Carsonified

by Ryan Carson

We’ve gotten quite a few comments in the last post that asking why we are “wasting so much” time creating an “umbrella brand”, so I’d like to address this point.

These comments seem to say that we should be spending our time and effort on our various different sites, instead of on a re-brand.

I whole heartedly disagree.

As a company, we’re growing and changing. The name ‘Carson Systems’ just doesn’t make sense for us. I chose it back when I was a PHP developer and all I thought I was going to do was build software. Now that we do web apps (DropSend and Amigo), online magazines (Vitamin), events (FOWA, FOWD, FOM, FOOA), and blogging (here), the name just doesn’t make any sense.

A re-brand is necessary so that people aren’t confused by our name. I’m sure you’re going to say that ‘Carsonified’ is no more enlightening that ‘Carson Systems’, however, it’s general enough that we have freedom to do whatever we want to do.

Another reason for the re-brand is so that we can start communicating to everyone that we’re behind all of these projects. You wouldn’t believe how many people I run into that say “Ohhhhh, I didn’t know you were behind XXXX”. It’s crazy. We’re obviously not doing a very good job of explaining that to people.

So by re-branding with a more general name and a great new logo, we can now start putting the Carsonified logo more prominently on all of our web properties. We think it’ll be fun to put things like ‘fully Carsonified’ prominently on our different web properties. It’ll help people understand who’s behind these projects.

Here’s a snippet from a recent comment by Brian Smith

‘Carsonified.com’ demands a tagline “because Carson.com was already taken.” There are probably hundreds of businesses with a name starting with ‘Carson’ the whole idea of trying to build a brand around such a common name is ridiculous.

Brian, what makes you think we’d want to be called ‘Carson’? I know it’s my last name, but isn’t that about the most boring name you’ve ever heard of for a company? This company is not about me. I’d like to say that again: This company is more than Ryan Carson.

As we said in the first post about this re-design, Gill and I didn’t even choose this name. The team did. That’s why I love it!

Another great thing about the name ‘Carsonified’ is that it’s an action. We’d like everything we do to be ‘Carsonified’. It’s the way we do business. Personal, friendly and quality. We think that it’ll be fun to say that our sites and events will be ‘fully Carsonified’, etc.

End of tirade :) I’ve gotta catch a plane to Edinburgh!

by Lisa Price

For anyone planning on attending next year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, the event’s Panel Picker is now live!

We’ve submitted the following proposals:

• Getting Things Done Are you being crushed under a sea of unopened e-mail? Do you start one project only to be distracted by another? This panel will bring you tricks and tips from the masters, a look behind the scenes at the workflow of top studios, and inspire you to streamline your daily chores. Are you ready to become a GTD ninja?
• Fire your freelancer, now! Following on from the controversial post here on Carsonified, this panel will ask, as freelancers become more expensive and offshore employees become more of a real proposition, should you be thinking about firing your freelancer and out-sourcing your projects? We’ll talk to some people who have gone down the off-shore route and those who haven’t to find out where the future lies.
• Pedantic Semantics: Using Subtlety to Fight Lazy Web Design As designers, it’s in our nature to agonise over the details - perhaps even to an obsessive degree. But this level of perfectionism should be celebrated and embraced, especially when it comes to applying that ethos to our markup. Care about semantics! Care about code indentation! Care about class names! Only through perfectionism can we convert the non-believers who are content to mark up sites like MySpace.
• How to sell a web app The goal of many web app developers is to sell it or to be acquired but how does this happen? What are buyers looking for? What should you avoid when trying to sell? What should you actively promote? All this answered and more.

If you like the sound of these panels, please vote!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/2/q:carson

We’ve got exciting news!

We’re changing our name from Carson Systems to Carsonified. It’s amazing how it happened and I think it demonstrates what I love about our company.

Let me give you a bit of back-story …

We’ve been contemplating changing our company name from Carson Systems for quite a while now - with ‘Carson Media’ being one of the main contenders. This was because the ‘Systems’ in Carson Systems just didn’t make sense any more. I chose that back when I was a developer, believing that all I’d be doing was building software.

Since then we’ve branched out into creating websites (Vitamin), a ton of blogging (BareNakedApp, Carsonified and more), building web apps (DropSend and Amigo), events (FOWA, FOM, FOOA and FOWD) and social meetups (FOWA Road Trip and BD4D). Rather than just doing web app development, we see ourselves as a web company, run by people by who are passionate about the web.

So, Gill and I were contemplating this name change, but we really hated ‘Carson Media’. It just sounded so corporate and souless - everything we despise. We’re excited about producing quality products, being friendly and kind, having integrity and connecting people.

Then one beautiful summer’s day a couple of weeks ago, we had a team meeting in the local beer garden, and I mentioned that Gill and I didn’t think we would be changing the company name after all, and that we’d stick with Carson Systems.

Instantly, the mood of the meeting dived. Everyone went quiet and seemed to hate the idea of keeping our existing name. Gill picked up on this and said “So, any ideas on what we can change it to?”.

Lisa had already been thinking about this and said, “I really think ‘Carsonified’ could work as a company name”: the reasoning was that it was already in place as the name of the company blog, and being part of the conversation about issues in the web industry is core to what we want to do, it’s something that can be easily applied to all of our projects (a lot of people get confused between our events, Vitamin and our blogs - having one logo and company identity that’s got a bit of zing will make that clearer) and it just sounds fun and energetic, sentiments we all share about the company, and hope that feeling emanates from the things that we do.

Suddenly everyone was bouncing around ideas. Elliot mentioned that he had been sketching logo ideas for the Carsonified blog on the train and I said “Go back to the office and get that sketchpad!” (See below)

It was amazing! There was a palpable buzz around the table (maybe the beer had something to do with it too?). I realized that I had been guilty of suppressing everyone’s excitement and innovation by trying to systematize everything as we grew the company. What we needed was room for everyone to breath and be creative again.

What’s even more surprising and rewarding for me, is that this was a democratic decision. This wasn’t something that Gill and I decided and then implemented, this was the team coming up with the idea and feeling enthused by it. And we can’t wait to get rockin.

I feel as if we’re returning to our roots again - focusing on what’s really important to us:

1. Encouraging the web community
2. Participating in the conversation about making the web a better place
3. Commitment to integrity and quality
4. Friendliness and kindness

So we’re going to be re-branding as Carsonified (without the exclamation mark :D) and we’ll be launching the new brand in a few weeks. Look out for more things to be Carsonified!

Just wanted to let you know we’ve been working hard on the new FOWA Road Trip page. Make sure to come out and have a beer with us!
Our new designer Elliot Jay Stocks really done an amazing job - beautiful design and beautiful markup.

By Elliot Jay Stocks

It’s a rare occurrence when so much excitement can be produced by the humble bookmarklet, but in the last two days not one but two of these little gems have caught my eye and stolen my heart.

XRAY

Web designers and developers the world over have long been fans of browser plugins that reveal information about the page and - more specifically - its document structure; I don’t think I need to mention Chris Pedrick’s ‘Web Developer’ extension for the main Gecko-based browsers.

But for pure simplicity’s sake and the advantage of some rather lovely UI design, XRAY gives you the power to view any page’s box model simply by clicking a bookmarklet and it has the advantage of working in Safari, for those of you who’ve felt left out of the Web Developer extension party. (Incidentally, Jon Hicks provided an excellent round-up of development plugins for Safari a while back.)

[ westciv.com/xray ]

Microformats

Mr. Hicks also vented his frustration at not having a Microformats plugin for the Apple browser, and once again it was the bookmarklet that came to the rescue, this time in the form of the aptly-named ‘Microformats’ by Remy Sharp. Again: elegance, simplicity and functionality all rolled into one tiny but tasty package.

As with XRAY, the Microformats bookmarklet allows you to view and download any microformatted information embedded in the page. Great from a user’s point of view, but also great for testing your microformatted markup!

[ leftlogic.com/lounge/articles/microformats_bookmarklet ]

Thanks to Twitter, I noticed that Thomas Hawk was messing around with a new Firefox add-on called Sparky.

It pops a cool little Alexa status bar in the bottom-right of the browser. It’s a nice way to get a quick feel for how popular a site is (if you trust Alexa, that is). I wonder if Compete is going to release a tool like this soon? (Their toolbar is the most annoying thing ever.)

Here’s a quick overview of Sparky (stolen from Alexa’s site):

Traffic Trend

Sparky’s trendline feature allows you to track a website’s popularity over time, plotting the traffic rank for the last 4 months on a handy little sparkline.

Reach Meter and Traffic Rank

Sparky’s reach and rank features give you a quick overview of a site’s popularity. The blue bar gives you an overall indicator - is this site popular or not? The rank number tells you exactly how this site ranks in comparison to all other sites on the Web.

Related Links

Sparky also comes with Alexa’s famous patented Related Links feature built right into the browser. Now, no matter what site you are on, Sparky can help you find similar sites.

Click Menu

With a click on Sparky you have immediate access to a wealth of additional information. Do a search for the site, find sites that link to it, see who owns it, where it is located, related links and much much more.

Hope you all can make it to FOWA in London in October. The lineup just keeps getting stronger and stronger!

We’ve just added:

• Matt Mullenweg - WordPress
• Om Malik - GigaOm
• Kevin Rose - Pownce, digg and diggnation
• Mike Arrington - TechCrunch

Om and Mike are going to have an on-stage debate about the future of web apps, Kevin is going to talk about the things they learned while launching Pownce and Matt is going to give some amazing pointers on creating community and growing your app.

It’s going to be a really fun two days.