wevonium.com: the little blog with the funny name

So my day job requires me to keep abreast with all the latest goings on happening on the intertubes. This can be a challenge. I honestly don’t know how people manage to have Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or all the other various social network accounts active all the time. I have a hard enough time with this blog and my LinkedIn page. None the less, I have taken the plunge and started fooling with Twitter. So far it seems pretty useless, more like a social IM than anything else, but we’ll see. Like all experiments, I’m sure I’ll learn as I go. One neat thing, I set it up so I can update it from an IM window. That in turn updates my Twitter page as well as the updates on the top right of this here blog. If I learn anything I’ll tweet you all.

Was cruising around the net today looking for an answer to an odd question when I stumbled upon askoxford.com. I particularly like the FAQ section. Some great trivia-esque things in there. My favorite question? Is there a name for a baby hedgehog? Turns out there is…

A hedgehoglet.

In every tech oriented mag I read, I always see a list of incomprehensible terms that are supposed to change my life this year. I decided to come up with my own.

Brandwidth
The volume of products we can care about at any one time.

Forcrastination
Figuring out how you can put off that job you need to do in 2 weeks.

Foreskinning
Comping up what an application will look like before understanding how it will actually work.

Vapid prototyping
Rushing your design team to build out your great new idea, no matter how bad it really is.

Bacterial Marketing
Advertising that is accidentally inserted into your life, like found objects in the art world.

Pharmatization
Taking something cool and making it really really boring.

Namd
The act of naming something “web 2.0″ style. See Flickr, Flagr, Eventful, et. al.

Bullshot
Doctoring a screenshot to look better than it really is. Designers do this with HTML type all the time.

When I get off the train most days, there is usually some ’street team’ eagerly trying to give me a free trial of something. In my time wandering out of NY Penn I’ve gotten chips, breakfast bars, soy milk, you name it. This, I think, is the greatest of them all so far…

I’m not sure which is better, the fact that they are edible or the fact that they are Bacon & Cheese flavor!

So when I first registered wevonium.com back in 1998 (editors note, wow I’m getting old) I was a young, feisty designer looking to show off my portfolio in the newly emerging interactive space. (One of the things I’m going to try to add to this site is a tour of what the site looked like throughout the ages. I should have all the files, but if not the internet archive should be able to help me out. Much like looking back on old high school pictures, there’s probably some horrifically funny design in there). I mention all this because the 5 of you that read this site on a regular basis may have noticed a change in the focus of good old wevonium.com. I thought I’d take a minute to explain.

When I took the job at “The Agency” my role was a Creative Director hybrid that had to focus on brand strategy a lot more than in employments past. Last year I was offered the opportunity to switch to a strategic role on a full time basis, a transition that I made and I very much enjoy. I shall spare you all the boredom of recounting my career highlights, but it does leave me rethinking the purpose of my website since I no longer need to utilize for a purely promotional sense. So…

I sat down on the train the other day and tried to figure out what I wanted with wevonium from here on out. Where I landed was that wevonium.com will become more of my sketch pad for ideas, short stories and some serialized content offerings I’m dreaming up. How often will I post? It’s tough to say. Daily isn’t going to happen, so right now I’ll just shoot for once a week. I write a lot at the job, but it’s mostly business and brand strategy briefs, which leaves my creative brain cells withering on the vine a bit.

So dear readers, bear with me. I hope you like what comes out the other end of this process. If not, you weren’t invited here anyway.