My five-minute CSPAN-like tribute to Gen. Henry Knox is featured on Hammock.com as our 4th of July special. Knox (for whom both Knoxville and Fort Knox are named) is an unsung hero of the Revolutionary War. While at the DAR Headquarters in Washington recently (they are a client of Hammock), I learned more about his role in the war and the founding of America through an exhibit they have of a recently acquired collection of Knox-family documents.:

Lost photos: I shot this photo from
my office window last April.
Unfortunately, I can’t locate the photos shot
from the same location on April 16, 1998.

My first ever accidental online “citizen journalism” (before the term existed) experience occurred ten years ago, today. Unfortunately, because of the ephemeral nature of the web and certain “wish we knew then what we know now” practices, there is no place for me to point to what I did on that day.

Today, posting “weather photos” is one of those participatory “user-generated-content” activities that even the most up-tight control-freak media company encourages. In the past week or so, I’ve been emailed by at least two big brand online services requesting that I join their network of weather watchers due to my practice of posting photos of weather outside my office window on the 7th floor of a building near Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Ten years ago today, Will Weaver (then an employee at Hammock, now the big-guy — literally and figuratively — at the e-mail marketing company, emma) and I did a rather remarkably dumb thing. We had an early digital camera and decided to take photos of a tornado that was heading straight towards our building.

All the smart employees (everyone but the two of us) headed to the core of our office building, but we were thinking how great it would be to take some photos and post them on the Hammock.com website. That was a rather out-of-the-box idea as the site was your basic brochure site at the time. Not like today where not only do we have several work-related blogs on the site, but every employee also has a “people page” where they can post information they’d like to share.

Back then, Will and I shot a series of photos (actually, I think Will was “shooting” and I was “photo directing”) of what turned out to be the tornado passing by our office as it touched down in Centennial Park on its way to hitting downtown (including the stadium, then under construction) before doing major widespread damage in East Nashville. (Today, the Nashville Tennessean has a retrospective of the days events.)

After the tornado passed our office building, Will and I and a few other Hammock employees jumped in a car and (I don’t recommend this to anyone — indeed, do not ever do this) drove out to survey the damage in the area immediately surrounding our office. A few blocks from our office, we came-upon what turned out to be one of the most tragic events related to that day. As we watched, a large team of Nashville emergency service and fire department personnel were attempting to save a Vanderbilt student who was pinned beneath a tree in Centennial Park. Unfortunately, the student died later.

When we returned to the office, Will posted the photos at the URL (which no longer works) hammock.com/tornado. Within an hour, CNN.com and other news services were pointing to the photos and the site, which perhaps on a good day got 100 visitors, was (thanks to a robust server) getting tens of thousands of viewers. Sometime during the night, a radio talk show host I had never heard of until then, Art Bell, linked to the photos and started talking about them on his show. (Later I learned that visiting aliens and bad weather were a staple of his show.) The link from Art Bell ended up crashing our servers, as I recall.

Several years ago, we discovered that we had “lost” those photos and any archive of what the site was like on that day. I haven’t actually given up on them turning up somewhere, but searches of the WayBackMachine and other services have not turned up any mirror sites that captured the photos.

One of the reasons I now am obsessed with backing up and organizing digital media — and displaying it on multiple platforms — is my disappointment in having lost that April 16, 1998 moment in time — as experienced by a few of us.

Today, Hammock Inc. would have the photos uploaded to Flickr.com/hammock and YouTube.com/hammockinc instantly and the photos would be backed up on three different servers in our offices and off-site. And, oh yeah, they’d also be posted on that “Out My Office Window” Flickr set. Additionally, we would grant rights to anyone wanting to display the photos for news-coverage purposes.

We’ve come a long way in the past ten years. Today, the city of Nashville has a network of siren alarms that warn people of weather emergencies. Vanderbilt students can be contacted immediately via text message during any type of emergency. And today, the notion of individual witnesses of an event providing personal coverage directly to an audience, and not mediated by a professional news operation, is accepted as a norm — and even “covered” by traditional media.

Later: Laura Creekmore, who then and now lived in East Nashville, recalls the day’s event (she was one of the smart people who went to our building’s basement). I spoke today also with Will Weaver whose recollection is similar to mine. If Lewis Pennock or others are reading this, please comment to fill-in-the-blanks of any details from that day.

Over on the Custom Media Craft blog on Hammock.com, I just posted some highlights from the annual survey conducted by the Custom Publishing Council called “Characteristics Study: A Look at the Volume and Type of Custom Publications in America”. (Note: Hammock Inc. was one of the founding members of the Custom Publishing Council). According to the survey, in 2007 a record number of marketers used custom media to promote their products and brands. Personally, I believe the numbers are still conservative as there are lots of online “content marketing” activities taking place that fall through the cracks of this research. For instance, most of the digital startups that have content creation for marketers (i.e., video distributed online) as part of their business model should probably be covered in this research — but aren’t.

One thing this survey underscores is a statistic that doesn’t click with many of my friends in the magazine and media industry who think of the magazine format as being, exclusively, a business model (i.e., consumer of B2B magazines). The magazine format is not just a business-model, it supports and serves other business models. I typically use university alumni or association magazines as examples here, but think of all the institutions and, now, companies, who use magazines and other media they create as platforms for fostering long term relationships with their constituencies (customers, alumni, members, supporters, etc.). While there are probably (and I’m guessing here) less than 20,000 magazines that have advertising and circulation-revenue as the focus of their business models, this survey indicates there are 143,173 magazines in America. Even if my number is low and their’s is high, the truth of magazine publishing is this: Most magazines in America “support” a business model — they aren’t a business model.

This is an important fact to consider when thinking about the “business model” of another media: blogging. Today — and forevermore — there will be only a small fraction of blogs that are, themselves, a business. The vast majority — as in 99% or more — of business-related blogs will support a business model (or a cause or institution or campaign), not be a business model.

Another thing: I confess: As much as I enjoy publishing — indeed everything about — magazines, I’m also very-much a new-media guy. I believe content-marketing, custom media, social media, conversational media — whatever you want to call it — should be front and center in any company or institution’s marketing effort (our company works with clients in doing just that). I see no “competition” or “conflict” or “irony” in me advocating new media while still championing the magazine format as the most compelling engagement media available.

At Hammock.com, view statistics and highlights from the Custom Publications in America survey.

No one asked, but here are the primary ways I’m currently expressing myself online.:

rexblog.com: Professional and business-related focus (media, technology, conversational & new media, marketing, magazines). Once each day, my blog includes a posting that aggregates all of the links I’ve bookmared on del.icio.us/rexblog that are related to those topics.

Hammock.com/rexhammock: My official Hammock Inc. “people page.”

RexHammock.com: Personal passions and random-topic tumble-log.

Twitter.com/r: Stream-of-life commentary in < 140 character posts, and where I "hang-out" online.

Flickr.com/rexblog: Where I post photos.

YouTube.com/rexhammock: Where I post videos.

Last.fm/user/rexhammock: Music I’m listening to.

Facebook, Linkedin, etc.: I don’t really “express myself” on these and other “social networking” sites, but on most of them, you can find me if you search for my name or the username “rexhammock.”

FriendFeed.com/rexhammock: A “lifestream” of everything I post anywhere.

Recently, I re-booted RexHammock.com, a URL on which I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr.com for several months. I had determined that I was under-utilizing it as merely a “lifestream” catcher — a place that collects all the different RSS feeds generated by my various online-expressions on Twitter.com/r, Flickr.com/photos/rexblog, etc. And, with services like FriendFeed.com and even MyBlogLog getting more into being pure-play lifestream platforms, I decided to go back and figure out how to better utilize the very cool features of Tumblr.

As you can see from RexHammock.com, one of the smart things they did was make it drop-dead-simple for me to use my own URL instead of some long / this-and-that account name. And, despite my design-free look on the site, the Tumblr platform has some attractive templates and is very CSS-friendly for those who want to (and can) be creative. I’m trying to master the functions and ethos of the platform and its community, before putting any time into determining what it should look like however. So, in my experiment, you can consider it now in a wire-frame state.

What I have determined is this: I’ll be writing about and pointing to mostly non-work or non-professional-related topics on RexHammock.com. For example, this week, I started off with my review of the Punch Brothers new release and have followed that up with posting quotes from the New York Times and the long piece yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. (I’m happy to note that if you had read my review on Tuesday, and had listened to a YouTube video I pointed to, you would have been better prepared to understand why such a “different” kind of recording is receiving such attention.)

So, to summarize: On rexblog.com, I’m gradually shifting to focused commentary and links related to magazines, new media (specifically, what I call “conversational media,”) marketing, corporate and association communication. Some of this is cross-posted on Hammock.com and elsewhere. My non-professional interests (stuff my wife & kids & pets do, the world, my hometown, travel, music, photography, books, movies, table saws, humor, tomatoes, Tennessee Titans, Vanderbilt basketball, etc.) are slowly showing up on RexHammock.com.

Hammock is happy to be one of the sponsors of Podcamp Nashville tomorrow at the Cannery Ballroom. It’s a free community “unconference” about new media — especially the kind of new media that I like to call mediacasting.

You can find more information about who’s attending, schedules and other activities at the Podcamp Nashville blog. It’s free to attend, but you are encouraged to register — and to volunteer to help. Look for me: I’ll be there.

Nashville is Talking’s Christian Grantham has a collection of links to posts by area bloggers regarding the tornados that passed through the area last night. Also, as I typically read his posts via an RSS newsreader and not on the site, this is the first time I’ve noticed the site’s “Nashville Tweets” feature that aggregates Twitter posts from area users of the service. Looks like something fun, but last night, it also served as very helpful service in aggregating messages posted on Twitter (tweets) directly related to a breaking disaster story, something I’ve written about before and that others with the resources and know-how to make it happen are doing.

Remember: Seeing the opportunity of repurposing toys into something that can save lives starts with playing with toys.

Sidenote: Thanks to those who have emailed and “messaged” me regarding the bad weather here. Those of us at Hammock were fortunate to miss any direct damage from the storms.

Bonus link: On his Hammock “People Page,” Bill Hudgins writes about the tornado that touched down in his hometown of Gallatin last night — and recalls a similar experience two years ago that he wrote about on this weblog.

On the Hammock website, we typically promote our services that help association and corporate clients better tell their stories. Today, we’re using it to encourage you to tell yours. Vote!

Later: One of the coolest Google Maps mashups ever: This “Twittervision” map providing an animated view of Twitter users talking about (tweeting) today’s elections.

Technorati Tags: supertuesday

At Hammock.com, we have a map mash-up where people with whom we work (our clients, free-lance network of contributors, vendors and other friends — even several folks who follow me on Twitter joined in when I invited them to participate with a Christmas Day tweet) are posting photos of themselves wearing a T-shirt we’ve mailed to them. “Every T-shirt has a story” is the theme of this year’s version of our annual tradition. For each five shirt photos added, we’re donating funds for a computer to the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (up to 20 computers). Today, the incredible photo above (larger version) was posted on the map by a Bay-area photographer we work with regularly, Eric Millette. It was such an interesting photo, I emailed Eric to find out more about how he came up with the idea and captured the image. I thought some of my photographry-blogging friends might find interesting the short Q&A I’ve posted on our company’s Custom Media Craft blog.

Technorati Tags: hammockinc, maps, photography

It’s true, I’m not a fan of the term “content marketing” and would never apply that term to the work I do. That said, I really like some people who are evangelizing the use of the term “content marketing” who have honored this blog with a high ranking on a new list of bloggers who write about what they believe the term describes (more on that in a minute).

So since I’m an accidental (but appreciative) “content marketing” blogger, I’d like to use this new authority to explain fully why I don’t like or use the term “content marketing” except when a potential client is using it to describe something they’d like to hire my firm to do. (The same is true for “Web 2.0″ or any other term I may accidentally be associated with.)

See, I have a problem with the word content when used to describe what I create. I believe using the word “content” voluntarily to describe what I do insults the talent, skill, creativity and craft that goes into the media my colleagues and I create and manage in collaboration with our clients. I believe the term “content marketing” makes it sound like I’m marketing a service to shovel out some commodity created primarily to fill up space or time. Creating “content” is not what we do. Helping tell brand stories. Adding value to products. Encouraging loyalty or involvement. Educating. Activating. Those are the things the talented individuals at our company do with and for the talented individuals who are our clients. “Generating content” is absolutely the least valuable of all the services we provide. And I say that knowing the “content” we create is consistently judged to be among the best “content” created by people at companies like ours.

Longtime readers of this blog know my go-to muse on the topic of the term “content” is the philosopher Doc Searls who summarizes everything I believe when he says (and I’m leaving it precisely in his vernacular), “Stop calling everything ‘content.’ It’s a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the ’90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put online. It’s handy, but it masks and insults the true nature of writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still, blessedly (if adjectivally) call ‘editorial.’ Your job is journalism, not container cargo.”

End of rant.

I need to be very clear: I have nothing personal against my friends and industry colleagues who want to use the term “content marketing” to describe a business category. I don’t use the term — but I’m not leading any faction that’s “anti-” anything. I’m for whatever anyone can do to let marketers know there are companies out there who can help them create and manage media used in building brands and creating communities. And I’m honored that my weblog is ranked #13 on the new Junta 42 Top Content Marketing Blogs. And I’m (big surprise here) enough of a self-promoter to encourage people to go there and “vote” (hitch) this blog up the list. And I’m also enough of a search-engine geek to know that if the marketplace wants to call the business I’m in “content marketing,” then I’m not going to try to hide from the term when potential clients are searching for it. So, “content marketing” searchers, head right over to Hammock.com if you’re looking for a company that can help you solve any editorial or graphic design or video or online content marketing needs you may have. Anything not involving container cargo ship content, in other words.

Oh, and another thing: if you haven’t fallen asleep yet, you must actually be interested in “content marketing” (or custom media, customer media, custom publishing, customer media, conversational media, conversation marketing, etc.) so let me also point you to a new weblog on Hammock.com called Custom Media Craft. It’s tightly focused on the “crafts” used in our development and management of brand story telling. Oh, wait. Another term for another post.

Technorati Tags: cluetrain, custommedia, custompublishing, doc searls, hammockinc

The white-coat gang at Hammock Labs are playing with Facebook pages. If you’re a Facebookian (Facebooker?) and care to play along, please “fan” Hammock or SmallBusiness.com (or both). As the lab rats have already discovered there’s no button that says, “fan,” here’s their first discovered recommendation: “Tell someone to add your page to their list of product and services — don’t tell them to “fan you.”

Also: I can assure you that no animals were harmed and no lead was used in the creation of the still rather wet-paint (and sparse) pages.

As a follow-up to my post yesterday about our office OS X upgrade, I thought I’d share this photo of Hammock’s head hackololgist, Patrick Ragsdale, being attacked by roaming packs of Leopards this morning. You can read @MeaganG’s post about it on Hammorati, the company weblog. Also, when he regains consciousness, Patrick will be blogging on his weblog, ScriptAlias, about geekier aspects of installing Leopard and Leopard Server in a 25-employee business environment .

I hate to sound braggadocious, but can’t help myself from giving a shout-out congratulations to the Hammock Publishing corporate spelling bee team for annihilating the competition in tonight’s 14th Annual Corporate Spelling Bee, benefiting the Nashville Adult Literacy Council.

Fittingly, they went ahead on the word annihilate and won on the word braggadocio.*

A perennial power-house in the competition, this is the second time the team has brought home the first-place trophy — a very big one, as I recall. Nearly as intimidating as this year’s Titans O-Line are these Team Hammock spelling ninjas: Jamie (2-Cs-in-Zucchini) Roberts, Megan (MeganG) Goodchild and Bill (The Spellinator) Hudgins.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I have never come close to making the team.

*corrected from an earlier version.

There’s a nice story about ‘office environmental branding’ in today’s Tennessean that features Hammock Publishing’s space. The online version of the story doesn’t include photos (later: oops, correction), so I created a Flickr set to accompany it. The work was done by Advent Marketing Results, which I just discovered has a website called LobbyMakeover.com, that features our lobby. It’s amazing what one learns by surfing around the web. I didn’t know we had a famous lobby. Now I do. If you’d ever like to drop by and see it, please feel welcomed.

Don’t know how I missed Laura Creekmore’s major pub in today’s Tennessean. Besides moderating the East Nashville listserv and blogging about food, she’s head of Internetology at Hammock. From that photo on Tennessean.com, you can see she’s the one with clutter-free desk.

Here’s a great story about how blogs work in mysterious ways. It’s about a dog named Thunder who needed a home and how a Nashville blogger “meat-up” back in December at which we were each encouraged to bring some pet food to donate to the Nashville Humane Society led to one thing that led to another. Actually, it started a long time before that, but I’ll let Wonderdawg and the commenters on his blog tell that part.

Technorati Tags: blogging, nashville