AgWired

One of the first people I spoke with after we started ZimmComm was Robert French who is an instructor of Public Relations, Marcom, CMS, Blogs, Education and New PR at the University of Auburn. Robert had some advice about our Talking News Release idea and the blogging and podcasting. He’s a guy who knows his new media. In fact I hope you’re a regular reader of infOpinions?.

I guess he keeps an eye on the agriblogger and just wrote a very nice post about what we’re doing. Thanks Robert.

AgWired is a site I’ve been impressed with for some time now. It is the brainchild of Chuck and Cindy Zimmerman. They had this funny idea about “Talking News Releases.”, long since renamed to AgWired or the ZimmCast podcast. I first wrote about the site in December 2004.

Well we’ll be fully clear once the country truck/plow gets done since he just showed up. At least we’ve got power. I just spoke to Mike Wilson in Illinois and they have no power. That can get old real fast.

My arms are like jelly after working with my youngest daughter for a number of hours today to get our driveway to look like this. Thanks go to my neighbor who got his 4-wheeler going with a front plow and helped with the last several feet. Please tell Cindy I need to have one of those!

This was a wild and wooly winter storm. Around midnight I woke up to major thunder and lightning. If you’ve never seen lighting in the middle of a snow storm you’re missing a wild sight. Earlier this week at the gym a guy was saying how we needed snow because it’s been so dry. It proves that you’ve got to be careful of what you wish for.

If you’d like to see more pictures from the Missouri Snow Storm you can find them in my Flickr Photo Album.

I’m done for the day.

In one of his latest posts on Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel writes about the end of the “page view” metric as a tool to evaluate online media value. I think he’s right on the money. Technology is changing so fast that it’s going to be interesting to see how we evaluate things in coming years. He’s giving the page view about 4 more years of life.

Remember when everyone bragged about how many “hits” their website had? Well, actually there still are people bragging about it. Most of us know that it’s not a very good metric anymore. I guess pretty soon page views will go the same way.

In case you’re interested though, AgWired hit a couple of new milestones in November. We had over 103,000 page views.

And just so you know. We had over 258,000 hits.

Just to add a little extra to your thought process consider this too. I have over 3,600 pictures in my Flickr account. These are arranged in sets, mostly by event where they were taken. I’ve had almost 20,000 picture views in there. I can tell how many times each picture has been viewed too. They’re all tagged and public. So, when I take pictures while I’m out and about keep in mind that it may not just be the post on AgWired where people see the picture!

And we can’t forget YouTube can we? I’ve only just started working with it. I’ve got 4 videos in there but they’ve been viewed 900 times collectively.

Oh, wait. There’s one more thing. I just Googled for the keyword “AgWired” and got 61,100 results.

I think that’s enough measurement for one day.

Everything seems to take longer when you’ve got 16 inches of snow on top of about an inch of ice.

This is a picture from my front yard this morning. We live on the top of a hill so the bottom of the hill neighbors usually park on the street out front in the hopes that it’ll make it easier for them to get out. It didn’t make any difference with this storm.

This is the largest snowfall I’ve been in here in Missouri since January of 1995. This is more snow than the last 3 winters combined I think. Now the question is, “When will they plow the road?”

Fortunately we have power and internet access. What more do you need?

There are a lot of ways that bloggers receive a pitch and I agree with John Scalzi that there’s a right and a wrong way. I thought this one from Gary Claxton’s PR person was okay. It was personal, short and to the point.

He would love to speak and entertain at any of your agricultural meetings and conventions. Check out Gary’s website at www.mouthofsouthgc.com and listen to some of his humorous stories.. Gary entertains at a lot of Young Farmer and FFA conventions and banquets and many other agricultural events, such as the Corn Growers Association, the National RC&D convention, the GA Soil & Water Conservation, the Georgia Cattlemen’s Association, and the Florida Farm Bureau Convention. He has appeared on shows such as the Grand Ole Opry and other national shows. Gary also stars in his own television show titled “The Mouth of the South Show”. He writes a monthly humorist column for the Georgia Outdoor Magazine. Gary has been a guest on several television shows. He is also a hobby farmer. If you are interested, please write back as soon as possible. You can email him at southmouth22@aol.com or call his office at 1-888-465-0438.