Frank Ramblings

In Life After the 30-Second Spot, author Joseph Jaffe states clearly and repeatedly that the 30-second television ad is a dying element of years gone by. He seeks to offer methods that businesses can use to invigorate their brand names by using new media alternatives to traditional advertising. Jaffe lists 10 Tenets for Marketing to a New Consumer and he offers 10 approaches that he says are changing the face of advertising and marketing. His overall premise is that the 30-second TV spot is dead, and that advertisers need to face reality and make effective use of new media alternatives if they are to succeed in the high-tech future that is already beginning to assert itself. He makes some valid points, as well as a few that have already been disproven in the short time since the book was written. Nevertheless, his ideas are thought provoking and I found myself agreeing with much of what he had to say.

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A few months ago, I reviewed Windows 7 here. At the time, I was using the Beta version. Since then, I’ve upgraded to the full version that was officially released two weeks ago. I’m happy to say I’ve posted an updated review over at YuBlog.org, a great blog dedicated to user-submitted content. I hope to continue submitting articles there in the future. You can read the article here. Leave comments!

I’ve been meaning to revamp the site for some time now, and I’ve also been meaning to switch from Blogger to WordPress. WordPress is much more powerful and versatile and allows for much greater customization. It just makes my life easier. I think I’ve picked out a pretty cool theme, though I’m not entirely satisfied with some of the smaller things. I’ll be tweaking things over the next few days. I also want to give a shoutout to my friend Frank for hooking me up with hosting for the new site.

I really love WordPress. The user interface is clean and simple, but it’s very powerful. A whole host of Plugins and Widgets make almost anything possible on this platform. I’ve always loved being able to customize things to my personal tastes and preferences, and WordPress makes it possible to do just that. There are limitless possibilities. If you’re new to blogging and just want a simple place to collect your thoughts, WordPress.com provides a hosted solution. That means you don’t need to worry about where to keep your site; it exists on WordPress’s servers. You also don’t need to worry about keeping your version of WordPress up to date. They take care of that for you. However, it also means you have less control over themes and such. But again, it’s a great solution for less experienced users.

What I’m using now, though, is WordPress.org. There is a difference between the .com and .org versions. The .org version requires that you download the WordPress software and install it on a server of your own choosing. This means more work for you, but experienced users won’t have a problem with that. The benefits make it worth the legwork. You’ll find that the interface is more complex and capable of more. For one thing, you have complete control over the look of your site, down to every last line of HTML. Blogger allowed me to do this to a certain degree, but I’m now at the point where I’ve outgrown Blogger’s basic capabilities and I’m ready to tackle WordPress’s more mature way of doing things. So far I’m loving it. Really looking forward to playing around with this and learning how to un-tap its full potential.