It’s the fall of 1987. There’s a new kid on the school bus. An Army brat, if I remember, or maybe the son of a frequently-transferred corporate executive. He was at our Catholic high school for …

Philadelphia User Experience Consultant, Author, and Media Producer
I've been keeping an online journal of some kind since the late 1990s. We started calling them blogs at some point, but now even that term's a little quaint. Here's a collection of my favorite posts and essays, along with new work that shows you where my head's at lately.
It’s the fall of 1987. There’s a new kid on the school bus. An Army brat, if I remember, or maybe the son of a frequently-transferred corporate executive. He was at our Catholic high school for …
You've got "reach." You've got "engagement." You've even got "amplification." But all the online media jargon in the world won't help you if your content marketing campaigns don't convert to actual …
Continue Reading about Measuring your messaging’s real ROI →
Every year has been 2820 Press' best year ever on just about every metric. However, the end of 2017 nearly broke me. Here's what we did about it. Christopher Wink warned me this would …
Continue Reading about We broke the 10K hours threshold without breaking me. →
On their Rework podcast, the Basecamp team expressed their desire to become a Facebook-Free Company. (DHH wrote an article about this on their Medium publication, as well.) They don’t depend on …
It's been a year of reinvention for me. 2820 Press has been rolling along for six years now, and it's been a long time since I've had bandwidth to devote to personal projects. Maybe that's why …
Continue Reading about Revisiting my favorite World Cafe sessions →
As we’ve been recruiting guests for season two of “The Build” I’ve found myself steering toward founders who share my bias for shipping physical products or creating real-world experiences. As much as …
If there’s already “too much content,” why even bother to write anything new? It turns out, the average lifespan of a blog post or a news article is just about three days. Older than that, and your …
Continue Reading about Who cares about your stories when there’s already too much content? →
Most of the founders I talk with on my podcast, The Build, didn't start their companies with huge investors behind them. Sometimes, they had a stockpile of cash from a previous "exit," or from a nest …
A client’s investor called me to check in on the status of a communications campaign. Having made it through both “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0,” he shared a perspective I hear often from media and …
Kickstarter looks and acts just like some of the 2.0 designs for public radio pledge interfaces I built for XPN back in 2001. Except, we had plenty of research to show us that you got way higher …
I declared victory over the need to get a cable box in the new apartment in this post from a few months back. You might be among the dozens of folks who've been asking me about what happened since …
Attending Barcamp Philly inspired me to solidify a lot of these ideas. There's a JFDI attitude in this town that I find myself connecting with more and more. Now that I'm settled in from our move to …
Continue Reading about I’m starting my New Year’s Resolutions a few weeks early. →