ShaneSchick.com

After months of planning, I’m happy to show off IT World Canada’s rebranded digital magazine for senior IT executives, which kicks off the latest recap of the best things I’ve produced over the last week or so:

CanadianCIO Inaugural issue: Focus on Big Data
IT World Canada Canada Newswire shows what it can do with Hadoop

The truth behind Apple’s next trick
Yahoo Canada Investors need to stop treating the company’s success like a fluke

Good-bye and good riddance to anonymous Android app reviews
FierceDeveloper If you’re going to be a hater, at least have the courage to be up front about who you are

Failure to prelaunch: Why apps need early buzz
FierceDeveloper Not every developer can achieve the hype of an Apple product launch. Can they?

What text messaging will look like 20 years from now
expertIP Global TV talks to expertIP about how we communicate in short forms today, and what the future will hold. Watch the 1.5 min clip

I’m excited to have picked up a new client, and a company I’ve been admiring from the sidelines for a while: Fierce Markets.

Based in Washington, D.C., Fierce has a slew of tech B2B Web sites and newsletters including FierceCIO, FierceContentManagement and a lot more. I’ve just signed a contract to edit FierceDeveloper, which looks at the people creating the latest software for smartphones such as the upcoming iPhone 5, Google Android and Windows Phone, among other platforms. This project interested me for a couple of reasons:

• Developers do amazing things: Though working with them comes up in a lot of the coverage I provide on CIOs, I’ve never really had an opportunity to profile and speak to the developer community directly before. These are often really creative, passionate people and their stories will be exciting to tell.
• B2C is suddenly crucial to B2B: FierceDeveloper.com is primarily about the consumer-oriented smartphone apps. In the past I ignored this side of the fence but what with the rapid consumerization of IT, it makes sense to start delving into the B2C world more deeply.
• Hello, America: Though my work has long been syndicated throughout the world via the International Data Group (IDG) News Service, I have never had a true U.S. audience of my own before. I do now.

You can read my first feature for FierceDeveloper.com: Why crowdsourcing firms see gold in mobile app ideas, or join 28,000 other readers of our weekly e-mail newsletter.

A lot of companies talk about content marketing. Allstream is one of the first vendors in Canada I’ve seen get serious about it.

I recently took on a consulting engagement with the company as editor of expertIP, an online community that launched in late April that tells stories about network convergence, cloud computing, big data and other important trends. I’ll be writing for expertIP and working with freelance writers and guest bloggers, but the site is also an opportunity for members of Allstream’s team to write their own opinion pieces, how-tos and analysis of what’s important in their market.

There are many ways to define content marketing, but to me the best kind is no different from great journalism: it focuses on the audience first and leaves the sales pitches behind. As it develops further, expertIP will become a case study in how to do this kind of thing right.