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Panoramas of the Vancouver Skyline

We spent a few days visiting Vancouver, BC after doing the RSVP Bike Ride (a 200-miler from Seattle to Vancouver). Took some great photos of the skyline there:

 

 

Daylight:
Night lights:

My Google Reader Aftermath = FeedBin + Mr. Reader

With the sunset of everyone's beloved Google Reader, there was a mass Internet scramble this summer to find new RSS aggregation and reading tools. Sure there are a lot of cool apps out there to curate news, from Zite to Flipboard, but when it comes down to the heavy lifting of plowing through your favorite feeds, nothing beat the simplicity of Google Reader -- nor it's huge ecosystem of apps that plugged into it. For example, being in the mobile marketing space, I subscribe to a couple of news feeds like Mobile Marketer, Mobile Marketing Watch, and Mobile Marketing Daily, among others. Between these, I need a dead simple way to browse through the 100 or so articles that they pump out to catch the valuable nuggets.

I tried all the popular Google Reader alternatives -- Feedly, Digg, NewsBlur -- and ultimately landed on Feedbin. It's great, here are just some of the features I love:

• 3 pane view (Feed List / Article List / Article text) for quick skimming of the news.
• Readability integration, which you can enable on a feed-by-feed basis -- THIS IS AWESOME for those pesky feeds that only give you excerpts, you can now pull in the full article text. 
• Supports multiple tags per feed (for example I have topical feeds like Tech or Photography, and then over-arching contextual tags for those GTD fans like @work and @home).

It looks nice and simple, which is what I want. None of this trying to recreate magaines with tiles and images everywhere. Just the news:

Then, I had to bring this all onto my iPad. Normally I use Reeder, but alas, there isn't an iPad version that supports anything other than Google Reader, so back to the drawing board (P.S. they have a great iPhone app that does support other platforms). After playing around with a few apps, I stumpled upon Mr. Reader, which despite the funny name and icon, is a GREAT app.

It has a ton of features, but the best one was new to me -- marking articles as read as I swiped/scrolled through the list. THIS IS A KILLER FEATURE. Most of my feed browsing habits are just scrolling through the headlines looking for gems. Now, rather than having to individually swip each one as read, or hitting the end of the list and then marking all as read in one fell swoop, it marks them as read as I go. Wow. I like reading my RSS feeds on my iPad more than on my laptop now. Great app:

 

I was on KATU Channel 2 News (for a holiday gift guide segment)

Last week, I teamed up with KATU Channel 2 News to do a segment on gadget gift ideas for the holidays. We ended up filming it at Jive:

I wrote out the full list of my ideas over on Techpaulogy .

Getting into panoramic photography with my iPhone

I've been getting into panorama photos lately, on my iPhone (I wrote a post on my tech blog about iphone panorama apps if you want more details). It's interesting, I've found myself using my other cameras less, because in the end, the best camera is the one you have with you. Here are some of my recent favorites.

Sunrise from the Steel Bridge:

Columbia River bend near Rooster Rock:

Sunset at the Oregon Coast, near Bandon:

Na Pali Coast on the island of Kauai:

Beacon Hill Estate winery at sunset, in the Willamette Valley:

2 NCAA Tourney Games Decided at the Buzzer - Really is March Madness!

This past weekend I went back home to Spokane for my Mom's 60th birthday and was lucky enough to score tickets for the NCAA Basketball tournament on Sunday. Ordinarily that's awesome, but in this case it was exactly why they call it March Madness -- both games were decided at the buzzer.

First, Maryland and Michigan State were in a head-to-head battle down to the final seconds. Maryland pushed the score to 83-82 with six seconds left, but then MSU's Korie Lucious hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer FTW!

With all the Terp fans dejectedly leaving, we ran down and swiped their seats, 3 rows behind the bench of the next game: Purdue v. Texas A&M. This game was a nail biter too. In fact, Texas had TWO chances to win it at the buzzer. First, with the final seconds ticking off (well 0.0, look at the clock), they put a shot up... brick. into OT:

Through OT the score stayed even. Nothing went unanswered... until the final 4 seconds when Purdue's Chris Kramer drove in for a layup. Texas had another chance to clinch at the buzzer, inbounding it and getting down to the perimeter in time to toss up a shot. It never came down. Again, check the game clock:

(And now I am going to work on nursing off the Gonzaga loss... go Cornell!)

Social media spending trends for 2010: engagement, not ads

A recent eMarketer survey/article shed some light on where online marketers plan to put their social media program dollars over the next few years -- not on ads, but on engagement. Compare these 2 charts:

#1 - Social Site Ad Spend

 

#2 - Social Media Marketing Outreach

Look how much faster the second chart grows. This is huge. It's one thing to spend more dollars and distribute more ads, but it's a whole different bag of tricks to actually reach out and get more deeply engaged with your customers and prospects. eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson suggests that savvy companies will be spending the bulk of their time and resources on:

• creating and maintaining fan pages
• managing promotions or public relations outreach within social networks
• measuring the impact of a social network presence on brand health and sales

We've already seen Facebook and Twitter eclipse Google (though I've yet to see those sources bring my B2B sites more traffic or leads -- SEO is still going strong!), so these are green fields ripe for innovation. And Jive is helping companies explore these channels, with its online community software and social media monitoring and engagement solutions, so it's exciting to be in the thick of it. From a marketing perspective, we have some big plans for 2010 that involve creative social media initiatives (as opposed to just rolling out more ads to the masses)... stay tuned!

Building a personal brand -- blogging on PaulBiggs.com

Ok. I'm kicking off a new blog here at PaulBiggs.com, after a couple years of testing the waters over on Techpaulogy. It's time to focus more on my personal brand -- connected to my name -- where I can extrapolate beyond the 140-character blurbs on Twitter. I'll be writing on topics related to:

• The daily travails of an online marketer in the B2B software field
• Overall industry trends in social media, internet marketing, search engines, etc.
• Adventures while living in Portland, OR
• The local tech and entrepreneurial scene

I'll still keep Techpaulogy around to geek out on software, gadgets, and apps of interest to the general public (and, of course, SEO), and continue to use it as a test bed for my various Web endeavors. 

See you online!

(You can subscribe to the new PB.com RSS feed here: http://feeds.paulbiggs.com/PaulBiggs)