So, no new posts in three months. I guess I went on hiatus. Not on purpose. Just didn’t post because I was too busy.

I’m three months into my job at Memphis’s leading information source (online or not). So far we’ve had two school shootings, a tornado rip through town, No. 1 in college basketball play No. 2 and one of the largest mass killings in the city’s history. Needless to say, I’ve been busy. Besides just trying to get all of the details in place on the site. I think it took me a while to get up to speed, but now I feel like I am moving a bit faster and caught on to the pace.

I’ll try to post more often. I promise.

Tomorrow I will start my new job as the online content manager at commercialappeal.com the web site of The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis. If you know me or you have read my blog you know that I love anything new online and I have a passion for journalism. At The Commercial Appeal I will have a chance to continue exploring a new frontiers of online journalism leading their team of producers, reporters and videographers in my home town. I love new adventures– learning about new people, places and things. This is going to be fun!

Seth Godin has a great post on his blog asking is good enough enough?. Instead of good enough he says we should redefine the objective to be “makes some people uncomfortable, changes the entire competitive landscape and is truly remarkable in that many of the key people we reach feel compelled to talk about it.”

Godin goes on to say that going to that extreme to succeed is synonymous with risking failure, getting fired and exhausting because you raise the bar every time, but at the same time, when you succeed, it’s worth it all of it.

Thursday night I finally finished reading Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. I say finally because it took me about a month to read it. Please don’t let that be an appraisal of my opinion of the book. I just spent too much time online and not enough time reading in the past month.

Scoble and Israel are admittedly blog evangelists in the book writing from the opinion that blogs are a permanent part of the business marketing/communications landscape. The book starts answering why blogs are important and how to do blogs right and how to do them wrong. Blogs usage in the US and internationally are examined. They address how different cultures react differently to the blogosphere. Finally the close the book with a look at the future of blogs and tips on how to improve your blogging.

I really enjoyed the numerous case studies they wrote on different corporations use of blogs. I had heard some of the stories before, but most of them were new to me. The authors really presented a simplified, understandable history of the web to date. They offered numerous helpful tips on how to improve your blogging which will hopefully help me out here.

Now onto The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson (Did you see my Good Reads section change on my website?).

I have had a Canon Powershot A95 digital camera since April 1995. I bought the camera to take with us to Maui and it took awesome photos, but after I got my Canon 20D Digital SLR I haven’t used it for much more than shooting videos. Today, I was shooting video of my kids with it and after I took a couple of seconds of video the LCD went black with some brown highlights and light streaks. Every second of video I took after that looked just like that LCD screen: black with brown highlights and light streaks. I could go back and look at older movies that I had shot and they looked fine, but the new video looked horrible. It was obvious to me that the image sensor was knocked off center or had a short in it or something. I thought the camera was trashed since it has been out of warranty for at least a year already.

Just to make sure there wasn’t anything I could do I visited Canon’s support website and found a Service Notice describing my problem exactly and offering a free repair. I called their toll free service number and now they are sending me a shipping label to send my camera in for a free repair.

That is great service! I have recommended Canon digital point and shoot cameras to friends and students for a number of years because of their quality photos, custom settings, ease of use and durability. Just when I thought I had found a flaw in their product, I discover instead that I can add great service and integrity to the list.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve added a couple of sections to this blog (very easily thanks to bloggers layout configuration tools). Today, I added the good reads (books) section with links to books that I am reading, just read or plan on reading next. If you have a book that you think I should check out, please let me know in the comments.

With this section addition, the amount of additional content that I have on this blog has gotten out of hand for a two-column layout. So, I switched to a three-column layout. Blogger doesn’t offer any two column layouts, so I found one from the Blogger Workshop. So, if you just read the RSS feed click over to lanniebyrd.com and check it out.

Along these same lines, I’ve been playing around with different blogging tools like Wordpress and Drupal. I’ve thought about switching this blog to one of those tools, but I’ve been with Blogger since February 2001 and Google is really trying to modernize blogger so I am going to stick with them for now. The one thing that has really bugged me about blogger is it’s sorry layout options and the lack of other themes (designs) out there (unlike Wordpress). This layout looks just like my old 2-column blue minima design from blogger, but maybe I will find the time to customize it sometime.

In the news today, the train at the Memphis Zoo lost its last car, then the car derailed and flipped. No one in the train was injured, but several riders were transported to the hospital.

I remember riding the train at the Memphis Zoo (they have nice site with a fun navigation rollover) since I was very little (if you have Facebook, you can see some photos of me when I was little that my sister-in-law Kim posted). Once in sixth grade I was at the Memphis Zoo for a field trip and several of my friends kept jumping off and on the train in the tunnel. After the 2nd time around with them jumping off, the train engineer (driver) stopped the train and found a hose and sprayed them down.

If you frequently read my blog you know that I enjoy web design, photography, politics and video production, but newspapers and online journalism are what really excite me. I am particularly interested in innovations at newspapers. In fact, I wrote my master’s thesis on online newspapers use of technology. Last week, Jay Small wrote a very interesting, extensive post on “making innovations at newspapers.”

Last month I posted 31 times on this blog. That’s a record in a month for me. I am especially proud of that many posts in the month with only 28 days. Apparently, there is something about February and blogging that I really like. February was my peak blogging month in both 2006 and 2005. I also started this blog in February 2001.

Today the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 416 points (about 3.3 percent). According to the Washington Post the main free fall in the market was “triggered by a technological glitch that caused a backlog of trades to be calculated at nearly the same time.” The story reported that about $600 billion in market value was loss. Now, the Dow was going to drop anyway today, but without the technical glitch how bad would the drop have been?

I know how much of our security and economy is based on computers and how fragile computer systems can be. To me it’s surprising that this kind of occurrence is as rare as it is.