Our pal Dan Benjamin, who continues to cement himself as a “Dick Cavett for the Internet Age” with his engaging Pipeline interviews, has a gem in his latest episode, talking shop with Adam Lisagor. Many people may know Adam from the hilarious You Look Nice Today podcast, but he’s now making a name for himself crafting memorable, one-of-a-time promotional videos for products such as Square and Flipboard.

Adam discusses his dissatisfaction with his previous work (doing graphics and visual effects for television and film) and what it was like for him to take the leap of quitting his job and venturing out on his own commercially. It’s absolutely worth a listen for anyone having done (or planning to do) the same.

Hear Adam Lisagor on The Pipeline »

Cheap plug masked as full disclosure: We designed the 5by5 Studios website.

UPDATE: Merlin Mann hits the nail on the head in his post about Adam’s interview:

“I don’t know how you could listen to Dan’s swell interview with Adam without feeling at least a teeny bit inspired. Inspired to pick your new projects more carefully, to dump the less gratifying old ones more buoyantly, to give your latest draft just one more line edit, to start noticing the well-disguised opportunities that are lurking in the shadows of inconvenience and loss—to at least briefly double-check that the trendline for whatever stuff you’re making that theoretically matters to you is moving in a sustainable direction you can be proud of.”

Seriously. Check it out. Now.

As a freelancer, you can give yourself a raise by increasing your hourly or per-project rates. This part is simple, but setting up the right preconditions for the change is a trickier process. How can you raise your rates while making sure you still get plenty of work?

FreelanceSwitch explores the topic in a well-written piece »

Everything takes three times as long as you think [to get done], plus meetings.

Merlin Mann, speaking the truth about client work at Phoenix Wordcamp.

At the moment, most of the buzz coming out of this morning’s presentation is surrounding the new MacBook Air, Apple’s almost-but-not-quite-ultra-portable notebook computer. Weighing in at less than three pounds and barely 3/4″ inch, it’s clearly one sexy machine, and one that I’m sure will sell like crazy.

Sitting back and digesting this year’s event, I’m focusing on today’s announcements from the perspective of a small business owner; what did Steve Jobs unveil that we can really incorporate into our workflow to help us work better, faster and more efficiently for our clients?

For what it’s worth, the MacBook Air doesn’t really fit that bill for Bainbridge Studios. Would I love to have one sitting on my desk right now? Absolutely! Would it be the right fit for our technology needs at the moment? Not really. With it’s fixed amount of RAM (2GB, built into the Logic Board), small hard drive capacities (80 GB HDD or 64 GB SSD), it doesn’t have the horsepower to really serve as a workhorse or desktop replacement.

It would make a hell of a portable for traveling and for client pitches and presentations, no question. Heads will turn the moment you open one of those bad boys on the office conference table. Plus it light weight and svelte dimensions would make it easy to travel with. Definite selling points for the heavy duty business traveler, but at a starting price of $1,799, it just doesn’t offer the degree of power and functionality that would make it a good investment for our office.

So what did catch my eye during the Stevenote? Time Capsule. Time Capsule is essentially a new version of Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless base station with a built-in server-grade hard drive. It’s offered in two flavors (500 GB for $299 and 1 TB for $499) and is designed to work seemlessly with OS X Leopard’s Time Machine feature (Time Machine is an automated back-up program that incrementally backs up your Mac every hour to a network drive).

We will be picking up Time Capsule and configuring it as our primary backup here on our office network. Currently, we’ve got Time Machine functioning on our two primary machines, backing up regularly (when docked) to a Firewire 800 and USB 2 external drives. Time Machine works pretty seamlessly when you’re connected to your computer’s selected external drive, but (as of today) doesn’t offer wireless backup.

Just the ability to have incremental backups constantly done here in the office, for all machines, is a huge time-saver and a great safety net to have in place. Previously, we’ve gone through a number of backup utilities, including our previous favorite, SuperDuper!, but all of them required an additional degree of interactivity that Time Machine does not.

In the words of the great Ron Popeil, we hope to use Time Machine and Time Capsule to “set it and forget it.”

Lots of folks are weighing in on exactly what may be the specifics of the change in the algorithm, but right now it appears that sites most significantly hit are those that either: 1) sell text links to other sites; and/or 2) have a high rate of links between blogs/sites on the same network. For example, a number of prominent technology blogs, such as Engadget, are a part of large network of multiple sites and employ a large number of “cross-site” links on nearly every page of their sites. In many ways, this is a means of “beating the system” to improve Google search rankings, as Google’s search algorithm rewards sites which feature large numbers of incoming links (from other websites). It looks as if it’s now (more-so than ever) important that those links be from true outside websites (not other sites owned by the same company or apart of the same network).

This is clearly something that will most significantly impact some of the larger players in the blogosphere, particularly any companies whose revenue model is built entirely on Google ad dollars. Despite this, it should also be a lesson to smaller companies and websites that their search engine rankings can be impacted and that they should focus on developing quality incoming links to their site in order to best increase their search rankings. Relying on manufactured outside links simply doesn’t cut it any longer, and it shouldn’t. Good for Google for correcting this loophole in their algorithm.

(via Kottke)

In many ways, it’s a shame that Vonage continues to get beat down by the larger phone companies. While some have offered competing VOIP services, in most cases they’ve not offered the competitive pricing and feature lists that Vonage brought to the table (which isn’t entirely surprising, as VOIP technology is a direct challenge to their established land-line and cellular businesses).

As a small business, we’ve found great value in many of the services Vonage offered. Bainbridge Studios’ primary phone services have been provided by Vonage since early 2006 and the flexibility they offered, including the ability to manage voicemail and call logging via a web-based dashboard, the flexibility to offer additional phone lines in multiple area codes and email notifications of new messages are all features we’ve made great use of.

Given their increasingly rocky standing and the non-stop barrage of litigation, we’ve begun seriously considering alternate providers for our phone services. Whatever alternate provider we ultimately choose, it’s unlikely to be one of the traditional phone companies, as they simply don’t seem willing to offer the same kind of value and service options that Vonage has. And that’s a shame.

Once you clearly understand what you don’t want the end product to be, you’re well on your way to effectively addressing the task at hand.

Here at my home office, from which the vast majority of all Bainbridge Studios work and communication emanates, the storm proved to be a particular test. Having been fortunate over the years, we’ve rarely been faced with any power outages lasting more than a couple minutes and Internet service outages have been few and far between (knock on wood).

Thankfully, we had pretty fair warning that this particular storm was coming and what could be expected as far as damage. By late Thursday afternoon, the winds and rain were significantly picking up and the lights began to flicker. Having finished up most of the day’s work, I went through a quick backup routine to get an additional set of all client/project files on a portal USB2 drive and then powered down the office server. Despite a few “blinks”, the power did in fact manage to stay on throughout most of Thursday evening, finally dropping off early Friday, around 1:15am.

Friday is what proved to be the true test of flexibility. We woke up to no power, no heat and (obviously) no Internet access. Given the seemingly slim prospects of the power being quickly restored that day, Dianne and I elected to head out of Seattle for the day, visiting with family in the burbs that were fortunate to have power.

Unfortunately, their DSL service was down.

What could have been a rather insane day of managing work, sans online access, turned out relatively painless. My Blackberry provided easy access to keep up on any/all incoming email and allowed me to inform clients of the day’s events and circumstances. That, paired with a relatively light work day (with only a couple minor deliverable deadlines to meet), made the potentially madding actually rather manageable.

I did find myself spending a good deal of Friday afternoon bouncing from cafe to cafe in search of a working WiFi connection to get a couple client email campaigns ready for delivery, but aside from that, managed to crank out a reasonably productive day in spite of the circumstances.

So what did I learn from last week’s experience? Planning is key. You never know when adverse circumstances (be it weather, accidents or any number of other factors completely out of your control) will impact your business, and it’s best to be prepared:

• Have flexible options for working from the road.
• Make sure your computer systems have working APC backup devices, to allow you to save files and properly shut down your computers in the event of a power outage (I discovered that my APCs didn’t hold up well when the power was lost).
• Have an email- and web-enabled phone or PDA that will give you access to email and necessary online services, and make sure that device works when the power or WiFi is down.
• Back up your data! Regardless of pending nature disasters, always maintain backup copies of your critical data. Ideally, that backup should be portable, so you can simply grab an external drive and take it with you.
• Finally, and probably most important of all, RELAX. No matter how frustrated and stressed you might be in that crisis moment, there are others out there dealing with a lot more. If you’ve taken the necessary steps to prepare yourself and your business for such adverse circumstances, you’ll be fine. Relax and enjoy the adventure.

“When you’re trying to solve a problem, always bring it back to the simplest formulation.”

Yunus was speaking specifically about Grameen’s microloans to individuals in impoverished nations, but that approach can be applied to many ventures, design included.

A fit, energetic man in his forties. The kind of person you never expect to be “the first to go.”

We hadn’t worked directly with this particular client and his company (of which he was a co-owner) since redesigning their website last year and I hadn’t had contact with anyone from their office in some time.

Hearing news of his death, it certainly got me thinking about business planning and addressing the “what ifs?” that so many of us don’t want to consider. Particularly for those of us that are either self-employed, entrepreneurial or running our own small businesses, planning for things like an untimely death is a significant issue (e.g., what happens to the business? To the client base? To employees?).

It’s not the kind of thing most of us want to consider, but it’s clearly important to do so. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of that…