Author Archives: Brian Alvey

C.K. Sample linked to this gorgeous picture of Tony Stark which showed how the Iron Man movie would look if it had been done by Pixar instead of Marvel. It made me wonder what Marvel movies would be like if Pixar made all of them, so I speculated in a bunch of tweets using the hashtag #PixarDoesMarvel. HereContinue reading “Pixar Does Marvel”

This morning I turned off my alarm and fell back asleep for about 20 minutes. I snapped awake after a crazy dream and was lucky to make it to a 9am meeting. First, I’d like to thank my subconscious for waking me up without my alarm. Second, I’d like to tell my subconscious that thisContinue reading “Get out of my dreams, get into my car”

Jeffrey Zeldman posted an interesting reader letter, called Letter of the Month. The author wrote Jeffrey to explain that his Designing With Web Standards book had changed his entire career. I remember what I now refer to as a pivotal moment in my web career. I was sitting in bed reading your book. I knew nothing really aboutContinue reading “Quitting web design”

Two weeks ago, our Crowd Fusion team was right in the middle of the big cloud outage at Amazon. All of the big brands using our platform run on Amazon servers. George Reese from O’Reilly had the best early recap and perspective of the dozens of stories I read: If you think this week exposed weakness in theContinue reading “Surviving Amazon’s Cloudpocalypse”

[This post originally appeared on the Crowd Fusion website, which has been replaced by ceros.com.] As a company who works with several enterprise customers in Amazon’s cloud, Crowd Fusion would like to remind everyone of what life outside of the cloud can be like. Remember, in 2007 when a Texas pickup truck rammed into a Rackspace Datacenter andContinue reading “Weathering The Storm In Amazon’s Cloud”

Eric Snider used to work for Cinematical before AOL bought The Huffington Post to improve AOL’s leadership position as the place where brands go to die. I was just going to link to his scathing Leaving in a Huff post on Twitter, but there were too many great quotes for 140 characters: “Say what you will about AOL, butContinue reading “You’ve got fail”

[This press release originally appeared on the Crowd Fusion website, which has been replaced by ceros.com.] Crowd Fusion Announces it is the Content Management System for The Daily New York, NY, March 16, 2011 — Marking a little over a month since The Daily was revealed, Crowd Fusion officially announces that it is the content management systemContinue reading “Crowd Fusion Announces it is the Content Management System for The Daily”

There’s a great post by C.K. called Dear Apple: You’re not “Post-PC” until you cut the cord. Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving everything I’ve seen about the iPad 2 and I plan on grabbing one next Friday when they become available, but watching the event from Wednesday, the use of the phrase “post-PC” was just blatantly incorrect.Continue reading “C.K. Sample isn’t living in a post-PC world yet, but I am”

I’m in the second row of the paidContent 2011 conference at the amazing TheTimesCenter and I just watched a panel called “Quality, Quantity and Mass Content.” Larry Dignan from ZDNet hosted a panel that included Jason Rapp from Mahalo, Chris Ahearn from ThompsonReuters, Luke Beatty from Yahoo’s Associated Content and Lewis D’Vorkin from Forbes and True/Slant. The feedback IContinue reading “Content farms vs. Felix Salmon’s Twitter stream”

I was a grand jury judge for my buddy Jason’s LAUNCH conference in San Francisco last week. There are two kinds of LAUNCH judges: celebrity judges who spend a half day on stage judging live presentations and the grand jury kind that watch all of the presentations and then pick winners for LAUNCH awards. I was one of theContinue reading “LAUNCH takes off”