By day, I’m a freelance writer and business consultant.  By night, I produce some unusual web media projects (see below).  Until recently, I did corporate social marketing for a living.  These days, I’m moving on to a new career.  Stay tuned for details…

19 Things You Might Want to Know About Me

1. In 2003, I created the web sitcom Something to Be Desired (aka “STBD”), which I produced from 2003-2009. In 2008, STBD was nominated for a Yahoo! Video Award for Best Web Series.

2. In 2010, with help from our fans on Kickstarter, STBD was spun off into a new series, The Baristas (2010-present).

3. In 2011, I launched CrowdfundingHelp, a hub of news, interviews and how-tos for artists and entrepreneurs seeking to increase their chances of success on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and RocketHub.

4. In 2006, I attended the first PodCamp, which was held in Boston and which poured rocket fuel on the careers of many a social media professional.  Here’s how that happened.

5. Six weeks after that very first PodCamp Boston, I co-founded the annual social media “un-conference” Podcamp Pittsburgh, which launched in 2006 and survives to this day.

6. I am the proud doggy daddy of a cockapoo (Rufus) and a cavachon (Buttercup).

7. I was born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania.  This means I am nearly immune to snow.  It also means I consider myself to be half-Canadian by association, which explains my love for things like Atom Egoyan and The Tragically Hip.

8. My first video game system was a Colecovision.  I was 7.

9. My first computer was a Commodore SX-64 “executive portable.” It weighed 23 pounds. I was 8.

10. I have been in 3 car accidents, including a 360 roll in which my Mercury Mystique was totaled.

11. When I was 16, I dropped out of high school.

12. When I was 17, I traveled the US with my dad, who was a traveling salesman.

13. When I was 18 (in 1995), my friends who’d moved away for college found a way to keep in touch using our computers.  It was called The Chatting Zone, which was a MUD client on telnet.  I accessed it from the Penn State Behrend computer labs in Erie, where I also first stumbled across this strange thing called the Internet.

14. When I was 19, I was a college radio DJ at Gannon University’s WERG FM in Erie.

15. When I was 20, I attended The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where I achieved an Associate’s Degree in computer animation and multimedia — which, in 1997, meant I took two classes of Macromedia Dreamweaver and that was about it.

16. I worked for five years as a video producer at a multimedia company in Pittsburgh that produced safety training for the steel industry, which means I sometimes got dressed in fireproof greens and a hardhat and went into working steel mills to film interviews and accident recreations with employees who’d been injured or lost limbs in furnaces and moving machinery.

17. In 2005, I quit my day job to start a freelance video production business… which eventually morphed into a career in social marketing.

18. I spent four years helping create and manage the social marketing efforts for digital agency clients like Bigelow Tea, Ouidad and Ecover.

19. Every weekday, I tweet a new question at 10:04 AM EST.

20. I curate cultural oddities like Marketing Douchebags and Tony Danza Space Pretzel.

And if that’s not enough, I’m constantly on Twitter.  (You’ve been warned.)

First time here?  You may want to browse through some of my top blog posts, or start with one that seemed to piss off a few people.