In case you may have been wondering where AgWired disappeared to, it was an attack. Someone spammed our comments and our hosting company had to shut us down temporarily because it was overloading the server. I’m not sure what kind of person gets their kicks doing this kind of thing but I’d love to have a few minutes alone with …

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?.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don’t mean to complain but actually I really do. Since about 8:30am today our primary internet access has been down. We use the local cable company, Mediacom. I’ve spoken with their business account support staff at least 6 times. For half the day the reason was a loss of power from the utility company to their equipment.

The logical question was, “Do you have backup power?” They said they have generators but apparently weren’t using them. That’s not good. If you’re going to have business level accounts like ours you might want to consider that electricity is important!

Since then the reason has been that we’ve got line problems such as a low signal to noise ratio and major “packet loss.” I can’t believe we’re losing packets. Sounds bad. I’ve been promised a technician on the spot for the last 4 hours. It’s not looking promising.

So I’ve put in some serious work on my Sprint PCS card today. That’s my backup. I just wish the local Sprint had their EV-DO but it has allowed us to get our client work done. It’s just cut into my posting time in a major way.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest and expect more AgWired news soon.

I know a lot of people who use Google Alerts. Here’s one I got this evening that I’ve had for a long time for the keyword “dairy.” I’ve been hearing about how Google is adding blog results and just started seeing them recently.

I know this isn’t a “farm” program but . . . it sure sounds like a good one that I’d like to find a way to get to. I’m not sure how that’s going to happen though. We’ll see.

If you’re involved in agricultural marketing today you just can’t ignore these types of professional improvement opportunities. Do you think you know all there is to know about using new media tools like blogging? Do you have a blog? If you don’t then how do you know what it can do or how to apply it to your company or clients?

I hope you’ve had a very relaxing Thanksgiving weekend. It has been an unbelievable warm weekend here in Missouri. So today it was time for a Katy Trail bike ride wearing these, connected to this, and listening to a little bit of this and this.