Her passion and enthusiasm reminded me of my favorite quote of all time, courtesy of Hugh MacLeod:

The market for something to believe in is infinite.

Closely related to this sentiment from Seth Godin:

What marketers actually sell: Not powder or chemicals or rubber or steel or silicon or talk or installations or even sugary water.

What marketers sell is hope.

The reason is simple: people need more. We run out. We need it replenished. Hope is almost always in short supply.

Hope, something to believe in. Sounds trite if you leave it at that. But think about the legions of people who are fans of successful Web entrepreneurs like Brian Clark (Copyblogger/Thesis fame), or follow the various prophets of the affiliate marketing industry. Or religiously read and watch the rock stars of the social media world. All of those people are looking for (and buying into) hope - hope that they too, through simple tactics and determined effort, can create the career or business they always dreamed of.

In the same vein, my lunch companion is looking to buy into some of that variety of hope. It’s what I, as a marketer and a budding consultant, am really in the business of selling. I’m selling to her and others the hope that I can make their lives easier, their business more successful, their brands more famous.

As I continue to (quietly so far) spin up my own independent consulting shop, I need to remember this truth and weave it into everything I do, say, and offer to prospective clients and partners.

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Of late however, Eddie Bauer has been pushing something more along the lines of the rugged mountaineer:

That is the result of the launch of First Ascent, a new label for technical mountaineering wear launched under the auspices of Eddie Bauer / Whittaker Mountaineering. Having long been familiar with EB, and feeling reasonably familiar with the mountaineering credentials of the Whittaker clan, seeing the pairing at first was jarring. But here’s where I think EB is getting this right in terms of establishing their validity in the mountaineering field and launching First Ascent:

1. Tapping into a Surprisingly Deep Heritage
Who knew? It seems Eddie Bauer has been involved in expedition mountaineering for decades, though they let that aspect of their brand atrophy in recent years for whatever reason. I love how they focus on the 55 years of mountaineering history with a peak-by-peak timeline and close association with some of the sports greatest names and accomplishments.

2. Outstanding Partnership
Especially if you’re from the Pacific Northwest, the Whittaker’s are something of an institution when it comes to climbing peaks. From Jim (first employee and ex-CEO of REI, first American to summit Mt. Everest, etc) and Lou Whittaker (250+ summits of Mt. Rainier) to Whittaker Mountaineering and RMI Guides, you’d be hard pressed to find a more established family name in the business.

3. Compelling Uniqueness
Instead of churning out yet another brand of technical clothing, they went for an angle. Rugged simplicity, in effect, tying deeply into a close association with some of the biggest names in elite expedition guiding using a “Guide Built” idea. This is summarized by a nice quite from yet another Whittaker, Peter, on the First Ascent site: “What can we get rid of without compromising functionality? Bells and whistles are just extra weight. We won’t carry them.”

4. Excellent Use of Social Media
YouTube channel, Twitter feed, Facebook page, blog with open comments, all there, all regularly updated with interesting content, and all centered around a powerful story. (Bonus points for using Wordpress on the blog and actually crediting the theme in the footer)

5. Telling that Powerful Launch Story
Social media without interesting content is just so much fluff, and the team at First Ascent avoided that charge in style. They outfitted their team of guides with the full set of First Ascent gear, and sent them on up Everest, sharing the story continually through their various social media channels. The “Everest Dispatch” video blog on YouTube is a fantastic means of tying the product and brand with that ultimate challenge in mountaineering, and do it in a very real and direct way.

Combine everything, and you have a great example of an established brand reinventing themselves and building credibility with a new audience. The are building an appeal to customers who might hit Eddie Bauer for those casual friday looks, but otherwise turn to REI, North Face, and elsewhere for their weekend excursion and play gear.

That makes no sense. You’re not trying to save the communication medium — you’re trying to save the messages. You don’t care whether the messages gets out through dots-and-dashes on a telegraph or by voice through a telephone. You just care that messages still can get through in the most efficient, most desired manner.

The tax break is fairly criticized as a political and largely symbolic stunt, which will in practice save a minimal amount of jobs and probably fail to save the newspapers themselves. However the larger point is exactly as Danny points out - it completely misses the point. Newspapers are in the content business, using presumably valuable content focusing on news and commentary of local or national importance to drive ad sales. They just so happen to deliver that content by printing it up on large roll sheets of paper and dropping it on your doorstep.

Other organizations, such as the new SeattlePI.com, Huffington Post, and countless other national, local, and niche Web sites, provide similar content, they just use a new and radically different means of getting it to the reader. Yet those organizations don’t qualify for the tax break.

Why? That old bullshit about quality, standards, and accountability.

Todd Bishop of TechFlash interviews Washington House majority leader Lynn Kessler:

“Anybody who’s blogging, God love ‘em, they can say and do whatever they want, because they have no liability or responsibility for what they say, because they are not held to any standard, and they shouldn’t be — they’re just individuals editorializing, if you will,” she said.

“The actual newspaper reporting is meant to be — and I know people argue about whether it’s biased or not biased — but it’s meant to get information to the public, and to make sure that our government is held accountable for decisions that government makes, and that the stories that are written are accurate, and they can get this information out to a broad section of our community,” she said.

This is simply a rehash of the cliched dismissal of people who use blogging as their communication medium as unemployable nuts who pound keyboards from their mom’s basement. I honestly thought we had begun to work past that, both with the rise in high quality and professional online operations and the many examples of how simply dropping something in a print newspaper does not automatically ensure accuracy, professionalism, or lack of bias. But as newspapers continue to flail economically it’s being trotted out again and again as an argument for why print publications serve a public need that online publications cannot.

I don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh on print newspapers, and certainly not on the many great journalists plying their trade via that medium. I grew up on a daily diet of the NY Times and the San Jose Mercury News, with the Sunday tradition of papers spread around the kitchen table, the whole family grabbing a section. They are part of the cultural lore, which in part explains why so many people refuse to recognize the reality that print newspapers are on the short end of a technology and business model revolution.

The business of packaging content on inky paper and dropping it suburban doorsteps may be dying, but journalism is alive and thriving. It’s just doing it online. Legislative efforts like this one may satisfy a sense of civic responsibility and tap into some nostalgic longing, but they ignore that plain and simple reality.

What remained was my own blog - 1000+ posts and several years in the making, I’ve been so busy of late that I haven’t focused on updating it with any regularity. So instead of presenting a nice, fresh, clean and informative home page for future clients/employers Googling me, it looked rather unfocused and stale.

While I was, and remain, a happy user of the Thesis theme, I set out to scour the Wordpress theming community for professional, clean, and modern themes focused on presenting an online resume of sorts. What I found was lacking. If you are a Web designer, artist, or photographer, you are set with dozens of high quality portfolio themes. Beyond that, not much was available.

So I turned back to the trusty Thesis to see if I could bend it to my will. Armed with the Thesis Openhook plugin (simple a MUST have to get past the myriad hook options in the theme framework), I set about on a two day redesign with a few goals and limitations in mind:

• It had to be clean, uncluttered, and easy to find information for prospective employers and clients.
• It did not have to function as a “sell” site for any particular consulting services.
• It did have to reflect my online activity around sharing, Tweeting, and so on.
• It did not need to include 1000+1 widgets, even those focused on traffic building and navigation (similar posts, most popular posts, etc) - building traffic is not my goal on this blog (elsewhere, different story).
• It did need to reflect a bit of personality.
• It did not need to include heavy graphic design as while I’m not incompetent when it comes to PhotoShop, let’s just say I’m no artist.

Version 1 is what you’re looking at now, if you’ve clicked through from your favorite feed reader. Version 2 will include a few enhancements, such as use of the Feature Box to summarize my bio + skills for anyone hitting the home or individual post pages, and a few sidebar tweaks.

If you’ve ever attempted to heavily customize Thesis, you are intimately familiar with the Custom CSS file. You’re also probably familiar with the challenges of jumping back and forth between the core style.css and the custom CSS file to understand what styles, elements, and attributes exist and can be modified. Here’s how I approach customizing Thesis CSS:

• Open the custom.css file in Coda from Panic, my Web development tool of choice for OSX.
• Open the core style.css file in CSSEdit, to quickly find and understand the default styles.
• When I want to edit something, I copy/paste the original style into custom.css, *always* labeling it (e.g. with /* navbar */) so I can quickly reference changes I’ve made later on.
• Open up two browser windows or tabs, one logged into the Thesis admin screens - as you likely will end up tweaking something, not least being column widths - and one on the public view of your site (either a locally hosted version, or a live version).
• Side note, if you are doing a locally hosted version for development, on a Mac take a look at MAMP to run your own Apache, MySQL, and PHP instances on your laptop. Makes things incredibly easy.

I have yet to figure out how to make CSSEdit’s live preview functionality work with the custom.css idea Thesis uses, so if anyone has a suggestion for making that simpler, I’m all ears.

Some other random tips and tricks I used:

• You can make use of “border-top” to create some nice non-graphic dividers. Just edit the #sidebars (and #sidebars_1 and #sidebars_2) and #content boxes, or wherever else you’d like them.
• Edit your nav bars - one thing I don’t like about the proliferation of Thesis is everyone seems to use the default nav bars. 9/10 times you can ID if a site uses Thesis by looking at the navigation styling - that and the siebar default fonts, which are very distinct.
• To create a nice “sharing” live list in your sidebar, try out the Lifestream plugin from iBegin. Easy as pie, this one. You can see all my active plugins here.
• To find great color schemes, look up Adobe’s Kuler community. I love this, and am generally bad with colors, so it’s a life saver.
• Try out negative margins to break out of the box, so to speak. I used a negative 50 px setting on margin-top, inserted as part of a custom style in the “Before Sidebars” Openhook section to “float” my social network buttons into the header. I’m sure this is a bad idea for some technical reason, but it’s fun to play with.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look. My goal is to refine this further to present on any entry page a clear sense of who I am, given the purpose of this blog. For now, on to other Web projects.

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One of my side projects of late has been to learn more about SEO, SEM, and how affiliate programs work. One flavor of affiliate site is the niche content store, which can drop in product listings from any number of sources, though the most popular are eBay and Amazon.

Along with this, I wanted to understand a bit more about how to customize the Thesis theme and build out my CSS skills along the way.

My first effort - MechGarage.com, your source for Robotech and Battletech books, games, collectibles, DVDs, and more! A big disclaimer - if I make a dime off this, great, though this is part of my self-education on all the above, so I’m certainly not expecting anything wild (or anything at all, really). And yeah…Robotech, BattleTech, I’m a geek, but “they” say it’s best to pick a niche you know something about and that isn’t over-saturated.

Leaving aside the SEO and SEM stuff, and focusing on how I built the site, some notes on what I used:

• Amazon aStore via the Affiliates program. Set up the page with a no sidebars template, and dropped in a fairly standard store. The one thing I wrestled with is should I create multiple instances of the store and drive navigation via the Thesis site nav bar? Or, as I have so far, rely on the aStore navigation. The latter is a bit cleaner, but it doesn’t allow for category-specific permalinking to guide visitors - say if they want “books” only.
• iTunes Affiliate Program - set this up via LinkShare, fairly straighforward. The “iTunes Robotech store” on my site is pretty basic as I haven’t had a chance to style anything and the relevant listings are pretty slim as is. But, again, an experiment.
• eBay Listings: While Amazon had the bulk of relevant products, the niche subjects lend themselve to collectibles, where eBay excels. So the “BattleTech and Robotech collectibles” store I created as a sort of add-on to the “main” Amazon aStore shopping experience. To drop those listings in, I used the phpBay Pro Wordpress plugin, which though it actually costs $, is extremely simple to use (one line of code dropped into any WP page or post) and flexible. I really wish there was a simple way to create a blended store with both Amazon and eBay listings, but so far, no dice.
• Other plugins I found handy? The Amazon Auto Link plugin from Joost de Valk, Thesis OpenHook (never install without it!), and the usual smattering of stats and customization plugins.

If I really wanted to mak any money off this site, I can think of 100-odd things offhand I’d need to do - more natural nav structure, better use of promotions in the main content and sidebar, some simple guides around grouped content, and so on. I’d also have to step up with a load of SEO and SEM work, which I’ll likely plug around with as I learn more and look to test out ideas.

All in all, a fun learning project so far and the first of several small side projects to come.