blunt advice from rosenfeld

Lou Rosenfeld gave some advice to the content strategists out there on a couple of points.  First, he wanted to remind them that engaged participants, not membership, was key:

Engage, folks, engage. Again and again and again. Associations are not so good at doing that. They see their targets as recruiting and retaining “members”. You don’t want members. Members bitch about not getting enough value for their $40/year fee. No, you want participants.

Second, don’t dawdle, don’t over-think – sometimes just do:

Victor Lombardi once gave me a sage piece of advice: “Just launch the fucker”. You should do the same; get it to market and keep your momentum going.

Worried about the long-term consequences of such decisions? Five points of extra credit. But the costs of migration, steep and painful as they will be, will be far cheaper than dithering and ultimately doing nothing today.

I bet you can see the parallels with librarianship without me spelling them out to you.

I’ve heard that ALA used to be this behemoth of an organization locked down behind closed doors where the hardy or select few found a seat at the round table.  I have hope that my generation of new librarians won’t experience this with the evolving open community that is ALA Connect; we’ll be participants, not members.

Victor Lombardi’s advice was sage, if a bit crude.  Sometimes you really just have to launch that product/service/initiative and let it grow organically.  Trim it if you must (and you will), but at least give it a chance.  Too many times great ideas get stuck in committee or overshadowed by the doubters.  And, yes, the big stuff does need some real organization and forethought, but how many times do the little projects get labeled as “big stuff?” – a lot.

Just launch it.

some portfolio design inspiration



Areft Jdey, originally uploaded by the.corkboard.

I’ve had a portfolio site for awhile now. But it fails in many ways to me.

I always find this guy’s work to be simplistic, clear, and purposeful.

thanks SWFLN!

I had a wonderful time this past Thursday presenting to a group of public and academic librarians of the Southwest Florida Library Network.  We talked about the need for librarians to be a part of the web design conversation, the importance of Information Architecture, and we dabbled in some markup with XTHML and an introduction to CSS.

Also, thanks to Florida Gulf Coast University for hosting us.  Their library building was quite impressive!

You can download the Creative-Commons licensed 162 slide presentation below in PDF format.  Allow ample time to download…

Download my C.V.

SWFLN Presentation

Time’s twitter article

Click to read me!

Click to read me!

I don’t subscribe to Time magazine.  In fact, the only time I read Time is on the occasion that I’m at someone’s house.  So was I  pleasantly surprised when my fiance’ brought home a copy of June 15th’s Time magazine? Quite.

  1. It proved that said fiance’ does listen to my tech ramblings.
  2. It concisely explained how this simple messaging system goes from perceived mundane adolescent writing to enlightened communication – something always missed on first tweet.

IE optimization needed

IE6 demolishes thecorkboard

After getting Parallels up and running on my Mac and seeing that my site is just blown away in IE6, I realized how bad this site needs some IE optimization.  Unfortunately, I’m really out of time at the moment for such an endeavor, but you can expect it soon.

Question: who actually uses IE, much less IE6 anymore?