I'm back in the office. Rested and relaxed from a week at the wonderful John Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. It may not sound "restful" to spend about ten hours a day for seven days making a loopback Windsor chair, but to me, it was enjoyable and, at times, inspiring. And, as usual when I have time to experience something completely new, I see the connections I never imagined before. While the trip was completely personal and off-duty (I even joked that my going offline was an experiment in being NeoAmish), Jamie Roberts assigned me a writing assignment related to it for an upcoming American Spirit. I also took plenty of photos and video. In fact, here is a set of photos on Flickr that follow the progress of the chair I made.

Okay. I'm not actually "on assignment," however I'll be writing about my next few days for an article appearing in American Spirit next year. I'm doing wood therapy. As I'll be working with sharp objects, I'm going to avoid most distracting devices during my time out of the office. However, if you need to reach me, you can contact Natalie Willis (nwillis[AT] hammock.com).

Today, our offices are closed to celebrate the 4th of July. We are very fortunate at Hammock to work with a client -- the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution -- (the DAR) who provides us with the opportunity to celebrate the founding of our America 365 days a year. Here's a five-minute video about Gen. John Knox and a special exhibit at DAR Headquarters. I put it together last week while in D.C., my "second" home.

The first part of this week was a blur. Sunday through Tuesday night, I was part of a crew from Hammock in D.C. attending the National Small Business Summit, where we helped produce a real-time event media gallery for NFIB. From there, I took an early morning train for a day-full of meetings in New York. An evening flight (late, as usual) home to Nashville last night and now I'm back in the office. My travel schedule is light through the end of the month.

Along with several of my Hammock colleagues, I'm in Washington DC on Mon.-Tues, June 9-10, for the NFIB Small Business Summit. You can follow our coverage of the event at the multi-media gallery we are coordinating for the event. I'll be in New York on Wednesday and back in the office in Nashville on Thursday and Friday.

[Cross-posted on rexblog.com]

Wired editor and author of the book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, posted an item on his blog today that contains an observation I believe is so obvious, it is completely missed by many self-appointed experts. (Okay, I'll admit I live in that glass house.):

"Not only do small (Long Tail) publishers montetize their content at 3-5 times the rate of the larger publishers in PubMatic's survey, but they're improving in the current environment while the big publisher decline.

This is a fact of life in business-to-business-media, where the business model has long been focused on "free" distribution of content to decision-makers in specialized fields. The "cost per thousand" (CPM) model of advertising sales does not exist as a metric in this long-tail of the media world. Of course, if an advertiser selling a $100,000 piece of equipment can reach 90% of the decision makers in a market of 5,000 specifying engineers, then, hell-yeah, the publisher of that content should be able to monetize it at hundreds of times the rate of, say, a newsweekly.

The lesson here: Online, if you want to monetize content, the number of eyeballs seeing your content is less important than who those eyeballs belong to. And the more helpful that content is in assisting real people make important and valuable decisions, the more "monetizable" it will be.

Four years ago, just as the economy was digging itself out of the recessions caused by the dot-com bust and 9/11, our friend and contributor, the columnist Harvey King at MyBusiness Magazine, wrote a column in the form of "a letter to himself in the future." He wrote it, he said at the time, to remind his future-self what to do during the inevitable economic slowdowns he would go through in the future. As we seem to be heading into that territory, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on Harvey's letter to the future, which, with his permission, follows.:

Dear Harvey:

It's me, Harvey. I'm writing to you from way back in 2004. I'm hoping you are older and wiser, but I'm afraid you may be getting a little fuzzy with your memory. So I wanted to send you a letter from the past to remind you of some lessons you said you really wanted to remember the next time the economy started slowing down. Good times, the kind I hope you've been enjoying lately, tend to dull one's senses a bit, don't they? Well, I hope this expensive, painful advice from your past will jog your memory a little and serve as a checklist for the economic slowdown on your horizon.

1. Do it now. Whatever it is that needs doing, do it right now. I hope you don't have to downsize, but if that's what it is, do it. If it means dealing with that confrontation you've been putting off, do it. It's a lot fairer to all parties involved if you'll just get it done.

2. Take care of your customers even more than you already are. I know you said you would never take any of them for granted, and I hope you haven't. But nothing else will get you through what's about to happen except the mutual respect, trust and loyalty you have with the customers you are serving (and profiting from) now in the good times.

3. Love your bankers. I don't care if you really don't want to, get on the phone with those bank folks and tell them how wonderful they are. I know Mom taught us not to lie, but do it anyway. If you timed this right and you're still a few months from the downturn, use flattery and your current fiscal soundness to lock down the best and longest terms they will commit to. I know you think it's crazy to get a bigger line of credit when you're not even using the one you have, but is your memory that short?

4. Brace yourself. I know you don't want to remember the pain, but get ready to relive some failures. You're about to rediscover what your face feels like when the door hits your nose.

5. Be patient. You'll hate this one, but get ready again for the world to move in slow motion. Remember, during a recession it takes a company six months to approve purchasing a package of pencils.

6. Do not panic. Hunker down, maybe, but don't panic.

7. Read and study and learn. While you're waiting for that pencil order, take up a new hobby.

8. Get ready for some great opportunities. When things start looking really bad, take those resources I know you've stashed away during the good years and start marketing when your competitors go silent. Get on the road when the airlines report that business travel has plummeted. During this recession, turn on some lights when things get their darkest.

9. Forgive yourself. Remember, you are not personally responsible for the entire economy, just the stewardship of your microscopic slice of it.

10. Write yourself a letter to the future reminding me (and you) how to make hay while the sun shines.

Historically yours,

Harvey

P.S. How are those shares of Google doing?

(Note: That P.S. is a joke - Harvey was not that smart in 2004.)

This is not yet another Earth Day post telling you how environmentally conscious our company is.

I assume you'd not be surprised to learn that we, like you, have grown more-and-more committed to thinking green. I assume you'd not be surprised to learn that we are working with our clients to increase their use of recycled paper products. I assume you would not be surprised that we are committed to working with printers who practice green manufacturing approaches like our largest vendor for the past 16 years, Quad/Graphics, that is seeking certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for all of its major manufacturing sites. I assume you'd not be surprised that we are enthusiastic supporters of all the efforts in the printing and graphics industry to encourage environmentally-friendly industry practices.

What I don't applaud are the efforts by some to turn any discussion of the environment, printing and paper into an opportunity for shouted accusations and knee-jerk rebuttals.

For example, a few months ago, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson made a good-faith effort to measure the impact on "climate" of the content delivered in the paper version of the magazine vs. the content delivered via the Wired brand's digital properties. "Are dead-tree magazines good or bad for the climate?" he asked. As expected from Anderson, the author of the best-selling business book, The Long Tail, his blog post was a detailed comparison of the carbon footprint of a magazine like Wired (the impact related to paper, printing and distribution) with the carbon footprint related to the energy necessary to power each of the computers used to read the same content online. What he discovered was a surprise to some: the carbon footprint of the paper version of the magazine is not that different from the footprint of the same content delivered digitally.

As you can imagine, the debate over Anderson's post (see the post's comments) raged on for months -- and is still raging, with back and forth arguments about Anderson's motivation and methodology. Last week, on the Huffington Post, activist Todd Paglia even used a post criticizing Vanity Fair's annual green issue to divert into yet another blast at Anderson: "Chris Anderson's (post) about the magazine industry's carbon impact came off less like the work of a cutting edge tech mag and more like a rehashing of the moribund timber industry's lamest propaganda."

Rather than point out the obvious fact that Paglia's post came off less like a work of cutting edge environmental advocacy and more like a rehashing of lame anti-paper and anti-printing propaganda, I'd like to call on those who want to out-green one-another to recycle some of this energy into something productive.

As both a magazine-industry observer and participant, it's rather obvious to me: Throughout the magazine industry, there is a recognition that adopting practices with less environmental impact is not only good for the environment, it's good for business. And while we may want to believe that "going online" is a more environmentally friendly form of publishing, we often don't take into consideration the unintended consequences on the environment of digital media. As we become media companies that are "multi-platform," and not merely "print," we must realize that "thinking green" is not limited to properties we create using paper and ink.

Rather than debate about who or what is more green today, I think a better approach is to stop arguing and start acting for tomorrow.

Here are a couple of suggestions about where to start:

Read Cherly Dangel Cullen's, "18 Tips for Environmentally Conscious Publishing." At Hammock, we've taken several of these steps and are working on more.

Check out the KinderHarvest program from our friends at MagazineLiteracy.org. The program rescues and recycles children's and other consumer magazines that would otherwise be discarded and destroyed, and distributes them to children's literacy programs.

Let's celebrate Earth Day. Not argue over it.

Lost photos: I shot this photo from
my office window last April.
Unfortunately, I can't locate the photos shot
from the same location on April 16, 1998.

(This "recollection" is also cross-posted on rexblog.com.)

My first ever accidental online "citizen journalism" (before the term existed) experience occurred ten years ago, today. Unfortunately, because of the ephemeral nature of the web and certain "wish we knew then what we know now" practices, there is no place for me to point to what I did on that day.

[After the jump, read about the Hammock 'tornado' photos.]

My friend Josh Hinds interviewed me on the topic of business networking. Here's the link to the interview. Thanks, Josh.