Two weeks ago I jumped in over my head on a new project. Sarah Cooley had approached me about helping out with her show What’s It All About on the producing level. I was just finishing up redesigning New York Tech Scene and looking for a new challenge, so I agreed. I had tentatively agreed to re-design the site for the show, produce the show and edit the show. It’s a tall order, but I’m very happy with the results.

We film the show at the Ambush TV studio. Ambush just made a splash for producing Gary Vaynerchuk’s new show Obsessed with Samantha Ettus. Tim Kress-Spatz has been working with us to get the show off the ground and is an all around great guy to work with. Tim has made the production of the show a breeze, and I’m looking forward to doing more with with Ambush and Tim in the future. I’d also like to acknowledge Stephen Klenert and the company Atlantic Metro for hosting the site adnd helping us get running using WordPress mu. Without Stephen’s support, I’d still be confused about how WPmu is set up.

In the future I will go over the challenges that designing a video theme for WordPress presents, but for right now I just want to announce that the site is done and the first relaunched episode is complete. Check out What’s It All About for the full effect.

[DESCRIPTION] [JOB TITLE] with [experience] in [TYPE OF COMPANY]. [ACCOLADE] in [QUANTIFYABLE JOB SPECIFIC TASK]. [proficient] in/with [LIST OF JOB DEPENDANT APPLICATIONS AND TASKS].

The italicized words can be substituted for synonyms of those words. Perhaps I should write out a whole resume’s worth of these. It might prove helpful to someone.

I’m not sure if this is a sign that the two shows could not compete against each other any longer, but I think it’s good news. I’m sure it’s a bitch to the companies that want to be involved in both to trek out to Vegas twice in two months. It doesn’t sound like a burden until everyone gets back to their respective homes and has to return to work.

This means there’s one major event to attend, which is a good thing for the industry and it’s a good thing for both conferences. Had it not been for the merger, I would have expected to see attendance drop off heavy this year, and with it sponsorships and exhibitors. Everyone was talking about how this years events were on a smaller scale, and this will help draw interest in what would have been a down year.

Now if we could only move this thing out of Vegas.

If you want to see the site, check out the Rob Blatt newsletter at www.robblatt.com/newsletter

I adhere to a strict “Don’t be a jerk” policy. I’m not going to spam you. I’m not going to sell your email address.

The simple solution was to create a second WordPress installation in a /newsletter subdirectory. After trying a few different methods of building the newsletter from inside of robblatt.com, I decided that it was too much hassle to try and exclude the posts from the RSS feeds and main page of the blog without screwing up the code.

Once I installed WordPress, I uploaded and activated my usual set of plugins (I’ll post about what those are later) and went about creating the homepage. I have a tendency to make things big, so I wanted the form field to be giant, which provided to be a little difficult because the FeedBurner code has inline styles, so I had to remove the inline styles that I was able to change and incorporate them to the CSS. The ones I wasn’t abel to accomplish in CSS, I left inline. That was the width of the input field. If I changed the width in the code for the form, it worked because of how the code is structured.

There was three different input fields in the code. Modifying any of the “input” values breaks the form, so I inserted the “width=600″ to make the form wide enough. The height was determined by the text size inside the field.

Once the site was working, the next was to use FeedBurner’s RSS to email service to send the updates. The downsides of using the service is that the emails go out at a scheduled point each day instead of instantly and a lack of styling options. I can live with those, as the blog is minimally designed and these are newsletter emails, not blog posts. I should be planning them out.

In review:

1. new WordPress installation at /newsletter
2. FeedBurner’s FeedSmith
3. Ask your friends to sign up!

Creators – this is the easiest to describe. These are the people who are making media in some form or fashion. TV or radio shows, streaming media, downloadable media,blogging, microblogging, etc.

Consumers – You are consuming media by reading it on a website, watching it on TV, listening to it in your car, etc. This is appointment based media, appointments in time or location.

Deleters – Downloading files and taking them with you. This includes time shifting as well. Deleters are becoming more and more popular.

I encourage you to listen to the show at www.createconsumedelete.com or subscribe to the show on iTunes.

This is the first of a few shows I’ll be launching in the coming months. I’ll let you know right here on the blog.

Is anyone else blogging as a professional and maintaining two blogs, one personal one business? How do you create the balance between the two?

I’ll also be posting about my San Francisco trip soon, including trips to the offices of Pandora and Tube Mogul.

The president of the company addressed the staff around 4:00, but I was on the road to my parents house for Rosh Hashana dinner. Amber and I stopped at a 7-11 for sunflower seeds, and I checked my iPhone and saw an email titled “It’s Official” from my boss. He read a statement to the staff that would go on to be published in today’s paper.

I’m going to hold back self publishing my thoughts about why the company went out of business and give myself a little distance. Observations are a different story. I was unhappy working there since the original “we might close” announcement, with more resentment growing each day. I watched my co-workers spend less and less time caring about the product they were producing and more about checking Linked In and Gawker. Gawker seemed to know more than we did about the situation.

The original name for thise post was going to be “Fuck That Place”, but then I decided to pull back.

Has anyone ever gone through this before? Knowing that the company will most likely go out of business and even the bosses say “There is still some hope” when asked about going out of business by the press?

The first is turning Chris Brogan’s ebook Personal Branding for the Business Professional into an audiobook. I’ve been very excited about this, and Chris has released it at his blog on ChrisBrogan.com I’m the reader of the book, and I did all the production. I’m extremely proud of the work I did and the end result.

Chris Brogan’s Personal Branding for the Business Professional audiobook

The second is that I’ve finally redesigned my business site for a return to working for myself. I’m still with the New York Sun, but I am now accepting work through Blattcave Media Productions once more. Please let me know what you think of the site and any feedback is welcomed.

Blattcave Productions

If you have a job for someone like me, don’t be shy about sending me an e-mail or calling me on the phone.

Someone has offered to pay for usage of one of my photographs. It’s not exactly one of my best, nor did I use a camera for it. I took it with my old Motorola e815 (my review of the Motorola e815) before Amber and I were engaged i October of 2005.

The usage was for a real estate agency trying to sell condos in my town. Here are their restrictions: They have the rights to use it online only for up to 1,000 impressions.

If they had asked to use it for free, I would have given them the rights to do so. I haven’t yet put all my images under a Creative Commons License, but I intend to do so. Instead, they offered pay, so I took it.

In related news, someone asked Amber to review a book for them on her blog The Amber Show! I think that is way cool, cause it means that someone cared enough about her blog to think that their book was a good fit for the audience that she’s cultivated over time. I’m proud of her for that.

Secondly, if you know a friend who just started working at Gartner in Stamford, CT, you can let me know too.

Thanks.

It’s pretty exciting, I’m going to be essentially a startup within a newspaper. They have no podcasts at the moment, no studio, no microphones, no nothing. This is where I come in. My official title is going to be “podcast producer”, though I’ll tell people “online media producer” to save me the conversation I had with my mother twice about what a podcast is.

So Starting September 10th, I stop freelancing and start with my “real job”. No, I’m not going to tell you what Manhattan based newspaper it’s for, cause I don’t do that.

I figure the least I can do is tell someone how terrible of an employee you’d be.

You guys are the best! Thanks!

I always had the idea that I wanted to live and work in New York City as an audio engineer. Instead of pursuing the career in Manhattan, I went to Connecticut to intern. I did this for a few reasons, the first was the appeal of winning awards was something I liked. And win awards I did. Two Emmys (eleven nominations) and an Oscar. Not bad for a 25 year old just starting out, right? The second was that I had heard from alumni that their interning wasn’t so great with the big studios and they wished they went to smaller places. I didn’t know too many people that got a job at their internship, but I knew plenty of people who parlayed that internship into jobs elsewhere. The third was that there was no interview, no need to send a resume. I want to UMass Lowell, and the guy giving the internship did too, so he trusted the program (and me).

So I moved to Connecticut and started working my internship. It was pretty awesome. I even pulled a 100 hour week, which is something I will be able to look back on and say “never again”. I had some help from my parents for my living expenses, because my internship didn’t allow me to hold another job. I fully expected to move after the internship back to Long Island to my parents house for a bit, then up to Boston. I was going to try and get a job working at Bose in Framingham, rekindle Blatt is the New Black and go to the Monster Factory to train to be a professional wrestler.

Don’t mock. These were real goals.

Instead I got a job at my internship, to my surprise. I knew I was a pretty good worker, but I had accidentally damaged an operating system to the point that the computer had to be wiped completely clean and we had to start fresh (we didn’t lose much work though) and had screwed up lunch orders more than a few times. My Massachusetts and Long Island inevitability were thrown out the window and I started looking for freelancing work.

Fast forward to today, I own a house, I’m married and I have two dogs, thanks to my freelancing work. But I’m always looking for more. A few few weeks ago I responded to an ad on CraigsList that’s a pretty good lead. I’m going for my third and final interview tomorrow for the job. A job that will pull me in close to the top, and potentially move me into the city. Nervous isn’t the word for how I feel about it.

Wish me luck.

Direct Download
The Official Site
The RSS feed

nickname: Jesus

Wonderful.

Instead of watching the awards, I made some oatmeal with Amber and tried to teach our new dog Leeloo some tricks. She didn’t learn any yet, net even her name.

I’m Leeloo!

Don’t let the photo fool you, she’s smaler than Matty. She’s a skinny little thing. Her and Matty having trouble seeing eye to eye at times (mostly when Matty wants to play) because she’s from Puerto Rico and probably doesn’t speak English like he does. I’ll give her full story later, because the important part is that we have two dogs and Matty has a sister to play with! She’s sneezing a whole lot, maybe it’s cause she stinks and needs a bath real bad.

In college it was the same concept, but I got a clean start every few months becase I had to clear my stuff out. Heres how it would go:

September: organized drawers
October: Less use, but still kinda sorted
November: starting to fill up with whatever’s around on my desk
December: there are things in the drawers that I haven’t seen since September. What does a musician need a staples for anyway?

This would also repeat in January, February, March, April and early May. At the end of the semesters I’d empty the drawers into a box or a bag and then these things would be sorted once I was moving back to my parents house. I think there was a semester that I never even unpacked one of these bags or boxes. I remember dumping stuff out once I was back and just putting it back where it was.

When I moved into my first apartment, I vowed to make a change. My new desk would have no drawers at all and I would be forced to throw things away or put them where they should actually belong. If it didn’t fit into a cup, it didn’t belong on my desk. I kept it pretty clean for a while. The one difference in this desk was that it had tiers. A simple difference which changed a whole lot of the desk. I couldn’t move the monitor or the speakers because they had their own spot thanks to how the desk was sengineered. I’m sure it works great fr other people, but damn it did NOT work for me. On all the tiers crap was shoved into anywhere that I could get stuff, and on top of that, I bought drawers to go near the desk. Defeated!

Amber’s computer died and she pretty much left her usual computer spot in favor of my old cluttered crappy desk. I’ve been floating around the house thanks to my laptop, and I do most of my work from home from the comfort of the breakfast nook or the big yellow comfy couch. My back isn’t all that happy about it, but I work faster now that I’m not buried in crap. But I can’t just do this around the house forever, the old desk sucks and the veneer on the MDF is peeling off and getting kinda gross, so that thing needs to get craigslisted or freecycled before I just burn it to the ground.

So I’m looking at a new desk again. This time I’m thinking that I’m just going to get a very simple no tiered, no drawers desk. Amber’s got one and I love the idea of it. So this time, I swear it will be different.

Possibly not, but we’ll see.