PaulMonaco.com

This has to be one of my (overall) most challenging blog sites to maintain.  My others all fell into a natural theme based on their TLD’s… NET for Internet related posts, FM for my audio and video, MOBI for my moble content… but COM is a hard one.  In old school thinking the dot com TLD meant commercial.  But that’s not what I’m all about and neither is a good chunk of the dot com domain names out there.

So this blog has basically become the catch all of my thoughts and ideas.  It chronicled the life and death of a spouse, several pets and far too many crazy ideas that came and went.  {pause} whoa, got a little verklempt there.

I guess this is just the natural evolution of the personal home page.  You remember, back in the days of Geo-Cities.  Back when the expense of having your own domain name (and the hosting package to support it) was out of reach for the average hobbyist.

So yea, things have come a long way.  It has all evolved.  Well almost all.  My disjointed, randomly shifting writing style never has.  A product of growing as the first generation American in an Italian broken English family trying desperately to give me a head start by speaking English only at home all the while embedding poor grammar and inverted sentence structures  deeply into my brain.

Oh.. where was I going with this post?  Hmm.. I forgot, but it must have somehow had to do with the iPad announcement.  You know.. that device that didn’t meat it’s hype, was compared to a feminine hygiene product, torn apart by many yet remains to be another  device I simply do not need yet absolutely must have.

Would it be odd to end this post here?  Well.. I will.  Bye

It’s that time of year again, new calendar, new determinations.  As technology changes and (hopefully) improves, there always comes a point where you have a bit of a speed bump to get over.  Recently that speed bump came to me in the form of a Wordpress update that wasn’t compatible with my older MySQL 4.0 databases.

So I had to manually upgrade the databases and a by-product of that was the loss of some formatting on my blogs.  Now before you jump all over me, yea I know I could have preserved it but honestly I’ve had such a full calendar lately that the quickest route was the most prudent.

Now I’m in the rebuild phase, most of my blogs have been updated.  Some have had cosmetics restored and a handful have new content.

Speaking of content…    I’ll be using a new carnation of an amazing social media tool to manage blog posting from here on out.. SocialOomph.  In the past I’ve used this service primary for status updates via Twitter and Ping.fm.  But recently this service has been expanded to allow now only status updates but full blown blog posts to a number of blogging platforms.

SocialOomph.com is certainly (for me) the number one social media tool out there.

So, Facebook is eveolving… yet again! First it starts as a network for academia.  Then the general public filters in and eventually the MySpace gang wander in.  Much of the MySpacers return once Facebook is infiltrated by their parents and then people realize the marketing potential that Facebook has.  Slowly the marketers become more casual and the casual users become marketers and wham…  Relationship George meets Independent George and it’s chaos!

So there you are at your desk, checking out the status updates on Facebook keeping a pulse on what’s happening.  You’re boss may walk by (or your spouse) and admire your diligent work when suddenly you scroll up to a page full of Mafia Wars and Farmville updates and the question of working or playing comes up.

Up until now I’ve avoided the Facebook “fan” pages.  I never liked that terminology and resisted becoming anyone’s fan because to me, it just didn’t seem right.  Until now.  You see, I used to feel the same way about Facebook applications.  I rarely followed anyone who played a lot of games and often unfollowed those who bombarded me with application requests.  As more of the people I follow became involved in these games I just couldn’t resist taking a peek myself and as expected, I was sucked right into it myself.

Since Facebook has become (at least for me) one of the leading chapters  in my social networking  repertoire I felt it was time to cross over into the world of fan pages as well as encourage some of you to consider doing the same.  The idea behind the Facebook page is to focus on the professional side of you and your personal brand.  Real Estate, Marketing, Entertainment.  Whatever industry you classify yourself in, there is most likely a category that matches.  The beauty of the page is that your gaming updates won’t get posted to your wall, so it’s all you all the time.  Narcissistic nirvana!

But wait.. there’s more!  You’re also provided with tools to track your effectiveness!  Chart fans gained and loss as well as how engaging your content is by comments and “likes”.

Watch for more posts about Facebook pages as I get more acclimated to them myself.

via Blip.tv

During a recent Twitter outage, I realized just how overly dependent I’ve become on the service.  It has become the hub of virtually all my outbound marketing and social endeavors so much so that I might as well have been without power or water.  Totally crippling.

In this video I share my thoughts on the subject and since then have put those thoughts into action.  With this (and other) videos for example, I’m rotating among the various hosting providers so should one become unavailable the majority of my content should still be online.  As an added benefit, I’m able to follow the progress of each site as video is still an emerging venue.

There’s a particular gas station in my hometown.  Along with gas they also sell the usual variety of convenience store items as well.  This particular store is especially convenient for me as it’s the only one on my route between my exit from the interstate, to my home.  I know I could shop around and get ever item in this store (including the gas)  from other stores for a significant cost savings but for me the convenience of it al far supersedes that.

Well one day the proprietor of this store must clicked the convenience store equivalence to “Get 1000 new followers instantly” and came up with the idea that if he programmed his “Pay at the Pump” machines to display the message “Please come inside for your receipt” that it would force people to always physically go inside the store for their reciept  and be so seduced by his selection of products that they would purchase more then just gas.

Now this shop is not quite so convenient as it once was.  Though not a very long walk at all, the prospect of doing just adds to the little things that clutterers my day and reminds me of my Buddhist principles of causality and how things are inter-related.  Now I must lock my car, take my keys and turn off the radio that I can hear while I’m filling my tank.

Sure in the big picture these are all very petty complaints and one could even say I am being trivial.  That said, this simple tactic of making me change my routine… adding one more step…  was just enough to get me to try some place else to get my gas.  On my outbound trip to work… to find a place where the aroma of freshly brewed coffee makes me want to come inside where the fresh donuts seduce me into yet another purchase.

Do I still go to the other store?  Yes, when circumstances force me to.  But now when I go I look forward to a potential series of blog posts ridiculing the proprietor as I document my visits on Brightkite.

So what’s the moral of this story?

Before you add that extra click to your site.. that extra splash screen… or that extra validation process…   make sure your visitors want your content or services bad enough to jump through those hoops.  There just may be another site out there with fresh brewed coffee and jelly donuts waiting to steal your traffic.

That’s right, I said, “Be There!”

If you’re reading this blog then most likely you are the kind of person who will benefit by attending a podcamp.  But I’m sure many of you aren’t quite sure about what it exactly is, so let me give this a shot…  first direct from the official podcampboston.org website:

If you’re wondering what’s next in social media, there’s no better place to find out than at PodCamp, regardless of whether you’re just getting started or you’re a veteran practitioner. Unlike other conferences which are just talking head affairs, PodCamp gives you the opportunity to learn, share, and grow your skills at any level, helping your community as it helps you.

But it’s so much more.. being an unconference it can truly be all things to all people.  I like to present it to people as the gateway into the next step of networking.  Social media is the fairway of the new generation.  If you’re not there, you’ll be left behind struggling with the old media thinkers.

At PodCamp, you have the opportunity to share ideas with people you man not normally have ready access to in the real world like CEO’s, venture capitalists, entertainers, programmers, experts and enthusiasts in every field imaginable.  Some are there to learn about marketing, public relations and brand building.  Others have a product or service to pitch.  Some are simply there absorb all the social goodness!

No matter what your motive is, if you have a dream or objective.. any at all.. then PodCamp is guaranteed to give you a return on your investment.  

If you’re attending, please look me up!  My Blackberry will be fully charged and online thru the whole event and I also plan on updating the mobile site and monitoring my email as well!

With the number of handheld devices on the rise and the general consumer become more tech savvy by the day I finally decided to fully take the plunge into mobile content.

Expect to find very concise posts in a timely manner, very conducive to mobile browsing on ANY device.  This venue is very new to me and quite frankly I’m sure experts in this media are few and far between as well.  You can expect a lot of adjustments as time goes on.

The 2-dimential barcode you see on this page is known as a “QR” code, short for “Quick Response”. Using QR scanning software on your camera equipped device you can quickly jump to mobile content embedded within the code.  

The dotMobi domain names comes with the requirement that the site meets a basic set of standards making it highly compatible with a broad range of devices, but fear not you can still visit the old fashioned way on a computer, by punching in paulmonaco.mobi into your favorite browser.

Download Green Bubbles Wordpress Theme

A whimsicle theme built around green bubbles. Header photo dirived from a Creative Commons licensed image by flickr user woodleywonderworks.

At first I’ve resisted and resented store loyalty cards thinking of them as an evil way marketers track their customers to suck even more hard earned dollars out of their wallets. Being a (what I like to think of as) “typical guy” I don’t use coupons since I never really plan my shopping and wouldn’t have them handy to use otherwise. But I did start noticing a lot of special pricing available that you can only get when using your card. This made me feel much better about it and as time went on it was just another part of daily life.

After years of using a loyalty card and being loyal to basically one grocery store chain, the day came when I lost my card. Yea it was my fault, I left it at the register and walked off.

On my next trip to the grocery store I stopped at the courtesy desk and told them I lost my card, never to be found again and I needed to replace it. The associate asked for some ID, looked me up in the computer and handed me the hand-written paper card above.

Off I went ready to shop when I realized… over 50% of the check-out lines are self-scan and to further speed purchases they now hand out scanning wands so that we can ring up our purchase as we shop. All fine and dandy.. IF YOU HAVE A REAL CARD WITH A BAR CODE!

The two lines open that had a flesh and bones cashier had massive lines of seniors, all either paying with “exact change” or meticulously writing out paper checks. At that point I realized that shopping without a bar code was just not worth it.

As good fortune would have it I had a loyalty card for another store that was just across the street. I rarely used the other store because at my old house it was not convenient, but here at my new residence it’s just as easy to get to.

So guess what? I’m happy at the new store and even though I’ve been a life long customer of Stop and Shop it’s very unlikly I will return now that I’ve discovered shopping at Shaw’s.

So the moral of the story…. just as technology can increase your sales efficiency it’s failure can decrease it just as quickly.

You never know what you’re going to stumble upon during a move. I just happened to have found a picture of my very first computer setup. Here we see a Radio Shack, TRS-80 Model I computer. It had 4k of RAM and no internal non-volatile storage. Programs and data were stored on a standard cassette tape. The monitor was a black and white 12-inch with only upper-case characters. Sound was not an option.

You’ll also notice a stereo tape deck on the desk. I spent hours with that pretending to be a talk show host reading scripts that I would have displayed on the computer. Of course back then there was no way to “podcast” or even store any reasonable quality audio digitally. This setup pre-dates the compact disk.

And yes, those were my two favorite “Angels” on the wall. Farrah Fawcette and Cheryl Ladd. I’m going to say this was about 1979 making me 14 years old. Boy do I miss those days!