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What kind of impact are you making?

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Business

John Moore over at Brand Autopsy has an interesting series of posts going on rightnow that focus on the impact that business are making. The legacies they are creating - or not creating - aren’t really thought about. This can apply to anyone, including you and I. How would you answer this about yourself or what you do?:

Does [insert your brand] provide such a unique product and customer experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist? Does [insert your brand] treat its employees so astonishingly well that those workers would not be able to find another employer to treat them as well? Does [insert your brand] forge such unfailing emotional connections with its customers that they would fail to find another company that could forge just as strong an emotional bond?

Some deep thinking there. What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment.


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Video: David Allen on Getting Things Done, GTD

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business, Videos

In this day and age, getting things done is getting harder due to the massive increase in the number of things that grab your attention on the Internet. David Allen is the expert on GTD, or “getting things done” - above you will find a fantastic talk he gave at on the subject. This goes out to everything with an overflowing email inbox, tons of open apps on your desktop, or those suffering from continuous partial attention in this Web 2.0 age. If you have 45 minutes, check out the video above. It’s worth it.


Scoble on Techmeme gaming, I’m still unexcited about the site

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business

My friend Robert Scoble put up a couple of Seesmic videos on how to reverse-engineer Techmeme. For anyone who doesn’t know, Techmeme is a fringe site that aggregates technology news from blogs. The more a story is talked about, the more likely it will appear on Techmeme. And the more authoritative the people talking about the story, the higher they will appear on the Techmeme home page. I watch both videos in their entirety, and enjoyed them. The thing I just am still missing is why it’s important to be on Techmeme.

Gear Live network sites have been on Techmeme quite a few times. We didn’t really see any significant boost in traffic or anything else. To some people, it’s almost as if it’s a game in and of itself - “I wanna be on the top of Techmeme!”. Me? I’d rather be the top Google search result for that story. Techmeme is so temporary. The other thing that gets me is the weight put on sites as far as how authoritative they are is done by a human being, Gabe Riviera. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Gabe at all. I’ve met him and he seems to be a cool guy. However, the way sites/bloggers are ranked means that people are going to get missed.

There very well could be someone who writes better than, say, Mike Arrington, about a certain topic. But until Gabe hears of that person, Mike is still considered number one? It would seem to me that Techmeme should have a paid staff of people who rate and rank things, almost Mahalo-style. A group of 20 people is way more efficient (but still not efficient enough) than one guy doing the ranking. You can say that the larger group of people that Gabe uses is the bloggers who are regularly featured on Techmeme - but really, if that is your opinion, you just aren’t realizing how much of an echo chamber the blogosphere has become.

In any event, I’d still recommend checking out Robert’s videos if only to learn how algorithms work.


Heather Flanagan Interviews Todd Bishop

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business, Videos

Here in Seattle, we have two major newspapers - The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Todd Bishop writes about technology issues for the Seattle PI, and I’ve run into him a couple of times at a few technology conferences, and he also came to the first Seattle Mind Camp event that we put on. Heather Flanagan I met at the second Mind Camp event, and found her to be hilarious. We still look forward to working with her very soon on a project or two. In the meantime, I came across this video interview that Heather did with Todd, and figured I’d share it, mostly because my name was mentioned at the start of the interview, which caught me off guard! Either way, this is an interesting look at how people in the traditional media industry see how things are progressing now that we have so many independent people doing news on the web.


Gear Live redesign coming soon…

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business

A few people were wondering why I’ve been quiet here on the blog for the last couple of months. Truth is, I’ve been hard at work on a complete redesign of the entire Gear Live network, which is finally near completion. We should have it rolled out within the next two weeks, and the team that’s been working on it is very happy with the results. We think our readers are going to love it. Check back soon to see it in action, and let us know what you think after checking it out.


Catch Me On PodTech’s Marketing Voices

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business

I did an interview a few days ago with Jennifer Jones, the host of PodTech’s Marketing Voices. We talked about the future of journalism, and what we referred to as “the death of print.” For those not in the know, major companies are starting to approach bloggers more and more for coverage of their products. Heck, at , we recorded almost 200 episodes of The Bleeding Edge, something I am almost certain no other “traditional” media outlet came close to doing. 

Read More | Marketing Voices: Andru Edwards and the Death of Print via PodTech


Grapes on a Plane Video Montage

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business, Personal, Videos


Click To Play

So, a couple of months ago I was one of the speakers at the 2006 Blog Business Summit in Seattle, WA. As a thank you to some of the speakers and better performing affiliates, Steve Broback and company flew us over to Washington’s wine country, courtesy of a couple of jets from Greenpoint Technologies. As always, we had our cameras in tow, and put together the montage video that you see above.


Gear Live’s The Bleeding Edge Show Wins At The Vloggies!

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business, Technology


Click To Play

I have no idea how we pulled this off, especially with stiff competition like Diggnation, Command-N, Systm, CrankyGeeks, and others - but we did it. Gear Live’s technology video podcast, The Bleeding Edge, won the award for Best Technology Video Blog. This is truly amazing, and an honor, and let’s us know that despite all the silliness and fun we are having doing what we do, there is a movement happening, and we are honored to be a part of it. Check the video above for a nice, truncated recap of The Vloggies. Oh, and yes - we couldn’t make it, and we didn’t send a video acceptance speech because, quite frankly, we didn’t think we would win!

Read More | Gear Live via The Vloggies


I’m Speaking At The Blog Business Summit (Or Halley Suitt Makes Me Blush)

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Blogging, Business

So, I will be speaking into two or three sessions at the Blog Business Summit here in Seattle. The event takes place on October 25-27th, and should be a good time networking and sharing philosophies on this space. Over on their speaker page, they have the hot profile for me:

Andru EdwardsAndru Edwards is the CEO of Gear Live Media, a weblog publishing company which contains some of the most popular technology and pop culture blogs on the Web, including it’s flagship blog, Gear Live. Through his passion for both writing and the subject matter, Andru took his blogs from a part-time hobby to a full-time successful company. Andru and his blogs have been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, KOMO 4 News, Q13 News, KING5, and NPR, among others.

The company has also jumped into the podcasting and videocasting space, most recently with their technology show, The Bleeding Edge, and upcoming movie review show, FilmCrunch (site launch soon.)

Gear Live Media is also the host of the biannual Seattle Mind Camp event - a self-organizing, digitally minded, entrepreneur-driven, overnight Seattle confab which brings together the areas most creative, passionate, and smartest people.

Of course, Halley Suitt gave me way too much credit in her post where she breaks down what she knows about each speaker:

Andru Edwards—Andru is just too hot. He was seated next to me at this amazing surf and turf dinner we had at Microsoft Search Champ Camp ... did he know how much he was turning me on ... with his brilliant mind I mean, don’t get the wrong idea. I think he was digging the turf.

Kind words - much appreciated, Halley.

If you want to hit up this event, you can sign up here and use coupon code AESM06 to save $100 off of registration.

Read More | Blog Business Summit

BootCamp Kills My MacBook Pro

Posted by Andru Edwards
Categories: Business, Technology

Alright, I had totally forgot that my boy caught this on camera. I spoke a bit about how BootCamp totally wrecked my MacBook Pro - while covering E3, no less - with the end result being that Apple totally stepped up to the plate to help me out. Check out the video above that Chris put on YouTube, capturing a portion of my tech support call to Apple while sitting in the E3 media room.


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