Mike Maney

Category: Uncategorized

  • Meat Clouds and Serverhuggers

    About a week ago, I posted my roster of The 2008 Cloud Computing All-Stars (I’ll be updating this shortly with new players and possibly a poll). Botchagalupe followed it up this week with his inaugural 2008 Cloudies Awards. My favorite category is his Best New Cloudy Terms (of which his top two for 2008 are Meat Cloud and Serverhuggers). Watch for Appistry (Disclosure: They are a client) to make a run at next year’s Cloudies based on what they are doing to help enterprises cloud-enable their applications.

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  • Picture This: I’m a photo contest winner

    About a month ago I came across a post in my RSS reader about an annual photo contest the guys at A Good Beer Blog were running. I’m an amateur photographer and, on a whim, decided to submit a couple of shots I had lying around on my hard drive. And, lo and behold, one of them was chosen as a finalist. My prize: Lew Bryson’s newly-published guide to New Jersey breweries!

    If you like beer, check out the blog. If you like beer and photography, check out the other finalists.

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  • The 2008 Cloud Computing All-Stars


    One of the most talked about technologies of 2008 was unquestionably cloud computing (okay, maybe not unquestionably…this is the tech industry, afterall). Cloud computing — from consumer-level apps such as Facebook to big company entries such as Microsoft’s Azure — dominated a good part of the tech conversation over the past year.

    And, like most hot technologies, a number of key players emerged. While my role in cloud computing flirts primarily around the periphery (i.e., I don’t write code), I am close enough to the conversation to notice which players seem to sit at the epicenter of the discussion.

    Among the creme of the crop are five who I believe make up The 2008 Cloud Computing All-Star Team:

    1. Jeff Barr (Amazon’s web services god)
    2. Michael Sheehan (GoGrid evangelist extraordinaire)
    3. Reuven Cohen (Enomaly founder and Cloud Camp instigator using open source to make the cloud elastic)
    4. Sam Charrington (Appistry VP using cloud application platform to put a hurt on the legacy app server market)
    5. Chris Gladwin (CEO of Cleversafe and the guy behind one of the hottest cloud storage technologies of ’08)

    Which cloud computing players would you recruit for your all-star team? Let me know in the comments.

    [Disclosure: Appistry is a client.]

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  • Taking the First Step: RSS Readers

    ReadWriteWeb blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick quoted me in a post earlier this evening highlighting a number of social media tools those in the industry (read: early adopters, geeks) first introduce new users to:

    PR pro Mike Maney says he starts with an RSS reader (specifically, NetNewsWire from Newsgator) because it’s “amazing watching people immediately grok the power of the web coming to them.”

    If you aren’t following Marshall and the gang at ReadWriteWeb, you’re missing out on some of the best, most insightful reporting in technology today.


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  • Let the Flakes Fly


    What better way to get ready for the flying white stuff than with a few shots of yours truly enjoying the deep and fluffy of Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

  • Web Linkage: GM + Marquette Basketball + High School Soccer

    It’s a big day on the web for two of my closest friends:

    • First out of the gate is this video on the impact of the auto industry bailout produced by GM’s social media team, led by Christopher Barger.
    • Former Marquette basketball team manager and Cracked Sidewalks blogger Tim Blair penned this piece on the Golden Eagles for NCAA FanHouse.

    Me?  The best I could do this morning was rank 8th on the all-time list of scorers in Hackettstown High School soccer’s history.

  • The Front Fell Off

    There’s usually nothing better than a client who stays on-message.  Take the spokesperson in this video, for example.  Try and guess what message he wants to make sure people hear.

  • Repurpose with a Purpose

    Social Media Killed the Video News Release StarImage by b_d_solis via FlickrOne of the things I advocate to my clients is the concept of content repurposing. To put it more simply: What else can we do with the content we have beyond its single initial purpose?

    For example, in the process of drafting a press announcement, most PR pros ask subject matter experts roughly the same set of 10 questions to get to the heart of the news. They then turn that interview into a press release (I’m being parochial on purpose here). Given the tools we now have at our disposal, why couldn’t we simultaneously do the following:

    • Capture the interview as an mp3 or on camera and post it as a pod/vidcast?
    • Repackage the interview into a Q&A?
    • Tweet good quotes as teasers?

    The idea is to do more, to get more, out of the content we have and the content we generate. For more, check out this post from SHIFT PR’s Todd Defren.

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  • The Gray Lady Links

    I recently canceled delivery Image representing The New York Times as depic...of the print version of The New York Times. I did so not because I stopped reading the paper, but because the paper in Web form is so much more accessible and powerful. That accessibility and power is most evident in today’s column by Frank Rich. Rich supports claims in his column by generously linking to a number of past articles and outside sources.

    Why is this important? Because the links allow smart readers to, in essence, fact-check Rich’s claims. By including the links, Rich (and The New York Times) begin to blur the lines ever so slightly between opinion and reporting. And in so doing, begin to reclaim the power and responsibility of The Fourth Estate.

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  • A Smashing Success for Science

    Geeks. Pocket protectors. Propeller heads. Today, all of the playful, derogatory descriptors go away.

    Scientists — explorers, more accurately — fired up the Large Hadron Collider to recreate conditions of the Big Bang. Do they know what they’ll find? They have ideas, but the excitement of what they don’t know they’ll find makes this a brave and important experiment. Teachers from kindergarten to college should take a minute today to highlight this ambitious scientific advancement, to use it as an example of why science is so vital to what makes us human, and to encourage their students to break through the boundaries of the possible to push the boundaries of what might be possible.