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I shall soon be adding a few new designs to the Blogcards range.
Any requests?
[PS:] I’m also having all the “©gapingvoid.com” tags removed from the front of the blogcards (they’re still on a few of them, but not all). They look tacky.

May 30, 2005

joi ito’s print

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Joi Ito has commisioned me to turn his business card design (i.e. the cartoon above) into a signed, limited edition of 50 fine art prints.
Signed, numbered, large poster size, heavyweight paper. All that good stuff.
We first talked about doing it over a year ago. Took us a while to get around to it. He was busy, I was busy, yada yada yada.
Thanks, Joi! This should be fun!

France rejects the European Constitution.

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France says “Non” to the 250-odd-page, intellectually bankrupt train wreck that is the EU Constitution (beta version). As France was one of the founding six members of the European Union (Britain wasn’t), it’s big news.
Hey Guys, next time you draft a proposed constitution, try to keep it under 1000 words. If you can’t, it probably means you haven’t really given it sufficient thought.
[UPDATE:] Jarvis pipes in:

It’s about trying to turn Europe in to a faux nation. It’s about protectionism. It’s about Europe thinking it is a world player when it is no longer. And it’s about a bad constitution that made up for in bureaucracy what it lacked in vision.

The Europe project has been around for over 40 years. Not once in the last 10 years have I heard any big-time Europhile ever try to answer the very simple question: “What problem is the current ‘Europe’ project actually trying to solve?“
Besides the problem of Eurocrats not having enough money, power or freebies, that is.

boris on the bbc

Boris Johnson, Conservative MP and mid-ranking celeb has a go at the Beeb:

Is this Britain, my friends, or is this some Central American dictatorship, circa 1970? I can think of only one reason for having a television in Oxfordshire, and that is so that I can refuse to pay Goodbody his confounded

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clay shirky on tagging

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More words from The Master: “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.“

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units — the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging — free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints — seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

Pay attention, Sig.

May 29, 2005

british blog rankings

The most linked-to British blogs, according to Technorati.
I’m ranked Number Three…

blogging and self-interest

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[UPDATE: Good news– Loic Lemeur has kindly agreed to also appear on the panel.]
I’ve been asked to hold a panel discussion at Reboot 7.0.
Here’s the plan:
Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Loic Lemeur and me will interview each other.
The main focus will be: What makes for successful blogging.
By “successful”, I mean, blogging in such a way that transforms your life and career in a positive way. That could mean money, or job, or social status, or personal stuff.
I have some questions I’d like to ask Doc and Robert on this subject. And hopefully they’ll have a few zingers to send my way.
I’d also like to bring up a few contentious issues. What landmines to avoid etc. Ethical issues etc. The politics invloved with blogs and keeping other bloggers’ goodwill intact.
We’ll do this for a bit, get things rolling then open up the discussion with everyone in the audience.
There’s a lot of people out there asking the question, “OK, I know blogs work. And I know blogs work very well for other people. But I haven’t figured out how to get it to work FOR ME yet. Not like how I’d want to. What do I have to do to make it happen?“
I find “blogging and self-interest” an endlessly fascinating subject. I’d like to use the panel to help bring that conversation more out into the open.
I’ll see you in Copenhagen.
[UPDATE:] Scoble gives it a mention.
[RELATED:] From Ross Mayfield: “Fear and greed is driving Social Software.”

May 28, 2005

pussy

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angel ted

nature abhors a vacuum

[Link to The Cluetrain.]

grosse fugue op.133

The BBC’s Radio 3 will be playing every single last note of Beethoven between the 5th and 10th of June. Rock on.
Beethoven is it for me. All the other geniuses– Michaelangelo, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Van Gough, Saul Steinberg, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Einstein etc– are secondary.
We think we know his work. Da da da dum etc. But seriously, how many of us have actually listened to Beethoven’s Ninth from beginning to end, in one sitting? It’s is a screaming hymn to humanity, triumphant and reflective and longing and unapologetic, when absorbed in its entirety.
Here’s a tip: a classical musician friend of mine once descrtibed Track 1 on this CD, Grosse Fugue Op.133 as “the greatest piece of music ever written, played by the greatest string quartet in the world.” He was not far wrong. I first heard the recording a few years before my friend gave me his glowing review.
Beethoven has been dead for over 150 years, and yet today it still sounds avant guarde, especially in the hands of Arditti & Co.
The first time I heard it, I was blown away. Never, before or since, had a piece of music fried my head in such a mind-expanding moment of incandescent lucidity.
“I’m Beethoven. And you’re not.” Heh.
[PS: My other fave composers are Bach, Schubert, Faure and Janicek.]

i want to sing

london geek dinner (cont.)

The London Geek Dinner on June 7th now stands at well over 150 people. Wow.
Robert Scoble and his wife, Maryam will be there, of course. Also looking forward to seeing a lot of blogging buddies again: Euan, Neil, Gia, Sig, Neville, Lee etc.
Loic Lemeur might make it but he [cough] hasn’t confirmed yet.
Lots of Microsoft people are coming. The place will be utterly swarming with them.
Then two days later we’re off to Reboot 7.0.
Looks like it’s getting busy ’round here.

May 27, 2005

blogger’s wine freebie 2345

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[UPDATED SEPTEMBER 22, 2005: The promo is now CLOSED. To see how other bloggers reacted to receiving their wine freebie, please visit the wiki.] [This page translated into French here.]

In order to give you guys a better idea about what I’m doing with Stormhoek, I’ve been allowed to give out some free samples.
Anybody want a free bottle of the pre-release 2005? Then you can find out what the whole “Freshness” angle means first hand.
BAR stormhoek freebie.jpg
(Stormhoek bottle arrived in mail with Name and Individual Number etc.)
Three things are needed.

1. You have to live in France [the UK and Irish freebies are now closed, sorry].
2. You have to be a blogger over 18 years old, with a regularly updated blog at least 3 months old.
3. You have to send me an e-mail with the words “Blogger’s Wine Freebie 2345″ in the title (the “2345” number makes it easier to keep track of the e-mails and makes them harder to get lost etc.).
Please include your full name, your blog URL, your mailing address (including the country), and a written statement that confirms both that you’re over 18 and your date of birth.

You’re under no obligation to blog about Stormhoek in exchange for the free bottle, of course. I just thought making it “Bloggers Only” would be a neat idea.
But if you want to tell your friends and readers about this freebie offer over the next wee while, that would be really cool. Share the love etc. Thanks.

(gratuitous product shot– hooray!)
If some lawyer comes breathing down my neck, I reserve the right to change the conditions of the offer.
It’ll be interesting to hear what the blogosphere has to say. I hope to hear from you. Thanks again.
[ENCORE:] To see how other bloggers reacted to receiving their wine freebie, please visit the wiki.

autoblogger

“Have you noticed how every one of my cartoons has been pretty much the same recently? Yep, AutoBlogger can generate graphics as well. Now go buy a $3000 suit.”

dvd hell

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To all my hacker friends:
My dear mother came back from a trip to the US last week.
She brought back all these new DVDs.
Oh Dear! They don’t seem to work in the UK. Some kind of baked-in market protectionism, no doubt.
Can anyone steer me in the right direction for possibly fixing this problem? Can a DVD player be reconfigured, or something?
Or is the problem unfixable, and DVD makers just plain evil?
Any help on this would be really appreciated. Thanks.

May 26, 2005

blogvertising: “advertising is dead” reason #8647

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Long-time readers of gapingvoid will remember from early 2004, when I spent a lot of time talking about my friend, Dave MacKenzie’s film “Young Adam”.
Dave has a new movie coming out, and Yours Truly will soon be blogging about that one as well, you lucky duckies.
Back when I was writing about Youg Adam, I was playing around with the idea of “blogvertising”… using a blog a way to spread commercial ideas (as opposed to commercial messages– and yes, there’s a huge difference).
Sure, I was delighted to be helping my friend promote his new movie. But the “Blogvertising” idea utterly fascinated me, and that’s what made me really get into high gear for Dave.

My audience reads my cartoons for free, in exchange they let me drone on about my friend’s movie. It’s not a bad deal. Besides, all the Young Adam plugs are clearly marked with a wee icon on the top. So it’s easy enough for folk to skip over– it’s relatively non-intrusive.
“Blogvertising” is a format that’s not limited to the dreaded 30-second TV commercial, the beyond-useless webpage banner ad, the overcrowded magazine page, the half-second flash of billboards, or the despised junk-mail paper mountain. Yeah, as somebody who’s been watching advertising closely for over a decade, I think it’s pretty huge.
The only issue is how much does it cost to get the demographically-correct eyeballs to log onto gapingvoid.

Then this year other projects came along. First English Cut, then Thingamy, and then Stormhoek.
While none of these three examples are technically paying me “to blog”, I have a business interest in seeing each one of these projects succeed. Ergo I find them genuinely interesting. Ergo I write about them. Ergo my readers hear about them. Ergo it helps get the ideas out. Ergo this helps drive the businesses forward.
Suddenly it occurs to me… besides my pet cartoon projects (t-shirts, books etc), this is basically all I’m doing for a living these days. For all intents and purposes, I’m a professional blogvertiser.
I’ve been thinking hard about blogvertising for a while. I really like the business model. Why?
In a word– “Overheads”.

1. A blogvertising capaign needs three things: an engaging blogger, an internet connection, and the cost of getting eyeballs in front of the homepage.
2. A traditional advertising campaign needs all sort of expensive stuff. Besides the expensive media and the insanely expensive production (they only REALLY want to sell you TV, let’s stop kidding ourselves), it has to pay for an advertising agency, the agency’s payroll (with all those lovely back-room jobs), the agency’s rent on the fancy office in downtown Manhattan, the fancy designer furniture that fills the office etc etc.
3. The latter’s final list is very long and all of it is insanely expensive. And unlike the blogvertising overheads, none of it is getting any cheaper.

There’s another three points to consider:

1. There has to be authenticity and genuine alignment, or else it won’t work. What the advertiser is doing and what I’m doing has to be somehow in sympatico, or else it’s just like traditional advertising– useless, overpriced, interruptive, huckstering slush.
2. Juxtaposing my ideas with the advertiser’s ideas inform both parties’ agendae, so the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Working with gapingvoid made English Cut more fertile, and vice versa. Same with Thingamy and Stormhoek with myself. Two plus two equals five etc.
3. This allows me to actually test The Hughtrain in real life, not just write about it in theory.

So if you’re an advertiser, perhaps you’d like to compare the cost of keeping me alive, versus the cost of meeting the payroll of your average ad agency. Do the math, then maybe drop me an e-mail if you want to discuss this idea further. Rock on.

english cut: four months on

Last week on May 19th, English Cut turned four months old.
Wow. It seems a lot longer than that.
Thomas is going to the States in two weeks, his second US visit under the “English Cut” banner. Last time he measured his new customers; this time they’ll be having their first fittings. The proof of the pudding is in the eating etc.
[My main observation:] Though it’s nice to have had all this blogosphere-generated interest (which directly led to a lot of new business), true value in tailoring is created by how many long-term clients you have. Regular, repeat business over a stretch of many years.
No big media spike can replace that. So it’s still very early days. I reckon it’ll be at least three years before I’ll be able to know how vaible this business really is. But I’m optimisitic.

stormhoek: my latest gig

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BAR stormhoek2.jpg
I was down South last week, attending the London International Wine & Spirit Fair.
I’ve been asked by my buddy, Jason Korman of Orbital Wines to start working on their “Stormhoek” brand.
Stormhoek (pronounced “Storm-hook”) is a South African wine, and it’s very good stuff.
The Stormhoek schtick is “Freshness Matters”. I just wrote The Stormhoek Manifesto. Go check it out.
[CAVEAT:] Though I’ve been asked to write the Stormhoek blog, I wouldn’t call myself a wine expert. But I’m hoping the blog won’t be about wine per se; more about the wine business etc.
Whatever. It’s early days. Let’s see what happens.

May 25, 2005

dramatic moment

May 24, 2005

a very radical advertising idea: business models that don’t suck.

From The New York Times: Advertisers getting less and less happy with their agencies’ product:

“In the 80’s, we used to fight with clients over creative. In the 90’s, it was about strategy. Now, it’s only about money,” said Jonathan Bond, co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners in New York.
[Thanks to Dave Parmet for the link]

That’s it in a nutshell. From creative, to strategy, to mere commodity within a few short years. The world evolving, faster than the service they offer.
When I read this kind of stuff I am reminded of the words a global brand director a very large company once told me about agencies: “Their business models suck and they’re expensive for what you get.“
I suppose the thing to do is have business models than don’t suck, that offer stuff that isn’t expensive. Sadly for Madison Avenue, people who make a lot of money in big agencies aren’t allowed to do that. Not if they want to keep their jobs.

May 23, 2005

book proposal (rewrite #471)

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“How To Be Creative“
A book by by Hugh MacLeod
[As regular gapingvoid readers will know, I’m hoping to turn <a href=”“How To Be Creative” into a book. This is my latest attempt to write the book proposal, as I see it in its finished form. Apologies in advance if you’ve already seen a lot of this before.]
In 2004 I wrote a post on my blog called “How To Be Creative”. Its premise was very simple:

“So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years.”

It really wasn’t so much a How-To laundry list, “The 7 Steps Of Highly Effective Creatives” etc. It was more of a series of meditations on the lessons I had learned the hard way over the years, as I tried to bridge the nearly impossible gap of making an OK living without letting my soul die from the inside out.
Somehow it ended up striking a chord with a lot of people. Lots of people ended up reading it (my best estimate is around half a million to the million mark). It went viral, to put it mildly. Later it ended up as a PDF file on Seth Godin’s ChangeThis.com. At last count it was the third most downloaded PDF on the site, topping manifestos written by people far more famous and talented than me, like Tom Peters or Guy Kawasaki.
Like I said, it hit a nerve.
Most of the Change This manifestos were written by people to be read by their peers. People in their thirties and forties, interested in the same kind of business-orientated subjects, whatever. Mine wasn’t. Mine was written for people far more younger than me– kids just leaving college, or folk who haven’t been in the real world very long, just looking to figure things out for the first time. Kids who want to do the same as me when I too was just starting out– stay alive spiritually while still being able to function in an adult world, without being eaten alive or turned into robots.
A few months later I started getting people from the publishing world asking me if I would be interested in turning it into a book. Of course I would, who wouldn’t? So they asked me to write a book proposal. This is what you’re reading now.
[RSS READERS: CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE THING.]

(more…)

food for thought:

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From an interview between The Hollywood Reporter and American Express Global Brand Director, John Hayes:

THR: And, of course, to every project you say yes to, you have to say no to dozens of others.
Hayes: Absolutely. There’s one other trend I think is worth noting — a few weeks ago, I asked a group to tell me about their favorite Starbucks commercial.
THR: The point being, there are none.
Hayes: Somebody said, “Well, they’re on every corner, they don’t need one.” But 10 years ago, they weren’t on any corner. Brands are not being built on advertising. You’re seeing this with more and more companies. If you fly Jet Blue, you talk about the experience. That’s how you build brands today, through experiences.

Thanks to Modern Marketing for the link, and for also supplying this doozie:

However, old-school ad boys like Mark Wnek think that the ad industry will take all this in it’s stride, because as he states in today’s Independent, the web is really just a “canvas for commercial messaging”.
Wnek believes that ad guys will just turn their skills effortlessly from one medium to the next. After all, he points out, “Who will fill these canvases in a way that excites consumers? The creative ladies and gentlemen who live in advertising agencies, that’s who.”

I’d make a comment if I weren’t so distracted by all the Schadenfreude welling up inside me.

May 22, 2005

let me kiss

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textbook hughtrain

Seth Godin writes about a painter who really made his day.

Two months later, I get an email saying the painting is ready and has been shipped. I send him a check, made out to his new name, on faith. A day later, a painting arrives by Federal Express. From Israel. With a handwritten invoice.
The painting is terrific – even better than the original. But more important to us is the story. Not sure what you can do with it, but thought you’d want to hear it.

I know exactly what to do with it, Seth. Cite it as textbook Hughtrain: “The market for something to believe in is infinite.“
Exactly.

“extreme business modelling”

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One of my favorite gapingvoid posts was something I wrote last July, to do with preferring my own business models, over other people’s:

The thing I like about gapingvoid is it has allowed me to do my thing (for fun and yes, profit) without having to marry myself to somebody else’s business model. Especially somebody else’s LOUSY business model, which traditional publishing basically is.
The older I get, the less I like other people’s business models. I prefer my own business models, thank you very much.
This is what the internet is really about– this is what causes the excitement. It’s all about giving more people control over their own business models, not relying on third parties to supply them. This is true in publishing, retail, advertising, the law, you name it.

And I had similar thoughts in “How To Be Creative”:

11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There’s no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.

So it looks like Sig’s been doing some similar thinking with what I think is a very compelling idea, “Extreme Business Modelling”:

A few important aspects of extreme programming, eh, extreme business-modelling:
Write a user story. Explore the value for the customer!
[Extreme business-planning specific: Acid test your pricing and margins. If you could easily deliver at half the price of the competition, you may be good. If you’re pretty sure you can deliver at 1/10th you’ll have the leeway to play really loose ]
The customer (even the potential one) is always available. Involve the customer, use him, make him a part of the process.
Pair programming and collective code ownership. Involve the customer again, let him have ownership to your product!
Make frequent small releases. Test one thing at a time, don’t get stuck with a half-baked and untested complete plan.
Iterate and integrate often. Test and try, go back make better, test and try again, go back.
Leave optimisation till last. When it gels, shape the last parts, refine when the basics are right!

He is talking about his software company, of course, but the idea extends far beyond software.
Nothing wrong with extreme business modelling. Look at Wal Mart. Look at Dell. Look at the future that awaits most of us.
[Disclaimer: Sig and I are doing some work together.]

free savile row suit

Tom’s giving away one of his old suits. We are being FLOODED with e-mails as a result.
Because the suits are designed to last 10 – 20 years, it’s not uncommon to hand them down, usually to a son, grandson, or if you’re a tailor, to your apprentice. As Tom has none of the above, he just randomly decided to offer it to one of his readers.
Tom reckons the suit has about another 10 years of normal wear left in it. Check it out if you’re interested.

joi feels the strain

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(A cartoon I drew last year, inspired by Joi’s hectic life.)
Joi Ito is feeling the strain of maintaining a well known and highly-regarded blog:

Of course, this is just a rehash of an old discussion of collapsing contexts, but I find myself struggling with this bloggers block more and more these days. I find myself hanging out on the IRC channel chatting about things that in the past I would be blogging about. I definitely feel like my blog is going [from] edgy to broad and boring.

My two cents:
1. Every blogger who’s been doing it for a while will have the same conversation eventually. Like I said recently, sometimes real life takes over etc. Joi’s just being brave by bringing it up in public.
2. The good news is, “Blog Burnout” is relatively easy to fix, because it’s usually not a symptom of blogging per se, but of blogging too often. So the cure is very simple: Blog less. Take your time, post less often, and put more thought in between postings. Your readers will adjust to the new pace eventually, and if they don’t, who cares? Readers who are hostile to natural change are probably not the kind of readers you want to hold on to, anyway.

May 21, 2005

new blog from tom peters

From everybody’s favorite bizpornographer, Tom Peters, comes a very promising new blog, TPWireservice. This comes only days after Tom announced he was cutting back on the blog-writing bit. I’m guessing the two events are not unrelated.
It’s got some really cool stuff on it. Congrats to everyone involved with it.

our grandparents had laurel and hardy

Steve Rubel writes a thoughtful post about the recent “Blogging Backlash” going on.

What eMarketer totally neglected to talk about, however, is what the opportunity is for the companies that do decide to be brave and take the plunge. For example…

Significant competitive advantage –you could become the loudest voice
in a channel where your competitors are absent
Press and consumers read blogs — either willingly (RSS/bookmarks) or unwillingly (Google); like it or not they influence purchases
Blogging ain’t going away. The conversation is going to go on without you. Be there or be square.
Blogs are a cost-effective marketing tool that helps smaller and mid-sized companies generate more attention. Just look at Stonyfield Farms.

Blog bashing doesn’t phase me too much– I actually find it rather entertaining. What can I say? It’s rather fun watching people being wrong, again and again, for the same “I have a dumbass suit & tie job in a big company ergo I must be terribly important” reasons.
Our grandparents had Laurel and Hardy. We have blog bashers.
[BONUS LINK:] IBM makes its blogging policy public. It seems they are actively encouraging their 320,000 employees to start their own blogs. Rock on.

jeff jumps ship

Jeff Jarvis, one of my blogging heroes, just quit his job at Advance.net.
Am I surprised? Not really. He’s always been a bit of a visionary. The Avance product never was. Of course, I’m sure he did his best to coax the company along as far as he could, but there’s only so much you can do if somebody else is paying you a salary. This new gig of his (doing something for About.com) looks much more up his street.
Good luck, Jeffers!

british blogging

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Left London yesterday. Got home late last night.
The London Geek Dinner that Robert Scoble and I have organised on June 7th has topped 125 people. Wow.
It was going to be a sit-down affair. But the numbers have gotten so large it looks like it’ll have to be a buffet of some sort.
At the rate people are currently signing up, it looks like we may very well have 200 people turning up. Incidentally, 200 is also the number of people who attended Les Blogs in Paris last month, to give you an idea. And Paris seemed like a lot of people at the time. It’s like this big blogging confab just self-created itself in a London restaurant.
Lots going on with me these days. I met up with Alistair Shrimpton (Six Apart UK) for coffee yesterday. We were talking about how much the UK (and Europe) was lagging behind America in blogging terms. For example, how many British CEO’s are blogging? How many “A-Listers” are British? How many British ad agencies are using blogs to alter the marketing landscape? How many Brits are blogging to radically improve their business’s fortunes?
The Brits have a lot of catching up to do. But therein lies the opportunity for Alistaire, myself, and anybody else crazy enough to catch the blogging disease.

May 18, 2005

in london

I’m in London at the moment, and it’s all quite busy. Blogging light till the weekend etc.
The geek dinner in London with Robert Scoble on the 7th of June is nearly full. Please sign up ASAP if you’re coming, thanks.

May 16, 2005

the porous membrane (cont.)

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[Each company’s market is divided into two parts, (A) the internal conversation within the company, and (B) the external conversation with the outside world. The ideally porous “x-membrane” seperates the two.]
Recently I wrote about “The Porous Membrane– Why Corporate Blogging Works”. And I went on to talk about the porous “x-membrane”, the imaginary line that divides the conversation about your product and market between your company (A) and the outside world (B).

13. The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa.

I also said:

15. Of course this begs the question, why have a membrane “x” at all? Why bother with such a hierarchy?

Since then I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that. Exactly. Why divide the conversation into two bits, A and B. Is it really necessary?
Could “Complete Alignment” render the x-membrane obsolete?
And what about the sub-membranes? Membranes that divide ‘A’ into litle subdivisions? Must there be a membrane seperating, for example, accounting from marketing etc. etc.?
Food for thought etc. Meanwhile, I’m off to catch a train to London at lunchtime, where I’ll be till Friday. More later…

May 15, 2005

blog as if your life depended on it (for the next three months, anyway)

19 Comments

Back in February, I linked to a rather encouraging post from Tom Peters:

Blog As If Your Life Depended On It!
Blogging, I firmly believe, is the premier emergent marketing-brandbuilding-lovemarkcreating tool of our times! It is the premier way to have intimate-engaging-informative-WOWing “conversations” with Clients and prospects! This all goes double for small enterprises and niche enterprises; and goes triple for the Professional Services; and works wonders in the Public Sector as well.

So if Tom’s life depends on it, why did he decide to cut back on blogging, 3 months later? What, has Tom reverted to typical “Do as I say, not as I do” consultantspeak?
Heh. Probably not. I know where he’s coming from. Life is messy. Been close to giving up myself, more than once. Most bloggers I know well have also said the same. Sometimes real life takes over etc.
The reality is, blogging is hard, even for famous business gurus like Tom. It’s like figure skating– it looks easy, but it isn’t.
Expect a corporate backlash against blogging in about six months, once all the meatpuppets who read the recent Businessweek front-pager start finding this out the hard way.

May 14, 2005

recent conversation:

Friend: What’s the hardest part about corporate blog consulting?
Me: Getting the client to realise that the buggers don’t write themselves.

good conversations don’t care who start them

I’m not sure if I agree with Evelyn on this one:

Try putting your customers and your ecosystem’s conversations at the center of the hub — rather than your company’s. Even if it’s simply a conceptual idea, it’ll radically change the focus of your conversation.
Marketing is not all about getting out the company story. Your customers have stories too.

Good conversations don’t care who start them.

english cut u.s. tour june 9 – 16

US map small.jpg
English Cut is visiting three U.S. cities in June: New York, San Francisco and Chicago.
Anybody fancy a $3000 suit?

May 13, 2005

gapingshirts

Ditto for Neville Hobson:

Robert Scoble’s gapingvoid t-shirt arrived in the mail:

Just got home. I’m so excited! My GapingVoid shirt arrived. Maryam thinks it’s cool. Sorry, Maryam, you can’t steal my shirt. At least not until I wear it next week at the Syndicate conference.
I got the “was it good for you?” design.

Hugh’s right — high quality, well made and very nice indeed. I chose the “Was it good for you?” cartoon:

If you use Flickr, there’s a “gapingshirts” tag where you can upload pics of the shirts. Sebastian has already uploaded quite a few.
[SPEAKING OF SCOBLE:] The London Geek Dinner organised by Robert and me is booking up REALLY fast. Please check out the details and reserve a place if you’re coming. Thanks.

May 12, 2005

from hierarchy to wirearchy

A real gem from Jon Husband from last June:

From Hierarchy to Wirearchy: Overview
What do you do as a leader

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sex is nasty

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blogcards etc.

The cartoon above, “Wolf vs Sheep” is the design I have on my own personal blogcard. It’s what I hand out to people.
I just ordered a new box, in time for the London geek dinner with Robert Scoble on June 7th, and Reboot 7.0 right after that.
The wolf analogy has always suited me. And with the whole Thingamy-Hughtrain schtick going on, it’s starting to suit me even more.
Avast, ye scurvies etc.
[UPDATE:] Here’s the set menu for the geek dinner. (Right-click to download)

May 11, 2005

nobody reads

beyond models:

From Sig: “We’re model buyers. We should be model builders.“

Rigid models cannot truly represent all of reality for all, thus the models will always be wrong to lesser or greater extent.
If you want to make better use of the resources, if you want a better place to work in, if you want to make great profits, in short, if you want to be successful — rethink the given models. Nah, do one better:
Become a model builder.

A raging discussion is happening in the comments– most of it way out of my depth:

In my view part of the benefit of the entrenched management methodologies and monolithic stacks of software that are out there is that there is a huge 3rd party market of complementary solutions as well as a large number of domain experts.
So what you really must be advocating is an uber disintermediation technology that somehow miraculously delivers unlimited customization and personalization whilst simultaneously guaranteeing universal compatibility and interoperability.

And Sig pipes in again:

As ‘most’ of your competitors chooses the easy way out, the pre-packaged stuff, copying their competition — a huge, really huge opportunity appears:
A great chance to beat them all, better chance than anytime in history perhaps? Change the rules by challenging the set models, experiment, try and test, be brave and become unique.

[NOTE TO SELF:] Stick to cartooning.

coolest thing ever

My Roberts Gemini-10 digital radio arrived in the mail today. It is the most wonderful little box of high-quality retro joy. I love it.
That’s real leather it’s covered with, and the digital sound quality is ouststanding. Completely static-free.
One of the advantages of living in the UK is the BBC. They really have utterly fabulous radio, especially if you like classical music.

i should dump him

No Comments

definition of ‘loser’

May 9, 2005

the porous membrane: why corporate blogging works.

94 Comments

The other day somebody asked me to explain why corporate blogging works. Sure, we know it’s the hot new thing and people are paying attention to it (including big media)… but why?
Why does it work? Seriously.
So I drew the diagram above.
1. In Cluetrain parlance, we say “markets are conversations”. So the diagram above represents your market, or “The Conversation”. That is demarkated by the outer circle “y”.
2. There is a smaller, inner circle “x”.
3. So the entire market, the “conversation” is seperated into two distinct parts, the inner area “A” and the outer area “B”.
4. Area “A” represents your company, the people supplying the market. We call that “The Internal Conversation”.
5. Area “B” represents the people in the market who are not making, but buying. Otherwise know as the customers. We call that “The External Conversation”.
6. So each market from a corporate point of view has an internal and external conversation. What seperates the two is a membrane, otherwise known as “x”.
7. Every company’s membrane is different, and controlled by a host of different technical and cultural factors.
8. Ideally, you want A and B to be identical as possible, or at least, in sync. The things that A is passionate about, B should also be passionate about. This we call “alignment”. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned.
9. When A and B are no longer aligned is when the company starts getting into trouble. When A starts saying their gizmo is great and B is telling everybody it sucks, then you have serious misalignment.
10. So how do you keep misalignment from happening?
11. The answer lies in “x”, the membrane that seperates A from B. The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between A and B, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both side of membrane “x” to adjust to the other, to become like the other.
12. And nothing, and I do mean nothing, pokes holes in the membrane better than blogs. You want porous? You got porous. Blogs punch holes in membranes like like it was Swiss cheese.
13. The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa.
14. Not to mention it makes misalignment, if it happens, a lot easier to repair.
15. Of course this begs the question, why have a membrane “x” at all? Why bother with such a hierarchy? But that’s another story.
[AFTERTHOUGHT:] And yes, this works with internal blogs as well, poking holes in the membranes that seperate people within a corporate culture; aligning “the conversation” internally etc.
The other advantage of internal blogging is that it organises conversation into a long-term manageable form. Two people sharing ideas via blogs is a lot more permanent, viral and useful for the company than two people sharing the same information over by the watercooler.
[AFTERTHOUGHT:] Poking holes in membranes subverts hierarchies. Avast, ye scurvies etc.
[UPDATE:] Just added this post to The Hughtrain.

english cut in copenhagen