My friend Chris Kelly turned me on to a music listening service called last.fm recently. This morning a song called "If everybody looked the same" by Groove Armada came on as I was writing on this blog, and it got me started thinking. What if all web sites looked the same? Here are the lyrics: If everybody looked the same we'd get tired of looking at each other I wonder; is that true? I think I hang around my friends because they're interesting people, because they enrich my life by … [Read more...]

I spend a little time each day reading what other people in my field are saying about their clients, about trends in the marketplace, about our work. Sometimes the way these colleagues talk to one another makes me feel bad for the clients and bosses of the world who have to work with them. For instance, design people are offended/threatened by a site called 99 Designs. The site takes work specifications from users, then designers around the world submit designs based on the specifications. … [Read more...]

I am a big fan of Seth Godin's thoughts on social media. I think it's groovy, but I'm still reluctant to see a movie about it because it breaks the Temporal Law of Media. Here's the law: Temporal Law of Media: Thou shalt not experience any media whose content is chiefly about a medium that came after it. I know these sorts of ancient laws can be confusing sometimes, so let me explain with the help of a timeline. Going backward on this timeline is like petting a house cat in the … [Read more...]

Probably everyone can think of a time in their lives when they were faced with an unintended consequence. Perhaps you, in an honest attempt to learn more about the biological workings of galvanism, have inadvertently reanimated a monster constructed of disparate body parts and that monster is now, through no fault of yours, slightly rampaging the countryside. Honest mistake! Sometimes, though, the unintended consequences are actually unintended benefits. It occurs to me that this is the case … [Read more...]

Im updating the Hodgson Marketing site today. Please bear with me through these changes. Thanks! Contact me at 404 492 9692 or jim@hodgsonco.com. … [Read more...]

There are really only a few sins in new media marketing. For the most part, it's the wild west out here, which is good. It means that a lot of interesting stuff can and does happen. However, there are four deadly sins that can really wreck your efforts. As hard as it may be to believe, this Internet thing is new to a lot of us still. Many businesses are still trying to get their heads around it, and thank God for it because it means I have a lot of work to do! Here's the most basic change … [Read more...]

Just got through speaking at the NAMM show. It was so much fun! It really flew by. If you didn't get a handout from my talk, feel free to download it in PDF format here: NAMM show handout (in PDF format) Thanks again! Feel free to email or call me at any time. … [Read more...]

I subscribed to the RSS feeds from LinkedIn for the questions people ask about social media and web development because I wanted to try my hand at answering them. I did manage to get a "Best Answer" in the web development category, a fact about which I am most proud, but many of the questions are a mystery to me. One that I seem to see a lot boils down to "What social media tools actually work?". It's my opinion that it is the artist much more than the tools the artist uses that are … [Read more...]

Designing web pages is a black art, it sometimes seems. Basically there are a lot of little helper programs that browsers understand that help web pages seem more like applications and less like static pages. If you're not a web developer, you would be amazed at the cryptic gibberish of a half dozen languages that it takes to make seemingly simple effects a reality in a web browser. The way that Gmail behaves, to give a popular example, is the product of heaps and heaps of behind-the-scenes … [Read more...]

This is just a short update to note for posterity that I am going on record as saying that I have coined the term "Bingle" to refer to Google and Bing at the same time. I feel immensely proud to have been the first to... Aw crap it's been thought of already. Well the site linked above is neat, even if I wasn't the first to think of "Bingle". It allows you to search Google and Bing simultaneously and compare the results. I searched for my own name and found my own web site, so clearly … [Read more...]