Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Category: Personal (Page 9 of 25)

Moving forward, reaching back

August 1, 2013 /

I am pleased to announce that on Monday I became Vice President, Global Ecommerce at PR Newswire, where I’ll be evolving the company’s online ordering systems and collaborating across product, development, user experience and strategy teams.

It’s a fascinating place right now: with nearly 60 years as the inventor of and leader in content distribution, PR Newswire has been progressing with its clients into a targeting, tracking and monitoring and workflow company, all while staying true to its roots. As information delivery becomes increasingly digital, having the right tools in place for communications professionals to distribute media is key. I’m looking forward to finding the optimal solutions for company and customers alike.

For me, this is also an intriguing moment, because it’s the first time in my career that I’ve moved back. For nearly 20 years, I’ve constantly explored new paths, more than once moving laterally out of intrigue. I’ve said it elsewhere before, but in my career, I’ve been all of the following: editor, writer, designer, blogger, manager, director, information architect, user experience consultant, marketer, strategist, business developer, and chief executive. My positions have run the gamut from education to media to consumer products to small and large agencies, from startups to 14,000-employee holding companies, with nary a linear move in more than a decade.

This week, I decided to head back into the things I know and enjoy. Back into ecommerce. Back into an in-house environment. Back into media and digital content. Back, in short, into what I do best. I couldn’t be more excited for the opportunity to deepen my expertise and help lead a strong, smart organization.

Part of my mandate at PR Newswire is thought leadership for the industry, and I look forward to increased blogging and public speaking in the days ahead. Stay tuned.

The all-new Ideapad

August 1, 2013 /

Hello from 2013! This page is still a bit of a work in progress, but I’ve migrated Ideapad to WordPress, after many reliable years on Movable Type. Some visual and structural updates were overdue, and while launching a WP blog is far from revolutionary, it’s a breath of fresh air around here.

In the update, I’ve also, for the first time, done a proper content migration. All my blog posts from 2001 to the present, covering the MT era and prior years in a home-rolled PHP CMS, have been pulled into the new layout. I seem to have lost some paragraph spacing in the transition, but all the entries are properly categorized with working HTML.

At the same time, I’ve managed to maintain my flat-file archives dating to 1998, which I invite you to explore, if only to laugh at the things that were interesting to me a dozen years ago.

Welcome.

My thanks to David Miller for ongoing tech support.

My Google Reader starred posts archive

June 18, 2013 /

Google Reader shuts down on July 1, and as a die-hard fan, I am going to miss it.

While I’m busy exporting my feed list and re-establishing my RSS reading elsewhere, I’m reminded that I often used the starring function to call out posts of note. Of course, the truth is that I rarely returned to my starred items, and with minimal social network tie-ins, those favorited posts never got much exposure.

So I’m resurfacing them here for posterity–fully, more or less, despite the fact that I have a lot of links from 2009 and earlier that make no sense to me now, or that just aren’t interesting anymore. For one reason or another, they were interesting then, and they deserve to be archived. And, naturally, some of my favorite blogs over the six-plus years I’ve been living in Reader don’t seem to have been starred along the way, like Alice and Kev, which will keep you riveted if you read it chronologically.

Regardless. From items I liked to items I wanted to revisit later (and likely never did), herewith, my Google Reader faves archive, in reverse chronological order, with occasional (present-day, in parentheses) annotations.

The year in cities, 2012

January 2, 2013 /

Eighth edition: listed here are the places I visited over the past 12 months. Per the annual rules, only overnights are listed; repeat visits are denoted with an asterisk (even those that I last visited five or 10 years ago; previously, I used a dagger, but it’s gotten redundant).
New York *
Punta del Este, Uruguay
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Orlando, FL *
Washington, DC *
New City, NY *
Livingston, NJ *
Hong Kong *
Blue Bell, PA
Bellevue, WA
Montauk, NY
Gloucester, MA *
St. Thomas, USVI *
Short Hills, NJ
Hawley, PA *
Palm Beach Gardens, FL *
Lake Buena Vista, FL *
Lakewood, NJ

Sandy

October 30, 2012 /

I am, oddly, almost apologetic to note in this space that I have little to report personally on the storm.
My family was out of town for the weekend ahead of Sandy’s arrival; we cut our trip short for safety purposes, got home Sunday evening with a responsible amount of food and bottled water, stormproofed the windows a bit, filled the bathtub, checked our flashlights and candles, and put the kids to bed. Then we watched TV and Twitter for a few hours, cast a wary eye at the wind-rattled windows, and went to bed ourselves as the flooding crested. We woke up to normal power and water while most of the region lacked one or both. Today we walked around a bit, hung out, took something of a family day. Could be a lot worse.
Which is not to say things are perfect. I’m way behind on my work. Our child care situation this week is going to be interesting. But relatively speaking, we came out great. I can only hope my friends and colleagues in less fortunate areas emerge as well in the coming days.
Tomorrow I report to a conference room at a sister company for what hopes to be a productive day at work. My team dealt with multiple deadlines this afternoon, many of them working through power outages. Life goes on. Even when it’s wet, and dark, and strange.

Formerly known as

September 28, 2012 /

A few days ago my last company disappeared.
Well, not exactly disappeared and not exactly a few days ago. But in a press release dated Monday, the ecommerce shop I founded, Canopy Commerce, was rebranded and folded back into its parent company, Alexander Interactive.
Canopy lasted roughly two years and built a successful portfolio of client work. We launched some pretty good stuff, frankly (“incredible success,” per the press release) and had a pretty good time doing so. Several Canopy employees rolled into Ai with the name change, ensuring a smooth transition.
Back in 2010, when I was creating Canopy with Ai’s owners, I advocated having a business unit and not a standalone company, so I am neither shocked nor disappointed that Canopy is now Ai-branded. My CEO role wasn’t filled after I left, so this is a logical step.
I have been thinking a lot about this, though, and about the ephemeral nature of employment in general. I now have worked for three companies whose names no longer exist, not to mention my own currently dormant consulting shop. While one former employer became a client of mine, 13 years later, I’m at the point where I don’t even know how to refer to some others.
For better or worse, people identify heavily with the work they do and where they do it. I typically recite with pride the places I’ve been, which is made harder when they disappear. It’s a little soulless, a little confusing, a little disjointed. People’s recall lessens. Web searches become less fruitful. LinkedIn profiles get messy. (I rolled up my Canopy title into Ai on my profile, for example.)
This is the nature of the business world, of course. I should be used to it as someone who specializes in Internet projects, where entire companies can disappear in a click; even my own website archives are full of missing files. But employers gone missing resonates in a different way.
Farewell, Canopy. We had an interesting run.

Brothers

September 22, 2012 /

Nate, holding an Elmo doll: “Eli, look! Who is this?”
Eli: “Elmuh.”
Nate: “Who is this?”
Eli: “Elmuh.”
Nate: “Say it one more time and you can have him.”
Eli: [blinks]
Nate: “Eli, who is this?”
Eli: “Elmuh!”
Nate: “Right, Eli, very good! Here you go.”
Seems my work here is done.

On LCD screens and parenting

July 9, 2012 /

Behold: the Fisher-Price Apptivity Case, a protective baby-friendly cover for your iPhone.
I’m a digital guy, have been since I got an Atari as a second-grader. I now have two kids that can’t help but see my TV set, laptop, iPad, iPhone, iPod. They think it’s fascinating and fun.
So I did what any responsible parent should do. I downloaded and tested some age-appropriate apps and let my older son explore. The iPad and iPhone are genius devices in their usability, with their clutter-free fascia and immersive interfaces. So now the gadget is teaching the boy animals, colors, shapes, letters, memory retention and matching, spatial relations, you name it. We also set up guidelines: no screens between breakfast and dinner, no YouTube (Thomas the Tank Engine snuff films! who knew?), you have to play out difficult boards and not quit things quickly, etc.
That boy is now 4 and is as digitally savvy as anyone his age. He’s also wicked good at memory matching games, he can write his letters in capitals and lowercase, and he plays sophisticated games like Flow, Trainyard and Rush Hour better than many adults. Heck, he figured out how to unlock the home screen at 21 months. And he still loves his real-world toys, crayons and books.
Done right, gadgets are as wondrously useful for young people as they are for adults.
My baby boy is 15 months and dying to play with the iPhone. Right now he only gets glimpses when his big brother is engaged. Soon enough, Eli, soon enough.

Something new

February 28, 2012 /

I am excited to announce that I have joined Proof Integrated Communications as Chief Strategy Officer, effective yesterday. I am a managing director at parent company Burson-Marsteller as well.
It’s a compelling next step in my career, as I’m charged with defining a variety of roles in an environment much different than the autonomous, scrappy startup I’d built at Canopy. From business development to corporate strategy, internal evangelism to organizational details, I’m going to have my hands in a lot of things, working with 70 colleagues in three offices to build upon their successes to date.
I leave behind a bustling agency in Canopy that has become a trusted destination for ecommerce and user experience projects, and an expanded Alexander Interactive that just moved its award-winning organization (and the Canopy team) to huge new digs on my last day at work.
Departing a nice environment is always strange, especially after four years of collaborative, impactful project work. But having successfully built something new for Ai–twice–I am ready for another set of challenges, starting with the ping-pong table directly outside my office. All in a day’s work.

Ten years

September 10, 2011 /

A confession: I’ve spent the past week two weeks willfully avoiding most September 11 commemorations. I certainly know why, although I have had a hard time putting it into words. Am I not ready to recollect? Do I find it too sad, too ugly? Does it feel too obvious to me?
Perhaps all of the above, or something else, subconscious and intangible, that drives me away from the past. Different things evoke different responses. I blithely skipped past The Economist’s coverage of the anniversary, but I can’t even bring myself to crack open the New York magazine special, and I have been noticeably averting my gaze whenever I spy the billowing smoke on its cover. A decade on, I am not at all inured to the visuals of the event–if anything, I have a more visceral reaction now, in remembrance, than when it actually happened and we all couldn’t stop looking.
My wife pointed out, rightly, that we as a society need to remember, to reflect, to refresh our memories, to celebrate the heroes and respect the innocent and the fallen. I had friends who experienced a far more dramatic 9/11 than I did, and friends who lost their lives.
Perhaps that’s where I am: I haven’t reflected because I haven’t forgotten. I can tell, in vivid detail, the story of that day and the entire week around it: where I was, what I did, how I felt, what I smelled. It was my reality and remains my experience. To that end, America’s insistent media saturation leading up to Sunday’s commemorations are invaluable: no one is being allowed to forget, just as I, and many others, already cannot.
Tomorrow is a somber and important day for all of us, however explicit our reflections may be. My thoughts are with those whose memories are far more painful than mine.
—
On and after September 11, the Internet was both a lifeline and an outlet for me. My blog posts from 9/11 through the 23rd are available in a single-read archive, and I invite my readers to explore them. For historical accuracy, the girlfriend cited in the posts is now my wife; we have long since moved out of Union Square to the Upper West Side, where we will be spending a quiet 9/11/11 at home.
In 2001 I also published my friend Adam Oestreich’s first-hand account of the attacks, which remains a compelling read. At this time of year it is always the most popular page on this website. (Adam, it can be noted, now works in midtown.)

« Older posts Newer posts »

Ideapad © 1998–2024 David Wertheimer. All rights reserved.