Archive for August, 2007
August 29, 2007
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[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]
I was thinking about Search and Social Media earlier today. Call it “Google vs Facebook”, if you will…
Let’s say you’re going to Phoenix next month with your spouse. Let’s say you’ve never been there before, nor do you know anyone who lives there.
Let’s say you’re looking for a nice Vietnamese restaurant in Phoenix to take your spouse to one evening.
So I’m guessing what most people would do is google “Vietnamese Restaurant Phoenix”, and see what The Holy Algorithm comes up with. You might luck out, you might not.
As a blogger with a pretty big audience, I have found a better way. I just write my dining plans on the blog and/or on Twitter and/or Facebook, and invariably I’ll get a couple of good recommendations pinged to me within hours, sometimes minutes. And because I know these folk, or at least, they know me and read my blog, there’s a certain amount of trust and bonhomie that comes with the recommendation.
But like I said, I have a pretty big audience, so this works pretty well for me. But for someone with a smaller readership, you could question how well this approach would fare for them.
So I’m thinking about how Facebook and/or its competition could help fill the gap.
If if they can, even partially, then Google should be concerned… because at the end of the day, all search begins and ends with people, not algorithms.
[UPDATE:] Nice comment from C. C. Chapman:
Not sure if Facebook is the right vehicle for this, but I completely agree that it is more about the people and recommendations then anything else.
I know Skype has been trying to integrate this kind of capability into it, but I never think of using it when a quick tweet or blog post is more effective.
I wonder if things like Spock or Mahalo will help bring this close. Hmm.…
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what Mahalo does with this space. But I don’t how much they’re planning to build their Search via paid employees, versus a Wikipedia-like social network. Jason?
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The film, Hallam Foe, starring Jamie Bell and directed by my old friend, David Mackenzie, premiers in London this Friday, 31st of August.
A wee note from David on Facebook:
Dear Facebook Friends,
Our film Hallam Foe opens in the UK this friday (31st). The success of the film is significantly dependent on the number of people that go to see it during its opening weekend.
The buzz on the film is great and if you want to see it (those of you that haven’t already) please could you try to make it during this weekend (or failing that, this week).
In our case the UK opening weekend is even more significant because it is the first release of the film and the eyes of the distributors from the rest of the world are on Hallam this weekend.
I would really appreciate it if you could pass this onto your friends and for them to pass it onto their friends. Facebook only allows one to send messages to 20 friends at a time, so this is a very personal kind of spam!
Many thanks and big love,
David
I’m going to a private screening in London’s West End tomorrow night [Thursday 30th] at 6.30pm. I’ve just been given another small handful of tickets, if you fancy coming along shoot me an e-mail. Hope to see you there! Thanks.
[Friday Update:] Robin Raven, who saw the movie last night, left the following comment below:
Thanks for the tickets Hugh. I thought the film was superb — a very weird creative tension wrapped in a beautifully sentimental story. I really hope it does well this weekend and will be telling all and sundry to go see it!
Thanks, Robin. Lovely to meet you last night 
[Hallam Foe Facebook group here.]
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This cartoon is now in Steve Clayton’s collection. All to do with a conversation about Microsoft [Steve’s employer] that we were having a few weeks ago.
Basically, with software companies, you have a balance of two axes: 1. How much of your offering is software vs. How much of your offering is services 2. How much of your offering resides in “the cloud”, vs. How much of your offering resides on the desktop/handheld/personal object etc.
The ideal answer, of course, is that there’s no right answer. In theory one should be able to change at moment’s notice, and the software company should be able to accommodate said change at equally moment’s notice. As Steve says,
Microsoft wants to be right there in the middle. The user gets to pick where they wanna be. I wonder if I can get Ray Ozzie to use this
[This cartoon has been added to the Blue Monster cartoon series etc.]
August 28, 2007
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August 25, 2007
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I am UTTERLY DELIGHTED to announce that gapingvoid now has its very own Facebook app, which basically does the same job as the gapingvoid widget, except for Facebook etc. Thank you SO MUCH to Michael Kamleitner for building it. You rock.
[LINK: People who have already added the gapingvoid Facebook app.]
CAVEAT: The app may need a day or two more tweakin’, while Michael fixes the bugs. [UPDATE: the bugs are fixed now, Thanks] Michael says that if you have any issues, drop him a note on his Facebook page. Thanks in advance for your patience etc etc.
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[Click on images to enlarge etc.]
Spent the afternoon in the pub drawing on the back of one of the Blue Monster postcards that Steve Clayton gave me at the recent London “Friends of The Blue Monster” breakfast [Facebook video here]…
August 24, 2007
1 Comment
Hallam Foe officially premiers in the UK on August 31st.
I have 8 pairs of tickets to give away for a London preview screening [Bloggers Only] on Thursday, August 30th [in the West End]. Full details to follow, but if you and a spouse/friend/lover fancy coming along, drop me an e-mail with the words “Hallam Foe tickets” in the title and I’ll see what I can do, Thanks [No, you don’t have to blog about it if you don’t want to, as per usual…]
[Bonus Link:] The first Hallam Foe podcast. Frickin’ awesome. Kudos to my friend Colin Kennedy, who made it [N.B. Colin did all the filming for last February’s Stormhoek “Big Love” tour.]
[Backstory: Hallam Foe is a movie staring Jamie Bell of “Billiot Elliot” fame, directed by my old high school friend, David Mackenzie. It’s really good etc.]
August 23, 2007
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[Kyle MacDonald, of One Red Paper Clip fame, holding up one of his iron-on patches, outside The Coach & Horses, Greek Street, London. His pal in the center holds the yellow Hallam Foe t-shirt over his shoulder.].
A few weeks ago, Lee Thomas and I were drinking at our regular watering hole, The Coach & Horses in Soho, when by chance I struck up a brief conversation with this random Canadian dude. He was using this really cool pen to write an address down, and me being the total pen geek, I just had to ask him about it. That’s what started us talking.
[My buddy, Simon with a white Hallam Foe t-shirt etc.]
After a few minutes, he and his friends had to split for a meeting, so I gave him a bright yellow Hallam Foe t-shirt as a parting gift, a few of which I had in my bag.
In return, the Candian dude reached into his wallet and offered me a piece of his own schwag: an iron-on patch with a Red Paper Clip icon on it.
Hey. I knew that icon!
“Hang on,” I said. “Are you the One Red Paper Clip guy?“
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m Kyle MacDonald.“
Wow. I totally knew who he was. I told him who I was. The gapingvoid cartoon guy etc. He said he knew my work as well, from off the internet. Small world.
[My Red Paper Clip patch, which is temporarily residing in my wallet etc.]
Apparently Kyle was in town promoting his new book. It turns out that when I met him, he was just coming from a brief appearance on The Richard & Judy Show [Watch the TV segment here. Note how he’s wearing the same jacket on the TV segment as he is in the photo above].
Anyway, Kyle just sent me and e-mail. There’s an article about Kyle in the New York Times today. In one of the photos, what is he wearing? The yellow Hallam Foe t-shirt I gave him.
[Pic of Kyle and his wife in today’s NYT etc.]
Small world, Again!
Kyle, it was great meeting you randomly the other week. Good luck with your ongoing paper clip adventures, and I do hope our paths cross again. Rock on.
August 21, 2007
5 Comments
Ironies of Ironies: Companies are forever being told “You no longer control the conversation”, yet from what my buddies in the PR industry tell me, their industry is utterly thriving.
Actually, that’s to be expected. With “conversational control” no longer being the certainty it once was, you’re more likely to seek help from the pro’s…
1. Problem: Post-Cluetrain Reality– There is no market for “Messages”.
2. Opportunity: There is, however, a VAST market for “Social Gestures”. As Mark Earls says in his brilliant new book, “Herd”, we are, after all, social animals. We are, after all, primates.
3. Execution: Social Objects, Anybody?
P.S. My own particular “Execution” launches September 12th. My blog remains in “Lame Mode” till then. Rock on.
August 20, 2007
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August 19, 2007
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August 17, 2007
26 Comments
It seems that my last post, “Why We’re All Blogging Less”, got a lot of pickup in the blogosphere. Some people inferred that I was down on blogging, or that I thought blogging was dead, or even that I was quitting blogging altogether. All untrue. So I thought I should clarify:
I remember Robert Hughes, the great art critic saying in his wonderful book, “The Shock Of The New” that the Conceptual Art scene that emerged in the 1960s-1970s was actually good for “Painting”.
Why? Because with everybody else scattering bits of string around gallery floors and calling it “Art”, or covering themselves with butter, rolling themselves in the grass and calling it “Art”, the only people left painting were those, as Hughes put it, “who still actually wanted to paint”.
And paint they did. Hence the big painting revival in the early 1980s. Artists like Julian Schnabel, Francisco Clemente, Basquiat, Keith Haring etc.
I feel similarly about blogs. With new tools like Facebook and Twitter springing up, there’s no need to have a blog unless you really want to, unless you really want to devote that kind of time and effort to it.
As I’ve said more than once before, “Blogging isn’t for everybody, Web 2.0 is for everybody”.
Blogging isn’t dead. Far from it. It’s just a subset of something much larger and more important. Time to quote Clay Shirky YET AGAIN. From 2004:
“So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.”
Twitter. Facebook. Jaiku. WordPress. Movable Type. Whatever. Vive la difference.
Hope that helps…
August 12, 2007
47 Comments
[“Dorothy”. One of my fave cartoons from the early days. NYNY, 1998.]
A common conversation thread I’m hearing a lot among the veteran bloggers, is how we all seem to be blogging a lot less. The reasons are numerous; here’s a short list of the main ones I’m picking up.
1. We got busy. For many of us, blogging created opportunities for us in the offline world, just like the early blog evangelists predicted. And as we found out the hard way, it’s actually quite hard to do stuff and blog about it at the same time. As my father, a very smart and observant man once quipped, “A lot of these bloggers seem to have a lot of time on their hands”. That may have been true in 2002, back when the recession was still on. It’s certainly less true with a lot of people I know.
2. Scoble quit Microsoft. Just kidding.
3. Blogging isn’t for everybody. Web 2.0 is for everybody. Keeping a half-decent blog going is very time-consuming work. So of course there was a market for more time-friendly Web 2.0 apps, like Facebook and Twitter. That doesn’t mean blogs will go away. It just means more opportunities for people to create and use new tools. The web stands still for nobody etc.
4. Believe it or not, some of us have better things to do than to be continually justifying ourselves to a crowd of passive-aggressive, self-loathing, loser fucktards. Thankfully these folk are a minority, but their one skill-set in life seems to be in the less-than-noble art of “using up too much oxygen”. Which makes “Engaging in The Conversation” a lot less appealing for the others. Life is short.
5. The future we spent a long time evangelizing has already arrived. Blogs are not the future. Blogs are the present. So we’re all looking for new things to keep our restless brain cells occupied. I was recently talking to Adriana Lukas about this very same subject. She’s getting more into her “next big thing”, namely, “VRM”.
6. They said what they had to say, then moved on. It happens all the time with book writers, why not the same with bloggers?
[Bonus Link] B.L .Ochman: “Reports of Blogging’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated.”
August 10, 2007
2 Comments
Thanks to everyone for coming to the Blue Monster Coffee Morning. Can’t wait till the next one. [There’s a wee Facebook video of it here.]
[Meanwhile:] “Friends Of The Blue Monster” now has 589 members. Wow.
August 9, 2007
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[Random London street this morning.]
August 8, 2007
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I’m currently packing my bags at the hotel in Chicago. About to boogie to O’Hare airport and catch my plane back home to London.
It’s been a hell of a trip. I can’t believe I’ve been away so long, visited so many places, met so many people.
As of tomorrow, of course, I revert back to my usual phone number: +44 770 309 9462.
What else? Well, if any of you read “Business 2.0″ magazine, you’ll notice Stormhoek got a full page in the latest issue. You can see the online version here.
[UPDATE: The Business 2.0 Stormhoek story has made it onto Techmeme. Wow. Didn’t see that coming.]
Secondly, yeah, I know, I’ve not been blogging much lately. The reasons are threefold.
1. I don’t have my scanner with me on my travels, so I can’t post new cartoons.
2. I’m working on a really BIG, secret project. In marketing terms it’s my most ambitious idea yet, and I can’t talk about till it launches on September 12th. So like I said on Twitter a couple of days ago, expect my blog to be in “Lame” mode till then. But as of September 12th, I’ll be talking about it A LOT. You have been warned. Rock on.
3. Like everyone and their uncle, Facebook has taken over my life.
Speaking of Facebook, can anyone help me with something? I’m trying to reach anybody there who works in the marketing and/or business development departments. I have an idea I wish to bounce off them. If you know anyone I should speak to, please drop me a line, thanks.
[Update:] Within two hours of posting this, Facebook’s VP of Biz Development sent me a note. The power of blogs yak yak yak…
August 7, 2007
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[Coming into Chicago from the airport, about half an hour ago. This is just North of Division Street on the Kennedy Expressway, really near my old loft on Division & Milwaukee Avenue, where I lived in the early 1990s.]
I’m safely settled into my lovely hotel room in the Chicago Gold Coast. WiFi available in all the rooms. Hurrah!
Flying nonstop to London tomorrow evening. In London early Thursday morning.
[As always, my phone number whilst in the US is 646 704‑4509.]
[UPDATE:] Alex made a Scrapblog of last Sunday’s Miami geek dinner.
August 5, 2007
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[One of John T. Unger’s ubercool “Firebowls”. More details here.]
Laughing Squid’s Scott Beale has some cool photos of the Facebook party he and I attended in Palo Alto a couple of days ago.
After the party Scott and I went to grab some coffee at a nearby cafe, before he kindly gave me a lift back to my hotel in SF.
We talked for a long time. He’s an interesting guy. Besides running a small, successful web hosting company, his main schtick seems to be trying to unite the vibrant San Francisco tech community with the equally vibrant San Francisco arts community. Go read his blog for more background.
As a cartoonist and a blogger myself, this is of course a subject very near to my heart. I really should put him in touch with my friend, John T. Unger, who has used blogging to promote his work better than any other artist I know. A self-confessed, hardcore advocate of the “Global Microbrand” philosophy.
Scott? John? Please say hello…
[Bonus Link:] From John T. Unger’s other blog: “Blogs as Stores: A Comprehensive Overview of E-commerce Solutions for Bloggers”. Good resource for “Global Microbrand” advocates everywhere etc.
August 4, 2007
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Cool. Stormhoek got a wee mention in a Businessweek video, courtesy of Greg Verdino, marketing blogger and chief strategy officer at marketing firm Crayon.
Greg speaks about marketing in the Web 2.0 space in the context of “Outreaching to Influencers”, which, of course, is the obvious way to go about it. At least, that’s true in the early phases of any venture… but it’s the later stages where the REAL money is made.
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[View from the condo this morning.]
I’m in Miami, having a few days of R&R. Here till Tuesday.
There’s a geek dinner happening Sunday night up in Coral Gables, if anyone is in town. Kudos to Scrapblog’s Alex de Carvalos for organising it.
[UPDATE:] Final Miami Geek Dinner details confirmed. We’re meeting at 7pm on Sunday, at Archie’s Pizza, 166 Giralda Ave, Coral Gables, tel: 305 444‑1557.
[MAP]
[As always, for anyone trying to reach me, my number while in the US is 646 704 4509.]
August 3, 2007
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[Me holding up a Blue Monster bizcard during my keynote etc. Photo by Erik.]
It’s been quite a day. Here’s my sponsor’s summary of the event. And here’s Lockhart Steele piping in.
I’m exhausted. Off to Miami tomorrow. See you soon…
[UPDATE:] During the keynote I made a big mention about “Social Objects”, an idea I was turned onto by the anthropologist, Jyri Engestrom. Here’s a video and a slideshow presentation he gave on the subject, last June in London.
[UPDATE:] Thanks to Andy Roberts for also turning me on to Soviet “Activity Theory”. Phew. Heady stuff. But interesting.
