I'm happy to announced the birth of the new and improved Mark Evans, which can be found at markevanstech.com. It was designed by the very talented Ben Bleikamp, who did a terrific job moving my blog to Wordpress. Thanks, Ben! Note: If you're an RSS subscriber, please switch the Feedburner URL to http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarkEvans. (I've already made the change on FB so it should subscribe you automatically to the new blog)
Note: By the way, the move to Wordpress from Blogware should not be seen as a knock against Blogware, which has been a solid blogging platform and provided me with terrific customer service over the past two and half years (Thanks, Siobhan!). But since b5 is a Wordpress-powered platform, I had to make the jump to become part of the community.
By the way, I'm going to keep this blog "live" for awhile so the URLs still work in other peoples' blogs. I have been told, however, that Google doesn't like duplicate content so I'm not keeping the Blogware blog around for too much longer than makes sense. Thoughts?

According to Pierce Mattie Public Relations, I'm one of the blogosphere's movers and shakers - along with Jessica Coen, Steve Rubel, Corynne Steindler and Robert Scoble, which is awful flattering company. The criteria for making the list was using a blog as platform for landing a job in the blogging industry. Truth be told, I started to blog in early-2004 as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about. From there, it took on a life of its own before b5media emerged on the scene. (Note: the list was compiled by Shannon Nelson, who writes a few blogs for b5).

For anyone curious about b5media's roots and where it's heading, check out an interview that CEO Jeremy Wright did with Media Industry Professional Profiles.

There's a lot to be said for Skype, e-mail, instant-messaging, Webcasts and video conferences but nothing beats talking to someone in the same room. We (most of the b5media management team) just wrapped up five days of strategic planning and operations meetings in Toronto, and covered a tremendous amount of ground that would not have been possible if we hadn't been together. It's the ability to brainstorm, propose new ideas, discuss and even argue while being able to read another person's body language is what makes real-life meetings so much more productive. Of course, it also helps to have several whiteboards to help people visualize and capture all the ideas being tossed around. As a virtual company, b5media lives and breathes Skype but nothing beats getting together. Note: Being together also let me tap Darren Rowse for blogging tips, including the use of my new, favourite blog publishing tool, ecto.