September 3, 2005
ha! i love it!
So, yeah, I know all this blog stuff. It
Hugh MacLeod
Hi, I'm Hugh.
My life is committed to drawing little illustrations that spread messages, inspire people, help businesses kick butt & support causes.
Gapingvoid is based upon the science of how these cartoons work.
If we can help you or your business, please email us here.
Prints |
Opening | Current |
|---|---|---|
NY NY |
$275 |
Archive for September, 2005
September 2, 2005
london wifi needed september 7th
The good news is, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext is throwing a party in London next Wednesday.
The bad news is, he needs to find a venue. One that has WiFi. I called the Texas Embassy (my usual geek dinner venue), but no dice.
Can anybody suggest somewhere? Please leave a comment either here or over on Ross’ wiki. Thanks.
Sarah, can you bring some girl geeks along?
[Evelyn’s post got me thinking:] Maybe Katrina is for wiki’s what 9/11 was for blogs.
french freebie
The Irish Blogger’s Wine Freebie should be going out late next week. Please be watching your mailboxes in about 7 – 10 day’s time.
Meanwhile, we are gearing up to extend the freebie thing to France in October.
French bloggers getting South African wine. Should be interesting.
No, we’re not expecting to sell a lot wine in France. They already have plenty of their own, which they are rightly very fond of. But setting our low-budget marketing plan against their massive “Appelation d’Origine Contr
September 1, 2005
still utterly failed by words
The Slidell wiki that I set up this morning (where people from Slidell, Louisiana go to post info re. missing persons) is getting heartbreakingly long. [SEE ALSO: The Slidell Damage Blog.]
A lot of people leaving messages, not surprisingly, aren’t too wiki-savvy. That’s OK; I go back and tidy up things every couple of hours. If anyone wants to lend a hand tweakin’ & a’tidyin’, I would appreciate it.
Also, Alan has set up a comprehensive Hurricane wiki. Well done, Alan: http://thinknola.com/wiki/
[UPDATE:] Alan says in the comments:
I’ve overwhelmed, communicating with people within New Orleans to communicate with people outside of New Orleans. The links really help.
1) Survivor Database —
There are many forums, blogs, email lists, web sites, but no one directory. We need to pick one and stick with it, so people don’t have to scour all the different forums. I chose to flog this one because it was running first.
http://www.familymessages.org/index.php
Turns out the programmer behind it is a web application wizard. He’s been whipping up new features all day, and the program has been rock solid stable.
You fill out a card, name and home town and it goes into the directory. You can add notes to each name.
It’s got RSS feeds for everyone’s notes.
We need to get critical mass. It’s only as good as the size of the database. Network efffects, and son on. You know all about that.
Please get the word out.
2) Effective Wiki — Wiki is great for spot emergencies, I’m finding. People need a place to rally, and a Wiki page goes up instantly.
The Xavier evac taught me this. It became a temporary clearing house until XU could set up their own page.
I wish I could do more, but I can’t keep up the Wiki trying to get the word out about the survivor registry.
Please, if anyone knows how to Wiki, get in touch with me.
Thank you, Hugh. Please get the word out.
[UPDATE:] Amazing pictures.
[UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: MORE FROM ALAN:]
Hugh,
I need your help. There is a problem with New Orleans. Reporting has been given over to the media, and they are talking about the looting, the shooting, the crime. It’s a great big show. It’s anarchy, it’s chaos. No information to be had.
But, in reality. There is A LOT of information to be had. It’s simply not presented in a way that is at all useful to the citizens of New Orleans.
There are land lines working, SMS messages are working on cell phones, people are running all sorts of information through the http://nola.com/forums/ .
That’s the problem. It scrolls off the screen and gets lost.
I gathered some of that information into a Wiki page. It was information about about Xavier University. A faculty member posted a list of trapped students. I formatted it and put it on a Wiki page.
Then people started to send me updates in e-mail. Someone thanked me for the page. So, I made point of gathering and formatting all the Xavier messages I could find onto the page.
The Xavier Wiki page became an unofficial web page, and kept it up until I couldn’t stay awake an longer, and sadly, went to sleep.
When I awoke, I found that the Xavier families, has simply kept the Wiki page going without me. I cleaned up the their markup, buth the information is there.
Now, I’m finding the page gets updated, nice and neat.
http://thinknola.com/wiki/index.php?title=Xavier
Wiki works.
Okay, cute. But this helped. Maybe only a tad, but tad more than nothing.
I wish I could create a page for every university, school, hospital, nursing home, apartment, etc. Gather photos off of Getty and AP and organize them by neighborhood. I wish I could key in more names from the myriad message boards into a real survivor directory like:
http://www.familymessages.org/index.php
The people in crisis don’t have time to fiddle with a new technology. But, we could help, by gathering and organizing this information for them. The journalists won’t do it. Someone has to.
Please, help me figure out how to get more people involved organizing all the loose information. There is a problem that we can help to solve from our keyboards. There really is.
Get a conversation going. It’s not about the software. It’s about getting the data organized. Giving people places to rally.
Alan
have a nice death, dinosaur
From a conversation I’ve got going with Rick Segal:
“Oh cool! You mean if you’re famous and say nice things about my work on your large-audience website, I’ll let you have some of it for free?“
As I’m fond of saying, “Have a nice death, Dinosaur.“
[More thoughts here.]
I dunno, I was having a similar conversation with somebody the other day, to wit: where Old Media/Old School gets it wrong is when they assume they can impose their own selfish, calcified values on the Blogosphere.
Whereas what actually works, what REALLY works is when you align your behavior to fit the blogosphere’s values. Which means genuinely embracing them. Not easy if you’re deep into “post-MBA marketing dork” mode, but hey, that’s not my problem.
Anyway, it’s something I’m often ranting about. Then again, it’s something I’m worrying less about. The companies that get it will thrive. The ones that don’t… who cares?
[Old related gapingvoid link:] Dinosaurspeak. “That rather sociopathic combination of being completely focused on customer benefit and yet completely selfish at the same time.”
what’s true of people is also true of products
Damian Jennings, a U.K. blogger signed up for the Stormhoek Blogger’s Wine Freebie.
To make a long story short, we had trouble getting a bottle to him. DHL tried delivering to his home, but he was away. Then Nick, the chap at Stormhoek in charge of shipping out the bottles, was on vacation for a couple of weeks.
Somehow we kept missing each other. Anyway, it’s many weeks later and poor Damian still hasn’t received his wine. But hopefully after a few recent e-mail exchanges he will be getting his soon.
In a recent e-mail to Nick, Damian wrote:
Funny thing is, I have now bought 4 or 5 bottles of the stuff having never heard of it before. And each bottle has been shared, and I have told the story.
So even though I don’t have my wine, I’m still marketing it for you. Bloody clever idea.
Heh. The idea-virus spreads.
Although we can track the blogger’s online conversations easily enough, we have no accurate way of measuring how many offline conversations the freebie thing is generating. Sure, we get anecdotal evidence of it all the time, like Damian’s above, but so far it’s impossible to measure directly.
Other marketing bloggers keep e-mailing me, asking me for numbers on how the campaign is affecting sales. Basically, they want a case study. They have products and ideas they want to sell to their clients, and they’re looking to me to provide them with objective, third-party proof that this whole blogvertising thing actually works.
Well, the wine has been selling very well indeed, ever since the Blogger Freebie thing started. But that’s just one part of the equation. Other factors include a damn good product, a good shelf positioning at the supermarkets, a marvellous sales team doing a great job, and also the fact that they now, like Damian, have a story (A) they genuinely like telling to other people and (B) other people don’t seem to mind hearing.
So maybe it doesn’t really need to be measured. Maybe all that is needed is FAITH that it’s a good thing to do, and that it’s working.
Maybe it’s more important to be interested in the conversation you’re actually having, rather than only what’s in it for the bottom line.
Have you ever noticed how impossible and tedious it is to have a conversation with somebody who’s only thinking of what’s in it for them? What’s true of people is also true of products.
[IRISH UPDATE:] The Irish leg of the Blogger’s Wine Freebie is due to start sending out the wine at the end of next week. If you signed up, please go check out the official list here, to make sure your name’s on it.
Please drop me an e-mail if there’s a problem, thanks.
