Can you believe it? Things are about to return to normal for my schedule, but the last few weeks months have been hectic.

Not only have I not posted, but my subscriptions in Bloglines have gone mostly unread. I’ve only had time to comment on a select few blogs, and I feel completely out of touch. I let the Rocketboom fiasco come and go completely without comment, and that’s not like me at all!

Alas, I promise to return to full form in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, all I can offer is some bonus links, one of which I found on digg. (Because I was being lazy and I needed something)

Bonus Link #1: Cool street art installations by Mark Jenkins. Way cool, and looks like a lot of work.

Bonus Link #2: Jason at Marketing is my Middle Name saw a CNBC anchor incorrectly quote movie statistics, citing Aquaman as the former-highest-opening-weekend-blockbuster, now eclipsed by Pirates II. This is funny, and it’s a major kudos to Entourage, which as I’ve said before is one of my favourite shows.

Well, today is the big day. The big “3-0,” as it were.

I don’t feel any older, but strangely I do feel much wiser. But maybe that’s just the grey hairs multiplying daily on my temples.

Anyway, the point of the post is not wax philosophic about reaching this much hyped but rather anti-climatic milestone. In fact, I just wanted to point out how easy technology has made it for people to keep in touch in this day and age.

Case in point: I had five emails saying happy birthday waiting in my inbox this morning before I even rolled out of bed (It is a bit harder now that I’m older, after all) and they’re still rolling in. That’s not counting the dozen or so well-wishes from friends on Myspace, or the auto-responders from all of the various online groups I belong to (The BMW forums saw fit to wish me a happy one, for instance, and the birthday reminder calendar I subscribed to wouldn’t make the mistake of letting today come and go without a form-letter of acknowledgement).

So I guess my point is, if total strangers are capable of using some simple technology to wish me a happy birthday, (and I appreciate it, I really do) then how are YOU leveraging technology to stay in touch with your customers?

Feel free to leave me a happy birthday message in the comments. It make the whole impact of getting older that much easier to take.

Okay, so I’m no Marshall McLuhan with my spoof headline there, but I can back that up with a few stories of shake-ups that have happened recently involving A-list bloggers. And all of this happened last week, I’ve just been too busy to comment yet, so don’t be too hard on me.

For those of you who don’t already know, Robert Scoble was an employee at Microsoft who started blogging about working at his company. Then he got famous. Really famous. And then thousands of Microsoft employees joined suit, and now the software giants have an army of volunteer evangelists and in-house critics.

In another story: Tara Hunt was a blogger from Toronto who was beckoned to the Silicon Valley to manage the marketing of the launch of Riya, a face-recognition-photo-software-program-turned-image-search-engine.

Anyway, as Paul Fabretti points out, now both are out on their own, sans day-job, starting new projects and aligning themselves with new opportunities. In these situations, you never get all of the details of the story, so it’s hard to say what caused these personnel changes, even when you hear the story right from the HorsePigCow’s mouth. I think that both Robert and Tara simply outgrew their surroundings (What? Scoble got too big and powerful for Microsoft!?) and became their own brand, simply by being themselves. Both claim an amicable split, and both are likely to end up coming out ahead when the dust settles.

Robert Scoble had the benefit of association with the hugest company on the planet, while Tara had some great ideas she thought might work, and a knack for networking. Both published great content, and their audiences grew like crazy. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record about this, but this sends a pretty clear message to me: People will connect with you, and with your company if you offer them some value in the form of content, and just be willing to have a conversation with them. In the case of Robert and Tara, they gained a following both for themselves and the companies they were plugging (and often times critiquing). If you’re smart about it and put the time in, it can work for you, too. Yes, it;s a bit of work, but if you’re talking about something you’re passionate about, it becomes more of a hobby than anything. Think of it as free PR, if that makes you feel better.

What’s the secret? Be yourself, tell the truth and have a bit of fun in the process.

Due to my long absences from posting (client work!!), here’s a few bonus links: With all this talk of Microsoft, I forgot to mention that Bill Gates is retiring from his daily duties at Microsoft! Paul Fabretti mentions that in his post too, if you were reading carefully. Bill’s gonna take a load off, and work on his charity instead. He’ll be scaled back to a normal human’s pace of work by 2008, he says.

Also over a week old, but certainly worth the wait: Our esteemed designer and photographer Rob Masefield is on an Eastern Canadian backpacking tour, and has blogged some of his favorite shots from his trip thus far. Stunning work, but really makes me wish I’d seen as much of my country as he has. I promise to link to his next set from the rest of his trip.