Dont Trust This Guy why not take my word for it? A blog by Jim Jeffers

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about peak oil, our place in the world economy, and the harmful industrialization of our everyday food. Simply put, I haven’t been writing as a result of the information overload that I’m enjoying at the moment.

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We were lucky enough to see an awesome lecture from Jason Fried at SXSW. Like Kathy Sierra’s lecture, all of the notes below were taken on my iPhone.

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At this year’s SXSW I didn’t feel like pulling out my laptop to take notes. Instead, I mastered the iPhone keyboard and jotted down some quick notes from the more interesting sessions. Here are my notes from Kathy Sierra’s excellent talk on helping your users kick ass.

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New technologies are popping up at a relentless pace today and staying relevant is now more of an issue than ever. Almost every day there is another new emerging tool along with many advocates promoting how it will change everything. But will it?

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All kinds of work including (but not limited to): paper work, actual work, side work, busy work, boring work. This year has blurred by me. I haven’t accomplished any important personal goals since the year began, nor have I had the time to. I’ve just made excuses - turned my face from reality - and let life go by me. It wasn’t until three weeks ago that I actually stopped to think about what realistically must happen.

I have debts to pay, bills to attend to, places to see, and goals to achieve. One of them is a new portfolio site show casing the work I’ve been doing over the last two years. Another has been to actually improve my writing and provide an insightful blog to the public. This I can say may very well happen in the next couple of days. I came up with a design three weeks ago, converted it into working code last weekend, and now this coming weekend I hope to implement it on this very site.

Still, my ‘killer’ application idea I wanted to launch in January is still festering in my mind and going nowhere as we speak. My little creative outlet Sumo Creations, likewise, is sitting around not doing much. Sure, I can attract work but I’m not attracting worth while work. Not doing cutting edge projects or anything innovative has left me feeling professionally stale and a little burnt out.

I have made it my personal goal the rest of this year to focus much more on mastering some of the design and development skills I’ve been practicing over the many years. I’ve been slinging code for over eight years but it was not until recently that I actually started to pay attention to and discover the theories behind programming. Design is just always something I’ve had a good eye for; it just came natural. But now, as of this year I’m actually actively studying and practicing design theories in my new work. Finally, being out of school for the last six months has given me much more time to think about my world I live in. I feel as though I’ve been caught up in a hectic tight bubble unexposed to the true world out there. In a constant haste from school to job I was not paying attention to what was happening around me. While I’m happy where I’m at now, I’ve gained an unsatisfiable appetite for travel. I hope to write about these things I’m doing and learning on this blog. It will not be focused - in fact it will hopefully feel as if each post belonged on a completely different website. My aim is not to be consistent but to be informative. I like many different things and become fascinated in different fields quite often. I hope this site will become interesting and insightful to some. I hope this site may become more helpful to me.

Dealing with indecisiveness has been one of the greatest challenges in my life. For the past year or so I’ve been saying I would rebuild this site as my own custom piece of software. I like to do things, especially things I understand, my own way. But what’s the point? The tool I’m using right now is fine. Probably one of the best there is for this sort of thing. So instead of rejecting the good in WordPress I’m just going to embrace it and stick with it. It’s time to get with it as opposed to always dreaming the grass is greener.

There are a few things I’ve learned from building and running my two blogs for the past three years. One, features our frivolous and purpose is key. Two, I finally got off my bum and set up “Akismet”:http://www.akismet.com as I have been told many times by my friends. Over the past four months alone I have gotten more sexual invitations, and advice on boner pills than I care to share with you. Not to mention, the deceptive hollow compliments from pro-spammers trying to seek my approval of their comments. I tell you I have had to put up with more suck-ups in the six months than Tony Soprano has had to deal with in all seven seasons of the Sopranos combined.

Lessons aside the thought of this writing is the terror of the reality that is marketing. Blogging and social software in general is a tool so people can interact with people in a meaningful way. It allows us to take advantage of a medium to connect to one another in ways we otherwise just could not. But in the present day, people such as my self, who set to share and discuss our thoughts, feelings, opinions, and intellect (intellect is often lacking) are forced to monitor for spam and install plug-ins and become part of a world wide collaborative software network to prevent it further and… it’s just exhausting and disturbing.

I dislike this abuse. This abuse has destroyed email. This abuse can destroy any form of communication if we let it get out of hand. This abuse is what makes marketing feel and seem terrible. What is acceptable and what is not? If only all of us could maintain a higher awareness of the affect some of these things we may do have on others.

Oh yeah.. I almost forgot DontTrustThisGuy.com redesign coming soon. Until then no design at all. Just the plain vanilla with peppermint flavor crystals style of the wordpress’ modern default theme.

I really enjoyed the speech Jim Coudal gave along side Jason Fried of 37Signals at SXSW Interactive this year. Jim commented on the shift the creative community is taking. In the past the focus of our community has been to create and adopt standards. We needed to determine the best practices so we could perfect our craft. But now that all has been done. It’s always developing but for the most part we’ve accomplished a level of standards that allow us to apply our craft effectively.

What’s happening now is really exciting, creatives are realizing that after doing all of these per diem jobs we’ve gained enough experience and business knowledge to bypass the client completely and launch our own businesses. Entrepreneurship is the new focus of the creative community and that is a really exciting thing. Especially considering what’s already been done. Just look at flickr, del.icio.us, BaseCamp, Campaign Monitor, or BlinkSale.

The fact is it takes very little to start these types of business if you are the master of the craft. Marketing materials, identity design, and web development are EXPENSIVE. It’s a fact. If you are the resource that creates the external face of the company as well as the core product and functionality (in terms of a web based company and or service) you can create companies with almost no budget whatsoever. It’s really an exciting time. A lot of people are trying it out. Many of them will be unsuccessful. That’s how all business is. The sharpest minds in the industry will win; those who are curious shall inherent the Earth.

Listen to the Podcast from Jim and Jason at SXSW to gain some wisdom.