Things have been slow on my blog lately and that is due to a variety of things. Over the last week I have been part of a big project at work that has required vast amounts of my time over the last week. In addition to that I have a several other things going on in my life.
Hopefully I can get refocused on my blog this week and be able to write some quality content for it as I have been having some good ideas lately. In addition to that I have some other web projects in the works that I hope to launch within the next month so I am excited about that. I also plan on making some more design modifications to my blog, because Cutline is so easy to modify and I usually seemed to get bored with my designs easily but we will see.
Last Tuesday I had the opportunity to go to the Jack’s Mannequin West Coast Winter Tour when it made its stop here in Kansas City. For those of you who don’t know lead singer of Jack’s Mannequin is actually Andrew MacMahon from Something Corporate. Also on the bill for the show were Head Automatica and The Audition here at The Beaumont Club in KC on a snowy cold night.
I was extremely excited to see the show since I bought my tickets a few months back. I have been a big fan of Jack’s Mannequin since I bought their first album Everything in Transit back in 2005. Well it was no suprise to me that they sounded great live and a great majority of their songs are piano driven and it definitely added another element to the live experience. They pretty much played everything off the Everything in Transit album with a couple Something Corporate songs as well. Overall their show was outstanding and in my opinionsome of the highlights for me were songs like Dark Blue, Into the Airwaves, The Mixed Tape and Holiday From Real. I have to say my favorite part of the show was torwards the end when they actually did a cover of Message in a Bottle by The Police. It was very unexpected but it sounded great and was definitely the highlight of the show for me.
I definitely look forward to when they come to Kansas City again and I can’t wait for their next album to come out. If they are going to be in your area, I highly recommend seeing them and be sure to go buy their debut cd Everything in Transit as I can assure that you won’t be disappointed.
In my never ending quest to someday earn my degree, I am taking a marketing class this semester. After I read the first few chapters I skimmed through the rest of the book and I was somewhat disappointed to find a lack of focus specifically directed towards online marketing concepts. If it were an older book I could understand not seeing anything focused on online marketing but the actual copyright date on the book is 2006.
Last week Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz had a great post describing what will happen to competition on the web over the next 10 years as the web becomes more and more populated. It is clear that over this time online marketing is going to see a huge rise in popularity and there will be a dramatic rise in the amount of competition among businesses online. Since these changes are inevitable, I see traditional marketing concepts will need to be complemented with a strong foundation of online marketing concepts in order for businesses to ultimately be successful online.
With that being said I would hope to see more marketing classes and books have some focus related to online marketing concepts since they will be such such a critical factor for the success of online business in the years to come. Has anyone out there had any experience with college level courses that are focused directly on online marketing?
I just finished watching the Grammys and I must say that I’m extremely happy for the Dixie Chicks as they won 5 grammys tonight including album of the year. I’m not much of a country music fan myself, but then again I don’t really consider them to be typical country music anyway. They were definitely well deserving of these award as they put out an amazing album that did great even when country radio turned against them, because lead singer Natalie Maines chose to use her constitutional right and speak her mind on something she believed in.
I have to applaud these three women for coming back like they did after everything they went through the past three years. Honestly, I just think it is absolutely ridiculous that they received the backlash they did over these comments. They received threats on their life and I can only imagine what their families had to go through as a result of this. This was all because someone spoke their mind and unfortunately since they are in a traditionally patriotic industry like country music it caused even more of a disturbance. My biggest issue with this is that it shouldn’t matter if they are country music stars, if they want to speak their mind then that is their right just like everyone else in this country. If you don’t like it then that is fine, don’t listen to them or their music, but the some of the stuff they have had to deal with over the past 3 years is just plain ignorance.
Here is a thought for all of you that don’t support the Dixie Chicks or think what was said was unpatriotic. Thats fine if you want to boycott them, but the bottom line is a very large percentage of other entertainers in hollywood and in the music industry have been very outspoken about this same issue as well. So I guess if you want to keep things equal across the board then you should stop watching their movies and listening to their music as well. I myself think it is great that their industry can pretty much turn its back on them and they can still have the wide range of success they had this year. It says alot about their talents and not alot of artists out their would have been able to overcome this like they have. Even some of their fellow country music artists (one in particular), have had some harsh things to say about them since this incident. Well the only I can say about that is the Dixie Chicks now own 13 grammys, so I would say that some people including myself seem to like what they have to say. I applaud them for their courage over the last three years and for their grammys they received for the great music they have made.
If you don’t watch The Office on thursday nights on NBC then you should. This is by far the funniest show on television right now and it just keeps getting better. The writers do an awesome job coming up with great material and the entire cast fits perfectly with that material. Check out the clip below from one of the episodes and be sure to check out The Office thursday nights on NBC.
Ok so it go up to 64 degrees here in Kansas City today and then a cold front hit and now its 26 degrees outside! Nothing like a 38 degree swing in temperature in like 5 hours. Oh well I guess it could be worse, I could live further north where it has been alot colder than it has been here in KC.
Anyway, I finished updating my blog to Cutline Version 1.1 and so far everything seems to be working great after a few minor problems. I do have to mention that Chris Pearson added a great new feature to Cutline. He added a custom stylesheet option for users like myself that do a lot of css changes to the original, so everytime an update is released you don’t have to worry about going through your CSS to update it. This is an awesome feature and it will save me alot of time with some of the other modifications I plan to do in the future.
On a closing note if you don’t read Shoemoney’s Blog go check it out. He had a hilarious post today featuring video all of the Geico caveman commercials. I have watched them several times today and personal favorite is the CNN interview, so go check them out
Well I’ve come to the conclusion that winter sucks. It has been pretty cold here in the Kansas City area for the last few weeks and I’m just sick of it. I like warm weather and I really am ready to see spring come. You would think after living in Kansas for 26 years I would have gotten used to it by now, but it still sucks as much as it always has.
Since its cold though it does give me an opportunity stay inside and work on my blog. My site might look a little strange today because I will be working on upgrading my blog theme. Chris Pearson released Cutline version 1.1so I am going to upgrade today and it might take me a little while to get all my CSS looking right. If you get a chance take a look at Cutline, it is a great theme to modify and give your own look to.
I probably will watch a little bit of the Super Bowl tonight, but it is really not that big of a deal to me. As long as the Bears don’t win is all I really care about. I am a Cincinnati Bengals fan so the game tonight really doesn’t matter much to me.
