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!

Director of Digital and Interactive Services for Direct Response Advertising.

Lead development and implementation of digital and interactive client services.

Evaluate, recommend and coordinate vendors and alliance partners for online marketing client opportunities to optimize revenue for both the client and Hawthorne.
Understand optimal online campaign strategy, management, reporting and statistical requirements.

Check out the story on the Hollywood Center Studios web site. There's also a press release on our main site.

In a recent DRTV campaign, we noticed new search terms showing on Google trends. Data in relative units for one example is shown below.

While this is an obvious phenomena, it's interesting to track the data. Search does not create it's own demand: people need to know about a product phrase before they start searching on it.

Zane Safrit posted a link to this article titled "How to Be Bold" in a tweet.

Tammy Shull found this great NPR "All Things Considered" piece on infomercials featuring our friend AJ Khubani at TeleBrands.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99087867

Archived copies of our Hawthorne Videoactive Report (HVR) newsletters have been showing up as garbage in Firefox and I've finally fixed it using Tip #1 from an Internet post. This I hope is the last of a series of messy cross-platform issues with the newsletter stemming from encodings are handled on different systems.