The Agency Outsider

I Want a Cookie

There was a story going around at Syracuse University in the 1980′s about how a student had reprogrammed the mainframe computer to block all access. Whenever someone tried to log in, it would simply return a screen that said “I want a cookie”. This frustrated the faculty and nobody would confess as to who hacked [...]

Do You Know Your Copyrights?

Copyright law existed as an obscure and abstract issues for all but content creators and publishers for most of its existence dating back to 1709 when book publishers in Great Britain petitioned Queen Anne for the privilege of a monopoly on the work they published. But today copyright law touches each of us every single [...]

Tim Talks at Barcamp Nashville 2010

I had the extreme pleasure of driving down to Nashville last week to deliver a presentation on “Making the Jump from WordPress to Joomla. The gist of my talk is that WordPress is a great blogging platform, and many times it’s the perfect platform for a tightly focused web publishing project. But when it comes [...]

Exploit the Restrictions of News Writing to Create Link Bait

Monday’s news brought the world an evocative story about a painting by 19th Century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini discovered in the Paris flat of a woman who locked the door in the late 1930′s and never returned. The painting went undiscovered for more than 70 years until her death at the age of 91. Do [...]

Business Branding on Facebook-The Right Way

Today’s most popular social networking site has been suffering from growing pains, mostly surrounding the idea of how to monetize their audience of one half billion members. That’s about 5,000 times the number of people who watch the Superbowl, so you would think that capitalizing on that audience share through advertising would work, but it [...]

How Low Does the Bar Go?

I was browsing my Facebook account on my iPhone over my morning espresso and spotted a video that a friend had linked to. My thought was “wow, this is really viral worthy”. I’m sure you’ve done that, too. You see something and it hits that sweet spot between amazing and delightful. I switched over to [...]

Google Gone Viral

Google spent in the neighborhood of $2.5 million to run a commercial during this year’s Super Bowl. Google doesn’t need to advertise, despite the marketing dollars being spent on Microsoft’s Bing. Google gets more brand impressions than anyone. Their logo turns up every single time a Google ad is viewed on a website. Why then, [...]

Texting Acronym Glossary

Online chat has been around for a long time, even longer than you might think. Chat was popular on BBS systems and online services that pre-date the web by as much as a decade, and many shorthand acronyms came from that time. ROFL was one of those puzzling responses a “newbie” might come across. It [...]

Apple's Next Big Thing

The rumor mill is churning about an impending tablet computer from Apple. Referred to as the iSlate by those who like to step out on a limb, the device is supposed to have many iPhone-like features including gesture navigation and a touch-sensitive screen. If you have faith in Apple as a technology innovator, you may [...]

Is a Content Management System in Your Future?

Websites are going through a transition, but when haven’t they? Sites used to be coded in HTML, then evolved through Flash applications, style sheet layouts, and Javascript interactivity. The best way to build changes almost as quickly as popular fashion. If your site is at least three years old, there’s a good chance that it’s [...]