But perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is the sense of cooperation. I have never seen anything like it. If you have something you want to do, if you have an inkling of an idea that may have legs, there are dozens of super-intelligent people out there more than willing to help you out. Whether it’s offering advice, sharing wisdom from their own journeys or making introductions, it is astonishing how generous these people are.

I’m preparing to move to Chicago, and there’s been something I’ve been thinking about doing for quite a while (inspired by one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met here in the city.) Yesterday I threw out some feelers to the web community, not really knowing what to expect. The response was swift and overwhelming – people who have enormous responsibilities who have no business wasting their time talking to some idiot whose skill set consists of booger jokes and burning businesses to the ground immediately were offering advice and suggestions, putting me in touch with folks who might be able to help. 24 hours later, I have a much better understanding of what I’d need to do and what I need to think about. And there’s absolutely nothing in it for them – they don’t know me, they’ve never heard of me, and anything I could offer they already have (except they’re probably better.)

It’s at once inspiring and humbling. Imagine if the world operated like this. Imagine what it would be like if everyone were as generous, thoughtful and selfless as these folks are.

What if that were the real lasting impact of this whole Web 2.0 thing?

Love him or hate him, you gotta hand it to him – Mel Gibson is a pretty fantastic marketer.

His new movie, Apocalypto, may or may end up being good – it’s hard to tell from the trailer. But I’m willing to bet that millions of people will see the trailer in the next few weeks.

Why? Because in the middle of the trailer (about 1:46 in, to be exact) he has spliced in a single frame of himself.

Simple trick, and I doubt it will ever work again. But if you want to get a bunch of people to see the preview for your movie (and perhaps the movie itself,) something like this is a great way to do it.

Who wants to bet Mel is actually Jewish…

I think that’s all true. And I think they have absolutely nothing to be worried about.

Today about half of my day was spent sifting through over 400 resumes from people all over the country. They have various backgrounds, various work histories, various talents and skills. They all have one thing in common – they call themselves ‘web designers.’

Out of 400 resumes my colleagues and I managed to whittle the list down to about a dozen. This isn’t a dozen strong candidates, mind you – this is a dozen people who passed the initial screening. I’m sure these people are very bright, energetic, creative, and hard working. I’m sure they have a ton to offer some company out there. Just not for the service they are advertising.

This is the fourth time we’ve done a search like this since I took over the creative department. And the search has yielded 3 people.

Perhaps this is because I’m extremely picky, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that there are web designers, and there are Web Designers.

Web Designers understand that theirs is not a service or a hobby or a skill. It is a craft, as much of a craft as painting or writing poetry or making shoes. They understand that a great Web Designer is not twice as good as everyone else – they’re 10-20 times as good.

Web Designers are obsessed with their code – they abhor tools like Dreamweaver. Their chisel is the text editor, and their code is painstakingly written by hand.

Web Designers are students of design – golden ratios, kerning, letting, color theory and the like. They know that unless they understand design the way a painter or sculptor understands design, their work will suffer.

Web Designers are focused first and last on what the user’s needs are. They don’t use tricks or effects for their own sake, but ground their work in methods that make their user’s lives easier.

Web Designers are constantly looking for ways to improve what they do. They were the first to move from tables to divs, the first to validate, the first to design for multiple browsers and media. They were the first to take advantage of AJAX and unobtrusive Javascript to make their sites more intuitive. They were the first to begin stripping everything out of their pages that wasn’t necessary or beneficial. They’re the ones who are constantly learning, stretching, growing.

There will always be plenty of web designers out there, but Web Designers are few and far between.

I’m wrapping up work this weekend on a site for The International Ecotourism Society in Washington. They hold an auction every year that is responsible for the bulk of their operating revenue, and they wanted a site that would get people excited about the vacation possibilities they had to offer. They also wanted to give the organizations donating trips an opportunity to market themselves – the majority of these groups have lofty goals and small budgets, so they appreciate any marketing opportunities they can get.

I was excited to take on the project, but knew my time contraints were limited. I needed a way to quickly get these auctions up.

Enter WordPress.

After attending Scott Kidder’s presentation at Barcamp about using WordPress as a full-featured CMS, I thought I’d give it a try. Turns out it’s surprisingly easy – WordPress comes with a nearly infinite amount of customization possibilities, which made it easy to turn the homepage into something entirely un-blog like. The template conventions are easy to customize, allowing me to build the custom continent pages as well. Pages helped me keep track of constant information, giving me the flexibility of having dynamic and static content on the site.

There was a lot I still wanted to do to some of the internal pages, but everyone’s happy with how it’s turned out. It relies heavily on the beauty of the various locations to do the selling, which makes my job easier.

You can check out the site at www.ecotourismgala.org – see if you can visit the site without getting a travel bug.

If you’re interested in helping promote Ecotourism, I encourage you to become a TIES member – it’s only $60, you get ridiculous discounts on travel to any of their member organizations, and a free subscription to Outdoor magazine. Oh, and you help a fantastic cause.

The premise of electronic stamps is to begin charging people for the privledge of sending email, theory being that spammers would be significantly deterred if they were charged for sending unsolicited mail.

This is a complicated issue. At first glance it seems like a no-brainer – your inbox is cleaner, spam goes down, ISPs make boatloads of cash in the deal as the de facto conduits between parties.

But a number of questions come to my mind. NOTE: When considering the merits of the following questions, keep in mind I’m an idiot.:

1. I’ve yet to use an email tool that knows when an email is coming from a company and when it’s coming from a person. There are numerous implications there – sending personal emails (I can think of dozens of old friends and new friendships that were cultivated are rediscovered via email) to schools sending messages to their students at their email address of preference (hint: not the school’s email account) to notifications from free services like Friendster. These would either become paid transactions (introducing the same friction that keeps me from sending letters to people,) or be relegated to a folder that is collated with all my other junk (forcing me to wade through all the spam anyway.)
2. Spammers have an enormous bag of tricks they can employ to send email – spammers who use an unknowing man or woman’s account to send out messages could potentially be making someone financially responsible for the activity. The need for email fraud litigation or some form of recourse on the part of the victim is now necessary – costs ISPs will now have to take into account.
3. Making a move to RSS would make segmentation and targeting difficult. One of the big tenets of Permission Marketing is for messages be as targeted, personalized and relevant as possible. With email and a simple sign-up form, I have the ability to market to as granular a population as I wish – something the subscriber appreciates and leads to greater revenue opportunities for me. RSS has a ways to go before it can provide the marketer with this power.
4. Are there price controls? AOL, Yahoo! and the like may publish well-known, publicly available information regarding price. But outside of the major mail services, how do I found out what ISP is behind some corporate email address and what their prices are? Wouldn’t I have to essentially ‘opt-in’ to each service? Competitors will certainly be hot on GoodMail’s footsteps, likely with different pricing models, etc. How does regulation of this work?
5. Most importantly – will there be commemerative Elvis birthday e-stamps I can use?

In spite of these drawbacks, I wonder if there’s a happy medium here. The practice of e-postage would undoubtedly decrease spam, but it should be a hoop restricted to businesses. Perhaps tracking IP addresses or domains by volume would help – if a particular domain or IP address/range sends mail that exceeds a certain quota, the ISP begins to charge for it. Just a thought.

A complicated problem, and a viable attempt at solving it. But not without problems of its own.

Unless I want to open a new account.

I needed to open a new checking account and decided to do so online. I live in New York but still use Colorado for my permanent address. When I set up the account I specified Colorado as the state I’d like to bank in. After completing the application you’re told to wait five days, which I did. You’re then told to print out a bunch of paperwork, sign it and mail it away. You’re then told to wait some more.

You’re then told that the bank mysteriously set up your account in Florida, via a middleman in North Carolina. You’re told that they don’t really know why this happened, but as a result, they’ll need to change your application to Colorado. Then they tell you to wait for approval.

Then they tell you to print out the same forms again, sign them and mail them to a new office in the state in which you’re banking. Then you’re told to wait.

You then discover you’ve been approved – not by receiving an approval, but by receiving two emails. One tells you how to order checks (you just have to call with your account number that you don’t know,) and the other tells you how convenient your online banking will be (you just need your account number that you don’t know and you pin that you haven’t selected.)

You then try online chat, but in order to have a conversation you need to know your account number and, you guessed it, your online pin – a second pin number that you also haven’t selected.

Online banking is a beautiful thing, but online account creation leaves a lot to be desired.

Our company had been searching for a project management solution for a long time before I first joined the team. They had evaluated the pros and cons of Microsoft Project and other tools, and had deemed them all too user-unfriendly for their purposes.

In I trotted with the diea that we use Basecamp, then a fairly new tool on the market. It’s brand promise is that project management will be painless – the interface is elegant, it doesn’t take any time to train new users, and it allowed us to keep in contact with our clients on a regular basis. The company embraced the idea, and I looked like a genius.

Fast forward to today – we’ve been using Basecamp for almost a year now, and every project we’ve started (roughly 250 of them) are in the system. As much as possible, we’ve moved away from email communication to posting messages and attachments on Basecamp. It was a little hairy (think 150 late milestones greeting you every morning, 150 to-do’s that someone in the company has to update every day,) but it got the job done.

Until yesterday.

I’ve long had a reputation for doing something first, then asking for permission. Usually it makes me look like the proverbial ‘go-getter.’ But sometimes it blows up in my face.

We had a server that wasn’t being utilized much. It seemed like the perfect repository for all the files we’d be storing in Basecamp (nearly 8 gigs as of last week.) So of course I set this up without asking for permission, without really notifying anyone. Why deal with IT and all the headaches that comes with? I had the access info to set everything up myself – let them deal with the 30 other things they have going on.

Yesterday, they shut down the underutilized server. And every file that’s ever been stored on Basecamp – every design mockup, every revision of copy, every data set – was wiped off the face of the earth.

We were able to back it up after discovering the problem, and we have the 8 gigs of files in safe hands. But clients can’t get to them. And since we used Basecamp, and agreeing to what amounts to a ‘use at your risk’ policy in doing so, we can’t make any modifications to the file paths to represent the new location of said files.

I’ve learned three lessons in the past 24 hours.

1. There is a definite downside to a limited customer service model.
2. As much as it pains you, it probably makes sense to talk with IT before making minor decisions…like where to store every piece of client communication your company has.
3. I’m going to be fired within a week.