Top 25 Smarts

One of the great things about collaborating is that it takes you outside of your personal zone … it makes you work and think in different ways. It exposes you and your ideas in (sometimes) quite confronting ways.

The Age of Conversation eBook has been an interesting exercise — through it I have come into contact with many more marketers, social media writers, activists and thinkers than I otherwise would have. One of these is Jim Kukral. And today, as I was reading through his site, I found a very interesting post on the Top 25 Marketing Blogs that Mack Collier puts together each and every week. I have been lucky enough to take out room and board in the Top 25 over the last couple of weeks so was included in Jim’s analysis … and here are my answers to some of his questions:

Names and branding — I don’t brand my name — in fact, my blog is more about the connection of ideas, stories and people than me, Gavin Heaton. I suppose I could have a blog about myself, but I would probably get bored writing it. Oh and I didn’t have a photo of myself here until I started contributing to The Daily Fix — and once it was available there I no longer had a reason to hide over here!

• Seth Godin — yes he is in my blogroll. One of my early blogging delights was receiving a short, personal message from Seth saying "Hi Gavin, thanks for reading". Goes to show how a little encouragement can make us all bloom!
• Advertising — there aren’t ads running on my site, though I did experiment with them for a while — mostly just to understand how they worked. I think I made a total of $7.
• Typepad — I started out running my own WordPress server but then got sick of it. Typepad seemed like a nice, stable and easy to use option. Now I am too deeply entrenched here to ever think about leaving … not a bad business model, huh? Goes to show those SixApart folks know a thing or two!
• Phone numbers — I don’t have my phone number listed anywhere. But you can email me easily enough — servant [at] servantofchaos [dot] com. I guess if you had a project that you needed help with you might want to call … but email is always a great first step.