Want to see some genius viral marketing? Look no further than http://www.youtube.com/oldspice.

Their crazy commercials are one thing, but carrying that over to the web = win. Kudos to Old Spice for capturing the attention of a lot of Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube fans. Will it sell more Old Spice? Only time will tell.

A couple weeks ago I created a new forum called Stylo Forum for us pen and paper enthusiasts. It’s purposely simple and easy to navigate and I think it fills a void for those of us who like all sorts of pens, not just certain types.

Right now, I have some giveaways going on to try to get some traffic going.

The first person with 25 posts* will win a free pen of my choosing (probably a Preppy or Slicci)

The 25th sign up will win a free Beetle highlighter and a free pen of my choosing (again, probably a preppy or something of that nature)

And first person with 100 posts* is going to win a little prize pack that will contain a Piccadilly Primo Journal and a few other goodies I have lying about.

All you have to do is go to www.styloforum.com, register, and start participating in our discussions. We need your participation to make this little site grow into a nice community of pen and paper fanatics.

*The posts need to be legit. No fair signing up and posting 25 “that’s cool” or posts of that nature.

One of my problems in life is having a mind that can’t settle on a hobby. And another downfall is my propensity for starting websites devoted to the hobby of that month and then letting the site fail. I own one successful web forum and the only reason it’s still around is the passion I had when I started it. Passion makes things like this work, without it, your chances of failure are high.

We all know about Fountain Pen Network, it’s the king of pen sites, full of great people and as far as I can tell, the largest pen site on the net. But when you take away the fountain pen, there are a lot of other writing instruments that people love, pens, pencils, and the art stuff is endless. Where’s the site that brings all of the journaling, writing, drawing, paper collecting geeks together regardless of the writing utensil we use? If there is a place like that… well I didn’t find it.

So I did what I always do and bought a domain name and set up a forum. It’s simple and I did that on purpose, this is how I think it needs to start. If it fails, I didn’t waste a lot of time, if it turns into something, then the community can shape it as it sees fit. I think that’s the way it should be run.

So I present to you: Stylo Forum.  I hope it’s useful to someone. If you like the idea and you want to help spread the word, I appreciate it. If it fails, I guess this domain name will turn into spam fodder in about a year.

The Michigan Renaissance Festival is… interesting. I mean that in the most kind way possible, it’s literally one of the most interesting events I attend each year. My brain has a very hard time coping with the sheer amount of input that my eyes are feeding it. Between the incredibly diverse costumes (Of note: I saw a pimp and a bunch of ninjas… not sure how that fits the period), the interesting people, the shops, and the wide range of food, I nearly have smoke pouring out of my ears by the time I leave.

Naturally I always keep my eyes open for writing related items. There’s a very talented calligrapher who has a shop there each year that provides a great amount of inspiration. There’s also a gentleman who sells very nice handmade leather bound journals. Even the paper is handmade and claimed to be archival quality. I purchased a mid-sized journal from him last year but couldn’t bring myself to mar the pages. This year I wanted to find something more affordable that I could perform some ink tests on. Luckily he had these very small 3″x2″ leather bound notebooks that are simply delightful in their simplicity. They contain the same handmade paper bound in a single stitch to a small leather cover and there’s a small string to wrap around it. Look for a full review of my findings shortly.

I also found a booth selling stationary printed with various Celtic and other unknown designs. The artist is named John Benson and he is a Michigan printmaker who is known for his wildly illustrated cards. I couldn’t decide on a single print design so I picked up the sample pack; it contains 10 cream colored printed pages, 10 plain pages, and 10 envelopes. He assured me that it would work very well with fountain pen ink which I’ll test soon enough. I’m not sure where the paper is sourced from but it’s a decently thick stock that has a nice texture to it.  He’ll be at my city’s art gallery in November so perhaps I’ll bother him to find out more information.

This has ended up longer than I wanted it to. I’ll just say that if you’re a Michigan resident and can make it over to the Ren Fest, do it. It’s a whole lot of fun!

I wonder when society decided that it was ok for a female to carry a bag for all her stuff, but a male should be able to fit his crap in his pockets. OK, I over-simplified that. But still, it’s sort of the “manly” thing to not carry an extra bag of stuff around. Men used to carry their stuff in bags around when we all rode horses, the business man made the briefcase “cool”, and in some areas I know the messenger bag thing is normal. Unfortunately I’m not riding a horse, I’m not a business man, and I’m not in an area known for having bike messengers. I need to carry a bunch of stuff somehow *pauses to scratch chin*.

Today I’m carrying… a bag of some sort. I guess I can call it a mini-messenger computer bag? Last night I managed to cram my Dell Mini 9, the current book I’m reading (the Lifehacker book in case you were wondering), a couple notebooks, an external hard drive, all the power bobbles needed for such things, and a bunch of pens. I tried to fit my little Aiptek HD camera in there but I was unsuccessful. If only I was carrying a slimmer book!

Needless to say, I felt a little funny walking into work today. It wasn’t that bad since I normally carry a backpack for my work laptop and it sort of hid the messenger bag. Walking out to my car for lunch will be a different story. All of this stuff was crammed into the work laptop bag + a bunch of other stuff and was just getting too painful to dig through so I have deemed 2 bags necessary. If this bag looked more like something other than a small woman’s purse, I’d be a bit more comfortable carrying it.

Now I just have to get comfortable carrying this around and not feeling self conscious. Or perhaps I should go shopping for something that’s olive drab and looks like it belongs on a special forces guy?

So many blogs seem to take a single subject approach. In fact, that’s one of the main suggestions from “pro” bloggers on how to get your site read. People don’t like to show up to a blog and not know what randomness might be showing up today. As much as I wish I could provide my readers a singular subject matter, I just cannot. Why, you ask? Well I’ve updated my About Me page to try to explain what level my brain works at. Hopefully it explains a lot.

Click the “About” button at the top of the page, or simply click here to read it.

When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was the dumbest idea I had ever heard. It seemed to be marketed as a way to tell people what you’re doing and I just don’t care that you’re eating ice cream right now.

Now that I’ve been playing with it, and I’m following a few good people, I’m starting to see a plethora of links and articles that I want to check out. Hardly a day goes by where one of the bloggers I’m following doesn’t post a link where I think “oh I need to check this out when I get home!”. Case in point; an article I found via someone I’m following that should end up inspiring a blog entry that will be posted later this evening. It also added another great site to my list of bookmarks.

So even if you’re not going to tell us all what you’re having for dinner, don’t be afraid of joining Twitter. You might just find the info gleaned from the tweets to be quite inspirational.

I’m not going to get all sappy but I got engaged this week. Thursday to be exact. I don’t think anyone reads this site but I feel like making that public. On XceedSpeed I got all sappy and weird but on here I’ll just say….. neato!

She better stay cool when we get married or I’m so out of here.

Here’s something I struggle with a lot and I’m willing to bet there’s a ton of people out there like me.

Say you have an idea for a website that’s going to give people the opportunity to perform a list of cool things. Obviously when you look at that list of cool things, your brain starts getting overwhelmed with the amount of work you need to do to get each thing working. If you’re like me, you start jumbling them all up and seem to be trying to focus on all of them at once.

The right way to handle this is with a simple priority list. If your site should do X, Y, and Z; you need to figure out which of those is the main focus or the most important. Say Z is the biggest thing that you are pushing and X and Y are just nice features. Then you should push X and Y out of your mind and start focusing on Z.

With Z as your focus, you get that working properly, test it out, and then add in X or Y but never both. Attacking one problem at a time and purposely pushing the other problems out of your mind as you do so will help you actually make progress. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve let a list of ideas overwhelm me to the point of leaving the project on the table and walking away.

My goal with my current web project is to use this method. We’ll see how far that gets.

Why does every guy go nuts over Megan Fox? She’s not that hot, has a rather boring body, and I can think of at least 10 if not 20 other celeb chicks that I’d rather ogle.

Side note: I don’t think I can get tired of the previews for the movie 9 set to the musical styling of  Coheed and Cambria.

Best. Band. Ever.