One night long ago, when I was living in White Plains and my first daughter was a little girl, I was dandling her on my knee, entertaining her by downloading a full-color satellite weather map, an image from just moments before. I flashed back to one night when I was a little boy in Arkansas and my father woke me up in the middle of the night and we crept outside.  There were all our neighbors in their pajamas, craning their necks to look up into the dark sky.  We watched the sky and there it was, a tiny light creeping across the sky: one of the first satellites.  --My daughter giggled at the colors filling the screen, pulling me back to the present.  And it was then I considered the internet would fundamentally change our perspective. I grew up in a world where we looked up at satellites and my daughter was growing up looking down from satellites.

My name is Brian D. Johnson. 
I'll be your guide today.

It wasn't what I expected. 

Beginning in 1990, I began working with private clients to help them understand and leverage emerging commuincations channels appearing on the internet.  In the very early days, this direction took him into some interesting places such as...

  • Working with Morgan Stanley and Wasserstein Perrella to help them leverage the newly opened Edgar database of SEC filings.  This work led to each of these firms savings millions of dollars in research costs.
  • Helping Time Inc. initially register the domains for their magazine properties (Time, Life, People, SI, etc.).
  • Working with journalists to give them access to the internet and teach them how to use it as a research tool.  

As it became clear that the internet was an important communication tool, his work took a different turn.  After working with CBS News for a year teaching producers and research staff how to use the internet, Brian was selected to appear on a weekly segment of the CBS News program Up To The Minute.  He worked on this program for two years and during that time built a website for the show, the first CBS News website to go online.  Here's a link to an archive of the site.  

Brian also worked for Esther Dyson's newsletter, Release 1.0.  In 1994, he designed, built and staffed an "Internet Rumpus Room" at her annual conference, PC Forum.  It was during this time that Brian's work came to the attention of Esquire, Fortune and industry trade magazines such as PC Week.

It was at PC Forum that Brian met Pam Alexander, the founder of Alexander Communications, a public relations firm based in Atlanta and San Francisco that specialized in High Tech.  One thing led to another and Brian eventually joined Alexander and relocated to the Bay Area from his home in New York.   For Alexander he built the first public relations agency website.  Here's a link to the archive of the site.  

In 2001, a new development caught Brian's eye, blogging which appeared to be the fullfillment of promises made at the beginning of the internet for a people's web.  He began experiementing with the medium and found an opportunity to put it to work when he joined CenterBeam in 2002.  Soon, he had started three different corporate blogs that leveraged content created for other purposes.  CenterBeam may not have been the first business to use blogs as part of its marketing initiative, but it was certainly on the very front edge.

Today, Brian is focused on implementing adjuncts to blogging that also leverage existing content, specifically photography and audio.  His recent work includes a two-year project with moblogged photography that's been reviewed and he was interviewed in a recent book and "revolutionaries" in digital photography.

My name is Brian D. Johnson and I'm an internet guide, the founder and principal of internet guide services.  I've done the hard work so you don't have to.  I can help you and the internet get along better together.