It is the death of life and the birth of a new holocaustic life. We’ve never actually had an actual nuclear winter on a global scale, though the threat is there as more and more nuclear weapons proliferate the globe. Many science fiction stories have been built around the concept of a nuclear holocaust and life after.

Although it’s a dark time, sometimes proverbial nuclear winters are necessary. They are the times when you throw away everything you know and begin from scratch. A chance at a new life. A rebirth. It’s a time to correct all that is wrong and hopefully get on the right path over the long haul. Economists call it “corrections”. Historians call it the “end of an era” or the “decline of an Empire” - depending on the context. I just cleared out all of my feeds from Google Reader and will begin rebuilding from scratch.

As someone who is not experienced in an actual nuclear winter, let me describe a few things that I’ve learned from proverbial “nuclear winter”

Photo by nogoodreason

1. All Assumptions are False

In a nuclear winter, life is not as you expect. Landmarks are gone. People you know are no longer in your world. You can no longer go to the grocery store and instead have to live off the land.

If you’re in a business that is facing massive layoffs, you cannot assume that the way things always have been will still exist in the world post-layoffs. You cannot assume that, even if you retain your job, your “new” job will remain as it was. You will likely end up giving up responsibilities due to business strategy objective shifts and maybe doing some new work due to the need to backfill for laid off colleagues.

You cannot assume that, because we’ve lived in a world of thriving internet startups, that you the lay of that land will remain the same in an economic holocaust. You can’t. It’s just not a safe assumption. Ask Seesmic.

2. Live Off the Land

In a nuclear winter, as described earlier, you simply can’t go to your Whole Foods and buy your hipster organic food. The reality is is that even if you could go buy organic food, it’s likely tainted from the fallout in the water, ground and air. No, you live off the land. You find the bugs and plants that carry an innate immunity to radioactivity or that have evolved enough to live and thrive in a nuclear landscape. Because you have to survive, and that’s more important than getting your Venti Soy Chai at Starbucks (that don’t exist).

More and more companies that continue to emerge these days are bootstrapping. Companies like AwayFind, who launched the other day, are bootstrapping and not taking angel investing or venture capital to stay alive. They are not taking a devaluation just for the infusion of cash. They are succeeding the old-fashioned way - a method that might take a lot more runway, but that ensures that 100% of the value of the company is retained by the principals. If you can live off the land, do it. It might be awhile before you find yourself a Starbucks in the nuclear wasteland.

3. There is Always a Remnant

During any nuclear winter in any story, you’ll always find a remnant. It might just be a small village of survivors that are doing their best to build a community and survive. They may have built a wall of scrap metal around their community to keep raiders away, but they are surviving.

At critical times where the status quo is challenged, the companies that are the hardiest and most cost-efficient are the ones that survive. While companies like AIG require an infusion of cash (or, as I call it, a crutch) to stay afloat they continue to splurge on non-necessities. Companies like this are doomed to failure.

While the auto-industry, built around an inefficient union mentality that, at one end, limits innovation because it de-incentivizes that innovation, and at the other hand overpays under-qualified individuals to do jobs that are worth half of their paychecks, struggles to figure themselves out, they will eventually have to declare bankruptcy. During that bankruptcy, they will be forced to cut, by some estimates, 50% of their workforce while updating their approach to union labor to ensure survival. There will be a remnant, and that remnant will figure out what needs to happen to survive the wasteland.

4. That Bridge Used to be the 14th Street Bridge

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 recently, which is set 200 years after a nuclear war between the United States and China. The setting is a region called “The Capital Wasteland” and is, in essence, the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region.

Throughout the game, you can find indications of what used to be. I recognized, in my wandering around the Capital Wasteland, a landmark that could only be the 14th Street Bridge. I would not have recognized it from anything other than geographical position. There were no distinguishing features and it was largely destroyed and falling into the isotope-filled Potomac River, but I knew it was the bridge.

Practices will change throughout life, but principles and patterns remain the same. It is the essence of the Chaos Theory which states that though the universe appears to be full of chaos and disorganization, it is entirely made up of fractals and patterns at an atomic and sub-atomic level. More simply, there are patterns and principles that remain true, though practice, execution and manifestation of those principles change.

In the communications, newspaper, and television industries, as well as many large businesses, people are wrestling with how to do business in a world that is dominated by the internet and then, only recently. They see chaos, where they should see patterns. The principles of public relations is to communicate effectively with the public. The practices of public relations, however, are shifting and the ones that adjust are the ones that will survive that nuclear winter.

5. Know Your Immune System

In a nuclear winter, there’s no one looking out for survivors except the survivors themselves. If there are doctors, they are few and far between. If there is a support community, you have to look hard and not trust anyone. It’s the nature of the new dog eat dog world that such a holocaust causes.

Companies right now are scrambling to figure out “what’s up”. They are looking at their profit margins, cash in hand and extending their runways as far as they can extend them. Investors are reassuring their portfolio companies that there should be a way to survive if they are smart and proactive, but the reality is that in a nuclear winter, no one really knows.

Even if a portfolio company manages to get that C-round and the $15M investment they need, it will be on a down valuation. In layman speak, that means it becomes, in essence, a high-interest loan where the company gets the cash they need but give up a larger stake in the company to make it happen.

The big banks are getting bailout money, but giving up controlling stakes in their companies in some cases. Rollups are likely with smaller companies needing an infusion of cash. People are being reassured that they will retain their jobs, and being laid off the week after. You can trust no one in a winter except yourself. I reiterate my recommendation from a few weeks ago, though. If you have a stable job, stay in it. If you are an entrepreneur, don’t seek shelter in a stable job. Survive, survive, survive…. then rebuild.

Gary gets it. He gets it in a way that very few other people, even in social media get it. I believe this stems from a lack of pretentiousness that drives him. He is who he is, and he’s focused solely on “the hustle” - the drive to build his brand and make money.

When Gary puts out a video, people listen. Because he knows what he is talking about.

We’ve talked a lot about brands and marketing here. I’ve talked about the trust and transparency factor. How if your customers can relate to you, because you’re transparent, they are going to do more business with you. How if your customers don’t trust you, your brand is worthless because you don’t control the value of your brand - they do!

Gary points out in one of his recent videos that brands of the past succeeded on “presentations” - that is ads, and marketing. They went where the eyeballs were. No one ever got to engage with the brand other than to buy the product. But, he argues, brands of tomorrow will succeed by “working the room” and talking to their customers because social media has changed the game.

Enjoy some Garyvee!

The point was to provide Top 10 blogs for their readers to read… sometimes on a special topic, other times more generalized. Blogs.com published this Top 10 List yesterday.

For those who have not adopted RSS reading and subscribing yet, consider opening a free Google Reader account and begin subscribing to blogs like these and mine  - you never have to remember to go visit a site then; Reader just automatically shows you new content when they appear.

Without further adieu (and in no particular order):

Read Write Web - a tech news analysis site. They do less reporting of the news and more hard hitting “what’s it mean to me” kind of writing. Also, maybe my chief competitor.

Chris Brogan - Well connected, and all about helping people understand the nature of online relationships and community.

Fred Wilson - an extremely savvy investor (Venture Capital) and principal partner at Union Square Ventures in New York. Success stories include FeedBurner (acquired by Google), Twitter (open portfolio company), del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo), etc. During hard economic times, Fred has been a sober and encouraging financial voice in the chaos.

Neatorama - is sort of a directory of wonderful things, with all due respect to Boing Boing who has adopted that tagline. It is all kinds of interesting things that the wrtiers have come across on the web or elsewhere.

Lifehacker - Lifehacker does a wonderful job of helping people discover technologies and tools that will make their lives more efficient. From email productivity, to Mac and Windows hacks, Lifehacker covers it all.

Textually - Those who know me, know I’m bullish on mobile. Mobile is the wave of the future and the web services that get this, are the ones that will be positioned to take the web into it’s next iteration when the economy comes back. Textually covers everything text messaging and SMS and does it well.

Digital Photography School - As an intermediate photographer, I love Darren Rowse’ community approach to crowdsourching and crowdlearning at his DPS blog. I learn all kinds of things about lenses, bodies, aperture, lighting and exposure from lots of people who are also learning the art of photography.

The Schmuck Stops Here - is a local Baltimore sports blog written by Baltimore Sun sports columnist and radio personality, Peter Schmuck. Cue the jokes on his name, Peter is no schmuck and is very insightful on Ravens football (which is why I read him).

Venture Beat - is my token social media technology news blog. I like these guys. They are really objective and not assholes, like their competition.

Tech President - Tech President is a great non-partisan blog that is examining how web technologies are playing into presidential politics, and politics in general. With a web savvy President coming into office, TP is bound to continue to be a great read.

Termed “Crazyhorse” at the beginning of the cycle, the WordPress admin is the result of complete thinking outside the box, research and user testing. The concept began as “Let’s throw everything away that we assume to be proper and correct and see what we can come up with when we have no preset conditions”.

The result is a semantically, aesthetically and structurally different WordPress than you’ve ever known before. This is not your grandma’s WordPress!

Vertical Menus

The first thing you will notice when you login to WordPress 2.7 for the first time is the new menu layout. Without a doubt it’s going to throw you for a loop and you’re going to hate it. As usual, I’ve run development versions of WordPress for much of the development cycle and let me tell you that this change, early on, almost pushed me away from WordPress - a move that would be earth-shatteringly huge.

Props to Jane Wells, Liz Danzico and the Happy Cog and the entire Automattic team for really creating a sexy interface. The new vertical paradigm is a direct result of the Crazyhorse testing, though, and it has ultimately grown on me.

The navigation is comprised of top-level menu items taking users to the most commonly used pages within the subset. For instance, clicking on Posts will take you to the Write screen. Accessing other menu items in the expandable subset can be achieved by clicking the down arrow for the subset.

Primary navigation items are Posts, Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings and are intuitively grouped together. The Vertical navigation bar can also be minimized to the left for those that like a pristine feel.

Dashboard

The second thing you will notice, after the initial shock of the vertical menu, is the dashboard. Semantically, the dashboard is extraordinary. By clicking on the gray “Screen Options” button in the upper right, you can gain access to the Dashboard configuration panel where you can check and uncheck the modules you want displayed in your own dashboard. Incidentally, this is also a per-user option now, so each of your members can configure this in a way that makes sense for them.

In addition, plugin authors now have much more flexibility in developing modules (dashboard widgets) for the dashboard, eliminating complicated semantic problems that existed before for developers.

QuickEdit and wp-admin Comment Reply

WordPress continues to try to make it simple for bloggers to get in and get out with as little impact or effort as possible. Enter the QuickEdit. Besides the fact that every post has quick access links to common activities, there is a new QuickEdit link under each post title on your “Manage” screen. QuickEdit gives you access to most of the “non-content” portions of a post such as author, post title, tags, timestamp, etc.

In addition to QuickEdit, there is also quick comment replying. Yes, this means you can do it directly from within wp-admin. This is particularly useful for people who get lots of comments and prefer to live within their admin screen. The beautiful thing is, by responding in this way, you will feed right into threaded comment replies (which I’ll talk more about in a bit).

Configurable Layouts

Taking a page from the new iGoogle and many years of configuration options from My Yahoo! etc, the entire dashboard and the post write screen can be customized to preference. That means every module and widget can be dragged and dropped, re-arranged and in some cases even removed. This is important because bloggers operate in different ways, have different tendencies and different needs.

For my purposes at Technosailor.com, for instance, Excerpts and tags are very important. As a result, both of these modules are prominently positioned above the fold to the right of the content box. Some themes rely heavily on the use of Custom Fields, so bloggers using these types of themes probably will want to have the Custom Fields quickly accessible.

Note: Plugin authors providing any additional modules to the write screen really need to ensure their plugin is compatible with the new paradigm. In fact, this goes for all plugin and theme authors. Your world has likely been altered. Modules added to the write screen could never be repositioned before, so unless you’ve been developing in parallel to WordPress 2.7 development, your plugin will need to be updated. Also note that the functionality of the plugin itself is probably not affected, but the repositioning is. Nothing that will break a blog, but something that won’t fit in with the new admin concept.

Threaded Comments and Comment Paging

Threaded comments have been around for several years in the form of a variety of plugins. With the advent of commenting systems like DISQUS and Intense Debate, comment threading became more common place. It only made sense that threaded comments would become part of the core offering and denotes the first major innovation to the comment system in WordPress, well, ever.

The core development team didn’t stop there, though. Some folks get crazy amounts of comments per post (I’m looking squarely at Liz and Erin), so to ease the pain of mile long pages, WordPress has created Paged comments. That is, comments can be broken down into groupings of comments for easier digestion.

Note that to use these new features, theme developers will need to now support the new wp_list_comments() for comment threading and the previous_comments_link() and next_comments_link() template tags. Review the default theme for example usage.

Media Page

WordPress continues to push ahead on media management. In WordPress 2.5, they gave us a new Flash-based image uploader and galleries. While all this was useful, it was rather difficult to manage images without uploading photos and media into a post (even if that post were to be tossed after the upload was done).

It was also difficult to manage that media after the fact. Which post was this one image uploaded to? Hmm.

Now Media has its own management page, where bloggers can do all their uploading, editing, etc.

Update: It was drawn to my attention that the media page is actually new in WordPress 2.6. False Alarm on this, though the new administrative interface makes it much more accessible and usable than before.

Complete Plugin Installation and Management

Possibly the biggest leap forward for this release is in plugin management. For years, bloggers have asked for a way to manage their plugins without having to use FTP and muck around on the server in an environment they didn’t know anything about.

Regardless of your technical expertise, I’m sure you are going to find the plugin installer a lifesaver. It is now possible to search and browse the WordPress plugin repository from within wordpress admin. Search by tag cloud, keyword search or simply browse popular plugins. Based on the new plugin upgrade technology brought about in earlier releases of WordPress, you can now install a plugin directly as well.

In addition, you can do an entire WordPress upgrade now using this same technique. When you get the nag that a new update is available, give it a whirl. Enter your FTP server, username and password (it’s not sent anywhere!) and do an automatic upgrade. But do make a backup before you try it, just in case something horrible were to happen, as Murphy dictates it sometimes can.

And as an additional bonus, if your server supports the PHP ssh2 PECL module, you can get SSH/SFTP installs as well which is actually even more secure.

The keen eye of the developers among us may have caught the blatant inclusion of PHP5 functionality, a marked - and overt - departure from the PHP4 only mantra that has ruled WordPress development since its inception.

Sticky Posts

Bloggers have been calling for “sticky post” functionality for some time. That is, the ability to designate a post as “sticky” and keep it at the top, regardless of how old it is.

WordPress has now added sticky post ability which includes the addition of the new conditional template tag is_sticky().

Nathan Rice has a fantastic write-up on sticky posts in WordPress 2.7.

Template Tags

As mentioned throughout the previous eight highlights, there are a variety of new template tags. wp_list_comments(), previous_comments_link() and next_comments_link() all deal with the new commenting system. The is_sticky() conditional tag is used with the Loop, $wp_query and sticky posts. Use for styling, perhaps.

Not yet covered is the wp_page_menu() tag which will output a list of pages, generally in unordered list format, that can be used for creating stylized page navigation elements.

Finally, yours truly contributed get_search_form() which I hope is widely adopted by theme developers. Currently, searchform.php is included in a theme and is generally a typical form for search. It’s also usually ripped directly from the default theme. It just works.

This behavior remains. If searchform.php exists in the theme, it will be used. However, theme authors can now use the get_search_form() template tag to do the same thing. And it is pluggable by filter for those who’d like to create plugins that hijack the WordPress default search.

Comments API

Most users will not get the benefit of this immediately, because none of the offline blog editors support this functionality… yet (though the WordPress iPhone app undoubtedly will completely support all of the XML-RPC API, including comments, immediately). However, the API has now been built to allow offline editors like Windows Live Writer or Marsedit to perform comment moderation and editing from an offline client.

With this new functionality, it is in essence opening up even more of WordPress to be managed offline. Desktop apps, web-apps or even mobile devices can now be turned into full featured offline blog management. Score.

Bonuses

I don’t usually offer bonus material. It’s 10 things, right? Right, but this time is different. There is so much under the hood to be excited about, so let me tease you with a little bit of it.

• New tag management page
• Close comments on old post
• Semantic CSS classes throughout
• Buggy 404 page fixes… Does not report Page not found when a legitimate author archive, for instance, is loaded but the author has no posts. This has been an annoyance to me for years and I finally decided to submit code to fix it.

I’m working in semiconductors again (you may recall I cut my teeth there)– and very next-generation. And managing programs for a company working (for now) on government contracts may not sound sexy. . . but the work we’re doing is awesome in every sense. Eons away from the silicon chips found in laptops and phones, what we build is for big power switching. We’re talking big.

And did I mention that it’s well funded? Primarily through SBIR grants, a thought-provoking (read: nondilutive) alternative to VC funding — even in good times — if you’ve got some unique IP.

In times like these, it seems like a godsend.

But my reorientation was (still is, in fact) intense. It’s the main reason for my blogging hiatus. Coming up to speed on nearly a dozen programs. Managing them using MSFT Project . . . which threw me back onto Windows XP . . . on a Lenovo laptop . . . and got my introduction to (drum roll): Sharepoint! We social-network app developers spend most of our time trying to make our interfaces intuitive and user friendly — it’s about love, not money — and a company with more money than Croesus creates the most convoluted, nonintuitive and just plane murky interface. Did they put a sadist in charge of navigation?

Still, I believe it will all be worthwhile. Why? Because we’re working on something that will be a game changer. In a non-technical word, we’re building — inventing — devices that will be the key enablers of alternative energy systems. Large scale adaptation of wind, solar, and energy storage systems — and their efficient connection to the grid — will absolutely require the kind of super semiconductor devices we’re producing.

That makes me feel good.

Okay, a paycheck makes me feel good, too. But I’m really trying to be deeper here. It goes back to when I saw Tim O’Reilly’s keynote. Not the one at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in April. That was all good times. But Tim’s tune changed after that. By Web 2.0 Expo New York in September, O’Reilly was downright somber (and news hadn’t even broken about the financial meltdown). Global warming. The U.S. losing its edge in science and technology. A growing income gap. “And what are the best and the brightest working on?” he asked, displaying slides of SuperPoke on Facebook, and the iPhone application iBeer. “Do you see a problem here?”

I did. In fact, it been brewing (sorry) in me for a while.

I consoled myself saying sure, the best and the brightest should be working on world-changing things . . . good thing I’m not one of them.

Then, eerily, I was sitting in church, and heard it again. (A calling?) Not to get all ‘religious’ here . . . but for someone who doesn’t, ahem, make it every week, last Sunday I was there to hear the Parable of the Talents. (I learned, too, that talent originally referred to a unit of weight of silver — value, as in money, like fractions of shekels). But the message was clear: it’s a sin not to use your God-given gifts.

I’ll be doing that. But I’ll still be applying some other skills to make the world a better (funner?) place with CHALLENJ. Just in my off hours.

The announcement indicated that video content will also be available offline with use of the new, yet popular, AIR platform.

Competitors to the Adobe Flash platform include Microsoft Silverlight and a variety of Ajax/Javascript frameworks, though one SproutCore seems to be Apple’s choice for rich media applications. It is unclear if it will develop into something more full-featured with the ability to handle video.

However, this is such a big release (game changer, at that!) that I wanted to tease you with some screenshots. I’ll let your imagination run wild (and you can go Google around for what others are saying). Make sure you are subscribed to this blog so you get the big release cheat sheet as soon as it comes out.

Update: I have released the big writeup on WordPress 2.7 now, so go check it out.

Last week, I mentioned that Obama had named Google.org’s Sonal Shah and Launchbox Digital cofounder Julius Chenakowski to his transition team. Within two days, Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Obama’s Economic Advisory Board.

Today, the count goes to 4 with the announcement that Susan Crawford, a former board member of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has joined the FCC transition committee. ICANN is responsible for the allocation of IP addresses on the internet and has oversight over domain registrars.

Crawford is also a University of Michigan Law Professor with a focus on internet law.

This will be a critically important nomination, if the assignment carries over from the transition team to the administration, because Net Neutrality is coming back with a vengeance.

My life has been a very diverse life. From my Christian upbringing in the home of a pastor, to my far-flung career of travel, social media and web technology. It’s filled with details that largely escape people who are not, well, me.

The Early Years

I was born on September 6, 1976 to Tom Brazell and Judy Brazell. I am the oldest of three kids. My sister, Corrine and brother, Tim.

My dad was a pastor from a pentecostal background and at the ripe old age of eight, I found myself in Zaïre (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) where I spent 4 years growing up with guys like James Dodzweit and Jamie Butler.

High School

I was somewhat of a social outcast in my high school years and most of the people that remember me from high school, in Annapolis, MD, don’t necessarily remember me positively. That said, Facebook has done a tremendous job of reconnecting me with some of that past and positive relationships are being built after 15 years.

Guys like Eric Funderburk I remember fondly. Eric wrote in my senior yearbook, “Time is our friend, just like fire”. I don’t know if he knew the wisdom of that statement at the time, but I’d venture he realizes that truth today.

Mrs. Wolfe was my English teacher, and would probably be proud of my work here if she knew it existed. :)

I had a crush on several girls in high school, as well. Girls like Heather, Stephanie, and even Rachel (who was always more of a sister anyway) were in this mix, as those high school things go. Only one of them, Stephanie, I am really keeping in contact with in a so non-crushy way (she’s married and I’m recovering).

Collegish

Most people don’t believe me when I tell them I didn’t go to college. I actually did go to a year of community college right out of high school and got bored. Years later, I’d return to get some credit but got bored because I could teach every one of the classes I was taking. However, I also did go to Elim Bible Institute with the intention of following in my dad’s footprints and becoming a minister. Didn’t happen and I don’t regret that.

While I was at Elim, I made a number of other friends and emerged from my socially awkward state that I lived in in high school. Among the friends, was my very close friend who I’d really love to be in contact with more, Fred Englehardt. Today, Fred works in the Albany City Schools. Eric Mellert is too conservative for my liking (we sparred a few times about Barack Obama on Facebook), is a super good guy and is living in Florida with his beautiful wife Shannon. Jennifer is apparently my neighbor in Alexandria, and we have yet to reconnect.

New York City

After a year at Elim, I headed to the Big Apple and worked with a non-profit dealing with the homeless in New York City. Among the relationships I built there was with my dear friend Dave Rowe (Papi!) who is now living in Hartford, CT and we still keep in touch occasionally. I’ll probably get an email from him after this post goes up because he lurks. :)

Modern Life

After NYC, I moved back to Maryland where, in time, I met Nicole who I would eventually marry. That would last eight years. During this time, I entered the web space while working at Northrop Grumman with guys like Zak, Sean and Anthony. I’d then move on to b5media and reunite with long time friend and web-head Jeremy Wright. Along the way, I’d make other friends like Christina Jones, Chad Randall.

In a parallel universe, I worked in the WordPress world where I met guys like Chris Pearson, Jeffro, and Matt Mullenweg. Some crossover existed between WordPress and b5media. For instance, I worked directly with Brian Layman and Mark Jaquith and maintain solid relationships with each of them to date.

Eventually, I would leave b5media and become an independent. I work closely with Micah and the entire Lijit team as my primary, full time client.

I can’t even begin to mention all the people I’ve met along the way. Likewise, I can’t mention every relationship that has started in real life and somehow made it into online life.

What I will say is this stuff is a game changer. It bridges the gap between those in real life, and those online and having that benefit changes the way everything is done. Now, more than ever before, it’s possible to do business, find business partners, find love, rebuild old relationships and extend personal brand. Now, more than ever before, everything is possible.

* Photo by Jared Goralnick

Since then, I’ve gotten to know the founder and CEO, Jared Goralnick who has been approaching the product with a very head down, listening approach. I have used AwayFind for some months now, providing feedback and soliciting advice from Jared on the best ways to use the tool.

Yesterday, they launched with big coverage from LifeHacker.

The idea behind AwayFind is simple. Check email when you can (this is a behavioral modification that AwayFind doesn’t tackle, but many GTD-style discipline/productivity systems do. While it is well and good to only check email twice a day, there is always that urgent one that needs attention right now. AwayFind provides a mechanism for senders to get urgent email through to you via an SMS notification.

I’m proud of Jared for his tenacity and vision for this product. I’ve certainly seen it go from a loose idea to a reality. Congratulations to him and his team for launching, but also doing it completely bootstrapped. Save your valuation, keep your company.