No longer are the teenagers of today completely walled off in the same old same old lifestyles of even your youth (let alone mine). The possibilities of connecting with people who share your unusual or outre habits exist! And, with the ease of social networking destinations like myspace, the teenagers who game until dawn with headsets and mikes on, chattering away, its hard to imagine not finding people like you, wherever they are. Fetishists, freaks, weirdos, or just the misunderstood are able (increasingly) to find friendly voices, at least somewhere. This doesn’t explain away people like the Canadian junior college shooter, or Harris and Klebold, but if you can bear with me, I can explain even that.
All of these people, at the ultimate extreme of loneliness and misery, tend to find themselves going out in an alienated blaze of glory, taking as many people with them as possible — if the internet is bringing people together, then why? Well, the Canadian did (it seems I read) leave big clues on his myspace account. Harris and Klebold were a little too early for this level of networking. And just as important — mental health issues don’t vanish with an increase in possible community sentiment, and the most understanding you can find online can still not be enough to counteract a real life made up of nothing but (perceived, at least) oppression and isolation.
Online communities work better for people the more of themselves they invest in it, the more they care about being good citizens of their group, the more they share with others. In the same way that complexity arising from social networking can lead to interesting and positive outcomes the more people are involved (quantity), the more each individual invests him or herself into the community, the stronger and more valuable it is as a resource (for information, support, etc.).
So, when a 15-year old kid goes into extraordinary detail about the drug and sex fueled weekend they had recently, to that individual it is a lot of things to that individual — adolescent bragging, acting out, looking to be transgressive, testing and pushing boundaries. However, to each person reading it, it also serves a different (and to a certain extent, unique per user) experience. It is a statement that I might not be the only person acting out like this.
That this is a possible action, that these are the possible outcomes — it might be a cautionary tale, an amusing legend, whatever. And, its also (kind of) a statement of trust in the reader — whether misplaced or not. In the movie “House of Games” (David Mamet), a hustler played by Joe Mantegna explains that what a confident man really seems to do is to give his confidence to the person he’s about to scam, and if you think about it, there is truth in that statement. By opening yourself up to someone, you are telling them “I trust you with this knowledge”, and that all by itself can be a touching gesture.
Will some employers in the future use this knowledge poorly, prejudging potential job applicants, grant recipients, etc.? Doubtless they will. But then there’s a corollary to this, which is if the person with whom you are dealing is judging you based on a part of your life that they so virulently disagree with, then perhaps you shouldn’t be associating with this person anyway. If someone is barring you because of these youthful peccadilloes (or even current behavior), then are they going to just be making your life a misery anytime you deal with them? Really it comes down to another kind of trust in others, specifically, trust that what you do in outside arenas that have nothing to do with what you are doing at this time is really your business, so long as it truly doesn’t impact what you are doing.
If your private life is dressing up like cookie monster, taking a dozen bizarre designer drugs, dancing for 30 hours straight on a weekend, etc., and yet you are able to roll in on a Monday morning, on time and firing on all cylinders as a certified public accountant in a grey flannel suit, then bully for you!
Rob Mitchell is a friend, a programmer and one of those people who knows everything about everything.
You ever think about what’s going to happen in 5-10 years when the internet generation starts looking for jobs? All these kids who are posting the intimate parts of their lives on Myspace and the such will be left completely exposed. Every potential employer will have full access to the graphic details of their lives.
It scares me more than a little bit that kids growing up today don’t seem to understand the permanence of their online identities.
But lately I’ve been thinking maybe it’s not the end of the world. The way I see it, in 5-10 years employers are going to have two options: Either judge a candidate by their past and don’t hire them or don’t. Now if enough of the candidates have chronicled their lives in all its excess glory, then it seems to me there won’t be that many options. Employers are going to have to allow the past to be the past and hire some people who have documented some things that might not be entirely professional. I just don’t see how else it can work.
What’s more, I can’t help but wonder if I’m just being old-fashioned. A friend of mine reminded me the other day that many of the things we now accept at face value were not considered ‘normal’ in the not-so-distant past.
In the world I live in, neither being gay nor being Black means you should be treated any differently, but that is clearly not an absolute truth.
So I can’t help but think that maybe I’m just being old-fashioned thinking that kids exposing themselves online is dangerous. It’s possible that what’s actually going on is we’re actually approaching a transparent society where there are, “ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here. . . These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.”
It’s time for the third installment of likemind. Once again, the idea is that a bunch of people of like mind get together, drink some coffee and talk about things of mutual interest. You don’t have to have been at the any of the previous to come. The whole thing is very loose: no agenda, no moderators Piers and I are just part of the crowd.
As for who should come: If you want to come, you should.
We’ll be in the back this time, since apparently we were a fire hazard sitting up front in that big group.
when: friday, september 22 at 8am
where: sNice, 45 Eighth Avenue, at West 4th Street, NYC (GOOGLE MAPS)
Once again, if you’re interested all you’ve got to do is show up. You can get more info and sign up to stay informed at likemind.us. I hope to see some of you there.
[Editor's Note: I try not to get too personal around here. This is an exception to that rule. This is my website and my life. This is where I think out loud and I believe it's important everyone know who I am. But more than that, I just want to share with you all. I try to give as much as I can here and this is just one of those times I need a little back.]
I broke up with my girlfriend of almost two years this weekend. It was mutual. We both reached a point where we realized that we would probably never reach that place. I think it was a good decision: The right decision.
It was far from easy, but as they say, the hardest things never are.
Needless to say, I’m feeling fairly emotional. I think I’ve been trying to avoid myself for the last 24 hours, but it’s time to face up. I’ve got my favorite sad music going and it’s just me, my mind and an empty page.
The hardest part is trying to parse the thoughts about the comforts of the relationship from the relationship itself. At some point the two became so intertwined it seems impossible to untangle them.
It’s easy to miss the comforts of being together: The evening phone calls, the person to share exciting news with, the person to hold. What’s hardest at this very moment is imagine a world without all those things.
But of course I will survive, and so will she. We will cease to be linked in a way we once were, though hopefully the relationship can continue to grow in different ways. The thing is, I have no idea what those different ways will be and that’s scary.
It’s hard to look the future in the face without someone to hold your hand.
That especially difficult since I pride myself in my ability to look into future. Much of my life revolves around my ability to untangle complex puzzles and extract the deeper meaning that lays beneath. I’m hardly ever my own test subject, however. I don’t get paralyzed by indecision or fear and I probably have more self-confidence than I should. I converse on a level with people much older and more experienced than myself on a regular basis.
All of this means that I often forget how young I am.
This is relatively new to me. Obviously I realize that the emotions will dissipate over time no matter how much that may not seem true at this very moment. But it’s still hard to face myself: To be honest and realize I have no idea how to deal with this.
When I was a kid I turned to my mother and told her my take on the meaning of life. It didn’t seem like an overly complicated explanation at the time, but it struck a chord with her. I just said, “it’s what you make of it.”
I don’t believe in fate or free will, but rather a hybrid of the two. Something to the effect of we are all nodes in a giant sea of possible connections. With each decision a whole new set of paths opens up. Each path has an infinite number of endpoints depending on which sub-paths you choose. More and more I believe no path is right or wrong: It just is.
As with every other decision, my path has shifted.
When the shift seems so large, though, its hard to remember its a small decision in a giant sea. One of my greatest aggravations is when people lose track of the larger picture when small hiccups arise. Sometimes I have trouble being empathetic in those moments. In my work life, I am far better at flying high above the trees and seeing the forest.
I don’t want to disconnect myself here, though. I want to feel it. I want to understand it. I want to learn as much as I can from it.
Much of my life is spent saying things and making decisions that I am not completely qualified to make. And you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way. The way I see it, none of us are really ever completely qualified to make a decision, so we just need to use our best knowledge and judgement and hope for the best.
A lot of the times we try to justify the decision afterwards, but the bottom line is we went with our gut.
When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people  at least the ones I’ve told you about  have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?
More and more lately I’ve been coming to the conclusion that the thing that separates the successful from the unsuccessful is the ability to make a decision, not necessarily a good decision. I’m hypothesizing here that much of the time the act of making a decision is more important than what’s actually decided.
I know that’s kind of crazy, but think about it this way: How many really important decisions do you make in a day? The vast majority are probably things that have no wrong answer? Should I take this route or that one? What should I eat for lunch? Should I move this logo a little to the right? Whatever you decide for any of those is what you decide. Chances are most of the decisions won’t even ever get noticed.
A lot of this thinking comes out of the simplicity of likemind and the relative success we’ve had. It’s completely self-selective: If you think you should come to one of our coffee mornings you should, if you don’t you shouldn’t. If you think you’re of likemind then you’re of likemind. It’s all pretty simple and yet it’s yielded fantastic results.
1. Whoever comes is the right people.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. When it’s over it’s over.
There’s something wonderfully organic about it all and I can’t help but feel like its a direct result of the complexity of our new digital world. That’s not to say its a reaction, but rather an outgrowth of the networked nature.
Maybe it’s not technology versus nature, but rather technology reflecting nature.
For all of time people have had their own definitions. The meaning of a word like friend is not universal. A friend to me might be someone I call at least five times a week, while you might call that guy you met once in third grade a friend. Before the internet this wasn’t really a problem. However you defined friend was fine by me.
All of a sudden social networking sites came along and friend became a verb.The action part was much more important than the adjective. Everything was cool until Friendster decided to define the social meaning of friend as well. A friend could not be a made up person or object. That, along with incredibly slow service, sunk the site.
Now Facebook seems to be repeating the mistake. They have taken decided that they know what a friend is better than you do. Just read how Mark Zuckerberg told the Facebook community to calm down about the news feed feature: “Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them.”
I’d be willing to wager that the vast majority of Facebookers wouldn’t define their Facebook friends as “real connections to actual friends.” How many people do you know with 500 ‘real friends’? Danah Boyd boils it down quite nicely: “The term “friend” in the context of social network sites is not the same as in everyday vernacular. And people know this. This is why they used to say fun things like ‘Well, she’s my Friendster but not my friend.’ (The language doesn’t work out so cleanly on Facebook.) The term is terrible but it means something different on these sites; it’s not to anyone’s advantage to assume that the rules of friendship apply to Friendship.”
This is a case of a platform overstepping its boundaries. For better or for worse, as social networking sites become a larger part of our lives the site itself begins to slide into the background. I feel like a broken record, but people don’t go to Myspace for Myspace, they go for my space. Same with Facebook, this is where people congregate. It’s a virtual town square. Now wouldn’t it make you a little uncomfortable if when you visited your real town square everyone you were given a full readout of everyone else’s exploits?
There’s one more important point to make here, though. I’m probably about to contradict everything I said.
This is not a town square. This is a digital universe. Built into this universe are certain rules and possibilities that simply don’t exist in your grass and gazebo park. All of this information is already out there and there’s a certain feeling of inevitability to the whole thing. The mistake Facebook made was not making news feed available, it was releasing it and making it default. Facebook is a platform, the users are the value, don’t define their world for them.
For all of time people have had their own definitions. The meaning of a word like friend is not universal. A friend to me might be someone I call at least five times a week, while you might call that guy you met once in third grade a friend. Before the internet this wasn’t really a problem. However you defined friend was fine by me.
All of a sudden social networking sites came along and friend became a verb.The action part was much more important than the adjective. Everything was cool until Friendster decided to define the social meaning of friend as well. A friend could not be a made up person or object. That, along with incredibly slow service, sunk the site.
[Editor's Note: This is part two in a series of posts on how to make money off your blog. Part 1 was all about The Deck and Part 2 was all about Text Link Ads. Here's the description from the first post: Obviously there are a million different ways to try and make money off a website, the easiest of which is slapping a couple Google ads on there and calling it a day. These three ideas interest me because they're different. They're not your regular CP-whatever deal, instead they're tapping into what makes blogs unique/special and monetizing that.]
It’s time for the wrap up ladies and gentlemen . . .
3. Job Boards
I actually first thought about doing a job board a few months ago. People ask me all the time if I know someone to fill so-and-so position. Lots of them sound great and I try to pass them along. I thought maybe it would be good to have a place to aggregate all these jobs, based on the criteria that it would only get posted if I found it interesting. Since then job boards have been sproutingupeverywhere.
The way I see it, these job boards are the perfect companion to a blog. Think about it: Blogs tend to be about niche topics (say the future of media and marketing) and have highly targeted audiences. That means if an employer can find a blog they like and relates to their work, chances are it’s a good place to find other like-minded people. What’s more, by posting a job on a blog job board, it lends a certain amount of cachet to the company. After all, they’ve got to be somewhat in the know to be posting at this niche site.
Basically, they’re the opposite of sites like Monster. As Jason Fried explained: “Big sites take a shotgun approach . . . You post a job. Anyone can see it. There’s no targeting, no like-mindedness. Our feeling is, if you want to hire the right people, you have to go where the right people hang out.”
My favorite part about these job boards, is that unlike more traditional advertising, job boards actually help all parties involved. The site gets some cash, the employer gets a good employee and the reader gets a job. Obviously problems could arise if the site really takes off and the board becomes a job destination rather than a blog with a job board. It’ll be interesting to see how these things turn out (I suspect it’ll work out just fine).
The Lessons
1. Once again, recommendations, even if they’re not explicit, are the most valuable resource a blog has (other than influence . . . which is really the same thing). In the case of jobs, just being listed on a site like 37signals can raise the coolness factor in the minds of candidates.
2. Advertising that serves a purpose is better than the noise of other forms of advertising.
3. Find a way to milk the niche nature of your site rather than trying to make it something it’s not. A blog with 300 readers isn’t going to do shit by way of CPM (cost-per-thousand), but if you’re covering a small topic selling job posts might be just what the doctor ordered (plus it somehow seems less sleezy as selling recommendations).
The bottom line here is embrace your inner niche. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Find creative ways to exploit your blogs most valuable asset: A small targeted audience.
That about wraps up this three part series. Hope you enjoyed it. If you’ve got any more ideas, please drop them in the comments. Also, I just wanted to add that I understand the vast majority of people don’t have any desire to make money off their blog. I’m actually (mostly) in that camp. However, I think whether you’re interested in engaging in some of these tactics or not, there are a lot of lessons to be learned.
All we hear is how small is the new big. Here’s the truth: It’s not.
Small is still the same old small. It’s just more scalable than ever. Data’s cheap and so is computing power. It’s easier than ever to deliver customization and personalization.
The tides have shifted, we are in control.
People are dreaming “of talking directly to a business and sharing my personal data; where I am valued for this and rewarded with tailored/cutsomized services that design out assumptions and waste. And they are rewarded with my attention.”
Scale used to dictate that everything must be equal, all products the same. It’s not the case any longer.
They are constantly passively creating content. They might not think of it that way, but the metadata footprint they leave is their blog. They have friends on Myspace and favorite videos on YouTube. They share pictures and post on forums.
Screw the ‘consumer generated content’ the advertising industry has declared. This one’s the real deal. Millions of people are leaving their number and waiting for a call.
[Editor's Note: This is part two in a series of posts on how to make money off your blog. Part 1 was all about The Deck. Here's the description from the first post: Obviously there are a million different ways to try and make money off a website, the easiest of which is slapping a couple Google ads on there and calling it a day. These three ideas interest me because they're different. They're not your regular CP-whatever deal, instead they're tapping into what makes blogs unique/special and monetizing that.]
As promised, here’s part deuce:
2. Text Link Ads
A few weeks ago a friend of mine mentioned their blog had just moved into the black. When I asked how, he responded that once you hit PageRank 6, life is easy.
It’s a funny Googlefied world we live in where such a statement hold so much truth. With the way Google works, once your site hits a level of popularity people are willing to pay you just to link to them. Sure there are moral implications with this, after all Google’s whole system is based on the idea that a link is equal to a vote of confidence. But who’s to say confidence can’t be bought?
Lots of companies are going around the web finding PageRank 4 and above sites and paying for links. As I mentioned, this is part of the appeal of The Deck: Rather than redirecting ads they are direct links.
Text Link Ads takes it a step further. As explained on the site, “We specialize in placing static html links on high quality, high traffic web properties.” Basically, they’re letting sites sell their PageRank. The interesting thing here is it doesn’t matter how many, if any, people click through on the ads. All that matters is Google picks them up and gives the appropriate bump to the linked site. Since something like PageRank is so easily quantified it’s fairly easy to quantify real value, as opposed to regular CPM buys where people may or may not pay attention to ads, less click on them. Realizing that Google is the center of the web universe, trying to raise your rank based on specific keywords can lead to real results for some businesses. Real results are worth real money.
The Lessons
1. Google is the center of the universe. Where you fall in the results is worth real traffic and thus, real dollars.
2. Better content leads to more incoming links. More incoming links leads to better PageRank. Better PageRank leads to the ability to charge higher rates for text links. Once again the lesson is to write good stuff.
3. Everything in this new media world is an influence game: PageRank is just another measure of it.
The bottom line is that everything comes down to your ability to create interesting content. Since the blogosphere is still such a small world, some of the most committed readers tend to also be linkers. It’s all about your audience. They make or break everything you do. Cultivate that audience, they’re your most valuable asset. It doesn’t need to be about getting new readers, just keep the ones you’ve got happy. If you’ve got a happy and committed reader base of smart individuals, there is always going to be someone willing to pay for access. (Hint hint!)
Obviously there are a million different ways to try and make money off a website, the easiest of which is slapping a couple Google ads on there and calling it a day. These three ideas interest me because they’re different. They’re not your regular CP-whatever deal, instead they’re tapping into what makes blogs unique/special and monetizing that.
So without any further ado . . .
1. The Deck
The DECK bills itself as “the premier advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals.” The network is made up of eight highly-regarded and highly-trafficed blogs/sites that rather than being specifically about design, cater to that audience.
Now the network part of it is not so revolutionary, what puts The DECK on this list is their standards for what advertisers they accept. As they explain, “We’re picky about the advertising we’ll accept. We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service. Sell us something relevant to our audience and we’ll sell you an ad.”
The DECK understands that what these sites all have is influence. If they shill a product that sucks, that very influence that they’ve built their site on goes down the drain. Maintaining a very high level of quality helps all sides: The advertisers get a sort-of stamp of approval and most likely more attention than they would otherwise, the sites get to make money while maintaining a high level of control and the readers, in theory, get recommendations for great products.
The Lessons:
1. Influence is the single most valuable feature of a blog. As the The DECK says, “it’s not about ‘cost-per-thousand,’ it’s about ‘cost-per-influence.’“
2. Recommendations are the new advertising.
3. Niche is the new mass.
A secondary benefit of advertising on The DECK is the fact that the ads are not redirected. While that means you can’t measure click-throughs, it also means advertisers get some serious Google juice from some seriously juiced sites (the average PageRank of the eight sites is 7.125 — just for reference NoahBrier.com is a 5 as of this writing). Instead of going into this too deeply now, though, I’ll save it for the next installment where I’ll talk about Text Link Ads (which also just happens to be an advertiser on The Deck).
To be continued . . .
Update (9/6/06): Part 2 of the series is out: Text Link Ads. Enjoy!
All the hubub a few weeks ago was YouTube’s branded channel thing. All of a sudden advertisers had a way to spend money on the site where all the cool kids were hanging out. The very first was a Paris Hilton channel sponsored by Prison Break. I don’t mean to rain on everyone’s parade, but who gives a shit?
Well, it represents a shift in how marketers are engaging and speaking with their customers. To me, it represents the impact of Web 2.0 on advertising. In fact, it is web 2.0 advertising. I agree that Paul Saffo’s quote on the current state of the web is spot on: “the Web is moving from being a place where people access information to a place where people access other people in an information-rich environment.â€? This is true on YouTube and this is true for how advertisers are trying to “accessâ€? customers; by leveraging 3rd party credibility and tools to establish dialogs in authentic environments. Sure, there will always be a need for high reach display advertising to help tell a company’s stories, but the true benefit of the Web is its immediacy and ability to engage and interact with users. The tools and sites of Web 2.0 are helping to make those connections and facilitate dialog amongst consumers.
Fundamentally, I agree that “the Web is moving from being a place where people access information to a place where people access other people in an information-rich environment.â€? But what about the YouTube sponsorship is new? At the end of the day, it’s still a media buy. YouTube is the property, Paris is the content, Prison Break is the advertiser. The majority of what’s being paid for, I’d imagine, is some kind of feature on the homepage and what could be less revolutionary than that.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t see the big deal. Seriously, if I’m just being dense someone set me straight in the comments.
The individuals are the stars on YouTube. People like lonelygirl15 with their 5,000 some-odd friends and millions of views. Why isn’t someone making deals with them? Even better, why not dig deep and find the niche stars? Connect directly with the people, since they’re the media anyway. It’s not about YouTube, it’s not about MySpace, it’s not about Flickr. It’s all about the people.
Sorry for sounding like a broken record, I just had to get this off my chest. Also, no offense to Organic on this one, I think it was a smart deal, just not a revolutionary one.
Last time we talked I finished with the idea that “in an effort to create stuff that appealed to everyone we were left with a world full of junk.” I’ve talked about it in terms of advertising in the past, but this is much bigger. We’re surrounded by a bunch of design-by-committee junk. The business world is trying so hard to appeal to everyone that they’re creating stuff that appeals to no one.
So where’s the opportunity here? It’s in the niches. I began to hint at this last time, but the beauty of a niche is that you don’t need, nor should you try, to appeal to everyone. You need to know your audience, speak to them and know what the hell you’re talking about (or be real good at faking it).
When you’re talking to a small group of people, your ability to earn trust and influence increases. It takes less water to fill a 10 ounce glass than a 20. What that trust and influence equals up to is a relationship, and that’s the end game all these marketers, advertisers and everyone else are gunning for. John Hagel explains it like this:
First we are moving from a world of relatively scarce shelf-space to relatively scarce attention. Second costs of production and physical distribution are significantly declining on a global scale and customer acquisition and retention costs are rising. At the risk of over-simplification, value creation is shifting from business driven by economies of scale in production to businesses driven by economies of scope in customer relationships. Layer in a third factor at work — the systematic and significant decline in interaction costs that make it easer for customers to identify vendors, find information about them, negotiate with them, monitor their performance and switch from one vendor to another if they are not satisfied with performance.
That, to me, is all about brand experience. Every touch point needs to thought through and manned with someone prepared to wow a customer and if you can’t do it, someone else can. Like me. I have the ability to email every commenter on this site. With a small audience, it’s possible to initiate that personal contact that makes people feel special. How can Coke compete with that?
I think that is the bottom line. Maybe it’s not fame/stardom that people are looking for, but it’s hard to deny that people want to feel special. I know what makes my readers tick. I know what videos Loren’s into, what kind of posts will elicit a sarcastic reaction from Jeff and the kind of links Chartreuse likes to read. Sure it doesn’t scale, but for $10-a-month hosting fees, it doesn’t need to. I can figure that out later, influence will always be a valuable commodity.
Feeling special is just a kind of attention, those three people I singled out are just oneofthemanywho have left comments around here lately an made me feel special. It’s a two way street, you see. “Rather than just focusing on how to get attention, vendors might also want to consider how they can help their customers receive attention that is important to them and not just from the vendor, but from others that matter to the customers,” Hagel says. Those links and callouts are a small example of a larger idea: These are real relationships.“A small audience of super-committed fans can be worth more, in economic terms, than a massive audience of casual viewers and readers.” That’s big.
I’ve got part three of theseries coming soon, but I figured I’d use this sick (fluish) Friday night to fill in the week.
Barcelona
See the whole photoset at Flickr. The place is amazing. Gorgeous architecture and art, obviously, but also the city is full of an amazing energy. It’s big, but feels small. The food is fantastic. I can’t say enough good things about it. I’m going back as soon as I can.
likemind.ny Round 2
Once again likemind.ny went off without a hitch, we’ve even now got our own commercial thanks to the friendly staff at 1938 Media. Check it.
I was thinking a lot on my walk over at 8am about what makes likemind special. More than anything else, for me it’s the self-selection. We don’t organize anything, or define what a ‘likemind’ is, yet for the second time in a row people clearly of likemind showed up. If you are wondering whether it’s the right place for you and you show up, it was. If you don’t show up, it wasn’t.
When I was thinking about this, I was reminded of something I read yesterday. After racking my brain all day to remember, I finally decide to put my google where my mouth was. After about 15 minutes of searches I had made the connection, it was an article from Digital Web Magazine about “Understanding the Unconference”.
In the article is a description of Harrison Owen’s ‘Open Space,’ which is defined by four principles: “1) Whoever comes is the right people, 2) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have, 3) Whenever it starts is the right time, and 4) When it’s over, it’s over.” That is likemind. Expect more on this in the future.
Average people now have the tools and networks to make their own products, promote and distribute them, especially online objects and downloadables.
Thanks to blogs, and only to blogs, the web is now fully democratizable, to usher in the Universal Content Utopia.
Business models for this new blogospheric/Web 2.0 user paradise?
One of the best is the All User Content product, like PostSecret. You do next to nothing, letting the users do all the work, which is posted freely to your blog, then assembled into a book, and possibly a blockbuster movie. Heh.
Get rich doing next to nothing is now viable. Not get rich quick, but get rich with the robots, RSS feeds, blog portal masters, and computer programs doing most of the work.
Blogger, you are an infobot, searching your consciousness, the internet, and offline sources for benefits to present to your readers. They contribute content to your blog via comments. So it’s a We Media based on lots of Me Medias hooking up and sharing and caring.
The whole comment’s great, but that last line in particular hit me. The crowd is only smart if all its members are working off their individual wisdom. It’s not strictly a ‘we media’: Lots of people going out of their way to do good things for other people. It’s a shitload of fantastic ‘Me Media’. Thanks to the tools inherent in blogging like comments and RSS, all those individual media channels can hook up to create a larger community/good. That’s revolutionary.
Alright, I don’t feel good, I’m off to bed. To all those I talked to at likemind, thank you. It was a pleasure to have you and a pleasure to speak to you. Honestly, there wasn’t one conversation I didn’t enjoy.
If I’m right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid. Outsiders don’t have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. Now, thanks to the Internet, they can start to grow themselves actual audiences. This is great news for the marginal, who retain the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite.
Now add that to ‘The Real World Rule’ (“the seemingly insignificant is often the most interesting”) and you’ve got a recipe for success. To quote Graham again, “The big media companies shouldn’t worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.”
As I’ve said in the past, you don’t go to MySpace for MySpace, you go for MY space.
But it’s not just individuals getting in on the action, it’s also the business world. What small companies didn’t have was audience: They didn’t have the budget to market their product effectively.
That’s no longer true.
Anyone can find an audience without a $10 million ad spend. What’s even better is that the audience is targeted and self-selected. Now getting, and holding, people’s attention is a hard thing to do, but considering us regular Joes are working on much smaller margins, we can afford to speak to smaller niches. We don’t need ‘hits’ on a mass scale.
This site has about 300 RSS readers. That’s a big deal to me. Those are 300 people savvy enough to use RSS and interested enough in this site to subscribe. I can confidently say that my cost/benefit ratio is higher than all those blue-chip advertisers. I’ve got a sniper rifle to their machine gun: Sure I might hit fewer, but I’m a hell of a lot more accurate.
There’s something interesting about influence that people don’t talk about: It’s relative to the size of the audience. The smaller the niche, the more influential you can be. If there are five people talking about purple hyperwidgets, chances are all five are pretty damn influential. That’s a big deal.
That ability to live niche makes for a much better return on attention (ROA) for my readers. I assume that the vast majority of what I write is at least somewhat interesting to you because it’s interesting to me. I’m not worried about appealing to everyone because I don’t need to be.
Which leads me to my next point: In an effort to create stuff that appealed to everyone we were left with a world full of junk.
My topic du jour lately has been how regular people are the new superstars. Media is changing. As Chartreuse so astutely put it, “Old media is begging for attention. New media is attention.”
So how did we get here? Hank Steuver’s got a guess: “‘The Real World’ went from exploring how to get your adulthood started (remember that its earliest housemates were trying to do something on their own — one was a doctor, one was a journalist, one was an AIDS activist) to a recurring drama of sloth, ill tempers, wasted days and wasted nights. ‘Real World’ producers quickly surmised that people prefer to watch other people do nothing with their immediate futures.” The seemingly insignificant is often the most interesting.
We are becoming the media and the media is becoming us. One is not taking over the other, they are just converging to become a single entity. Blogging doesn’t spell the end of journalism, it spells a new beginning.
It’s not about the speed of communication for speeds sake, but rather for recognition’s sake. At all times we are both producer and consumer. As McLuhan put it in “At the moment of sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors”, “The mysterious thing about this kind of speed-up of information, whereby the gap is closed between the experience and the meaning, is that the public begins to particpate directly in actions which it had previously heard about at a distance in place or time. At instant speeds the audience becomes actor, and the spectators become participants.”
Hell, it’s even effecting Girls Gone Wild, “In the beginning, when ‘Girls Gone Wild’ cameramen first popped up in clubs, the women who revealed themselves seemed innocent — surprised, even, by their own spontaneity. Now that the brand is so pervasive, the women who participate increasingly appear to be calculating exhibitionists, hoping that an appearance on a video might catapult them to Paris Hilton-like fame.”
Last time we talked I finished with the idea that “in an effort to create stuff that appealed to everyone we were left with a world full of junk.” I’ve talked about it in terms of advertising in the past, but this is much bigger. Much of the time we find ourselves waist deep in corporate crap.
Though mediocrity is hardly ever cited as the part of the equation, it has doubtlessly played a large role in the rise of so many small businesses. Most of the corporations producing consumer goods have been doing so for a long time. They grew up in an era of limited choice and complete control. They could afford to make shitty stuff because people didn’t have any other options. Now we do, and we’re demanding better.
First we are moving from a world of relatively scarce shelf-space to relatively scarce attention. Second costs of production and physical distribution are significantly declining on a global scale and customer acquisition and retention costs are rising. At the risk of over-simplification, value creation is shifting from business driven by economies of scale in production to businesses driven by economies of scope in customer relationships. Layer in a third factor at work — the systematic and significant decline in interaction costs that make it easer for customers to identify vendors, find information about them, negotiate with them, monitor their performance and switch from one vendor to another if they are not satisfied with performance.
Basically, today we have unlimited shelf space. With unlimited shelf space comes unlimited information. Unlimited information and limited attention don’t always play nice together. The companies that will succeed are the ones that realize this and create products and brand experiences for a world where attention is the scarcest commodity. If you don’t do it, we’ll go find someone else who will. Simple as that.
So what’s the answer? Well, it’s got to be great experiences. One of the largest opportunities I see in the marketing world is to enter the equation earlier and bake a great experience into every product. If your company can pull it off and create said ‘great customer experience,’ it’s never been easier to build an audience. After all, in blogs influentials finally have an audience to call their own. Create great stuff and we’ll talk about you until the cows come home.
Better yet, though, help us get attention and we’ll give you all the content you want for free. “Rather than just focusing on how to get attention, vendors might also want to consider how they can help their customers receive attention that is important to them and not just from the vendor, but from others that matter to the customers,” Hagel says.
Listen to us, speak to us like human beings and answer our calls in reasonable time. It’s really not all that much to ask.
After the huge success of the first likemind, it’s time for round two. Once again, the idea is that a bunch of people of like mind get together, drink some coffee and talk about things of mutual interest. You don’t have to have been at the first to come to the second. The whole thing is very loose: no agenda, no moderators Piers and I are just part of the crowd.. Last time everyone just naturally talked to everyone else, getting up and switching seats on their own to speak to new people.
With that glowing review, here’s the info for number two: (that’s the likemind rhyme)
when: friday, august 25 at 8am
where: sNice, 45 Eighth Avenue, at West 4th Street, NYC (GOOGLE MAPS)
Once again, if you’re interested all you’ve got to do is show up. You can get more info and sign up to stay informed at likemind.us. I hope to see some of you there.
Do The Right Thing is one of my all-time favorite films. Spike Lee says some stuff in that movie that scares the vast majority of people. It tells a story of race relations in this country that I believe was accurate in 1989 and still holds water today. The center of the story is the fact that urban businesses are often owned by outsiders not looking out for the well-being of the neighborhood. In the case of the film an Italian owns the pizza shop and a Korean owns the bodega.
Now I bring this up because yesterday morning I read this in the paper: “[Andrew] Young said Wal-Mart should displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods. ‘You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,’ he said of the ownsers of the small stores, ‘ and they sold out and moved to florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough.” Then the Wal-Mart spokesman put the nail in his coffin, “First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”
Now the point of all this is not to engage in the debate that Young brought up (though I have a hunch he’s right), but rather to use it to illustrate Paul Graham’s excellent “What You Can’t Say” essay. He says if you’re looking for ideas that are correct you can look no further than the ones that people are most offended by. “The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed,” Graham explains. “I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.”
Nobody came out and said Young was wrong, they just said that he was offensive. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation league said, “The sad part [is that] even people of color and even minorities who suffered discrimination and prejudice are not immune from being bigoted and racist and even anti-Semitic.” Of course the Wal-Mart executives who have a vested interest in coming into those urban centers didn’t claim Young was wrong either, explaining “Ambassador Young’s comments do not reflect our feelings toward the Jewish, Asian or Arab communities or any other diverse group.”
I expect this is because Young is not wrong in his ideas, but rather in his delivery. As Graham explains, “When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as ‘divisive’ or ‘racially insensitive’ instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention.”
The problem is that Young engaged the wrong people. It’s a double-edged sword, however, because in order to get attention sometimes you need to be shocking. If you choose your words incorrectly, however, you run the risk of wasting all your breath arguing with people on the points that don’t matter instead of the ones that do. In this case, Young is stuck talking about racism instead of talking about the problems in urban centers.
So what’s my point? Well, at its most basic, I’m sick of hearing the same things over and over again. I am always looking for voices of opposition, for people who take a different route. Graham’s equation of looking for offended people and figuring out what offended them is one way to find those voices. It might not be the right way, but anything is better than listening to the world on repeat.
[Editor's Note: I'm still on vacation, while I'm away here's something for you to think about.]
By Jeff Hughes
Hello all -
I’ve basically quit as a movie critic the last few years but I saw WORLD TRADE CENTER yesterday.
First, let me make a few quick points:
1. September 11th – to most of this country – was a “televised event.” The story was broke to them by a friend’s phone call or a CNN Alert and then they spent the next few days in front of their television watching the pinnacle of human drama unfold.
2. To the people in New York City and its surroundings at the time, it has become so many different things. Noah remembers how beautiful the day was. My uncle remembers a cloud of smoke from the New Jersey Turnpike. I vividly remember soot-covered businessmen running into the deli under our building and slamming 40s of beer, faces flooded with tears.
3. To people in those buildings or those who lost love ones, it is still an unspeakable event.
For me, more than anything else, the days after were worse than the day itself and have haunted me so terribly that I’ve stil never been to Ground Zero. I’m not interested. I don’t think it would be cathartic.
And using myself and the eleven others in my theatre as an example, I’d have to say there is no possible way this country is ready for Oliver Stone’s WORLD TRADE CENTER. Because I wasn’t and I knew it immediately.
Now, for the moviegoers out there. It’s beautifully shot and the score is quiet and subtle. But this isn’t a movie. This is history reaching into your stomach and tearing you apart. I didn’t cry at WTC the way people cry at movies. I cried at WTC the way people cry at life, more appropriately, at death. I felt everything all over again and perhaps more viscerally than the first time. You feel the tears coming from inside and you can’t keep them in. I took two breaks during the movie. Not for a drink or a piss but to catch my breath. To remember things were okay. I wasn’t alone. No one in the theatre I was in made it all the way through and two gentlemen, who were clearly cops, looked like they’d been through a way by the time it was over.
Movies were very important to me on the Friday after 9/11, when the AMC at Union Square opened its doors for free all day. Then I walked back to my Lafayette Street dorm, covering my face with my hand because the smell in the air was so thick it felt like it was pushing down on your shoulders. All of that came back to me in the last row at the Lincoln Square Loews yesterday and I didn’t want it back. My mistake. I shouldn’t have bought the ticket. I thought I was ready, five years later.
I wasn’t.
And I’m not exactly the most sensitive cat out there.
If I’m not ready, I doubt others will be. But give Oliver Stone credit. He wanted to bring us back to a place and time. He did it. I just didn’t want to go.
Jeff Hughes is a New Jerseyan living in New York. He’s also a playwright, critic, Bears fan and blogger at Da’ Bears Blog.
I leave for Barcelona today. Can’t wait. I haven’t been on vacation yet this year, so it’s a much needed break from life. Wish it were coming at a bit of a better time, but isn’t that always the case?
Anyhow, I’ve printed out a ton of articles to read and think about while I’m away, and I figured I’d post links to all of them in case anyone wants to read along. If you find anything interesting, just come back here and add your two cents. Let the conversation continue while I’m gone.
New York Times: The Brand Underground: The idiom of today’s alienated (or anyway, hipster) youth isn’t art or music or literature. It’s turning an idea you have  or maybe your ‘i’ self  into a product.
So I have no idea if any of those articles are interesting because I haven’t read them yet, but if you do and enjoy and have something to say, come back and comment. Start a new conversation, don’t sweat it.
In addition, I figured I ask a few questions to ponder while I’m gone.
If you had access to the attention data of millions, what would you do with it?
What’s the most important cultural shift that will happen as a result of all this user generated content?
Can YouTube be beaten? How?
Can Myspace be beaten? How?
Are people becoming brands?
Those were all the questions I could think of off the top of my head. Before I go, let me make one last reading recommendation. Chartreuse’s “The Big Difference Between Old and New” is as good a ‘state of the media’ as I’ve read. This line almost made me cry:
Old media is begging for attention.
New media is attention.
I’ll leave you with that to chew on. You may get a few sporadic posts while I’m away, but I’m not making promises. Take it easy!
I’m going to expose some big things here, so be prepared.
Journalists are just regular people who write for a magazine.
Advertisers are just regular people who work in the advertising industry.
Superstars are just regular people who get a lot of attention.
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, it’s all a sham. The media industry is filled with regular people. When you look behind the curtain, the wizard is actually us.
For a long time what these people had going for them was distribution. Not anymore.
We’ve all got it now.
People don’t go to MySpace for MySpace, they go for MY space. We are all creators and our creation is our lives. As we become more aware of how the world functions, of how businesses operate, of how textiles are produced, our consumption choices become a kind of production of their own.
We’re all in the game now. We’ve just got to accept that we’re all acting on the same stage. It’s all about self-awareness. Reality television, for all its shortcomings, has shown us that we’re all players. The internet has exposed the inner workings of our brain.
When you step back and look at the landscape from above, you start to realize that it’s all shaped by people just like you.
Update (8/8/06): Got rid of a Shakespeare quote I took completely out of context (which Jeff corrected me on).
On Friday night I went to a friend’s improv performance. The evening consisted of three teams performing for an audience of 50 or so people. I had a good time and did a fair amount of laughing along the way. On the way home my girlfriend Brittany and I were talking about the performance and she said something that really got me thinking: The jokes people liked the best were the ones that replayed an earlier gag. It was almost like they were telling inside jokes, she said. Thinking about it, she was absolutely right, it was those earlier references that got the most laughs.
Tonight, when I got home I had an email from Kareem with a link to an article titled “The Death of the Double Entendre all about how there are no more inside jokes in advertising. Whereas once advertisers expected some level of cultural competency to understand what they were creating, today we simplify things to a level where misinterpretation is impossible. Sure, today’s advertising may be more risque, but that doesn’t mean it’s more interesting. In an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible advertisers have all but ended the inside joke. They wouldn’t dare write a line that couldn’t be easily understood by their entire demographic segment.
That, I think, is the problem. We’re too mass. We spend a lot of money trying to generate more leads (the ultimate goal of advertising), rather than better ones. It all seems pretty backwards to me.
There’s buzz in the marketing blog world about Agency.com’s “viral” video pitch for Subway. To be honest, 9 minutes is way longer than my attention span, but Karl over at ExperienceCurve has some insight into it: “In a world where agencies shit their pants at the idea of failure they tend to be more conservative than the companies that hire them. They cave to clients cost constraints, and totally skip the important “creativeâ€? bit at the beginning and then waste a tonne of money on the execution. That being the case Agency.com just did an experiment in the ‘fuzzy front end’, no money on the line, no deadline, just some ideas and some playtime.” In response to Agency.com, the folks over at Coudal have been nice enough to provide their own, unsolicited, gem of a video. The sandwiches taste like shit, now that’s an insight.
Chartreuse is paying the way for some people to go to New Orleans and document what’s really going down. Follow the action at New Orleans Now.
While we’re on the topic of Chartreuse, his post How All This New Media Stuff is Going to Make You Famous and Rich (Or a Happy Ending is Just a Story That Isn’t Finished Yet) features a gigantic picture of me with my tongue out. Once you get past the fear, however, he’s got some serious thoughts on the future of stardom: “Smart companies are thinking about how to exploit all the power of all these individuals to sell shit. Smarter companies are being set up to bridge that gap between individuals and the companies that need them.”
This was the week of transparent marketing blogs for me. First I run across The Chocolate Blog promoting the LG phone and then Yodel, the Yahoo! blog. Both are refreshingly honest. Here’s how they set up the chocolate blog: “LG recognises the influence that the internet has on people’s perceptions and purchase intentions and is keen to engage with consumers online. They realise that consumer-to-consumer recommendations carry a higher trust factor than virtually all other forms of advertising, and that word of mouth is a frequent factor for purchase. They also recognise that bloggers are the most important initiators of online conversation right now.” Thanks for admitting it.
Aaron Swartz on blogging: “So that’s what this blog is. I write here about thoughts I have, things I’m working on, stuff I’ve read, experiences I’ve had, and so on. Whenever a thought crystalizes in my head, I type it up and post it here. I don’t read over it, I don’t show it to anyone, and I don’t edit it — I just post it. I don’t consider this writing, I consider this thinking. I like sharing my thoughts and I like hearing yours and I like practicing expressing ideas, but fundamentally this blog is not for you, it’s for me. I hope that you enjoy it anyway.” I think that’s the best description I’ve ever read.
That’s it for now. I’m going to Barcelona next Thursday and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the blog in the meantime. Supposedly I’ll have WiFi, but I’d really like some disconnected time. If anyone feels like writing something, drop me a line. That’s it. Stay cool.
As usual I’m not willing to leave well enough alone. My favorite blog as of late has been chartreuse(beta), as I kept reading and enjoying, I kept wondering what made it so good. Yeah, he’s got style, smarts and great links/videos, but beyond the content, the form fascinates me. It’s just different than what you run across elsewhere, and after much though I think I’ve identified a few reasons why.
1. Hyperlinkology: At least that’s what I called it. Basically, it’s using links as a way to add to annotate the content. So many people (including me), link to things by saying “I just read on so-and-so website” . . . Chartreuse just talks and lets you explore the links for yourself. As usual, someone else has explained this better than I. In Interface Culture, Steven Johnson describes Suck.com linking style:
Whereas every other Web site conceived hypertext as a way of augmenting the reading experience, Suck saw it as an opportunity to withhold information, to keep the reader at bay. Even the sophisticated Web auteurs offered up their links the way a waiter offers up fresh-ground pepper: as a supplement to the main course, a spice. (Want more? Just click here.)
As should be evidenced by this post with it’s boring links, actually pulling this off well is incredibly difficult. It requires “abandoning language conventions and embracing some of the power of this new medium.” When you do it right, though, you create an atmosphere where readers want to click on everything.
2. Characters: Beyond just Chartreuse himself, you’ve got site security and a wealth advisor. They all add to the experience of the site as something more than a blog: You’re reading episodes, not entries. I find myself reading the comments to see what’s going to happen next. Who is site security going to go after this week? It’s an adventure, not a blog.
I write all this as a recognition of innovation. chartreuse (BETA) is interesting because it abandons many blogging conventions. As with most new media, it takes a while for people to get comfortable enough to experiment. It gives me a glimmer of hope that at some point in the future we’ll be talking to more than just us geeks.
For as long as I remember it’s been my feeling that part of what made the internet so powerful was that it finally gave us a way to understand networks. Prior to the web, networks were mostly invisible and we didn’t have a great grasp of how they worked.
The problem with my argument was that I didn’t really ever have anything to back it up. I mean, I had my understanding, but I hadn’t ever read anything that explicitly spelled things out this way.
I am repeatedly asked a few basic questions when I lecture about networks: Why did it take this long? Why did we have to wait until 1999 to discover the impact of hubs and power laws on the behavior of complex networks? The answer is simple: We lacked a map. The few network maps available for study before the late 1990s had a few hundred nodes at most. The enormous World Wide Web offered the first chance to examine the intricate anatomy of large complex systems and established the presence of power laws. As other large maps followed, we gradually understood that most networks of practical interest, from the language to the sex web, are shaped by the same universal laws and therefore share the same hub-dominated architecture.
In case you didn’t feel like reading that, my bigger point is that whatever it is we take away from the surface web (say watching videos or reading blog entries), the structure is equally important to our understanding. You might even say the medium is the message.
Think of it this way: The message is the bright shiny object, the low-hanging fruit. It’s the 3 minute YouTube video of the guy lighting his farts on fire. It’s the thing that makes you laugh. The medium, however, is also communicating some very strong messages, letting you know that you can find entertainment on new screens, that three minutes is the ideal time for your shortened-attention span, that if that idiot can light his farts and get 70,000 people to watch it, so can you.
Most everyone concentrates on the message, and rightly so, those watching the video most likely don’t care about the deeper repercussions. Much of that communication is covert. The thing is, if you want to understand what’s really going on and make something meaningful, you need to be in touch with that covert communication.
Here’s how McLuhan broke it down:
What I am saying is that new media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had thought and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.
It’s been awhile since I stumbled upon a new service that made me say wow, but I’ve finally got a new one to add to the ‘newly discovered’ list. It’s called twttr and it’s simple:
Sign up. Send a text message to 40404. You’ve got a mobile blog.
There’s more to the service, but at the moment all I’m using it for is just writing myself notes. If I’m out and see a friend and want to remember their email, 40404 it. If I’m in the bookstore and see something I want to buy off Amazon, 40404 it. If I’m reading in the park . . . you get the drift.
It’s super simple, it doesn’t cost anything (assuming you have unlimited text messages) and it does something I seriously need (give me a place to keep notes). Once they add an API/RSS feed to get my data out of there and some way to edit something you’ve sent, the service will be amazing. Not sure how they’re going to make money off it, but if you’re reading this, I think I’d be willing to pay a subscription fee.
Anyhow, if you want to keep up with my thoughts/notes, jump over to twttr.com/heyitsnoah. Nothing overly exciting at the moment, but that’s cool.
There’s enough going on around here this week to warrant a morning edition. Here’s a bunch of most-likely unrelated stuff to read, click on, watch, hear and think about.
TV was a temporal medium before YouTube. Now that everyone can catch a moment on YouTube is TV finally a mass medium? After that Zidane incident, the water cooler was once again abuzz.
It’s all about the customer experience. Of course it is. I need to write a whole thing about how customer experience and product design are the two most important things marketers should be thinking about. (CK gets credit for the link.)
Finally, a few weeks ago I saw this episode of Zefrank’s The Show. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and figured I’d share it with everyone. All about how the democratization of design is going to force us to reconsider what we find both ugly and beautiful. (RSS readers, click over to the site.)
If you haven’t been following there have been some amazing comments to the last few entries I’ve posted. Thanks so much to everyone who’s added to the conversation and if you haven’t, join in. As a small incentive, I’ve turned off “nofollow” so there could be some PageRank in it for you.
I want to talk about attention. More and more lately I’ve been thinking about it as the primary driver of people’s actions on the web. But when you think about it in a larger context, it’s really at the center of what much of the population does off the web as well. Think about it, how many people want to be famous? What’s fame? A whole lot of attention.
The vast majority of the world don’t get paid to contribute to culture, they do it for free. That’s why artists starve and actors wait tables. The light at the end of the tunnel is never just fortune, it’s always paired with fame. People want to be noticed and that’s the bottom line.
As I understand much of traditional economic theory is based on the idea that people are completely rational beings, but if that’s the case, why is attention so valuable? Sure, sometimes you can convert attention into profit (think infomercials), but what about all the people that just do stuff to get on TV. Come on, you know the guy, the one who stands behind the newscaster making funny faces so that maybe, by some stroke of crazy luck, one of his friends is watching.
We’re not rational in any way, television did a good job breaking that. But now, with all these people on the web, it’s becoming all the more apparent. There are millions of people adding content to the web with no apparent goal in sight. My writing here is not a profitable endeavor. I have to pay for my hosting and, assuming my time has some value, waste my time. The result is a site that I hope will attract interesting people. I want attention.
Sure, down the road I may have a hair-brained scheme to turn that attention into profit by using this site as a springboard, but the fact is that most of us don’t even do it for that. We do it because we like being a part of something. We want attention. We want to feel connected. We want to meet people of likemind. In fact, most of these things are probably worth more than money to a lot of people.
So the big question is, what happens when the non-web world catches on? If the web economy is made up of things like attention and trust, what happens when, like most trends nowadays, it exits the digital realm and enters ‘real life’?
Anyone??????
Update (7/26/06): Just ran across this Anil Dash entry about the current Digg vs. Netscape feud and why people contribute content.
I’ve been reading way more than I can possible write about, so here’s what didn’t make the entry cut (yet). Also, for those not aware, you can follow my sidenotes by subscribing to the RSS feed. Anyway, let me give you what you really came for . . .
Jeffrey Veen: “Users aren’t stupid, they’re efficient. They’re spending the least amount of effort (i.e. intelligence) as they possible can on each step of the goal they’re trying to achieve. If you make them spend more, they’ll go somewhere else — it’s like intellectual bargain shopping.”
The Oreo CEO: “I’m Internet famous. It’s a rough life I live, but I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. And if you actually believe all this shit then you must be Internet famous like me.”
Bob Sutton: “Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of ‘confirmation bias.’”
A logo is a flag, a signature, an escutcheon.
A logo doesn’t sell (directly), it identifies.
A logo is rarely a description of a business.
A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around.
A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is more important that what it looks like.
Guardian Unlimited: “In the centuries since their freebooting peak, the reputation of Captain Kidd, Calico Jack and co has endured a remarkable transformation. In the 18th century, pirates were the baddest of the bad guys. They created a crisis in world trade: between 1718 and 1722, they captured and plundered more than 2,400 vessels on Atlantic trade routes. According to American preacher Cotton Mather, “all Nations agree to treat [pirates] as the Common Enemies of Mankind, and to extirpate them out of the world”. The modern parallels are there, as playwright Simon Bent points out: “For pirates to take out merchant ships returning laden with gold from the New World would be like taking out the Twin Towers in our era.” So will the Johnny Depps of the future play raffish versions of Osama bin Laden in Hollywood blockbusters?”
[Editor's Note: I don't make any money off this blog and at the moment have no plans of doing so.]
The hot question is what’s the revenue model. Everybody’s got a great idea, but none of us can put our minds together and come up with anything better than let’s slap some advertising on it and hope that people pay attention. Well, today, while reading John Hagel and Jeff Jarvis on the train to Connecticut I had an idea which I’ll get to after a bit of set up.
Journalistic integrity is bullshit. Now that’s not to say that journalists don’t have individual integrity, but if you ask me it takes a lot more integrity to stand up and admit to your bias than pretend you don’t have one. Reporting both sides of a story when the other side is all but non-existent isn’t fair and accurate, on the contrary, the situation you’re creating is one where two unequal sides are given equal attention.
Now I know the road I’m going down here is a bit of a treacherous path, people need to receive both sides of a story and I’m not arguing against that. I’m just saying that often journalists search out the other side and represent it in an unbalanced way. In Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” he cites a study of 928 abstracts of global warming articles, noting that not one questioned the existence of or human contribution to global warming. On the other hand, he reported that a large number of journalistic articles in that same timeframe presented the story as a two-sided one, often quoting skeptics. Sure, numbers can lie, but the larger point is that clearly many of these stories misrepresent the opposition as larger than they really are, an idea that can be even more damaging than not representing them at all.
Okay, so what does all this have to do with revenue models? Well, here at NoahBrier.com, I don’t have journalistic integrity, I’ve just got personal integrity. I have to answer to myself and myself only. The information posted here does not go through an editor or fact checker, it just goes from my head, through my fingers and out to you. I only post things I find interesting and fully admit that something I said yesterday I may not believe tomorrow.
The reason you keep coming back is you trust me as a filter for you. You come for the links or the writing. You want to read what I’ve got to say. If all of a sudden I started talking gibberish (which I may be doing right now) or started to sound like a commercial, you might decide to end the relationship. But until then you’ll probably stick around. Maybe you’ll even leave a comment sometime. We’re connected.
So why shouldn’t I use that connection for some financial gain? What would happen if I started accepting money to talk about products. Except part of the deal for the company was that in accepting the payment (1) I didn’t have to say anything and (2) if I did say anything it didn’t have to be nice. No part of the deal was that I had to mention I was paid, though. Why should you care? You’re here because you trust me. If I broke that trust by recommending a shit product you wouldn’t come back, leaving me without the audience needed to demand the cash from the ‘advertiser.’
Here are two tests. Most media companies today are driven by product centric economics – they track in great detail what it costs to make a media product, how many units are sold or distributed and the revenue generated by product. How many of them effectively track the life time value of their audience members or customers – what it costs to acquire an audience member or customer, how long their relationship endures and how much revenue and profit is generated by audience member or customer? These customer centric economics drive customer relationship businesses.
Second test – how ready are most media companies to point their audience members or customers to media products offered by their competitors? From my experience, very few. A customer relationship business acts as an agent on behalf of the customer, helping to connect them with whatever resources are most valuable or relevant to them, regardless of source.
It’s the second test I’m interested in. I’m in the customer relationship business. I constantly send you to other sites without any worries of whether you’ll return or not. I know that if I recommend something interesting, you’ll come back for more. So why couldn’t I just extend this model and start recommending goods and services? As long as I wholeheartedly believe in what I was recommending, why does it matter if I was paid or not? Sure there are dangers with people selling out and recommending crap, but like I said before, if that happens they’ve damaged the relationship with the reader. In other words, I would have a serious financial interest in only recommending the best stuff out there.
Now I have no clue whether this would actually work or not, but at least it’s an interesting idea. Right?
Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers, the guy brilliant looks at trends and extracts the deeper implications. I’ve read his books and now read his blog. The other day I decided to just drop him an email and tell him how much I enjoyed his writing. Five minutes later I got an email back telling me I had made his day.
He’s in it for the same thing I am: attention. His blog is not a moneymaking venture (to my knowledge), its a place for him to reflect and think out loud. Just like this one.
With each search, with each subscription, our narratives expand to tell the story of which team we follow, where we will be taking our next vacation, which conference we are planning to attend. The gestures of our lives are recorded, and we become represented – on “Top 100� lists, blogrolls and Flickr badges of different sizes. And the narratives of our electronic Attention gestures have even crossed back into offline mass media: on CNN’s headline news or American Idol’s SMS voting. We may not be followed by paparazzi, but airtime on national television is a start.
2. Everything is flattening; we’re entering the free agent age.
That comes from chartreuse (BETA). If you don’t read him, get on it. He understands what’s going on without all the hype normally associated with blogging, videos, web 2.0, blah, blah, blah. The way he sees it, “We are all eventually going to free agents and it’s important you have people who around you who realizes that and know how to exploit it to your benefit.”
I hung out with chartreuse and Loren the other night, we chatted for a really long time about what’s going on in this crazy online world. The two of them are working on a new kind of talent agency.
3. PageRank is the new hot.
Speaking of Steven Johnson, in lieu of flowers and food baskets, he’s asking for links to a post about his new son Dean. As he puts it, “I’m titling this post “Dean” for Google’s sake. I think it would be most excellent if everyone would link to this page, and drive this post up Google’s results for the word “Dean.” I think it would help him get a head start in the world to have a lot of pagerank right out of the gate.” PageRank is an indicator of future success.
4. It’s all about the people.
Over this week I met a ton of different people who up to this point I only knew online. I mentioned Chartreuse and Loren, plus the first likemind.ny went off like a rocket. About 15 people showed up and every single one of them was interesting. It was great to talk to everyone and I expect some big things will come out of it. If you missed this one, we’ll be doing the next one soon, I’ll make sure to announce it here, but if you head over to likemind you can sign up to stay informed.
More than anything else, though, this week reminded me that there are some unbelievable people behind all these sites I love. Getting to know them is amazing. When you meet a blogger for the first time it’s like you get to skip all the garbage. You know what they’ve been paying attention to for the last six months, giving you common points of interest. Blogs are almost like people filters, helping you figure out who you are connected to an who you’re not.
Tonight I attended an event called Attention vs. Engagement put on the ROOT and BuzzMetrics (or maybe more specifically Seth and Max). Much of the conversation felt like a lot of people who were deeply entrenched in one way of thinking (advertising) looking for any possible way to justify it. It’s not to say I blame them, I understand that it’s got to be hard to watch your world crumble around you, but instead of trying to come up with new metrics why not spend the time looking for new ways to cash in on your core competencies?
Eventually the conversation kept coming back to what makes people talk about products/services. That’s not advertising or marketing, it’s great customer experiences. If you want to inspire passion in your customers, don’t spend the money on marketing, concentrate on building a great business that puts them first. Now that’s not to say that all us marketers are out of a job, on the contrary, there are now more opportunities than ever for groups who understand how to interpret audience needs.
As marketers we need to step up to the plate and find better ways to leverage our skills to help companies create great customer experiences. That might mean writing copy for customer service reps in call centers or helping the company create packaging that’s easy to open. After that our job is easy. Think about: Great products sell themselves, but instead of helping to create great products, we’re stuck marketing mediocre ones.
With that said, I came up with 9 ways to save marketing
Start saying something! Don’t be afraid to speak your mind, at least you’ll elicit a reaction. A negative reaction is better than no reaction at all.
Get involved earlier! Why do we wait until we get a brief? We need to try and insert ourselves more into the product development cycle.
Let go of the brand! That’s not to say the brand is dead, just that we need to accept that it may be appropriate to deliver different brand identities to different groups with different needs.
Admit there’s no one answer! Different products have different buying cycles, there’s not going to be one metric/method for every purchase category. Toilet papers will always be different than TVs.
Institutionalize R&D! Let’s stop relying on employees to bring innovative ideas to the table and start investing in innovative thinking.
Advertising’s dead! Don’t even bother talking about just advertising anymore. It’s silly. Marketing is the only option.
Marketing’s dead! It’s a holistic approach. Don’t limit yourself by what’s ‘marketing’ and what’s not. Include everything and anything that helps you reach your end goal. It’s all about creating a great experience.
Leave no stone unturned! There should be nothing within the organization that marketing doesn’t at least attempt to touch. You need to be worried about everything from call centers to product placement. It’s all about the experience and that’s what you do now.
Stand for something! Have beliefs and stick to them. Don’t be afraid to stand behind something that might be controversial. You’ll most likely gain more supporters by standing your ground than detractors, no matter how loud they may be.
Sorry, I couldn’t come up with 10. Got any more I could add?
Yesterday was the two year anniversary of this website. I actually had it marked on my calendar and everything, except for some reason I wrote it down for the 17th, not the 16th. Anyway, it’s been a wild and wonderful two years and I wanted to thank everyone that’s contributed to the site.
I often try to explain to people why I keep a website like this, but I never quite do it justice. At its most basic it’s an expression outlet. I get to keep track of new thoughts and ideas as they pop up and, on occasion, even get to discuss them with the world. More importantly, though, having this outlet has allowed me to stay in a perpetual state of critical thinking. Anything I encounter I treat as possible fodder for the site. Whether it’s an article in the newspaper or a sign on the street, having this outlet lets me think about its relation to the rest of the world. I guess what I’m saying is the site is my excuse and I love it for that.
On the other side, of course, are the many great people I’ve met as a direct or indirect result of the site. So many of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in recent memory have been with random people. It’s nice to know that there are so many people out there that are excited as I am about thinking about the future.
Anyway, all that was a longwinded way of saying thank you. Thanks for sticking around, for reading the site, for entering conversations and generally for being a part of my life. It’s fun to know that anything I write will be read by hundreds, many of whom are complete strangers.
Finally, my usual request, if you’ve been hiding for all this time, why don’t you come out of the shadows? Leave a comment or drop me an email, tell me who you are, what you do or what your blog is. I’m a real person. I swear.
Oh, and for those interested, how about some stats from the last two years:
Last week I asked people if they’d like to meet in real life. Well, Piers from PSFK got in touch with me and suggested we do a coffee morning together. Out of that grew likemind.us. The idea, not surprisingly, is that a bunch of people of like mind get together, drink some coffee and talk about things of mutual interest. Here’s the info for the first morning:
when: friday, july 21 at 8am
where: sNice, 45 Eighth Avenue, at West 4th Street, NYC (GOOGLE MAPS)
If you’re interested all you’ve got to do is show up. You can get more info and sign up to stay informed at likemind.us. I hope to see some of you there.
One last thing, I thought it might be cool if other cities hand their own likemind mornings. So if you’re interested in doing one, just let me know and I’ll post the info on the site.
Have you seen Apple’s newish ad campaign? The one with the ‘hip’ Mac guy and the ‘square’ PC guy? I hate them. Really really hate them.
If you haven’t seen them, Apple’s got them all online for you to watch. The gist of it, for those that have missed it, is Macs are cool and PCs are not. The guy representing the PC gets a virus causing a literal crashes and he shows off his vacation moment: A pie chart displaying ‘hang out time’ and ‘just kicking it.’ All the while, the twenty-something jeans and t-shirt clad Mac guy acts like a condescending asshole.
As Seth Stevenson puts it, “As the Mac character, Justin Long (who was in the forgettable movie Dodgeball and the forgettabler TV show Ed) is just the sort of unshaven, hoodie-wearing, hands-in-pockets hipster we’ve always imagined when picturing a Mac enthusiast. He’s perfect. Too perfect. It’s like Apple is parodying its own image while also cementing it. If the idea was to reach out to new types of consumers (the kind who aren’t already evangelizing for Macs), they ought to have used a different type of actor.” He’s the embodiment of just the person I don’t want to be: A smug, condescending know-it-all who thinks he’s far cooler than he really is.
Luckily bestweekever came out with a spoof that puts it perfectly. After the Mac guy says he’s into doing movies and music, the PC guy replies, “I’m into important stuff like spreadsheets, time sheets and pie charts.” Obnoxious Mac guy is quick to respond, “That’s cool, but you can’t capture your family’s vacation on a pie chart.” That’s when the PC guy hands it to him like you wish he would in the real commercial. “Yeah, but a podcast about your favorite hoodie as an independent film won’t help you pay for that vacation.” The Mac guy’s only reply is, “No, that’s what my trust fund is for.”
Now ignoring the cheap joke at the end, the point is that these commercials make it uncool to be doing business on your computer. Who made that decision? When did Apple become the arbiter of cool? I would much rather associate myself with a successful ‘square’ than a pompous creative.
As if going to work in a suit every day is some sort of eternal damnation. Now I’m not saying that’s my cup of tea, but I certainly respect people who do it. What’s more, the commercials make me feel alienated as a geek. To me
I’m into important stuff like spreadsheets, time sheets and pie charts.
I’m a Mac user and a fairly recent convert. I bought a Mac because I was tired of dealing with my needy PC. I also bought a Mac because I thought it would make me more creative. Maybe it was silly, but I thought if all these creative people use Macs there must be something to it. You know what? There is something to it. The computer makes me feel more creative and though it’s just in my mind, in this case there’s no doubt that perception is reality. I am more likely to do creative things because it feels like the computer was made for it. Just the same way I feel like I should write important things down in my Moleskine.
Now I love my PowerBook, I really do. I think it’s a great computer and it really does make me feel more creative, however cheesy that may sound.
Because this is my personal blog, occasionally I get to tell some random story because I feel like it. I try to keep this site fairly ‘professional’, but sometimes I just want to share because I can.
Most of you who have visited the site recently probably have some idea of what I look like (thanks to the stream of photos on the homepage). For those that haven’t known me for some time, though, you probably don’t know that I lost a lot of weight: Around eighty pounds or so. I lost it all four years ago and have successfully kept it off since. I like to think that I’ve permanently changed my health. I try to eat reasonably healthy and go to the gym daily (though it doesn’t always work out that way).
My real point here isn’t really about losing weight, though, it’s about what happened after I lost all the weight. Instead of feeling fantastic, I felt terrible. I mean, sure my body felt and looked much better, but personally I wasn’t happy. After you dramatically change your appearance you expect everything to change. The thing is, it didn’t. Life was still more or less the same. What was worse, I had such high expectations that I was constantly disappointed. I was waking up every morning expecting to have the best day ever because I was skinny. I had completely bought into the idea that happiness is directly correlated to weight.
All in all it was one of the most unhappy points in my life.
Things didn’t change much until I went away to London. It was there that I learned what I think was one of the most important lessons of my life: You’ve got to let things come to you.
You see, I was expecting every night to be the best night ever, and when it wasn’t I was left disappointed. A good friend of mine taught me not to expect anything out of an evening, a lesson that I extended to the rest of life. All of a sudden everything turned around and I was having the best nights of my life. It was easy to exceed expectations when there were none.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t expect greatness, on the contrary, I firmly believe you should. This is specifically about letting a good time come to you. Sometimes we all place unneeded pressure on ourselves and sometimes that pressure can effect our attitude, which in turn effects the final result. Occasionally it’s important to let go and just enjoy.
A while back a bunch of companies got together and decided the best way to curb comment spam was something called a ‘nofollow’ tag. Essentially what it did was tell the search engines not to give credit to links that included this tag, the idea being that if spammers didn’t get credit for their links they’d stop spamming. On the Google blog they explain it like this: “From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.”
Now ‘nofollow’ was a perfectly fine idea, but it did absolutely nothing to stop the onslaught of comment spam. I would often wake up in the morning to see 40-50 comments talking about everything you might expect spammers to talk about. Because spamming is so cheap, it turns out the SEO (search engine optimization) help doesn’t really matter. Now I don’t completely understand spamonomics, but I’ve got to assume that the random person who clicks and buys something through these fake comments makes it all worth the while.
So why do I mention all this? Well, mainly because I just turned off nofollow. Like I said, it was doing nothing to help me with my spam problem. Turns out it’s just one of those things that are great for Google and not the rest of us. What I mean is, they now know what’s spam and what’s not, so they don’t artificially rank spamming sites, but the comment spam here wasn’t slowed at all. It was a totally one-sided solution.
For the other-sided solution, I have turned to Akismet and I must say I’m very impressed. The occaisional spam filters through, but it’s mostly been smooth sailing for the month or so I’ve had it installed. I can’t say enough good things about. (I’m knocking on wood the whole time I write this. The goal of this entry is not to incite spammers to try and break the system. Please leave me be.)
Akismet was originally developed for WordPress, and still requires a WordPress.com API key, but now they have Movable Type version. So if you’re having a comment spam problem, I suggest you turn to them.
Before I finish, let me expand a bit further why I turned ‘nofollow’ off. What it meant was that all you wonderful commenters were not getting any Google credit for your comment. If you had a website, by commenting here it was not helping your PageRank. Now it is. Not that all of a sudden everyone should start commenting for a better PageRank, but I thought it was only fair that if someone leaves a thoughtful comment they should be rewarded in some way.
Renegade (the company I work at) is looking to fill a jr. writer position. It’s a great company and a really cool group of people (including your’s truly). In addition, this position would work quite closely with me. If you’re recently graduated and looking for a first job, this could be perfect. Here’s the description:
We’re looking for someone who’s passionate about words. It doesn’t matter if people call you a ‘writer’ or you studied English in college, you just need to enjoy using language to express yourself.
As a Jr. Writer you’ll be collaborating with the creative team to develop Renegade ideas. You’ll be called on to assist in both the writing and ideation phases, and work with the team and client to develop copy that meets both their needs and yours. Projects will be online and off, so you should enjoy working in all media.
With that said, it’s very important to understand that you’ll be doing more than just writing. Your appetite for words should be equaled by your appetite for ideas. You should have a desire to understand human nature in addition to grammar.
You don’t need to know everything about marketing, in fact you shouldn’t. You should be curious and excited about an opportunity to grow and learn new skills in an environment that encourages that sort of stuff.
If this sounds like you, email Christopher Downing (cdowning@renegademarketing.com) your resume and a few writing samples (if you’re wondering what a few means, in this case it’s two or greater). Please include “Writer” in the subject line of your email.
I’ve had two pseudo-money making ideas in the last few days and I figured I might come right out and tell everyone about them to see if they make any sense.
The first is a job board/blog. The idea here is that lately I’ve been hearing about a ton of interesting jobs. I want a place to pass these opportunities I hear about on to like-minded individuals. Unlike a regular job website, it’s not a place anyone can post. It’s exclusive. I’ve got to be sold on/connected with the place to post the job. It’s got to be something I think is cool. The idea here is that if I act as a filter (and do a good job), it should have some pretty interesting stuff on it (like this opportunity at Buzzmetrics).
The second idea is to compile a nightly (if I could pull it off), PDF that could be printed out by commuters. Included would be a number of interesting articles from the day for you to read on your ride home.
In the end, both of these are based around me as a trusted filter. This is one of the most interesting things going on in advertising for me at the moment. Looking at The DECK for example, you see a network that only accepts ads for companies it knows/respects/uses. With the way blogs work as a trusted source, it’s a simple extension to offer recommended goods and services.
Enough babbling, what do you think? Anything to either idea?
Hi, I'm Noah. I am the co-founder of Percolate. I like writing on, thinking about and making stuff for the internet. I'm responsible for a few internet experiments like Brand Tags, likemind and My First Tweet. On this site I write about media, marketing, culture, technology and randomness. I like it when people email me.
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The drip denotes a curated post from Percolate. The comment is mine, the content on the other end of the link is not.
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Hi, I'm 
