Wordpress upgrade, theme refresh, list of plugins

Just upgraded to WP 2.7.1. There were a few fun moments.

Wordpress.org

The Upgrade

It should have gone like this

$ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.7.1/ .

but instead it went like this

$ rm -rf *.*
$ svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.7.1/ .

New Theme

Also installed the Grey Matter theme. Did some hackery on a few items, but really tasteful right out-of-the-box. Hope you like it.

Wordpress Plugins

My WP plugins look something like this (not 100% accurate, but maybe 90%)

Activated

Deactivated

July 4, 2009 • Tags: , , • Posted in: wordpress • No Comments

What is the Meaning of your Brand?

I highly recommend the book Making Meaning by Diller, Shedroff & Rhea (2006). The material is well researched and built from significant insight and a good deal of hard data. The core question of the book is what meaning is being produced through interaction with a brand.

From this perspective, the production of meaning can be understood as a key or even primary goal of the brand interaction.

Of course meanings can be significantly culturally-bound. However, they identify a number of meanings which appear to be cross-cultural. Not meant to be an exhausting list, it is nonetheless interesting.

Which one of these meanings could be considered vitally important and even understood as the primary goal of your brand?

July 2, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: brand • No Comments

3 Highly-ranked social networking sites you may not have heard of

Browsing through the Alexa data (the top 1m sites), I ran across some interesting numbers and a few social network sites I had previously overlooked.

Why are Social Networking Sites important?

Why is this important? In the age of Personal Branding, social networking sites are important places. Think of them as a portal of people.

On the other hand, the idea that one has to join every site and engage in the same level of interaction (or conversely, only behave in a broadcast, non-interactive mode), should be dispensed with.

Exclusive Rights

Joining social network sites, setting up profiles, and reserving usernames simply has value in terms of exclusive rights. This means that excluding others from reserving your current username (and therefore confusing the message of the brand name as well as ease of findability), is itself valuable. After all, intellectual property rights are exclusive rights, the right to exclude others from speaking on behalf of brands or being confusingly similar.

Social Networking Sites and their Ranking in Alexa

June 28, 2009 • Tags: , • Posted in: socialmedia • No Comments