Archive for May, 2010
May 31, 2010
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Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Roger Had A Plan”, goes to one of my favorite tech journalists, Kara Swisher.
I met Kara in Paris two winters ago, at Le Web. What can I say? Damn good tech journalist. Damn nice lady. Damn good to see women like her and Sara Lacy rise to the top of what is traditionally a very male-dominated trade. Rock on.
The thing I like about Kara’s writing is, unlike Roger in the cartoon, you get the feeling that there’s one helluva smart, interesting human being writing this stuff, who is genuinely interested and inspired by the material she covers. That quality in tech journalism is more rare than you’d think, sadly…
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Kara, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
3 Comments
[My friend, Marty came up with this idea…]
May 28, 2010
20 Comments
[Download the high-res image here etc.]
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Socialism Is Evil”, goes to the utterly brilliant political journalist, Megan McArdle.
Legend has it that somebody was once so impressed with her old amateur blog, Asymmetrical Information, they offered her a job at The Economist, one of the most respected news organs on the planet. She now works at The Atlantic, where she has a massive fan base of super-smart people.
I met her in London in 2005 at a geek dinner I had organized, back when she was doing The Economist gig. She was a most fun and welcome addition. I remember introducing her that evening to Gia Milinovich, another very bright American expat in town. I thought they might get along.…
Growing up in Edinburgh in the 1970s and 80s, I eventually left for University in Austin, Texas with a very grim view of Socialism. Though I hadn’t seen it at its worst (we’re talking Scotland here, not East Germany) I’d seen enough of it not to like or trust it. To me it seemed not so much a political system, more like a sad, bitter, venal cultural suicide note.
Even nowadays, if I tried hanging a poster of this cartoon around Edinburgh or Glasgow, I’d still probably get lynched. Which is EXACTLY why I like this cartoon.
Besides that, there’s something rather amusing to me about a beautiful, cultured, sophisticated Washington journalist handing out “Socialism Is Evil” cards at swank, East Coast soirees. Exactly.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Megan, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 27, 2010
11 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Thank You Sir”, goes to BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, who’s having, shall we say, one bitch of a week.
Oh well, I guess that’s why he gets paid the big bucks…
Of course the current oil slick is horrendous. In spite of that, I’m no more one of those anti-big-oil people than I was before. My father, a geologist, was in the oil business for a good chunk of his working life. I also used to work in the oil business when I was a kid in college, offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
At the end of the day, oil is dirty, nasty, dangerous stuff to get out of the ground. And every now and then, sadly, we are reminded of this. “Cut down our dependence on oil”? If that lever existed, we’d have pulled it long ago. Don’t get me started…
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Carl-Henric, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 25, 2010
4 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “200 mph”, goes to another fellow author from my publisher’s stable, Mark Frauenfelder.
Mark’s got a new book out, “Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World”, which I’m halfway through reading (The publisher kindly sent me an advance copy etc). As editor in chief of Make magazine, Mark’s in a good position to write about the spiritual and social merits of DIY culture…
But if that wasn’t enough to place him high up on the geek pantheon, BOM BOM BOM Mark is also the co-founder and co-editor of pretty much the coolest blog on the planet, Boing Boing.
I only have eleven blogs bookmarked on my browser in the “Favorite Blogs” section. Boing Boing is one of them. I’m getting picky in my old age.
While designing this bizcard, I was thinking about what it was about Boing Boing that always appealed to me since Day One… It wasn’t just all the cool, geeky stuff they were linking to, it was something about the way they did it. Like it was the ideas and human drives behind the cool stuff that mattered, not the actual cool stuff itself.
This high-speed, voracious appetite and enthusiasm for new ideas… that’s what makes the internet, at its best, so much damn fun. And nobody does it better than Boing Boing. “Driving 200 mph on the highway of ideas” pretty much summed up their ethos to me.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Mark, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. And if your Boing Boing co-editors, Cory and Xeni do likewise, I’ll extend the same offer to them as well. Thanks!]
May 24, 2010
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Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Purpose”, goes to John Jantsch, of Duct Tape Marketing fame.
John’s a very clever fellow– one of the most respected marketing bloggers in the business. He could easily make lots of money helping big companies solve problems, instead he prefers helping out small businesses. Which he does, very well.
John has a new book out: “The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself”. It only came out last week, and since he has the same publisher and editor as me, I thought it would be cool to dedicate today’s business card to him. Easy.
The carton was inspired by a great little recent blog post of John’s. “Is Your Purpose Patent Still Pending?” And no, I’m not just saying that because he used one of my cartoons to illustrate the post, the idea of “Purpose” in business is something very close to my heart. John writes about it well:
I firmly believe that one of the foundational secrets to success in business is to invent, discover, and connect what we are doing with a sense of purpose that drives the entire enterprise. You’ve certainly heard many people talk about the idea of doing work you love, but this is more than that. I’m suggesting that you must connect with some reason beyond the fact you enjoy the work, that you must be able to feel a greater sense of value that drives your entire strategy and filters your decisions at the highest level.
Congrats on the new book, John, and keep on fighting the good fight etc.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[John, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 21, 2010
3 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “The Utter Terror”, goes to my favorite rapper, Ice T.
I’ve been listening to Ice T for two decades. “Body Count” is one of my favorite rock albums.
I’ve never been much into rap per se (I’m more of a Lester Young fan), but I always liked and admired Ice T’s approach– raw, honest, truthful, uncompromising, interesting, thoughtful, intense, original… with a playful sense of humor, buried deep in the apple like a razor.
i.e. The man is no phony. The man is an artist. All art springs from that “utter terror”, whether we care to admit it or not, so I’m thinking he might like this cartoon.
Besides that, it seems we’re both Iceberg Slim fans. Rock on.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Ice T, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 20, 2010
2 Comments
[“Love Forever”, which I sent out in the newsletter recently. You can buy the print here etc.]
Earlier I was talking on the phone to my friend and mentor, Jerry Colonna. I drew the wee monster ‘Cube Grenade” on his blog a few months ago.
During our conversation, while I was moaning and groaning about the relentless day-to-day pressure of being a small-time entrepreneur, Jerry, in his kind, generous, lucid and laser-focus way, reminded me that in spite of my trials and tribulations, somehow in the past year I had managed to morph from a “marketing consultant” to full-time artist.
I guess that’s exactly what has been happening. I don’t quite know how I managed to pull that off– although long hours, low overheads and a superb business partner certainly helped.
Jerry then talked about his own career evolution– from successful New York venture capitalist, to private business coach with a thriving practice.
Jerry told me that he simply creamed off the part of being a VC that he liked the most– i.e. helping good people make a difference– and forgot about the rest.
During this conversation, I suddenly realized that I’m now trying to do EXACTLY what Jerry has already managed to do for himself. Take the cream off the top, leave the milk behind.
I can think of worse ways to spend the next couple of years. You?
8 Comments
Advertising hacks losing their jobs is a subject very dear to my heart (I was one of them, more than once). Advertising hacks re-inventing their crash-and-burn careers and turning it into something more interesting, is also a subject dear to my heart (I’ve done that, too).
Which is why my latest “Cube Grenade” goes to Eric Proulx, founder of Please Feed The Animals, the blog and support group for out-of-work Adland. He’s also the grand ninja brainmeister behind the documentary about out-of work advertising executives re-inventing their post-advertising lives, “Lemonade”.
Besides that, I was also in the mood to draw something big, bright and yellow, so it all came together nicely.
[Commission Your Own Cube Grenade.]
[The Cube Grenade Archive is here.]
2 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “South Beach”, goes to Alex de Carvalho, one of Miami’s most active social media evangelists.
Alex and I have known each other for a while. We first met at Le Web Paris 2005. He was living in France at the time, he moved to Miami a couple of years later, about the same time I first started going there on a regular basis.
As my business got more and more Miami-based (I now visit there once a month, for around 4 – 10 days), we became good friends. When I’m in town Alex, Maria and I will usually meet for drinks at least once or twice, probably at Monty’s. It’s become part of my Miami ritual.
I drew this cartoon back in January, while I was staying in South Beach, Miami. Up to that point, it was the longest I had ever stayed in that town– ten days or so.
It was quite an experience. South Beach is full of random people– tourist and local– walking around, almost aimlessly. I wandered up and down Ocean Drive again and again, trying to see stories in the faces. All their faces seemed to tell stories. Not all of them were happy ones.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Alex, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 19, 2010
3 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Doughnut”, goes to Jenny Lawson a.k.a. The Bloggess.
What can I say? She’s probably the funniest blogger writing today. Her stuff is hysterical. I’m addicted.
Besides that, she’s also part of the Houston, Texas posse. Nice to see there’s first rate stuff coming out of my home State, not just from places like SF and New York.
Jenny and some of her crew (including Katie Laird and Monica Danna) were visiting out here the other week. We met up and hung out in Marfa, sitting around the fire pit at Padre’s. Within half an hour she had my friend, Ty Mitchell (who’s got a pretty wicked sense of humor himself) eating out of her hand. A great evening.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Jenny, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 18, 2010
4 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Empires”, goes to Joi Ito, web visionary, ICANN board member, and CEO of Neoteny, his own private investment firm.
If you ever hear a new good idea about the Internet, chances are Joi heard it five, maybe even ten years before you did. Yeah, he’s that good; he’s that ahead of the curve. And besides that, he’s always been a kind and helpful friend to me, and countless others.
If he doesn’t grok this cartoon, probably nobody will. Oh well, that’s how it rolls…
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Joi, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 17, 2010
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Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “NYNY”, goes to Nick Denton, the founder and owner of Gawker Media.
The design started life as a “back of business card” doodle I drew back when I lived in Manhattan, circa 1998. Then last year I turned into a fine art print. Recently I was thinking somebody living in New York should have it as their own business card. Who better than Nick Denton?
Nick is one of my old New York blogging posse, from back in the early blogosphere days. I first became aware of him through Elizabeth Spiers, whose long-deceased blog, “Capital Influx” was one of my favorite blogging reads, back circa 2002 – 2003 (I actually once went on record saying that I thought Capital Influx was one of the top ten coolest blogs of all time. She was VERY good– no wonder Nick hired her.). Soon after I met her online, Gawker.com launched with Elizabeth as its first ever editor, before she later moved on to other things.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Nick, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 16, 2010
12 Comments
[Alpine, Texas. Walking up Hancock Hill earlier this evening. Part of my new training regime etc.]
Anthony Arrigo, my old Kung-Fu buddy from my time in New York is in town for a few days. He’s gotten me back on the wagon. Long story. Watch this space etc.
P.S. Today was seriously the hardest workout I’ve had in years…
May 13, 2010
3 Comments
2 Comments
Russ Thornton commissioned me to do a Cube Grenade for his company, Thornton Wealth Management.
The brief started off with a line of Russ’, “You Only Have One Life – My Sole Focus Is To Help You Make The Most Of It.” And so I ran with that.
The red & black square on the left represents “Life”, as it were. A big blob of fleeting moments, that somehow manages to coalesce together.
Simple and impactful– I think it works well. Thanks to Russ for the great commission, I had a lot of fun with it.
[The Cube Grenade archive is here.]
[Commission your own Cube Grenade]
7 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Life Is Too Short”, goes to Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media.
What’s there to say about Tim that hasn’t been said already? He’s one one of our great Internet and technology visionaries. I was fortunate to meet him a few months ago at Supernova in San Francisco. A really charming, well-mannered guy in real life.
The cartoon above was DIRECTLY inspired by a personal mantra of Tim’s, “Work On Stuff That Matters”. And of course, it’s the fact that we’re mortal (and life is short) that gives Tim’s mantra its sense of urgency. If we lived forever, we’d be more inclined to just sit on our butts all day long. That was my thinking behind it, anyway. The cartoon was also the first one I sent out in my daily newsletter, back in January. You can also buy the print here etc.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Tim, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 12, 2010
9 Comments
[“Nightmare”, which I sent out in the newsletter recently. You can buy the print here etc.]
[Today’s guest blog post comes from Pat Kane.]
“No ‘occupation’ or ‘vocation’ or ‘craft’ or ‘sector’ is ever going to be stable and predictable ever again.”
The first phrase that came into my head considering the title ‘remember who you are’ is the Marianne Williamson line: “Your playing small doesn’t serve the world”. Indeed not.
The second one came from John Calvin, via Theodore Roszak.
“If God had formed us of the stuff of the sun or the stars”, wrote Calvin, “or if he had created any other celestial matter out of which man could have been made, then we might have said that our beginning was honourable. But we are all made of mud, and this mud is not just on the hem of our gown, or on the sole of our boots, or in our shoes. We are full of it, we are nothing but mud and filth both inside and outside.” But as Roszak says, cosmology tells us we are indeed formed of “the stuff of the sun and the stars”. So to refute the old moan, our existence is thus intrinsically honourable.
Remembering who I am, at this stage in the game, is about remembering the conceptual, artistic and emotional breakthroughs I’ve made in my life as musician, writer and lover (of change, people, and everything in between). And these breakthroughs have essentially been about recognising that illimitabiity — so foul to Calvin, so joyous to the cosmologists — at the heart of the human condition.
When I was a wee child, it was about the infinite possibilities of Lego, comix, fevered dreaming. When I was a young man, it was the endless variations involved in creating a new piece of music, or the excitement when a great thinker blasted my existence into a new context, penetrated to the heart of the obvious and made it new and strange.
As a father, it was realising that a daughter who seemed to be set to repeat her parents’ choices (media/culture) decided to answer her own call and do something completely different (eco-engineering at MIT) — the beautiful though obdurate fact that you bring them up to be autonomous, and you shouldn’t be surprised when they exercise their autonomy.
And as an adult maker, it’s being struck by the vertiginous realisation — in the age of nano, bio and cogno, the Kurzweilian trinity — that no ‘occupation’ or ‘vocation’ or ‘craft’ or ‘sector’ is ever going to be stable and predictable ever again. And right here, right now, it’s understanding that the playfulness you began your human state with is the playfulness that will keep you adaptive and resilient, as you move through an age of endemic transformation and crisis.
But there is real profoundity and paradox in the play scholarship — which I obsessively sift through at http://www.theplayethic.com. From biology, ethology and psychology, it is that we play best when we stand on a ground of play: when we are some distance from hunger, when we have a surplus of materials we can play with, when there are distant guarantors of our security while at play. To be clear about this: play doesn’t pull you up by your own creative bootstraps; play needs some security to truly flourish.
And I think that understanding is a real challenge to those in the creative industries and sectors who might too easily fall into Darwinist fallacies like “out of competitive chaos, new order reigns”. Our playful illimitability, in short, depends on limits — the prior necessities of care, health and strength that we would be foolish not to attend to. (As a father, nurturing my girls into full self-possession, how could I ignore the relations between care and play?)
The fashionable term now is ‘neoteny’ — that extension of juvenile characteristics into maturity that defines us as humans. But that flexibility and openness that makes us creative and response-able is also a vulnerabilty and a fragility. At the very least we need to think about a social safety trampoline, never mind a safety-net, if we are going to commit to the high-wire act of a performative, creative life.
For example, might not an American people collectively freed from the fear of falling into ill-health generate even more innovation in products and services? Might they not have some emotional and psychic headroom to lift their heads above the grind, and see real entrepreneurial possibilities in an everyday life which seems amenable to their purpose, rather than treacherous and dangerous?
So remembering who I am, right now in 2010, is about remembering my own affiliations to a tradition of collective progress (call it socialism, if you wish, and I leave Obama out of that one), and trying to reconcile that with the fissible, morphing, transformative networked society we live in right now. How do I make a buck out of that? Not easy. But when you stand face to face with your personal truth, nothing is.
[Besides being a Glasgow-based “musician, writer, consultant, play theorist, activist” and the author of “The Play Ethic”, Pat Kane was lead singer of one of my favorite bands, when I was a kid growing up in Edinburgh.]
[The “Remember Who You Are” archive is here.]
[Download the high-res “Remember Who You Are” poster here.]
2 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “I Want To Sing”, goes to musician and “ghost blogger”, Lindsay Manfredi.
Lindsay plays bass guitar in a band, Neon Love Life, but like many artists, she has to hold down a day job to pay the bills. She calls her day job “Ghost Blogging”, i.e. anonymously writing blogs and social media on behalf of her clients.
I can think of worse ways to make a living; very “Sex & Cash Theory” etc.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Lindsay, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 11, 2010
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Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “All Control”, goes to one of my favorite marketing thinkers, Mark Earls.
Mark is one of the most respected advertising planners in the UK. Nobody besides him and Cluetrain have done more to credibly trash the idea that “The Brand controls the conversation”. He was one of the very first people in the agency world to take that sacred cow out the back and shoot it in the head.
I came across Mark’s books about five years ago and it changed my life. Since then we’ve become really good friends. To get an overview of his work, check out the interview I did with him back in 2008.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Mark, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free batch of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 10, 2010
4 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Make Love To My Imagination”, goes to my art-world buddy in Toronto, Amrita Chandra.
Amrita ran her own art gallery for a while, which is how we first got talking. We were on the same SXSW panel earlier this year, talking about how Web 2.0 affects the art world. She has some very interesting thoughts on the subject. She also has a day job as Marketing Director for Asigra, a computer cloud backup service.
I guess we’ve been kindred spirits in this whole “Art World 2.0″ thing for a while now. It’s still early days for us all, but there’s A LOT of artists currently out there, trying to figure this new world out. An exciting time to be alive.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Amrita, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free batch of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 9, 2010
29 Comments
From the Intro to EVIL PLANS:
“TO UNIFY WORK AND LOVE”
Sigmund Freud once said that in order to be truly happy in life, a human being needed to acquire two things: The capacity to work, and the capacity to love.
An EVIL PLAN is really about being able to do both at the same time.
So how do you do both at the same time?
Easy. You love what you do.
How do you love what you do?
You make the decision to do so.
The earlier in your life you make that decision, the easier your EVIL PLAN will be to pull off.
The easier it will be to actually create something.
The longer you’ve been working, the more you see this: People in their thirties and forties, who have kind of hit the wall in their career trajectory, but somehow need the money more than ever.
You know, to pay for all that “stuff”. Fancy cars, nice houses in the suburbs, golf clubs, that kinda thing.
They hate their work, but they love their “stuff”.
They say they have no choice. They have children, mortgages, responsibilities, that kinda thing.
But they also have a lot of “stuff”, which requires ever more time and money to enjoy properly, to keep the veneer from cracking.
Because the older you get, the more time and energy is needed to compensate for the fact that basically, you hate what you do. That you never liked what you do. That all along, it’s always been about the “stuff”.
Those people always get crucified, eventually. Their bosses always get rid of them, eventually.
So please decide to love what you do, the sooner the better. “Death By Stuff” is really no way to live.
[Bonus Link: Comedian George Carlin’s classic rant about “Stuff”.]
May 7, 2010
2 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Staying Young Forever”, goes to Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, who’s having a very, very long week.
The line in the cartoon was originally about aging New York hipsters. But then I saw strong parallels between that and current European politics. “Yeah, but what are you ACTUALLY going to do about it” etc.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Mr. Papandreou, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free batch of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 6, 2010
1 Comment
One of my favorite Cube Grenade clients, Mike Walsh, just wrote a nice blog post about how he uses his– including business cards and putting it on the front of a Flip camera. Thanks, Mike!
With fierce competition for attention these days, it’s really important to differentiate. Fortunately, It’s pretty easy to do something unique when you can leverage the work of great artists, great technologies and great services (Flip uses Cafe Press to print screen the image). As far as return on investment – that’s easy. Hugh’s art has paid for itself in tangible and intangible ways. It has gained me a new client (which is significant because I am limiting my client work to 6 clients this year), word of mouth and great conversations.
I knew the Cube Grenade idea would work from Day One. I also knew it would take me quite a while for the idea to gain traction. So that left nothing to do but keep my head down and work my butt off.
Same as any entrepreneur with a new idea…
[The Cube Grenade archive is here.]
3 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “I Am Not Normal”, goes to journalist Clive Thompson, who I met briefly in March at SXSW in the Hilton Hotel bar.
Clive writes for both Wired and The New York Times. Meeting him, I had the impression of an extremely active, original mind. Somebody totally engaged in the world around him, somebody not beholden to Boredom. A quality we could all use more of…
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Clive, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free batch of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 5, 2010
1 Comment
[“Conspire”, which I sent out in the newsletter recently. You can buy the print here etc.]
I just wrote my first guest post ever over on Copyblogger.com, “Why You Shouldn’t Write For Other Writers”.
Traffic spikes can be quite addictive. The type of blog post that might get you a lot of “bloggerly love” may not be (and probably isn’t) the kind of blog post that gets people to buy whatever it is you’re selling.
Traffic and influence are great. It’s lovely having all these people kissing your hiney at social media conferences.
But at the end of the day, it’s not the A-Listers or the pajama-clad, Web 2.0 basement-dwellers who are paying your mortgage. It’s the regular shmoes with a regular problem who are willing to pull out their credit cards to get it solved.
I hope you’ll go check it out, Thanks.
6 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Everything Is Marketing”, goes to Wiki Pioneer, Ross Mayfield, the Chairman, President and Co-founder of Socialtext.
Ross and I have been hanging out together at blog & social media conferences for almost as long as they’ve been around. Our first one together was Les Blogs, back in Paris, 2005. Our last hanging out was at a bar during SXSW, watching Jake Dilley and The Color Pharamcy (a favorite band of mine) play live. The lovely Deanna Zandt was also with us that evening.
Ross is a bit like me. At conferences, you’re more likely to find him hanging out in the corridors or the bars, than running around, networking like crazy, or sitting in the lecture halls for hours on end, live-blogging endlessly. He just kinda hangs around nonchalantly and lets people find him.
Sometimes these conferences can get a little crazy– especially the large ones– but Ross is always an entertaining oasis of good-natured calm. Damn good company.
Another quality Ross has that I really like, is that he gets tired of buzzwords and “the latest trends” faster than most people I know. He can always tell when the me-too bandwagon is just about to descend on something like a pack of wolves and remove all the fun from it.
The “Everything Is Marketing” riff is at least a decade old in most Internet circles; I’d wager Ross has been sick and tired of it since long before that. So this one is for him.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Ross, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free batch of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 4, 2010
4 Comments
[“Sacred Zombie Cow”. Click here to download free high-rez image etc.]
Thanks to David Gammel of Orgpreneur.com for the great “Cube Grenade” commission. Backstory here.
A “Sacred Zombie Cow” is David’s term for an idea that, although it has far outlived its usefulness within an organization, is still treated like Gospel Truth. David advocates the killing of these sacred zombie cows as the best way to grow.
[Commission Hugh]
[The Cube Grenade archive is here…]
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Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “I’m Not Dying”, goes to my favorite tech consultant, James Governor.
James and his partners have a small tech consultancy firm, Redmonk, which handles blue chip clients like Microsoft, SAP, Dell etc.
Redmonk have an interesting (and highly effective) way of marketing themselves. Because they come up with so many ideas, they can only realistically execute on 10% of them.
What do they do with the other 90%? Easy. The give them away for free on their blogs. Simple, but it works.
James probably knows more good consultant jokes than anyone I know. So I thought maybe he could use another one, hence the cartoon above. Exactly.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[James, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free batch of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 3, 2010
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Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Puck”, goes to one of my New York blogging posse, Fred Wilson.
Fred is very successful venture capitalist, a partner in Union Square Ventures. I first became aware of him via his blog, AVC.com, which I was turned on to by Nick Denton.
Besides always having an interesting and entertaining take on the tech industry, what separates Fred from the other VC bloggers (and I believe he was the first to do this), is that he talks about other stuff on his blog besides his business. He talks about his family with great love and affection, he likes talking about his hobbies, and he REALLY likes sharing his music collection with people, turning folk on to his favorite albums etc.
i.e. He writes like an affable human being, not like a hard-nose businessman.
This makes people like him. This makes people trust him. This makes people want to give his relatively small firm early access to the best deals out there. Which helps his business no end.
I know from talking to Fred that Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote, “Skate to where the puck is headed, not to where it’s been” is a favorite of his. So I incorporated it into the design; I also used the same olive green from his USV website.
Keep blogging, Fred. We need more like you out there…
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Fred, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free batch of 100 to you. Thanks!]
