Thoughts on Being a Paid Blogger

Jun 29 2011

The aforementioned tweet.

Thoughts?

Below is a collection of articles written recently, mostly by fellow bloggers, about the state of the industry. These are the type of articles that started flooding the internet last week.

Send me any I missed, and I’ll link them up.

Casie Stewart – The Blog Days are Over Now, don’t get me wrong because there IS a difference

Mashable – How Social Media is Changing Paid, Earned and Owned Media

Zach Bussey – Bloggers and PR – The Spiral of Earned Media

Rebecca Levey – Someone’s Getting Paid, Why Aren’t You?

CC Chapman – Nice Guys Get Paid Too

Watch a Ford Focus Park Itself

Jun 10 2011

Tuesday Ford invited me to test drive their 2012 Ford Focus for a day via a car rally.

They partnered us each up, that’s my awesome cohort Ryan Durrell in brown.

(photo by Morsel Photography Hi Jerry! Look I stole more of your photos!)

The day kicked off with Ford saying, “here, go run our car through that slalem course, hard as you can”. Oh reallllly?!?! I got this.

I made that thing fly, and below is me standing on the brakes, and tada, cones are prefectly intact. I told them I was surprised how well it took the corners. Torque vectoring FTW.

Remember that time I did advanced driving school? Exploring a Race Car (video)

Each team was given an iPod Touch to film their experiences, and then Ford handed us our footage from the day on a USB key. So sorry for the poor audio.

Have you ever edited iPod or iPhone footage? Ugh. All that tall footage is tough to work with. And I don’t get it, why wouldn’t Final Cut talk better with .movs? Anyway.

How many horse power? Would you like a cupcake?

I learned that a horse is 14.3 hands high, anything smaller is considered a pony.

We stopped by the Canadian Car Museum , so many nice cars. I will never call them whips :|

Here’s Lauren and I, ha.

Interesting fact – the Focus is 85% of each pound of material used to build the car is recycled material.

Then I gave a little lecture.

Thanks for a great day, Ford!

If you ever need me to test another car on a track, I can do that!

All. Day. Long.

700 MHz Is All The Rage

Jun 5 2011

Tuesday I attended the Canadian Telecom Summitt 2011 #CTS11… Canada’s leading and largest telecommunications industry event.

Media sits at the back.

There were big-name keynote speeches all day, heads of Telus, HP, Rogers, Microsoft, Bell and CRTC people.

This is how I learned we got a new Minister of Industry two weeks ago, Christian Paradis.

Congratulations on your new job! Please protect Canada.

Made some new friends both IRL and online during it, hi guys! Keep in touch.

The most interesting topic of today was the 700 MHz Spectrum.

You can’t just go around blasting signals haphazardly, where and whenever you wish. Depending on what you’re doing, depends on which frequency you transmit/broadcast/communicate on.

Below shows (some) of the MHz spectrum and its allocations. See the band where I added the text, flanked by ‘mobile’ and ‘broadcasting’?

That’s the 700 MHz band, and it’s soon up for sale.

(See the full diagram here)

It was once owned by the broadcasters, and was used to broadcast analog TV.

Now the government owns it, and is about to sell it.

The auction will take place late 2012. The gentleman above is in charge of said auction.

It’s a powerful spectrum which can penetrate walls. This makes it ideal for broadband communication. It also has a great range and can travel long distances; one tower broadcasting 700 MHz can cover 20 miles.

Think of it like… it’s the Ferrari of spectrums.

Tweets and fun facts from today.

Many of the talks re-inforced my theory about how the future internet will be designed, I talk about it in my video, About UBB – Usage Based Billing, fast-forward to 0:31.

Then I invited myself to the stage.