I am suffering from severe blogger’s block. This tends to happen to me when work becomes really active or I try to take on too many things. I push the blog to the back burner. This time is different though. My mind has been preoccupied by the fact that my friend, colleague and noodad.com partner-in-crimeGregory Ng and his family, have made a life changing decision to move from Boston to North Carolina.
My problem is that I cannot understand why he would want to leave a city that fits him like a glove. I will now summon the power of Blogdar, the relatively unknown Norse god of blogging, to convince him that he should stay.
Mr. DM
In the direct marketing and interactive space(s), you will be hard pressed to find a person with more high quality, actionable ideas. My old boss used to say that he hated sales. He wanted to put a dollar in the vending machine and have a client fall out. We all know that that is a sales pipe dream, but if you were to ask for that sort of scenario for ideas, well that’s Greg.
If you have not been to Twitturly.com, you are missing out on the second most most important Twitter resource. The twitter search tool Summize is number one.
Joel Strellner has thoughtfully created a tool that gives us insight into the most popular URLs from the past 24 hours. Each time someone types in a link, Twitturly thoughtfully counts it as a vote for that URL. The best part is that it doesn’t matter if you’re using a tinyurl, is.gd or one of those other tools that help reduce the size of URLs (to rickroll your friends). Twitturly follows the URL to its destination.
I may never need to write a software application again! It turns out that flavors of two ideas that I had have already been done (sort of). The API to twitter is so easy and intuitive, applications are popping up all over. In fact, twitter is actually a part of a sub dimension of the blogosphere that I (would) call the twitterverse (if twitterverse wasn’t something else, but more on that later) or maybe the twalaxy.
Stepping back: Direct marketing guru and Internet junkie, Gregory Ng, introduced me to twitter. After a couple of days of use, I got the general gist of it, but I really wanted to figure out what I could learn from it. After all, this was really close to my dream of being able to work all day mining AIM or MSN conversations and then return home with my 6 friends to our dark haired princess who washes our clothes and makes us supper. I just want to learn how to serve you better. I promise I am only quasi-evil!
Call me Michael.
This is what I tell people when they ask me my name. Still, about a third of them decide that they like Mike better and start off with a “nice to meet you Mike.” This fills me with temporary wookie-style rage. Fortunately, I rule at suppressing my inner Chewie.
My mother named me Michael Schneider. If it were up to my father, my name would be Wolfgang. He thought that it would be cool to call me Wolf or Wolfy. This is probably the only thing my father and Eddie Van Halen, who DID name his son Wolfgang, have in common. Schneider is a name of German origin. It means tailor. So you can imagine that Michael Schneider is a fairly common name. There are some pretty interesting Michael and Mike Schneiders out there too.
Mike Schneider is a TV personality for ABC. I can remember watching him in the late 80s and early 90s anchoring the early morning news program: ABC World News This Morning. He also had a soft political career and now is with Bloomberg TV. I actually majored in mass communications for a semester. I wanted to be a radio jock. My dad convinced me that business was a better major. I should have majored in Computer Science, but MIS and Accountancy have served me well.
