I admittedly dont check in everyday, but Chris is so funny I think I have to start doing it…

So we were able to recover the data off my hard drive and back it up to my iPod this morning at the Apple store in Kendall. Poor gramps was bored stiff as we waited over an hour, but it was worth it because I got to show him a bunch of photos on Flickr. Now I need to get a new laptop because it seems the logic board is bad. Perhaps I can get them to give me a credit on a new MacBook Pro instead.

I can hardly believe it. 2 east coast trips in less than 6 weeks and once again, as was the case with Boston, my laptop has died while on the road.

This time, it is extremely hard to deal with. Last time there was not really much of a loss, other than a few emails and a bunch of photos, which I was able to recover later. This time however, I lost a presentation I was working on for NetSquared conference that is due Tuesday, a ton of important emails, about 100 photos from the Beyond Blogging event, 100+ photos of my big brother and his family, a requirements document I was working on for one of my startups, 2 blog posts I wrote on the plane, the podcasts I recorded at the event and a couple of other important documents I worked on while flying east on the way out here.

Really big bummer and it really hurts this time because so much was lost and will need to be recreated. Worse still, now I am really behind an already overloaded schedule and I have to borrow access on my friend’s PC. Now I will need to take it in to the Apple store tomorrow and get them to look at it and/or perhaps pay one of the data recovery companies a few hundred dollars to retrieve the data.

It would not be so bad if this had not just happened about 5 weeks ago. I thought I was supposed to have a new hard drive after the last one failed under warranty, but perhaps they replaced it with a refurbished one? Regardless, there is not much I can do other than deal with it, defer all the deadlines and pray that the Genius Bar can get the drive up long enough to burn the stuff over to DVD.

The weird bit is how it happened. I was working on the blog posts on the plane, when I went to save them as Word docs and the spinning color wheel came up, only to freeze in place. When trying to restart, it just went from the bright white screen to a grey one. After landing, it restarted in the car miraculously, but then froze. It started a couple more times after that, but would not shut down when I closed the laptop. So on the way home tonight I picked up some CDR’s with the intention of recovering whatever I could get off of it – after many failed attempts, I have finally given up and just hope it might come alive tomorrow.

I am more of a spiritual, not religious sort of guy, but please do pray for something good to happen from this for me. Apple did such a great job in fixing the laptop last time, going really above and beyond. It would suck to know that they gave me a crappy refurb hard drive that died just a few short weeks later causing me all this anguish and loss…

This is the final session from our small, but powerful mixup of New Orleans natives and people who care and time did not forget. Photos to be posted shortly to Flickr.

Listen Now:

On Thursday May 4, 2006 I sat down with Earthlink Blogger Dave Coustan to talk about his experiences as a corporate Blogger. This follows up on the Blog post entitled "Reflections on Blogging for Someone Else." There are some really interesting insights from his experience working at Earthlink as well as some more simple details on certain aspects of the work. You can reach Dave through his Earthling Blog.

<P>Beyond Blogging 2006 is an event for communications professionals being held on Friday May 19, 2006 being brought to you by Fleishman Hillard and DC Communicator.</P>

There is an old saying that goes, “Some days it is in the cards, and some days it isn’t”. My grandfather used to say that a lot about whether or not he would be able to golf when the summer rains came, but it just as well could refer to my relationship with Blogging. Rather than looking at blogging as ‘my job’ which I must do every day, I go with the flow and my blog posting frequency changes dramatically as a result.

Somedays I am so excited by an idea or news item that I must put other things on hold to blog about it. Sometimes, I end up writing posts just for me that never get published – many never even saved, just written. Other times, like the past couple of weeks, I am so deep in the activities of ‘work’, having conversations with people and simply being in the real world, I have no time for it. Even if it is important to share or perhaps just personally meaningful, it is nearly impossible for me to get a blog post published. I suspect a lot of people out there are like me in this regards – sometimes we are just too busy with life, work or whatever to find time to blog.

The key is that I don’t need to blog every day, or several times a day to make an impact, but it would certainly help in some regards. My goal is to merely communicate with people who care about the things I care about – to have my voice heard and be recognized for my ability to understand a particular topic. So I do it when I have time and do my best to share valuable insights, stories and experiences with you. Depending on your goals, or the goals of your organization though, the demands on your time could be vastly different. I know of at least 2 startup companies here in Silicon Valley who don’t do plan to do any traditional PR activities. They expect their blog will be the company’s official voice to the public, to their customers and to the press at large. They blog when they have something to say. not everyday for the sake of blogging.

The month ahead is going to be an interesting shift for me as I move from the free flowing Blogger mentality of writing when I feel like it for the sole purpose of serving my own passions to blogging every day as part of my work life. Today marks the beginning of a new gig I am doing with my friends over at Fleishman Hillard. I have this incredible opportunity to lead an online conversation leading up to an event they are sponsoring with DC Communicator called Beyond Blogging 2006. The premise is very dear to my heart and is something I have been talking about for quite some time.

The truth is that Blogs are a free style, free ranging form of communications that have made it possible for people and organizations to more directly communicate with the world over the Internet. It does not require an army of ‘techies’ to publish, it does not require some special knowledge of some cryptic computer language and it does not require any real capital expenditures. A Blog can be started in under 5 minutes, it can be free or a few dollars per month, it can be private or public, it can be used as a simple outbound communications channel or it could be used as the foundation of a community. Blogs are just another tool in the communications arsenal, so I am glad we are not doing another conversation on Blogs – it is time to go way beyond the initial idea and look at the bigger picture of how all of this fits together and can be used properly by all communication professionals.

Too many people think that the ‘Blog’ is some mythical panacea for communications. Too many people don’t understand the idea of Blogging within the proper context of participating in the conversation. Too many people think that the Blog is just another fad. (even I have written about Blogging being a fad previously) Regardless of what we think of Blogging, it is here to stay – the power of the tools are growing tremendously along with the number of people who are using Blogs for personal and professional communications. So this event, and this Blog, represent a great opportunity to dive into the conversation with communications professionals who are on the front lines of the industry. Together we will explore the strategic and tactical aspects of Blogging in the context of the shifting media landscape, to collectively gain a better understanding of where it fits within the broader context of communications.

So your first assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to dust off your old copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto and celebrate the 7th anniversary of this landmark book with me. The majority of what we will be talking about over the next month leading up to the Beyond Blogging event on May 19th will likely be based within the key principle of Cluetrain thinking – “markets are conversations”. From my perspective, the job of communications professionals, marketing pros and even sales people is to engage people in conversations – this is perhaps what has been forgotten by a few and is what real people are craving – but that discussion can wait for another day.

Over the month ahead, join us in a discussion that will go beyond the ideas and the strategies and dive into the practical applications of how it all works together. We will start off by delving into some of the basic questions like “What are tags? and How do I use them?” As we get closer to the event, we will be hearing from the panelists more directly and moving the conversation into areas that are of interest to you. So let’s get this party started – post a comment and let us know what sort of things you want to discuss.

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