I have recently seen the photo for this banner ad on a couple of different websites (Facebook and Yahoo) in a few different layouts. One ad is to encourage people who make less than $45,000 a year to go back to school, the other I saw was for Dads to go back to school, both could qualify for Financial Aid.

I have to say this is probably the worst photo I have ever seen used in and advertisement. At first I thought it was a joke, that no serious ad could use a photo that looks this out of place.The guy looks like a member of Al Qaeda. I doubt a person like that would be surfing online looking to go back to college to better their life. The title should be changed to something like you may qualify to be on the US Most Wanted list.

I would of loved to sit in on the design review for this project when they presented this to whoever was in charge of making decisions to see their reaction or hear what they had to say about it “ok that looks great, it really captures our target audience, go ahead and send that out”. Though they may of chosen this photo to get a reaction out of people or at least cause them to look at it for a few seconds loner than they normally would of.

I wonder how well this ad is actually doing. I’d like to find out.

I have been a loyal Apple customer for years, have owned several computers, iPhones, iPods, personally and for my business, I also have turned numerous people on to your products. However the latest software update for the Apple iPhone absolutely disgusts me. I owned the first generation iPhone and it would charge with my built in iPod stereo connection in my car, I thought this was a great feature. However with the third generation iPhone it would not charge the device for some odd reason, even though it is the same connection. My father also experienced this with his aftermarket car hookup. I understand this is your poor attempt to control the market place and make people buy your over priced accessories. Over time I grew to accept this fact and was a little disappointed by your move to do this.

Before a recent trip to Europe I purchased a Brookstone external battery to extend the life of the mediocre at best iPhone battery during my travels. The product worked great and allowed me to use the iPhone for extended periods of times between charges. Upon my return I kept the battery in my car as an emergency charge since you took away my capabilities to charge my phone via my stereo hookup with the iPhone 3GS. During a recent all day trip I needed to charge my phone, and low and behold I was greeted with a warning screen when I plugged the device in. “This accessory is not made to work with iPhone. Charging is not supported with this accessory”. This is funny because it was supported and worked fine for me before. I had to shut my phone off for extended periods of time to conserve the batter for my trip home in case of an emergency. It is obviously a software update that disabled the charging from other devices as this battery worked fine for weeks, and it works fine on my first generation iPhone. I would like to know why you took away the ability for other devices that once worked to do something as critical as charge the phone? Is it so you can make more money on over priced Apple accessories? I bet it will be hard to sell accessories to the loyal customers you keep screwing over.

I am going to educate as many people about this issue as possible in hopes that you take notice of this and stop doing shady software updates taking away valuable features that people are used to and depend upon. Your once perfect brand is now tarnished severely in my eyes. No longer will I blindly purchase any Apple product just based on your brand. I will do detailed research and consider other alternatives when in the past it was anything Apple.

I would like a response back as to why you disabled the ability for my already purchased accessories which are now worthless and a waste of my money. Also is it is possible to revert this update back to a previous version in which my external battery worked. I know I probably will not receive a response, or some canned response not addressing my problem or how to fix it, but I figured it was worth a shot.

Josh Hughes, former Apple advocate

Twitter keeps gaining popularity at an alarming rate. I was doing research this weekend for an upcoming trip I am taking to Europe and came across two interesting groups using the popular micro-blogging service.

First was the US Consulate in Munich Germany had their own account. It makes sense as they could post information relating to travel and security information. The second group I found kind of surprised me. I was looking up information about Buckingham Palace and right on the homepage of the official Royal site was the infamous twitter logo. Somehow it seemed out of place with the regal feel of the site and what it represents. I had a little laugh imagining the Queen tweeting from her iPhone. However I do think it is cool to see larger establishments taking part in the craze, if the people are here their leaders should be as well. After all the Obama administration has an account so why shouldn’t the British Monarchy.

I also set up a new twitter account for Local Mojo which we will be using for the official twitter for Mojo. So go ahead and follow that to stay up to date on the progress of the company and then for useful information relating to local search and small businesses.

Apple needs to put more resources into their iPhone app program. We have all heard how slow it is to get apps approved or for simple updates to be pushed through. We experienced this first hand working on iHoops where some simple updates took close to two weeks to get approved.

Now some apps are being rejected due to third party content that the developer has no control of. Apple pulled these apps claiming it violates their policy of no adult or hate related content. It is impossible to police everything on the internet and the fact that some user could sabotage an app which costs thousands of dollars and weeks or months to develop seems unfair. As long as the app adheres to Apples policy I don’t think third party content brought into the app should be made to follow the same guidelines as long as their is proper warning that the content is being delivered from the internet not the app itself. What is the difference of launching Safari and going to an adult website on the phone. There is none.Yet Apple has allowed controversial apps to be approved in the past. I want to know who dropped the ball on the Baby Shaking app which Apple initially approved and then later removed.

Searching for apps also presents problems. Apple needs to incorporate some type of better search algorithm. It seems as if old school black hat seo tricks of the web work on the app store, such as keyword stuffing, and unrelated content about other apps. I recently searched for an art type of application and though the top results were related to my search after the first couple of apps they started to become totally unrelated. I clicked on the apps to see why and found out that in the description text listed hundreds of other popular apps at the bottom. To me this seems so out dated. If I am searching for “Graffiti” why would “Coed Spring Break” come up ahead of iGraffiti. Just because they have the name in their description? Come on, take a page from Google and learn how to filter results better and not let simple tricks such as unrelated keyword stuffing determine the results. If it takes so long to get apps approved why not take a few minutes and have the person approving the app actually read the description to make sure it is in line with what the app claims to do and not allow unrelated content.

I am one of the biggest Apple supporters out there and love pretty much anything they do. But I feel they need to invest more time and money into their app store to streamline the process, deal with third party content in a better way, and improve their own search capability. There are just too many inconsistencies with the app store and apps in general.

I worked on creating a lot of the social media profiles for Graff Toyz. We are excited to be a part of this project. Jay and I have been talking about this for years and finally have it underway. Over the next few months we are going to be working hard on this and will start to release more info about what exactly it is. In the mean time follow Graff Toyz on twitter and get ready for some cool stuff!

Today when checking my CNN News Widget on my Mac I saw – Hunch’ Web site will make decisions for you -. It seemed interesting enough and figured it was some type of personalized search engine. It seems to be a combination of a search engine mixed with Pandora where it “learns” what you like over time. Personalized search is not new as many companies are working on it. But with this interface it has more of a social media site feel then a traditional search engine.

The site just launched on Monday and was created by one of the co-founders of Flickr. I can see design elements from Flickr here, very clean, lots of negative space, 2.0 style looking javascript etc. The site is very user friendly and follows the trend of less is more and user generated content being the focus.

I think this will be a good place to do some initial research for products or decisions weighing on your mind. Or simply a fun place to surf around if you are bored. From a marketing perspective companies can use this form of crowd sourcing as the ultimate market research to zero in on exactly what their customer base is looking for. It will be interesting to see how this site / company progress in the future and who buys them out.

So go read the CNN Article and then head over to Hunch to check it out.

Local Mojo is finally up! We’ve been working on this behind the scenes at AgencyWeb for the last several months. I designed the front end of the site and built the css framework. Again we worked worked with Luke and his guys who built all the amazing features that make this platform work. It’s currently in soft launch but ready for some businesses to sign up for. It’s the perfect blend for most businesses. We found that a lot of companies don’t need or can’t afford a full blown web marketing agency like AgencyWeb, or they need something more then a directory listing like National Online Directory. Along came Local Mojo.

Local Mojo provides businesses with free local sites that provide the standard directory style information such as location with maps, hours of operations, payment options, services etc. But they allow you some “mojo” by having the ability to embed your own YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Twitter updates and more. Local Mojo also gives the user to track everything with powerful state of the art analytics and the option to buy targeted localized traffic to get even more visitors to your site.

So if you want a free website to help your local business check out www.localmojo.com and if you want to really have some mojo sign up for some of the enhanced features.

I’ve been working hard over at AgencyWeb on some internal SEO work for that site as well as Digital Skratch. It’s nice to see the results of this stuff happen so fast. Also have been working on an email campaign for Comcast. Our Local Mojo project is also progressing along nicely and should be ready for a soft launch in a few weeks. Then we have been getting geared up for our next big project, top secret for now but by August we will be ready to launch.

Busy busy busy

I also have some stuff on the Digital Skratch side coming soon. Been working on updates for Lannom and should be creating a blog for them next week. Also some updates to come for Green Garbage.

I’m flying up to Boston on Friday for the weekend, see some friends, go to Phish and then see the Sox. Can’t ask for much more than that!

So I finally got to paint my first piece! I had custom stencils cut awhile back from BlackBooks of the circle DS logo and put them to use last night. They showed me some techniques and let me have at it. I had a blast doing it and can’t wait to do some more decks and other projects. I think it came out alright considering this was my first run. I really like how some of the circles over lay to form arrows coming off of the d or s.

We also bounced around some ideas for a project we are starting and came up with a really powerful idea that we are gonna be working on as well so stay tuned for that!

Enjoy the pics, it looks good hanging next to the 53 piece.

Thursday night I went down to hang out with the guys from BlackBooks. I picked up the Digital Skratch and AgencyWeb business cards, they look amazing. We also got to play around with the laser etching machine and tried a few new fun things!

Afterward we all worked on the front of their building to get ready for the local Fort Lauderdale Art Show they were having Saturday night. The owner of the building wanted the guys to do an install on the front of their building for the show as well as other buildings he owns later on. It was fun to see the entire process from start to finish. I had a blast and they are great guys to work and hang out with. Enjoy the pics!