What was going to be a newsletter is now a hastily composed blog post. I have precious few hours before we travel home to spend a few days with family and way too many hors d’oeuvre. Yay!!

(Merry Christmas…by Flickr user Tio)

And so, I wish thee all a very Merry Christmas (that’s what celebrate in my family) and I will see you all again very soon.

Sidebar:: As a bonus link, I was looking through my sister’s copy of Vanity Fair, and I noticed an interesting ad for Target, which spanned several top 1/3 pages, featuring sheet music for Tony Bennett’s “I’ll be home for Christmas,” remixed by Moby. I thought that was pretty cool, then I went to download it at the link they gave: www.target.com/tonybennettremix. What was really neat was that you can download it as a GarageBand file (Macs only, snobs!) and remix it yourself.

David Blaine hanging in a box to promote Target = 1.0
Tony Bennett + Moby + UGC (User Generated Content) = 2.0

Again, enjoy your holidays everyone, and get wound up to honor those resolutions come January one!
Love,

Jordan and Alex

Roland is in the middle of an interesting SEO/content management debate, and I have to say I agree with him:

Yes, a static website is much better than no website. But with modern blogging software like WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Plone it’s easy to setup static pages as well as blogs and you then get all the advantages of blogs (ease of editing, RSS which leads to higher search engine rank) and traditional static websites. This means you have a system where anybody can update the content without needing a webmaster or FTP which means the site is more likely to be up to date unlike most static websites.

(self portrait by Roland)

He continues..

Technical people and web designers who recommend to clients to use static pages with FTP, Front Page, Dreamweaver, etc. are doing their clients a disservice! It’s 2006 not 1999!

Better to use WordPress (even though I work for a Drupal company I’ll continue to plug WordPress for blogs and simple static sites; use Drupal if you want a comprehensive web presence including a true community site) and just use its static web pages features and make the blog part invisible) than to use some custom or hand coded static site.

I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps it would be too blatantly self-promotional to remind everyone that if you need a site built with Wordpress…

The blog turns 1-year-old this week, the company celebrates that same milestone this Spring.

As an early birthday and Christmas present, Rob has been making tweaks to the site again, to the back end as reported earlier and most noticeably, to the banner.

I love it. It’s Vancouver, it’s fun and it features a great photo by Rob himself, of False Creek and BC Place. The stadium which, sans inflatable roof, will be home of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in 2010. Great job, mate!

:: You know what else would be a great birthday present? Leave a comment behind, and maybe even let us all know when you started reading.

First, the existing Z-list, as reported by Mack Collier:
BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman’s Blog About Surprise
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
darrenbarefoot.com
Two Hat Marketing
The Emerging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew’s Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
NewsPaperGrl
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence & Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly

And now, my additions:

Jeremy Latham’s Blog
SMogger Social Media Blog
Masey.com

For starters, I haven’t been posting much. This is most disappointing to me, because I vowed I would be consistent. Much worse though is the fact that I haven’t added the rest of my podcasting series, and now we’re close enough to the holidays that it seems I might break that promise too.

My sincerest of apologies to those of you who were waiting for more episodes before Christmas, especially those who made a point of saying so in the comments. In the New Year, I will atone for all of my sins, I assure you. Still, Time magazine has voted me Person of the Year.

Lastly, I owe a big thanks to Mack Collier, his “Z-list” has brought me a huge burst in traffic and links, and I haven’t had the time to reciprocate to all of the linkers. This one I will rectify much sooner. Thanks to all of you who are reposting my link over and over again, I am entirely grateful. I haven’t checked yet, but you might have moved me up the Technorati ladder quite a few notches. In blog land, that’s like hard currency.

And, did anyone else notice that the entire Wordpress dashboard UI changed overnight? I’m still getting used to it.

Update: ‘Twas Rob who changed my dashboard; adding a plugin as a surprise, as he mentions in the comments.

I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I missed the sign-up deadline for Casecamp, Crayonville (held in Second Life) tonight. Sounds like I missed out.

Anyway, without that coolest of the cool ‘unconference’ to attend in that 3D world I’m gradually warming up to, I started digging into the episodes of “Crayoncast,” the podcast by staff of Crayon, “a new marketing company.” And I like it. The staff each give a quick minute on their favorite topic of the week. Some of it is actually useful too, such as the tip to check out JPG Magazine, the first “user-generated” print magazine, for photographers.

What are you waiting for cool kids, submit your shots now. You could win and get published, and with that receive $100 and a free subscription. The future of publishing is now.

You’re probably all just dying to know, and although I’m tempted to publish a whole list here, this is actually just to announce a cool new feature from Flickr:

Give the Gift of Flickr. As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of the service, but I am still on a free account. And even though, as Factory Joe (aka Chris Messina) reports, those free accounts are going from 20MB to 100MB per month in uploads, I still feel as if I owe it to the Flickr community to contribute more than just my occasional photo or two.

So if you’re stumped, and you want to get me something that I will cherish for many years to come, this is the idea you’ve been looking for. If my new Pro account isn’t under the tree this year, I resolve to purchase this for myself in the New Year. Just like I resolve to finally start training for the Vancouver Marathon. Seriously.