Articles by Ian Lurie

…and some alliteration. Two new faces at Portent. I’m really excited to have them on board, both because they’re scary-smart and will be great for the company, and because their hiring means we’ve reached another milestone of sorts. I’ve decided to welcome them to the company with some horrifically bad puns: Lindsay Thomas Lindsay’s not [...]

Dear President Obama:

You’re not going to read this. Republicans will read it and roll their eyes. Democrats will read it and grind their teeth.

But I’ll feel better, because this crap is driving me crazy, and I finally wrote it all down.

I have horrific writer’s block right now. I’m tired, burned out on writing and generally verbally fried. Alan Bleiweiss gave me an amazing idea: So, thanks to Alan, here it is. All my limited artistic talent focused like a blurry laser beam in a snowstorm on my current nemesis: Writer’s block. I don’t know. I [...]

My forehead should be bleeding. I’ve pounded it against my desk about thirty times in the last 24 hours. If I can help other people and companies market themselves, why can’t I ever do it for myself? This isn’t the first time I’ve asked myself this question. But it’s the first time that I can [...]

Dear CEO/VP of operations or whatever you are: Information technology departments don’t kill businesses. CEO’s using IT departments kill businesses. I’m reading a great book by John Hughes: Haunting the CEO (affiliate link). He’s a CIO-for-hire, and he’s seen it all. I’d started writing this post before I started the book, but the book really [...]

Someone at Portent asked me to put together an explanation of why I behave the way I do. They meant it in a nice way. So this is it: The Field Guide to Ian Lurie, written for “Portent” employees and anyone else I might encounter in the working world. Feel free to laugh at me, [...]

AKA: The Responsinator Lee Odden, Todd Malicoat, Jonathan Allen and I did a site clinic/lab at SES San Francisco last week. Of 5 sites we reviewed, 4 delivered the wrong response codes if I: Visited a broken link on the site. A server should respond with a ‘404’ error code. Most of these servers instead [...]

Steady, smart content curation can grow your audience on lots of social media outlets. It’s list building, social media-style: You help folks find and filter other people’s good stuff. In exchange, they start paying more attention to your good stuff. Just the facts, folks: This is a step-by-step look at how I do my daily [...]

In all my running yesterday (and flight delays) I forgot to say ‘sorry’ for missing the Author’s Lunch at SES San Francisco. So: I’m sorry. Usually I leave more time for delays – this time it didn’t work out. You can all leave nasty comments below:

I’d love to say I’m about to draw a spectacular parallel between cycling and internet marketing. But internet marketing isn’t anything like cycling. I’ve never barfed after a hard day of internet marketing. Nor have I gotten road rash because of a badly-behaved poodle. And I never won a bicycle race because of my brain [...]