Thom Allen Weblog

Here are some great links I came across during this past week.

Resolve Conflict Quickly with The Four Agreements. I've read this book before. It's fairly small, both in diameter and number of pages. But the content is very strong.

Blog World Expo - Day 1 Recap. My good friend Ash Buckles spent a few days at the Blog world Expo in Las Vegas. Here is his take on the first day.

Term Sheet for an LLC vs. a Corporation. This was a very relevant post seeing how I'm facing that exact question right now. Perfect timing and great advice.

Advertisers- This is Sexy. Chris caught an ad from Blackberry that was inconspicuously part of the layout. He didn't need to click on anything the advertiser was relying on the fact the name would stick with the reader.

Getting Too Old? Dye Your Hair Before The Interview! Jason caused some ruckus around the blogosphere with this post. It's pretty good.

Guy Kawasaki - 5 Books you Must Read. I'm glad Janet captured the books Guy suggested, I had to walk out of the presentation just as he was naming them off.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

My Upcoming Blog Series

While I was writing the Build A Better Blog series I decided I would write a few more series. Here is what I have so far. None of these will be 31 days. Most will be 5 posts covering a topic I enjoy.

Beginners guide to using the Nikon D40
Jazz Music 101
NASCAR: A Fanology
LifeStreaming (look for this series to start on Monday November 12th)
FlickrCasting
Gadget Bags

Will you help me? Add to the list, right here in the comments or on your blog and link back. Will you start your own series?

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Participating In November NaBloPoMo

After writing a series everyday for 31 days in October you would think taking on another project like writing a blog post everyday and writing a Novel during the month of November would be insane. You are probably right. I guess we'll find out together at the end of the month how it all turns out. See you on Friday November 30th, 2007.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Numb To What Has Become Commonplace

Posted by mobile phone:
Jim Long is a guy I would love to follow around and experience life as he sees it. His job as an NBC cameraman gives him a unique opportunity to experience life as it happens. Jim chooses to share some of his experiences with his friends on Twitter. I'm lucky to be one of those friends.

The other day Jim flew with President Bush to San Diego and he gave us a behind the scenes look at how it was going. But one tweet caught my eye and I'm not sure anyone really caught it. Her is what he said right after landing back in Washington:

newmediajim: as our plane taxis we pass an honor guard placing a coffin in a hearse here on base

Jim has seen this many times but the general public doesn't. Brave soldiers are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether you agree with our current military actions or not, our fellow Americans are giving their lives. Lets not forget them please.

Thanks Jim for remembering the things that are still important.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Utah Geek/Blogger Dinner Tonight

Hey everyone, tonight there is a Geek/Blogger dinner in Sandy, Utah. Get all the details here. Have fun without me.

Time and Place
Date: Thursday, October 25, 2007
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Hometown Buffet
Street: 10390 S State St
City/Town: Sandy City, UT

Gcal link
Facebook link

Friday, October 19, 2007

Wanna See The Power Of Social Networking?

A few hours ago a young woman was requesting small donations to go to college. I think the starting amount was somewhere around $400. A Twitter friend of Chris Brogan mentioned this cause and Chris jumped into action. Within a few hours, and mostly through Twitter friends, people had donated enough money for the woman to meet her goal. As Chris proclaimed:

chrisbrogan: Raising over $500 in 2 hours? Great work, Twitter nation! I'm beholden to your power.

This was amazing. I'm sure everyone is abuzz over reaching the goal. But as Twitterer davedelaney said "@chrisbrogan: When the Brogan speaks we listen :-)" And I agree.Â That was the feeling of everyone who was watching and participating.

So my thought is, what else can we accomplish using Social Networking? Chris also started the Grasshopper Network which is a group of people dedicated to helping someone when they need it. All you have to do is ask.

Think what you could do and engage your Network.

Monday, October 8, 2007

A Prize From MightMugs And ProBlogger

I think I have mentioned the word ProBlogger about a hundred times this week. The marketing campaign seems to be working. During the Birthday Bash giveaway, I entered one of the contests and won a very cool prize from MightyMugs. Please take a minute and visit MightMugs and order yourself or someone you love a mug with your mug on it.

Thanks ProBlogger and MightMugs.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Helping To Find A Cure For Multiple Sclerosis

I have a vested interest in finding a cure for Multiple Sclerosis. There are so many lives affected by MS, and most people you see who have MS you wouldn't be able to tell. It's a debilitating disease that eventually robs a person of all their motor skills. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society describes it this way:

MS is thought to be an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system (CNS). The CNS consists of the brain, spinal cord, and the optic nerves. Surrounding and protecting the nerve fibers of the CNS is a fatty tissue called myelin, which helps nerve fibers conduct electrical impulses.

Several of my close Family members have MS. I would love to see a cure happen in my life time. It's important to continue researching what causes this disease. Who gets MS?

Approximately 400,000 Americans acknowledge having MS, and every week about 200 people are diagnosed. Worldwide, MS may affect 2.5 million individuals.

There are many ways you can get involved in helping the fight MS. The MS Society has a great list here.

ProBlogger.net, as part of their Birthday Bash, and a sponsor FreeMoneyFinanace.Com are giving away $1000 to the winners favorite charity. Mine would be the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I would encourage you to donate as well.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

ProBloggers Birthday Bash and $54,000 in prizes

Yes, you read that right, $54,000 in prizes are being given away for ProBlogger's Birthday Bash. Personally I'm excited at the chance to win 2 20" LG USB Monitors. Hey, what have I got to lose.

Darren does a great job of generating traffic to his site, and giving his sponsors more traffic too. I've followed Darren and ProBlogger for a while and I don't think I know anyone better at showing their readers how to make a living by blogging. He walks the walk. If you've ever wanted to see a blog that makes money and isn't just a bunch of lists and links to other sites, add ProBlogger to your feed reader.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Blogging the Utah Blogger Dinner

So it's that time again. Utah Blogger Dinner. We always have a great time at the Blogger Dinner. Several of our regulars couldn't make it. Some are in CA at the Podcast and New Media Expo, and others are busy doing life stuff. That's what's great about this meet-up, come if you can and if not see you at the next one.

Today we had

If you are a Facebook user find some pics here, if not check them on Flickr.

Are you a Utah blogger and in the Salt Lake City area? Come out and meet other bloggers. Subscribe to my blog, I always share when the next meet-up will take place.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Utah Blogger dinner for September 2007

The pretty much monthly Blogger dinner for the Salt Lake City area is this Thursday, September 27th, at 6PM. Check out Ash Buckles site for all the details.

Why should you attend? Well, its a great way to meet other bloggers who you didn't know existed, or meet the ones you read in person. You don't have to be a techie or even be an extremely active blogger. Just come out and meet people. I did this a few months ago and have created some great friendships.

Where:
Applebees
123 E. 12300 S.
Draper Utah
(801) 495-4460

Friday, September 21, 2007

BlogRush is pushing the envelope

Whether or not you use or even like BlogRush, I'm getting a noticeable increase in the amount of traffic my blog has been getting ever since I signed up. There have been some problems with cheaters, as happens with services like this, but it seems to be drawing readers to my blog which I really like. BlogRush is attempting to improve the service and minimize abusers.

In order to use BlogRush you have to install a plug-in on your blog. At first I didn't like that, and pretty much I still don't, but that's what's required so its on my blog. I hope they come up with something not as obtrusive as this large graphic box they have now. It would be cool to just have the headlines. It would fit into my blog a lot nicer than this big huge monstrosity, and probably load much faster.

At the moment it seem to be living up to the hype. I'm not into all the backlash that has taken place. If I can increase the number of reader by a few hundred I'm all good.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Technology That Empowers Me

I'm around technology all day. I have a laptop, a PDA, several desktops, cameras and so on. But there are a few pieces of technology that empower me. My T-Mobile MDA empowers me the most. It gives me the ability to be connected just about anywhere.

1. I have mobile Internet. This allows me to check my email account via GMail, track my calendar with GCal, read my RSS feeds with Google Reader, visit web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. However a majority of web sites are not PDA friendly and are useless to view. This is also true for video. Trying to stream video is nearly impossible. Great services such as vTap are starting to change this.

2. My MDA has a built in MP3 player, Windows Media Player, that allows me to listen to all the music I want, and because I have a large storage card I can have dozens of songs available at all times. I can even watch videos, but I can't watch many because of quality issues. But this isn't really an issue for me because I don't watch a lot of video on my MDA.

3. The ability to stay in touch with my teenagers via SMS is invaluable.

4. View PDF and Office documents. One of the reasons I decided to go with an MDA instead of the Dash is the ability to edit Office documents. I spend a lot of time writing Word documents and tracking projects in Excel. It's nice to be able to use the file on my MDA and on my Laptop.

5. I've recently started storing more photos on my MDA. I used to have a whole bunch of pictures in my wallet, but it didn't seem as cool as being able to show more recent photos of the Family, events and just plain cool pics. So I took the photos out of my wallet and put them on the MDA.

There are more reasons my MDA empowers me. One I hope will give me even more utility is Skype. It's shaky on my MDA, but I know the technology will get better. This opens up a whole new world including mobile podcasting. Now if there was a mobile version of Audacity I wouldn't really need a computer any more.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

My blogging station

Darren Rowse asked his readers to send in their blogging stations after he revealed where he works. Actually, Darren's work space it quiet simple, and so are most of the other entries. That's what's cool about blogging, you can do it pretty much anywhere. I typically blog on my HP Notebook. Sometime I blog from my iMac, but only once in a while. I use my iMac for creating podcasts. Here is my blogging station entry. I'd really like to get something on my MDA that would let me blog, that would be nice.

I've asked this before, show us your blogging setup.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Speaking at the Utah New Media Conference

I will have an opportunity to speak at the Utah New Media Conference on October 18th. The topic will be Podcasting. I will be sharing the stage with Lorri Randle of MediaJoltz, who will speak on Videocasting.

I will share more on the event as it approaches. I do know that the topics covered will be Blogging, Podcasting/Videocasting, Social Media (Facebook, MySpace) and Monetizing your website.

Make plans to be there. Visit the conference web site here.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Utah Blogger Dinner August 2007

The Utah Blogger dinner for August 2007 is going to be this week, August 30th @ 6PM. Get all the details here. Come one come all.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Single Life Stream feed via Yahoo! Pipes

I forgot to mention in the post about my new Life Stream, that I'm using Yahoo! Pipes to create one single RSS feed made up of many individual feeds.

Yahoo! Pipes rock. It's not the end all, but I'll tell you what, the interface is incredible. It's a complete WYSIWYG editing interface similar to Visio. Drag and drop functionality. Wow.

Here is a link to my pipe which I use to feed my Tumblr blog.

Moving my feeds to a Life Stream

Just like Steve Rubel, I've been creating a Life Stream. It's actually more like a big bucket that collected all the various RSS feeds where I submit content. This includes Flickr, my blog, Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us. I have others, such as blip.tv, but I'm not sure I include them all.

I want to be part of all the really cool social networks, but I also wanted to give everyone who cares a place to get all of my various posts. Thanks to Tumblr and Feed Burner, I've pretty much solved the problem.

The only real drawback is Tumblr doesn't allow for comments. I'm ok with this because Tumblr's not really an interactive tool it's a Super Aggregator. If you want to comment on my pictures, click through to them. If you want to comment on my latest blog post, click through to it.

Tumblr also provides a mobile version of your site. If you go to www.thomallen.com/mobile on your PDA browser you get to see a mobile friendly version. I can also publish to my Tumblr with my mobile device. Very cool.

Now I have one RSS feed, but the ability to send people where they want to go. Steve mentions using Tumblr for a specific feed or subdomains. For example, you could go subscribe just to my Flickr photos at photos.thomallen.com. This would point to my Tumblr that just displays the photos. You could do this for Twitter or any other number of sites that publishes its own feed.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Coming out of the closet

Oooh, I know that will get some click through's. But in all seriousness, I'm confessing my addiction to Galactic Fiction. I term Galactic Fiction as TV and movies around Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG1 and Atlantis and of course Star Wars. Now this may not be some earth shattering announcement, but there is a reason behind it.

For years I've read if you want to be a successful blogger you should write about the things you're interested in. To that end, I'm starting a new blog, one that is about my addiction to Galactic Fiction. I'm just a fan. It's my perspective. I don't plan on scooping SciFi news, there are plenty of sites for that. I don't want to start a SciFi bulletin board, there are thousands of those.

So there you go. I've confessed; come out of the closet. This should be fun. It's all in fun. I love this stuff. New blog is GalactiFi.com. I hope to write Star Trek style stories here books.galactifi.com.

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