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.