Archives for November 2011

Leaves by grafixar.

Kirsten Wright quit her sole proprietorship and joined Social 5150 as its social marketing director.

Tyson Goodridge quit his sole proprietorship and joined Acsys as its social media director.

He recollects:

A while ago, I starting asking myself some simple questions.

Am I scalable? Is this business model sustainable? What is my experience and skill set worth on the open market?

My wife asked (urged!) me to start testing the waters. And I did…

Each of them left their worlds of independent consulting and entered professional communities of workplaces and coworkers. They leveraged their backgrounds and skills with a desire to be on the inside looking out.

They inspire me.

Kirsten and Tyson, and others such as Danny Brown, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Ben Parr are jumping ship. Whatever their reasons they find the faith to seek change.

I don’t know what is next for me but I’m tired of working for myself.

Self-employment has reached the point of not being enjoyable for me. It’s no longer sustainable. I tried it for a few years and, while I gained a lot of experience and met many connections, I recognize that at the age of 36 it is time for me to go back to working in an organization.

I also miss workplace camaraderie in a way that only people who know what I mean can understand.

I am actively seeking a full time position…

Boy by kakisky.

I want to use my 12 years of experience in integrated communications to help an organization with social media marketing, community and media relations, writing and editing, and policy development.

I want to work for the right organization and help them with a blend of communications, marketing, and public relations. I’m willing to commute within a 30-mile radius of Newburyport, where I sit on the city council and was recently re-elected to a second two-year term.

The web is where I currently shine and I’m frequently acknowledged for my social media strategy, internet advocacy, and online coalition building in publications ranging from TechRepublic.com, Poynter, and MSNBC.com to Fast Company and Federal Computer Week.

My background includes freelancing hundreds of articles for newspapers and managing projects in state and local government. I’ve taught community college courses on social media marketing over the past year and I thrive on personal communications. I’d like to leverage my background, elaborated on my LinkedIn profile, and talk to the right people at the right organizations.

I’m accessible by many means so please visit my contact page and select which works best for you. Thanks.

Any questions I can answer? Can you help?

I did not want a Kindle to replace the experience of reading tactile books when I wrote about it in February 2009. The majority of your comments agreed with me.

Fast forward nearly three years and I still don’t want the thing.

The Kindle Fire is not for me.

Not yet.

Engadget reviews the Kindle Fire with a concise conclusion:

The Kindle Fire is quite an achievement at $200. It’s a perfectly usable tablet that feels good in the hand and has a respectably good looking display up front. Yes, power users will find themselves a little frustrated with what they can and can’t do on the thing without access to the Android Market but, in these carefree days of cloud-based apps ruling the world, increasingly all you need is a good browser. That the Fire has.

When stacked up against other popular tablets, the Fire can’t compete. Its performance is a occasionally sluggish, its interface often clunky, its storage too slight, its functionality a bit restricted and its 7-inch screen too limiting if you were hoping to convert all your paper magazine subscriptions into the digital ones. Other, bigger tablets do it better — usually at two or three times the cost.

So, the Kindle Fire is great value and perhaps the best, tightest integration of digital content acquisition into a mobile device that we’ve yet seen. Instead of having a standalone shopping app the entire tablet is a store — a 7-inch window sold at a cut-rate price through which users can look onto a sea of premium content. It isn’t a perfect experience, but if nothing else it’s a promising look into the future of retail commerce.

I am typing this sentence on an iMac. I also own a smartphone. And, when mobile and wanting something in between, I have a netbook computer. Where would a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad even, fit into my world of technology? To replace the netbook? If I go that route, then sure, I’ll consider something. But a tablet as in a book reader? Not for me.