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.

This is a topic that I seem to re-visit a lot. And not just here in the blog, but almost everyday in my personal life. People seem to like to ask me, “What is a blog?” and I’m getting better and better at answering the question with a quick “elevator speech” that doesn’t put them to sleep while they try to take it all in.

These days, Tell Ten Friends is seeing a lot of new traffic from clients and other friends who want that very question answered; then they discover that most of my blog is just spewing nonsense about the latest Web 2.0 product, shake-ups in the blog community, and so forth.

Still, my regular readers have noticed by now that often I do take a few steps back to bring the uninitiated into the fold, and bring them up to speed on what’s going on in this exciting new world of self-publishing and Really Simple Syndication, etc.

Mike Sansone of “Converstations”

That’s why I was just tickled when Mike Sansone dropped by to comment on one of my recent posts, because it led me to his blog, whereupon which he is giving a step-by-step tutorial on the subject of business blogging, in a series of posts, entitled:

“What makes a blog different?”

1. The Intro
2. The Tools
3. The Talk
4. Who Cares?

If you’re new to the blogosphere, check it out. Read each one, and even follow Mike’s links, and it will guide through a nice little “newbie” blogging experience.

A keen eye will note that in his series, he links to me, and now I to him. And it all resulted after he stopped by my blog to join the conversation. There’s a lesson to be learned there as well, isn’t there Mike?

Before I get carried away doing my best Elton John singing “Circle of Life” at the top of my lungs, I’ll remind myself that this post really will be of value for many clients and site visitors for years to come, and that such antics are ill advised outside of the shower anyway.

Of a quote I once heard. Canadian TV guru Mozes Znaimer once said, “The best TV tells ME what happened to ME today.”

When I read this post from Howard over at Future Now Inc., I thought of that. Howard points out a quote from Sean Carton, originally posted at ClickZ, on the subject of online video:

“The real story about the rise of online video isn’t about the fact consumers seem to really like to watch short low-res video clips on their computers. Nope. The real story is that consumers are starting to take control of their media, and they really seem to like it. Control, not video, will have huge implications for advertisers, publishers, and marketers in the future.

Welcome to the on-demand future. Prepare for major disruptions.

The on-demand future isn’t about just video; it’s about all media. The signs are all around us: podcasts changing the way consumers listen to audio, social news sites (e.g., digg) changing the way people get information, the number of automated aggregator sites (such as GoogleNews and popurls.com) increasing. Paradigms about how media are created and published are radically changing.”

Some people find this stuff scary. I love it. But then, as the owner of a new media marketing company, I’m a little biased.