Pretty Jazzed About My New Moo Cards

My good friend Andy Ciordia is the closest thing I have to a coworker.  My clients think more highly of me when I bring him to a project — he’s a social media and design whiz and all-round nice guy.

Andy designed these two versions of a business card for me using tag clouds!  Ordered them from MOO and can’t wait to see them. The other side has my contact info (of course) and a mugshot. I went ahead and included my Twitter handle @TamelaRich while I was at it.

Tell me, are you using your Twitter handle on yours?

Anyone else noticing how few business cards you need these days compared to five years ago? And resumes? Heck, you wanna see mine, go to LinkedIn.

Gotta Love footnoted.org

Financial pros and self-directed investors alike appreciate the work that Michelle Leder at footnoted.org does speaking truth about powerful businesses and the people they overpay to run them. Good to know someone’s on the job ferreting out the things companies try to bury in their routine SEC filings.

Ms Leder found her calling as a forensic reader of company reports after losing part of her IRA on Qwest Communications. Conducting the post-mortem on that  transaction,Ms Leder realized that “instead of relying on happy talk from corporate executives and over-enthusiastic analysts, she should have spent her time reading the company’s SEC filings. In a little over an hour’s time, she found several red flags that pointed to overly aggressive accounting.”

A seasoned business journalist, she wrote Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company’s True Value and launched footnoted, which was acquired by Morningstar earlier this month. Proof positive that sometimes those who do good can also do well.

Be sure to bookmark or get a feed from footnoted’s blog.

Here’s a recent video of Ms Leder who, like me, works out of a home-based International Headquarters and is ably assisted by a canine.

Endorsements & Recommendations

In this Web 2.0 world, clients and colleagues recently asked if they could endorse the work I did for/with them on my blog.  Brilliant thinking!

Thanks!

Ode to Open Source

I had the itch for a better website. With a big speaking event coming up, a newsletter to launch and downloads to offer, I knew there was a better way. Heck, I worked for a dot-com eight years ago, shouldn’t I know how to proceed?

Well, I knew how to begin. Craig’s List, of course. Placed an ad on Craig’s List and elance.com for “HTML & Google Analytics Expert” because I thought that’s what I needed. Whoa, out of the woodwork crawled DotNetNuke, Drupal, Adobe Contribute and base code (ASP) options.    My head swam and bank balance belched.

What’s a Web 2.0 gal to do? I went to LinkedIn and perused the Q&A.  Found an interesting discussion on WordPress as a content management system.  That’s funny, I thought of it as a blog platform.  Dug a bit deeper. Asked a LinkedIn question  whether WordPress was possible or advisable for my specific goals.  Answer, YES.  I admit to being a sucker for most things open source.  I browse with Firefox, get my mail with Thunderbird and now run my site on WordPress.  All part of the wisdom of crowds.

I’m now part of a worldwide community of WordPressers — no Dow Jones Big Brother watching my every move, just lots of friendly worldwide cousins who let me borrow a monkey wrench and tell me how to best use it.

In addition to web searches I dug into my Rolodex (is that a term people still use?) and was referred to Andy at Nuance Labs .  A mutual friend worked with him on his own site and on some nonprofit sites including the Charlotte, NC chapter of Slow Foods.   Anyone into the slow foods movement is likely to be my kind of co-worker.

Of course we met in a coffee shop.  Of course he sports a ponytail and wields a Mac.   Of course he manages me very well — tells me he needs to stay on task and produce the deliverables I prioritized before following me down several rabbit holes of other interesting options.  I assure him I’ll be a “good client,” and let him grind it out.

Then, ON TIME and ON BUDGET he sends me the first peak at my new site.  I almost cry when I see the functionality, the design elegance, and his judicious selection of passages selected from my old site, my LinkedIn profile and other things I’ve written.  “Yes,” I think, “we can be very good coworkers.”

I say to him “Use your Millenial/GenX sensibilities to spice it up” and that’s enough prodding.  He gets it and I get what I’ve asked for.

Bottom line:  LinkedIn’s a gem mine of information. Consider WordPress for your next site.  Nuance Labs is a great web partner.