Chad

I had a great time last weekend at my brother Charlie's wedding. I wrote a toast, the original of which appears below the embedded video. Of course, I had a few adlibs and had some fun, partly at the expense of my awesome wife, who shot the video. My nephews were on backup vocals.

Charlie, I have to admit, this was one of the hardest things I've ever tried to write.

I started and stopped dozens of times since the day you proposed and Jenn, after calling you a "Jerk" for surprising her, said yes.

It became my own little game, "let's write Charlie's wedding toast today." But I never was able to. The reason: I've never tried to write anything where I felt the words so plainly failed to measure up to the subject I was writing about. So, Charlie, I'm going to blame my writer's block on the fact that you're such a great guy.

I jotted down a long list of attributes to describe you to people, but to be honest, it sounded more like a eulogy than a wedding toast. Besides, that's the great thing about you, my brother, is that it really isn't needed. I mean, I could probably walk up to anyone here and ask them how long it took to tell you're a great guy and we'd probably be talking in terms of seconds instead of days or weeks or months.

Of course, I do know of SOME people who haven't thought too kindly of you over the years, but I've never actually met them. They're the ones who shake their fist at you when you're driving much MUCH slower than they'd like you to on major roads.

But that's also part of what I love about you. You've always done things at your own pace. In your own way. That's been one of the most enjoyable things about watching you go from being my little brother to becoming your own man. Your steadfast generosity has been a true gift to receive, and I've received more than my share. I've watched you fix computers (usually I'm watching you fix ones I've broken) and I sometimes marvel at your ability to stay with it until you impose your will on it and it runs better than it ever had before.

But more impressively than computers, I've seen you do this with people. I've seen you inherit a situation or a responsibility you did not ask for -- much like the computer issues that were caused by others -- and with a similar determination and grace, do whatever you can to make the situation better or make it run more smoothly.

And let me reiterate, it's not *what* you do, that so impresses me, it's how you do it. In knowing you Charlie, I've come to understand the meaning of true humility. I mean, anyone who writes "Everyday is so much better then I deserve" on Facebook has to be looking at the world with a humble heart.

And this leads me to Jennifer, or as I finally get to call you officially, my sister. My wife Erin and I are so happy that you two are now husband and wife. I have this habit of involuntarily smiling every time I think about the two of you together. Some of the hardest moments in life are not about wanting for yourself but about how you want for those you care about the most. I'll be honest that I sometimes worried Charlie wouldn't find someone who I felt measured up to the gifts he brought to a relationship.

Jennifer, it is one of the great joys in my life to see the two of you together and watch you two interact. You both have a kindness and a spirit that I feel compliments each other in ways that few people can match, but Jennifer you bring a pinch of troublemaker to the table that keeps you two from being sickeningly sweet. I would just like to express on behalf of our entire family how happy we are to have you become a part of it and how overjoyed we are that you came into Charlie's life.

I will warn you though, as the big brother who slept on the top bunk over him for a number of years, he's not a light sleeper. There were many mornings where he'd toss and turn so much the sheets would be either in a ball on the bed, or completely on the floor. I also don't know that you can use my old trick for messing with him late at night. I used to impersonate the Incredible Hulk, which would freak. him. out. Every time. I can still hear him yelling out "Mom, Chad's saying Incredible Hulk again!"

But I'm sure we can conspire to play some new pranks on him. Let the games begin!

So I was listening to the on-demand archive of Twiter CEO and Founder Evan Williams' (@ev) conversation with Susan Mernit (@susanmernit) at the Online News Association conference and was stunned to hear a question I submitted posed to the founder.

My question "Do they plan to change the status box from 'what are you doing' to something else?" was answered at about the 23:10 mark of the video embedded below:

It was cool to make an appearance in such a session, but the question I submitted that I REALLY wanted answered was "Why is the search query for search.twitter.com limited to just 140 characters?"

This started out as a comment on Matthew Debord's post: U.S. Open Tennis: The American Tennis Boom Was a Fluke, but Huffington Post said my comment was 47 words past their 250 word maximum, so I thought I'd post it here

I have been playing and covering tennis for a few years and have worked at many print and online publications. Tennis is always a forgotten about piece of the sports section puzzle. If you wanted to find a typo, broken link etc. on a sports site, jumping into the tennis area is usually a good bet. I think the heads of the WTA and ATP tour need to sit down in a room and analyze what made the NFL America's current National Pastime. They have a condensed product (16 regular season games, as opposed to the schedules of MLB, the NBA and NHL) so every game is an event.

While McEnroe is getting press this week for complaining about the roofless Arthur Ashe stadium, if you gave him a choice between that roof for free and a greatly reduced tournament schedule, I promise you he'd pick a shorter schedule. And this doesn't need to come (completely) at the expense of the smaller tournaments.

I've had a few opportunities in my life to do what I call "walking inside my television." That's where I'll be at home, watching an event that's nationally televised, and then a few minutes or a couple hours later, I'm then in the scene that's being covered. The first one came during a White House press briefing in 2002 the day I covered the Maryland's men's basketball team visit to the White House. I started the day watching the briefing on TV at home in Arlington, Va., then a few minutes later, was inside the same briefing room while it continued. Quite a surreal feeling.

I felt that again yesterday. But it wasn't when I filed past the dozen or more satellite trucks or the equal number of stilted, made up anchors under bright lights doing live shots in front of the John F. Kennedy Library. It was the kids. In particular, the children of Bobby Kennedy Jr. who accompanied their parents and were shaking hands of hundreds of strangers, including mine. Just three or four hours earlier, I couldn't help but focus on them as they were televised with their parents watching Ted Kennedy's casket being loaded into a hearse by a military honor guard.

I am in the middle of building or tweaking a few different Movable Type and Wordpress sites, including one for a friend who is now a client.

He sent me an email yesterday, asking me to weigh in on the following blog post. I had been meaning to weigh in on MT vs. WP for some time, and I actually wrote my take on things before I even read the post. After reading the post, I felt that my take could stand as is, so here's my reply:


I've always thought Anil Dash (who commented in the post you sent, FYI) made some great points in this piece:

http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html

Through my experience, I've noticed several advantages that Movable Type has over Wordpress. I'll list the ones I feel are most relevant to your site/needs:


INTERNAL PUBLISHING OF PAGES VS. DYNAMIC PHP:

This is the core difference between MT and WP. Wordpress is designed so that you design internal templates that are used to dynamically generate "pages" when you visit a URL for a Wordpress site. This means that there are no actual "pages" that are "published" in the traditional sense. One of the dangers of this is that if you are not very very fluent in PHP, you can inadvertently break your entire site with a small piece of bad code, and not even know it right away.

Conversely, with Movable Type, it's Perl-based publishing system generates actual pages that are stored on your file server. During that publishing process, if you use improper MT code, it often does a tremendous job of preventing you from publishing content until the conflict is resolved.

For example, let's say you have some code that starts with <mt:Entries> and instead of putting in the proper </mt:Entries> tag, you forget the slash. Movable Type will highlight this conflict and tell you what template and what line the error occurs in, thus helping you to resolve the conflict.

In Wordpress, by contrast if you have a similar error, every page that uses that template will display an ugly PHP error.

Sometimes these errors are obvious and easy to fix, but sometimes, you don't know right away, and if you were to make such a mistake on, say, a Friday afternoon, it might be several days before the site gets fixed.

From the conference site:
"Marketers and activists alike have taken notice of the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Jascha will discuss the tools and techniques used by the presidential campaign's record breaking online efforts. In addition to telling the inside story of the campaign's online engagement efforts, he will also discuss how these strategies and tools can be applied to a variety of other sectors beyond politics."

Speaker - Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital

The important thing is recognizing that all clients have a bigger issue they're trying to get around.

How do you incorporate those actions around the world into the web site

We have a platform of tools we use, centered around a CRM tool

Early 2007 through present

More than 1B emails to 13 million addresses
>1m sms subscribers
200,000 offline events planned via the web - NOT official campaign events
35,000 local volunteer groups

14.5M YouTube viewing hours - Does NOT include Wil.I.Am - Cost for this viewing time would have probably cost $40-50 million

$770,000,000 35% Offline / 65% Online

Campaign was able to shift from state to state, they were able to already see who had started grass-roots groups and then parachute professionals into the


How did they do it

NOTE: This is what I have up to the break. Will add the rest later. Cheers!

This session was run by Connie Bensen, Techrigy SM2

Community is NOT boring, it's so exciting, the direction we're going in

My day job is working with a listening tool.

I don't like the term 'community manager' because you really don't manage anybody

Whatever you call your community manager person ... they're you're human connection

I have 3 philosophies
    - Community building applies to everything and everyone
    - B2C: If you provide resources and excellent customer service, people will buy from you and want to make sure you get reimbursed
    - B2B:  What used to be only available to b2c is now available to B2B

Titles don't matter any more when you're networking online. They interact with me because of the knowledge I have

It's shifting from us talking to our customers to our customers wnat to talk to us, and we need to figure out how to handle that.

I'm happy this isn't a room full of marketers ... happy that we have engineers, social media experts etc. This isn't only about marketing.

If you ignore your customers, they WILL go away

If you can build enough word of mouth, you can pretty much quit or cut back on your advertising. If you develop brand visibility, people will come to you, and if you're busy enough, you won't have to be cold calling.

I love unintentional comedy, and the Internet provides more every minute. While this isn't as funny as my favorite headline ever, an AP story on the Green Bay Packers after winning the Super Bowl ("Life on Top Difficult for Packers") this Huffington Post front page made me giggle.

Cheers