Jean Gazis Copywriting & Content Development

If people who say that their vote doesn't matter drive you as crazy as they do me, here's a timely WikiHow page on How to Convince Someone to Vote with some excellent suggestions.

Just one more vote per precinct in Florida in 2000 could have made the difference. If that's really true, wow!

Now, go VOTE. It matters.

Some of the very well-known and respected, active community contributors are women, and apparently the Drupal community is generally less gender-unbalanced than other open source projects - women made up a whopping 10% of the most recent DrupalCon. One participant says "Drupal has always had a larger number of female contributors than most open source projects, the percentage just a piddly 2% in open source in general. We've been at 7% for a while now and it's so great to see those numbers increasing."

I came across this interesting article in Chief Marketer's "Marketing ROI" e-newsletter. The gist of it is that the current trend in marketing is towards analytics, which are of course very important, but not meaningful unless balanced with compelling content.

"Customers see only the creative elements of marketing, the content, and they expect it to be good... Ultimately, human beings react to content.

I've been scanning business cards collected from various networking events to get the contact info into a database. I can see why someone might want a two-sided card to put a nice big logo or tagline on the back. But why, why, WHY would anyone design the card so that the actual business name and URL – or worse, their name and title – don't also appear on the front of the card at all? That is just stupid, people!

Effective Marketing Rule #1: Put all the information people want where they can get it easily!

Here are links to some other blogs I like.

My Sister

Crooked Timber

My Public Google Reader Page

I attended my first Drupal Camp a couple of weekends ago. It was my first experience of the "Bar Camp" concept, and I was very impressed. The way it works is that a mixed group of interested people gets together, from "newbies" to experienced developers, and everyone throws out some ideas of what they'd like to talk about, what they're capable of teaching, and it's all scheduled using a grid of sticky notes on the wall. I believe there was some behind the scenes preparation, but it was all handled very informally - and very effectively.