Guy Kawasaki’s Head Explodes – Video

Guy Kawasaki speaking with Steve Ballmer about Xbox Live subscribers at Mix 08. Guy starts praising Xbox and the technology, then asks Steve how many subscribers Xbox Live currently has.  The results are devastating to Guy.

Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade Experience

Wordpress 2.8 offers 790 bug fixes from v2.7 provides  several cool new features. You can now upload new themes using the admin panel, edit plugins from the editor, standardized drog and drag widget activation and placement and many other things that speed up wordpress’s performance.

I chose to manually download and FTP the unzipped files into my hosting account. I pulled up the admin area as soon as the uplaod was finished and was greeted with a “Upgrade Database” button, that I pushed, then was promptly presented with a Success page. It couldn’t have been easier.

I updated a few out of date plugins (Wassup, All in One SEO Pack, Contact Form 7) and took care of a few other housekeeping items while I had my hands dirty.  Share your upgrading experiences by leaving a Reply below.

Video: SEO for Local Search

Rand Fishkin (founder seomoz) and David Mihm discuss Google’s location prominence score, local search results, and how Google uses information from local sites in your area to decide how important you are to your geography.  Watch this video to learn how to boost your site’s ranking within your town for the key terms and phrases that are most important for generating new sales.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Take a Break for Clients’ Sake

It’s lunchtime on Monday and I have a few minutes to read over some of my coworkers recent blog postings.  One that caught my eye a few weeks ago was Dennis Yu’s article on “Brutal Efficiency“.  Dennis makes some great observations in his article about working hard, being efficient, and getting the job done.    Ironically, his article, coupled with a 20 hour weekend of work, made me realize that  stopping yourself from working all the time is just as important as starting and completing work in the first place.

Remember to take a break (for your client’s sake) and reflect on work.  I often get so stressed out and tired that I end up blowing up on coworkers and clients for small things.  My patience disappears, my ability to comprehend and absorb new ideas diminishes, and I get stuck in 4wheel-drive, sometimes in the right direction and other times completely off course.  I don’t even need to mention how many nights I’m sleeping on the couch lately, poor nutrition, or angry dogs.

If all you do is work, the work can start to blind you.  You can easily work yourself into a position with no clients or friends by trying extra hard to make everyone happy and never taking a break.

Are you working 120 hours/week?  Try to relax a little, you’ll have more success.

AT&T BlueRoom and iPhones at Bonnaroo

AT&T BlueRoom featured great live performances this weekend from the scene of the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester Tennessee.   One unplanned gift AT&T gave Bonnaroo fans watching from home was multiple live video streams being webcast from the iPhones in the crowd.

As I write this article, a fan is broadcasting tonight’s live Phish show on his Ustream.tv Channel to over 4700 remote viewers. The viewers can “Tweet” in a side chat panel. Once submitted, each tweet is automatically tagged with #phish and the URL of the video feed, what great promotion.

Tweets, YouTube and Facebook mobile uploads from the crowd are overloading AT&Ts bandwidth between songs. This causes the video feed to get choppy momentarily, but once a new song starts the quality returns.  Enormous use of social media and blogging has lead some media to refer to this years even at “Bloggaroo 2009″.