From Tree Decorating to Holiday Parties LevelTen is all about the Holiday Season! Here is a glimpse into a day in the life of a LevelTen Employee in December!

After writing recently about the Brick Wall of Learning Drupal, I got a lot of responses from people frustrated with trying to learn Drupal. Clearly this a big issue. Some of the big challenges are discovering "best practices" and finding the "good modules." While there is no quick and easy answer to learning Drupal, there are 5 ways to find the information you are looking for.

1. Websites

Whether you like them or not, QR codes are slowly being embedded into the digital marketplace. I am always on the lookout for a random QR code experience. Below are recent findings and ideas for my fellow codies!

Retail

The book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is about the importance of intrinsic motivation. The foundation of the book is that there are three levels of human motivation:

1. Basic needs – survival, food, sex, etc.
2. External rewards and punishment
3. Internal interest and purpose

Whether your company is launching a new product, is changing its name, is repositioning or has merged with another company, branding plays an important role in building awareness and extending customer loyalty. While many people think of their brand in terms of identity, brand is so much more.

During an impromptu trouble-shooting and resolution meeting this week, LevelTen’s President Tom McCracken brought up an interesting challenge facing LevelTen, and the web development industry as a whole: achieving organizational balance.

LevelTen is unique in its employee composition, with professionals ranging from 1 to 20 years of experience with web development and interactive services. Many agencies gravitate towards one extreme or the other:

While the aggregation of content has been around as long as the World Wide Web and the ability to filter aggregated content has advanced considerably over two decades – as seen through search engines, news websites, personal feed aggregation, etc. The ability to disseminate content across multiple networks has seemingly been slow to develop.

Check out our interview with Social Media Club of Dallas President, Mike Merrill. For this interview, we leveraged the collaborative features found in Google Wave. You can follow the interview on the Wave embed, or see the transcript below.

Note: You will need to be logged into Wave to see the embed. Need a wave invite? Leave a comment with your e-mail address and I'll get one to you soon.

It's official; I'll never walk into a Walmart store again

Last night Conner and I had to make a quick stop into the Walmart in Hurst and I was amazed at how beautiful the inside of the store appeared. It was quite evident that they had invested some time and energy researching the competition (Target) and found that bright stores with wide isles do make for a better shopping experience and most likely more repeat business.

Think open-source is just for start-ups and small budgets? Think again. Here's a list of well-known and established organizations that are using Drupal:


Emmys