a picture book and apparently not on the inter-tubes either. :)

The New Site at Something-About-Harry.com

2008-11-25T11:45:00.001-05:00

The new site is live now. Its at Something-About-Harry.com ( www.something-about-harry.com ) . I haven’t updated the feed yet for everyone that is subscribed, but aside from this post, all future posts will go to the new site.

I’ll work to get the feed fixed as fast as I can (probably over the holidays). :)

I’ve still got to work some kinks out of the new site, but its not completely useless just yet. :)

Harry is Moving!

2008-11-24T17:18:00.001-05:00

Hey everyone, very soon, I’m going to be getting some new diggs, and you will be invited over for the moving party.

We finally going to move this website, There’s Something About Harry to a new location. I’ll provide more details on this soon….

New Theme for Viral Grape Vine

2008-11-24T00:56:00.001-05:00

Today, I built a new theme for Viral Grape Vine. I consider this one partially complete as I have not yet been able to work my background image (a great picture of a family grape vine that we have been keeping alive for over 100 years) into the image for the site.

Here is what I have live so far. I’m happy with the way the menu turned out, as I learned how to incorporate 301 redirects into the menu so that I can link to related locations out of the home site.

Here are some of the more recent articles from VGV:

In general, I’m going to try and do about 3-4 site upgrades with brand new themes across all of my sites per week.

Tonight Iearned some cool stuff about menus, and how to incorporate hover over images into the header (even though I didn’t use that here).

I think if I can keep my hands on these things every few days, I’ll have this new skill mastered by Christmas.

Improving the Blogosphere Article

2008-11-23T18:18:00.001-05:00

Here’s an article I wrote over at The LiveWriterz. If you have not yet signed up for an Izea Insider Group, I’d like to ask you to consider joining mine. :)

The group is open to anyone that wants to improve their blogging efforts.

In this particular article, I talk about 10 tips (plus a bonus tip) to help Pacific Rim Bloggers that have real talents, avoid being stereo typed with the thousands of Pacific Rim bloggers that write low low quality content.

10 Tips to Help ‘Good’ or ‘Improving’ Pacific Rim Bloggers Avoid Being Type Cast as ‘Bad’ Pacific Rim Bloggers

Three New Themes for 2 New Sites and 1 Old Favorite

2008-11-23T15:29:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I built and launched three new themes. The first theme was for an existing website, The Solar Gold Mine Digest. This is a site that I have been running and writing for now for over a year. All of these new themes were designed by your truly. This is a new skill set I have recently developed, and I’m having a lot of fun getting more experience with it.

The New Look

The Old Look (not a theme that I designed)

The other two sites are new projects. The first is the Global Depression Survival Guide. I’ve been preparing for the worst myself, not in terms of building a bomb shelter and stock piling food, but trying to find practical ways to keep my business thriving during the current major recession and the likely depression that it is leading into.

We are in for some choppy times, and I’m working to insure that I am prepared for those choppy times myself, and looking to help others get prepared too.

The other site is a concept that is still a little bit undefined. The site is the SMO Tipping Point. The SMO stands for Social Media Optimization. The more I work in social media and the more I expand out my efforts in Social Media Management and Social Media Marketing, and Social Media Execution, the more I see a need for companies to optimize their efforts to get the most bang for their buck and their effort.

My work on this site will likely start out in the form of position papers, and case studies and grow out from that point based on my real world experiences in the industry.

I have not yet loaded up the last two sites with content yet. They are virgin sites, but it won’t take me long to generate some great content and get things running there!

del.icio.us tags: wordpress themes by softduit media, global depression survival guide, smo tipping point, social media optimization, solar gold mine digest

Technorati tags: wordpress themes by softduit media, global depression survival guide, smo tipping point, social media optimization, solar gold mine digest

Harry – Playing with Pipes

2008-11-22T13:23:00.001-05:00

So as yours truly was trying to get some work done today, I heard water running down on the ground under our house in the crawl space. It was just about this time, that my wife sent my son downstairs to tell me that we had a leak…

The LiveWriterz – an Izea Insiders Group

2008-11-20T17:19:00.001-05:00

Well, I just made my second pass at a custom theme for my future group site for the LiveWriterz. There will be essentially two fronts to my efforts on this.

All of my events and general communications will come through this site There’s Something About Harry, which will likely get a make over itself.

But my individual group work, counseling, mentoring, contests, etc will go through The LiveWriterz.

Kicking Off My Izea Insider Team! TheLiveWriterz

2008-11-20T02:38:00.001-05:00

This week I learned that I was selected as one of the Izea Insiders. You may recall that played for this program a couple weeks ago utilizing a very long-winded article that I've room with Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10. You could kind of consider that articles not just an application into the program, but a bit of my thesis on where I've been and where I'm going in the world of social media and blogging in general.

Well I've been picked for the program, and now it's time to let the rubber meet the road. I'm still waiting f. or a number of details myself, but while those details are coming in, I'm moving forward. To start with, I set up a Facebook group for my new IZEA insider team. (Friend me on Facebook and I can send you a group invite or search for TheLiveWriterz )

I have also set up a group on Utterli to enabled people to join up with my team the ability to communicate with myself and everyone else. I have been active at Utterli for over a year now, and find it to be a great place to help people communicate with each other, no matter if they are on a computer in an office, or traveling about the country.

Among other things, Utterli is a fantastic blogging tool. For this reason, I'm also an utterly evangelist, and a former Utterli ambassador. With the group that I'm going to set up, I'm going to help the people in the group benefit from all of the experience and tools that I've learned how to utilize to good effect over the last few years. I'm also hoping to learn many more things for the people in the group and cross pollinate all those good ideas amongst us.

The primary goal here is to strengthen the blogosphere. To give bloggers new skills and new purpose. I want to help people deal to generate better content, be more creative, and earn a very good living doing it. :-)

So if you are interested in joining up with my team, or with one of the themes of the other IZEA insiders, drop me a comment, or send me an e-mail, or stopover at Utterli and talk to me there. We've got a lot of work to do, but it's going to be a lot of fun too.

Oh and did I mention that we're going to make a lot of money as well?

First things first, let's get organized, and improve the quality our content and our blogs and the rest will follow! :)

EDIT

I just finished putting together an initial custom theme for the new site, and getting the site itself up and running. :)

You can check it out http://thelivewriterz.com/

Brrr Morning

2008-11-19T06:38:00.001-05:00

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NaNoWriMo Check in Day 18

2008-11-18T15:10:00.001-05:00

Its past the middle of the month. I'm at 28k in words for NaNoWriMo and the goal is to hit 50k by the end of November.

I do not expect to have a problem hitting 50,000 words, but I can rapidly see that the novel I'm working on is going to be a lot more than 50,000 words.

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Where to put the book?

2008-11-16T02:17:00.001-05:00

OK, so as a novel writer, I’m a blogger first. That means that I don’t think I can sit around and well, sit on a book until the whole thing is done. So I think I’m going to serialize it like they used to do with novels back in the 17th century (Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe etc.)

I’m going to publish the chapters one at a time and space them out maybe every 3 days. So far, I’ve written 19 chapters and about 15 of those have also been through a rough edit.

I think I’m going to offer up the book under two lines or threads.

One of the threads will be the rough edit. Where people will see the raw book before it is edited.

The second thread will be the next draft up the chain, where I take any and all feedback from the rough draft, and fix it in the next draft.

Some of that feedback might even be used to cover future chapters when people ask questions about what is going on. My goal is to tell a good story, as if people were sitting around listening to that story as opposed to having the story automatically unfold as if I’m a puppet master guiding people through a plot on a stage or screen.

This should even give my audience (whomever they might be :) ) some ability to guide the direction of the plot, and tighten things up. Since I’m a GooseGrade user even, some of the people that contribute the most help, might even get drafted in to participate in other ways as well.

But my biggest question with this project is “Where do I publish the book?”

I’d like to put it here on There’s Something About Harry, but this site is powered by blogger an that’s really not the ideal platform for this type of thing. I will more likely put it on a WordPress powered site, but haven’t decided where that will be yet. Likely a new sub domain on Softduit, I guess. :)

I’ll keep you posted!

Hounds in the cat food?

2008-11-15T11:36:00.001-05:00

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SURPRISE ATTACKS...

2008-11-14T17:44:00.001-05:00

Now here's a motivational poster you can sink your teeth into.

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New Webcam 2nd attempt on Utterli

2008-11-13T11:00:00.001-05:00

I can play the video back today, just like last night, lets see if it flies this time.

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Good Morning

2008-11-13T07:57:00.001-05:00

These flowers didn't get the fall is here memo. . . :)

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Good Evening from a new Webcam

2008-11-12T21:17:00.001-05:00

Hi everyone, just wanted to test out a new web cam and see how its working with Utterli.

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Practicing Speech for Student Council

2008-11-12T03:43:00.001-05:00

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Warning the House a bit

2008-11-11T23:37:00.001-05:00

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Good Morning

2008-11-11T09:15:00.001-05:00

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Weird Day Capped Off by Train Accident

2008-11-11T01:26:00.001-05:00

OK, so this is a weird situation even for me. Today, my wife and I had a meeting with my son's principal. After the meeting, my wife and I split up in two different cars. I took my son to karate class and she took our middle daughter to collect my youngest daughter from day care.

After stopping at a gas station for a hot dog for my son, we drove to Cramerton, the small town where my son goes to karate class. We arrived and my son changed into his karate uniform in the van, while I talked to my brother on the phone.

I started noticing fire trucks going both directions on the streets, along with ambulances and several police cars. Police officers were even directing traffic by the intersection that goes underneath a train track bridge over the main street into town.

Soon, I started seeing helicopters in the sky, which for a small town is extra strange. Then about the same time, I saw a guy get out of a car parked near me, and start humping two very large cameras with telephoto lenses up the street and around the corner.

I was thinking about getting out of the car to see what was happening, when I started to see people up on the hill next to me where the train tracks were located, start to gather on the tracks looking up the tracks in the direction of the helicopters and photographer.

So with my curiosity getting peeked, I got out of the car, climbed up the steps to the tracks and started to walk a little bit near the tracks to see if I could see around the bend.

I thought maybe a train had derailed. The police weren't evacuating the town or anything so I wasn't worried about chemical spills.

I'm still talking on the phone with my brother while I'm walking and after a minute or two a police officer yelled up to myself and the other people (about 100 meters away further down the track) to clear away from the tracks.

I agree, but ask back to him what had happened.

He informs me that, 'Its a crime scene.'

Well, that was informative and not informative at all.

About the same time my sons sensei shows up. I drop my son off and drive out of the parking lot trying to figure out how to drive up the street and see what is happening, thinking there might be an article in it or something.

The police have a couple of the streets blocked off and so I start navigating a old subdivision trying to work my way up the tracks on the road.

I finally come up to a street running along the tracks, and see a freight train stopped on the tracks surrounded by some of the police cars and one ambulance and maybe some fire fighter vehicles, plus about 50 people in this town that probably has a population of 250.

I find a place to park and get out of the car, and had the conversation that you can hear with the recording that goes with this article.

....

In retrospect that conversation was a little weird and morbid, but keep in mind that the people I'm talking to live about 40 feet from this train track and this type of thing happens and has happened quite a bit over the years.

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Moving Dragon to My New Computer

2008-11-10T02:02:00.001-05:00

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Returns not my way to spend a day

2008-11-09T14:35:00.001-05:00

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Empty Parking Lot Depot

2008-11-08T16:45:00.001-05:00

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Full Parking Lot at this Retailer

2008-11-08T15:25:00.001-05:00

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Good Leafy Morning

2008-11-08T09:20:00.001-05:00

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Leaves on the Lake

2008-11-07T18:38:00.001-05:00

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CNN Projects too

2008-11-04T23:11:00.001-05:00

Congrats Barack

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I was turned away at the polls :(

2008-11-04T14:18:00.001-05:00

It was a dog thing.

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This years Palm Beach Ballot Problem

2008-11-04T14:06:00.001-05:00

One in ten people voting incorrectly in Palm Beach County

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I was turned away at the polls :(

2008-11-04T13:55:00.001-05:00

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Done Voting, Turned from Undecided to a Vote for Obama

2008-11-04T13:47:00.001-05:00

I did not decide until the very end, but ultimately I ended up voting for Barack Obama. My gut tells me that he might be as bad if not worse than George W Bush. Hopefully, he will prove me wrong.

On the flip side, I’ve never voted for a Presidential candidate that actually wound up winning, so my support on this may not be the boon that Obama and supporters are looking for. . .

Election Fatigue

2008-11-04T09:49:00.001-05:00

Napping after the vote

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Vote scanner

2008-11-04T08:40:00.001-05:00

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Voting in progress

2008-11-04T08:26:00.001-05:00

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2008-11-04T08:05:00.001-05:00

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Improving the Blogosphere from the Inside (of Izea)

2008-11-03T21:26:00.001-05:00

My name is Brett Bumeter and I am and have been a professional blogger and social media specialist since 2006. Since 2006 I have been actively pursuing my vision for advancing New Media and the Blogosphere in general. To that end I have worked to build relationships between bloggers, new media creators and companies ranging from the fortune 100 to the fortune 500 to small local start ups.

The Short-Winded Version

Hey, I like to write! I typed this while my son was in karate class this evening . . . Seriously though, with this article I wanted to point out that 200 words as a ‘typical’ blog article is does not always say enough to communicate a point. I’m not saying everyone needs to write 6,000 words, but bloggers need to start thinking about what the right number of words is to get a point across. Consider this article as a demonstration of how important this topic is to me and how much I can write on the topic off the cuff.

In a world that is flattening and changing rapidly, I see a major need for more knowledge workers. New Media and the blogosphere are two areas that provide both a communications platform as well as a business model for talented, creative and smart people to share knowledge, provide entertainment and create perspective on the application of tools and services of all natures for their readers, listeners, followers and networks.

For several years, I have been testing the inner and outer bounds of this industry, learning from the best and sharing my knowledge with people around me in the form of mentorship programs, internships, and general consulting services. It is a zany mix, but enables me to have a great deal of fun and cover it in video, text, audio and more.

I work in web design and social media marketing providing solutions to my customers, not just delivering a web site, but a functioning aspect of business with incoming traffic, customers, leads, referrals, and business.

I come from a diverse background that has included growing up in a family business, working in sales, serving in the US Army as an intelligence analyst and cryptographer, then running a bar in Savannah Georgia on River Street (a popular tourist area in a fantastic and historic international port), working in process improvement for the Postal Service, while attending college where I received a double major in Finance and Accounting after switching from advertising early in my college years. I later went to work for Motorola in Finance, rose rapidly through Motorola and eventually spun off with a Motorola division, where I worked in a fast paced start up environment for several years, until as an accountant I discovered illegal fraudulent activities taking place, which immediately resulted in my becoming a whistle blower.

That last sudden career change put me on the lamb, hiding out from chinese mafia types that were threatening to make me disappear and kill my children. I came to the life balancing decision that finance wasn’t a safe career choice and after providing the IRS with all of the information that I could to get those corrupt bastards (not vindictive just being accurate :) )

I then settled into a new life building my own business, through business development consulting and later professional blogging and my work in the social media industry. Today, (when its warm) I work from a wifi fishing dock on a lake in North Carolina 25 minutes from the Charlotte Airport, which is my gateway to social media events around the country.

I have attended a number of events in Social Media for several years now and am building up my expertise, skill set and demand to also speak, train and direct the conversations at social media conferences. I have written tens of thousands of articles, and through PayPerPost alone I have ordered close to 700 articles with PPP to date, with overall budgets of almost $50k in cash and swag. My multiple websites (over 15 active) not only earn a profit, but I bring advertising opportunities and direct advertising feedback and insight to my fellow bloggers backed with cash and tools to help them improve their own blogs, and online business ventures.

Part of my writing includes joking, writing satire, and what many would consider just shooting the shit and screwing around. :) But all kidding aside, my vision for the future of social media is very real and it has been my passion to pursue my goals very seriously for two years now. I love what I do, and only do what I love. For quite sometime, I have been working to help bloggers quit screwing around with their day jobs and start taking blogging seriously. :)

Izea Insider Opportunity

Recently, Izea put out a call for a small group of Izea Insiders to gather bloggers together and around them to build teams of bloggers to go out and spread the word around the blogosphere and around the world in general. They are looking for people that are connected, know what they are doing and have some level of success in that.

I already do all of these things and will continue to do all of these things. In fact, I already work with Izea as a distant partner since January of 2008. I see this as another opportunity for me to work more closely with Izea, while I continue to do exactly what I’m already doing, hopefully just better with the extra support of a company that I have know since they were founded in July 2006 when they launched, and I signed up. :) I’ve made thousands of dollars through Izea, and more importantly brought even more money than I have made from Izea to the bloggers at Izea!

I’m doing everything I can right now as an advertiser to help bloggers improve their efforts and their financial success through Izea and through other networks.

Relevant Social Networks

Izea Boards Since September 2006 1400+ posts aprox.
SocialSpark - 2008
Utterli 150+followers
Twitter 150+followers
LinkedIn 150+ connections (not fluff)
Facebook 150+friends
MyBlogLog
BlogExplosion – since 2006
BlogMad – since 2006
Comedy Soap Box – since 2006
IBNMA - International Blogging & New Media Association – Member since 2007
Performancing – since 2006
Associate Content – 2006
NaNoWrimo - 2006
MindManager Yahoo Groups since 2005 – MindManager Trainer

Video Services

Financial

PayPal – Since 2000
MoneyBookers 2008

Events

eComXpo (Attended last 7 shows and brought major customers to Izea)
CES exhibitor 2006, Planner/Attendee 2006, Press alum 2007, registered 2008

Bloghaus 2008

New Media Expo(formerly Podcast Expo) 2006 LA, 2007 LA, 2008 Vegas
Laughlin River Run 2008 Nevada – Interviewed Joan Jett with Rock n Roll Geek Show, covered 4 day event as blogger, Reported on Arson Fire through CNN and Las Vegas Local Nes

Voice 2008 (Voice Actor Conference in LA 2008)

Blogworld (2007, 2008) – Ran Dragon Naturally Speaking Demo at Blogger & Podcaster Booth 2008

WordCamp Birmingham Speaker 2008

Social Media Trainer American Red Cross for Utterz 2008 (now Utterli)
Former Utterz Ambassador,
Current Utterli Evangelist
Windows Live Writer Trainer (cross blog platform composition tool)
Shot Show 2005
Numerous Tweet Ups, Industry Parties, events, award shows, magic shows(seriously those voice actors are zany),

Partnerships

New Media Creative (Since 2008) – Business Developer, Web Designer, Social Media Strategies
Izea (PayPerPost Inc) (Since January 2008) – Lead Generation, Campaign Management
BlueLiner Marketing (Since 2007) – Social Media Specialist / Contract Ghost Writer

Technical Preparations

Internet Connectivity

Primary – Time Warner Cable – with 2 wireless routers
Verizon Wireless Air Card – Yes with 3g wifi router add on
At&t DSL – Yes, backup connection

cell phones, tmobile & Verizon
Skype – Yes in and out with video
5 active laptops + 1 desktop
2 terabytes of storage
Server from InMotion Hosting
WebDesign – Primarily done in Adobe products (Flash, Dreamweaver, CS3, Fireworks, photoshop, illustrator)
Bloggging tools – Snagit, WindowsLiveWriter, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and more
Video – Vegas Studio, Camtasia, Pinnacle Studio 12, AVS Video tools
Email Accounts – more than I can count

The Long Winded Version

OK, if you didn’t get enough from the Short winded version below is the Long Winded version and my history of social media and PPP. I wrote the previous 1100 words by hand and the next 4500 words with Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, a product that I’m passionate about and working to advertise through the Izea Network of bloggers.

Back in 2006, while I was dabbling in web design and working as a business developer, I started blogging. I came across a service called PayPerPost. For many months, I had been writing about technology and business and a number of things I had worked with in my former professional career as an accountant.

In those first few months, I was actually fairly successful at earning money through Google's AdSense program. It must have been beginners luck, because by June of 2006. The money from Google had virtually evaporated.

As a business developer, my consulting career was stalling out as I had approached the point where my client base no longer needed my services. For the most part I had helped many of them achieve what they were looking to achieve. My clients were very competitive and didn’t share good ideas with others, so my word-of-mouth referrals were nonexistent. Basically, they were not going to refer my services to their competitors. :-).

At the end of June, I heard about this new company that would pay bloggers to blog about the ‘things they loved.’ I was on vacation when I heard about it and signed up the next week on July 7^th. I then started playing with PayPerPost and working it into my blogging efforts, late that summer taking it very carefully. I figured the whole concept was likely a lark, and the company was doomed to failure within a week or two, and I would probably never be paid for any of my work. :-)

Then I received my first payment(about $200), and that definitely changed things quite a bit.

As an accountant and as a credit manager. I had lived very successfully by the principle that when a person or company pays you, that is a good indication that they are healthy enough to have paid you. It's a bit of a paradox, because the historical action does not necessarily mean that a future event will happen, such as getting paid a second time.

However in credit as well as in finance and business in general, you have to build up some level of trust and faith in your business partners. Money is a primary way of measuring good faith, and establishing trust. It is definitely not the only thing, and over the next few months I rapidly saw this brand-new company called PayPerPost grow into an Internet phenomena.

I became very active in the community that fall, and at the same time. I began traveling in social media circles, literally. I started by going to the Podcast Expo in 2006 (today it's known as the New Media Expo). At the time, I was working to bring the first WiFi MP3 player to market, under the Motorola brand name. That didn't pan out, and it was a year later before Microsoft was able to successfully achieve the same goal, even though we had the product working in hand, a year earlier.

I rapidly met up with a number of Podcasters that were working in this exciting new area of social media. I'm not even sure if it was called social media back then, but it was definitely a rich form of media. The community was tightknit and very close and everybody was working on something completely brand-new.

I could see that these people had developed a keen sense of creating quality content, building solid relationships with their viewers and readers and listeners, and really had a passion for what they were doing.

I also saw that most of them weren't making a dime doing anything. With the exception of RocketBoom, which brought religion to Podcasters that year, but it didn’t sink in till the next.

I watched all this through the spectrum or filter of my recent experience with PayPerPost in the blogosphere. I had seen PayPerPost ignite a wild fire of activity in the blogosphere as people jumped on the bandwagon to earn money, getting paid up front for writing a blog article.

Many of these bloggers were relatively new at blogging, and quite a few of them had actually been involved in it for almost a decade. But earning money in this way was new to everybody for the most part. It was the wild West in the blogosphere, and as I went to the Podcast Expo, I could see a convergence of this business model developed by PayPerPost, and the quality content generation capabilities of those hard-core Podcasters.

I thought this convergence would take place sometime in the future.

This also happened to be the year that YouTube was taking off and just going crazy. Everyone could see that video was going to be jumping into the mix, very soon. PayPerPost even got some other bloggers to create a number of crazy and zany videos of themselves creating fake tattoos, silly videos, and even dressing up in sexy costumes. Back then, I didn't know anything about video, but I even put together a pretty poor video myself. :-).

The cool thing about this whole getting paid to blog concept was that it gave people a feeling of value for the work they were doing. This was just a hobby for many people anymore, this was real business. People grew their businesses extremely quickly, and admittedly some grew them very poorly. But people took their blogs much more seriously now as they started to pay bills with their earnings and some even reinvested in themselves.

By the fall of 2006, I happened to fall into both camps as the business cycle of business developing was in a trough, I was paying bills with my blog earnings and investing in my future at the same time.

I personally felt like a bit of a mad scientist, maybe that's a little extreme, I felt like a mad business developer. I was writing business plans, day and night, burning through mindmaps and whiteboards. I could see that the blogosphere was being filled up with a drive to create a quantity of content that no one had really seen before. New bloggers were joining PayPerPost by the tens of thousands, and all bloggers were jumping on board to cash in on their own sites that had been developed over years. It was basically a gold rush on the Internet.

During a gold rush, gold miners typically don't get rich. It's the people that sell the tools that get rich. PayPerPost does a very good job of functioning as the general store. They offered up a marketplace where bloggers could easily find work, and advertisers could come in and collaborate with very large numbers of bloggers, all from a central location and with relatively little effort involved. Gone were the days when an entire public relations department might have to reach out to 50 or 100 or 500 writers across the country or the world. A single person could put in an order through PayPerPost and reach 10,000 bloggers in a single day, and by the end of the week, that advertiser could reach 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 readers of those articles.

PayPerPost was not the only one earning money. Advertisers were significantly improving their own business results and a number of bloggers were joining the ranks of those like myself that had earned thousands of dollars from their blogs in short order.

As all this happened, I continued to build up my skills. I continued to learn how to code, in HTML and PHP. I learned how to run multiple websites and manage my own server online. I ventured into affiliate marketing, and learned how to write Linkbait articles. I started ghostwriting for other websites to develop my skills, learn from the best in the business, and get exposure to new trends and techniques.

I even started up my own company for a brief time working to essentially cut out the middleman in the relationship that had formed between bloggers, PayPerPost, and affiliate advertisers.

A new niche of advertisers had creased into the situation that were created websites that were simply landing pages to funnel people and readers away from bloggers enter in intermediary page before they landed on the actual landing page to buy something. I call these made for affiliate program websites. And they were basically buying page rank from bloggers in traffic from bloggers through natural search.

I wanted to help bloggers remove this middle person from the equation and learn how to write content and cover products that would enable them to get their readers to the right destinations on the Internet without having to go through a middleman along the way collecting the commission.

The problem with this scenario, existed in the fact that these same made for affiliate advertisers were paying bloggers upfront to write articles and churn out content. This was not high quality stuff and it was not high paying work either. I could see that this was creating a downward spiral of quality and I was working like hell to cut that off at the pass and simultaneously bring New Media content producers around to new more lucrative business models.

You see, Google has a fatal flaw in its search engine. It relies on text in order to index the Internet. Bloggers write about things and create a great deal of text. Essentially, bloggers were the de facto people involved in helping Google to categorize and organize the Internet. Just like those directory reviewers or editors at Yahoo in the old days. Google had found a way to spread that review capability further across the Internet, but they still had the same fatal flaw. They needed people to look at stuff on the Internet and write about it so that their search bots can figure out what it means and where it's going.

PayPerPost was essentially a path of least resistance for people that were trying to increase their presence in Google search engine rankings. Google created this marketplace, but they hadn't found a way to improve it, such that it could not be manipulated.

In fact, Google still has not found a way to avoid being manipulated!

PayPerPost provided two things that were key to their success. They provided easy access to a large number of bloggers, who in turn provided influence to readers. Ted Murphy at PayPerPost came from an advertising background, and he recognized that access and influence are valuable commodities in advertising.

PayPerPost also provided a way, by keeping things simple, of generating text links within blog articles. From an SEO perspective, these links put in the blog articles were like money in the bank. Search engine optimization orders piled in to the system, while Ted and crew did their best to bring in high-quality advertisers that recognized the benefit of access and influence from HP to USA Networks to The Police and many more.

So the marketplace became a little weird for quite some time. This created a great deal of controversy in the webmaster world of the Internet, where selling links was something that was taboo for those people that supported Google, or at least wanted to remain in Google's good graces as the monopoly on the Internet that they are. Ted also happened to be a genius when it comes to guerrilla marketing, and he rode and milked this controversy for all of it was worth. All of that negative attention that he received from detractors was channeled into building his company and making it successful.

Bruce Lee has nothing on Ted Murphy when it comes to doing business. :-).

Through this whole time, in addition to building out new clients, they invested a significant amount of money building and improving their systems. They rebuilt the system from the ground up on more than one occasion. They had to as the network was growing at outrageous rates.

About a year ago, at BlogWorld (2007), Ted & company showed up with a great big booth, and they even bought an extra day at the Las Vegas convention Center to run an event called PostieCon. Their goal was to bring PPP bloggers together and do two things.

Gather feedback and share some best practices, and
More importantly show off the new SocialSpark system. SocialSpark was a brand-new company line that removed the page rank and link selling aspect out of their system. Selling links on the Internet is easy, and PayPerPost was taking a ballsy move to position itself away from link sales and move into a more white hat advertising play.

The system was designed to gather and harness the metrics associated with each of the sites owned by bloggers around the Internet, such that an advertiser could reach out into a number of categories and niches and raise awareness of their products and services or events, building buzz about it across the Internet, and ultimately generating new business.

Transparency was key, when it came to disclosure. So all of the links were now compliant with Google. In fact, the system picked up an endorsement ultimately from Matt Cutts himself.

Now to back up a step, I should first date that I've been attending the consumer electronic show for a number of years now. I started going when I worked for a company that was a spinoff from Motorola. We ran million-dollar booths at the show and launched new products with XM radio and Motorola among other things. I kept going to the consumer electronic show, as I worked as a business developer. But in January 2007 when I went to CES, I started talking to people about this new ability to reach out to people across the Internet. I talked about the numbers that could be reached. When you push a message through 10,000 bloggers, you're able to achieve numbers very similar to American Idol.

This caught the attention of many of the people and companies at the consumer electronic show. At the time, no one really had a solid enough company to approach a Fortune 500 company with an advertising plan, and with the exception of a few, such as Hewlett-Packard, there were not too many daring companies out there that wanted to dabble in some new Internet startup.

Later that fall, in 2007 I went to the podcast and new media Expo of 2007, where I cemented some of my relationships. In that community. I was no longer trying to push a consumer electronics product, but this time I was trying to function as a blogger, and as a new social media insider that understood how a business model worked in the blogosphere and how it could be applied in new media.

The tone of the show had changed significantly, and now people were very interested in learning how they could make money from podcasting and new media content. I had just live this through the previous year, and I could see the path that was laying out before a number of these people. This show was quickly followed by BlogWorld and PostieCon.

I can already see the quality of content, decreasing in the blogosphere. In essence, some of that gold rush cash was like a bit of a bomb that had gone off in the community as people struggle to figure out the right way to balance good content with lucrative yet easy advertising revenues.

Over the summer I had worked with a number of bloggers trying to show them the light. I was less than successful with this initially, and moving into the fall I set up an internship program, where I recruited college students to learn how to run a blog is a business. My idea was that if I could reach people that were brand-new to the business, people that were already living in rich social environments and exposed to rich sources of information and ideas, they could be taught the benefits of writing good content and creating great videos or audio content and then balancing it with advertising revenue. I thought that this would be a good first step into the realm of training people how to blog better.

Now when I went to PostieCon, a month later, there were only a few bloggers that recognized the perils of lower quality content, and even a smaller number that were doing something about it. Many people recognize detrimental content contributions coming from foreign countries where the writers did not speak English as a first language. But fewer people saw the problems with writing in a way that was just not effective communication.

Maybe to be more precise, many people were not verbalizing this problem yet. However, there was this overall sense that a number of people felt like they were stretching themselves then, with their writing and churning stuff out like piecework. Writing a blog article for money had become something like ring the cash register. Push the right number of keys and hit the enter button, and out pops a five dollar bill from the cash register. To make this a business cycle, all you have to do is repeat the process.

While that can be very lucrative, it's not very fulfilling work. People were starting to gravitate away from this business model and dabble in some of the new knockoff networks, that had creeped into the system that basically copied what PayPerPost was doing. It happened to be opportune timing, because Google had started slamming people's websites engaged in blogging that sold links. The method for valuing those links was nuked by Google. With no way to value a link, the price point rapidly dropped for many bloggers from levels of $50-$100 down to five dollars.

Google did not delist these blogs and the traffic for these blogs do not go away. They just took away the easy way to value the worth of the links that were being sold. So as many of us attended PostieCon, we were watching our websites and websites of our friends being ravaged by Google, while we were simultaneously trying to assimilate the potential of the changes coming in a new system called SocialSpark, which would not be live until January.

I saw the value in SocialSpark from the perspective that all of those companies and advertisers at consumer electronic show, could now jump on board and safely enter into this advertising market.

I went to the consumer electronic show in January 2008 and rapidly built up a client list of companies that were interested in using the service that spring. Unfortunately, the SocialSpark system didn't go live in January as it was expected to. In fact, it didn't go live until that spring, and by that time the advertising dollars for most of those clients was gone.

Now each year, I also attend an event called the eComExpo. It's a virtual tradeshow that occurred about every six months, but has recently slowed down to about every nine months. I had also started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking around January 2007. I was trying to find a way to write content faster, and with less effort, and just get those great ideas out of my head without damaging my hands. I've been typing for years, and even though I trained and trained others in ergonomics, I did not want to damage my hands or body.

Learning how to write with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, took a lot of practice, because it's a different area of your brain that drives the words that come out of your mouth versus the words that are typed out of your fingertips.

During the summer of 2008, a perfect storm of an opportunity came together. During the eComExpo, I connected with Digital River, a leading affiliate marketing company, who happened to manage the affiliate and e-commerce platform for Nuance, the makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

We talked a great deal about how affiliate marketers utilized the blogosphere to build links and drive people through intermediate steps towards a transaction. It was an inefficient process, and we decided to put together a campaign to build buzz about the launch of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, leveraging the power of blog marketing, with Digital River and Nuance.

Building the campaign was not easy, but ultimately we were able to launch this campaign and get it running through SocialSpark and PayPerPost. As I write this, we are running a buzz marketing campaign utilizing full disclosure, and no follow links.

Our campaign epitomizes the realization of the convergence of this market, and the potential and power of the blogosphere to share the right information with the right people when they need it to make informed decisions on what to buy and how to use that tool. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is unique in that it also happens to be a tool that can help bloggers write higher quality content.

Through this campaign, we have utilized a number of tools to increase the buzz about this product in ways that have not been seen in the Izea networks. We are using interactive video, blogger generated video, blogger generated articles and insights, and industry expert articles and insights in a mix of blog articles and buzz building efforts are helping to spread the word about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. Our campaign is not yet complete, in fact it's only about one third done.

That said, we have definitely broken new ground with this marketing campaign, and we've increased the communications between bloggers and advertisers through the network in the process. Today were having almost daily discussions between bloggers and advertisers on how to improve the system, improve blogs, improve the way that advertising campaigns are structured and delivered and communicated to bloggers, and much more. We're providing extremely viable feedback to Izea, enabling them to develop and identify friend new business lines and products which will make the entire network, stronger and more successful.

I have been driving this particular ship myself since July, and the entire campaign is my brainchild. It's not something that was developed overnight, but was developed, built an orchestrated two years experience working with the system and with this industry. It was built because I've been able to work with people at each level of the industry from the bloggers to the business team at Izea to the affiliate partners and to advertisers. I've even been in discussions with venture capital partners at Izea, who provided excellent feedback and insights into ways to tune and improve my campaign and their business.

Is this open communication between all of these levels that made this campaign possible, and have kept it progressing forward.

As I look to the future, I see a new opportunity that I'm working to seize. I see a number of bloggers in the Izea networks these days, that want to significantly improve the work that they are doing, and as a result, be more successful, both financially and from a career perspective. I would like to be able to share my knowledge and help orchestrate their efforts to improve and grow their skill sets, their networks and their blogs.

I'd also like to start working with many more bloggers to help coordinate the efforts of future campaigns. Typically advertising campaigns that go through the Izea network are built in a very flat structure. Campaigns are fired in a shotgun blast across the blogosphere. This is typically done because people are experimenting with this new industry and with this new advertising platform.

My campaigns are designed to build on themselves growing, the benefits of the campaign as it runs for longer amounts of time. We are building the capability and the blogosphere to help people navigate the paths of knowledge and information. That's what bloggers do best, they cut to the chase of what's important, where it is, how much it costs, and how to slice through the red tape to get what you need and get something done effectively.

Those things cannot always be expressed in a single article. Consumers typically have to go on a journey to investigate and find information that they're looking for. This journey may start at different points for different consumers, and that can lead them to finding an open door on any given blog of any given day, hour, or minute.

An open door, or gateway can then lead them to a path through the blogosphere that can help them guide their investigation and their decision. Each consumer will make different choices along that path and will need to find different steps towards the solutions that they're looking for, because not every consumer is the same. They have different needs and come from different backgrounds and areas of the world. And sometimes they will need to be able to relate to a specific solution or presentation that can only be provided by someone that shares their unique perspective. Enter the blogger, and enter blog marketing.

This is a path of knowledge management that I think is extremely valuable in the blogosphere. I think there's an even more important area that this industry will ultimately evolve into. I believe that more bloggers are building up their skill sets, and rapidly becoming better, site managers, better publishers, better writers, better graphic designers, and better video creators. I was quoted by Technorati in the 2008 State of the blogosphere, saying, “This is just the beginning for blogging. People are getting better and better at this skill set, quality is improving, and we will soon have millions of people generating great content around the clock.”

This is not only something that I believe, but this is something that I believe I am witnessing, and being the mad business developer that I am, it is something that I am working to realize every minute of the day. I see a future where we will need more bloggers than we have today. I think there is a huge demand for content and an even bigger demand for high quality entertainment.

It is getting easier and easier to utilize technology tools that can achieve things in music and video and audio that required entire teams of people. In past years and decades. A single person can put together an entire TV show today for next to nothing. The challenge is to get that person. The skills that they need to create a quality TV show, publish it, and get that show out to the eyeballs of an audience of substantial size. This is rapidly becoming possible, and it is the future for many bloggers to realize this goal, either by themselves or by learning to work together and collaborative teams.

This concept of collaboration is something that I hope to explore during the next year working as an Izea insider. I hope to gather bloggers together to run effective campaigns in the short-term that are profitable for everyone that's involved, while simultaneously generating stronger content and building out audiences. But ultimately, the true value will be in helping bloggers learn how to work with each other as well as with other partners in this growing industry of new media.

I take this very seriously, because this is exactly what I'm passionate about doing. This year anticipated sending the consumer electronic show again, along with South by Southwest, and many other venues including podcamps and wordcamps. I will be back for BlogWorld, but in general I'm looking to hit smaller venues in the new media genre to have more focused discussions with individuals attending these groups to find a way to bring more people together.

I also intend to cover more shows in the affiliate advertising industry, as I build up my connections with these groups. New media needs to learn how to more effectively work with these groups and provide the right solutions to help our both of our industries forward. New media needs to find better ways to incorporate its own strengths and providing the right information at the right time for the right products and services and the affiliate industry needs to work at providing the right ways to establish a handoff to walk the customer through a process and a checkout that has very little red tape and gives them the solution that they truly need, when we hand our loyal readers over into their care.

We all have our challenges this year as we face a economy is dropping off. That said the industry of social media marketing is in a prime position to capitalize during the downturn. Our marketing solutions are extremely effective, and a relatively very inexpensive. To achieve all the goals that were looking for, we have to increase the quality of content, increase the audience size for that content, and increase the quality of the handoff of audience members when they start looking for solutions through our referrals.

A good morning Egret

2008-11-03T07:29:00.001-05:00

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Real NIN fans following show state to st

2008-11-02T09:56:00.001-05:00

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Good Morning From Greenville

2008-11-02T08:52:00.001-05:00

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End of Show

2008-11-01T22:33:00.001-05:00

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Just Playing

2008-11-01T22:02:00.001-05:00

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That's almost it...

2008-11-01T22:00:00.001-05:00

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GW IS THE Background image

2008-11-01T21:56:00.001-05:00

Bite the hand that feeds

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Track from Ghosts

2008-11-01T21:06:00.001-05:00

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Transition to Down in it

2008-11-01T20:47:00.001-05:00

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The wretched

2008-11-01T20:43:00.001-05:00

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Can not stop

2008-11-01T20:31:00.001-05:00

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March of the pigs

2008-11-01T20:30:00.001-05:00

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Just started

2008-11-01T20:25:00.001-05:00

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Stage view through a beer

2008-11-01T20:13:00.001-05:00

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Between Bands Beer

2008-11-01T19:41:00.001-05:00

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LA BAND

2008-11-01T19:34:00.001-05:00

correction definitely an LA BAND :)

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Health we think that is the band

2008-11-01T19:21:00.001-05:00

athens band maybe

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Can't remember opening act name...

2008-11-01T19:09:00.001-05:00

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Meat Beat Manifesto

2008-11-01T18:55:00.001-05:00

Not live but playing on the sound system. Would love to see them in concert.

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Here Early but in the right mind state

2008-11-01T18:33:00.001-05:00

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Ready For Concert

2008-11-01T16:39:00.001-05:00

Going to eat supper first

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Edge Digital Photo Frame Contest at The BenSpark

2008-11-01T11:38:00.001-05:00

Drew at The BenSpark is offering a contest giving away a 7” Digital Photo Frame. The contest starts today and goes until the end of the month.

SEE INFORMATION ON ENTERING HERE

There are a number of ways to win, and I don’t mind sharing with you even though, I am entering myself. (Hoping to win a Christmas Present for my grandmother, who always wants to see the latest pictures of all of her grandchildren. :) )

Enjoy, I’ll be back tomorrow as I’m heading to a concert tonight, which I’ll be mobile blogging about later today.

Ducks in the Distance

2008-11-01T11:03:00.001-05:00

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Looking Scared

2008-11-01T10:09:00.001-05:00

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Spoils of War Post Trade

2008-10-31T21:04:00.001-05:00

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Stole the Wolfman's Head

2008-10-31T19:22:00.001-05:00

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Undecided guide for voting

2008-10-31T18:15:00.001-05:00

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Pumpkin Ale

2008-10-31T17:48:00.001-05:00

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To the First House

2008-10-31T17:15:00.001-05:00

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More Morning Fog

2008-10-31T07:26:00.001-05:00

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A foggy Good Morning to You

2008-10-31T07:24:00.001-05:00

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What Could You Do With Universal Health Care?

2008-10-31T04:24:00.001-05:00

Reducing your medical expenses is nice. Reducing expenses for your employer or company is nice too.

But maybe, maybe we are thinking to small...

ps Thanks Bill for turning me on to this video

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Talking head boxes with errors

2008-10-30T17:19:00.001-05:00

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2008-10-30T16:10:00.001-05:00

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Wolfman in car

2008-10-29T17:31:00.001-05:00

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Burnt

2008-10-29T15:43:00.001-05:00

Wasn't paying attention and burnt my brats :(

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Obama Assassination Plot Disrupted

2008-10-27T15:39:00.001-05:00

Here's the latest breaking news on a new plot to kill Obama that has apparently been thwarted.

"The ATF says it has broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree."

http://washingtontimes.com/…srupted-1/

http://news.google.com/news/url

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Dog snarfed my pillow

2008-10-27T02:09:00.001-05:00

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Pictures from the Hike up Crowders Mountain

2008-10-26T16:30:00.001-05:00

Today, I took a hike up Crowders Mountain in North Carolina with my daughter Mya. The mountain is about 20 minutes from our house by car, and we drove over there around 11 and a morning or so. When I say "hike" I'm using that term relatively loosely. It's basically a steep gravel road up the mountain that we took today. There are some trails of the mountain as well, but Mya is a wobbly and I don't want to take her up a few of the paths that are a little bit more dangerous.

There's hardly anything dangerous about the roads, even when Mya wrote on my shoulders for a good part of the trip up the mountain and down the mountain. :-)

A couple of these pictures include Mya and I at the top of the mountain where there are a number of satellite and radio antennas. I was trying to explain to Mya that this is where Scooby-Doo really comes from, but she wasn't buying any of it.

All in all it was a good hike, and I got a good start on outlining the prelude to a book that I'm working on. I donned a headset and plugged it into my voice recorder which I use to then record part of the opening scenes of the prelude. It definitely helped as the prelude takes place on the mountain and it includes the experiences of a small boy walking up the mountain with his grandfather.

So that's how my day went this morning at least, and now into the rest of the evening, have a great deal of work to get done in a number of blog articles that I need to have transcribed off my oyster quarter so I can get them published on my own sites and on several of my clients sites.

There is a tree in the center of this picture, that have leaves that look violet in color. I tried to capture this with my camera, however at best the leaves look all little bit blue. It was quite an amazing color that I don't think I've ever seen on a tree before, and it was in part due to a trick of the light I'm sure, but it was rather stunning coming down the mountain to see a tree that looked as violet as well as violet as you might pick in a field.

This picture features a pine tree on the edge of a ditch near the side of the road. It's somewhat spectacular in that the trunk actually extends below the ground a couple of feet before branches off into roots.

Backpacking Mya

2008-10-26T12:03:00.001-05:00

Up Crowders Mountain known sometimes as kings mountain

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Lizard on the Screen

2008-10-25T19:58:00.003-05:00

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Using up the Paint

2008-10-25T19:58:00.001-05:00

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Red

2008-10-25T19:31:00.001-05:00

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Pain? At the pump

2008-10-25T12:21:00.001-05:00

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Fall flower

2008-10-25T10:42:00.001-05:00

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Fence Monkey

2008-10-25T08:42:00.001-05:00

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Good Morning!

2008-10-25T07:55:00.001-05:00

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Ladders are hard

2008-10-24T23:10:00.001-05:00

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That's just a bad name for a kid's game

2008-10-24T23:06:00.001-05:00

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In line for bean bag toss

2008-10-24T23:05:00.001-05:00

The fairy princess and werewolf are mine. My lion is dancing to the ghost busters theme song

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A Trip to Greenville

2008-10-24T00:29:00.001-05:00

In a little over a week, I'm going to be making a trip to Greenville South Carolina for a Nine Inch Nails Concert. I've driven through many times but never stayed, so this will be a first.

The last time I saw Nine Inch Nails in concert was in 1991 in San Francisco when they were still relatively new (about 18 months after Pretty Hate Machine came out). They were ok in concert (played during the day during the first Lollapalooza).

I remember the trip back. I was with a girl and we were riding on my motorcycle, a Honda Shadow from San Francisco back to Monterey where I lived then. She and I were both in the military, and she was dating a friend of mine and I was trying to date a friend of hers, just before I ended up dating someone else or some convoluted thing like that that only happens when you are 19.

We were supposed to be keeping each other awake after the concert but kept nodding off and waking up when the bike would swerve on the wet pavement. It was a cold, foggy ride back in the middle of the night back and the fog in the mountains was making the road pretty damn slick. We were both sober, just cold and trying to huddle together with each other and the bike itself which was putting off a little heat.

I think I did like 45 mph on the 101 just trying to keep the wind down a bit to stay warm. I'd lost half my clothing during the concert and one of my shoes in the pit. If I'd had half a brain, I should have pulled over, but again when your 19 your at least 120% as stupid as you will probably ever be. (Glad I'm just getting by right now at 98% stupid).

Regardless, we made it back safe in sound. This time I'm driving a car and staying in the Hilton. There's something that seems very strange about going to a) a NIN concert in South Carolina b) Staying at the Hilton and c) well just the whole thing. :)

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Ron Howard, The Fonz, & Andy G on Obama

2008-10-23T22:49:00.001-05:00

Over the last couple of weeks several conversations have popped up here talking about Fonzie Jumping the Shark and Happy Days and various events (usually around the crappy plot twists on Heroes).

Well tonight I was reading the associated press and heard about this video that Ron Howard, Henry Winkler and Andy Griffith made to inspire people to get out and vote for Obama.

I'm not sure that the video would sway me one way or another, but it does make me nostalgic for happier days...

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