June 1, 2023
First thing every morning, I go to my Google Analytics account to see which pages on my site were visited yesterday. Today I saw that a visitor to colin.org looked at my recruitment brochure for Brooks Institute of Photography, a now long-gone outfit. It was another one of my “first person” brochures. I interviewed the […]
I made a flyer for an outfit called Keep Your Keys.
I answered a CraigsList ad asking for “flyer modification.” I met John Shaver at a coffee shop in Goleta. He said he had a lot of responses to his ad but I was the only one who was truly local to Santa Barbara. He showed me his existing flyer (right). He wanted a better one.The […]
May 15, 2023
Interesting article about memory and creativity. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/memory-creativity/ Part of it is about a study of Patient N.N. who had a memory impairment. He was unable to remember anything about his own personal life but retained information about everything else. Give him a list of words to be memorized and he could do it. A surprising […]
May 1, 2023
May 1, 2023 At the Writers Workshop Saturday I yakked with Brian for a few minutes before the meeting started. He’s a Brit trying to get his memoirs written about his adventures working in many different places around the world, now retired from his job as a technical writer at QAD here in Santa Barbara. […]
Our Chemical Eden
Our Chemical Eden explains the beginnings of life in the hydrothermal vents in the ocean deeps. This has long been my preferred theory and it was good to see it explicated in persuasive new detail. My previous sources for this theory are THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE (1998) by Thomas Gold and QUANTUM EVOLUTION (2001) by […]
My New Years’ Card
What kind of copywriter am I?
I was thinking about a BBDO moment…I was assigned to write a newspaper ad for pickup trucks for a Dodge dealer in Buffalo, New York. The way everybody else at the ad agency did it was to look in the files for an ad that was approved in the past, and use that while […]
June 27, 2022
June 27, 2022 I’ve been in the doldrums since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/2008. My clients all vanished. Or rather they pulled in their horns and let me go. I’ve been poking and prodding around ever since trying to find gigs. My previous methods of finding work have all petered out. I […]
June 25, 2022
June 25, 2022 I am adrift in the national sea of nothingness as we approach the maelstrom. Everything is falling to pieces everywhere and Americans sit blandly doing nothing while 11,494,000 jobs go unfilled. I doubt this curve goes up any higher. Despite all the jobs supposedly available, I haven’t been able to find […]
Content analysis for tech companies
Content analysis for tech companies A lot of the tech sites I look at have their essential content buried behind a barrier of complex technical writing. What I do as a technical copywriter is to is to emphasize the unique selling points that set a company apart from competitors. I analyze a company’s content from […]