This past weekend I took a few days to travel to the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina to experience the fall foliage up there. That is truly God’s Country!

While I was away I got a call from a long time colleague of mine – Chandler Turner – who has been a guest more than once on this podcast. He let me know that the presenter of a scheduled seminar on LinkedIn had to cancel because of a family emergency and wanted to know if I could deliver this two hour master class. I knew I could come up with the material of course, but this is a fee based class – the folks attending had to pay to be there.

After considering it for a while I felt convinced I could deliver a value to the attendees even on that short notice… and well I guess I’ll let you be the judge of that … here is the unedited audio track from a video I recorded at the event. I intend to post an edited version with the slides I am referring to in the seminar in a few days here on the podcast companion website.

By the way if you would like to view my profile on linked in you may find it here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomanthonydotcom

I want to Thank Cathy Lewis and her staff for giving me permission to rebroadcast the program as part of the Web Strategies Podcast.

What a great time as a guest on HearSay with Cathy Lewis yesterday!  The other guest – Ed Sykes of The Sykes Group, and Malcolm Venable of the Virginian-Pilot. Both great guys, and very well informed on various aspects of social media – or as Cathy likes to call it “The Facebook”

One of the topics we discussed was the public and private side of social networking – Cathy accepted my Friend Request – but instead of posting to her personal Facebook account I added a comment to the HearSay with Cathy Lewis fan area. If you listen to the show you’ll get the perspective – but essentially we were saying that sometimes the personal and the professional get unintentionally intermingled.

After a fairly long hiatus, the Web Strategies Podcast to about to return. Like so many other podcast creators I knew this was the right thing to do – I have working knowledge of Web Strategies for business and the best way to widely share this knowledge is through podcasting. Getting the time to create the actual podcast while holding down a rather intense day job however, is problematic. For example – while I am making this post my lunch is cooking in the office microwave.

The content level here is about to improve – if nothing else by default… I have been asked to be a guest speaker on a radio talk program – and my recording of that interview will serve as the next new Web Strategies Podcast. See OMG

Hope you like the new look and feel of the site too – I use WordPress and just updated all the plug-ins too. Enjoy

While there have been shortages of episodes of The Web Strategies Podcast there certainly have been an abundance of changes lately. This is a time for introspection for me personally as I begin a new life.  Statistically a majority of us have gone through a separation or divorce, and I know I need say no more in explaining why this venue has stood in silence for several months now.  The focus of my world recently has been to transition to living solo which is going well.  I am now living in Chesapeake, close to my office.  Thankfully my professional life continues to flourish along with the  success of  Web Teks.

I guess the biggest news is the Open Source Music Project. With more time as of late to devote to my music, it brings me great comfort – and surprisingly others seem to enjoy it as well.  This project has a corresponding podcast which I will link to as soon as iTunes gets back to me with an ID.

The Open Source Music Project was actually germinated during my association with a group knows at A2 in 2007. Although I am obligated to leave out most of the details, A2 is an effort to launch a new kind of digital entertainment. As far as I know that is still an effort in progress.

So what the heck is open source music?

I made it up. But the concept is to allow the free use of any individual tracks as the ingredients for a new song. When you record and produce your own music it is usually a series of separate audio tracks blended together. My inspiration came from getting such different results when mixing certain tracks together and leaving some out of the mix. Some of them are not so great – but a few really shine.  On the Open Source Music Project site I encourage anyone interested to download these tracks and use them any way they like (under the Creative Commons Attribution License). If you take a listen let me know how abysmal that stuff really is.  You may comment on any track on that site and if you really are a glutton for punishment subscribe to the RSS feed.

This is The Web Strategies Podcast Number 01, and let’s begin by telling you what the show is not. There is no online course in business development to buy. We don’t have some mega seminar to buy tickets for– except in the sense that this podcast is distributing information widely. In fact we are not selling anything.

There is no such thing as a free lunch so I must say this podcast does have a business strategy. I believe, and our sponsor Web Teks believes, that by freely giving the same kind of information we give to our consultancy clients you may see a value in our level of expertise as it applies to your business. Otherwise, this is free.

I believe we have an interesting first program, talking about the difference between performance and return on investment.

In Wikipedia KPI is defined this way: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are financial and non-financial metrics used to help an organization define and measure progress toward organizational goals. KPIs are used in Business Intelligence to assess the present state of the business and to prescribe a course of action.

While ROI is defined as equivalent a core financial; rate of return. It is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. Big difference, but both related. In Podcast WSP 01 Tom Walker gives us his views on the difference.

WSP 01 Podcast Extra

This week I wanted to offer you directions to get to one of the most remarkable resources on the internet: iTunes U. Apple accurately describes it this way: iTunes U puts the power of the iTunes Store to work for colleges and universities, so users can easily search, download, and play course content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows

Head and shoulders above the pack for my taste are three files I found on iTunes U featuring Author Thomas L. Friedman. First if you have not purchased the book “The World Is Flat” you are really missing the picture of how and why the world is transforming into a global economy. Do a power search for Friedman and you’ll find those files and a great talk about his new book, Green is the new Red White and Blue. This is Very worthwhile material. To find it go to iTunes and search for Thomas L. Friedman.

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-19cf19ab8c04492f269146516fd48790}

Podcast Alley???

Podcast Alley is a podcast directory service, and I order for the Web Strategies Podcast to be listed there they require a link back to their site. That’s pretty clever actually. The way Google ranks website popularity is based mainly on the number of other web sites that link to your. So if every podcaster who wants to be listed in the Podcast Alley directory is forced to link back to the company website, it has the effect of raising the web site in the rankings.

I think we can do a whole show on search engines pretty easily, and still keep within the theme of our program – which is Business. A great TV program I have been watching talks specifically about this link back process in an entertaining way. The show is called Download: The True Story of the Internet and it’s on the Science Channel

Here is another one : technorati
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