With this weblog I hope to exchange ideas and observations. I’ll try to keep topics relative to design, web and media (I’ll keep the free verse poetry for another blog).
It is also an opportunity for me to network and get connected with interesting people like yourself. So, read, react and contribute.
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September 18th marked my one year anniversary with Sermo. It’s been an incredible experience. I’ve committed all my energies toward Sermo and thus my blog is woefully out-of-date. If fact, my whole website is out of date.
Check out www.sermo.com to see what I’ve been up to. Or, drop me a line and we’ll chat.
- posted 1080 days ago
Social Networking sites are sprouting up for every type of demographic and interest. Why should doctors be left out?
Sermo.com is a peer to peer networking site that is for physicians only. “For Physicians by Physicians” is the tagline. Here MDs can make observations and post questions. The idea is to help doctors get their questions answered, discuss relevent issues, and ultimately help their patients.
The Sermo business-model is based on “information arbitrage”. This is when information from the medical insights of doctors becomes a commodity that a third-party would find valueable. These “clients” could gain millions from potential research information or patient safey concerns.
I’ve been very busy launching this company off the ground and creatively directing their marketing site and brand image.
Comment - posted 1431 days ago
I did some minimal research into the world of blog apps. Some seemed overly simple while others complex. Of course I had to choose the complex.
My reasoning was that the more complex, and open, the program, the more I could customize it to my liking. I didn’t want to be locked into a rigid template structure.
I chose Textpattern. I didn’t expect to encounter such a long ramp-up time to install, and learn it. My initial review of Textpattern is that, although very open and customizable, it’s interface and instructions deserve more attention.
Textpattern is free. It is a joint effort of programmers and bloggers to build a robust blogging app. There are tons of plug-ins and code snippets available as well as templates to choose from.
But even with my knowledge of HTML and CSS, I had some difficulty figuring out the backend. It’s not a plug-and-play program. Seemingly simple things like uploading pictures is very complicated. The manual is a Wiki manual. It’s comprehensive but a little unorganized. I had to hunt and peck to find what I was looking for.
In general, I’m pretty happy with it. I have nothing to compare it to so I’m going to stick with it. I think it will easily evolve into a pretty cool blog.
Comment - posted 1460 days ago
A biophysicist by training, this 65-year-old race car driver and retired advertising mogul will never have a shortage of stories to tell at cocktail parties. He’s sailed around the world during his career as a racing sailor, won the legendary 12 Hours of Sebring, and collects 17th-century Dutch paintings.
As founder and former chief executive of Mullen Advertising, Jim Mullen is an accomplished entrepreneur. Despite his adventurous hobbies, he has admitted that starting an ad agency was the most dangerous thing he’s ever done.
Mullen was not an ad-man by training. When he started Mullen Advertising in the 1970’s he had never set foot in another ad agency. He soon outgrew the offices and moved his small agency to the North Shore of Boston, deserting the usual artsy, metropolitan agency surroundings for a mansion that sits on a sprawling 50 acre property.
Jim Mullen sold the agency to the Interpublic Group (Deutche, R/GA, Jack Morton etc.) in 1999, but still leases the mansion to the agency. He keeps his collection of exotic cars, and their full-time mechanics, in the mansion’s carriage house.
Today Mullen Advertising remains a leading creative services agency with over 410 employees. Jim Mullen’s influence and thinking can still be felt in the frenetic hallways of the mansion.
Comment - posted 1467 days ago
The Amazon Shorts promotion has launched on Gather.com. Amazon Shorts (no, they are not a fashion item), are short literary works by well-known authors that are available for download for $0.49. Gather teamed up with Amazon to run a promotion that would allow unknown authors to have a chance to get published on Amazon. The members of Gather.com vote on the stories and the top three get sold on Amazon. It’s a cool idea.
I worked on the graphic design and development of the Amazon Shorts promotion. Check out my handiwork here.
Amazon is a huge company. Working on this project gave me an insight into the number of retail areas that Amazon has reached. It is a strong brand. It seems that offering so many goods and services on a global scale has the potential to dilute the brand. You can buy a Stephen King novel and a BBQ grille in one transaction. Like Virgin and GE, the brand gets stronger as it gets bigger and more diverse
Amazon’s lineage comes from bookselling. Founded as Cadabra.com by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and launched in 1995, Amazon was the first exclusively online book retailer. There was a question to whether anyone would buy a book without first picking it up and flipping the pages. This was quickly proved wrong as Amazon became a successful business and a darling of the internet bubble of the late nineties.
Now, in the tradition of partnering with companies and expanding their products and services, the behemoth Amazon is working with the startup Gather.com to venture into yet another marketing arena.
Comment - posted 1495 days ago
Summer. A time for growth and expansion. Plants grow and produce flowers, fruit and vegetables. Bees are busy with cross-pollination. Even our hair grows more in the summer (or so I’m told). And companies seem to be going hog-wild with site re-designs.
Two dynamic companies, Gather.com and Smartbargains, are in the midst of complete site re-designs. I just finished up a stint with Gather.com and am in the middle of a Smartbargains
re-design.
Gather.com is a social-networking site. Think Myspace for the 30-55 crowd. When I logged onto the site to get an idea of what the company was all about I was hit over the head with so much information that I had no idea what the company, or the site, did. Tommy Churchill, the Creative Director, did a great job of cramming a huge amount of information onto the pages while still attempting to keep a clean look. I took his lead and designed template pages for the marketing page and promotion pages. Look for the Amazon Shorts promotion as well as the new marketing splash page to launch in July.
Comment - posted 1531 days ago
The barber finally got a haircut; I launched my new portfolio site. The hardest thing for a designer to do is design for himself. I tried to keep the site simple, casual and utilitarian. My goal was to make an easily updateable and “dynamic” site.
Comment - posted 1569 days ago