Blog Ryan

Both Williams and I have written about Maya Jade the non-profit we are working on getting off the ground to help children struggling with survival in Latin American countries, beginning with Guatemala.  The other day my wife showed me a link from David Perry where he was showing a video he had shown at the United Nations on International Adoption.  There are an estimated 148 Million orphaned children worldwide.  We are truly facing a worldwide crisis as a human race.  Many of these children are orphaned from diseases contracted by their parents, many by lack of education or understanding of the most basic human needs.

Consider this an early New Year’s resolution to kick Maya Jade into full gear this year.  We appreciate the overwhelming amount of support we’ve already received despite the fact we aren’t fully established.

Here is a link to the video.  The video will make you forget about the small problems of your life…and put the larger problems in a different perspective.

Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

- Bill Drayton

We are still in the planning stages of our new project, Maya Jade, but I have to admit I can’t recall being more excited about a project. The basic idea behind the project is to take humanitarian expeditions down to Guatemala (other countries to follow) and allow the volunteers to participate on a wide range of service projects ranging from health and education to gardening and micro-enterprise. We have a million ideas flowing through our heads about how we want to tackle this new project. I am particularily excited about the potential use of the internet and social networking to grow support for our cause. The production of a top class website for Maya Jade is going to be crucial to our success. I envision expedition participants logging onto the website prior to the expedition and sending out customizable greeting cards to their friends and families inviting them to join or sponsor the expedition. Likewise after the expeditions I can envision them uploading their own photos and again sending out greeting cards - this time telling about their experience and once again encouraging them to get involved. I would hope past participants would be excited to promote the foundation via adding their trip photos to flickr, creating myspace and squidoo pages about their trip and even youtube videos. Of course, we would also have past participants have blogs on the website chronicling their trips. The website will also need to be very user friendly for donations and spell out customized monthly sponsorhip opportunities.

As I just read on Ashoka: “All ideas must be user-friendly, understandable, ethical and capable of engaging wide spread support.” I’m thinking that a cms (content management system) will be best for Maya Jade - not sure if wordpress or mod x is the right choice. Anyway, I’m just anxious to get moving with this new project and would love to hear people’s ideas for social entrepreneurship and how to leverage social networking to grow a cause. 

McCoy told you the other day that he and I have formed a new non profit called Maya Jade. We have a lot of big plans for this new venture that will hopefully combine my background in leading tour groups to Latin America with his business savvy and result in some great service opportunities for the volunteers who choose to accompany us on this great adventure.

Anyway, today I stumbled across an intriguing list of non profits who are excelling at using the internet to further their causes. I hope to learn from each of these oranizations.

We’ve talked about starting a non-profit organization for a long time. Both of us have thought that it would be a lot longer in the making. Williams couldn’t wait any longer and filed the paperwork for our non-profit over the holidays. You can follow it at our website for Maya Jade. We will be “planting seeds of hope” in Guatemala by trying to help orphanages, schools, hospitals, and villages receive the funding and staffing they need, and the support that will make their projects and lives better.

I’ll let Williams elaborate more on this when he has the time. We’re excited about it and hope that some of you, as you learn more about our efforts, will find the desire to donate to such a great cause.

After a weekend of good rest and relaxation, I’m feeling much better. I lost 10 pounds over the holidays because I was so sick. I missed out on a lot of my favorite foods, so now I have to play catch up.

As you all have probably seen there is a game of tag going on.  I was tagged by my good friend Ryan Williams who was tagged by Brad Pace. Brad was tagged by Jeremy Palmer.

So now it’s my turn.  Here are 5 things that relatively few people know about me.

 1. I’ve worked at more jobs than almost anybody I know.  I’ve worked in home construction (clean-up crew), owned my own window washing company (as a teenager), made sandwiches at Subway, shoveled off roof tops in Park City and Deer Valley, washed cars for car dealers, been the Director of Marketing for an English as a second language school, co-founded a now defunct linux company (Linux2order), worked as an analyst for a venture capital firm, been a bean counter for a logging company, answered customer service e-mails for Netscape, worked in call centers for Health Benefits America and 1-800-contacts…and now finally I’m running my own business.

2. I accepted a job at Microsoft to be part of the adCenter team, then rescinded it the next day. 

3. I live in beautiful British Columbia, Canada on a 700 acre farm.

4. I have lived in Guatemala, Belize, Canada, and 3 western states.

5. Never tried drugs or alchohol but am so addicted to the hit show 24 that I can hardly function until I finish a season.  I’ll usually start a DVD at 10:00-11:00pm and go until about 1:00-2:00 in the morning.  I do that every night until the season is over.

Ok, so here are the people I’m going to tag:

Matt Smith, Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, Natasha Robinson, Jason Poteet

Apparently there is a game of blog tag going around the internet and it appears I have been hit. Although I’m not sure where it started it appears that Shawn Collins tagged Scott Jangro who tagged Jeremy Palmer who tagged Brad Pace who tagged ME. So, if I understand the rules correctly I must share 5 things most people don’t know about me and then tag 5 other people somewhere out there in the blogosphere.

1. I moonlight (day job is internet marketing) as a tour guide to Latin America. I lived in Guatemala and Belize for a time and fell in love with Latin America - I now typically lead 6 to 8 tour groups (ranging in size from 20 to 100) per year. Most of my trips are Mexico, Belize and Guatemala but I also lead cruise ship groups at times and include additional stops in Grand Caymen, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama and Jamaica.

 2. My wife and I have raised our kids (3 with a 4th on the way) bi-lingual (english - spanish).

3. I get interview requests to discuss NBA Basketball on the radio all around the globe - particularily when Draft time approaches.

4. I helped start an orphanage in Guatemala that now houses over 100 children ages newborn to 16. I expect everyone that reads this to get involved and help:)

5. I was recently recruited by the CIA to be a “covert operative” but declined when told I would need to spend my first assignment in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

 Ok, time for me to tag some people:

Ryan McCoy, Dave Bascom, Moiz Khan, Ryan Ewer, Gilbert Lee

When 24 premiered back in 2001 it was a modest hit.  When the DVD came out and those who hadn’t been watched from the beginning caught on to the show they became addicted.   As people caught on to the fact that they needed to watch every week to understand the development of the show Fox realized the gem they had.  As they soon discovered, an audience in mass proportions, could stomach a show like 24. The second season of 24 was a huge hit–sky rocketing from the 8.60 million viewers the first season was able to pull in, to an 11.73 million viewers.  Here is a quote from watching24.com

“24 was beginning to shape a phenomenon that we only really got a glimpse of this year. After 24’s success ABC premiered Lost in 2004 garnering huge praise from critics and audiences alike. Serial dramas were off and running.

According to the TV Guide dated Sept. 11-17, 2006, which was the Fall Preview of all the new shows, 92 shows premiered and over half of them were serialized soaps, dramas, or thrillers. Now with shows like Heroes and Studio 60, who have tremendous production values, TV shows are beginning to look a lot more like extended movies rather than small screen ways to pass your free time.”

With my new addiction in mind, I’ve found some sites for you to get your 24 fix.  (I’m currently halfway through Season 3, and I’m pacing to finish Season 4 and Season 5 before Season 6 premiers in January).

• 24podcast.net
• Jack Bauer’s confirmed kills
• Yahoo TV’s 24 Page
• Television without pity 24 forum
• Official 24 site
• Wikipedia 24 site

Ok, that’s probably enough posting about 24 on this site for a while. 

Not long ago my brother introduced me to a terrible addiction.  It started out innocent at first.  I was down for a visit in the summer and he had a business trip to St. George, Utah so I decided to tag along for the ride.  We stopped at Best Buy and grabbed the first four seasons of 24. I’d heard a ton about the show and how much everyone loved it.  I had no idea what I was in for.  While he drove I watched the first 5 episodes of season one.  I came home and bought season one and sat down to watch it with my wife.  We got hooked right from the beginning.  We watched Season One in five days.  We just started Season Two last night.  We’re pacing for another five day season.  This is going to mean a lot of late nights (early mornings) this week, so if my thoughts aren’t real clear on the blog this week, then you’ll know it is from sleep deprivation from a great television series.  Jack Bauer is my new hero.

We’ve kicked the idea around (writing a blog) for over two years now. He (Ryan Williams) first suggested it, and I (Ryan McCoy) thought it would be a great idea. The problem is work has kept us so busy that we haven’t hardly had time to do anything else..that and we tried it once and couldn’t get the previous blog to archive posts correctly and we got frustrated and scrapped the idea. We’ve tested out Word Press and it has worked great, so I think we are finally ready to go. So…we’ve decided things are never going to slow down and that it is time to just join the rest of the blogosphere in commenting on things that are important or interesting to us. This blog is more of a personal blog, and we’ll launch a business blog focused on affiliate marketing in the coming weeks where we’ll share some of our experiences and advice, interview top affiliates about various topics and chat up some of the top affiliate program managers. So without further delay here is blogryan.com