The SitePoint Podcast: BlogWorld Interviews, Part 4

The SitePoint Podcast

Patrick O’Keefe, Stephan Segraves, Brad Williams and Kevin Yank share their fourth and final batch of interviews from BlogWorld Expo 2010 in Las Vegas. This week on the show: UnMarketing’s Scott Stratten; TriOut’s Wayne Sutton; and from the Ask a Ninja Podcast, Kent Nichols!

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Episode synopsis

Episode 92 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Brad Williams (@williamsba), and Kevin Yank (@sentience) share the fourth and final batch of interviews from BlogWorld Expo 2010 in Las Vegas. Listen in as they chat with Scott Stratten (@unmarketing, the author of UnMarketing), Wayne Sutton (@socialwayne, who works with TriOut), and Kent Nichols (@kentnichols, co-creator of the Ask a Ninja video podcast).

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Interview Transcript

Kevin: December 17th, 2010. UnMarketing, Geolocation, and Ninjas. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #92: BlogWorld Expo Interviews, Part 4.

Welcome in to another SitePoint Podcast. Today we have the final batch of interviews that we recorded live at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas back in October. I don’t mind saying that for this fourth batch of interviews we have saved some of the best for last. We’ve got Wayne Sutton from TriOut who will be talking about how small businesses can engage with their customers through the use of geolocation services, so connecting to the people who are actually in and around the community where your business is based. And we will also be hearing from Kent Nichols who comes to us from one of the big names in video podcasting, Ask A Ninja. One of the co-creators of Ask A Ninja, Kent Nichols will be talking to us about how they are reinventing their show, their hilarious video podcast, for 2011 and how really the success of their podcast is all about engagement with their community. And if you’re detecting a theme here you probably won’t be terribly surprised when I say first up we have Scott Stratten. Scott is best known for his blog and his book called UnMarketing, and he talks about how the best way to market a product usually is not through quote/unquote “marketing” but by engaging with your customers. And so we’ll start off with Patrick. Patrick?

Patrick: Hello, this is Patrick O’Keefe with the SitePoint Podcast Live at BlogWorld Expo 2010. I’m here with Kevin Yank and Stephan Segraves, my usual co-hosts, and our guest Scott Stratten, he’s the author of UnMarketing and he writes at unmarketing.com. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott: Thank you for having me.

Patrick: Excellent. So, for those of us who are not necessarily familiar with UnMarketing the concept, the book, the whole kind of vibe, can you explain that and introduce that?

Scott: Well, UnMarketing is all about “stop marketing start engaging” and that means stop being hypocritical about marketing. People hate to be marketed to like cold-calling and spam and bulk mail, but we do it for our own business and it makes no sense. We have to engage with each other, people do business with people they know, like and trust, so why don’t we do things to increase those.

Patrick: Right, okay. So, I know we talked a little bit before this about blogging frequency, I looked at your blog and I see it’s infrequent, I think I saw a quote from someone on Twitter saying, “Write when you have something to say,” so what’s your take on that?

Scott: That was the whole point, that was the whole point of the keynote a couple days ago here was people stress frequency in blogging, and they said you should write twice a week, you should write once a week and I think that’s kind of full of crap. I think that blogging, blogging started out of passion; when blogging first started people said something because they’re passionate about something, and somewhere along that way we lost that and it was all about click-throughs, advertisers, keyword rich content. Now I understand that stuff works, but we forgot the part about passion, that you should write when you have something to say. Because when you mail it in— I rather you write once a week or once every other week than three times a week of filler. Nobody’s ever read a blog post and said you know that post was terrible but it was really keyword rich so I’m gonna spread it around, it doesn’t happen that way.

Kevin: So, the devil’s advocate here; is a blog where you’re only passionate enough to post something of value once every couple of weeks, is that worth having a blog for, are you going to be able to build an audience on that level of content? Can you think of any blogs that are posting at that level?

Scott: Well, me. I posted last week my first time in nine weeks, but you know what people said when I sent it out, people who signed up through email was, this has to be good because he has something to say. Now that’s way too long, nine weeks obviously is I’m just lazy like that, so I don’t advise that; if you can blog daily with great content that is the greatest thing you could ever do. The more you blog great content the more you build that audience, but that’s the thing is great content. So I know guys who can do it once a day, I can’t. A lot of people can’t but the problem is they feel like they have to, and when you mail it in, the day you mail in one post when somebody reads it and just goes, “meh”, they’re not spreading it and then you’ve lost that touch you had with them that you’ve built up; you can write 40 incredible posts and one is mailed in and you’ve hurt your audience.

Kevin: So post frequency isn’t a dial you can grab and turn up without affecting anything else.

Scott: Right. And if you get three good post ideas in two days then save it up, sure, then send it in the next week. I understand frequency, I totally get that, but forcing a frequency at the sake of mediocrity doesn’t make any sense.

Patrick: And you’ve been on a book tour as well, so that’s part of the reason for the lack of posts, right?

Scott: That’s true, this is stop 11 of 30, so I’ve been a little bit — I don’t get off a plane and crisscross the continent and say I gotta write a blog post, but I did, my last post was an experience I had at a hotel, at a Hilton, where I got a crappy breakfast, it was cold and it was old and I walked out—

Patrick: It was cold and old.

Scott: That’s my new rap album by the way, cold and old y’all (laughter), and I walked out and the manager just took care of the bill, but what happened was the chef ran out and said I am so sorry, I am so sorry, this is not what we do, I am embarrassed, he goes, what can I do to make it up to you. And I looked at him and I said “you just did,” you cared about what you did. I ran up to the room and I wrote a blog post, that inspired me, and what happened to the post, people spread it all over the place. If I just mailed something in with the top five things about blogging this week or something else, you know, when you mail in those top lists it kills the blog, it really does, I truly believe that.

Patrick: So we got a question from the chat here, I know blogging is just a part of what you do, but WebKarnage says, “How focused should you be on topics or doesn’t that matter?”

Scott: I really do think that blogs work well on topic, I really do, I think Twitter’s a nice place where we can ramble off bad 80’s hair bands and stuff about our cat, but I really think blogging if you really want to get it structured and you want to have a business of it, it really should be focused. And sometimes the more focused the better, like if you write a blog about hot air balloons in Albuquerque that’ll be a violent angry following of passion for that, right—not a huge market, 5 people!

Kevin: (laughter) I want to read a violent angry blog post about hot air balloons in Albuquerque.

Scott: I might write on, I might write that, violentangryhotairballoons.com.

Kevin: Yep. Sorry, I’m just distracted; they’ve got someone doing chin-ups at the Army booth across from us here.

Scott: Yeah, I’m gonna hit that right after this. (laughter)

Kevin: So, I agree with everything you’re saying about the do’s and don’ts of building a killer blog, UnMarketing tells me that even though you’re not selling you need to be selling.

Scott: Totally, totally. UnMarketing isn’t martyr marketing, right, you still have a business, but UnMarketing is stop shouting at people, stop pushing it in their face, and people say “Well it works, Scott, pop-ups work, we should use them.” If you throw a pop-up at me on your blog with two seconds coming in your site, that’s like somebody walking into your retail store and you punching them in the face and saying, “Hey, we have something on special!” Let me learn the content; I don’t even mind pop-ups, but by the way, if you call it, no, well it’s a hover or it’s a pop-in, it’s a fricking pop-up, alright, I don’t care what we call it, it’s the same damn thing. The whole point about it is give me some time to get to know. If I’m leaving and you want to say hey stick around and give us your email for more updates if you liked it, okay fine, cool, but don’t assault people to market to them, it’s a bad marketing technique.

Kevin: I was impressed with a case study I saw, I think Darren Rowse of ProBlogger was showing it that it might be even on his own site, that his pop-up that he has he actually waits a minute, so if you get to his homepage and you’re staring at it, you’re mousing around, you’re trying to figure out what it’s about and it takes you more than a minute the pop-up comes up to kind of rescue you from that experience.

Scott: Right, right. And there’s some really pretty good, almost scary, programming and artificial intelligence where it’s apparent where your cursor goes, it’ll pop up, it’s kind of weird where if it goes over or hovers too far down to the bottom it comes up, it freaks me out. But it’s effective, you can do it if it makes sense but it has to have some kind of logical conclusion, it shouldn’t be how many times can I hit these people to make them do it? Absorb the content, your job is to consume content on a blog, not interrupt content, there’s a huge difference between those two things.

Patrick: So it sounds like UnMarketing is sort of a departure from interruption marketing.

Scott: It’s totally, it’s permission marketing type of stuff where I want to stay in front of people. So often with such great content when they have a need for something like consulting or speaking or the book I’m their logical choice, that to me is what I’m try to do with people.

Stephan: So, I don’t know if you’re a reader of Daring Fireball or sites like that, but what do you think about like his model of advertising where it’s just a post, one post, what is it once a week I think he has, and it’s very unobtrusive, you don’t even notice it, if you’re a subscriber you just click through the post; is that something that you would tell people to go for when they’re marketing their stuff?

Scott: Yeah, I’ve got no problem with people monetizing. We have to eat. I just don’t flippity-floo around the country just preaching this stuff and not make a living, just understand that depending on how you’re trying to make that money. It’s like AdSense, I have a huge problem with AdSense on blogs when your job, your blog is to position you as a service provider or product provider but you’re giving away four cents, somebody clicks off and leaves your site. Like a copywriter friend of mine she had AdSense on her blog and in the middle of each post was an AdSense bar for other copywriters. Like hey there’s even better people here, then you click halfway through and you’ve left the site; you know you can’t open a new window with AdSense so you lose them. Is that worth 12 cents?

Kevin: Interesting strategy.

Scott: It’s very interesting at ten cents. Her clients were like a thousand, two thousand dollars minimum, like really? Nobody clicks to your competitors you have to get to make that money, it makes no sense.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Kevin: The conventional wisdom that the more your ads can look like your content I think has led a lot of people astray. Whereas you look at something like a Daring Fireball that, yes, that content is styled the same so an eye scanning the page will see it as content, but when you actually read it, it says Daring Fireball this week is supported by kind the financial support of these people and this is why you should check them out, it’s very open and it’s very honest, you’re not hiding the fact that it’s an ad.

Scott: Here’s the difference, right, it really comes down to disclosure, right, are we being transparent. Transparent and disclosure are both subjective, so my idea of disclosure and some jackass at internet marketing’s idea of disclosure is two totally different things. People say well I’ll put a blanket statement on one of my hidden pages about assume links are affiliate links, well, didn’t the government come out and say that’s not good enough now too? I don’t really think we should have the government telling us that we should be ethical; we just should be ethical about it. And I got no problem, when I see a post saying “supported by” well I know that blogger who I love to read is being supported by somebody and I will support them if they’re transparent. But if I find out later that they had a product placement in there and they didn’t really disclose it that makes me feel dirty, and that can ruin your reputation or hurt it just a little bit.

Kevin: Yeah. If I’m a fan of someone and a product is a fan of that same someone I’m gonna think better of that product.

Scott: Well, it’s totally, it’s for me like this whole thing, this whole book tour, Tungle sponsored the first half of this tour, I tell their story at every session because of how I met them through Twitter, but the entire part of that session is full disclosure of sponsorship. People say I gotta go talk to them because they liked your stuff, they supported your stuff to get you here, I’m gonna go talk to them, and that’s pretty cool. By the way, I just disclosed that Tungle’s one of my sponsors.

Kevin: Yeah, full disclosure; we use Tungle to schedule our time at this podcast booth.

Patrick: Well, we try to do so (laughter).

Kevin: So, we should get a bit of fully disclosed advertising out of the way for your book. I’m kind of liking the concept of un-marketing, how does that fill a book, what do you cover in that?

Scott: The book is probably about one-third social media, a third brick and mortar stores, and a third internet marketing and other things, so newsletters and blogging, things like that, where it’s 52 sections of spastic ADD, so its two or three pages per section. So if you picked it up, you’re sitting on the can and you just flip to section 30 you can read three pages and have something actionable out of it. It’s a lot of case studies, a lot of things, it’s really my experiences with marketing and how you can apply those things; a lot of ranting, a lot of sarcasm if you couldn’t tell.

Stephan: I like that.

Scott: It’s easy.

Kevin: Un-book authoring.

Scott: It’s the un-book tour, un-book, man, that’s what I do. I wrote it the way that I talk and I like to read which is not pretentious, not full of jargon that is thrown around but look just smack somebody in the face and say listen, why are we doing this technique when you know that doesn’t work but you’ve been told you should. It’s really kind of hopefully a wake-up call for a lot of people out there.

Stephan: Cool.

Kevin: Alright. Scott Stratten, thank you very much.

Scott: My pleasure. Happy to be here, thanks guys.

Patrick: Hello, this is Patrick O’Keefe from the SitePoint Podcast live at BlogWorld Expo 2010. I’m here with my usual co-hosts Kevin Yank and Stephan Segraves and we are joined by our guest Wayne Sutton hailing from the state of North Carolina like myself.

Wayne: North Carolina in the building (laughter).

Kevin: Welcome back to the show Wayne.

Wayne: This is our second time, so I mean it’s like I’m not saying I’m a rookie, but I’m becoming a SitePoint guest, you know, like a veteran now.

Kevin: You’re a friend of the show by now.

Wayne: Friend of the show? Alright—cool, cool.

Patrick: Wayne joined us at the WordCamp Raleigh live show there a few months ago and now again he is a marketing and development, business development strategist for TriOut, a North Carolina focused geolocation service. So, Wayne, staying on that kind of topic, geolocation for business, small business, what’s the power, what’s the allure?

Wayne: Businesses can use geolocation services to easily communicate directly with customers, with clients, existing clients, and also find out who are their most visiting clients and customers. And so the location based services are a great way to what we call ring the register, you know, offer coupons, order programs; for businesses large and small to make customers come in the door.

Patrick: This is a podcast that is well-listened to by developers, so I wanted to ask you about the platform TriOut because that’s going to be really interesting to our audience. How can developers use TriOut and its platform to build their own geolocation services?

Wayne: Well, we have a full API re-write, api.trioutnc.com, it’s going to be api.trioutworld.com, and developers can basically use our platform to integrate geolocation into their services or their apps and so forth. One guy, actually we already have a guy who built a WordPress plugin off of our API, and another guy he built a Google Chrome extension that you can check in from your browser through our API. And so we have other cool things like that, we are working on our Android app, but if a developer wants to help us out on that that’d be great too.

Patrick: How does the WordPress plugin work with geolocation services?

Wayne: So, basically I can take the WordPress plugin and put a widget on my sidebar and it’ll show my recent check-ins, and then it can do like a little Google Maps, all my other locations, or either just list the location as well.

Patrick: Okay.

Kevin: So, what I especially admire about what you guys are doing at TriOut— A lot of these geolocation services, the Gowallas, the Foursquares of the world, they’re talking a big noise about integration with each other and basically sharing their user bases back and forth, they’re talking a lot about it, they’re not doing it a whole lot, but you guys are actually doing it.

Wayne: Yes, exactly. My days are mixed up, but I think Wednesday we released trioutworld.com and launched a new website and an iPhone app, and basically it’ll show your friends check in on Facebook, on Gowalla, and on Foursquare, and if we get Google Latitude access, because they’ve got three million users, even though we don’t here about Latitude that much, that as well, hopefully integrate with Whirl and Scavenger, because your friends use more than one location based service. You know Facebook came into play, everybody thought they were going to take over everything, but, you know, they still are relevant to the location in play, and so we wanted to make sure that we provide value for any user using our service whether it be the app or the website so you can see your friends on multiple platforms, so we are doing the integration.

Kevin: Right.

Patrick: See, Kevin’s all the way from Australia and he knows TriOut and about what you’re doing so it is already worldwide.

Wayne: I appreciate it, thank you, thank you.

Kevin: You’re welcome. So, how’s BlogWorld going for you?

Wayne: BlogWorld’s been amazing. It’s my second year here, I had an awesome time on the panel yesterday with Patrick from the show, great guy, pulled everything together with the “I’m Nothing Without Your Fans” panel with D.A., Asher Roth, and just hanging out with Patrick is good seeing him and putting on—my thoughts are running around. It’s been great, the conferences have all been great, opportunity to meet you in person and see other friends from the show as well.

Patrick: Cool. So, one thing about TriOut that’s interesting as well, and I think Kevin said it as well, talking about it and actually doing it even though it’s been generally focused on a small area I know there was one service that was just added photos, just talking about adding photos, and TriOut’s already had photos; in its service when you check in you can include a photo. What drives you guys to kind of stay ahead and keep kind of doing those things before the bigger services do, because there’s just one, how many developers?

Wayne: We have one-and-a-half.

Patrick: One-and-a-half developers (laughter). One-and-a-half iPhone developers and website developers, that’s all we have.

Kevin: I would call myself a solid half-developer, yes (laughter).

Patrick: So one full time one part time.

Wayne: Exactly, the founder and lead developer and then we have another guy helping us out part time on the iPhone app, yeah. So, for us it’s about adding value to our platform for our users. We started hyper local in the Raleigh-Durham, Chapel Hill area and we knew the community that was tech savvy and we knew that they liked uploading pictures, we knew they liked writing reviews, we knew they liked to comment and so forth, so we knew from the time we launched let’s do photo upload. And then when we launched the world version this week we’re doing video upload; we’re the second location based service to offer video upload through the app. The first was Pegshot out of New York. And so now when we’re talking about reviews and we’re talking about comments and things like Yelp, now imagine if I’m at a restaurant, at a place, and I just do a quick video review showing people what my experience is like because it’s like it’s not just a check-in; you check-in and then you share your experience, now you can share your experience with a short video, upload it at TriOut and people can easily see what you are experiencing.

Patrick: So obviously text is one thing, photos are another; video is a much more intense form of content.

Wayne: Exactly.

Patrick: What are you planning as far as scale and hosting all that content; do you have something in place?

Wayne: Yeah, we have a couple partnerships, there’s a great hosting provider that reached out to us that’s local, because we like to work with local companies in North Carolina, we may move to that, it’s a Cloud platform, right now we’re using I think DreamHost, they’re doing great for us right now, so it’s been good. I think we did have a little bump yesterday where we had some downtime and so we let our users know, I think we’re using the Tumbler website, so trioutstatus.tumbler.com, doing the Twitter thing, you know, trying to follow like the cool guys and let them know we’re on server downtime, but so far so good. Having a problem right now for us of too many check-ins, too many users, and being launched in February, small bootstrap startup, that’s a good thing.

Kevin: That’s a good thing, yeah.

Patrick: Okay, cool. So where can people find you online, Wayne?

Wayne: They can find me online at my website socialwayne.com, on Twitter @waynesutton, Facebook Wayne Sutton. The new one’s trioutworld.com because now we’re available to the world, download the iPhone app, just search TriOut, t-r-i-o-u-t.

Patrick: Excellent. Well, thank you Wayne for joining us.

Wayne: Thank you guys, enjoyed it, always.

Kevin: Thankyou!

Hi, this is Kevin Yank coming to you live from BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas for the SitePoint Podcast. I’m with Stephan Segraves and we’re joined by Kent Nichols.

Kent: Hi.

Kevin: Hi there. Kent, you are involved with the venerable, seminal Ask A Ninja Podcast.

Kent: That is right, yeah, I am the co-creator and now I’ve moved into the CEO role, I’ve become a grownup and we just relaunched Ask A Ninja earlier this month and we just finished our second full week of programming and we’re really excited about it.

Kevin: So what’s different about this iteration, this incarnation of Ask A Ninja?

Kent: Well, we know that the fans love the Ninja and want him to answer questions, and so that’s what we’re giving them every week, but on top of that we’re adding in a couple new show formats including one we call The Stair which is a weekly wrap-up show of like viral videos and memes of the week. Then we also do a weekly shout out show featuring content from other web series around which is just sort of, hey, this is something we love. We did The Guild, we’ve done Kids Re-enact, we’ve got Legend of Neil coming up, Axe Cop, and some other really cool things. And then we also do a sketch that is completely not Ask A Ninja related but just from our minds and allows us to have sort of an after dinner mint to cleanse our palates every week (laughter), both for us and the fans. And then we do, we release unreleased things that haven’t been on YouTube before as well.

Kevin: Okay. So there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. And this is about low-fi versus high-fi sort of in video podcasting. When Ask A Ninja started it was kind of one of the first video podcasts, and these things started because it became just barely possible to do it on a one-man operation sort of budget. You guys have come a long way since then, obviously there is always the temptation to invest in the next level up of equipment, of production values, but Ask A Ninja especially has always been kind of a low-fi production, you know, solid red background…

Kent: Absolutely.

Kevin: How do you deal with that tension; what’s your experience of that?

Kent: Well, like when we first started like we’ve just upgraded to HD basically, and so now instead of before everything we shot on one camera, you know, and standard def to start with and then HD later, but it was always basically a standard def show. And so like our first hard drive that we bought back in 2006 like was a 250 gig hard drive and it lasted like three or four months.

Kevin: So do you still have the original master shots of that first episode?

Kent: Yeah, I think so, yeah, I’ve got all the tapes.

Kevin: It sounds like it’s lucky they survived with the storage issues.

Kent: Yeah, totally. But the first day back shooting we shot 250 gigs of material, so like we shot an entire hard drive worth, and when you move up to HD even though we’re still very — we’ve retained the straightforward single camera angle, like using the two cameras to have a higher quality zoom-in and things like that has really, you know, it still is order of magnitude more expensive to produce then the way we were doing it. But like with that said we can still produce four episodes in one day of shooting, and without breaking a sweat, and so for us it’s not necessarily about the technology it’s just about the what can a small group of people accomplish in a very prescribed timeframe. And so we only shoot one day a week and then we’re able to produce a week’s worth of content off of that.

Kevin: So what do you say to a beginning video podcaster who’s maybe filming a show for YouTube on their iSight camera, they’ve captured an audience, they get their first sponsorship, they’ve got a few thousand dollars in check form in front of their eyes, and the choice is put it in the bank, call it profit, or go out and buy a better camera. When is the right time to invest in another piece of technology? What’s HD getting for you guys?

Kent: Well, you know, I think what HD is getting for us is just like it looks a lot better on bigger screens, and there are bigger and bigger screens and higher resolution computer screens, higher resolution TV screens.

Kevin: You guys are thinking about TV now.

Kent: TV, all of that sort of stuff, and even we talked to the Apple TV guys and they’re like well we don’t want to feature you on that, even though we were shooting in HD at that point, we were doing computer blowups on it and it wasn’t as high quality, well, it’s sort of fuzzy, like yeah, okay. And it looks so much better now.

Kevin: Is anything lost? I mean that was kind of the charm the low-fi production.

Kent: Absolutely. Absolutely the charm is in the low-fi, some people are rebelling against the newer slicker graphics and things, you’re like okay, whatever.

Kevin: Ninjas should not be seen in such detail.

Kent: But we were holding back on re-releasing the new intro with the song because the first swipe at it was just sort of trying to recreate the low-fi version of it shot on the red. And like it just wasn’t as zany and funny and weird and stupid as like six still things that were roughly matted popping up was. And so it was like, no, if we’re going to do a motion intro it needs to be at a whole different level of zaniness and like just trying to recreate a low-fi with state-of-the-art camera equipment is a poor choice, you know. So, it is that balance, but for us like I think it always comes back to if that person with the iSight has gotten a sponsorship and an audience it’s much more about the writing then it is about the visuals and everything else. And so I would just — I would reinvest to some degree always in yourself and what you’re doing, but also don’t starve (laughter).

Kevin: So, what is BlogWorld for you this year?

Kent: I’m speaking on a panel about “Not Your Father’s YouTube” moderated by Paul Culligan and Andy Burns on it and Julie Perry, and so that’s fun, and then it’s really about just sort of like reconnecting with a lot of old friends and friendly faces and just see what’s going on with this world still at the frontline level. And like I say that with the Army right to our right, it’s right there, the frontlines.

Kevin: Yeah, well they had someone doing chin-ups before, it was kind of distracting.

Kent: Oh, yeah? Were they an attractive person doing chin-ups?

Kevin: I think it was a nerd, honestly.

Kent: A nerd was doing chin-ups, sure.

Kevin: They did three (laughs).

Stephan: We should have taken the camera over there (laughter).

Kent: Right, absolutely. But, yeah, it’s really to listen, learn and see what’s going on. Like just in the few conversations I’ve had over the last 12 hours it’s been great to just reconnect and just see like, okay, we’re — are we doing a plan that’s going to work and it seems like it, and then just talking to other people with what they’re doing.

Stephan: Is this your first BlogWorld?

Kent: No. We started back when it was the Portable Media Expo back in Ontario, California. We keynoted one maybe three or four years ago, so we’ve been around.

Stephan: You’re natives to the land.

Kent: And like the first one I went to it was even before I started Ask A Ninja, and so it was very — like I was thinking about all this stuff but I hadn’t actually launched it, and so when I launched it five or six months later and I came back the year after it was really interesting.

Stephan: Cool.

Kevin: Alright, well thank you Kent Nichols.

Kent: Thank you. Yeah, check out askaninja.com, youtube.com/askaninja, and /askaninjados, that’s our back channel now.

Kevin: Great, thank you!

And thanks for listening to the SitePoint Podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions about today’s interview please do get in touch. You can find SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom. And you can find me on Twitter @sentience. Visit sitepoint.com/podcast to leave a comment on this show and to subscribe to get every show automatically. We’ll be back next week with another news and commentary show with our usual panel of experts.

This episode of the SitePoint Podcast was produced by Karn Broad and I’m Kevin Yank. Bye for now!

Theme music by Mike Mella.

Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.

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