February 21, 2012
by Andrew
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The PDX Digital Marketing Series is a quarterly meetup that brings in local digital marketing professionals to speak about current trends, challenges, and topics.
This quarter’s meetup featured mobile web and app professionals from Portland. They each took a segment of the hour-long presentation to discuss their company’s methodologies on mobile web and app solutions, as well as their personal principles or takes on projects.
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February 21, 2012
by Andrew
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It was a rainy, windy walk to Babcock & Jenkins in Downtown Portland, but well worth it. Colleen Jones, author of Clout, gave a presentation tonight on her process for creating attention-grabbing content over at the agency. She encouraged that whether you work with content for an agency, an employer, or as a freelancer, we should all follow a set of best practices to create influential content.
Jones began by diving into why digital is so darn complicated as of late. It used to be just a site and people who use it. Maybe some videos and audio embedded here and there.
Turns out that content drives this recent complexity, with technological advances riding shotgun. Jones implies in her book, and in her presentation, that as communications professionals of all types, it’s our duty to take action and tame this complexity. We could leave it to run amok, but it would leave the web in confusing, irresponsible ruin, wouldn’t it?
February 13, 2012
by Andrew
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Better Off is a book by Eric Brende, a super-scholar who takes his wife on a year-long part-adventure, part-experiment to live in a Minimite community. Minimites are people who live a life much simpler than that of the Amish. As the name implies, Minimites use as minimal of an amount of technology as possible.
The Minimite definition of “technology” doesn’t just include contemporary things like computers and phones, but also refers to any kind of tool or machine that runs on anything besides organic labor (humans, animals, water).
It took the better part of a year and a half for me to finish the book. If you are a person who enjoys introspection and measuring the value of life not by how fat the wallet is, but perhaps by richness of mind and body, you’ll probably nibble on this book the same way.
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February 10, 2012
by Andrew
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JD Hooge of Instrument, an interactive agency (and much, much more) in Portland, gave a presentation on the background, going ons, as well as some core principles of the agency at this month’s Creative Mornings PDX. While Hooge started the presentation with a quick rip on himself for being “boring,” that was definitely not the case.
The noticeably tired father of twins and partner at Instrument mustered up the energy to let us in on some bits of golden info dug out of his personal log of “10,000 hours” of interactive experience.
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