The Rabbit Hole

I'm Out.

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 06:50:00 -0700

Making some changes. Moving on. You can follow my new exploits here: http://macerated.posterous.com/

Foursquare Checkin Unlocks This Apartment Door, DIY Kits Coming Soon | Fast Company

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:53:00 -0800

When the video of the door that unlocks with Foursquare check-ins went viral, I decided to go see how it works--and whether I could get my own.
It was tempting to whip out my phone, check in and walk right upstairs, announcing that I didn't know where I was--just that I was blindly following my MapQuest. Instead, I fired off a tweet ahead of time and was greeted by Nick Hall, a Brooklyn Web developer at Apartm.net who happens to have built this little piece of Foursquarey magic right up the street from me in Brooklyn.
Hall and his brother Erin Sparling, also a Web developer, installed the Foursquare door a couple of months ago as a way to let their underlings neighborhood friends and allies enter the office. He took me through the door system and the rest of his uber-wired stuff, which include a home-built touch-screen media system, improvised satellite T1 connection, and a coffee table made of an Apple X-serve.
Here's how the door works. The key to the Foursquare door is a little Web relay device, which actually hosts its own little webpage (aw!) that the brothers use to run some Javascript. "The relay is supposed to be for industrial use," says Hall. "I think it's meant to be used to control pumps." Here it is:
A Mac Mini chills out near the door and makes requests to Foursquare's API every three seconds, looking for new check-ins at Apartm.net. When the computer finds one, it contacts the Web relay, which sents a simple binary bbzzzz! through a little copper cable that has been soldered to the intercom button in the hallway. The intercom is fooled into thinking the button has been pressed, and it unlocks the door via the building's existing buzzer system. It's shockingly quick. (Right now, only white-listed Foursquare users can get in, but all that will change when the brothers throw their New Year's Party: it'll be open to all.)
Their ISP is a satellite dish aimed at the Empire State Building. See that hole in the wall below? That goes to a satellite dish on the roof of their northside Brooklyn apartment, which is pointed at another dish on the Empire State Building. Using this line-of-sight connection, the brothers were able to get an industrial T1 connection beamed straight to our sleepy Polish neighborhood. Now that better ISPs have arrived, they're transitioning to a hardline connection, but Hall doesn't sound like he's ready to let the satellite go just yet.
They built a homegrown touch-screen media server. Below, you'll see Nick and the office media center to his right. That monitor mounted on the wall? It's a touch-screen that operates the Mac Mini they use as a media server, which you can see on the shelf below the AirPort base station. The touch-screen also powers the projector over the couch, and the stereo. Unfortunately, this system wasn't hooked up, because they're in the middle of upgrading the system to run entirely off an iPad.
Oh, and check out their Nintendo exhibit below the A/V stuff, and the obligatory bucket of bike parts: This is Brooklyn, after all.
This is the coffee table that you do not spill drinks on. It's an X-serve that one of Sparling's students converted into a coffee table for them (he teaches an HTML class, in addition to heading up front-end development for the Wall Street Journal). "Originally, we just put the X-serve here and rested things on it. So we figured we might as well make it a real table," says Hall.
Below, that's a new MacBook Air, for scale (and envy). The Canon 5D on the table isn't the same one they used to shoot the viral video; that's the work of his brother's 5D Mark ii. Oh, and it's worth mentioning that this coffee table is the Web server the brothers use to host the Apartm.net website -- so if this article gets too much traffic, it'll generate a meltown in their living room. (A new HDD is on us, Nick.)
Here's the actual office space where "work," at some point, gets done. The Mac Mini that runs the Foursquare door operation is to the right, outside the frame. Next to it are a few terabytes of backup storage.
Yes, they might sell the Foursquare door system. "We haven't figured out quite how to commercialize it yet," says Hall, but he and his brother are certainly considering putting together a DIY kit. If you think they should, let us know below in the comments, and we'll be sure to follow up with their progress -- we've even been promised Beta tester status. Maybe there's a Kickstarter project waiting in the wings?

via fastcompany.com

really dig the thinking on this and the mentality Nick has on just doing things. and his website layout. its annoyingly awesome.

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The Great Twitter Secret Santa

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:24:00 -0800

As I sit down to write this we're closing in on 400. Almost four hundred people who've signed up to be matched with someone whom they're engaged with on twitter but might have never met in person. It's pretty cool, if you ask us.

To start, the www.TheGreatTwitterSecretSanta.com came out of a random brainstorming session. As with most ideas, turning it into a reality looked daunting until we enlisted a friend well versed in coding. After some back and forth on the layout and user experience, stress-testing and securing we managed to get the site live in a manner of just around 5 hours with nothing more than a couple tweets. I personally have a strong belief that working in this medium, digital that is, is about doing. So we did. It was by no means perfect, but instead of attempting to guess every single potential pitfall before launching, we decided to let the users tell us what they needed. People, as expected, voiced their concerns, 'who are these guys', being one of the main ones and 'why would I want to give some semi-stranger my address' being another. All very good questions; ones to certain degrees we thought we'd answered and others, we had completely overlooked. All of them, ones we hope to clarify.

First, we're just three regular guys, two are in advertising and one is in web development. Our names are on the page and a quick google search would give you more info than some of us would probably like.

On the second issue, this site is what you want it to be. We purposely made it so you could share any level of information. Instead of required fields, traditional address boxes and the like, we wanted you to decide the context and the forms of engagement with which you are comfortable. We've already seen some fascinating trends, from folks wanting in-person meetings to others simply asking for a charity donation and hello, there's more but that'd ruin those surprises.

When we set out to make this, none of us really had any idea what it would all mean and still, we're pretty convinced that its just a fun little blip in internet land. But as things progress and sign ups continue to grow, we're also excited by the fact that this little machine is helping networks out there make their connections mean something a little bit more, a secret santa exchange has always been a bit trivial, but when you strip away the trivial nature, it's a wonderful, exciting way to recognize someone you respect, learn something new about someone you only slightly know or strengthen a bond with someone you hold dear.

However way you slice it and however way you choose to participate is up to you. I know there are probably a million more questions to be answered and we'll do our best, so keep them coming. In the meantime, we just hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

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Propaganda

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:22:00 -0800

Been reading a lot on propaganda lately for no real apparent reason. Its a bit striking that what was a book about something as sinister as propaganda now amounts to what we would consider a good marketing book today. Sure we're not out to takeover countries and murder entire groups of human beings. Just interesting.

I'm not here to make projections or guesses, but I wonder if that could be what changes in the future. When someone asks, "what will future generations look back on and think 'how could they ever do or believe that'?", will it be the fact that we spent billions of dollars attempting to essentially manipulate each other into buying stuff.

This isn't me feeling sorry for what it is we do, that's a slippery slope, but maybe just maybe, everything we're building today, will make the next generations that much more savvy and the following ones that much less reliant on things like advertising.

Just a thought.

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Ellul on Propaganda

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 06:59:00 -0800

PROPAGANDA AND THE EDUCATED

1. It is almost certainly the case that the ultimate achievement of higher education for the great majority of people, is to open them up and prepare them for bigger and bigger lies and to make them receptive to being part of a group that simultaneously sees itself as above propaganda, and also as a member of a semi-elitist class. As Ellul suggests, however, education, at least as its referred to in the modern sense of the word, is an "absolute prerequisite" for propaganda.

2. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls "pre-propaganda"--the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as "facts" and as "education." Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda for three reasons:

            a). they absorb the largest amount of second-hand, unverifiable information;

            b). they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our             time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such

            indigestible pieces of information;

            c). they consider themselves capable of "judging for themselves."

For these reasons, they literally need propaganda.

via web.archive.org

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Threadless founder Jake Nickell on community and crowdsourcing | Econsultancy

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:30:00 -0700

Posted 22 September 2010 17:23pm by Chris Lake with 0 comments

Jake Nickell is the founder of Threadless, a brand that has become synonymous with t-shirts, design, community and crowdsourcing. Somewhat disturbingly, Threadless is this year celebrating its tenth birthday. They grow up so quickly these days!

Jake has commemorated this double-figure milestone by producing a rather lovely book, called Threadless: Ten Years of T-Shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Design Community. It features some of the best t-shirt designs ten years and also provides a step-by-step history of Threadless, which makes for an interesting read.

I interviewed Jake to find out more about the company’s approach to community engagement...

I still think of Threadless as a startup, so it's bewildering to realise that you have been around for a decade. Do you still have a startup mentality?

Very much so! I still try to do most things on an extremely barebones level, trying to do as much as we can with as little as we can, while maintaining a fun, energetic, startup office culture that is challenging and rewarding for everyone involved.

I think that's why I'm still around after 10 years… it's just as fun as it was when we started.

Can you explain how the business grew the community, and what your focus was in the early days?

We didn't grow the community, the community did. We just made sure it was a fun place for people to interact with each other, fostering creativity, by being real people and members of the community ourselves.

In the early days our focus was all about making cool things with our artist friends online. It started as a hobby and for two years we didn't take any salary, just kept making shirts with the money that came in from selling the previous batch of shirts.

I think just how simple and basic we kept it was the best thing we could have done to grow the community. No funny business going on.

How has that focus changed, as you have grown?

It's mostly just gotten more and more aspirational. Every year I wonder: How many more opportunities can we bring to artists? How many more people in the world care about t-shirt art, can be inspired by it and find the drive to try making it themselves? And now we're wondering, what other things would artists want to design for and how can we bring those opportunities to them.

So the focus is really the same, it's just on a whole new level scale-wise.

As a pioneer of crowdsourcing, what advice do you have for brands that want to make the most of community-generated content?

The biggest thing I would suggest is to not look at crowdsourcing as a way to outsource your work to a crowd but more a way to help a talented group of people find productive, fun and fruitful things to do with their talents.

It's so much more natural when the 'work' being done by the community is things their passionate about. That's why we have no spec of what needs to be submitted. It's just artwork: it can be a 100% personal art piece, it doesn't need to meet a specification.

How has community participation evolved over time? Does the Law of Participation Inequality apply to Threadless?

I am not familiar with that law, but the biggest change we've seen is just in ways people use the web to communicate socially.

When I started online it was BBS's, then chat rooms, and when we started Threadless it was all about forums. Now it's all about real-time social things like Twitter and Facebook along with mobile starting to become much larger.

Who knows what will happen next but I think it's important for you to be where the people are if you are looking for a community to interact with you.

What are the best tactics you've used to boost customer and community engagement?

The best thing we did is to trust our community. To constantly ask them for advice, to show them we are listening, and to change things based on what the community is feeling. We also wholly invest ourselves in being members ourselves.

How important are incentives? What does your community value most? Kudos vs cash?

I think the incentives are important for some and definitely a nice perk at the very least for everyone. But I believe that the real motivation for submitting is something else. Things like being a part of a movement bigger than yourself, or growing and learning as an artist from a vast, talented community, or finding a creative release outside of whatever your day job is.

The tone of voice you use on Threadless really contributes to the general feel of the site. How important is this in terms of defining the brand?

I think it's super important... if we spoke really stiff it would come across fake and with a community based business that just doesn't work.

With such passionate fans I bet the social media thing to some degree managed itself? How are you using platforms like Twitter and Facebook?

Yeah, for a long time it did. We didn't embrace Twitter and Facebook fully until really last year. But once we got on there we found a lot of success really fast.

We have more than 1.5M followers on Twitter and 150k+ fans on Facebook, and it's one of the best ways we've found to get the word out on new stuff. We just use them to tell people what we're up to... it's a great way to communicate with a massive amount of people really easily.

I've seen the Threadless site almost fall over when you announce time-limited sales on Twitter. Can you share some numbers on the volumes of traffic you need manage when you see spikes?

It gets ridiculous sometimes. At times we can be pushing nearly 1 Gigabit/sec between our servers at Rackspace and our CDN... that is absolutely insane traffic and it can definitely take out our servers sometimes. We've gotten pretty good at handling the load recently and haven't had any complete shutdowns in a good six months.

You added PayPal to the site recently. What did this do for the business?

We found it to be a great move especially internationally and with our younger customers. It wasn't staggering but we did find a really nice incremental addition to our sales.

You ship internationally, or at least to the UK... how did you approach the internationalisation of your business?

Yeah, we ship all over the world. London was actually the number one city we shipped to for a while, even including the US.

From the very beginning we have had a very international following and to this day we ship more than 50% of our orders outside of the US.

We haven't really done anything special though other than just shipping from Chicago, although just a few months back we did launch some translated versions of our site in French, Spanish and German.

So what's in store for Threadless in the next decade?

Lots more of hanging out with our community of artists, making cool things together! I try not to put together too comprehensive of a plan because things always change, especially when you have such a vast variety of people helping drive where Threadless should go as we work with our community on nearly everything we do.

Chris Lake is Director of Innovation at Econsultancy, an entrepreneur and a long-term internet fiend. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin.

via econsultancy.com

well said.

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Raging Against The Machine: A Manifesto For Challenging Wind Tunnel Marketing « BBH Labs

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:06:00 -0700

Raging Against The Machine: A Manifesto For Challenging Wind Tunnel Marketing

16th September 10

Posted by Mel Exon

Posted in Brands, Insight

4 comments

Author: Jim Carroll, Chairman, BBH London

This is the second of a two-parter by Jim. For the introduction to Wind Tunnel Marketing, check out his earlier post here or read both pieces in today’s Campaign magazine (available on campaignlive.co.uk next week). As always, we’d like to know what you think – please share any thoughts in the comments.

***

1. Seek Difference In Everything We Do

“Is it different?” has been relegated to the last question, the afterthought, the bonus ball. But the last should be first.

We should tirelessly seek difference in the people we talk to, the questions we ask, the processes we follow. “Is it different?” should be the first question we ask when we look at work – both in terms of content and form.

2. Kick Out the Norms

We’ve become addicted to backward looking averages. But norms create a magnetic pull towards the conventional. Norms produce normal. The new frontier doesn’t have norms, but it does have endless supplies of data, and a rich diversity of tools with which to mine it.

We should create a data-inspired future, not a norm-constrained past.

3. Only Talk to Consumers who are Predisposed to Change

Where there is change, there are people that lead and people that follow. In research we mostly talk to followers, because there are more of them and they’re cheaper. But ultimately they are less valuable.

If we’re seeking to change markets, shouldn’t we talk exclusively to change makers?

4. Embrace Insights From Anywhere

We’ve lived for too long under the tyranny of consumer insight. Of course consumer insight can be engaging, but it can also be familiar.

Surely insights can come from anywhere and we’re just as likely to find different insights from an analysis of the brand, the category, the competition, the channel, and, above all, the task.

5. Don’t Iron Out All the Creases

The Wind Tunnel abhors rough edges. It likes to smooth over, iron out, edit away. But people are drawn to the irregular and eccentric.

Let’s treasure, protect and nurture the happy accident, the illogical flaw.

6. Test in the Market, Not in the Test Tube

We have known for years that the optimal way to deal with complex communication needs in a fast moving, volatile market is to test in beta. The gamers know it and the retailers knew it before them. Now all markets are fast moving and volatile.

Let’s learn from and with the market.

7. Practice Foresight

We’ve become too accustomed to considering the world as it is now. We need more often to be considering the possible worlds of the future.

Let’s lift our eyes to the horizon.

8. Learn to Love Risk

The Wind Tunnel is risk averse. We have come to consider risk as something to be feared, minimised, eradicated. But risk is integral to innovation and change. It’s integral in fact to success.

We need to learn to feel comfortable with risk again, to calibrate it, to embrace it.

9. Value Expertise, Value Inexperience

Our risk aversion has led us to overvaluing category experience and undervaluing communication expertise. But an excess of experience predisposes to the tried and tested. Relevant difference occurs at the intersection between expert judgement and naïve enthusiasm.

Let’s listen again to the experts, whilst opening the process up to the inexperienced.

10. Hurry Up

For many years Agencies have argued that they need more time to protect quality. But too much time compromises quality because it creates room for caveats, committees and complacency. And we’re often late before we’ve arrived.

Speed can be liberating, exciting, invigorating. Come on. Let’s go……

via bbh-labs.com

more likes!

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words to strategize by / what consumes me, bud caddell

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:05:00 -0700

words to strategize by

September 21st, 2010 • posts i've written

These are some strategic marketing principles that shape how I think. Most, if not all, of these principles are stolen. P.S. This is a list in progress, so do your part for the empire and jump in the comments.

Think of the list as a simple set of heuristics to be mated, recombined, mutated, adapted, and evolved for specific needs. Also, feel free to debate the hell out of them. Here we go, in no particular order …

DEFINE INSIDERS & OUTSIDERS
Mike used to say this like a broken strategic record. Strong brands are bold enough to define who’s in and who’s out, who makes the cut, and who is left behind. Most brands, and most marketing managers, aren’t willing to do this. Your product or your marketing message can’t be designed for everyone, and it shouldn’t be. Gareth Kay also says, “have a point of view on the world, not a position in the market,” and without a strong point of view, you can’t decide who’s in and who’s out. Simon Sinek also reminds us that people don’t buy what we do, they buy why we do it.

PROMOTE IDEAS THAT CAN BE ADVERTISED, NOT ADVERTISING IDEAS
Gareth Kay brought this one to life. To me, this means that we can’t fall in love with the technology or the medium itself. I’ve seen this countless times, people pitching clever manipulations of a medium, fidgeting within the borders of the ad space, instead of thinking broadly about culture. This kind of thinking is responsible for the cult of clever that permeates digital advertising shops. And this thinking produces the type of advertising that advertising people love, but not messages that spread through culture and ultimately impact behavior. I’ve also found that clients that simply want advertising ideas (and protest anything beyond that) are clients that I’d rather not work for. To me, it’s a shibboleth for both clients and new hires.

IF IT DOESN’T SPREAD, IT’S DEAD
Originally coined by Henry Jenkins and fellows about spreadable media, to me this says something profound about what I do. Advertising and marketing isn’t art for one important reason – we can’t afford to be Emily Dickinson, toiling away in obscurity only to be recognized for our genius decades later. Our work is successful if it’s actually distributed by networks of real people and can impact their behavior. Of course, how advertising works is mysterious and complicated, but we have to endeavor to understand it and to make it work for our clients. I try not to pay attention to award shows because they tend to do a disservice to our true goal. Chase business objectives not aesthetic trends.

IDEAS THAT AREN’T CONTENT, IDEAS THAT CREATE CONTENT
Faris promoted this one. Brands are increasingly talking to generations that are read AND write, that know how to use their voice, and practice these skills when their passions call for it. This doesn’t mean run another UGC contest, it means find intersections between your needs and your customers’ needs, and mine that overlap for opportunities in co-creation. Marketing must become increasingly symbiotic.

FIND NETWORKS THAT NEED FEEDING
Grant dreamed up these words during a discussion between the two of us regarding The Fiesta Movement by Ford. Instead of reaching out to “the influencers,” Ford (and partners) went out searching for content creators that had accumulated significant following all on their own, but they were people that would benefit greatly by opportunities to create more content. The Fiesta Movement helped them sustain, care for, and grow their networks. In turn, the content creators went above and beyond creating content and promoting the program.

NEVER ANOTHER SANDCASTLE
Aaron says he deserves credit for this one, and I agree. This one’s pretty obvious: quit building micro-sites. Fish where the fish are, and other such sporting metaphors. If your big idea is to build an experience completely orphaned from the social platforms that customers actually use, and use to share things with others, then you’re doing it wrong. Basically, if your idea ends with “and then we drive traffic to it,” you’ve failed.

PARTNER WITH EXISTING PATHWAYS
If you want to reach 18-24 year old dudes online, then there’s really no one better to partner with (to both create and spread content) than CollegeHumor. If you want your new soul-uplifting novel to reach housewives across America, then you can do no better than Oprah. Whatever your objective, seek out partners that have assembled the most powerful pathways across networks of your audience, and make their strengths your own.

REAL-TIME RESPONSIVENESS TO CULTURE
Once upon a time, a time in which not every product was a pretty good product, brands stood for consistent goods that were responsive to consumer needs. You drank the branded milk because there was a better chance it wasn’t rancid. Today, every product is branded and every brand is a part of culture. And now brands owe responsiveness to that culture. We call brands that do not respond to culture “antiquated” or “uncool” and when these brands do finally choose to make a statement, we often dub them “inauthentic” because of the delay in their messaging. Of course, by now, W+K and Mr. Old Spice have completely proven how effective a brand can be once it embraces a more responsive attitude to culture.

So, what’d I miss?

Related posts:

words to think by

what’s the point?

you are what you link

Trackback URI.

via whatconsumesme.com

i like.

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Apple: It's All About the Brand

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:47:00 -0700

Ask marketers and advertising experts why Mac users are so loyal, and they all cite the same reason: Apple's brand.

It's no coincidence that during the late 1980s and early 1990s it was a marketing executive from Pepsi, John Sculley, who turned Apple into the biggest single computer company in the world, with $11 billion in annual sales. Sculley marketed Apple like crazy, boosting the advertising budget from $15 million to $100 million.

"People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company," Sculley told the Guardian newspaper in 1997. "It was the marketing company of the decade."

The current CEO, Steve Jobs, spent $100 million marketing the iMac, which was a run-away hit. Apple continues to spend lots of money on high-profile ads like the "Switch" campaign, and it shows.

"It's a really powerful brand," said Robin Rusch, editor of the Brandchannel.com, which awarded Apple "Brand of the Year" in 2001. "The overwhelming presence of Apple comes through in everything they do."

Marketer Marc Gobe, author of Emotional Branding and principal of d/g worldwide, said Apple's brand is the key to its survival. It's got nothing to do with innovative products like the iMac or the iPod.

"Without the brand, Apple would be dead," he said. "Absolutely. Completely. The brand is all they've got. The power of their branding is all that keeps them alive. It's got nothing to do with products."

Gobe, who hails from France, formulated this view while researching his book, in which he tells how brands have established deep, lasting bonds with their customers.

Apple, of course, is the archetypal emotional brand. It's not just intimate with its customers; it is loved. Other examples are automaker Lexus, retailer Target and outdoor clothing line Patagonia.

"Apple is about imagination, design and innovation," Gobe said from his office in New York. "It goes beyond commerce. This business should have been dead 10 years ago, but people said we've got to support it."

Gobe is of course referring to Apple's financial tailspin during the mid-1990s when the company looked in danger of going out of business. At the time, its products were lackluster, its branding a mess.

"Before Steve Jobs came back, the brand was pretty much gone," he said. "That's one of the reasons Apple has been rebranded -- to rejuvenate the brand."

Apple abandoned the old rainbow-hued Apple logo in favor of a minimalist monochrome one, gave its computers a funky, colorful look, and streamlined the messages in its advertising. It's done wonders, Gobe said.

Gobe argued that, in some cases, branding has become as powerful as religion. "People's connections with brands transcend commerce," he said. Gobe cited Nike, which sparked customers' ire when it was revealed the company's products were assembled in sweatshops.

"They were not pissed about the products," Gobe said. "It's about the company's ethics. It's interesting how emotionally involved people are."

According to Gobe, emotional brands have three things in common:

* The company projects a humanistic corporate culture and a strong corporate ethic, characterized by volunteerism, support of good causes or involvement in the community. Nike blundered here. Apple, on the other hand, comes across as profoundly humanist. Its founding ethos was power to the people through technology, and it remains committed to computers in education. "It's always about people," Gobe said.

* The company has a unique visual and verbal vocabulary, expressed in product design and advertising: This is true of Apple. Its products and advertising are clearly recognizable. (So is Target's, or even Wal-Mart's, Gobe said).

* The company has established a "heartfelt connection" with its customers. This can take several forms, from building trust to establishing a community around a product. In Apple's case, its products are designed around people: "Take the iPod, it brings an emotional, sensory experience to computing," Gobe said. "Apple's design is people-driven."

Gobe noted that Apple has always projected a human touch -- from the charisma of Steve Jobs to the notion that its products are sold for a love of technology.

"It's like having a good friend," Gobe said. "That's what's interesting about this brand. Somewhere they have created this really humanistic, beyond-business relationship with users and created a cult-like relationship with their brand. It's a big tribe, everyone is one of them. You're part of the brand."

The human touch is also expressed in product design, Gobe said. Apple's flat-screen iMac, for example, was marketed as though it were created personally by Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, not by factory workers in Asia.

"People are anxious and confused," Gobe said. "Technology is accelerating faster and faster than we can keep up with. People need to find some grounding, that human touch, the leading hand. There's a need to recreate tribes that give people a grounding."

Writer Naomi Klein is a leading critic of branding, especially Apple's. Klein, author of No Logo, argues that companies like Apple are no longer selling products. They are selling brands, which evoke a subtle mix of people's hopes, dreams and aspirations.

Klein notes how Benetton used images of racial harmony to sell clothes, while Apple used great leaders -- Cesar Chavez, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama -- to persuade people that a Macintosh might also allow them to "Think Different."

"People are drawn to these brands because they are selling their own ideas back to them, they are selling the most powerful ideas that we have in our culture such as transcendence and community -- even democracy itself, these are all brand meanings now," she told the Guardian newspaper.

Klein's analysis of branding finds a receptive audience in the marketing community. Jean-Marie Dru, described by Adbusters as the "ad industry's current wonderkid," also believes that brands thrive or perish based on the ideals they espouse.

"Apple expresses liberty regained; Pepsi, youthfulness; Oil of Olay, timeless beauty; Saturn, the American competitive spirit; and AT&T, the promises of the future," he wrote in his book Disruption.

To Dru, brands are more important than products. Products have limited life cycles, but brands -- if managed well -- last forever. "The battle of brands and products will be, above all, a battle of ideas," he wrote.

Ryan Bigge, writing in Adbusters, said: "Our dreams and desires for a better world are no longer articulated by JFKs nor generated through personal epiphanies -- they are now the intellectual currency of Pepsi and Diesel. We used to have movements for change -- now we have products. Brands may befriend us, console us and inspire us, but the relationship comes at the highest price imaginable -- the loss of self."

Apple's famous "1984" Super Bowl ad, for example, was expressly political: It's message was, give power to the masses. The power, of course, was computing power.

"Macintosh was always bigger than the product," Steve Hayden, the ad's copywriter, told AdWeek. "We thought of it as an ideology, a value set. It was a way of letting the whole world access the power of computing and letting them talk to one another. The democratization of technology -- the computer for the rest of us."

The "1984" ad began a branding campaign that portrayed Apple as a symbol of counterculture -- rebellious, free-thinking and creative. According to Charles Pillar, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, this image is a calculated marketing ploy to sell expensive computers.

"Expressions of almost spiritual faithfulness to the Mac, although heartfelt, weren't a purely spontaneous response to a sublime creation," he wrote. "They were a response to a calculated marketing ploy to sell computers that cost much more than competing brands.

"I'm not making this up. Members of the Mac's original engineering and marketing team told me all about it. They did it by building a sense of belonging to an elite club by portraying the Mac as embodying the values of righteous outsiderism and rebellion against injustice. It started in the early '80s with the famous '1984' TV commercial that launched the Mac, and continued with 'The computer for the rest of us' slogan and several ad campaigns playing on a revolutionary theme."

Steve Manning, co-founder of Igor, a brand consultancy in San Francisco, California, said even a seasoned professional like himself is seduced. "Even though I understand this stuff, I’ve bought into it," he said. "I own four Macs. They’re more expensive, but the advertising and marketing works."

via wired.com

Seems we've been having the same discussion around this topic (specifically Apple) for some time now. Hopefully one day we decide to move on.

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Banksy in his own words | The Sun |Features

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:34:00 -0700

"I STARTED painting graffiti when I was about 14 or so, and people always ask, yer know, what makes you do it?

"But the question was always really, why would you not do it?"

These are the words of one of the world's most famous artists, and most elusive characters.

Secret ... Banksy's true identity has never been revealed

Bristol-born Banksy is hugely popular worldwide, his guerilla-style graffiti his calling card.

Yet for 18 years he has succeeded where The Stig failed - and kept his identity totally secret.

Who is he? That's the question on the lips of everyone from trendy youngsters to the snobbish art world elite.

Rat'll do nicely ... Banksy uses stencils to create art quickly

For the first time ever, the street artist has spoken at length about his amazing rise from a spray-can-toting youth, to someone whose work sells for £1million a time to Hollywood's A-listers.

And The Sun is the first to bring you the interview.

His openness coincides with the DVD release of his film Exit Through The Gift Shop on Monday.

Explaining where it all began, Banksy says: "You're 14, 15. It's a big world out there, you wanna make your mark, and no one listens to a word you say. Whereas, yer know, one night, one spray can, all of a sudden people notice you."

Banksy was plugged into the trendy street scene, and gives a nod to fellow Bristolian, 3D from dance music outfit Massive Attack.

"There was always a lot of graffiti in my home town growing up, urmm, I think 3D from Massive Attack had brought it back with him off tour in America and he'd been painting all over the city.

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"I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it. I always used to get things too close together or too far apart and it used to take me ages.

"So I had to come up with a way of making it quicker, otherwise I was gonna get nicked."

The works that catapulted Banksy into the spotlight almost all involved black and white stencil drawings, such as the iconic image of two policemen snogging.

"I mean they're very efficient, stencils. You get to put something up in very little time and it's hard to mess it up.

"When I moved to London I just carried on painting. I never saw that there was anything bad in it.

"You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.

"And I always felt that it was all right to answer back a little bit, I suppose. That the city shouldn't just be a one-way conversation "I didn't see why you'd settle for just walls. So I started vandalising statues and that led to vandalising parks. It just kept going really.

Elephantastic ... decorated live elephant used for his LA exhibition

"So I'd come up with this idea of painting graffiti over oil paintings instead of on walls. And I was completely convinced it was a genius idea nobody had had before."

Banksy began producing his own versions of classic paintings, his most famous being Monet's Water Lily Pond with discarded shopping trolleys under the bridge. In 2003 he snuck into London's Tate Britain gallery and added one of his creations.

He explained: "I thought, 'How do I stop people from stealing this idea?' And I reckoned the best thing to do was to get it hanging up in the Tate with my name next to it.

Maid to order ... stencilwork and skill are combined in his iconic street art creations
Rex

"But obviously if you were waiting for them to come to you, you'd be waiting quite a long time. So I thought I'd just go in the Tate and stick it up.It was funny. I was going to all these galleries and I wasn't looking at the art, I was looking at the blank spaces between the art.

"So I thought it was probably about time to have a gallery show. But I don't really like galleries, so I, er, ended up renting this warehouse instead."

One of the most memorable moments in Banksy's career was when he sabotaged the launch of Paris Hilton's music album.

Opportunistic ... Banksy's work uses the urban environment

He managed to replace 500 copies with his own CD in September 2006. On the cover he superimposed a picture of a dog's head over Paris's and added a sticker that said it included tracks Why Am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?

For the first time he explains how he pulled it off. "I'd been talking to the DJ Danger Mouse about trying to vandalise some pop act or hijack somebody who was in the charts.

All those in favour ... Bristol council made the public vote on whether to keep the art

"And then suddenly we found out that Paris Hilton was going to make a record. And we had like three weeks to turn it around before the CD was in the shops.

"It was an idea that was just waiting for Paris Hilton to happen. I messed around with the visuals then Danger Mouse sort of turned the album into this one long track where she just repeats herself over and over again.

"We packaged it up, we put it in the cases and then me and two other guys split up and went across the country reverse shoplifting.

"We put out 500 of 'em, which I think probably turned out to be a fair percentage of what she actually sold. I mean, what can they do you for? Littering? Maybe? I guess?"

Just a short time later Banksy caused controversy by staging an exhibition in LA that included a live painted elephant.

He says: "I guess I fancied going somewhere a little bit warmer. So we ended up in Los Angeles and, yer know, it's this really glamorous town that also has this dirty side to it.

"But... above anything else it's the easiest place in the world to rent an elephant." Today Banksy's works can fetch £1million, with Brad Pitt famously picking up a piece at a London auction with a phone bid in 2007.

Small pieces regularly command six figures. But it wasn't always that way.

Keeping it reel ... DVD of Banksy film comes out on Monday

Banksy says: "When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But... er... the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I'd done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, yer know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand.

"It's great, I guess, when your paintings are hanging up in a museum.

"But I can't help feeling it was a bit easier when all I had to compete against was a dustbin down an alley rather than, you know, a Gainsborough or something."

Despite success beyond his wildest dreams, Bansky remains endearingly modest about his work.

"Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off. I mean, most of it is just designed to look good from a moving vehicle. Not necessarily in the history books.

"But maybe all art is about just trying to live on for a bit.

"I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."

If this is true it will be a very, very long time before Bansky finally gets to rest.

n.francis@the-sun.co.uk

via thesun.co.uk

one of the greats.

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Hemingway Desk

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:35:24 -0700

via standupdesks.com

Lots of talk about stand up desks lately. Figured I'd join and get my Hemingway on.

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Food For Thought

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:13:48 -0700

via notesfromthestall.com

notes from the stall is a blog about exactly what you're thinking. above is my favorite.

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A simple answer to "Why?"

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:12:00 -0700

Ironman_lessons_July_2010.pdf Download this file

If you're a friend of mine at some point you've probably questioned "why??" when the conversation has veered to the topic of Ironman triathlons (which most likely has often been the case this past year, my apologies). Anyway, above is a document written by Neil Brenner, partially a race report, partially a beautiful attempt at answering that question. For some I'm sure it'll be a bit tedious as the language is generally geared to those who are familiar with the sport (or sports), but my hope is that you make it to the end as I think he touches on some truths that ultimately find a common thread throughout life. A thread that ultimately answers a lot of those "why?" questions.

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Tocky!

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:42:06 -0700

via nandahome.com

really need one of these things. iphone alarm isn't cutting it anymore.

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Nick Cave's Love Song Lecture

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:40:19 -0700

To be invited to come here and teach, to lecture, to impart what knowledge I have collected about poetry, about song writing has left me with a whole host of conflicting feelings. The strongest, most insistent of these concerns my late father who was an English Literature teacher at the high school I attended back in Australia. I have very clear memories of being about twelve years old and sitting, as you are now, in a classroom or school hall, watching my father, who would be standing, up here, where I am standing, and thinking to myself, gloomily and miserably, for, in the main, I was a gloomy and miserable child, "It doesn´t really matter what I do with my life as long as I don´t end up like my father". At forty years old it would appear that there is virtually no action I can take that does not draw me closer to him, that does not make me more like him. At forty years old I have become my father, and here I am, teaching.

What I wanted to do here was to talk a bit about "the love song", to speak about my own personal approach to this genre of songwriting which I believe has been at the very heart of my particular artistic quest. I want look at some other works, that, for whatever reason, I think are sublime achievements in this most noble of artistic pursuits: the creation of the great love song.

Looking back at these twenty years a certain clarity prevails. Midst the madness and the mayhem, it would seem I have been banging on one particular drum. I see that my artistic life has centered around an attempt to articulate the nature of an almost palpable sense of loss that has laid claim to my life. A great gaping hole was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my father when I was nineteen years old. The way I learned to fill this hole, this void, was to write. My father taught me this as if to prepare me for his own passing. To write allowed me direct access to my imagination, to inspiration and ultimately to God. I found through the use of language, that I wrote god into existence. Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, that gave him shape and form. Actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist. The love song is perhaps the truest and most distinctive human gift for recognising God and a gift that God himself needs. God gave us this gift in order that we speak and sing Him alive because God lives within communication. If the world was to suddenly fall silent God would deconstruct and die. Jesus Christ himself said, in one of His most beautiful quotes, "Where ever two or more are gathered together, I am in your midst." He said this because where ever two or more are gathered together there is language. I found that language became a poultice to the wounds incurred by the death of my father. Language became a salve to longing.

Though the love song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for Love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God. It is the cry of one chained to the earth, to the ordinary and to the mundane, craving flight; a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.

The loss of my father, I found, created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose. The great W.H. Auden said "The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting – had it not occurred, it would have found another- in order that its life come a serious matter." The death of my father was the "traumatic experience" Auden talks about that left the hole for God to fill. How beautiful the notion that we create our own personal catastrophes and that it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. We each have a need to create and sorrow is a creative act. The love song is a sad song, it is the sound of sorrow itself. We all experience within us what the Portugese call Suadade, which translates as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.

In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Frederico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friend and Dirty 3 have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualised are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.

All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.

In Lou Reed´s remarkable song "Perfect Day" he writes in near diary form the events that combine to make a "Perfect Day". It is a day that resonates with the hold beauty of love, where he and his lover sit in the park and drink Sangria, feed animals in the zoo, go to a movie show etc., but it is the lines that darkly in the third verse, "I thought I was someone else, someone good" that transforms this otherwise sentimental song into the masterpiece of melancholia that it is. Not only do these lines ache with failure and shame, but they remind us in more general terms of the transient nature of love itself – that he will have his day "in the park" but, like Cinderella, who must return at midnight to the soot and ash of her disenchanted world, so must he return to his old self, his bad self. It is out of the void that this songs springs, clothed in loss and longing.

Around the age of twenty, I stared reading the Bible and I found in the brutal prose of the Old Testament, in the feel of its words and its imagery, an endless source of inspiration. The Song of Solomon, perhaps the greatest love song ever written, had a massive impact upon me. Its openly erotic nature, the metaphoric journey taken around the lovers bodies – breasts compared to bunches of grapes and young deer, hair and teeth compared to flocks of goats and sheep, legs like pillars of marble, the navel- a round goblet, the belly- a heap of wheat – its staggering imagery rockets us into the world of pure imagination. Although the two lovers are physically separate – Solomon is excluded from the garden where his beloved sings – it is the wild, obsessive projections of one lover onto another that dissolve them into a single being, constructed from a series of rapturous love-metaphors.

The Song of Solomon is an extraordinary love song but it was the remarkable series of love song/poems known as the Psalms that truly held me. I found the Psalms, which deal directly with relationship between man and God, teeming with all the clamorous desperation, longing, exultation, erotic violence and brutality that I could hope for. The Psalms are soaked in suadade, drenched in duende and bathed in bloody-minded violence. In many ways these songs became the blue-print for much of my more sadistic love songs. Psalm 137, a particular favourite of mine and which was turned into a chart hit by the fab little band Boney M. is a perfect example of all I have been talking about.

The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness. Whether it be the love of God, or romantic, erotic love – these are manifestations of our need to be torn away from the rational, to take leave of our senses, so to speak. Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

In Psalm 137 the poet finds himself captive in "a strange land" and is forced to sing a song of Zion. He swears his love to his homeland and dreams of revenge. The Psalm is ghastly in its violent sentiments, as he sings for love of his homeland and his God and that he may be made happy by murdering the children of his enemies. What I found, time and time again, in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was that verses of rapture, of ecstasy and love could hold within them apparently opposite sentiments – hate, revenge, bloody mindedness etc. that they were not mutually exclusive. This idea has left an enduring impression on my songwriting.

Within the world of modern pop music, a world that deals ostensibly with the Love Song, but in actuality does little more that hurl dollops of warm, custard-coloured baby-vomit down the air waves, true sorrow is not welcome. But occasionally a song comes along that hides behind its disposable, plastic beat a love lyric of truly devastating proportions. "Better The Devil You Know" written by hitmakers Stock, Altkin and Waterman and sung by the Australian pop sensation Kylie Minogue is such a song. The disguising of the terror of Love in a piece of mindless, innocuous pop music is an intriguing concept. "Better The Devil You Know" is one of pop music's most violent and distressing love lyrics.

Say you wont leave me no more
I`ll take you back again
No more excuses, no no
Cause I´ve heard them all before
A hundred times or more
I´ll forgive and forget

If you say you´ll never go
Cause it's true what they say
Better the devil you know
I know, I think I know the score
You say you love me, O boy
I can´t ask for more
I´ll come if you should call

When Kylie Minogue sings these words there is an innocence to her voice that makes the horror of this chilling lyric all the more compelling. The idea presented within this song, dark and sinister and sad – that all love relationships are by nature abusive and that his abuse, be it physical or psychological, is welcomed and encouraged, shows how even the most innocuous of love songs has the potential to hide terrible human truths. Like Prometheus chained to his rock, so that the eagle can eat his liver each night, Kylie becomes love's sacrificial lamb bleating an earnest invitation to the drooling, ravenous wolf that he may devour her time and time again, all to a groovy techno beat. "I´ll take you back. I´ll take you back again". Indeed. Here the Love Songs becomes a vehicle for a harrowing portrait of humanity not dissimilar to that of the Old Testament Psalms. Both are messages to God that cry out into the yawning void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliverance.

As I said earlier, my artistic life has centered around desire or more accurately, the need, to articulate the various feelings of loss and longing that have whistled through my bones and hummed in my blood, throughout my life. In the process I have written about two hundred songs, the bulk of which I would say, were love songs. Love songs, and therefore, by my definition, sad songs. Out of this considerable mass of material, a handful of them rise above the others as true examples of all I have talked about. Sad Waters, Black Hair, I Let Love In, Deanna, From her to Eternity, Nobody's Baby Now, Into my Arms, Lime Tree Arbour, Lucy, Straight to You; I am proud of these songs. They are my gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children. They sit grimly on their own and do not play with the other songs. Mostly they were offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births. Most of them are rooted in direct personal experience and were conceived for a variety of reasons but this rag-tag group of love songs are, at the death, all the same thing – life lines thrown into the galaxies of the divine by a drowning man.

The reasons why I feel compelled to sit down and write love songs are legion. Some of these came clearer to me when I sat down with a friend of mine, who for the sake of his anonymity I will refer to as J.J. and I admitted to each other that we both suffered from psychological disorder that the medical profession call erotographomania. Erotographomania is the obsessive desire to write love letters. My friend shared that he had written and sent, over the last five years, more than seven thousand love letters to his wife. My friend looked exhausted and his shame was almost palpable. I suffer from the same disease but happily have yet to reach such an advanced stage as my poor friend J. We discussed the power of the love letter and found that it was, not surprisingly, very similar to the love song. Both served as extended meditations on ones beloved. Both served to shorten the distance between the writer and the recipient. Both held within them a permanence and power that the spoken word did not. Both were erotic exercises, in themselves. Both had the potential to reinvent, through words, like Pygmalion with his self-created lover of stone, one's beloved. Alas, the most endearing form of correspondence, the love letter, like the love song has suffered at the hands of the cold speed of technology, at the carelessness and soullessness of our age. I would like to look, finally, at one of my own songs that I recorded for The Boatman's Call album. This song, I feel, exemplifies much of what I´ve been talking about today. The song is called Far From Me.

For your dear, I was born
For you I was raised up
For you I´ve lived and for you I will die
For you I am dying now
You were my mad little lover
In a world where everybody fucks everybody else over
You are so far from me
Far from me
Way across some cold neurotic sea
Far from me

I would talk to you of all matter of things
With a smile you would reply
Then the sun would leave your pretty face
And you´d retreat from the front of your eye
I keep hearing that you´re doing best
I hope your heart beats happy in your infant breast
You who are so far from me
Far from me
Far from me

There is no knowledge but I know it
There´s nothing to learn from that vacant voice
That sails to me across the line
From the ridiculous to the sublime
It´s good to hear you´re doing so well
But really can´t you find somebody else that you can ring and tell
Did you ever care for me?
Were you ever there for me?
So far from me

You told me you´d stick by me
Those were your very words
My fair-weather friend
You were my brave-hearted lover
At the first taste of trouble went running back to mother
So far from me
Far from me
Suspended in your bleak and fishless sea
Far from me
Far from me

Far From Me took four months to write, which was the duration of the relationship it describes. The first verse was written in the first week of the affair and is full of all the heroic drama of new love as it describes the totality of feeling whilst acknowledging the potential for pain – for you I'm dying now. It sets the two lovers it describes against an uncaring world – a world that fucks everybody over – and brings in the notion of the physical distance suggested in the title. Strangely, though, the song, as if awaiting the "traumatic experience" that I spoke of earlier to happen, would not allow itself to be completed until the catastrophe had occurred. Some songs are tricky like that and it is wise to keep your wits about you when dealing with them. I find quite often that the songs I write seem to know more about what is going on in my life than I do. I have pages and pages of fourth verses for this song written while the relationship was still sailing happily along. One such verse went:

The Camellia, The Magnolia
Have such a pretty flower
And the bells of St. Mary's
Inform us of the hour

Pretty words, Innocent words, unaware that any day the bottom would drop out of the whole thing. Love songs that attach themselves to actual experience, that are a poeticising of real events have a peculiar beauty unto themselves. They stay alive in the same way that memories do and being alive, they grow up and undergo changes and develop. A love song such as Far From Me has found a personality beyond the one that I originally gave it with the power to influence my own feelings around the actual event itself. This is an extraordinary thing and one of the truly wondrous benefits of song writing. The songs that I have written that deal with past relationships have become the relationships themselves. Through these songs I have been able to mythologize the ordinary events of my life, lifting them from the temporal plane and hurling them way into the stars. The relationship described in Far From Me has been and gone but the song itself lives on, keeping a pulse running through my past. Such is the singular beauty of song-writing.

Twenty years of song-writing has now past and still the void gapes wide. Still that inexplicable sadness, the duende, the saudade, the divine discontent persists and perhaps it will continue until I see the face of god himself. But when Moses desired to see the face of God, Exodus 33, 188, he was answered that he may not endure it, no man could see his face and live. Well, me, I don´t mind. I `m happy to be sad. For the residue, cast off in this search, the songs themselves, my crooked brood of sad eyed children, rally round and in their way, protect me, comfort me and keep me alive. They are the companions of the soul that lead it into exile, that safe the overpowering yearning for that which is not of this world. The imagination desires an alternate and through the writing of the love song, one sits and dines with loss and longing, madness and melancholy ecstasy, magic, joy and love with equal measures of respect and gratitude. The spiritual quest has many faces – religion, art, drugs, work, money, sex – but rarely does the search serve god so directly and rarely are the rewards so great in doing.

via everything2.com

beautiful.

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if you're going to do it, do it right...

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:21:00 -0800

A lot of you have probably seen Outback's ads lately touting their veteran's day special offering a free Bloomin' Onion to those serving or that have served in the military. While I completely respect their intentions, it strikes me as a bit half-hearted, especially while other establishments, such as Applebee's, are offering a whole meal free.

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Thoughts on ideas

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:12:00 -0800

I've been mulling over ideas lately, how to bring them to life and how to tease them from groups of people and I recently stumbled upon some writing by Jonathan Harris (co-creator of WeFeelFine) entitled World Building in a Crazy World. It is comprised of 15 short vignette's centered around his thoughts on where we are, digitally speaking as a society and how best to move forward. A few things jumped out at me, the first being:

I believe in mystery and generally keep an open mind even to its wildest suggestions. Mystery can be a valuable tool for making work, especially if your work is less about how the world currently is, and more about how the world someday could be.

And the second:

...my first principle—that each project should be based on a universally understandable idea.
The next two principles followed from there—that each project should be executed as simply as possible, and that each project should possess an element of play, nostalgia, or beauty to humanize it and bring it to life.
So—a universal idea executed simply, with an element of play, nostalgia or beauty.

I know a lot of this seems obvious and elementary, but I think it's that mindset that often shoves aside these simple principles (curiosity and simplicity), which almost always leaves ideas confusing and wrought in the mire of imitation and complexity.

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Hype and hoopla

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:00:00 -0700

My girlfriend's father recently pointed out the Time's article on Google Wave. This struck me, is it weird that Time is covering Google Wave, when I'd suspect the majority of its readers still need twitter explained to them? Not to mention the fact most people don't even have access to Google Wave yet?

I am not against it, this isn't a dig on demographics and who's ahead of the curve or not, but Time is not necessarily the first place I'd go to keep up on Technology. Seems older publications are rushing out to discuss a new platform determined not to be late again (a la Twitter, which depending on your audience, you still may not be too late to run those Twitter articles).

Anyway, what I'm more curious about is how this affects adoption rates and the hype cycle?

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Apologies

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:52:00 -0700

It's been too long. I know, I haven't called, I haven't written. I shouldn't resort to over explaining excuses, below is one of the things I've been working on over the summer. Plan on seeing me back here very soon.

Also, kept myself busy with a few triathlons and fundraisers. What did you do this summer?

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smokes mellifluous paraphernalia

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:58:00 -0700

The above is a video a friend sent over yesterday. A dig on twitter that hits the strange microblogging culture pretty squarely. (And as Alexander mentioned on the Leo Burnett blog, I agree there are people who'd actually be interested in this.) Also, speaking of, the same blog pointed out the Facebook status generator. Amazing how quickly something can turn into a chore.

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