The British are Coming! And they're buying!

AQUAPAC "OUTDOOR CHAMPION" HAPPY HOUR

WHERE: Aquapac, Booth #39139

WHEN: Thursday, July 23, 4-6 p.m.

Welcome the London-based Aquapac team as they host their first-ever US cocktail hour at Outdoor Retailer this Thursday ... and show them your distinct thanks for the cold beverages as you try your luck at winning one of five framed prints from Aquapac 2009 Outdoor Champion, Daniel Fox.

As a bonus perk, Aquapac will be giving away the grand prize of a 6-day sea kayaking trip in Baja's Sea of Cortez (airfare/beer not included) hosted by AMG.

To win ... Register early at the Aquapac booth, #39139. Must be present to win!

(Below are some of Daniel Fox's images to be displayed at the Aquapac booth...)

M27: The Dumbbell Nebula

First discovered by Charles Messier in 1764, this pic of the Dumbbell was taken by my Uncle Brent last week.

The central star is a White Dwarf -- aka, a dying star -- and is the largest White Dwarf ever found.

LINK: M27 Wikipedia

Every step you take ... could win you a Specialized mountain bike at ORSM

Finally, those poor tradeshow-appointment-making skills can finally pay off.

If you've got an ORSM calendar full of those dreaded climbing-wall-to-shoeville half-mile laps, it's time to join the Ahnu Footwear Make it Count Challenge, If your calendar is long enough, you might just be able to head home from Outdoor Retailer with a new Specialized mountain bike.

To enter, get to Ahnu Footwear (29167w) as fast as humanly possible once the OR show starts on Tuesday morning. A two-minute registration process will get you a Plus 3 account -- which automatically records and logs your miles -- as well as a nifty little GPS system or pedometer. Each day, after you've endured a thousand laps around the Salt Palace, you just log your miles into your account and Ahnu will do the rest.

For every person that enters the Make it Count Challenge, Ahnu Footwear will donate $5 to The Conservation Alliance. The daily leaders will also have a donation made in their name ... $500 for the day one and day two leaders, and $1000 for the final day's big kahuna. And if you're spotted wearing an official Ahnu/Plus 3 race bib during the course of the show, you could also win one of 100 prizes from Ahnu, Aquapac, Teko and GoMotion.

The winner will be toasted over a cold beer on Thursday at 3 pm at the Ahnu Footwear Booth. To stay in touch with the whole thing, Twitter is the way to go. Follow www.twitter.com/MakeItCount2009 to stay up to date on prizes and leaders.

If that's too techy for you, send me an email. Or better yet, fax me.

What happens in mosquito netting, stays in mosquito netting.

A very special tribute from Toolik Field Station in the North Slope of Alaska. I love this ... especially, the eagle-sized mosquitoes buzzing around these cats.

Thanks to Kyle Dickman at Outside Blog. LINK

Fouth of July: Warren, Vermont

Enter the Valkyrie: Maine's first homegrown, one-at-a-time, all-carbon, tri-bike

My buddy Jim has a new hobby ...

"The Olympia model,a full carbon women's specific race road bike,was delivered on Saturday, June 20th. The client picked it up in Freeport and with no time to spare rode it on her searing hill interval session with her training partners. There was much praise and we are happy to hear it. That's history for the company. We are looking forward to working with more athletes to help them explore their speed. Look for Teresa and her Valkyrie Olympia as she takes on the women's open field on July 19th at 29th running of the Yarmouth Clam Festival Bicycle Race. Go Teresa!"

LINK: Valkyrie Cycles

Be careful what you wish for

...."If you don't support our newspapers, we'll start doing all of our news coverage from the piano bar..."

Featuring none other than former Jackson Hole newspaperman Casey Seiler.

The benevolent distraction

The nausea that accompanies chemotherapy is difficult to describe to those who haven’t had the pleasure.

Most often, I describe it as being not too far from a serious hangover, all the time. The low energy, the turbulent stomach, the nasty flavor in the mouth, the lingering fog that never clears: that’s the legacy of a FOLFOX regimen.

But unlike a hangover (which only worsens when confronted by a quick shake of the head), the chemo haze is quite constant. You can’t make it go away, but you can’t make it get worse either.

The trick is to find something to do, something other than lying in bed, feeling shitty and watching Seinfeld DVDs to cheer yourself up.

For me, I craved something that involved as much physical activity as I could handle (which wasn’t much), something that a dealt out a good dose of mental distraction, and something that ate up huge chunks of time.

Something like golf.

In the previous few decades of my life, I’d spent a decent amount of time on the golf course, but mainly for the drinking and gambling. I liked the game enough, but I was really just a follower along for the ride.

It’s a ridiculous game, as every golfer will admit. But for me, in that season when swinging an aluminum shaft a few dozen times in an afternoon became as much as I could physically and mentally handle, golf became my saving grace.

Most of the time I would walk, though on the days close to a chemo dose I would take a cart. The dizziness and exhaustion I’d feel from walking a few dozen feet was a drag, but the company of other people was wonderful. And the pace of the game was addicting.

The excitement and anxiousness I’d feel pulling into the parking lot were the same emotions I remembered from big powder days. The first holes would be filled with promise, the middle holes a blissful blur of sameness, and on the 18th fairway I would always feel a touch of sadness for the round that was about to come to an end.

The chemo … of course … went away. But my love for the benevolent distraction of golf only grew.

In the seasons since then, as the oncology appointments have slowly dropped, so has my score. And today, just a few months away from what will hopefully be my last invasive reconnaissance mission for a very long time, my golf game is about to reach its peak.

In a few hours, I’ll be boarding a plane for Scotland with three friends, heading to St. Andrews – the birthplace of golf – to celebrate one of their birthdays. We will play some of the most heralded courses in the world, including the heralded Castle Course and Old Course of St. Andrews, and the epic links of Carnoustie.

That this once-in-a-lifetime trip is actually happening seems like a bit of a miracle to me.

But then again, each time I hit the ball well seems like a bit of a miracle, too.

Is that a Buff in your pocket, or are you just happy to be adventure racing?

To be honest, I'm not sure where Stephen Regenold came from, though I've heard it's a place called Minnesota.

As a nationally syndicated columnist in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Spokane Spokesman-Review, Redding Record, Casper Star-Tribune, Billings Gazette and Twin Falls Times-News ... nobody rocks the red states like Stephen.

But as much as Stephen loves the adulation of the Casper, Wyo., crowd (who wouldn't?), he hasn't rested on those dusty laurels. Instead, he has parlayed his newspaper savvy into an ongoing series of cool pieces for the New York Times (like this one about natural water parks in Vermont), a spotlight slot on Outside Online, and a recently redesigned www.GearJunkie.com.

Didn't you used to work in a climbing gym? If not, I seem to remember talking to you when you were IN a climbing gym ... and you were telling me that you were thinking of getting into the outdoor gear space as a journalist. What was your original plan then?

I was the editor of a climbing magazine called Vertical Jones. Might be what you're thinking. Although I used to hang in climbing gyms a lot (though was more of a "trad" climber outdoors.) I started Vertical Jones while in journalism school in the late '90s at the University of Minnesota. It was a quarterly 'zine, and it lasted for about four years. Not successful in a financial way. But it launched my career into the world of outdoors writing and travel journalism.

How many people get a paycheck of some sort from the Gear Junkie world at this point?

I have three business partners with GearJunkie.com, a tech/design guy (John Peacock), a marketing guy (Pat Petschel), and a publisher, who sells ads and sponsorships (Mike Santi). Through our company, Monopoint Media (http://monopointmedia.com), we partner with web sites like TrailSpace.com, SuperTopo.com, Gear.com, GetOutdoors, Wend, and
WildSnow.com. We sell -- Mike and Pat sell, that is -- network ad buys. So people from some of those web sites get paychecks that come through us as well.

If you hadn't called it Gear Junkie ... what would you have called it?

I used to have the list of names I brainstormed for the newspaper column -- this all started as a newspaper column -- and I think a few of the other thoughts were Gear Fix, Gear Guru, Gear Jones. . . a few other bad ideas, too. But I think it was always something to do with gear in the name. Gear Junkie just seemed to work best.

Your blend of newspaper syndication and online media is pretty unique. It's almost the direct opposite of those who start in the very visible outdoor magazine world, and THEN try to get online and into the papers. Was this something that grew organically? Or was it part of the plan?

Organically, I guess. I have always preferred writing for newspapers versus magazines. I can retain the rights to my material easier in the newspaper realm. It was the key ingredient that allowed me to launch GearJunkie.com in 2006 with hundreds of pages of content -- I had all these "old" newspaper columns sitting on my hard drive, and I owned the rights to everything. With magazine writing, most freelancers sell all rights and get paid only once for their words. A syndication model, what I do, allows me to sell my content to several places around the country. And then I can post it to GearJunkie.com as well.

Remember those Evil Kneivel ski gloves you wore at Alta? Where did those come from?

Those things rock. They are the Kombi Captain Freedoms from 2007. I get many questions about those gloves.

Is your newspaper syndication work growing at the same rate as your online presence?

Online is the future of Gear Junkie. I still have about eight syndicate newspapers and a few magazines that run the column. But my reach is growing almost as big online. And last year I made about 50% of my income from Gear Junkie from online ventures.

Last year, you did a sweepstakes where readers could "win a trip with the Gear Junkie" ... do you think you'll ever do that again?

It was a big success. Here's a wrap-up of the trip: LINK. The winner, Matt Eder of Portland, was an awesome candidate to win this trip, as he was a resort skier dabbling in backcountry travel. The trip -- to mountaineer in Sequoia National Park -- was the perfect introduction for Eder.

What's next for the Gear Junkie empire?

We just got back from the Teva Mountain Games. Did a big push there making an event out of my experience racing in the Ultimate Mountain Challenge. (Here's the area of the site on that). Next up, we're putting our noses
down for a couple months of traffic building initiatives. And, as always, we'll be at the Outdoor Retailer trade show in July.

Do you get much teasing for listing the Original Buff as the top gear innovation of the last 10 years? If not, can I tease you now?

It was five years, not 10. But, dang, I tell you, no other product has served me so often and so well. Make fun all you want. I love the Buff. (No, they do not pay me a retainer fee!) And the company just made me a happy man: They designed a custom Gear Junkie Buff for the Teva Mountain Games.

I just read about how the media and PR is dead and I can’t stop hyperventilating

Relax.

I also feel like the oxygen is being sucked out of the room when somebody starts spraying about the death of media and PR. But then I remember that the media delivered the story that made me hyperventilate, and that the sprayer-in-question was using the media as PR conduit for their message.

Ahhh. Breathe.

Sure, media is changing … but it’s far from dead. Public relations is changing too, but it’s been doing that since my first job out of college where I’d spend 6 hours a night faxing basketball results around the country.

The first pose of my mental yoga on this matter is keeping in mind that we are living through an era that could truly be called the “bubble bubble.” One more rapid deflation of a seemingly impervious and skyscraping market shouldn’t really surprise us at this point ... but it does. After the dot-com bubble crashed, we didn’t stop using computers. And after the housing bubble imploded, it’s not like we scrapped windows, doors and wood.

I suppose it’s more than a little ironic that the media (which has definitely profited from covering bubbles) is enduring a bubble of their own. But the bursting of any bubble, even that of media, should be recognized as a valuable opportunity for change. The fact that PR is undergoing some changes at the same time shouldn’t be seen as a Swine Flu-level disturbance in the Force … it’s just business.

If you're still hyperventilating, try thinking through these cocktail party conversation starters:

* The best that social media has to offer comes in links to published works. Published works are supported by advertising. Advertising-supported works are considered media. Ispo facto, media is not dead.

* We crave the voices of leaders.From Walter Cronkite and Hunter S. Thompson to the more recognizable voices of the outdoor world, citizen-consumers love to hear what people with a point of view have to say. At the moment, those leaders are refining their voices within the new rules of media engagement. Take the hyper out of your diaper and give them some time. They’ll be back.

* We are all capitalists at heart. As much as you think you’re a groovy, nerd-geek chic hipster with three Twitter feeds and a couple fixies in your garage, and the end of the day you are going to look at yourself in your deliberately skewed mirror and admit that figuring out a way to make money is in your DNA. That's what your parents did, that’s what Americans do and that's what makes us different. And it's what most pros are doing with their conversations on Twitter and Facebook right now. Trust me, when somebody finds that leprechaun at the end of the rainbow, the secret won't last long and the resulting emergence of structure in the previously unstructured social media landscape will be faster than a house falling on the Wicked Witch. Media will be back. Hard and fast. Of course, if the money doesn't get found in this big Twitter-treasure hunt, you can bet that things are going to dry up fairly quickly over in social media land.

* The current leaders of social media only talk about how much they know about social media. Ironically, the most money to be made in social media appears to be from being an expert in social media. Did I mention that we’re living in a bubble bubble?

* Public relations professionals who think it’s only about media relations should never have gotten into PR in the first place. I spoke with a prospective client the other day who was simply speechless to hear that paper press kits were a no go. The fact that her current PR firm is – yes, in 2009 – spending hundreds of billable hours per year designing, printing, stuffing and mailing paper press kits is all the proof you need that old school public relations firms are off the back. The efforts of their PR pied pipers to replace the old PR management structure with a bright-shiny-new management structure is nothing more than a shell game. Same shit, different piles.

Breathe ...

Coming soon to a life near you: a backpacking adventure for two in Wales

Spring means mud. Spring means long-delayed ACL surgeries. Spring means finding out how much your biking legs lost over the winter. And if you work in public relations in the outdoor industry, Spring means the announcement of Backpacker magazine's Editor's Choice Awards.

As far as PR goes, award season is easily the best of times and the worst of times. Here's why: if you're lucky enough to find yourself on the winning side, the 'best of times' includes approximately 42 seconds of blissful post-award enjoyment and laurel-resting. But the 'worst of times' involves the same $64 question from every client who ever won a piece of the rock: "how can we maximize the reach of this award?"

There is a long-recognized standard approach to award PR, both inside and outside of the outdoor industry: you issue a press release. It's great for client relations, but that's about it. Alerting other media to the fact that one of their competitors likes a certain product is sort of like calling all your old girlfriends to tell them that you're getting married.

So ... in late winter, when we learned Sierra Deigns was to be a 2009 Editor's Choice winner ... the heat was on.

Fortunately, Backpacker gave us some great material to work with. They spent months in search of a location that would provide the most spectacular backdrop possible for gear testing. They wanted rocks and cliffs and coastlines that would translate into spectacular photography. And they found a perfect partner in Wales.

Not only was the landscape ideal, but the weather gods of Wales whipped up a good old fashioned hurricane-style smackdown the night of Backpacker's tent testing. While other tents imploded and tore and spun off, Sierra Designs Lighting XT tent remained standing ... and dry. Not only was it stable in the foul weather, it was roomy enough to house the entire Backpacker testing team (including the missed-his-calling-in-the-NBA editor Jon Dorn) who comfortably spent the entire night in the tent, riding out the storm (LINK).

When they told me about the coming award, I could tell by the way the editors were smiling that the weather was truly shitty that night. I could also tell that they were completely relieved to have had at least one tent that held up well enough to keep the crew comfy and dry.

Great tent. Great venue. Great story. "You had to be there," they said.

So, we took them at their word, and the idea for a celebratory sweepstakes that literally retraced the steps of the Backpacker Editor's Choice testing team was born.

Created with the invaluable assistance of our new friends in Wales, the Wales Adventure Sweepstakes is the trip of a lifetime for any two backpackers. The fantastic prize package includes all the gear you need: a Sierra Designs Lighting XT 4 Tent; two Sierra Designs Verde 20 sleeping bags, and two sets of Sierra Designs Cyclone Eco Jacket & Pants.

Sweepstakes grand prize winners will also win:

* Airfare for two on Virgin Atlantic Airways.
* Two nights lodging in a luxury yurt at the Graig Wen resort.
* Two 1st Class BritRail FlexiPass for transportation around Wales and to Snowdonia National Park (one of the Seven Wonders of Wales).
* Two nights at Escape, a five-star boutique bed and breakfast, prior to flying home.

Entries will be accepted at www.sierradesigns.com/wales through the end of September. Enter now or forever quit whining about how you never get to go anywhere.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE WALES ADVENTURE SWEEPSTAKES.

The great Outdoor Retailer bailout?

Congress, most likely at the behest of the newspaper industry, is debating ways to keep newspapers alive.

There are some excellent conversations on the topic ... going on right now (YAHOO, FORBES, HUFFPO, HUFFPO). But the short story is that they're considering tax breaks for papers, considering allowing non-profit status for papers, and considering subsidies for papers.

Newspaper journalism is an essential part of a functioning democracy, say the men in the blue suits and red ties, and because it's so essential, the Government should consider stepping in to keep it alive.

It's an interesting notion ... macro-community support to keep independently owned media alive ... and it made me wonder: should the outdoor industry be considering the same thing?

Should OIA be looking at an emergency ad buy this summer? Something that would throw a lifeline to the media that is hard hit during the downturn?

What if Outdoor Retailer reached deep and bought a few ad pages in some of our "essential" media outlets -- possibly bridging the difference between survival of a key promoter of outdoor activities and their permanent disappearance?

Should AFFTA be doing the same thing in fly fishing? Would an SIA ad buy have helped Powder owners from going bankrupt last month? What about Interbike dropping a few back covers in the rapidly disappearing bike rags?

Or should we stay the laissez-faire course? Should we take a more conservative, a more Republican position, and let the chips fall as the may, let our media outlets fail, and let the market decide what we need?

Part II... Is Twitter the soup du jour?

I think most people underestimate Twitter as a publishing platform. It's not necessarily social (read: friends, family, chatty) like Facebook (which of course has other applications too). What it is is an effective news feed, a way to get information out to a varied bunch of people to make it relevant. It also works well for real time conversations (as opposed to more static blog or message board comments). And who knows what other ways it can be used. The initial perception of Twitter was that it was a way to update on every mundane thing you do... that's a waste of its potential. The NY Times had a story about how Twitter only has a 30 percent retention rate (as opposed to 70 for FB). I posit that's because so many of those new users don't really get that Twitter works best as a professional tool, rather than a friends and family fun thing. They think it's going to be Facebook on speed, but it's not. Followers aren't friends.

A big question, I think is when does social media exhaustion set in? Remember how we all went nuts over email when we first got it? Then it became work. Then we all started blogging? Then it became work. Social media will become (or already is) work too right?

The Adventure Life: It's not just for breakfast anymore

Steve Casimiro, formerly of Powder/Bike and currently the West Coast Editor of National Geographic Adventure, started his own website over the winter. A purely independent pursuit, The Adventure Life is starting to attract attention ... at least from me. It should be noted that while Steve is indeed a handsome hairless man, he has no affiliation whatsoever with Lex Luthor or DC Comics.

1. OK ... so you've been a writer for as long as I can remember and you've been a photographer for almost as long, why get into publishing now?

A bunch of reasons. First, I'm an old school print guy--my first job literally was a paper route (the Washington Star), which paid for my first 35mm camera, which I got at age 11--and it took a while for me to turn the corner on online as a credible media source. I mean, one of my first jobs was online--when I was at USA Today, I worked at an online news service startup in 1984 (!!)--so it's not like I'm new to it. But it took a LONG time until I saw it on equal terms. Once I did, though, I wanted to learn as much as I could and the best way to do that was throw myself into it. (BTW, I started shooting long before I started writing...)

Second, I've worked with almost every outdoor book there is. I was at Powder for ages, I started Bike, I'm now West Coast editor for Nat Geo Adventure, etc. But I've also written or shot for Backpacker, Outside, Men's Journal, Hooked, Bicycling, Mountain Bike, Skiing, Snowboard Journal, Ski...and as great as each of those publications is, none of them has quite the same perspective on outdoor adventure that I do. I wanted to build something--for awhile I thought it might be print, but it didn't turn out that way--where I could riff on the joys of powder skiing, the coolness of surf art, the radical nature of space exploration, and still give gear reviews, environmental news, and sick athlete interviews. There was nothing that brought all that under one roof. So I decided to do it myself.

Third, and this is probably a corollary to second, is that there are literally thousands of great outdoor adventure stories that are ignored or overlooked or not quite right for the big four books. Now, I'm very much a part of the NGA family. I've never worked with such a great group of smart and dedicated people. I love and respect the magazine, its work and mission, and the NG Society--the solving of the Everett Ruess mystery last week being just one example of the great work John Rasmus has guided. Outside is a good magazine. Men's Journal got a new sense of life under Brad Wieners. Backpacker does an excellent job year in a year out, its three recent National Magazine Awards testament to Jon Dorn's leadership. But they all have specific, defined editorial views which, combined with the finite space of print, can't help but leave out a lot wonderful little nuggets of outdoor life. Would any of them write about a wallpaper designer who incorporates bikes into his art? A Finnish artist who comments on climate change dressed as a snowflake? The worst songs to have stuck in your head when hiking? (Editor's Note: My suggestion for Suzanne Vega Tom's Diner did not make the cut, though it should have).

Fourth, most outdoor blogs suck. They're unprofessional, amateurish, snarky without being funny, or boring. The few smartly done, online-only media outlets are killing it in terms of readers. If I could pull it off, it seemed to me there was room for another site, if it was well-done, visually engaging, and thoughtful.

2. What sort of traffic growth are you seeing?

Oh, massive. I passed dollyparton.com in March and Facebook just last week. Google, here I come.

Yeah....

I'm averaging about 1,100 visitors a day. But I've seen huge spikes of visitors around marquee stories, as when Apple wrote about my review of outdoor iPhone apps on their Hot News page, followed by the classic dragon's tail shape as it mellows out. But I try to ignore the spikes and focus on what I think is my core daily visitation--that growth has been steady and solid, with a pretty good leap in the last month or so. Tossing out the spikes, March was around 300 a day and now I'm consistently getting 800-900 a day. 1,100 is true and accurate, but I think it's more important to look at the people who find the Adventure Life, like it, and keep coming back.

I guess that's pretty good growth, but I don't know--I don't have a lot of reference points. It looks like I've passed a few of the independent outdoor websites, but it's hard to tell--accurate public metrics aren't so easy to find.

3. It seems like you've really poured the gas on things since mid-winter ... is that true, or am I just spacing out again?

Well, you and I have talked about the Adventure Life since it was just a concept and before it even had a name. And you saw it in beta, so it might seem like it's been bubbling along. But I launched it in January. In February, Apple brought a lot of traffic. Then Shane McConkey died in April and the Adventure Life coverage was among the earliest, most directly reported, and most thorough, so a lot of outdoor people saw it then for the first time. And over the last four weeks my print deadlines have eased a little, so I've been able to get stories posted almost every day and then spread the word about them. Now it seems like there's a bit of buzz about it.


4. Where the hell are you going with this? Is this just a stopgap while the print industry gets it together, or is this the first step of InterCasimiro Enterprises?

My wife, god bless her, has yet to ask me that.

Print is dead, man. Magazines...forget about them. The world has changed forever and for the better and the sooner magazine people realize it, the more likely they will be to survive.

Here's the deal: What the hell is a magazine, anyway? In the old days, it was a bunch of guys sitting around in an office, throwing together ideas and discoveries in print and sending it out into the world. If you got four letters to the editor, it was a good month. You measured your success through newsstand sell-through, which has more to do with how hot your cover model looks and whether the grocery clerk has moved your mag behind Martha Stewart than any talent on your part. Renewal rates? That's reliant on how much cash you pump into direct marketing, whose brightest minds consider a four percent response a whopping success. You spend millions on raw materials, labor, and shipping, then sell your product for four or five bucks, of which half goes to the Mafia-controlled distribution network. Oh--and your product is stale in 30 days when the next one arrives.

Tell me again how this is a model for success?

As I learned at Powder Magazine, where a confused muzzleloading enthusiast would call one a year or so, a magazine is where you store stuff--originally arms and gun powder. And the problem with print publishers struggling to find their way online is that they still think about their products as print publications that somehow have to find a new home in this intranet thing. What they DON'T get is that they're really just communicators, stewards of ideas, instigators, hecklers, keepers of a certain kind of flame. They are the recordkeepers of a culture and sometimes the drumbeaters and sometimes the priests. So, to my way of thinking, a magazine is a voice, a worldview, a perspective that's different from all other perspectives and that, if it resonates and is true, will find a following of like-minded people.

And whether that voice is shared in print, electrons, podcast, micropublishing, film festivals--it really doesn't matter. The delivery mechanism, while important, is much less important than the voice itself.

So, where I'm going with it--I don't know, exactly. For the immediate future, I'm focusing on finding my voice, on developing The Adventure Life "worldview" (gack, pretentiousness alert), on finding people with whom it resonates. My immediate goals are to build traffic and work out some of the technical bugs, of which there are many. After that, I can start exploring commercializing it.

As I've said to any number of people, The Adventure Life is an experiment--I'm testing myself and my ideas. Can I sustain the investigation and writing and reporting every day? Am I still passionate about sharing this info? Can I convince people to come see it? Will they like it? Will they come back? How will this change my print work, my writing style, my work flow? How does the dynamic nature of online change how I approach stories? It's all so very, very cool and I'm having a blast with it. If it can support me and find a place in people's regularly bookmarks, absolutely, I would love it.

The first question most people ask is how I'm going to make money with it. Three times this week I was approached by potential advertisers. And just yesterday a major online retailer contact me about the possibility of working together. Maybe I'm naive or just plain dumb, but right now I'm just focused on the sustainability of the...voice. That seems to be falling into place and I'm still stoked, so eventually I'll start working on the money side. But I really want to have a great, professional, dependable site before I do.

5. I don't see any traditional ads on the site, but you are making money on this.... right?

See answer to question 4. But no--not now and now in the immediate future. Any time a patron wants to step up and help take the pressure off, though, the door's open.

6. Now that you've been promoting your own product for a while, do you have more sympathy or less sympathy for PR guys?

Both more and less. Selling something, especially to the hacks that pose as gear writers (present company included), is about as thankless as it gets. Good luck! On the other hand, if you're pitching something that people want, it's pretty exciting. The levers are there, you don't have to have a huge budget, you just need imagination and the ability to see which levers to pull.

Of course, I say that and I suspect I'm totally full of shit. Keep in mind I'm not actually selling anything, I'm just trying to get people to come see something for free. How hard can that be?

Is Twitter the soup du jour?

Funniest movie ever. Hands down. But when things are truly funny, truly memorable, it's not because they're dumb.... it's because they're smart.

There's a funny thing happening right now in public relations consulting. We've become the de facto owners of social media outreach for our clients. Which is a good thing. A smart thing.

Not only do PR professionals have the right skill subset for the job (fast typing, caffeine addicted, occasionally snarky, glued to our laptops and iPhones), but the category of "public" relations is actually the appropriate place to house strategies and tactics which engage the public.

The funny thing .... which may or may not be a smart thing, depending on your perspective ... is that social media is on a super-cycle, an accelerated timeline, a bubble of a growth curve. And we all know about bubbles, don't we?

The cornerstone of social media is blogging, aka "reverse chronological participatory web journalism", and it really hasn't changed much since it came on the scene in the late 1990s. The form and the intent has remained almost exactly the same. The only difference is in the players.

As media megabrands, paid authors, celebrities and ...yes ... advertisers have descended into the blogosphere, independent bloggers have gone deeper underground to find a more equitable place, a place where each voice actually counts as one. A place called Twitter.

I love Twitter. I'll admit it. For anyone with a sniff of marketing in their bones, it's a no-brainer. It's fast, it's effective, it's democratic, and Jesus ... who are these people?

Public relations RFPs now come with Twitter requirements as a standard part of the package. They ask for Tweet-strategies, and they beg for quantifiable numbers of the thousands of followers you'll attract .... which is a little like asking two college freshmen how much beer they think they could drink in a million years.

The funny thing about Twitter, though, is that it's the soup du jour. In the last two weeks, I've read about it in the New York Times, heard about it on Howard Stern and our local Vermont WDEV, and been asked about it by my mom.

Yes, Twitter is a natural part of public relations in May of 2009. Yes, it's an essential component of social media outreach this year. But it's only one part.

The truth is that while Twitter might be around as long as blogging, it might also be tracking like the shorter-cycled MySpace. Or it might die as fast as it has grown.

Twitter could be gone by next year, by next fall, or even by next month. And if it does go away to the great Compuserve graveyard in the IT department, what will your public relations strategy look like then?

"Mmm, I'll have that."

Bike commuting: the best defense is a good offense

"...At 150 pounds unloaded it does not climb hills very fast either. But nobody is ever going to steal this monster since it is only for one size rider and is not easy to ride since it is heavy. It has excellent rain protection. cargo capacity and ramming capability..."

LINK: Joe's Garage

Via, The Goat