Ingrams Magazine, a local Kansas City business publication recently listed twenty individuals in the KC Metro that “are showing promise, vision and commitment to their entrepreneurial ideas”. I’m truly honored to be recognized in the inaugural class. Here’s the excerpt from the magazine:

Of course I’m humbled by the honor (and my parents are lovin’ it) but I can’t reiterate enough it’s the people around me who have helped teach, guide, inspire, enable and provide the opportunities to make me who I am.

The company I work for, Digital Evolution Group continues to make work life enjoyable. Instead of getting a traditional boring “thank you card” or bad tasting “grocery store cake”, they made a “facebook-like wall post” website as a congratulatory gesture. HOW FREAKIN’ COOL IS THAT!?!

Screenshot: http://congratsramsey.digitalev.com

I’ve blogged before about how “…people come into our lives for a reason, bringing something we must learn. We are led to those who help us most to grow, if we let them and we help them in return.”

I’m living it. I am who I am because of it… and I truly believe in it. While this recognition is nice, the best has yet to come.
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Check out this footage I shot while attending the 2008 Kansas City Downtown Airshow at the Charles B. Wheeler Airport. I somehow scored an interview with Kansas City’s own, Thunderbird Pilot Dyon Douglas! Probably the craziest thing I saw that I captured footage of was a “how it works” explanation of a jet powered porta potty that goes over 70 MPH.

Earlier this year Microsoft released an application called Photosynth. What does Photosynth do? You take a bunch of photos of something, shoot a bunch from angles. They say it’s best to have between 20 and 300 photos (I took 316 photos). It creates a 3D mesh of all the photos that you can “walk” through. There are several demo Photosynths on the site.

Check out the one I did of my room, below (click around on the buttons to explore!). How cool is this!?! Nice work Microsoft, a product that is well executed and easy to use.

This is a mash-up:

So I really don’t think EVERYONE should blog — but we quote this YouTube video (below) at our office all the time. It’s hilarious (or at least to us it is).

Within the past week Twitter has been blowing up about the website www.faceyourmanga.com. This site has completely gone viral — which is just fancy corporate jiber-jab-er for “everyone is telling everyone about it and everyone is doing it” (I swear that makes sense in my head).

The website is simple, it’s a tool for creating your own avatar. There tons of choices and options (much like the Nintendo Mii). Pointless? Maybe. Fun? Yep! Check out mine below and (i’m still not convinced it looks exactly like me) go to www.faceyourmanga.com and make your own.

The blogosphere in the past few months have been buzzing about Public Relations. Specifically, there has been discussion about the changing role of PR and the social media space. My disclaimer before you read the rest of this post: I’m not an expert in PR — but based on my experience and personal knowledge, I have some thoughts in regards to this recent discussion and the “Social Media Release”.

In my opinion the “Social Media Release” is only one piece of a two part puzzle. There’s a distinct difference between the Social Media Release and having a Social Media Strategy. In my mind, PR should not only understand these are growing trends… they should already be doing it, and perfecting it.

So what’s a social media release?
It’s a clean, clear, humanized press release. It should be outward focused (on the customer and audience). Similar to a 140 character Twitter message, it should be short and sweet — and it should lead with the “meat and potatoes” first and be supported with the finer details farther into the text (also known as the inverted pyramid approach).

Most importantly it should the ingredients for what truly makes it a social media release:

• embeddable content
• embeddable photos
• embeddable video
• links to other relevant websites
• key quotes and testimonials from the source
• the use of social tools to bookmark it (digg, delicious, facebook)
• tags for indexing, SEO and discoverability (so there’s an understanding of what keywords are relevant)
• subscriptions via RSS

Bottom line, a social media release gives you everything you need to discover/learn, share, and MOST importantly — everything you need to retell the story.

The second piece to the puzzle is having a Social Media Strategy. This is having the wherewithal and experience of how to engage in the right areas online to publish and post your information. It also needs to be within the areas it’s most relevant and has value. Brian Solis recently created a helpful ‘Conversation Prism’, a chart that illustrates where conversations are taking place in the online space.

The implications? No longer does your website function as just the hub in which you disseminate out information. Much like in marketing, where the people are communicating — you should be there too, engaged as well.

On a more holistic level, PR is shifting to a role of understanding how to tap the key influencers online and/or allow anyone to have the necessary assets to provide their take on the story. Being a gatekeeper of information shouldn’t be the focus in PR. Establishing an open relationship and conversation with the people who are writing the stories is what it’s all about. It’s happening already — except people are going about extracting the information on their own (also referred to as the groundswell). PR should embrace and augment the “story creation” process for bloggers and people online. While it’s scary to swallow, it’s about enabling audiences to take your information and run with it.

*UPDATE* If you want to see an example of how CNN is already embracing this shift, see a great example of a recent social media release here.

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I know, I know — Michael Phelps is a golden god (I blogged about it already). If you check his Facebook fan page today you’ll see he has over 943,797 fans, 43,249 wall posts 1,019 fan photos and 355 discussion topics (side note: it’s interesting how people are adopted his Facebook “wall” as a virtual yearbook. Literally people are writing messages in the context that they would if they were signing a yearbook or guest book).

So, aside from Phelps being a-m-a-z-i-n-g, I wanted to bring to your attention the 100m dash. It was shown LATE on Saturday, so the majority of the U.S. missed it. People have been blogging how NBC has failed to prominently highlight the 100m dash — which is shocking since to me, I mean come on NBC, the 100m is one of the flagship events of the summer Olympics.

If you haven’t seen it yet — watch it first. If you have seen it… HOLY JEEZ. Usain Bolt of Jamaica jogged in the last 15 meters he was so far ahead. I personally ran track in high school (and loved it), one of my events was the 100m dash, to see this is utterly amazing. It’s not an event that historically is won by such a large margin.

Not only did he win, but he set the world record. What’s frustrating is he could of easily won with with larger margin and faster time. EASILY. While Usain Bolt may have not thought twice about it — his decision to “jog in” the final 15 meters it was something I struggled with. Olympians train their entire lives for moments like this. Was he making a mockery of his win? Was he just being plain arrogant?

I believe there are several life defining moments that happen in each of our lives. This was one for Usain Bolt. Maybe it’s just the competitive nature within me, but I would have left the celebrating for after the race was over. I believe it would have made more of an impact if Bolt left the games with a WR that was significantly faster than the previous record.

Details matter. While Bolt still walked away with the gold and a new WR, he may never be back at the games again to set another WR, or even worse — as good of shape to do it so easily. If I had my way, I would of made my mark in the world with a little more respect and class than Usain Bolt did.
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If you are in the corporate world grind, or have read a business magazine within the past two years, at some point you’ve come across the phrase Web 2.0. What is Web 2.0 anyways? What is Web 3.0? You and most people out there have no freakin’ clue what that even means. Well Marc Benioff, the chairman and CEO of SalesForce.com, wrote a great article on TechCrunchIT that gives one perspective of what “Web 3.0″ means — it’s short and succinct and well worth your attention.

Web 3.0 by his definition, is “the shift” in software as web-based applications, in an environment stored “in the cloud” — that can be done anywhere.

He also does a great job of also backtracking and defining the terms Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 as well:

Web 1.0: Anyone Can Transact
…the emergence of the “killer app” from companies like eBay, Amazon.com, and Google. Although we thought of them as Web sites at the time, they were really amazing applications with a level of functionality, ease of use, and scale that had rarely been seen before by the average consumer. Transactions, not just of goods but of knowledge, became ubiquitous and instant.

Web 2.0: Anyone Can Participate
…the next generation of applications on the Internet, featuring user-generated content, collaboration, and community. Anyone can participate in content creation. Posting a viral video on YouTube, tagging photos from a party on Flickr, or writing about politics on Blogspot requires no technical skill, just an Internet connection. Participation changes our idea of content itself: content isn’t fixed at the point of publication — it comes alive.

Web 3.0: Anyone Can Innovate
…it changes all of this by completely disrupting the technology and economics of the traditional software industry. The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.

While I personally cringe when anyone utters these buzzwords, these are in fact real movements of the Web that are important to understand for anyone in business (not just for us geeks). The shift of some form of platform as a service in the cloud is only going to continue to increase.
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Check out these pics I snapped this weekend of my sister’s new puppy — his name is “Charlie” and he’s a cockapoo. He’s chill, loyal and quiet. A great addition to the family.

“…’great’ must be in the eye of the target, not the creator. Post-click must deliver what that target was seeking when they clicked in a way that’s clear and comfortable for them. That’s what works.”

This quote encapsulates the importance of designing websites from the end-user perspective. It’s a simple principal — but it makes all difference in fulfilling the expectations of the audience you are targeting.

What I mean is that he’s a amazing athlete who is so above and beyond his competitors — his only real competition is himself (much like Lance Armstrong was). Frankly, after watching the replays on his flip turns — Phelps is a freakin’ dolphin if you ask me.

Fellow video blogger and old Justin.TV friend iJustine a.k.a. Justine Ezarik blogged about which iPhone apps she’s currently got installed on her iPhone. While I don’t have 5 entire pages filled with apps like she does, I’ve got my fair share.

(click the image to enlarge)

Steve Jobs shared some information in today’s Wall Street Journal article, regarding the Apple app store:

• There have already been 60 million downloads, the majority of them free.
• Paid downloads have pulled in about $30 million in revenues in the first 30 days.

TechCrunch also provided some interesting insight on the sheer number of apps one even uses:

“The question is how many apps can one person really manage before becoming overwhelmed. While the initial impulse is to download as many apps as possible to try them out, there is a limit to how many apps you can juggle on your iPhone. It is not much different than a PC. You have tons of apps, but how many do you actually use on a regular basis?“

While I’d like to believe that apps will continue to improve and build upon the 3G iPhone capabilities, there are critics that believe that these apps are going to hit a saturation point real soon. I know in my own personal day to day usage — the ones I use (starting with the most frequently used): SMS, Email, Safari, Notes and AIM.
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This past Friday, American Idol rolled into Kansas City to hold round one auditions for Season 8. Of course, I grabbed my camera and video blogged the craziness. It was great — I really met a lot of cool people in the couple hours I walked around. One thing I found surprising, the majority of people were practically fighting to sing for the camera …and they were actually all pretty good! Check out my audio blog on Utterz and my video blog below. P.s. You’ll be crackin’ up when you meet “Mr. Banana Man”, a memorable character for sure. Enjoy!

My audio blog of the event:

…this was one of those moments that I had to get on video “just in case” something happened.

Every morning I wake up anxious to start my day more motivated than the next. Why?

The greatest possession you have is the 24-hours in front of you.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when or what — but at some point of my life a light switched on in my head that gave me perspective, motivation and more importantly the drive to want to be the difference in the world (yes, this is going to be one of those motivational blog posts, so strap in and hang on tight, cue motivational music).

Matt, a fellow consultant I work with, was speaking at our staff meeting about his previous life prior to working at our company. He described how he took an entire year off to travel/backpack the world after essentially “burning out” at his previous workplace (he worked there for 8 years). One quote changed his world perspective (and BLEW my mind). It was the following:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

- Mark Twain

[ca-ching!] The philosophy and motivation that is encapsulated in that quote is truly what it is all about. I want the most out of life and am looking to spend my time where it makes the most impact. Of course life doesn’t just hand things to you — YOU have to get out there and make things happen for yourself.

The keys to fulfill this hunger takes hard work. But it’s the little things in life that make all the difference. For what it’s worth, here’s my advice:

• Embrace what you are passionate about in life. Once you’ve done that — don’t just be good at it, strive to be the best at it. Want to take it a step further?…get paid to do it!

• Surround yourself with people who motivate you. Nobody likes hanging out with “debbie downer”. If your circle of friends don’t fill that void — constantly read the books or blogs of people that do, follow their presence online, subscribe to their podcasts.

• Do what works for you. Learn what works. Try out lots of things. Understand failure comes with the territory and you must persist.

• Get inspired. That moment of inspiration you get when your neurons “spark” you to do something or take action is what life is all about. Whatever it is that ignites that, do it. You can also never be to busy to search for inspiration. Make sure you are not only inspired, but inspired frequently. It can’t be every other month, strive to make it daily or at least weekly. Make post-it notes, put quotes on your bathroom mirror, send yourself reminders, setup alerts — you must foster an enviornment for inspiration. I personally have a fear of mediocricy and you should too.

• Make a “bucket list“. Toss in your bucket things that are personal and professional. Never mind how crazy the notion or idea, make sure you have a list. It’s only then after you’ve committed and identifyed these things, in which you then begin to step through and plan out how they can be achieved. Remind yourself instant gratification in completing your “bucket list” isn’t realistic… “We do what we have to do in order to do what we want to do.” The current tagline of my blog is very fitting to reference, “If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it”.

I love to write, communicate/interact with people, share and explore. At my roots, I consider myself an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs understand the “now” but live in the future. My own personal view of entrepreneuralism is having an inherent drive and personality to thrive on innovation and achievement. While the city I live in, Kansas City, may not be thought of as a place that breeds successful entrepreneurs in the Internet space (an honor usually left to the coasts) — I’m determined to make my mark.

Every endeavor I’ve embarked upon; web consulting, video blogging, photography, lifecasting on Justin.TV — they all started with single thought and the notion I can do it.

I’m excited to be here.

You should be too. Now you get out there. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Last week eMarketer published an article titled, “Retail Shoppers Hit the Web First“.

“Eight out of 10 respondents who had recently made consumer electronics purchases in a brick-and-mortar store said they had visited the store’s Website first, according to a May 2008 Nielsen Online survey. More than one-half said they purchased from the retailer on whose Website they had spent the most time.”

…the article then goes on to describe:

“If they had to choose just one method of researching their purchases, 58% of respondents said they would choose the Internet — far more than would choose their own friends and family.” Only 8% chose friends and family.

To me, this is a no brainer, I’m a digital native. However it should be a LOUD message to those Marketers, Executives, and CEOs out there who don’t view the web as a major component of your marketing communication strategy. When is the last time you reviewed what you’re providing online? Is it timely, relevant, and adding value to your personas that are finding you online?  It better be.
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I read an article in the New York Times regarding last months launch of www.criminalsearches.com. Essentially it’s a free service that lets you search government records criminal backgrounds. And you can search for everyone… in every state. Keep in mind, it’s using all public data that’s available — except now it’s online and for free. Whoaaaaa - what!?!

“…the site draws data directly from local courthouses and offers records of arrests and convictions in connection with everything from murder to minor infractions like blowing past a stop sign — at least for jurisdictions that include traffic violations in their criminal data. It also lets users view a map showing addresses and names of all those arrested or convicted of a crime in a specific neighborhood, and to place alerts that prompt e-mail when someone in their life gets busted or someone with a record moves in nearby (via).”

It’s increasingly more common for everyone — not just HR departments to “Google” your name to see what kind of information they can find out about you. I’m sure there are critics out there that will say this is “creepy” and “unfair”. However, if the information is not restricted in any way, placing it online for reference is was inevitable. Try it out, you know you want to .

» www.criminalsearches.com

I took this photo when I recently was in New York City. This is right off of Times Square on 47th Street and Broadway. I upped the contrast, decreased the brightness and chopped in the color. Anndd waaaa-laaaa! I think it’s pretty cool…

**UPDATE** I received a Twitter reply today regarding this photo… someone actually wants a poster print of this!?! And here I was just having fun with photoshop…

Rapper Big Boi is pushing Obama in his new music video. Do celebrities influence your vote? Why should we even listen to them regarding politics?

Think about it, celebrities are famous for acting, singing, dancing, whatever, etc — not for their intellect regarding politics. Do you ask your doctor for his political view points? Do you care who your church pastor is voting for?

You can’t deny their power to sway the vote exists. But should it? I’ve always had mixed feelings regarding celebrities using their fame and power to push their own personal views regarding politics. My beef with celebrities is simple — people who are not informed and do not take the time to educate themselves to have an informed opinion and willingly adopt their celebrities view point. In retrospect, you can also argue that it also may inspire someone to research more information regarding the issue(s).

So how about you… does the “Oprah effect” or other celebrity endorsements change your opinion?
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Have you ever made a phone call praying to someone’s voicemail, and the person picks up? Doh. I can name two scenarios that just happened in the past week. In some situations, you struggle for words because you weren’t expecting the person to pick up

Translated and abstracted; “I want to communicate something to you, but I don’t want to DIRECTLY communicate with you.” Enter Slydial, a phone service that essentially connects you directly to someone’s mobile voicemail.

Whaaaat!?! Ramsey, that’s silly. Why would you ever want to go directly to voicemail?

Well — think about it… it’s a brilliant cheat and an illusion of communication. You can leave late night happy birthday voicemails, avoid talking to your boss to tell him you’re late, dump your girlfriends, avoid a long convos with your parents, and leave client direct voicemails and not interrupt your/their workflow (I do openly acknowledge that if you use this service for these reasons, you can argue it’s a not-so-valiant character trait to possess).

The service is free (you have to listen to an advertisement) so I tried it out for myself. All you do is call 267-759-3425 and then enter the mobile number you want to connect to voicemail. Annnnnnd sure enough it works like it says it does. Pretty slick. So now I’ve added slydial to my contacts list — we’ll see if it comes in handy in the upcoming week.

The idea and concept of this service made me step back and want to catalog technologies/mediums we use for communication. In my opinion, these are in order from highly direct, to least personal:

1.) Face-to-Face
2.) Phone
3.) Instant Messenger
4.) Voicemail
5.) Text Messaging
6.) Email
7.) Letter/Postal Mail

What’s interesting about the introduction of the service Slydial — is the use of technology to deceive. No one can deny we are slaves to our devices that allow us to be reachable and connected (i’m guilty). I think it’s a important skill in life to understand when and what medium to choose from the list above.

Does Slydial cross the line of morality? Is it even ethical to use such a service? You can argue that Slydial is just a compliment to the medium itself. In my opinion, I think it all depends on the situation and the person, but ultimately Slydial can help a person concerned with efficiency and time. In retrospect, it also can greatly benefit cowardly people who like to avoid direct communication.
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Brilliant interpretation of lolspeak! I love it.

Earlier this week you may have heard the “buzz” regarding the launch of the new search engine “Cuil“. The components of the launch all seemed to be “storybook” — the company was positioned as direct competition to Google (in theory), heavily invested, created by Ex-Google workers, claims that the search technology had a farther and more effective …all of the components seemed to add up to one all-to-good-to-be-true story. Could there really be competition brewing to “the great Oz” aka Google?

Fail.

I happened to catch the Twitters while walking the streets of New York about the launch — so I opened up my mobile browser and searched for my full name on www.cuil.com, only to be disappointed that the servers were too slammed for the site to even work.

Being a web consultant myself at Digital Evolution Group — launching a website is hard. It’s never an easy task. With its Ex-Google employee history and $33 million dollars in funding, you would think it would have taken more calculated steps, especially for a site launch that garnered so much press. This of course, is all much easier said than done.

Regardless, the lesson learned is potentially a fatal one for Cuil as a company — “details matter”. Cuil knew it was going to be hit hard but failed to consider all the angles. They knew they were going to get lots of traffic that could potentially bring the site down, why not endorse a “beta” logo or disclose any type of “pre-launch” or “in testing” disclaimer. Why not also place this same type of verbiage within its error messages? Why not provide transparency to the lack of testing done prior to launch on the site?

It’s failure to do so instantly has tarnished it’s credibility. End-users had the expectation the site was complete and ready for use.  Now, it could be argued that the majority of people who had a “bad first-time experience” will ever consider using it again. Just a little attention to detail, with a minimal amount of development effort would have possibly placed them in a much better light across the blogger community, but more importantly with the general public.  Now, when I ask my friends about their thoughts on the Cuil it’s unanimous — “what a complete failed attempt to beat Google”.
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