At the bottom of the blog post entry screen, you'll see a new field named Embedded Video. You should be able to cut and paste a link from any of the video sites listed in the help for this field. The system will then embed that video in your blog post. For example, I pasted the YouTube link to our most recent Videoactive report in this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc67jStSB68

I enjoyed J.D. Meier's article How to Think Like Bill Gates. Lots of other good stuff on Meier's blog.

I love outdoor concerts and this one with The Nadas and the Beach Boys was one of the best. Pretty good for a small Iowa town!

Upgrading my home computer from Vista to Windows 7 went well but took a LONG time. I don't see a huge difference. It seems more solid, the UI has improved, and I'm finding some useful new features. The Windows 7 firewall and backup/restore have solid improvements over Vista.

This is a really great article about the implications of digital abundance by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail.

I had a lot of fun this weekend playing with OpenLaszlo, a very cool open source development environment for interactive web applications. I was led to OpenLaszlo through my interest in Red5 and OpenMeetings which runs on Red5.

Hawthorne Direct Announces Gina Lombardo-Negron as Short Form Media Supervisor

Hawthorne Direct Announces Scott Montgomery as Media Buyer

Hawthorne Direct Announced as Four Times Communicator Awards Winner

I was thrilled to see Greg Smith's article in MediaWeek, Web 3.0: 'Vauge, but Exciting.' For fun, I play around with semantic web software at home in my spare time.

Surprisingly my greatest personal challenge in my position as CTO is not technology. Technology is the easy part: I enjoy it and excel in it. However, technology alone never seems to address the real needs of our company, and I suspect any company. There is an overabundance of technology available and it is easy to drown in cool technology, sucking up as much resources as are made available. I believe my role is to select the minimal amount of the appropriate technology to effectively address our needs.

Mark Cohen, CMO at Human Factors International came to Hawthorne today to give a command performance of a talk I heard him give a few months ago. After hearing this talk the first time, I asked him to come to Hawthorne to give it to our leadership team.

I've never been much of a salesman, but I'm getting more and more of a thrill seeing orders come in through the ecommerce sites we've been developing. Some of it is the usual satisfaction of a working system that scales to handle a load. However, the new thrill is that I'm more a part of actually selling something than I've ever been before. I'm contributing to the success of our clients and Hawthorne.

You can teach an old geek to enjoy sales!