John Raymond

Yesterday I saw a tweet about this awesome youtube wedding dance video (watch it below). Yesterday afternoon it had about 300,000 views; today and it had over a million and the couple was on the Today Show. It’s amazing the power of the internet and the viral video. Ironically enough, I think the person who could benefit the most out of this is Chris Brown. Most of you know about the horrible and disturbing encounter between Chris and Rihanna last year that sent Rihanna to the hospital. I was so sickened that I couldn’t bare to listen to Brown’s hit song “Forever.”

However, because of the youtube wedding dance video, the song makes me think of this great dance and the amazing things that come with marriage and love. It makes me wonder if the millions of other people who have viewed the video feel the same way. In a time where Brown has attempted to rebuild his career by publicly apologizing, this could potentially help him out tremendously.

Given that, will we see this tactic used by marketers in the future trying to rebuild a client’s reputation? Do you think this helps or hurts Chris Brown?

UPDATE:
As of the last few days, the song “Forever” has been in the 10 ten on the itunes top songs. Before the video came out, it was nowhere to be found in the top 100. You now wonder if it becomes a staple song at weddings going forward along with the Electric Slide, YMCA, and Shout.

Wordpress plugins are very powerful add-ons to the wordpress bloging software. If you’ve heard of them and aren’t sure what they are read my previous post about Wordpress Plugins.

Gistinfo.org uses a few of my favorite plugins including the event calendar and photo gallery plugins

It’s amazing to me what extra functionality you can add to your wordpress web site instantly. Here are a few of my favorite plugins:

Contact Form 7

This plug-in instantly set up forms on your web site without knowing html.  It also allows you to place the forms anywhere on your web site/blog including on the side bar.  It’s very easy to set up and implement.

NextGen Gallery

This is a photo gallery plugin that will allow you organize and display photos on your web site.  The plugin uses lightbox as well.  It also allows you to add images to a sidebar on your page

Events Calendar

Instantly implement a calendar to your site.   I’ve mostly used it to highlight upcoming events for different clients.  You can also list your next 5 upcoming events on the sidebar of your site as well.  When you add an event, you have the option of creating a post for it as well.  This will help with search engines and giving more details on the event.

All in one SEO

Getting people to your site is key.  This plugin allows you to control the meta data information for each page and post on your website.

IntenseDebate

This is a plugin that I’m going to test very soon.  I’ve seen it on other blogs and I like that it visually shows the reply from the author back.  Again, I haven’t had a chance to really play around with it, so if you have some feedback on this, it would be great

tweetmeme or tweetsuite

Essential functionality that records a visitors comment and allows them to tweet about your blog post to their friends and followers on twitter.  I highly recommend this one.

I’ve used most of them on this web site: http://www.gistinfo.org.

Check it out and let me know what your favorite wordpress plugins are.

I’ve been working more and more with wordpress lately. Wordpress is open source software, meaning that the software and the code to the software are available for free. Because of this, it has a community of programmers around the world developing plugins or add-ons to the basic software. Most are available for free. I’ve been building out blogs and web sites using wordpress for several reason, one of them being the plugins available.

Wordpress plugins are extra features that you can install to supplement the base software. You can find a whole library of them here or by googling wordpress plugins. There are plugins you can instantly implement that took weeks and months to develop 7 years ago. Read about a few of my favorite wordpress plugins so you can get a better understanding of the power of wordpress.

I’m looking forward to presenting at Virginia Marti College of Art and Design in Cleveland, Ohio this Friday. I’ll be giving a seminar to the students and faculty about how to set up a blog and the importance of having one if you are a college student. I will discuss my approach when I started  job searching at the end of grad school last year. I treated myself as a product. Since I did a bunch of different things (not just designing web sites), I needed some way to break down and document all the different things that I was working on.

I used a blog (different than this one) to showcase the projects I was working on in school. At the time I was working on a number of school projects that included a variety of things such as search engine optimization, css, and iMovie and Final Cut Pro. I made each project a post and talked about my role on each project. 

The result gave potential employers more information on each project (more than just a picture of what I had done) and actually drove more traffic to my site (because of the way I had utilized the blog and keywords.  For current students, they could talk about each class or a specific project in each class that they worked on and talk about what they had learned from it.

This approach applies to pretty much everyone. Whether you are a business or a college student, structuring your blog appropriately, may help you achieve your goal.