Announcing BlogCorp, Inc.

At long last I have finally launched my blog consultancy called BlogCorp, Inc.

This business grew out of my independent consulting projects over the past few years. I found that my corporate clients felt more comfortable working with a group of people instead of an individual, so I changed the name of my existing New York coproration from BlogLabs, Inc. to BlogCorp, Inc, folded my independent consulting into a client list, built the web site, and now I'm at BlogOn 2005 in New York City.

BlogCorp is a full-service consultancy designed to help companies understand how to use blogs and online community in the most effective way. We help businesses large and small build integrate blogs into their marketing plans, their intranets, and their corporate communications. We specialize in building online community, whether it is for consumers or a closed community within your corporation.

Check out the site, which is about 90% complete, and feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions.

Offensive Free Speech or Political Oppression?

I was reading this article today about a woman who got booted off a Southwest flight from L.A. to Portland because some passengers complained about her t-shirt which had a picture of Bush, Cheney, Conoleeza Rice and the words "Meet the Fockers". She comments:

"I have cousins in Iraq and other relatives going to war," she said. "Here we are trying to free another country and I have to get off an airplane in midflight over a T-shirt. That's not freedom."

Reading further, it is clear that the problem is not her t-shirt but rather the boneheaded people on the plane who found her shirt offensive. Have we really come to this? Are we really to a point in this country where all it takes to get kicked off a plane is to wear something that might offend someone else? I find the whole incident highly ridiculous and a little bit disturbing.

The next time I fly, the cynic in me will want to complain about the people wearing crucifixes or religious propaganda -- not because it offends me but because I want to show how ridiculous it is to have such convictions about someone else's choice of clothing or accoutrement, whether it be political, religious or whatever.

Update: Is there some kind of underground campaign going on to ban this t-shirt from stores? Here's an article from a newspaper in Wisconsin that talks about a local political activist group called Tosans for Responsible Government trying to get this shirt and Victoria's Secret clothing removed from a local mall's stores.

A Scrabble Proposal

I'm getting married. I know, I can't believe it either, but it's true. While on vacation out west last week I proposed to my girlfriend, Bonnie, who I met last August right after moving back to NYC from D.C.

Our vacation consisted of flying into Phoenix and then driving to the Grand Canyon, up to Yellowstone Park and then back to Phoenix - stopping along the way for Zion National Park and Grand Teton National Park. For days I'd been trying to come up with a unique way to pop the question and about half-way through the trip it came to me. We both like to play Scrabble and had recently bought a travel-sized edition of the game (the board folds in half and the pieces snap into place). I snuck into the hotel bathroom in Wyoming one night while Bonnie was sleeping and created something like this (the original photos are lost as the Compact Flash card in my camera went bad):

It took me three more days of asking Bonnie if she wanted to play a game of Scrabble before she finally came up with the idea late one night of playing a game of "Dirty Scrabble" where you can only play using swear words and sexual slang (the rules are also much looser; make up your own). I pulled out the Scrabble board and opened it up. Before she could even comprehend what was happening I had the ring out and she was acknowledging that yes she would marry me.

As far as proposals go, I guess it was a good one. I'm still trying to figure out the score, but I know that somewhere in there I scored a Triple Word Score and we both ended up winning.

CamWorld Back From the Dead

Sorry about the downtime. Last week, while I was on vacation out west, a hacker once again got into my rack server and installed software that was trying to exploit other servers. My bandwidth provider received notice within minutes from several sources that my box was compromised and shut down all services except for mail processing. When I got back to NYC I proceeded to move 21 sites (55 domains) to a hosting account at Pair.com, where I've pre-paid for a year's worth of service. I've decommissioned my rack server and am selling it to a colleague who has other machines in the same rack. I'm hanging up my sysadmin hat and am going back to using a realiable hosting provider. It has its limitations (CPU cycle quotas, disk quotas, etc.) but at least I can be confident the machine is secure and if/when it ever does get compromised it is not my mess to clean up.