newmediaMike

Winds of change

We have arrived at my favourite weekend of the year. Labour Day weekend. There is something so special about the feel of this weekend. Perhaps it’s the memories of being a kid and the anticipation of the coming school year. Meeting new friends, getting caught up with old friends and being part of a larger collective again.

When I was a younger adult, I found myself changing jobs in the fall a few times. Something about September spurs me into action with change.

In September of 2001 I became the editor of Visual Convergence and I was able to tap into my love of writing. Not just writing but writing about my favourite topic … technology!

Last September I found myself without a full time position, it was a scary position to be in, what with the darkening clouds of the recession looming. With the help of my burgeoning social media network, I made the switch to a career path I had been entertaining for some time and today I am glad I did. I am not changing from that career path, but will be putting what I do for others to use for myself.

So what does this September hold for newmediaMike? The winds of change are definitely blowing when it comes to my online world.

A project I’ve been experimenting with for a couple of years is starting to finally take shape. These are sites that are a combination of online video with online marketing . I will be rolling out a series of user generated video classified ads for vehicles and other items. The elevator pitch is “Craigslist meets YouTube.”

These sites will be under the Videozine umbrella. Videozine is the site I launched many years ago when I became the publisher of the magazine Visual Convergence and also launched a video production company – coincidentally in the fall as well; hence the unique name – Video-zine.

I will still be blogging about Holistic Online Marketing and sharing SEO tips of course and the frequency will increase. You see I discovered the “publish later” feature of WordPress.  I will be able to write several articles at once and have WP publish them at a later time. Like this one – it was actually written late on Friday night.

When the new Videozine sites go live I will let everyone know.

GMail outage of 09-01-09

Gmail’s reliability honcho jumped on the webmail’s official blog last night to explain what happened during yesterday’s  outages.

So? What happened? In a nutshell, it appears they brought down some servers for maintenance on Tuesday morning (Pacific time) and expected the webapp’s “request” routers to handle all the re-directs to valid servers. Which makes sense. But they  were unpleasantly surprised, when the re-directs couldn’t handle the traffic and GMail ground to a halt.  Meanwhile over at Twitter their lines were burning up with everyone Tweeting about the GMail outage.

The Gmail team notes that IMAP/POP worked throughout the outages, and that they’re working on a fix for similar problems in the future.

Which is good news for those of us who have put more and more of our faith into Google Apps like GMail, Google docs, etc.  Personally, I route all of my emails through my GMail account. Did yesterday’s outage make me re-think this decision? For a nano second, then it was back to work.

How did you handle this outage?