I gave a talk today the the edUi Conference in Richmond, VA. It’s been a fantastic conference so far, and worth more words than I can devote right now (because Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) is speaking and she’s fantastic and worth the attention). But the response to my talk was just overwhelming, and I wanted to get the slides up here quickly.

Thanks for all your feedback and tweets so far - please stay in touch!

I had a great time this past week dropping in on a few collected classes’ worth of marketing students at Providence College. I was asked by good friend and former client Ed Gonsalves to talk a bit about how Social Media and Mobile has changed marketing in recent years. While marketing isn’t necessarily a core interest of mine, I’ve been involved in it in one way or another fairly constantly over the years. I think it’s actually hard to NOT be involved in some way when you work as a design and strategy consultant.

Now that #FOWD 2011 is come and gone I can make the video available for my talk from last year! Thanks so much to @Carsonified for permission to make it public (and inviting me back again this year!)

You can find the slides for download here as well.

I need to write more about my experiene at #FOWD this year - because it really kinda blew my mind. It’s a rare thing indeed to go through two days of sessions at a conference and have not a single dud. Seriously - and I could easily have sent a clone to a few more. Just an amazing bunch of speakers who all clearly spent a TON of time on their presentations and were as generous with their time and knowledge off the stage as on it.

So I went to Brooklyn this week pretty excited: I’d been asked about giving a talk on web typography at Do It With Drupal ( #diwd ) - Lullabot’s conference about Drupal and the larger world of the web. With keynotes from Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ), Jeff Robbins ( @jjeff ) and Josh Clark ( @globalmoxie ) it was an honor to be on the schedule. I also had a fun little announcement to make that came about just in time too. Things, as they say, didn’t necessarily go according to plan.

Design Thinking (DT) is a pretty big ‘buzzphrase’ these days, it’s true. Big in business education, business innovation writing and even (shockingly) in the design world. What has always struck me is that purely by definition, design thinking is exactly what designers have been (or at least SHOULD have been) doing for decades.

I guess I should be clear: this is going to be way too short a post to catch up on ALL of the past month or so - but with so much having happened and the pace continuing, I had to give it a shot.

I was interviewed by Kimberley Donoghue ( @kydonoghue ) recently for the Providence Business News and it just came out today (view here). I’m really flattered - especially since PBN.com was one of the first big clients I had back in the 90’s and the first large-scale CMS I ever developed. 

I gave a talk today at DrupalCamp ( #DrupalCampWMA ) on Web Strategy and how Drupal fits in that view of the world. I have to say I was hugely gratified with the reception - the room was packed and everyone asked a ton of great questions and sparked wonderful conversations. I've certainly written previously about what web strategy is and why I think it's so important, but what's equally vital is how Drupal can play such an integral role in enabling that strategic approach in designing and developing really compelling web solutions.

Well, not a huge revelation here - but something that came out of my talk at #FOWD was a bit of inspiration. As web professionals we should remember that we do make AWESOME happen. The web has the potential to be the single most pervasive & transformative development in the history of business - but only if we learn enough about that organization to see how it can be applied.