I would like to take this time to announce that our agency has grown just a little bit more this month. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Ryan McCormick to the team in the newly created position of Director of Integrated Production. Ryan is an industry veteran that has successfully produced award winning work while at both Blast Radius and Tribal DDB. Ryan's experience producing both digital and broadcast for such brands as Clorox, BC Dairy, BC Tourism, Boston Pizza, EA, PBS and many others.

Ryan's roll here will be to produce all digital projects that we are engaged with. He will also continue to develop our professional network of contractors and partners that are hired to execute the work. Ryan will draw on his existing large network of professionals and seek out new ones that will add to the breadth of Powershifter offerings.

More quick facts on Ryan:

• Lives on an island in his quest to shatter the myth that no man is an island.
• Uses almost 6 gigs of tethered data on his iPhone monthly commuting from that island.
• Dad to 3 lovely girls that keep him pretty busy while not at the office.
• Caused quite the stir with the co-invention of luggage stickers for The Cheeky.com
• Gets more done in a day than most do in a week.

We are scheduled for some corporate shots in the coming weeks and will reveal what this mystery super producer looks like when they are done.

In February of 2009 I blogged about the fact that Twitter was becoming more and more a crowdsourced news editoral application for me. In the post I reviewed how I was using Twitter more as a way to source content and less about conversation.

Let me break it down:

Since that post I believe that I have tweeted about 10,000 or so times. I guess I was a little off on the conversation part. Now for an update on how this has progressed over the last 1.5 years. There is no question that in recent weeks my outbound and conversational habits on Twitter have dropped substantially.

This is due in part for a few reasons. The first is that the agency has gotten very, very busy and there really is less time to converse with others in social networks. Second was the discovery of a very cool, but simplistic, Twitter app called Twittertim.es. Twitter Times is then linked to your Twitter account via  it's oath and then spiders all of the people that you are following. The application crawls your list and then pulls all of the great content, pictures and all, that is being posted in your stream. The page looks nothing like a Twitter stream and resembles an online news or magazine site. The app then weighs the importance of the tweeted links by the frequency that it is posted and re-tweeted by those that you follow. This is the crowdsourced editorial staff that I referred to in the past. Only this time around their commentary is diminished and the posted content is made more important. Sure the "postees" are listed at the bottom of each story but their conversational tweets are removed. As your day fills up with important activities it's nice to be able to get the hyper relevant content, from those you follow, without being sucked in to the conversation.

Now let's step that up even further with the announcement of the new iPad app called Flipboard. The application looks very much like a magazine but all of the content, like Twitter Times, is from your social networks. This time they have included all of the links in your Facebook, Flickr and other social feeds. In fact the crowdsourcing is upped in power but the fact that you can subscribe to user generated Twitter lists to create categories.

If you look at the preview video below you can get a pretty good sense of how it works and how gorgeous it really is. I must admit that I was holding out for the second generation iPad until I saw this app. I consume a ton of social contributed media from the people I follow and would love to be able to take it with me and to view it in a much better UI.

Flipboard is not the first iPad app that is based on this concept and I suspect won't be the last. The talented folks over at Teehan + Lax have a very cool looking iPad app called TweetMag that is soon to be released as well. There is now a race on and this is where I think social is really going in the next few years. I think this is bigger than geo-location apps to be honest. People really do want to know what your reading more than they want to know where you are reading.