As you may have seen on our Facebook, Mindclay has recently re-vamped our Creative Lab. It is, in a word, awesome.

A few months ago, our company’s building won best office space of Tampa Bay. Just imagine how we’ll compete again next year. Is there a higher rank than best?

With neon green walls, exposed brick, a ping pong table and a makeshift corner studio, this new Creative Lab certainly does foster one thing above all else: creativity.

(Did I mention the brand new dry-erase wall? Yep. We’ve got one of those, now.)

And in light of all the miraculous doodling that has already begun, Mindclay’s Creative Director Marc Battaglia has instituted a brand new competition: Best Doodle Wins.

‘Wins what?’ you might ask. What is the grand prize? Only the best thing ever. Bragging rights.

Yes, whoever wins the weekly doodle competition gets to hold their ego high, chin to the sky, knowing that they – against all odds – beat out the steep competition, holding the title of “Best Doodler”.

So here’s where you come in. You as the viewer/reader/blogger/Facebooker/GooglePlus-er get to vote on whichever your favorite is. Once we post the images, you get to vote for your favorite! Plus, Like, Comment On, whatever!

Because the only thing that fosters creativity better than our kickass new creative space is good, healthy competition. :)

Sometimes a simple graph says more then an entire blog, check out the growth below of Google+ when compared to Twitter & Facebook. Click here for a larger view by Leon Haland , very interesting!

Once in a while, there are moments that call for no conversation, because that moment is so beautiful and perfect already… without all the noise of nouns and adjectives.

In that mindset, here’s a video with absolutely no explanation, but one you will enjoy.

Image via Wikipedia

From the moment I walked into my first Five Guys, I was in awe.  All the peanuts you can eat, a simple no-nonsense menu, and a burger buried in a bag of tasty fries.   Forget Jimmy Buffet.  The stark white and red-trimmed interior of Five Guys is the true cheeseburger paradise.  But I digress…

In light of this Ode to Five Guys (I swear I have no stake in the company), you’d think I go there all the time, and, for a while, that was the case.  But no more.  Now I try to avoid the place for two reasons.  One, as much as I love it, I know the food’s only real purpose is to take up permanent residence in my arteries.  Two, the “new” wore off.    Yes, I’m no more than a shallow reflection of society at large.  I gobble up novelty and then, unless there’s a more meaningful permanence to the relationship, I move on.

Now, I do have a reason for writing all of this and, rest assured, it has little to do with actual hamburgers.  The point is, there’s change in the air.    Google+ is waving its digital fist at Facebook and Twitter.  Once fresh off the fryer,  these platforms are starting to lose their exotic  hamburger sizzle.  The fries are cooling.    Some people are starting to see them for what they are.  Still tasty, but, are they what you really want, now that you can see past the “new”?    And what about this Google+?   This may or may not be the new contender that topples the old.  However, you know something will.   It’s only a matter of time – meaning we’re all going to have to be nimble in the next few years.  We can expect the first wave of social media players who need to find and “early adopt”  new online communities as a means of maintaining a hold on the cutting edge.   Then the masses, scared of irrelevance, follow whether they’re truly personally motivated or not.  Not making judgements here.  That’s just organisms in flow, and systems in flux.

I sense the current is turning against Facebook and Twitter.  I’m not predicting their out and out demise or downfall.  Just saying that humans are predictable.   In real estate and desirable destinations, whether they’re real or virtual,  allure comes not with the established old haunts, but with what’s around the corner.

That said, I still love Five Guys. I swear I’ll still visit every once in a while.

There’s no doubt.  Our world of shared media and endless distribution outlets – oh, internet, you bane and blessing – forces all of us to continually shift our weight in a struggle to find the right equilibrium.   We want to share.  We don’t want to steal.    It used to be that only professional journalists had to wrestle with these issues.  Now, we’re all in it together.

Witness what’s been happening in the last couple of days over at the Huffington Post.   Ad Age’s “MediaGuy”, Simon Dumenco, wrote an article, alleging and decrying the Huffington Post’s practice of helping themselves to other writers’ content, all in the name of “aggregation”.   Specifically, Dumenco cites the use of material from one of his earlier AdAge articles which magically found it’s way  -  somewhat reworked – onto HuffPo‘s pages.  Apparently, HuffPo responded with an indefinite suspension of the writer in question. In turn, Dumenco now says HuffPo missed the point –  it wasn’t just one writer being irresponsible.  Dumenco maintains that, in fact, that writer was simply following long-established practices that are at the very core of HuffPo’s way of doing business.  He asserts that the methods in question flow from the top, with accountability resting on the shoulders of HuffPo Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Arianna Huffington.

Personally, I’m a longstanding HuffPo fan.  I don’t always agree with their individual stances, but I have enjoyed the site as a convenient one-stop for news and opinion.  With no direct insight on Dumenco’s allegations, and no knowledge of the Huffington’s Post’s actual established practices, I would simply guess that some protocols will be reassessed, if nothing else than for the sake of good PR.   However, I do think this incident serves to cast light on a broader ethical issue that affects us all: Are we in the blogging community acting responsibly as pass-throughs for the works of others?   What, exactly, are the new rules for sharing, attribution, and aggregation?    I’m sure upcoming classes of media and communications students will sit through lengthy dissertations on the subject.  As for the rest of us, it looks like some may have to learn the hard way.

I am writing to you, personally and directly.   Yes, YOU!

What?  You think this blog goes out to the masses and there’s no way I can anticipate and cater to the attention and interests of one isolated blog reader?  Not so!

Alas, I haven’t the time needed to delve into the whole superpowers backstory.  Suffice to say, several years back, I fell into a giant industrial vat of some mega-syllable caustic chemical compound and emerged with the power to anticipate individual bloggers’ interests and thoughts.

There, now that we’ve established trust….

Again, I’m talking to you.  What are you doing not creating?  Ha!!  I’ve called you out on it.  I know.  You rationalize that you ARE creative in some ways, and that your life really doesn’t offer enough creative outlets, and that if you did try to be more creative, you’d simply be out-shined by others.  Well, that’s just kitchen swill for pigs! (aka, hogwash)

This is YOUR time to be creative.  Why?  Because you’re desperately needed.  Have you looked around lately?  Wait, I’ve just been handed a list by our Aggregators of Calamitous Events and Ruinous Maladies (CERM) here at Mindclay Central.  Posting the abridged version:

.

As with all lists, even our own Aggregators will admit this one is imperfect and subject to the variances of personal priorities and differing views.  You are welcome to make your own.

The point is – there’s a lot of work to do and, really, most of it boils down to creativity. These are, inarguably, momentous times.  Momentous times require greatness on all fronts, but especially in the areas of inspiration and creativity.  We’ve never been in more dire need of creative solutions.  At the same time, there’s never been such a woeful dearth of them.   The great thing is creativity, when unleashed, is pretty much self-perpetuating and takes all forms, from technical innovation, to inspired leadership, to new ways of communicating and sharing ideas.

Now, as we’ve established earlier, I’m imbued with a special type of blog clairvoyance.  I can sense that you have what it takes. You’re capable of tons more than just sitting on the sidelines and tossing snark bombs. You’ve got the ability to truly contribute and make a dent in at least one of the problems on your own personal CERM list.   So, that’s it. Life is all about creation.  You are a creative being.   Therefore, it’s your responsibility to outweigh destruction with creation – to counterbalance decay with improvement – at every possible moment.

Hey, what do you mean you’re pointing the finger back at me!?   You’re asking if I’ve made any dents on my own CERM list?  Fine! Not that I have anything to prove, but rest assured that, from this point forward,  I’ll work on creative solutions to Endless Transformers Movies and Couscous.   I think I’ll start by writing to my congressional representatives  (I might mention the debt ceiling impasse while I’m at it).

As the title implies, this post is all about getting your hands dirty.  In fact, this is a bold-faced celebration of dirty hands – not in the Rod Blagodevich style – but more like this:

Yes, those are honest to goodness dirty hands.   They belong to these people:

The Crew: Chance Qin, Max Baird, Gary Grant, Nick RIghi, Sealii King

And why are their hands dirty?  Because warehouses are dirty.  Why were they in a warehouse?  Because that’s the environment we needed in order to have enough “elbow room” for shooting miniature sets requiring extremely deep backgrounds.  It’s all for a project that plays with  forced perspective shots (among other visual tricks).  This is the team that kindly agreed to participate in the craziness this weekend, willing to sacrifice some of their hard-earned time off for sake of visual experimentation.  It’s what we at Mindclay  call an “incubator” project.   Fun material and definitely a great creative challenge, but also a test of the fortitude of all involved.  Conditions included:

The aforementioned dirt

Oppressive heat and sweltering conditions

Hot lights

A fog machine that wouldn’t play nice

Bald guy making things up as he went along

But it wasn’t all trial and tribulation.  We had some fun along the way.

"I don't know what it is, BUT I LIKE IT!"

Sealii + Fog Machine = Smoke Monster!

"Don't ask, just go with it!"

Can’t wait to share the finished results with you.  But, for the time being, I’ll offer this shout out to our weekend visual effects crew – Nick, Sealii, Chance, Max, Sarah, Suzanne – awesome job everybody!    Next time I promise less dirt and more beverages!

This edition of Coolest Things in the Universe “focuses” on a very cool newly-developed technology by some smartypants in Mountain View, CA.

It’s a camera person’s dream… Shoot first, focus later.

Fiction? Nope. But it is being called the start of a “picture revolution.”

The science behind it is pretty cool. Lytro, a company concentrated on the innovation of images, is developing a new kind of camera  based on “light field” technology, something previously considered unimaginable for a standard camera to be able to capture. Light field technology captures all the light rays streaming into the camera, in contrast to standard cameras that just interpret all the light as one light source. This makes it possible for the camera to interpret light hitting items from the immediate foreground to the distant background.

With this technology, they’ve also created a software that allows user to interface with the images in a completely new way. They call it the “living photograph”. (Check it out here!)

With this combination of tools, someone can take a photo (without focusing), load the photo on their computer, and then have the ability and flexibility to focus at any focal length on the image.

Obviously, the implications of this technology are huge.

Users will be able to take photos much faster, have infinite flexibility, and (just as impressively) they’ll be able to do so in much lower light since there is so much light being captured through the sensor. And if that weren’t enough, this technology also works with the rapidly expanding 3D trend, as it’s images can also be 3D images.

Also, makes you wonder when this technology will spread to digital video…

Because of the amazing potential of this super-cool technology, Lytro’s “Living Picture” development has landed one of the titles of “Coolest Things in the Universe”.

Check out this video & see for yourself!

When things change, people start to get nervous. And by people I mean corporations with obscene amounts of money at stake. And by things changing, I mean everything.

With respect to the current public entertainment trends, everything is digital, online, in the palm of the consumer’s hands. And with this enormous shift in entertainment trends from television to all the current options, it’s not surprising that things would start to get confusing, and a little heated.

The hard-lined regulations for TV, commercials, movies, and the like, are becoming more and more blurred at an unprecedented rate.

Discussions are beginning to surface on a wide variety of topics that are unfamiliar to most. And when network money is involved, the discussions quickly turn into debates on the ownership of digital space, defining the rules for digital content streaming, determining geographic limitations on advertising when everything is online, and so on.

These are very complex and ambiguous topics, topics that – until recently – have either not existed or had hard definitive answers. But with change comes confusion.

Recently, Viacom has taken out their war paint, and prepared for legal battle. They started, first, with Time Warner. (Specifically Time Warner Cable’s iPod app.) And literally, a day after they came up from air on that one, they dove right back in with Cablevision, again, about their iPad app.

What has gotten Viacom so pissed off? Well, the deal is this:

Viacom claims to have not given permission to stream their programming on the iPad. And Cablevision claims that the iPad app functions exactly as a television would, thus no licensing agreements have been broken.

(You can read a full article on this here.)

What I think is interesting is this: there is no clear legal precedent on matters like these, because the technology has blossomed so recently. I’m interested in the months following this debate, what happens in this courtroom, and the inevitable hundreds more on cases just like this.

What changes in restrictions and in availability will there be?

And with new amazing technologies like this developing, will there ever be an answer to questions like “who owns the air”?

Image by Daniel Slaughter via Flickr

Often times, I see people thanking others for following them on Twitter, a bad habit carried over from older types of media, in which the one being observed thanks the audience for observing.

Thanks for watching!

Thanks for listening!

Thanks for following me!

However, when you come to think of it, people don’t follow you to do you a favor. They do it entirely for selfish purposes. They follow you because you give them information, because you entertain them, because you answer questions for them (or that are at least relevant to them), because you give them something they want… Because you give them value.

That’s right. The real value of a follow is the value you decide to give, not the other way around.

If anything, they’re the ones that should thank you.

But I know… I get it. We’re the ones being observed, so we want to show them our fake humility so that they like us more. We’re so desperate to be liked, that we look for ways to boost that approval even in people that have already decided to listen to us.

The risk we run in thanking people for following us is in thinking they’re the ones doing you a favor, when it’s actually quite the opposite. You’re the one serving them, therefore the responsibility to be awesome, to deliver great content, to help, all of the above is entirely upon your shoulders. Stray away from this mission, and your online persona turns bland, self-serving and non-valuable.

Do you want your followers, subscribers and likers to like you more? Here’s what to do: Keep giving ‘em great stuff. Heck, give out your best stuff. And do it in volume. And for free.

Not only will they like you, they will thank you, reward you, and refer you to others that will follow you the same.

And no, I won’t thank you for reading this… But I do sincerely hope this was of value to you. :)

Related articles

• The Twitter Thanking Crisis (ninabadzin.com)
• Come, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow me (vielmetti.typepad.com)