“Old Skool” Flickr members are being forced to switch to/merge with Yahoo! IDs to access the popular photo sharing site (Read their rants here). I think the issue here is summarized perfectly by ScrewDriver, a representative from Flick Off, an anti-Yahoo Flickr User Group.

Here’s what Screw had to say:

The dissension here in part is a resistance to change and a deep-rooted distrust of mega-corporations possessed with wallet assaulting tentacles. (from BBC)

I am an avid Flickr user. I check my account countless times throughout the day, and every image I post to this blog is hosted on Flickr. I use Flickr to share logo ideas as well as photos from my digital camera. I would consider myself a Flickr early adopter, but I joined post-Yahoo-acquistion, so I just used my Yahoo ID to sign in. Therefore, I don’t have such an issue with the change, plus I really like Yahoo (and Yahoo mail). I can, however, completely related to the uproar because of something I keep in my wallet.

I have a Disney credit card that earns Disney Dream Dollars that I can use towards Disney vacations. I’m a big fan of Disney and I like the card for that, but I also like the card because it says “Charter Member” on it. Charter means that I was one of the first to get a Disney credit card, and that’s something special to me. Credit cards have come and gone from my wallet, but Disney will stay there because [1] I want to keep earning Disney dollars and [2] again there’s something special about being a charter member. I get no extra benefits, in fact nothing extra, but that’s ok.

I am sure Old Skool Flickr users are feeling the same thing. They are losing their home, it would be interesting to have someone else come along and offer them a new place to roost.

Blake and I recently had the great privilege of touring the offices of Zappos.com, the web’s largest shoe store. It was one of the most impressive and inspirational experiences of my entrepreneurial life. I believe in the power of corporate culture, and the impact it can have on the success of an organization. In my career I have been part of a company that was enthusiastic and energetic as well as a company thats culture could be described as complacent and and uninspiring. The first company was successful and fun to be a part of, the second failed.

Zappos is a company that exudes a positive, energetic and fun culture. Our tour guide and friend, Meghan Boyd, described the dedication to the culture that the employees exhibit as almost cult-like. Founder Nick Swinmurn and CEO Tony Hsieh have instilled their internally-famous 10 core values throughout the organization.

One of the words you first hear when you walk into Zappos is WOW. The monthly “Master of WOW” gets the Bob Hope (best) parking spot. Their goal is to WOW the customer at every turn. Below is a list of the WOW’s I experienced at Zappos.

1. Everybody (literally every person we saw) smiles and waves to visitors.
2. There is a employee library with recommended reading. These are books the employees can take home and keep at no charge. Clearly a great focus on continuing education. Examples are Good to Great, Purple Cow, The World is Flat, The Tipping Point.
3. Zappos has a full time life coach who we sat down with. He helps “Zapponians” to set growth goals and build balance into their life. He snapped our picture in the King’s Throne for his “wall of fame”.
4. Free employee meals.
5. Every employee knows the company history and is conversant about fashion trends and customer loyalty
6. During the hiring process, potential employees are screened to make sure their values mesh with the Zappos 10 Core Values. This is a major part of the hiring process.
7. There is a “chill out room” where stressed out employees can recharge as well as a game room to blow off steam
8. Zappos is clearly a fun place to work as Halloween decorations still were all over and we heard stories of the legendary haunted house.
9. The CEO, CFO and entire management team sit in the middle of everyone in an open workspace. No closed-door corner offices around here.
10. Everybody has fun working there. Meghan says she can’t wait to get into work every morning.

I’m currently reading the book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win by William C. Taylor & Polly G. LaBarre. I highly recommend the book to all entrepreneurs looking to create a powerful and unique corporate culture. Zappos has clearly done that, and I couldn’t have been more impressed with their energy. I told Blake as we were leaving that the visit was inspiring and gave us a glimpse of what we are working to create with Voodoo Ventures in action at the next level. Kudos to Zappos and thanks for letting us get a peak inside your world.

From New Orleans CityBusiness Daily Update:

King cakes bought at Whole Foods Market stores will benefit Louisiana shrimpers, the organic and natural foods retailer said.

For every king cake sold in stores in Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, Whole Foods will donate a dollar to support the White Boot Brigade, a project of Loyola University New Orleans’ marketumbrella.org.

In Louisiana and Texas stores, the promotion runs from February 1 to Mardi Gras Day Feb. 20. For Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina locations, it runs Feb. 1-25.

The White Boot Brigade aims to help a small band of local shrimpers sell their catch directly to New Orleans area restaurants to boost profits for the fishermen.

In 2006, Whole Food’s south region of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina donated a dollar for every king cake sold and raised $5,000 for the Crescent City Farmers Market.

Sorry so echo-chambery. I’ll add a little value by pointing you to a delicious king cake recipe on the Whole Foods site. It serves 15, so I’m expecting a piece.

I got the opportunity to visit the Zappos.com offices while I was in Vegas attending the Affiliate Summit, and I have to say (cue the geek) it was one of the coolest experiences of my life.

Zappos is the world’s largest shoe store. It’s cool, innovative, and powerful, but there’s something else that Zappos is. Zappos is customer service and there’s a lesson to be learned here by anyone interested in making what their company does and what their company is the same thing.

The magic that Zappos has captured isn’t merely selling shoes online, it’s the way they sell shoes online. They list almost every shoe on the planet, and will ship it free in both directions and offer standard overnight delivery service. And when a transaction needs some hand holding, Zappos will blow you away with their customer service. I was a guest the day I visited their office, but I was treated by every single employee as if I were one of them, or better yet, a customer.

The tour started in the lobby. We had to wait a bit for Meghan (our friend Gerard’s fiancée) to meet us. Meghan is an assistant buyer at Zappos, but she, as well as every other Zappos employee, is also a Zappos historian able to recall a remarkable, Wikipedia-sized knowledge base of Zappos trivia at the drop of a hat.

For example, in their lobby they have this flat screen TV displaying video of constant streams of shoe boxes moving down conveyor belts, and Meghan and the guy (I believe Cameron was his name) that worked at the front desk discussed back and forth how tall a certain mechanical component in the warehouse was. Do your employees know, or even care about details like that?

Beyond the lobby, we walk through large rooms separated into small vicinities by cubicle walls. The main room where all the brands and business is managed was a colorful feast for the eyes. Posters and streamers were hanging every where, and above each desk hung the name of the person that worked at that station. At least half of the people that worked on each row stopped what they were doing to give us a quick nod, smile and hello as we passed. They all made eye-contact and seemed genuinely happy to see us. And why shouldn’t they be so proud? As far as I’m concerned they have the second best job in the world, working for the second best company (my job and Voodoo being #1 respectively).

The tour ended in the cafeteria, and if I was a little geeky in the beginning, I’ll definitely be a little “fat kid” right now. We showed up to Zappos on sandwich day (btw, Zappos employees eat free everyday), but these weren’t your average bologna or pb&j’s. I got two, one with turkey, dressing and cranberry sauce, and a second with roast chicken and provolone. It took me a minute to pick a drink since they had everything you could think of, and next to the drink machine, free vending machines. I snagged a Klondike bar from the ice cream cooler on the way out, and did a really fat kid thing by smudging chocolate all over my shirt by the time I made it back to the car.

The point I’m making here isn’t to describe touring an office (even though if you ever get the chance, take it!), but to share true insight in to why I believe Zappos’ executives have created such a unique working environment. Their employees are happy and probably look forward to coming in to work everyday. This undoubtedly translates into great customer service experiences. After all, can you tell when someone is smiling over the phone?

Blake and I had a great time in Vegas (its really hard not too), and came away from the Affiliate Summit really excited about where we are headed with siteMighty. We received very solid feedback from the affiliate networks that we approached about integrating their offers into siteMighty. Look for new offers to be integrated into siteMighty over the coming months from a variety of affiliate networks. Our philosophy for siteMighty is that we are building a software platform, and we are affiliate network agnostic. We want to integrate any and all networks into siteMighty. We will be building out an API for networks to feed their offers to siteMighty, but right now we are custom integrating networks so that we learn what is the best way to fit affiliate offer data into our publishing platform.

On that note, we met briefly with Vinny Lingham, someone we have tremendous respect for, who is developing Synthasite. He is taking a very interesting approach to tackling the same problem we are. We all agreed that web-based publishing platforms are undoubtedly the future of affiliate marketing and web publishing in overall.

We also really enjoyed meeting Jerry and Dave from one our affiliate partners on our credit card sites, NCS. We’ve been in business with these guys for a long time, and it was great to finally meet them. Additionally, we spent a lot of time with Scot from iCommissions, who has been instrumental in helping siteMighty get off the ground. He has been a partner from the beginning and has really helped shape what siteMighty has become.

As far as the conference itself, I want to give props to Shawn Collins and the Affiliate Summit team for bringing together a lot of the top people in this industry. The networking was incredible for us, and having the opportunity to meet face-to-face with partners is something that even in this age of Skype videoconferencing is irreplaceable. We attended the opening session with remarks by Michael Sanchez, CEO of ClubMom. The trade show was impressive but not so large it was overwhelming, and I would guess that for the exhibitors it was well worthwhile, as the booths were packed at all times. Half of the trade show hall was filled with round tables for meetings, and these were packed at all times as well. This was a very thoughtful addition, and one that many trade shows forgo. We were able to sit down at one table on Tuesday and meet with iCommissions, CJ, and Vinny, all based on bumping into them.

We’re looking forward to the next Affiliate Summit in Miami, and look forward to seeing even more people there.

David Pogue and 37Signals have picked up on a great contest to design Apple’s next great product. Worth1000.com is running a contest encouraging people to submit their photoshopped images of Apple’s next product. A lot of them a pretty funny. It’s amazing how good some of the mockups are. It is equally amazing that all of them are fakes. Apple is so good at managing their messaging, and by that I mean keeping all products secret until Steve Jobs is ready to make the announcement at Macworld. So many iPhone mockups ran rampant in the weeks an months leading up to the real announcement of it, including our blog. Visit the Worth1000 contest to see all the future Apple products that are no doubt coming out and will look nothing like they do here. I personally love the iPolitician because you can set his agenda to “changing to the metric system.”

We’re at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas today, and kicking off our meetings this morning with potential affiliate network partners for siteMighty. We’re thrilled to be out here, and had dinner last night our good friend, Gerard Ramos, who is a recent convert to outsourcing and is charging ahead with Simulagent.

The image to the right is a peek at the marketing collateral that Blake has been developing for siteMighty. We’ll be passing out flyers and stickers to attendees at the summit. The flyer has a promo code for 50% off siteMighty fees for 3 months, so find us for your code.

(On a personal note, I’m back from a completely disconnected vacation. Not just no internet, we stayed at a cabana hotel in Tulum, Mexico that had no electricity. But there is nothing like a week of being disconnected to get you fired up and recharged, so its good to be back.)

I used to be a huge fan of Survivor, the reality show where castaways are stranded and have to out wit, out play and out last the other contestants to win $1 million. I haven’t watched in a couple of seasons, and thought dividing the teams by races last season was a little tacky, but I may watch this season because 2 of the castaways are from Louisiana (and from towns not far from where I grew up).

I listen to NPR every morning during my drive in to the office. This morning, I heard a story about how the Tribune Co., the nation’s second largest newspaper chain is up for sale. Newspapers are dying dinosaurs, but I am convinced they aren’t going to down without a fight. In fact, the Tribune Co. is being bought in-part by a billionaire family who owned a massive newspaper empire but sold it last year.

Why would a billionaire family who got out of the newspaper business last year be so anxious to jump back in?

They’re billionaires, so I’m sure they don’t need the money. Family pride might be a reason, but I think they know something that we don’t (or at least the public at large doesn’t know).

What could that be?

My money’s on newspaper blogs. Getting popular columnist to start blogging is a simple transition, and as ad dollars shift from print to online, the shift from papering to blogging is almost inevitable. And you don’t have to take my word for it. See this.

I’m sort of getting into investing and the stock market. Just like I should have bought a few shares of Apple when I first heard of the iPhone (because stocks soared 7% the day Jobs announced), I need to buy some shares of the company that buys the Tribune Co., because blogs are here to save the day.

We are members of the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) Accelerator Program, and today I had my monthly “EO Trio” lunch with two of my fellow Accelerators. At lunch, we always talk about things we’re working on, and the fact the we blog here at Voodoo always seems to come up. The interesting thing to me is that blogging is still something people 1) really want to do, but 2) are not really sure how to get started. Getting started is completely simple, go to www.wordpress.com and create a blog for free. We recommend Wordpress because it’s what we use, it’s the best of breed, and it’s completely free. That’s not what this post is about, though. I’m continually interested in getting normal people (those that don’t work in technology) to start blogging.

Beyond The Soapbox

Why is blogging something they (you) really want to do? At it’s core, blogging is a soap-box. Everyone, at least everyone interested in blogging, has something to say, and blogging is currently the best and most popular way to get your thoughts out of your head and on the page. Beyond the soapbox, blogging sets you up as an opinion leader on a particular topic, and if you blog long enough and keep a meaningful conversation going, you’ll inevitably gain an audience (and audiences are valuble). Get enough people listening to what you have to say, and you can earn an income from selling ads on your site. OR you can use your audience to spread the word about a new product or service at your company lightning fast.

Blogs Aren’t Just For Geeks Anymore

‘Geek’ is an affectionate term I use to describe people that work in technology (If you know what the term ‘Web 2.0′ means you’re probably a geek). My friend at the EO lunch today owns a restaurant, but he just so happens to be a politics junkie - something I didn’t know before, but a perfect fit for blogging. He told me he goes every month and buys every new politcal book from Barnes & Noble. Add this to the fact that he watches MSNBC, Fox News, etc., and you have someone with a lot to say. Imagine what he could say about politics in New Orleans. Imagine who would find that interesting.