By Will McInnes

Combine Twitter with Pulp Fiction

...and this is what you get - Tarantinoesque Haiku:

Woke up in the lobby wearing nothing but five strategically placed cupcakes. Eyes feel like olives stabbed with little cocktail swords.

and:

  I saw a little kid trip over a pug and cry, and I didn't have that dream about my mother. So far, best birthday ever.

and:

Killed a man in Reno just to watch him die of exsanguination, hypoxia, and heart failure. That and crocheting are kind of my hobbies..?

Fucking genius! Fireland on Twitter.

Fanks to Jennybee for the recommendation earlier this week.

links for 2008-01-31

• Etsy :: The Storque :: Etsy News :: Etsy's First Five Years
  Delightful vision of Etsy. Loving the vibe. If I was a naysayer I'd focus on the $27m vs. 'we're the small guys' but I'm not going to because I believe in Etsy and it's cause. Lovely stuff.
  (tags: etsy business strategy vision inspirational worldchanging community goodcopy commerce ecommerce vc)
• Tweetmeme - 20:10 PM, January 30th, 2008 UTC
  (tags: twitter memetracker mashup api)

Bloggers FAH-REEEEK me OUT

Written as if everything that each person is *thinking* is actually said out loud.

Normal person: You've got yer laptop out ya fucking gadgetised tech loving weirdo, this is a conference, yeah? Most of us come here to switch our minds OFF not on. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked, so...if you brought your laptop to a conference and have it open on the table, I'm guessing you're a blogger - am I right (weirdo)?

Blogger: Yep, tosspiece, I'm a blogger, and I find your tone and that weird pathological foaming rar-ra look in your eyes slightly odd...

Normal person: Great, fuck me sideways, we've got a live one, a real BLOGGER weirdo right here. So why do you blog...no friends?

Blogger: Errrr, because I like to express myself and share that with other people I mostly already know.

Normal person: WEEEE-YERRRRD! Whoah. WHY??

Blogger: Ummmm, because I have opinions and designs and  I enjoy it...kinda thing.

Normal person: So do you like to write negative stuff, I mean - what motivates you to write bad stuff about people - are you angry, were you maimed as a child, are you broken and twisted inside?

Blogger: I don't write bad stuff about people

Normal person: But you're a b-l-o-g-g-e-r, yes? NEGATIVE! It's what you feed off, right? C'mon.

Blogger: No. I mean, if I was really unhappy about something I'd probably write about it, but most of the team I just toodle along.

Normal person: Right...I see...and what kinda shit do you EAT? Food? Do you eat food? Or do you melt down silicon chips and rub the hot fluid into your parched geek-thin lips? Maybe you're too busy watching filthy web cams and playing World of Warcraft to eat, yes?

Blogger: Ummmmmm.

Normal person: Why can't you be normal like me?

Blogger: ........

links for 2008-01-30

• iPhone video
  the peerless edward tufte on the iphone interface. i love his tone when he points out the rare flaws - 'except the lines should be grey and only 1 px wide'. ahh, the genius of real perfectionist-experts.
  (tags: EdwardTufte ux ui iphone interface design review comments analysis apple information mobile usability video)
• SproutBuilder: You've Got to See This Drag and Drop Widget Maker - ReadWriteWeb
  needs investigating.
  (tags: widget widgets builder creator tool flash)
• Facebook members reach 2m in London - Brand Republic News - Brand Republic
  "The London network on Facebook has become the first city-specific network on the social networking site to reach 2m members."
  (tags: facebook uk london statistics)
• blog.pmarca.com: Yeah, I'm paying attention... what?
  More stats on our increasing continuous partial attention
  (tags: cpa continuouspartialattention media consumption statistics trends analysis multitasking home)
• alarm:clock euro: Why Two Early Mobile Social Startups Are Heading To The US
  (tags: mobile socialsoftware startup)
• Morae: Usability Testing Solution for Web Sites and Software
  (tags: usability user testing tracking ui software test webdesign web eyetracking)
• Live Issue... A frenzied industry wonders if it’s addicted to pitching - Brand Republic News - Brand Republic
  On agencies and pitching. (As an aside, I am annoyed by the quality of Brand Republic's content, having slagged off their crappy pay-wall, and now keep bookmarking good content - damn.)
  (tags: agency world pitching article global)
• Is the Tipping Point Toast? -- Duncan Watts -- Trendsetting
  important - please read this. you don't need to agree, but you need to *know*.
  (tags: analysis article behaviour attention buzz future influence networks popularity psychology socialmedia socialnetwork socialnetworks society statistics strategy theory trends viral viralmarketing wisdomofcrowds)

My notes from PR, Social Networking And Blogging In Practice

Yesterday I spoke at and Nixon McInnes had a stand at PR Week's 'PR, Social Networking And Blogging' event.

The speaking line up was unusually good - it's normal at an event like this to have 2 or 3 corkers, and then some middling talks and some downright death by powerpoint and lack of passion-ers. From where I sat there was a much better split there yesterday.

I also met two twitterers, both client side, which in itself is a great thing - the Twitter-fam grows: Jenny Bee and Kerryatdell.

I took particular heart from what the many client speakers were saying and how bang on and Cluetrained up it all was. Woo hoo - the client community is well and truly on board now.

Here are the few factoids I noted:

• Telegraph online gets 1,000 - 2,000 comments per day coming in
• Blogflux - mentioned as blog tools to investigate
• Timesonline spend £70k per week on advertising the website (whoah)
• Evidence to show the change from our media consumption as 6 am - 9 am and then 7 pm - 10 pm to all day through with 60% of social networking happening during the day, so it's not about a few key windows of consumption but a more even spread of 'always on'-ness
• 'Flat Earth News' was recommended as a book
• 40% of senior decision makers want 'consumer insight' from the blogosphere

Some other observations:

• Most social media talks have too many massive numbers in them "300 million blogs are added EVERY SINGLE DAY" (sigh). These are shitty, irresponsible fear-inducing tactics from the industry community and clients deserve a little more respect than that.
• Most social media talks gloss over things that most clients don't yet have a decent handle on - e.g. 'all of this is powered by RSS..and yada yada'. In my mid-afternoon slot I asked the 200 attendees 'how many of you use RSS and understand how it works in principle?' - about 15 hands went up. I asked 'who knows what a widget is'. Same. This is not patronising, these are real people who know *other stuff*. Our job is to teach them the new. Don't assume, Mrs/Mr Speaker...
• Bloggers are not Martians - some of the clients to or about 'bloggers' were hilarious, as if they were aliens, an entirely different species. LOL. A blog post on this alone will follow :)

If you were there and we didn't get to meet, drop me an email (email address below my pic).

If you did and hope to never see me again, I understand. I'm sorry about the '3 pairs of pants' remark.

links for 2008-01-29

• How Much Money Are Facebook Apps Making? Not Much Apparently
  A bit of reality for those developing facebook apps to win revenues (rather than say sponsorship by a brand, or purchase by someone that wants a community or user base).
  (tags: facebook application revenue figures trends calculations analysis advertising network)
• Dell's 23 Confessions - Direct2Dell
  great example of a big brand 'owning up' in an authentic and open way on a blog. dell is the poster child these days of best practice in customer engagement thru social media.
  (tags: bigbrand casestudy bestpractice example blog blogging negative feedback blogosphere honesty open authenticity business community dell socialmedia)
• Exploratree - Exploratree by FutureLab
  fucking hell this looks good n interesting. using this, nothing stands between me and a consultant-wanker-load of stupid 2x2 boxes mapping the 'leveragedness of global internet connectivity community innovation platforms and their impact on homogenised we
  (tags: analysis framework guides ideas visualization writing research resources strategy tools)
• Futurelab - Innovation in education
  absolutely lovely website. in the top 1%, easily.
  (tags: goodwebsite thinktank Consultancy education research agency cool creative)
• nameless web design - Bristol, London, Glasgow, Cardiff and the world
  the agency that did the futurelab website. fair fookn play.
  (tags: agency digital creative)
• the social marker- the "social object" on steroids
  a nice term coined by hugh mcleod - 'social marker', being the reference that people make early in a conversation to set the context and position themselves. E.g. oh i was talking to steve jobs last night.
  (tags: social marker term new concept brand context)
• Amadeus - Bill Earner
  I met this guy at the Umair Haque meet up last week. A great name for a VC.
  (tags: vc london)
• Geek Boy's blog: QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture.
  i love my mac. i hate the way it doesn't play nice with microsoft. damn you two juvenile giants.
  (tags: mac powerpoint howto)

Quick video write up

This year, with the perfect storm (buzzword-tastic, that is) that is:

near-ubiquitous video camera availability in new mobile phones,
the maturation of online video providers,
the high availability of broadband,
and subsequent rise in website visitors expectations,

...I'm personally committed to using as much video as I can.

I wanted to try some of the mainstream video hosts that are out there - here's my very brief take on things so far in case it's helpful to you too:

YouTube - slow, ugly, bad video quality, large community, which is only valuable depending on your aims. Deeply flawed for my purpose, I now think, which is hosting videos to embed in web pages, specifically on blogs. But clearly if you have a 'fish where the fishes are' strategy, and want your content to play on the biggest stage, then YouTube is probably essential.

Viddler - most advanced feature set, with the ability for viewers to comment in the video's timeline which works fantastically on the Gary Vaynerchuk vlog, and the neat little incoming links feature which picks up inbound links to the video, and miles smoother and tastier than YouTube. Just basically feels like pro vs amateur, compared with good ol' YT.

Vimeo - smoothest, nicest interface, incredibly fast upload (which may have been due to lack of other people using our office bandwidth after office hours), I like the look of the community features, but can't personally vouch for them yet.

If you know of any other good contenders or have an opinion on any of the above please let me know - I'd like to keep trying out new services or find deeper smarter bits that can help me on the above 3 services.

The timber clean up on Brighton beach

Brighton beach clean up and winter sun from will mcinnes on Vimeo.

links for 2008-01-28

• Social media and PR course outline Neville Hobson.com
  (tags: socialmedia pr 2.0 training education overview outline course programme)
• About EveryBlock
  Exciting, bold hyperlocal news web project. "We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We're a geographic filter -- a "news feed" f
  (tags: hyper local media news community website government ambitious inspirational)
• Redeye VC: After the Techcrunch Bump
  start up aspects to measure, monitor, work on.
  (tags: startup business strategy metrics key areas entrepreneurship marketing technology viral)
• Flickr Photo Download: Right Arm by Diau-An at Taiwan Tattoo - Kaohsiung, Taiwan
  (tags: tattoo)
• BBC NEWS | Business | Vancouver is 'best place to live'
  but what about the 5 months of drizzle?
  (tags: cities international living bbc bestof)
• The social network for learning languages - VoxSwap
  online social network for learning languages (built by the guys at Kwikk)
  (tags: online socialnetwork community languages learning education p2p offtheshelf)
• Haymarket Events : PR, Social Networking And Blogging In Practice : Programme
  speaking here tomorrow. be interesting to see how much overlap there is between many uncoordinated speakers talking on the same themes all day!
  (tags: blogging conference online socialnetwork event speaking pr 2.0)

links for 2008-01-27

• Seth's Blog: Music lessons
  some thoughts from the godin on how the music business should change
  (tags: music business strategy howto tips analysis sethgodin digital future ideas inspiration)