I recently attended the SXSWi festival, aka spring break for geeks, in Austin, TX. After the event, I was reminded of something that I read over on Mitch Joel’s blog a couple of weeks ago. It was something about how we should change our perception of our websites. Mitch argues that we should no longer look at our websites as simple places to
shill our products and services with mumbo jumbo and corporate rhetoric.
He’s right.
Your website is really an information publishing portal, and seeing it as anything other than that, is …

An article published on Newsweek says that the low productivity of Latin American countries is to blame for the region’s low per capita income and lack of development. The Inter-American Development bank (IDB) appears to have sponsored the study.

Photo Credit: thejourney1972 (away until april)
That article, is a complete load of manure. Let me tell you why.
The study period is from 1960 to sometime in the past, but we’re not told the exact end of the study period. Apparently, it’s not important for us know.
Also:

It makes reference to a “typical” …

This is a few days late, but the advice in this email is still valid. In light of my recent stint at South by Southwest Interactive, I felt like this was an appropriate after thought to that entire event.

Photo Credit: Nyghtowl
This message is from Mike Young. He’s a lawyer that specializes in internet business law and from time to time he sends out messages to his list that are at times inspiring and at other times a forewarning. Anyway, he sent this out on St. Patrick’s day and …

In this video, I catch up with Patrick O’Keefe, aka @ifroggy on Twitter. We talk about the presentation that he gave and he goes over one of the most important things for you to avoid becoming an online ______________.

Patrick doesn’t mention it, but some of the communities that he manages are quite large, he knows what he’s talking about.
He gives us some nuggets about how to not look like a __________ whenever we’re in or on community based sites. Go to iFroggy.com for more info on managing online communities.

As I was finishing up another interview, I was introduced to Brandon Eley. I took a few minutes to get to know Brandon a little bit better and we ended up talking about what brought him to SXSWi and about his book The Online Marketing Inside Out (Online Marketing: Sitepoint).

Finally got the video small enough that we could get it up on the video server for y’all to watch. I had to compress it to such a point that it’s a bit grainy, but ironically, this audio is a little better than the audio recording that I posted earlier this week.
This video is from the 2010 South by Southwest Interactive panel discussion “Austin: Latino Internet Capital of the World.” Featured in the video are Cindy Casares, and Fidel Martinez from Guanabee.com and other local speakers. Watch the video, …

This video is from Darren Rowse’s presentation about his upcoming new book. The sites that Darren runs/ administers include Problogger, Digital Photography School and others.
I always knew Darren from Problogger, and was surprised to see that DPS is a larger blog by comparison.
Nuggets from the video:

Content – a blog needs content to get readers.
Provide useful content to your audience to keep them coming back
Have a clear idea of who your audience is
It’s OK to be embarrassed by writing content for beginners
Go back to the beginning and write content that solves …

Saturday afternoon session at SXSWi entitled “Austin Latino Internet Capital of the World.” It featured several local speakers as well as Cindy Casares and Fidel Martinez from Guanabee.com.
This is the audio from the session.
There is video from the session, but the video is proving to be a bear of an editing/ posting job. The hangup is in trying to get the video file size to be smaller than 500 MB for uploading etc. The video will be posted sometime soon!