Internet/Media junkie.
Ella
It’s hard not to be happy when in the company of my niece Ella. Amanda and I got to babysit her for an evening back in June. She has grown up so much in just a few short months.
View Pictures: Babysitting Ella on Flickr
Yesterday I saw a guy walking down the street with a huge parrot on his shoulder. No biggie.
Dude walking down the street with a parrot
One of the reasons why I’ve been so busy this year is because of all the big events. Along with three weddings (mine included) comes three bachelor parties. As of this post, we’ve already gone through two of them, and they’ve both been an awesome time. I’ll get to the second one in a future post, but first things first.
Dave was the first to get married this year, so to celebrate we planned a guy’s weekend in Lake Tahoe. I’ve never been there before, but have seen Dave’s video from his trips and it looked amazing. It was as blue and awesome as I imagined which really lent itself towards taking a lot of very blue photographs. I invested in a polarizing filter for my relatively new dSLR camera. The weekend was filled with Kan Jam, wine, hiking and biking. I took a ton of pictures so check out a few below and a couple of sets on Flickr too:
All of Dave’s Bachelor Party in Lake Tahoe (289 photos)
Best of Dave’s Bachelor Party in Lake Tahoe (53 photos)
The guys hiking at Lake Tahoe
Don and his new lobster friend
Wine + Grilling = Perfect Weekend
Angels and Airwaves at 9:30 Club
Back in May – one of my many favorite bands over the last 5 years is Angels and Airwaves. Couple that with my favorite local venue – 9:30 club, and you got a great night. As always, I locked down my position at the back bar right by the VIP area. Good vantage point with easy access to the back bar. That’s just how it goes in my old age. Check out the rest of the pictures here on Flickr.
I love that Gatorade is taking analytics seriously enough to give it its own campaign. Check out their mission control area where they monitor their website, commercials, twitter, and facebook interactions.
via: Mashable
Sometime in the last year or so, my camera started to take pictures slower than I could draw them, and also had developed a line of dead pixels. I think it was mostly because I didn’t take care of it and shoved it in my linty pockets instead of storing it in a case. I hemmed and hawed over what to buy next. Should I finally get a dSLR, or stick with a point and shoot? I decided not to decide. Thanks to a great financing deal at Best Buy, I got a new P&S and my first dSLR. A major factor was our choice of honeymoon spots (more on that later), and thinking of all the great shots I would be missing if I only had my slow P&S.
New P&S: Canon PowerShot SD1400 IS:
I haven’t used this camera extensively yet because I have been mostly messing around with the dSLR. It’s pretty much the same as my previous camera, with a couple more bells and whistles. The most important factor was the HD video recording capability. Like I said, I don’t use it that often, so not much video has been captured either. It’s form is very tiny, so that’s good for transporting, but a little harder to take those self-composed pictures of me and Amanda.
New dSLR: Canon EOS Rebel T1i:
I went against the grain a little bit here by going Canon instead of Nikon, which most of my friends have. I found it to fit better in my hands, and also was used to the menu system. I’m still shooting in all the auto modes, but I’m very pleased with the picture quality, and mostly the speed of capturing a moment. My first “shoot” was for my niece’s month party. It’s hard to get used to lugging around a huge camera, but the pictures make it worth it. Here’s one of my favorites.
Check out the rest of the set on Flickr: Ella’s Month Party
Wow, a lot has gone on in the past 4-5 months since I last posted. I hope to get back to posting a little more regularly, if not just to link to the pictures I’ve been taking in my Flickr photostream.
Since our trip to Horton and Barboursville Wineries:
Ovie - MVP?
Well that’s it for the first entry into summing up the last 4-5 months. Stay tuned for more…
Finally, Spring is here. I was definitely tired of the snow piled up on the streets for weeks. To celebrate, and get out of the house, we took a day trip down towards Charlottesville to visit a couple wineries for the day (Barboursville and Horton). We picked up a few bottles, and look forward to drinking them on our rooftop this summer.
See C-Ville Wineries on Flickr.
Great weather at Barboursville
While going through my baby book at my parents house, I stumbled onto this gem of a picture that my dad snapped. Back in 1987, near the end of the school year, was a great (and soon realized environmentally irresponsible) tradition of launching hundreds of balloons into the air. I think the idea was that if you tied your personal information onto the balloon, when someone found it, they could become your pen pal. Not sure why anyone would want that?
I love finding old pictures like these. Did anyone else have a balloon launch at their elementary school?
Last week I got to go to my first Omniture Summit. For those that don’t know, we use Omniture at work to measure everything about what people do on our site. The summit is a gathering of all the vendors, clients and Omniture employees to figure out what is going on in the web analytics world and what the trends in the industry are. Yeah, it sounds pretty nerdy, but it’s what I do! I gotta say, I enjoyed being immersed in learning and thinking about the different ways real companies are out there solving problems – and how we can do it better. On top of all that I won a business card drawing from one of the sessions (more on that one later).
As you can imagine, the conference costs a decent amount of money, which allows them to bring in great speakers, and entertainment for the week. This year, the big speakers were John Battelle, marketing guru Seth Godin, and The Killers! They were awesome. I hope to go again next year. But enough of that talk – I just wanted to share a few pictures that I took…
Seth Godin speaking at Omniture Summit 2010
View of the mountains from my hotel room
I woke up to this in the morning!
Killers playing at The Rail in SLC
Relaxing on our balcony enjoying the people watching #DauphineSt (at Dauphine Orleans Hotel)
Our neighbor Brenda dropped by and gave us awesome Redskins gear. The hammer smashing the Cowboys helmet is awesome. (Taken with Instagram)
Coming in for landing. (Taken with Instagram at Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD))
Successful media provide an experience, not just bits of information.
In case you missed it in the link to the PDF from my earlier post - One of many spot on insights and predictions provided in a 20 year old memo by Bob Kaiser. Worth a read.
http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/files/kaiser-memo.pdf (PDF)
We’ve learned that, at its best, content is a dynamic blend of smart algorithms, smart networks, and smart people.
- Manage A/B testing program. Coordinate design and technology groups to test user experience and design variations to increase user engagement and revenue.
- Led re-implementation of Omniture through CMS change.
- Recruit, hire and train new analyst talent.
- Manage team responsible for technical implementation of Omniture and other analytics solutions.
- Build automated dashboard reporting
- Analyze user behavior on washingtonpost.com and Slate Group properties and mobile products.
- Work closely with newsroom and business groups, using data to guide decisions and recommend solutions.
- Maintain Omniture SiteCatalyst and provide ongoing training and support for 400+ users.
- Collect and interpret business requirements to ensure that analytics data can successfully facilitate business and product decisions. Work closely with development team to guide Omniture SiteCatalyst implementation for washingtonpost.com, mobile.washingtonpost.com, The Washington Post iPhone/iPad application, slate.com, theroot.com, foreignpolicy.com, and thebigmoney.com.
- Conceptualize, build and automate dashboard reports to guide tactical and strategic editorial and business decisions using Excel and Omniture ReportBuilder.
- Collaborate with editorial and business stakeholders to build forecasts and recommendations to grow audience reach and engagement.
Analyzed site traffic and user engagement for washingtonpost.com and The Slate Group websites (includes slate.com, theroot.com, thebigmoney.com and foreignpolicy.com).
Used SiteCatalyst, DataWarehouse and Discover to segment site traffic.
- Analyzed web site performance, trends and visitor segment data for a network of 30+ websites.
- Implemented Unica and Quantcast tagging on 10+ web properties.
- Published weekly KPI metrics book with analysis to report on the health and status of key sites.
- Provided weekly, monthly, and ad hoc reporting in order to help business owners understand traffic patterns, key site metrics, marketing performance, and opportunities for improvement.
- Evangelized web analytics, data and metrics.
- Provided ongoing training and support for more than 40 users of Unica NetInsight.
- Analyzed the performance of AOL properties (including AOL.com) using Keynote Systems and internal proprietary tools to monitor availability, achieve faster page load times and improved user experience.
- Conducted training for new analysts in the US as well as on-location in Bangalore, India on analysis techniques and data processing.
- Experience with Omniture SiteCatalyst and ComScore.
- Monitored and analyzed performance of AOL Client software throughout beta development cycles as well as post release upgrades and maintenance. Analyzed large volumes of proprietary log file data to uncover disconnect, connect failure and crash rates of US and European software clients.
- Managed and mentored interns.
- Participated in system design and requirement document creation and review for projects and reporting requirements.
- Promoted from Associate Systems Analyst and Systems Analyst.