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To Grow: THAT is the answer

Note: also posted on Almost Cool, Peter’s personal blog.

After consulting with a number of people I know and trust, I’ve made
the decision to move ahead and grow my business. Current challenges have
to be overcome, and future opportunities abound. I need great people
here to work with me.

Today Michael Caputo and Lucia Mancuso joined Richard and I at TBS
world headquarters. Mike is an excellent designer, with a keen eye for
balance and placement. His work has an elegance that fits well with my
aesthetic. He’s pretty handy with xhtml and css too.

Lucia joins us as project manager. She is here to save me from
myself. Ask any of my current clients, and they’ll tell you what I mean.
She’s been here for a day, and already there’s a sense of control
returning. Lucia will take over the tasks that I don’t particularly
excel at or enjoy. This will allow me to focus more on design and
managing the overall creative direction.

I would like to thank my clients for having the patience to stick
with me during this nutty growth spurt. I’m writing this publicly to
preemptively let the blogosphere know we’ve “experienced slippage” in
many of our recent milestones. If you’re going to hear about problems
with my company, I want you to hear them from me.

I’ll tell you honestly: I misjudged my workload. I hadn’t factored in
the slack to allow anything to go wrong. Hence, once something did, it
spiraled into a nasty storm at a wholly inopportune time (of course).

The addition of Mike and Lucia to the team is specifically to help us
get back on track. As a result, we’re not going to be starting any new
work until Dec. We are booking work though, so if you have a project
you would like to discuss with us, please do so sooner rather than
later. This will ensure we can get it on the schedule as early as
possible.

There’s lots of lessons here, not the least of which is “be careful what you wish for”.

Journey of Hope

During the second world war, 30,000 Jews managed to escape from
Austria and other parts of Europe, and made a new life for themselves in
Shanghai. Not much has been told about their story – so the friendship
that exists between the Jewish and Chinese people is not widely known.

The Journey of Hope exhibit, which opened last night in Toronto, tell
the story through the eyes of people who were there, and those who are
still there. It’s a fascinating adventure story, made poignant by it’s
daily routine and apparent normality.

I was extremely honoured to be asked to design the web site and
interactive kiosk for the traveling exhibit. The site and the artifacts
on it tell the story much better than I can. You can have a look for
yourself by clicking here or on the screen shot below.

——-

I just saw the future of blogging.

It’s name is flock. It rhymes with rock.

Flock is a BIG IDEA (cue the kettle drums). It takes
browsing the web and seamlessly turns it on its head. The barrier
between surfing and contributing blurs. My rss feeds, my flickr photos,
my blog and the entire web all live in one speedy integrated package.

I can upload an image to flickr directly from iphoto (shakes fist at
Steve and yells “Hey, it’s time for an iphoto update buddy!”), then,
using the flickr image browser, I can drag it right into my post. It’s
scary how easy it is.

Plus, I can highlight any text on the internet and right click it to
post to my blog. Doing so opens the blog editor with the text already
set in blockquotes. What’s more, the citation is there too! Crazy.

But wait. There’s more. When I add a bookmark, I don’t just add any
old bookmark. I add a delicious bookmark. So what, right? I’ll tell you
what: I’ve got a plugin running on my blog that pulls the latest
additions to my delicious account. Meaning that I can update my sidebar
links from anywhere on the web. With one click.

As much as this is going to change my habits, it’s going to make a
huge, massive, enormous change in the life of the “average” business
blogger. Right now, I imagine most of us separate blogging time from
reading newsfeeds or surfing. No longer. This thing reduces the time
required to blog, and makes it way more fun and useful.

Now for the downers: this is a very early release, so there are
plenty of bugs. Not everything works yet, and worse, not all the blog
platforms are supported yet. If your blog runs on mt, typepad or
wordpress, you’re in luck though.

I haven’t been this excited about a piece of software in, well, ever. I’ve seen the future of blogging. And its name is flock.

ps: Thanks to Erik for the tip!

No, I didn’t spam myself. aka reputation on the web

Ok, this one is WEIRD! Online, your reputation is your life. I am
proud of the fact that we’re building our business by doing good work
for good people. We’re starting to get a bit of reputation for being
good people to work with. That is the the single most valuable business
asset I could ever own.

So, it makes me especially cranky when I’m accused of spamming.

This story starts with a fan of our redesign posting a story on digg
linking back here. I’m super stoked that someone would want to tell the
rest of the world what we’re doing, and to do it in such an incredible
way. Some people though have clearly interpreted this as an attempt spam
digg. The comments say as much.

This incident is pretty minor, but once again it’s got me thinking
about reputation, and just how incredibly important it is with online
business.

Reputation is the currency of the online world. I’m a bit freaked out
at how easy it would be to do serious damage to one’s reputation. It
would be kind of interesting to conduct an experiment. One could slander
his or herself around the blogosthing, and see what happens, then share
the results. I’m not volunteering.

Redesign rolling out

The Blog Studio v3 is in the midst of being rolled out. There are a
couple of broken links lying about, and the odd “coming soon” stuck here
and there. We’re still hammering away, but come on by for a look-see.
Just mind your step.

About The Blog Studio

The Blog Studio is a web and logo design firm with a twist. While we
design and build “regular” web sites, our expertise is working with
clients who want to connect with their client base in an emotional,
memorable manner.

We approach each design project as though it were a conversation
between the site owner and his or her audience. In a conversation
between people, the words that pass back and forth through the air make
up only a percentage of the total information exchanged. Our job is to
add the tone, volume, intonation, gesture, and expression back into your
plain text; to make your words come alive.

We have extensive experience with all the major blog platforms, and
can write custom plugins and scripts to make your sites really come
alive.

We can also convert your existing hard-coded website into a flexible, supremely easy to update powerhouse marketing machine. What’s more, we can do it for a fraction of what you’d expect to spend.

Give us a call, or fire off an email today. We’d love to chat.

——-

TBS Express sneak peek Part 3 – A New Hope

If you’re following along, you’ll know I’ve been saying I’m going to
be launching TBS Express any day. Clearly, I’ve been mistaken. B5 media
ate up a bunch of time last week (great project btw – still lots to
go). Progress is being made though. The core code has been written, and
the designs are coming along nicely.

I’m really excited about the doors these templates will open. They
are going to put high-end, unique, semi-customized sites in the hands of
the less budgetarily gifted. There’s still work to do, but I’ve got
some help coming the form The Blog Studio employee number 001. Yes,
that’s right. Stay tuned for details.

In the meanwhile, have a gander at this.