Great evangelism for your startup.
// May 12th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Branding, Communication, Fun, people, Social Media, Social Media, Video
Why add polish when in today’s society, being so geeky is so credible? I love this intro video for Diaspora. Now it needs to be mashed-up into a music video for some yet-to-break indie band. Call it “OK Go Make A Social Network”.
The thought for today: when branding, be true to who you are. Customers have a seventh sense for these things.
// April 3rd, 2010 // 0 Comments // Branding, Fun
Someecards.com is a provider of ‘ecards’ — the things Hallmark and Facebook make a fortune out of these days. Unlike the boring twats at Hallmark and Facebook, the ecards on Someecards have a particular dry satirical tone I love. It extends to their killer tagline, which neatly summarises what Someecards does and how important their product really is — “When you care enough to hit send”.
Great stuff!
Someecards - when you care enough to hit send
// March 31st, 2010 // 0 Comments // Fun, Writing
I suppose I suffer from fear of the blank page as often as any other writer — that is to say, often. I feel it all the time, unless I’m writing in anger or I’m drunk, neither of which happens often enough that I could count on it to earn a living as a writer.
In this animated short, George Metaxas confronts the demon of the blank sheet of paper and comes off second-best. It’s an amazing animation, constructed entirely of paper, cardboard and blu-tack, and it took over his bedroom for the four months it took him to complete it. What a creative way to avoid writing for almost half a year! Congratulations to you, George.
You can read a brief interview with George here. Otherwise, enjoy this short film. I know I will be — I have a blank sheet of paper and a deadline to avoid!
the Blank Page from George Metaxas on Vimeo.
// March 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Fun
Got downtime? Here’s a fun game: use a web tool with an orgchart or mind-map or genealogy feature to create a map of your dream company structure or perfect family. Then share it with your work colleagues, your real family, or your friends on Facebook. Then see how long it takes to be fired, or frozen out of Grandpa’s will.
Here’s one I did earlier using Yammer’s orgchart feature. You’ll see I’ve finally succumbed to the Dark Side (I could never truly master my fears.) I’ve exploited my new-found evil powers by recruiting/enslaving a few underlings, including the very comely Princess Leia in her Tatooine slave-girl outfit. Sigh…
Nobody tell Emperor Palpatine he has a 'superior' OK?
I sense a disturbance in the Force. Or a fault in the aircon.
I know you creative types can do much better than that. So I’m offering a $10 iTunes gift voucher to the funniest, most creative orgchart or family tree submitted via the comments section below. (Entries close Friday 19th March. Entries will be judged by a panel of Sith Lords. Emperor Palpatine’s judgement shall be final. Really, really final.)
// November 6th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Fun
I was talking to a CIO yesterday about how hard it is to relate to “IT people”. I think by “IT people” the CIO meant developers. Personally, I enjoy relating to developers and prefer their company to other species of IT people such as project management, sales and marketing. I think I’m half-geek — unable to gracefully code but deeply in awe of those who do.
Today I’m deeply in awe of American singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton (I’m probably the last person in the world to discover him, sorry, I’m just not that cool). (more…)
// June 3rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Fun, Writing
I’ve rescued this post from my old personal blog, which I’ll be retiring soon. The post was written in 2002, when Marcel Marceau was still alive, but Jaccques Cousteau had just died. The importance of that information will soon become clear if you read on…
It’s a shame Jacques Cousteau is dead, as it effectively ruins my chances of ever persuading him to swap places with Marcel Marceau for a day.
One day I had Jacques’ name on the tip of my tongue but just couldn’t get it out, and instead all I could think of was “Marcel Marceau”. In the end I stuttered, “You know, the French guy, not Marcel Marceau, the other one…” My friend patiently ran through the famous Frenchmen he knew: Mitterrand, Basquiat, Belmondo, Tati, Proust (was he French? Deserved to be) and finally Cousteau. “Yes! I cried, that’s the fella!”
Then I realised that the reason I kept thinking Cousteau and coming up with Marceau was that the two men are, on some deeply fundamental level, entirely interchangeable. Both very successful, both world ambassadors-at-large, both very French, both old (fatally so in Cousteau’s case), both dressing up in silly outfits. Their surnames even rhyme.
They are so similar, you could almost swap them and many of us wouldn’t immediately cotton-on. And if you swapped them, it could be a lot of fun.
Remember the Jacques Cousteau TV series? “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” or something similar? Imagine, for a moment, how much fun “The Undersea World of Marcel Marceau” would be. Here is Marcel miming the act of swimming into a strong current. Here is Marcel pretending he is about to be attacked by a great white shark. Here is Marcel 90 feet underwater in only his miming clothes and face-paint, trying valiantly to hold his breath long enough to deliver just one more solo performance piece.
And the comedic potential of Cousteau, on the theatre stage, trying to capture the imagination of a capacity crowd as he mimes walking into a strong wind while dressed in full scuba gear? Priceless.
// May 31st, 2009 // 0 Comments // Fun
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy
Believe it or not I was trying to draw a little guy sitting at a laptop. Can you see it? Done on my iPhone. More at www.flickr.com/groups/typedrawing
// April 23rd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun, software, Writing
Sorry, but I'm with someone new, and it's better (photo by Michael Sarver)
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer IE 8 showing up now is like an unfaithful ex-partner showing up a long time after you’ve found someone better looking and less likely to break your heart.
Wrote this post after Amnesia Razorfish asked me to write about IE8, for Microsoft’s http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate. You can find other opinion-leaders and read their leading opinions there (warning: many are not as funny as mine). I’m impressed Amnesia Razorfish and Microsoft were up for constructive criticism since IE8 is such an important product. Evidence Microsoft is learning to listen and ready to begin changing. You can contribute your opinion on http://microsoft.com.au/ie8debate or just twitter with the hashtag #ie8debate
There was a time (though it seems like centuries ago now) that Internet Explorer had me by the heart-strings. It was the mid-nineties, I was but a young stripling then, and all I could think about was the beauty and the power of the internet. I was a producer with a small internet business called Yahoo! that hoped to make some money selling ads on web pages when people went searching for stuff (as if!) and Internet Explorer was one of two browsers that most consumers used to access what many people still called “the world wide web.”
Back then Internet Explorer (IE) had a small but rapidly growing slice of the market and I was in love with her promise of fast times, with her sexy interface. (Can an interface be “sexy”? Can I get a “hell yeah” from the geeks in the audience?) In those days, compared to Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer was attractive; alluring, even. IE was great for me, great for Yahoo! and great for our customers. She made me look good, and she was going to help me make money — who can ask for more from a girlfriend?
Then the relationship began to go bad.
IE started to get carried away with the power she had over me. She wanted more money to keep Yahoo! search as an option for IE users searching the web. She wanted me to adopt new technologies like ActiveX that weren’t compatible with Navigator. By now, Navigator was just another browser I was just friends with, but that wasn’t enough for IE — she wanted me all to herself.
Then she started to hang around with a bad crowd, and developed a crack habit. Spyware and malware and all manner of nasty types started exploiting security vulnerabilities I hadn’t noticed when we first started dating. She had a problem, and although she kept releasing updates to address each vulnerability, there seemed to be a new crack in her armour almost every week.
At first I thought it was just a phase she’d grow out of. Slowly the crack habit began affecting the time we spent together — I’d have to download and install a big new patch before I began browsing the web, and it was costing me money and time in bandwidth (which was expensive and slow back then) just to maintain our relationship.
Even then, I probably would have stayed with her if it weren’t for two of her friends: MSN and Windows.
There’s a common observation in single guy relationship theory: the more beautiful the woman, the more likely she is to have a needy, unattractive best friend. The unattractive best friend (who my mate Tony calls “the bonus monster”) doesn’t like you, and will always be around just when you really want to be alone and romantic. She will undermine you, and if you’re not careful, she’ll manage to shut you out altogether.
IE’s bonus monster was MSN, this overweight, insecure, unattractive consumer web portal that kinda-sorta-wanted-to-be-AOL-and-Yahoo!-put-together. At first I didn’t believe MSN was a threat to my relationship with IE because nobody who knew how to change their default homepage really wanted to use it. But soon IE started to insist that we think of MSN’s feelings on every decision we were making; including MSN in everything we did together, even insisting I use MSN if I was going to do something online. Ick.
Then there was IE’s fat, clumsy and often aggressive big bully brother, Windows. At lot has changed since Windows got in trouble with the law and lost, but back then, Windows was a pretty scary guy to deal with. There was a tiny core at the centre of Windows — a brainstem that remained almost literally unchanged since the Jurassic equivalent of consumer computing evolution — and on top of that, all manner of computing services had been stacked, sometimes carefully, sometimes haphazardly. Sometimes the stack would fall over several times a day.
(Once I taught myself to juggle during a two week period of hell when Windows would crash my laptop hourly and then take 5-10 minutes to recover itself when I rebooted.)
Microsoft, IE’s dad, decided about mid-way through our relationship that it would be a good idea for IE to spend more time with Windows, and began insisting that they hang out together in what became an uncomfortable, unnatural way. It seemed like the more successful IE became, the more determined Microsoft became to make IE take care of her bully brother. Sometimes it was like Windows and IE were just one person; they started sharing a plate, started hugging a little too closely, began finishing each other’s sentences. It was wrong on so many levels. It was incest. And yet, when the courts finally sought to intervene, for a while Microsoft tried to say it was no longer possible for Windows to exist without IE. That was so weird it was embarrassing.
I’d been through a lot all this time, putting up with the constant downtimes, updates and workarounds I needed just to stay in this relationship, but I still had eyes only for IE. At least, until poor bloated, dependency-addled IE could no longer keep up with advances in HTML itself. And I bought an iPod.
See, for the past decade my employer had chosen the operating system I used at work, and while my shiny new iPod worked OK with my Windows laptop at work, I was blown away by the ease-of-use and clean simplicity of my iPod. I’d used Macs before in the past (I’d been a Mac evangelist and Editor of Australian Macworld magazine before there really was an Internet) and I began to wonder if perhaps the great times I was having with my iPod would be the same if I tried using Mac’s OS X instead of Windows.
When I left Yahoo! to go do my own thing, I bought a Mac. On my Mac there was IE, but not the IE 6.x I was used to, just something slow and clunky labelled IE 5.x. Not very much like the IE 5.x I’d used on Windows before. There was also Safari, another browser from Apple, which was basic and short on some features I’d miss a bit, but it was much faster than IE, and it was really stable.
There was also this new girl: Firefox. Somehow while I’d been focused on just getting by in my tumultuous relationship with IE, the un-sexy, clunky Navigator I’d known in the ’90s had dramatically changed. After a near-death experience and a long time in rehab she had gone into a kind of group therapy called Open Source and come out transformed. She was now everything I might want, and as my needs changed, the open source community ensured that she not only changed with my needs but often anticipated my needs before they changed. She was light, she was fast, she was flexible, and I could dress her up with themes to suit any occasion.
She was even OK that I was still good friends with Safari and wanted to stay that way. I’d found the girl of my dreams.
So a few years went by. Then just the other day, Firefox and Safari and were are at the coffee shop, working and talking via Twitter and Skype and Jabber with our friends, and you’d never guess who walked in. Internet Explorer 8. Looking cleaner, less seedy, and for a change, not joined at the hip to her scary brother Windows and her ugly best friend, MSN. I hardly recognised her.
So I asked Firefox and Safari if they’d excuse me, and I moved to another table to talk with IE 8 for a while. And every thing I learned just made me certain I’d made the right decision in leaving her.
She made it clear that she wanted me back, but I don’t think she even really knows what I want anymore. Yes, she has has some new features but I’m not overwhelmed by them, in fact, I’m not even whelmed. They’re very similar to stuff I already get with Firefox and Safari. Yes, IE 8 is now less befuddled with crud than before and more able to support the advanced scripting web services like to do these days, but that’s something I’d expect of any modern girl.
We went through a lot together, IE8 and I. I know it hurt both of us, not just me. But it takes a long time for those scars to heal. It takes a lot of upside for me to give her a second chance. I can’t see that upside in her right now.
And I’m a Mac guy now. Is there an IE8 for Mac guys? Ah, no. In fact, there isn’t even that terrible IE 5.x for Mac users anymore.
Sorry IE, but you’re the unfaithful ex-girfriend, and I’m in a better place now.
When I first started as a web producer, everybody I knew worked with only Netscape Navigator and IE in mind and they did it only from PCs. Now, in my consulting gig at Pollenizer.com Our team are nearly all Mac-based and we work mainly in Firefox and Safari (when we’re not testing for browser-compatibility). Times have changed for me. How have they changed for you?
// April 6th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun, Writing
If you’re going to be wasting bytes by putting all that fine print at the bottom of your emails, at least be honest and do try to be funny. Here’s how:
// March 31st, 2009 // 0 Comments // Featured, Fun
In 2001-2003, when instant messaging was in its infancy and social networking was something we did in bars, I probably spent too much time trying to write funnier status messages for Yahoo! Messenger than the 500-odd other employees. Is it any wonder they were happy to see me go?
Interestingly, in my original collection I had saved, “Is there anyone out there?” — what seemed like a funny thing to say in 2001 seems just weird to ask these days. Can you even imagine what it was like when there were whole chunks of the day when nobody was there in your buddy list?
These days, everybody’s got at least one status message, mood or “What I’m doing now” attached to an online profile. I bet the Dalai Llama’s says, “Laughing, again” and Kim Jong-Il’s says something like, “I feel like launching missles today.” So here are some of the most interesting status messages I’ve collected over the last few years.
Where known, I’ve credited their author by their Yahoo! Messenger ID. Many of those people still go by the same IDs, so if you’re interested, try googling them (oops, I mean “yahooing” them.) The remainder are my own work, hope you like them.
Think I write well? I’m available for hire!
Copyright © 2012 Doing Words. All rights reserved.
