Eric S. Townsend

flashback series: 1979 sony walkman

a friend of mine posted a link to a bbc article on a 13-year old boy who swapped his 2009 ipod for a 1979 sony walkman. the walkman wasn’t a complete loser in the teen’s opinion – at least not across the board. the boy preferred the dual headphone jack and quick way to plug it into a socket to save battery. he wasn’t wild about the clunkiness.

widening generation gaps in the u.s.

a new study on generational gaps by the pew research center found americans of different ages increasingly at odds over a range of social and technological issues. examples of the issues wheres the gap was the greatest were cell phones, texting, religion, and manners. i can personally vouch for this in my experiences with clients ranging from 20 through 7o years of age.  to me, it looks like there are five age groups when it comes to investigating generation gaps: 18-25; 25-35, 35-50, 50-65, and 65+. the 25-35 group sees things very differently than the 65+ group.

9 ways to improve your technorati rank

stumbled upon sensible advice on how to improve your technorati rank. this is for bloggers who want a higher seo rank, or who want to sell ad space or links. having a strong technorati always helps you in the latter two instances. enjoy the above link!

5 ways to boost seo with a wordpress website

i stumbled upon a set of wordpress seo guidelines from 2009 semmy award winner, joost de valk. for those who don’t know, the semmys are a top search engine marketing award.  at the above link, joost talks about many more detailed ways to jazz up your wordpress backend to boost seo. i just thought i’d summarize the top 5 he recommends here. these are the simplest, most bang for your buck tweaks you can make.

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don’t stop ’til you get enough

“in death, jackson’s music enjoyed a commercial renaissance that had eluded him for years. his songs surged to the top 15 best-selling albums on amazon.com within hours.” we are a sick people - time to get real.

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the king of pop

i’ve been immersed in the music industry since 1990. i grew up listening to my favorite artist, prince, and taking his side in numerous arguments over who was more talented – he or michael jackson. while i was never a huge fan of the king of pop, there was no denying his enormous gifts. i won’t lie – there was a time when i was big into dancing and i often tried to emulate his steps. man, there was no touching the dude. click on for a tribute.

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anti-social ceos

a friend of mine and social media fan, greta weiner, passed along this interesting thread. A survey conducted by uberceo shows that ceos at the top 100 companies of the fortune 500 are not getting into the social media game.

the highlights, you ask?
• only two ceos have twitter accounts
• 13 ceos have linkedin profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections.
• 81% of ceos don’t have a personal facebook page.
• three quarters of the ceos have some kind of wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information.
• not one fortune 100 ceo has a blog.

what is a browser?

would you believe that less than 8% of people recently surveyed by google in new york city knew what a browser was? it’s true. watch the below video for the sad truth. courtesy of friend and fellow blogger, jason campos.

wanda lasseter lundy – website design

i completed a new website for a world-renowned intuitive healer – wanda lasseter lundy. the project features audio and video content, a membership suite with three premium levels, a blog, an “ask wanda” service, a free download area, a calendar of events with subscriber feed, the ability to share any page with your email database or social media pages, and a store with all her latest branded merchandise. training on how to utilize the backend content management system to further advance the website will be completed this week. for the most part, it was smooth-sailing – and wanda couldn’t be a better client!

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click to enlarge

flashback series: 1971 ford pinto advertising

my grandmother drove a ford pinto – quite possibly the ugliest car ever made. but any loss of cool points i suffered while being carted around in this beast pales in comparison to how ford must have felt when they first launched in the brazilian market. as it turns out, pinto is brazilian slang for tiny male genitals! look it up, i’m not busting balls here (no pun intended). so how did ford reverse this embarrassment? they renamed the line corcel – which translates into horse. click on for subsequent innuendos in the pinto advertising.

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