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After 20 years of UX work, I finally got my stinkin’ badge.
The first time I held a copy of Designing Web Usability in my hands, it was 2000. I had launched spinme.com in 1997 as a daily newsletter with my best friend, and nobody had invented the word “blog” yet. At my day job, my radio colleagues had been tip-toeing into digital distribution through partnerships with…
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Mellow Yellow
When I worked at World Cafe, we spent an afternoon recording a session with Donovan. He’s one of the genuinely nicest guys I’ve ever met. I’d never have believed he’d become such an important part of my memories. At the end of the taping, he told me he wanted to share a special gift with…
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In memoriam: Joe Taylor Sr. 1945-2020
My dad loved cars, music, and his family. One of six siblings growing up in West Philadelphia (and, later, East Lansdowne), every story he told about his childhood always involved pranks, mischief, or general hijinx. He spent four years in the Navy, sailing the Mediterranean and fishing Apollo astronauts out of the Atlantic Ocean. After he returned to the…
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Silence is violence.
Mine isn’t the voice anyone needs to hear right now about the systemic racism that keeps tearing our nation apart. Yet, as I often tell my clients, silence is acceptance. Today, we now have to realize, silence is violence. Today is a moment for leaders—of all races, of all sexual orientations, of all economic backgrounds—to…
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Essential Small Business Management Tools
Update (5/4/2022): Since I first wrote this post and granted this podcast interview, some major changes happened at Basecamp that caused me to change my mind. Tara and Shannon from the excellent What Works podcast (and from the What Works Network, of which I’ve been a member for years) rounded up a crew of folks…
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The Syllabus 2020: The Brand You 50
Tom Peters made bold predictions about the future of work in 1999. Here’s why I still recommend this powerful (but tiny) book on building a personal brand.
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Personal Branding’s a bunch of bulls#!t! (But we’re going to need it, anyway.)
Smart professionals recoil at the phrase, but personal branding’s going to play an important part of your career in the next decade.
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How I’m using Facebook these days
Earlier in the year, I wrote about getting louder and how I hadn’t really been active on Facebook very much in the past few years. Even though I was one of the platform’s earliest adopters, I’m no longer a fan of a system that routinely invites so much personal abuse and harassment into the lives of its users. And…
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Introducing Podcast Taxi
It was just a matter of time. For years, I’ve been recommending podcasts, audiobooks, and other personal audio recordings as a pillar of a successful content marketing strategy. In a media environment that’s become so crowded and noisy, podcasts still offer the potential to build strong relationships with audiences without interference from bots or clickbait.…
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Beautiful evening. You can almost see the stars!
Jay Frank gave a toast when Lori Taylor and I got married that might have been as long as the actual ceremony. And though I teased him about it in the years since, I never doubted his sincerity. That really was the driving force behind our friendship over the past three decades. Because as many…
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An Hourglass and a Flower Pot
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 such a small amount of time that I barely remember his name. Yet, wearing a leather bomber jacket and…
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Marketing on the post-organic web
The “level playing field” we enjoyed online from the early 2000s now looks a lot more like broadcast media from the late 1980s. Let’s talk about what it’s going to take for your business to thrive. If you’ve been coasting on waves of “free” traffic from organic search and social media, get ready to climb…