Live in Seattle with rain and snow but still want killer performance AND space? The new S8 (see bottom of page) must be one of the meanest, prettiest cars to roll down the street. Amazing.

Most people know that Seattle is near the San Juan Islands. For those who don’t know, the San Juan Islands are located in the northern reaches of Puget Sound, some 80 miles north of Seattle in the northwesternmost corner of the state of Washington. There are approximately 172 islands in the group, depending on how you count them. One of the very small ones goes by the name Crane Island and is the vacation home of Tom Hughes. Each year, a big group of friends descend on the island for a weekend of fun, drink and relaxation. Tom’s newest addition is the Tiki Bar. The photos tell it all. Thanks to Tom and Jessica for hosting and to the crew for being a blast to hang out with.

The pics on my site are here.

You can view slightly larger sizes on Flickr here.

The whole group photo is here.

Want to view the REALLY BIG (5MB) high resolution group image separately? You can do that here.

Learn what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. The US government has put together some handy illustrations for that time when the terror alert status gets elevated to red.

This is a great list of marketing lies that is worth reading. In fact, the original “lie series” over at guy kawasaki is a good read too.

I love lists like this.

Each year, a group of friends heads to little Crane Island in the San Juans to hang out. Crane is one of those many little tiny islands out there and has but a few homes. We’ll take lots of pictures though I suspect most of them will show us with a cocktail in our hand throughout the weekend. We’re doing our own version of the game show Deal or No Deal where there is a chance for someone to walk home with $2,000. Should be fun!

When I first started out in tech, I was basically in sales. Then I moved to business development. Then product marketing. These days, I’ve gotten a bit closer to design and product management/development. Over the years, I’ve worked directly with many large media and infrastructure companies in a direct selling mode. This is the “business development” part. Typically, business development means you’re trying to cut a partnership. Sales means your pushing the same boxes (or software licenses) over and over again. In business development, a typical task might have been “go and figure out how we can work with Sony so that we can leverage their distribution.” In a nutshell, this kind of revenue building exercise is a case-by-case, face-to-face kind of discussion.

These days though, I’ve become very interested in the finer details that have made Google as big as it is. If you have traffic, you make money. A lot of it. Why? Advertising is bigger than almost every other industry. And, if you know how to get traffic you can run just about any online business. Sounds simple enough. How many people understand the basic model that is Marchex? Some. But how many really understand the industry behind the scenes that makes Marchex so much money? I suspect only those who work in the SEO business know it well. I’m a believer that if you know what drives traffic and how to drive traffic more effectively and for less money, you could quit your job and sell just about anything online. I’m not the first one to come up with this notion but I admit I am late to the party. I have never bought any online advertising personally. I have never given Google a dime. I have never participated in an affiliate network. I’ve never used ad tracking software. I have never engaged in “split testing” (heh…you’ll have to look that one up heh?). Bottom line? I’ve worked in the internet space since 1994 and I’ve never had to concern myself with driving traffic to a website. While I understand the basics, I’ve never had to worry about whether my business website contained important ranking elements that appeal to top ranked pages in major search engines nor would I currently know how to significantly improve your rankings as of this moment. This might surprise some people. But, selling RealNetworks Video servers was never about search engines.

I dont believe you can be good at everything and I’m not aiming to become a best selling web marketing author. But, I do think that this knowledge seeking exercise will be healthy. This curious soul is about to go through web marketing boot camp. Should be interesting…

Everyone once in awhile you trip over a site that you think is really inspired. The guys who do this work over at Semplice Lab are pretty special. Great stuff.

I don’t generally give stock advice because I don’t believe anyone can predict the stock market. However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a few predictions which I’m backing by buying the two stocks I mention here. The first is RealNetworks. Yep, my former employer. Now, this isn’t the good ole days when the stock was in the hundreds but the company has a war chest full of cash and the advertising market for products like Rhapsody is very strong. Also, Rob Glaser was always smart but now he’s battle tested. He’s older and wiser. The market has acted a bit flaky over the last week but RNWK has looked steady. I’m thinking RNWK will announce good financial results and will be using all that money for something interesting. Around $10 it’s a buy. Heck, I even told my mother-in-law to buy some. Now that’s going out on a limb!

The other one is Adobe. When Adobe bought Macromedia I told anyone who would listen that they should buy the stock for one simple reason: monopoly. Adobe owns desktop publishing and the stock has only gone (way) up since the Macromedia purchase. In the last few days, the stock has taken a bit of a hit because they announced that quarterly results were on the low end of expectations. But, the company still owns desktop publishing. And, flash video is getting more pervasive. This company is here to stay. Buy it while its down.

I was browsing Chad Edge’s site and read that the fine Coudal folks released an iteration of their JewelBox line. The JewelBoxing Studio really is one of those simple, but brilliant ideas. My guess is that they are going to sell a lot of these. As an aside, I’ve got the original Jewelboxing case system and have used it on various work projects. Also very handy if you don’t think you’re ready to step up to the full enchilada.

A good part of each day has me working on a little project called ImageKind that intends to provide a community for converting digital imagery into actual wall art. Doing this project has revealed a lesson that I won’t repeat again. It’s the necessity for wireframing.

Most projects I’ve been involved in had written specs in a word-doc type format. More complex projects, like www.theplatform.com consist of chapters and chapters of detailed rationale for various product features and the associated schedules in formats like MS Sharepoint. But, unless you’re building the simplest of brochure websites, you need to wireframe.

I suspect a good portion of the people who read my blog already know that a wireframe is a skeletal rendering of every click-through possibility on your site - it is a simple visual mapping of each decision, path and feature that the project will consist of. The whole point of the exercise is to help clarify the IA (information architecture) of the project which tends to be the most difficult aspect. Getting IA exactly right can make a good idea very, very successful. Getting it wrong can take a bad idea and send it straight into oblivion.

My initial thinking was that I already had a clear idea of the logical and business functions for the project and that I would start mocking up graphical components very early in the process. This was a bad decision. By wireframing, you flesh out many of the things you don’t know that you didn’t know before the project started. Even if you understand the purpose of your project and the features you want to implement, you couldn’t possibly identify all the entry and exit points that users will experience as they try to use the application. You couldn’t have forseen all the steps necessary to implement logical consumption of the features you feel so strongly about. I’d suggest that great software products aren’t about more features. They are about your ability to logically consume and utilize the product without frustration.

The wireframe process is not a technology discussion. In fact, you wireframe first, before a single line of code is written and before any decisions are made in regards to design, navigation and content. The process is a discussion with other constituents in the company as well as respected external resources who are good “what if” type thinkers. The process should help the site work better by asking a lot of “what if” questions right up front. What if a user wants to sign up right away and clicks over here…what happens? What if a site visitor is not yet registered but wants to start buying? Do you let them buy with a guest account? A simple registration? What information will you ask for? Will product pages share other elements from other parts of the site?

The process is a bunch of questions, followed by a discussion, which results in subsequent decisions which finally results in a very simple, non-technical set of “wireframes”…simple pages that reflect page functions and flow…not design. I started with design and managed information architecture during the design process. That was dumb. Had I done this, I certainly could have saved more money and shipped faster. Plus, it allows developers and designers to be better at their own jobs. And finally…the product is just going to be better.

This isn’t a short-cut I’ll be inclined to explore again. Every new project has way more unanswered questions and unknowns than there are knowns. Wireframing helps catch a good chunk of that stuff up front. I knew it too. Biggest mistake of the year.