Category Archives: Web Stuff

Redemption for Vader?

Posted on July 29, 2011 | 6 Comments

I wrote an article this week for Brian Solis’s marketing blog, in which I have a little fun with the common designation of the marketing industry as “The Dark Side.” I didn’t want to get into it in the article, but let’s talk here for a minute about The Dark Side, and the giant ethical turd sandwich that is Star Wars.

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Posted in Random Links, Web Stuff

18 Highlights From SXSW 2011

Posted on March 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

My brain is totally full of new ideas and memories that I picked up at SXSW over the past few days. It’s probably the most productive, most inspiring, and most fun week of the year. As I move the brain-data from the buffer cache to the hard disk for better storage/retrieval, here are some of the highlights:

  1. Didn’t even make it out of the Austin airport without eating great BBQ when I landed. Who knew the Salt Lick stand in the airport was open at 10:30 am?
  2. While queuing up for a certain gadget to go on sale, I ended up waiting in line behind a prominent tech/startup lawyer from Boston, and we slowly discovered we have lots of friends in common.
  3. While standing on the sidewalk with a coworker Friday night, three different groups of friends happened to pass by in succession, while a fourth pulled up in a pedicab. My friend thought I was some crazy Austin maven (when it was really just dumb luck).
  4. Pedicabs as preferred mode of transportation
  5. My panel on Saturday afternoon was standing-room-only; in fact, some of my friends tried to get in but were turned away. So, it was a quantitative success, at least. (There’s a good writeup here)
  6. The panel moderator, Bob Garfield from NPR/Ad Age, said he wanted to punch me in the face. I called him a not-nice name. All in good fun (seriously, he was amazing).
  7. Meeting the dude from @Longreads, my absolute favorite Twitter follow.
  8. 90s karaoke after-afterparty with some coworkers and assorted other friends, half of whom are in good bands. We did three-part harmony on “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
  9. Theophilus London did a 90-minute hip-hop set at the Bing party for about 60 people, and it was amazing.
  10. Ted Leo solo show–just a man and his guitar
  11. Local Natives show–like Beach House + Fleet Foxes. Awesome
  12. Vimeo hosted a european-style rave at a giant abandoned power plant, with an amazing light show. When we got there we realized that Diplo was the DJ. Afterward, hosted a chilled out afterparty for some of the Vimeo folks in the Hilton lobby.
  13. Excellent copywriting tips from the editor of Groupon
  14. Geeking out with a handful of transmedia experts at GMD’s party
  15. Ran into my college newspaper editor, who just finished a stint at Camera Bag and is now a researcher at Carnegie Mellon.
  16. Watching the JWT folks have fun with the JWT BBQ truck and corresponding (disturbing) video, which was projected on walls around town.
  17. So many great food trucks!
  18. Club soda and Diet Coke, all night every night.

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Posted in Music Stuff, Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Cannibal Animals

Posted on March 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

So this is amazing. Can’t wait for SXSW! (which, by the way, I’ll be blogging about on my other site, adgeek.us. Follow along at home!)

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Posted in Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Vox PowerPoint, Vox Dei

Posted on February 11, 2011 | 2 Comments

[Warning: This post is a somewhat heated response to a flawed marketing deck. If that sounds as boring to you as it does to me, you should skip it. I worried that I was over-reacting by writing it, so I ran it by a friend of mine, Steve Evans at Banyan Branch; his commentary is included below in bracketed italics.]

 

Guys. Just because something is on a slick PowerPoint slide does not make it true. This is not a knock at all on PowerPoint—the best and most dangerous thing about PowerPoint, though, is that the software makes it easy to take bad ideas and make them look respectable and polished.

Our brains are wired to quickly determine the reliability and validity of ideas, pictures, people, and words, and external cues play a big role in that. If a book is nicely bound, if a movie is beautifully shot, if a man is well-groomed, if a song is well sung, we give more credence to it. It’s professional.

And therein is the dilemma. Good PowerPoint slides are easy to create. Good ideas are very difficult to create. But bad ideas can become good PowerPoint slides–we’ve all seen it. Continue reading →

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

My Guest Post on Ad Age

Posted on February 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Quick plug: wrote a guest column for Ad Age that went online yesterday, highlighting some of the topics I’m hoping to touch on in my Social Media Week panel next week. The panel is entitled “Social Listening Done Right,” and the column lays out a brief primer on what that might entail.

A couple of my journalist friends were a bit creeped out by the extent to which brands are listening to customers, fans, and detractors, which I thought was common knowledge by now. Just so you all know, yes, companies are monitoring what you say about them on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, comment boards, etc. If it’s public, it’s being scraped and served up as market intelligence.

It’s not spying and it’s not a bad thing at all. Companies listen to online conversations so they can monitor what people are saying about them, find out what people say about competitors, and gather feedback that leads to improvements in products or operations. It’s really a no-brainer, and it benefits everyone. If it creeps you out, stop tweeting/commenting/blogging. (In which case we call in THIS guy to gather info…but wouldn’t you rather we just read your tweets?)

Anyway, the column and the panel are about best practices for conducting these monitoring activities. Obviously, the live discussion will be more fun than words on a page (if only because there could be dissenting opinions), but check out the column and let me know what you think. Any questions or issues we should be addressing during the panel?

If you’re in the NY area, you should come. The panel will be in JWT’s office building (a sponsor of Social Media Week). Register here.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Where Are the Great Mormon Artists?

Posted on January 25, 2011 | 6 Comments

I participated in a BYU-Idaho student documentary about Mormon art (probably because I wrote a blog post agreeing with a Slate blog post about the lack of great Mormon artists). It’s well done and it’s embedded above…give it a view and a good rating.

The documentary starts with a famous quote from Orson F. Whitney, a leader in the church about a hundred years ago: “We shall yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.”

The question the Slate article addresses and that I address during my comments in the video is simply “Where are they? Why hasn’t our culture produced them yet?”

If there’s one negative about the video, it’s that everyone doesn’t agree with me all the time like they’re supposed to. There are a few local/indie musicians and artists who participated, along with academics and writers. The creatives were understandably defensive about the idea that Mormons can’t create great art (and, seemingly, to the idea that they themselves aren’t creating great art).

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Posted in Music Stuff, Web Stuff

The Messy Business of News

Posted on June 2, 2010 | 2 Comments

Seriously, I’d love to just rant all day long about media stupidity, and why I can’t stand watching TV news, and why you should select your “journalists of record” carefully. (The list of tech journalists I trust is short–the list of IT tech journalists I trust is VERY short).

Instead of doing that, I’ll just link to other people’s rants. Today’s rant comes from Danny Sullivan, who is definitely on my short list of brilliant tech writers. Sullivan broke a nifty story last week about a lady who is suing Google because Google Maps’ walking directions allegedly directed her, on foot, onto a highway where she was hit by a car.

Great story with all the right ingredients: a crazy lady we can all shake our heads at, who had a problem we can all identify with (who hasn’t been led astray by Google Maps at some time or other?) And it plays perfectly into the whole “don’t trust technology” mindset that old people love, and the “haha stupid people” mindset that young people love.

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Posted in Web Stuff, Work Stuff

All the news that’s fit to…what?

Posted on May 5, 2010 | 1 Comment

Funny story: Apparently Steve Jobs hates the NY Times iPad app.

Been thinking a lot about my own news consumption habits lately (as in…oh…the last 8 years). But especially today, because I totally missed the Nashville flood until my friend Whitney tweeted about it this afternoon. Honestly, hadn’t heard anything about it.

I spend pretty much all day every day immersed in tech news sites.When it comes to non-tech news, I get almost all of it from The Daily Show and from links I see posted on Twitter (I follow mostly journalists and news organizations on Twitter).I also read The New Yorker, Wired, and New York magazines, but those aren’t really sources of “hard news.” On a day-by-day level, my news consumption is admittedly a bit scattershot.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Rules of Engagement

Posted on April 2, 2010 | 1 Comment

I follow the SQL Server community pretty closely on Twitter. That sounds dorky, I know, but it’s an incredibly intelligent, passionate, and friendly/funny group of people (mostly IT and database administrators, or developers). I’m primarily an observer, but I’ve noticed very specific patterns in how this community responds to outsiders, requests for help, and breaches of protocol. And the lessons I’ve learned from this online community and others have influenced the way I think about relationships, both on and offline.

Like all communities, the SQL Server community has established social norms and best practices for itself. If you’re a DBA with a question, tweet about it using the #sqlhelp hashtag and someone in the community will probably respond to your request with help (either the answer itself, or a link where you can find the answer). I’ve seen extreme kindness around this hashtag, where the community will band together and spend an afternoon helping someone fix a bug or a piece of faulty coding, all in public, all on Twitter. Anyone that can jump in with a suggestion is encouraged to do so.

But there was a major kerfuffle last week around another social norm. Continue reading →

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Posted in Web Stuff

SXSW: Privacy Parts

Posted on March 19, 2010 | 5 Comments

Got back a few days ago from my annual trip to Austin for the SXSW Interactive conference–learned a lot of cool stuff and met a lot of cool people, as always. I’ll be posting a few of my observations over the next few days, but before I do, I wanted to point you guys to the transcript from Danah Boyd’s excellent keynote address on Internet privacy and social norms.

Give it a read–the issues she’s addressing affect literally every Web user. In my former life as a tech blogger and security editor at PCMag.com, I came to realize a few things:

1) Your data is not as private as you thing

2) Your data is much more valuable than you think

3) The companies that collect data on you are using it

4) A huge subset of Web users are completely clueless. About everything. It might not even be a subset…it might be a majority.

5) It’s almost impossible to enforce any kind of privacy norms, because everyone (myself included) checks that little box that says “I agree to the terms and conditions” without reading the terms and conditions. And most of us choose the privacy defaults that we’re presented with. And most of us are completely clueless.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff