24 Sleeps to BWE

I’m like a kid waiting for Christmas!! Blog World Expo is my favorite time of year. We’re all about getting involved in the blogging community and meeting up with everyone. We’ve got a bunch of our Bloggers and hard working Channel Editors coming out this year. With everyone working remotely, meeting up once a year at a place like Vegas is really awesome.

Out of the bloggers that are coming, I’m personally excited to hook up with my old pal Jon Rochetti from The DC Traveller. He really knows my style and we are going out on the town. Shea Sylvia from MTV Reality World is going to be there too. After all the time we spent together at SXSW in March, she’s gotta be missing me by now. Lara Kulpa from Dating Dames is meeting up with us. Hopefully she can offer me some advice on my love life (my blue complexion gets a lot of attention, but sometimes I think it’s all just superficial). Even Jason Bean from Microsoft Weblog is coming out! Like Shea, he probably misses all the fun times we shared at SXSW! And Kevin Palmer is coming. Big deal.

The Channel Editors that are making it out include Kelly from the Business Channel. Hopefully she’s not all business!! Of course Mary Jo from the travel channel is coming…she’d go to anything that she could travel to. And Arieanna from Entertainment is coming out…hopefully she can entertain us down there. I know she certainly did at SXSW!! b5’s new Training Manager, and Channel Editor for the Music Channel, Jeanne Dupuis,  is coming out. I wonder if she does music training? We’ll have to find out.

Should be a good time all around…can’t wait to see everyone!! We got some good stuff planned for the weekend we are there, so let us know if you are going to be around so we can include you!!!

b5 at BWE 2008

Once again b5 is planning it’s sponsorship at Blog World Expo in Vegas (Sept 20th and 21st). This is my favorite time of the year and probably my favorite conference. They’ve got great speakers (some b5ers in there), great panels, great industry folk, great parties, great times.

Like last year, b5 is doing a blogger day the day before the full conference starts. It’s open to the public, but we’re really hoping to get a lot of b5 bloggers out this year. Being in the head office is cool, but we LOVE meeting the men and women who really make it happen for us….we realized this at SXSW in March when we got to meet Shea Sylvia, Jason Bean and Joe Ruiz.

We’ve got tons of fun b5 stuff planned for while we’re down there and a lot of the team is coming. (Finally, I get to meet some of the Channel Editors!) We’ll keep you posted on the fun stuff that’s planned…come out and meet us!

Who’da thunk it, two b5-ers in the FriendFeed Top 250

FriendFeed is pretty hot right now. Might not be the Twitter-killer folks all claim it to be, but hey it’s still fun. Regardless skimming through FriendFeed this evening I came upon a post that no one in social media can pass up clicking on—User 21 » FriendFeed’s Top 250 Most Followed Users. Yeah we all want to know where we all sit.

Turns out there are a couple b5 folks on the list.  In fact not only are there two b5 folks on the list, they are in the top 100 (well 62).

Take a guess?

Yep It’s Darren Rowse and I at 59 and 62.

Who’da thunk it.

Tags: Darren Rowse, FriendFeed, social media, Tris Hussey

Pardon the Dust

We’re just updating the design of our Team Blog. Mostly cause the last one was totally b0rked (you could comment, but nobody could see your comments). This new one is basically Revolution, hacked up a bit to do a bit more of what we want.

We’ll keep fixing bugs over the next few days, but feel free to comment with thoughts/comments/issues/etc!

Moving Day

So, we moved offices today. Not a huge move, we moved across the hall. With all the growth we’ve had over the passed year, we outgrew our old office and needed more space!

The move went fairly swell. Joe did a lot of the heavy stuff, while Salim watched. Darcie and Rachel feng shui’d the place. Everyone else pitched in and it was all streamed live.

 The best part of the move was actually a week long affair. On Tuesday, Chad and Jeremy were the only ones not in the office, and a great idea came about for a trick to play on them. We decided to tell them that we were going to paint the office on moving day some really funky colors so they would need to wear painting clothes today.

Chad threw a fit claiming to be “allergic” to paint fumes. Sure Chad. Because the whole office was in on it, we really had him going.

Jeremyaccepted it so quickly that we were sure he was going to play a joke on us. We thought that he had clued into the prank (mostly because this isn’t the first time something like this has been played on him. Halloween.) and was planning some sort of great retaliating joke. Nope. Turns out he’s just very trusting. And was actually excited about the bright green and orange we were planning on painting the boardroom. On Wednesday, he called his wife and asked her if she knew where his lumberjack shirt was so he would be able to use it to paint. The whole office was in an uproar (but we had to pretend we were laughing at Salim had said, though Salim is never funny).

So he showed up today in his regular clothes (because he does have a very important meeting with respectable adults), but brought his paint clothes. Joey even dressed up in his overalls to add effects. We made him put his clothes on before we told him the bad news that there was no painting going on.

In a phone call later between Jeremy and an unspecified caller, we overheard “No, we’re not painting today. (pause). Because they’re assholes.”

All in all a good joke.

Other news: Lee ripped his pants and had to borrow Jeremy’s painting pants. Salim will get his first ever Co-Worker of the Week award in a few weeks because it was promised to him if either Chad or Jeremy showed up in their painting clothes. He’ll probably do something to tick everyone off between now and the time he’s supposed to win so that he will lose his privileges.

A-Ron’s last day…technically

Today was Director of Technology Aaron Brazell’s last day at b5media. Well, tomorrow is his official last day, but he’s flying home to Baltimore from Toronto then. Some of us are sad that he is going. Ok, well, no one has said that, but I can only assume that someone in the company likes him.

No, seriously, we will miss him. Things we know about Aaron:

1) He does very poor imitations of himself

2) He speaks clearly, yet doesn’t make sense

3) We are always shocked that his wife hasn’t left him

4) He’ll attend any chili cook off, anywhere

5) He can’t handle the spice in jerk chicken

6) He is banned from eating bok choy around Darcie for eternity

We would like to take this time to remind Aaron, that once he leaves, anything negative from b5’s inception to now is your fault.

Tags: Aaron Brazell

Happy One Year Anniversary Brian!!

Today marked the 365th day that Brian Layman, Code Ninja has been b5’s slave.

Things we know about Brian:

1) He is on Jeremy’s list of nice people

2) He likes to purposely jump into swimming pools, regardless of how cold it is

3) He rides a kickass motorbike

4) He’s much taller than you would think

5) He pimps out b5media t-shirts with a bitchin’ fedora

Tags: brian layman