gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

name tag

I just designed this name tag sticker for the London Geek Dinner on the 7th.

Does anyone who's coming own a good printer? If so, would you mind printing up some stickers and bringing them to the evening? Just click on the image above to download the high-rez version. I'm guessing we'll need around the 200-mark.

[cough] I actually don't own a printer.

[UPDATE:] The groovy cats over at backstage.bbc.co.uk have kindly agreed to supply the name tags. Thanks, though, to everyone else who offered.

[ALSO:] Does anyone who's coming own a portable amp and mike? Since there's going to be so many of us, we're planning on having an after-dinner speech or two. If you can offer one for the evening, please e-mail me. Thanks.

Robert, would you mind blogging this to help spread the word?

new blogcard designs

I shall soon be adding a few new designs to the Blogcards range.

Any requests?

[PS:] I'm also having all the "(c)gapingvoid.com" tags removed from the front of the blogcards (they're still on a few of them, but not all). They look tacky.

joi ito's print

Joi Ito has commisioned me to turn his business card design (i.e. the cartoon above) into a signed, limited edition of 50 fine art prints.

Signed, numbered, large poster size, heavyweight paper. All that good stuff.

We first talked about doing it over a year ago. Took us a while to get around to it. He was busy, I was busy, yada yada yada.

Thanks, Joi! This should be fun!

France rejects the European Constitution.

France says "Non" to the 250-odd-page, intellectually bankrupt train wreck that is the EU Constitution (beta version). As France was one of the founding six members of the European Union (Britain wasn't), it's big news.

Hey Guys, next time you draft a proposed constitution, try to keep it under 1000 words. If you can't, it probably means you haven't really given it sufficient thought.

[UPDATE:] Jarvis pipes in:

It's about trying to turn Europe in to a faux nation. It's about protectionism. It's about Europe thinking it is a world player when it is no longer. And it's about a bad constitution that made up for in bureaucracy what it lacked in vision.

The Europe project has been around for over 40 years. Not once in the last 10 years have I heard any big-time Europhile ever try to answer the very simple question: "What problem is the current 'Europe' project actually trying to solve?"

Besides the problem of Eurocrats not having enough money, power or freebies, that is.

boris on the bbc

Boris Johnson, Conservative MP and mid-ranking celeb has a go at the Beeb:

Is this Britain, my friends, or is this some Central American dictatorship, circa 1970? I can think of only one reason for having a television in Oxfordshire, and that is so that I can refuse to pay Goodbody his confounded £126, and thereby show the BBC what I think of the licence fee. We imagine we are living in an advanced free market economy. Yet here is Goodbody, an emanation of the state, threatening me with surveillance and fines, so that I can continue to fund 10,000 state-sector journalists; an idea that seems increasingly peculiar and anomalous in 2005, but which is made more offensive to me by the BBC's continuing habit of ever so subtly sneering at my party (the Conservatives) and anyone who votes for it.

I like the BBC (90% of my non-internet media intake is BBC radio), the World Service is probably the greatest media institution on the planet (with The Economist coming in a close second), but like any state-owned broadcaster, it's also in the business of social coercion (although I'm sure they prefer to think of it in terms of "social cohesion"). So it's fun watching Boris bring his pet bull to the china shop.

clay shirky on tagging

More words from The Master: "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags."

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

Pay attention, Sig.

british blog rankings

The most linked-to British blogs, according to Technorati.

I'm ranked Number Three...

blogging and self-interest

[UPDATE: Good news- Loic Lemeur has kindly agreed to also appear on the panel.]

I've been asked to hold a panel discussion at Reboot 7.0.

Here's the plan:

Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Loic Lemeur and me will interview each other.

The main focus will be: What makes for successful blogging.

By "successful", I mean, blogging in such a way that transforms your life and career in a positive way. That could mean money, or job, or social status, or personal stuff.

I have some questions I'd like to ask Doc and Robert on this subject. And hopefully they'll have a few zingers to send my way.

I'd also like to bring up a few contentious issues. What landmines to avoid etc. Ethical issues etc. The politics invloved with blogs and keeping other bloggers' goodwill intact.

We'll do this for a bit, get things rolling then open up the discussion with everyone in the audience.

There's a lot of people out there asking the question, "OK, I know blogs work. And I know blogs work very well for other people. But I haven't figured out how to get it to work FOR ME yet. Not like how I'd want to. What do I have to do to make it happen?"

I find "blogging and self-interest" an endlessly fascinating subject. I'd like to use the panel to help bring that conversation more out into the open.

I'll see you in Copenhagen.

[UPDATE:] Scoble gives it a mention.

[RELATED:] From Ross Mayfield: "Fear and greed is driving Social Software."

pussy

angel ted

nature abhors a vacuum

[Link to The Cluetrain.]

grosse fugue op.133

The BBC's Radio 3 will be playing every single last note of Beethoven between the 5th and 10th of June. Rock on.

Beethoven is it for me. All the other geniuses- Michaelangelo, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Van Gough, Saul Steinberg, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Einstein etc- are secondary.

We think we know his work. Da da da dum etc. But seriously, how many of us have actually listened to Beethoven's Ninth from beginning to end, in one sitting? It's is a screaming hymn to humanity, triumphant and reflective and longing and unapologetic, when absorbed in its entirety.

Here's a tip: a classical musician friend of mine once descrtibed Track 1 on this CD, Grosse Fugue Op.133 as "the greatest piece of music ever written, played by the greatest string quartet in the world." He was not far wrong. I first heard the recording a few years before my friend gave me his glowing review.

Beethoven has been dead for over 150 years, and yet today it still sounds avant guarde, especially in the hands of Arditti & Co.

The first time I heard it, I was blown away. Never, before or since, had a piece of music fried my head in such a mind-expanding moment of incandescent lucidity.

"I'm Beethoven. And you're not." Heh.

[PS: My other fave composers are Bach, Schubert, Faure and Janicek.]

i want to sing

london geek dinner (cont.)

The London Geek Dinner on June 7th now stands at well over 150 people. Wow.

Robert Scoble and his wife, Maryam will be there, of course. Also looking forward to seeing a lot of blogging buddies again: Euan, Neil, Gia, Sig, Neville, Lee etc.

Loic Lemeur might make it but he [cough] hasn't confirmed yet.

Lots of Microsoft people are coming. The place will be utterly swarming with them.

Then two days later we're off to Reboot 7.0.

Looks like it's getting busy 'round here.

blogger's wine freebie 2345

[UPDATED SEPTEMBER 22, 2005: The promo is now CLOSED. To see how other bloggers reacted to receiving their wine freebie, please visit the wiki.] [This page translated into French here.]

In order to give you guys a better idea about what I'm doing with Stormhoek, I've been allowed to give out some free samples.

Anybody want a free bottle of the pre-release 2005? Then you can find out what the whole "Freshness" angle means first hand.

(Stormhoek bottle arrived in mail with Name and Individual Number etc.)

Three things are needed.

1. You have to live in France [the UK and Irish freebies are now closed, sorry].

2. You have to be a blogger over 18 years old, with a regularly updated blog at least 3 months old.

3. You have to send me an e-mail with the words "Blogger's Wine Freebie 2345" in the title (the "2345" number makes it easier to keep track of the e-mails and makes them harder to get lost etc.).

Please include your full name, your blog URL, your mailing address (including the country), and a written statement that confirms both that you're over 18 and your date of birth.

You're under no obligation to blog about Stormhoek in exchange for the free bottle, of course. I just thought making it "Bloggers Only" would be a neat idea.

But if you want to tell your friends and readers about this freebie offer over the next wee while, that would be really cool. Share the love etc. Thanks.

(gratuitous product shot- hooray!)

If some lawyer comes breathing down my neck, I reserve the right to change the conditions of the offer.

It'll be interesting to hear what the blogosphere has to say. I hope to hear from you. Thanks again.

[ENCORE:] To see how other bloggers reacted to receiving their wine freebie, please visit the wiki.

autoblogger

"Have you noticed how every one of my cartoons has been pretty much the same recently? Yep, AutoBlogger can generate graphics as well. Now go buy a $3000 suit."

dvd hell

To all my hacker friends:

My dear mother came back from a trip to the US last week.

She brought back all these new DVDs.

Oh Dear! They don't seem to work in the UK. Some kind of baked-in market protectionism, no doubt.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction for possibly fixing this problem? Can a DVD player be reconfigured, or something?

Or is the problem unfixable, and DVD makers just plain evil?

Any help on this would be really appreciated. Thanks.

blogvertising: "advertising is dead" reason #8647

Long-time readers of gapingvoid will remember from early 2004, when I spent a lot of time talking about my friend, Dave MacKenzie's film "Young Adam".

Dave has a new movie coming out, and Yours Truly will soon be blogging about that one as well, you lucky duckies.

Back when I was writing about Youg Adam, I was playing around with the idea of "blogvertising"... using a blog a way to spread commercial ideas (as opposed to commercial messages- and yes, there's a huge difference).

Sure, I was delighted to be helping my friend promote his new movie. But the "Blogvertising" idea utterly fascinated me, and that's what made me really get into high gear for Dave.

My audience reads my cartoons for free, in exchange they let me drone on about my friend's movie. It's not a bad deal. Besides, all the Young Adam plugs are clearly marked with a wee icon on the top. So it's easy enough for folk to skip over- it's relatively non-intrusive.

"Blogvertising" is a format that's not limited to the dreaded 30-second TV commercial, the beyond-useless webpage banner ad, the overcrowded magazine page, the half-second flash of billboards, or the despised junk-mail paper mountain. Yeah, as somebody who's been watching advertising closely for over a decade, I think it's pretty huge.

The only issue is how much does it cost to get the demographically-correct eyeballs to log onto gapingvoid.

Then this year other projects came along. First English Cut, then Thingamy, and then Stormhoek.

While none of these three examples are technically paying me "to blog", I have a business interest in seeing each one of these projects succeed. Ergo I find them genuinely interesting. Ergo I write about them. Ergo my readers hear about them. Ergo it helps get the ideas out. Ergo this helps drive the businesses forward.

Suddenly it occurs to me... besides my pet cartoon projects (t-shirts, books etc), this is basically all I'm doing for a living these days. For all intents and purposes, I'm a professional blogvertiser.

I've been thinking hard about blogvertising for a while. I really like the business model. Why?

In a word- "Overheads".

1. A blogvertising capaign needs three things: an engaging blogger, an internet connection, and the cost of getting eyeballs in front of the homepage.

2. A traditional advertising campaign needs all sort of expensive stuff. Besides the expensive media and the insanely expensive production (they only REALLY want to sell you TV, let's stop kidding ourselves), it has to pay for an advertising agency, the agency's payroll (with all those lovely back-room jobs), the agency's rent on the fancy office in downtown Manhattan, the fancy designer furniture that fills the office etc etc.

3. The latter's final list is very long and all of it is insanely expensive. And unlike the blogvertising overheads, none of it is getting any cheaper.

There's another three points to consider:

1. There has to be authenticity and genuine alignment, or else it won't work. What the advertiser is doing and what I'm doing has to be somehow in sympatico, or else it's just like traditional advertising- useless, overpriced, interruptive, huckstering slush.

2. Juxtaposing my ideas with the advertiser's ideas inform both parties' agendae, so the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Working with gapingvoid made English Cut more fertile, and vice versa. Same with Thingamy and Stormhoek with myself. Two plus two equals five etc.

3. This allows me to actually test The Hughtrain in real life, not just write about it in theory.

So if you're an advertiser, perhaps you'd like to compare the cost of keeping me alive, versus the cost of meeting the payroll of your average ad agency. Do the math, then maybe drop me an e-mail if you want to discuss this idea further. Rock on.

english cut: four months on

Last week on May 19th, English Cut turned four months old.

Wow. It seems a lot longer than that.

Thomas is going to the States in two weeks, his second US visit under the "English Cut" banner. Last time he measured his new customers; this time they'll be having their first fittings. The proof of the pudding is in the eating etc.

[My main observation:] Though it's nice to have had all this blogosphere-generated interest (which directly led to a lot of new business), true value in tailoring is created by how many long-term clients you have. Regular, repeat business over a stretch of many years.

No big media spike can replace that. So it's still very early days. I reckon it'll be at least three years before I'll be able to know how vaible this business really is. But I'm optimisitic.

stormhoek: my latest gig

I was down South last week, attending the London International Wine & Spirit Fair.

I've been asked by my buddy, Jason Korman of Orbital Wines to start working on their "Stormhoek" brand.

Stormhoek (pronounced "Storm-hook") is a South African wine, and it's very good stuff.

The Stormhoek schtick is "Freshness Matters". I just wrote The Stormhoek Manifesto. Go check it out.

[CAVEAT:] Though I've been asked to write the Stormhoek blog, I wouldn't call myself a wine expert. But I'm hoping the blog won't be about wine per se; more about the wine business etc.

Whatever. It's early days. Let's see what happens.

dramatic moment

a very radical advertising idea: business models that don't suck.

From The New York Times: Advertisers getting less and less happy with their agencies' product:

"In the 80's, we used to fight with clients over creative. In the 90's, it was about strategy. Now, it's only about money," said Jonathan Bond, co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners in New York.

[Thanks to Dave Parmet for the link]

That's it in a nutshell. From creative, to strategy, to mere commodity within a few short years. The world evolving, faster than the service they offer.

When I read this kind of stuff I am reminded of the words a global brand director a very large company once told me about agencies: "Their business models suck and they're expensive for what you get."

I suppose the thing to do is have business models than don't suck, that offer stuff that isn't expensive. Sadly for Madison Avenue, people who make a lot of money in big agencies aren't allowed to do that. Not if they want to keep their jobs.

book proposal (rewrite #471)

"How To Be Creative"

A book by by Hugh MacLeod

[As regular gapingvoid readers will know, I'm hoping to turn "How To Be Creative" into a book. This is my latest attempt to write the book proposal, as I see it in its finished form. Apologies in advance if you've already seen a lot of this before.]

In 2004 I wrote a post on my blog called "How To Be Creative". Its premise was very simple:

"So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years."

It really wasn't so much a How-To laundry list, "The 7 Steps Of Highly Effective Creatives" etc. It was more of a series of meditations on the lessons I had learned the hard way over the years, as I tried to bridge the nearly impossible gap of making an OK living without letting my soul die from the inside out.

Somehow it ended up striking a chord with a lot of people. Lots of people ended up reading it (my best estimate is around half a million to the million mark). It went viral, to put it mildly. Later it ended up as a PDF file on Seth Godin's ChangeThis.com. At last count it was the third most downloaded PDF on the site, topping manifestos written by people far more famous and talented than me, like Tom Peters or Guy Kawasaki.

Like I said, it hit a nerve.

Most of the Change This manifestos were written by people to be read by their peers. People in their thirties and forties, interested in the same kind of business-orientated subjects, whatever. Mine wasn't. Mine was written for people far more younger than me- kids just leaving college, or folk who haven't been in the real world very long, just looking to figure things out for the first time. Kids who want to do the same as me when I too was just starting out- stay alive spiritually while still being able to function in an adult world, without being eaten alive or turned into robots.

A few months later I started getting people from the publishing world asking me if I would be interested in turning it into a book. Of course I would, who wouldn't? So they asked me to write a book proposal. This is what you're reading now.

[RSS READERS: CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE THING.]

The Book Idea.

The book is an informed meditation on "creativity" and how to live with it. It is not a book on how to become "more creative". It is a book about understanding it more, so a person can manage it better without it ruining their life. It's a book about how to deal with being bitten by the creative bug. The world we live in is not geared up for "the creative life" very well and it's damn hard to know what to do at first. By sharing my perspective and experience, I hope to make it a lot easier for people.

Like a friend of mine said, "You didn't write it for your friends, you wrote it as a gift." Exactly.

As I am primarily known as a cartoonist, there will be lots of cartoons- 300 or so- interspersed randomly throughout the text. They will take up a sizeable part of the book. Some cartoons will be directly related to the written text, and some won't. This format already works very well on my blog. The random juxtaposition between text and cartoon enhances the reading experience of both- creating a "third experience", as it were. This isn't rocket science- The New Yorker inserts cartoons in its magazine in the same fashion for precisely the same reason.

Why I think the book will be commercially successful.

I think the book will be successful simply because I consider the work already successful. In its rough, online form, it's already been seen by a large number of people (again, my estimates vary between half a million and one million folk, though it may well be more than that), if you include both its HTML and PDF versions. It's already been at the top of the most-linked-to lists in the blogosphere. Seth Godin, no book-slack himself deemed it good enough to publish it on ChangeThis, where in terms of eyeballs and downloads it's topped many already-bestselling authors including Mr. Godin himself.

What gives me even more confidence in this regard is not just all the eyeballs, the blogs talking about it, all the people linking to it, and the hundreds of pieces of "fan mail" I've received. What really does it for me is, every couple of days or so, I get an e-mail from a reader basically saying, "I read it, loved it, and I have forwarded to my son/daughter/nephew/favorite 22 year old" etc. People aren't just reading it, liking it and telling their friends about it. They're passing it on to the next generation. I think that says something.

Why I'm The Guy To Write It.

I'm the person to write it for three reasons:

1. Because I've already written it (obviously).

2. For all my many faults, I'm considered an authority on "Creativity". Besides cartooning, I've worked as an advertising creative for 15 years, I've written TV shows, and my blog is in the Top 200 of the Technorati rankings, which is the primary measure these days. In blogging terms, I'm about as well known as anyone.

3. Because of my very non-linear, haphazard background I've had a lot of experiences that a lot of "creativity" gurus have simply not had. Besides my cartooning, I've done a lot of other things. Worked offshore in the oil business. Made TV commericals. Started businesses. Embraced the internet. Worked in ERP software markets. I've been all over, a loose cannon, living in cities in England, the USA, Scotland, France, Africa etc and its givem me a very wide perspective.

My Back Story.

I had always drawn cartoons, but never really wanted to do it professionally. Cartooning as a day job meant chaining yourself to your table, scratching out a living in silence, interrupted only by frequent trips to the coffee shop. I wanted to see more of the world than that. I wanted to get out, have adventures, travel, make money, live in the adult world. I wanted to be part of the noisy, hustle n' bustle, big city life. I wanted to look out my bedroom window in the morning and see skyscrapers. Cartooning was too “college town” for me.

So straight out of college I got a job in a big Chicago advertising agency. It was a good choice. It pretty much used the same part of my brain as cartooning, the pay was good, the work doable enough and you got to interact with adults most of the time. Plus it also indulged one's fascination with mass media that all young adults seem to have. I was dead pleased to be in the business.

Still, my first few years in advertising were not easy. Writing ads is a tough profession. There are far too many people doing it, it’s very competitive, it's hard as hell to stand out and get ahead, the stress is awful, the future is always uncertain, the hours are long, the working weekends are many and the politics involved are completely insane.

By the late 1990’s I was starting to burn out a bit. The job was taking its toll. In spite of this I found myself being offered a great new job in New York City, which I jumped at.

My first year in New York was a transient time for me. Uncertainty about my career and other personal issues meant instead of settling down like a normal person, I was going out a lot. I was drinking way too much. About this time I started doodling on the back of business cards, just to give me something to do while sitting at the bar.

Business cards are the perfect medium for a New York barfly. They're easy to carry around, they don't attract a lot of attention, they don't take up a lot of space at the bar, they're cheap and disposable enough so it doesn’t matter if you spill your drink on them. They’re a completely unfamiliar, baggage-free, expectation-free medium, so it doesn’t matter if you never get a foothold in the gallery or publishing scene. They can simply exist without a lot of fuss.

People walking past the bar on the way to the bathroom would see this jittery, unkempt guy in a tweed jacket on a barstool, doodling furiously and wonder what was up. Sometimes they’d look at my work. Sometimes it would be met with entusiasm, sometimes not. Often I was asked if I publish. I’d say no, I don’t.

Saying no would invariably get me a funny look. Why was I bothering doing something this involved if I wasn’t planning on publishing it? This is New York, dammit; you’re supposed to have a master plan for world domination etc.

But I had the advertising job. I didn’t need the money, not really. The advertising paid well enough; even if it was wearing me out a bit. I knew how much most cartoonists make (peanuts) and how hard they work (very). It wasn’t a route I wanted to go down.

Besides, I had been working my ass off for over a decade. Maybe I liked just doing something for no reason, for a change. Maybe I liked the fact that these wee drawings would never be seen by a wide audience. Maybe I liked not having the pressure to succeed at all costs in the forefront of my psyche. Maybe it made me feel less of an animal to be motivated by something other than raw ambition.

Maybe I just saw myself swimming in this crazy, desperate, horny, existential, urban, greedhead-frenzy sea of random bodies, and maybe the act of sitting at the bar and doodling for no reason was my little antidote for it. My little piece of driftwood to cling on to.

It is a very agreeable feeling, when you know you have something special and wonderful happening, but you don’t feel any particular need to let everybody know about it. I knew the cartoons were good, I knew I could do something with them. But I also knew the publishing market. I knew those media folk weren’t ever going to make my life easier. Instead of waiting to be discovered, I was doing the opposite. I was deliberately keeping them from the commerce-minded people, who I just knew would spoil everything the moment I let them anywhere near.

Then the internet came along and changed everything.

I’m not sure how I got into the internet so heavily. It just snuck up on me. One day I just built a website and started posting my drawings on it. A few months later 9-11 happened and all hell broke loose. People were being laid off all over. People were at home, surfing the internet. I guess that’s when my work started getting noticed. People started blogging. I started blogging, too.

The world has changed since 9-11, anybody who thinks differently is a fool. And for some reason I find myself far better suited to the post-9-11 world than the fun, prosperous, party-central one that came before.

The future we see before us is a chaotic one. Somehow sitting there at a Manhattan bar in the late 1990s, endlessly doodling away for no reason, I got a glimpse of the impending chaos a few years sooner than my more stable, prosperous, well-adjusted friends.

And now it's informing my advertising career.

Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don’t happen when everything is neat and “just so”. Creativity is all about distruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they’ve got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There’s just you, God and the need to invent. And this uncertain world is what most of us now find ourselves entering, willingly or otherwise.

Creativity equals chaos. Chaos equals creativity. Embrace it or die. I’ve already done so. I know all about it. It almost cost me my liver but like I said, education is expensive.

The Creative Age is upon us. The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.

We live in amazing and interesting times. If we're lucky, while on this earth we can do a damn good job proving it. And I intend that the book conveys this message in no uncertain terms.

The Book's Target Market.

As I've said before, the book is not for my peers, but for the generation coming after me. But it's more than that. It's for the first generation of people hitting the job market just as "The Creative Age" starts rising above the horizon like a bright, orange sun.

Your dream may be modest, it may not be. It could be a little candle shop; it could be a software company with the GNP of Sweden. It doesn't matter. Meaning Scales.

The Sleeper Has Awaken.

We are entering "The Creative Age". We have started to look for meaning.

We are hungry. Meaning is the prey.

That doesn't mean we suddenly quit our accountant jobs and go back to film school, or give up selling real estate and start cranking out our first novel.

Some of us might, but not all. That would be far too predictable.

It means we're starting to recognize that our work is just as much part of real lives as our evenings and weekends, that our jobs are not mere economic units that pay for "our real lives" outside the office.

Our jobs ARE our real lives, dammit, and we're going to fight like hell to make sure that people recognize and respect this, not just our colleagues, but even sometimes ourselves.

We're not quitting our jobs in droves to go open organic bakeries and internet startups because we're too lazy to go get a real job in Corporate America. No, we're leaving Corporate America because "real" is EXACTLY what we want our jobs to be.

Real to us.

And maybe we'll stay within the corporate structure. Maybe we'll just go find a better corporation. One that's getting with the program. One that doesn't take its own strength or its people for granted.

Or maybe we'll just stay with the jobs we already have. Maybe the change that's required just needs to happen silently, from within.

Maybe there's more than one way to crack this nut. Maybe that's what being creative is really all about.

We are turning off the TV. We are using the internet, reading books, attending museums, buying paint, taking night classes and purchasing art in unprecedented numbers. We suddenly feel alive and excited about life in a way that would have seemed crazy a generation ago.

We are learning to sing.

We are starting to write in record number. We have discovered blogs. 40,000 of us start new ones every day. Will it make money? Who cares? This isn't about money; this is about getting our thoughts together.

Our thoughts are coming together because we are no longer asleep. We're not even sleepy.

Meaning Scales.

Our eyes are open, and now we're looking for fun things to do with them.

As Buddha says, there is no one road to Nirvana. Enlightenment is a house with 6 billion doors. While we're alive, we intend not to find THE DOOR, not A DOOR, but to find OUR OWN, UNIQUE DOOR.

And we're willing to pay for the privelege. We're willing to give up money and time and power and sex and status and certainty and comfort in order to find it.

And guess what? It'll be a great door. It'll add to this life. It'll resonate. Not just with us, but with everybody it comes in contact with. The door will useful and productive. Alive and kicking. It'll create wealth and laughter and joy. It'll pull its own weight, it'll give back to others. It'll be centered on compassion, but will be intolerant of dullards, parasites and cynics.

It may be modest, it may not. It could be a little candle shop; it could be a software company with the GNP of Sweden. It could involve politics or working with the elderly. It could be starting a design studio or opening a bar with Cousin Mike. It could be a screenplay, oil paints, or discovering the violin. It doesn't matter. Meaning Scales.

The Book's Structure.

1. The book will be a combination of cartoons and writing. The cartoons will be a selection of my cartoons, maybe 300 or so, in no particular order. Interspersed between the cartoons will be small chapters dealing with all aspects of "How To Be Creative."

The writing will be divided into distinct parts:

1. An introduction. Creativity is important. Welcome to The Creative Age.

2. My back story. How I cam to be a creative professional. How I discovered the cartoon format. How I ran with it and finally made a success of it after many years of struggle (See above).

3. My personal favorite cartoons (See below).

4. "How to Be Creative". The main body (See below).

5. "Now shut up and go do it." Practical steps for how to go about starting the process of becoming not just the person you want to be, but the person you were born to be, the person you simply have to be if you're life is to have any meaning whatsoever.

My personal fave cartoons.

The originals are drawn on either business cards or bristol board cut to the same size i.e. 3.5" x 2". I use mostly a Rotring 0.25mm rapidograph pen. Occasionally I'll use other things- pencil, watercolor, ballpoint etc, but not often.

An artist is quite a fucked-up thing to be, and to be honest I'm not sure if I would recommend it to anybody. Still, in my collection there are a couple of examples that, in some sick and twisted way, make the whole thing seem worthwhile. For the first five minutes, at least:

The Shark Bar

When I first moved to New York, I stayed at the YMCA on West 62nd.

My first drawing as a New York resident was on my second evening, sitting on a barstool at the Shark Bar- a hip, young place in SoHo.

Having only been in town just over 24 hours, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by New York, to say the least. Plus I had drunk quite a lot that evening. I think both show up in the drawing.

I've been back to the Shark Bar a couple of times since then, but it never had the same insane magic of that first evening. Great name for a bar, though. Especially in Manhattan.

Vanished

Spring '98. I was at a bar, it was late, I was kinda tipsy.

Suddenly I realized that my life hadn't changed much in the last decade since leaving college. Work, bars, cartoons, random conversations of a big-city nature, second-hand bookshops and art films, the occasional bout of random or regular sex to tide things over etc etc.

It wasn't as interesting as it used to be. But I hadn't moved on, really. And I had no idea where to go next.

Welcome to New York.

The best cartoons are the ones that give you these amazing moments of clarity as you draw them. That's the best thing about cartooning, really. Everything else seems rather secondary in comparison.

Fanelli's

December 29th, 1997. Fanelli's, on Prince and Mercer in SoHo, is one of the great bars in Manhattan. I had been in New York only a couple of days when I found myself there, drinking heavily.

I no longer drink much, however at the time I had this idea that seriously heavy drinking was essential in order to enjoy New York properly. I don't think I was wrong, either.

Around midnight at the bar I bump into an old acquaintance of mine from Chicago, Mark Mann. He had moved to New York about 3 months previously to do something with his film career. He is one of the funniest and most interesting people I know, but at the time I didn't know that. We were quite suspicious of each other for the longest time before we admitted that we actually were friends.

I hadn't told anybody I was moving to New York except on a need-to-know basis, so he was quite surprised to see me there. A ghost from his former Chicago life- just popped out of nowhere.

Told him my story. Told him about being laid off in Chicago. Told him about this new job I got in New York. Told him I only knew I got the job officially 5 days before Christmas- only about a week previously. Asked him how he was liking New York.

"It's great," he said. "Everybody's insane with loneliness, but that's OK. After a while you realize that's part of the edge."

I was hit with a paradox. I wanted to be in New York, I wanted to be "part of the edge", but I didn't want to be "insane with loneliness". Was one necessary in order to have the other? Was it a price worth paying? To this day, I still have no answer.

A couple of months later (July, '98) I drew this, sitting on a barstool. Thinking back to that conversation with Mark, suddenly I had a realization: The simple truth about New York is that people don't go there to give. They go there to take, or at least, to get. If you feel like giving, good for you, somewhere an angel is smiling yada yada yada, just don't expect other people to follow your example. And if you're feeling lonely, at least now you now know why. This drawing is partly about that.

Commitment

Within 1 week of meeting this person you realize that not only have you found your soulmate, but you've found your soulmate who likes to have sex 4 times a day in the bed, on the dining table, on the kitchen floor, in the changing rooms at Bloomingdale's etc.

Within 2 weeks you're already talking about moving in together.

Within 3 weeks you're talking about having babies together.

Within 4 weeks you realize this person is a complete psychopath.

Within 5 weeks this person also thinks you're a complete psychopath.

Within 6 weeks you're sitting at a restaurant with an old friend who is giving you the "How come you only call me when you're single" speech.

Eric

I remember being young and stupid. How utterly sweet and simple life seemed back then, but I also knew in the back of my mind that these days weren't going to last forever. Ouch. Hopefully, in a decade or two I'll be looking back to this time now with equal affection. I think that's all you can do, really.

Complete

Early 30s is a great time to be alive- you're still young, but you have experience. A powerful combo.

The downside is all that weird rockstar shit you believe about yourself is well past its sell-by date, and if you haven't outgrown it by then, it starts to fuck up your life.

New York is tough enough if you're a man. God knows how the women manage to do it.

Please

The piece is not particularly clever nor especially beautiful to look at. But something gently disturbing resides just beneath the surface. Hmmmm… sort of like apartment brokers.

C.F.A.

Yes. Exactly.

Mighty

All clients want one, I am told.

Cheap Plastic Toys

Some of it was my fault, some of it wasn't. Regardless, I've made a list and they will pay dearly.

Mistakenly

There are many advantages of getting older... more money and respect from the world at large being the main one. However, with all this newly found cash & kudos comes the idea that maybe the world isn't such a nice place, after all. That maybe all that unhappiness you see on the faces of your fellow commuters is there for a reason. And no matter how much you try or how hard you work, none of that will ever change.

Still, I suppose it's better to know that said brutality exists, rather than burning all those calories pretending it doesn't. I just wish I'd wised up a decade earlier than I did.

Lying

OK, this one isn't exactly subtle. But it doesn't take any prisoners, either. Unrestrained bile is actually pretty hard to pull off, artistically.

Wolf vs Sheep

No, I don't have an answer to which option is better. Both exact a heavy toll, eventually.

Too Many Cats

Good thing a certain friend of mine never reads my website.

Dorothy

I've always been a big Dorothy Parker fan. Urbane wit at its finest. Would I trade my life for hers in order to be that talented and famous? No way. Like all intoxicants, talent can be a poison. Reading her biography, it seems she learned that more than most.

It's 2 am and I'm in this crazy Midtown Irish bar. I have no idea why I'm there. I shouldn't be there. I should be somewhere else. Asleep, comfortable, happy, sharing my bed with a sensible girl from a good family, Brooks Brothers' pyjamas, insufferably middle class. But no.

Everybody in that bar is crazy. I tell myself I'm the only sane one but I think I'm kidding myself.

Being an artist/creative is like wearing funky clothing. Every year gets a little bit harder. After a while it just looks stupid. Eventually the stupidity reaches critical mass and the late-night tailspin begins. At a midtown Irish bar at 2am, while I'm drawing this picture, these things no longer seem to matter.

I like this card because it's the kind of thing poor old Dorothy would have written.

All The Time

After years of struggling in impecunious obscurity, a very old friend of mine recently had a bit of success in his business.

Suddenly, everybody in the industry knew who he was, and would mob him at trade shows and conventions. People who wouldn't have given him the time of day only a year before were shamelessly throwing themselves at him, scattering business cards like confetti.

My friend, the rock star. Who knew?

Shortly after one of these little feeding frenzies, we meet up for a drink, as we do.

He’s telling me all about it. All the off-the-record stuff that happened. All these relentless people coming after him, like terriers on the bone.

“How weird,” I say.

“Sure is,” he says. “Now I know what it's like to have a vagina.”

Pickaxe

One evening after a gruesome day at the office I went into a café on 6th Ave to write. Got a coffee, found a table, opened my laptop and looked around. I'm not kidding; there were nine other people in the café with open laptops, writing away, just like me. Nine. I counted. They were probably writing the same tedious crap I was.

"It's a novel about some guy who moves to New York to break into the high-brow literary scene and score with lots of chicks yada yada yada…"

One of the reasons I stick to cartooning is because my traditional prose writing is so godforsakenly awful.

Writing about New York is a bit like writing about sex- it's already been done to death. And done. And done. And done again. It's a form of literary necrophilia. Unless you have something completely unique and visionary to say about New York (I have yet to meet somebody in the flesh who does), any kind of Manhattan-fuelled artistic ambition runs the risk of turning you in to a "ligger".

"Ligger" is Scottish slang. A ligger is a hanger-on, a wannabe, a parasite-to-the-hip. Somebody who goes to art openings to drink free wine, but never buys a painting. Somebody who sees art as not something you make, but something you milk. Somebody who is always seen, but never remembered.

Living in New York is only possible if you treat it like a religion. Liggers are really good at this, for some reason. Hence their vast numbers; hence why a big part of your average day in New York is spent seperating the liggers from the real people.

Henry

So you're going out a lot. Pretty soon you're going out too much. Parties. Bars. More parties. More bars. So you decide to cut back a bit, y'know, start living like a normal person.

So you trade in those wild & crazy times for delivered Chinese food, Forbes Magazine and Seinfeld reruns. You're just going to try it for a couple of weeks, and see how it feels. After all, this is a "new you" we're talking about. A better you. A saner you. A wiser, more sensible and compelling you.

But you know in your heart of hearts that you didn't move from suburban Cleveland, Denver, Pittsburgh etc to a $3000-a-month Manhattan apartment just to watch Seinfeld.

In New York, you always think that if you try harder, work longer hours, make more money, spend more time at the gym, put more effort into networking, read more books, go to bed earlier, drink less booze, avoid negative people, be less shallow about the whole sex thing, be more supportive to your close friends, eat more vegetables and stop smoking so many damn cigarettes, you will eventually be able pull off that great Miracle Of Miracles i.e. you'll finally, finally, finally be able to live in Manhattan while simultaneously leading a healthy, productive, emotionally-balanced life.

Ha.

The Main Body: "How To Be Creative."

[NB: The full version of this "main body" is here. Over 10,000 words, 31 drawings etc. The shortened version appears below for reasons of space.

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:

1. Ignore everybody.

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the biz card format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn't I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest i.e. cutey-pie greeting cards or whatever?

(more...)

2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world.

The two are not the same thing.

(more...)

3. Put the hours in.

Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort and stamina.

(more...)

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.

(more...)

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.

(more...)

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I’d like my crayons back, please."

(more...)

7. Keep your day job.

I’m not just saying that for the usual reason i.e. because I think your idea will fail. I’m saying it because to suddenly quit one’s job in a big ol' creative drama-queen moment is always, always, always in direct conflict with what I call “The Sex & Cash Theory”.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

Nor can you bully a subordinate into becoming a genius.

(more...)

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don't make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow-line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

(more...)

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.

(more...)

11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.

(more...)

12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it's going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, it's worth it. Even if you don't end up pulling it off, you'll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It's NOT doing it when you know you full well you HAD the opportunity- that hurts FAR more than any failure.

(more...)

13. Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside.

The more you practice your craft, the less you confuse worldly rewards with spiritual rewards, and vice versa. Even if your path never makes any money or furthers your career, that's still worth a TON.

(more...)

14. Dying young is overrated.

I've seen so many young people take the "Gotta do the drugs and booze thing to make me a better artist" route over the years. A choice that was neither effective, healthy, smart, original or ended happily.

(more...)

15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.

(more...)

16. The world is changing.

Some people are hip to it, others are not. If you want to be able to afford groceries in 5 years, I'd recommend listening closely to the former and avoiding the latter. Just my two cents.

(more...)

17. Merit can be bought. Passion can't.

The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does.

(more...)

18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.

They’re a well-meaning bunch, but they get in the way eventually.

(more...)

19. Sing in your own voice.

Piccasso was a terrible colorist. Turner couldn't paint human beings worth a damn. Saul Steinberg's formal drafting skills were appalling. TS Eliot had a full-time day job. Henry Miller was a wildly uneven writer. Bob Dylan can't sing or play guitar.

(more...)

20. The choice of media is irrelevant.

Every media's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Every form of media is a set of fundematal compromises, one is not "higher" than the other. A painting doesn't do much, it just sits there on a wall. That's the best and worst thing thing about it. Film combines sound, photography, music, acting. That's the best and worst thing thing about it. Prose just uses words arranged in linear form to get its point across. That's the best and worst thing thing about it etc.

(more...)

21. Selling out is harder than it looks.

Diluting your product to make it more "commercial" will just make people like it less.
Many years ago, barely out of college, I started schlepping around the ad agencies, looking for my first job.

(more...)

22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay etc, especially if you haven't sold it yet. And the ones that aren't, you don't want in your life anyway.

(more...)

23. Worrying about "Commercial vs. Artistic" is a complete waste of time.

You can argue about "the shameful state of American Letters" till the cows come home. They were kvetching about it in 1950, they'll be kvetching about it in 2050.
It's a path well-trodden, and not a place where one is going to come up with many new, earth-shattering insights.

(more...)

24. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.

Inspiration precedes the desire to create, not the other way around.

(more...)

25. You have to find your own schtick.

A Picasso always looks like Piccasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven Symphony always sounds like a Beethoven's Syynphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.

(more...)

26. Write from the heart.

There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you.

(more...)

27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.

(more...)

28. Power is never given. Power is taken.

People who are "ready" give off a different vibe than people who aren't. Animals can smell fear; maybe that's it.

(more...)

29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.

Selling out to Hollywood comes with a price. So does not selling out. Either way, you pay in full, and yes, it invariably hurts like hell.

(more...)

30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

If you have the creative urge, it isn't going to go away. But sometimes it takes a while before you accept the fact.

(more...)

The Last Section: "Now Shut Up And Go Do It."

This I'm intending to be a couple of thousand words long, all very practical and no-nonsense. Subjects would include:

-The importance of staying frugal.

-Practical advice for breaking into certain "creative fields": advertising, TV,, film, design, music etc etc.

-Interviews, advice and commentaries from already successful "creatives"- Authors, filmamkers, businessmen, entrepreneurs etc.

-How to best manage the hard times. How to stay focused on your long-term goals, even when real life starts getting in the way.

-The importance of finding other routes to the top of the mountain than the most obvious routes. Creativity in business and in the coporation.

-Ways of devloping much-needed talent, discipline and stamina.

-Ways of thinking about markets and business models differently.

In Conclusion:

1. The book is already mostly written.

2. The market is already mostly established. The work already has a sizeable and enthusiastic following.

3. The time is right for this book. It's a message a lot of people who haven't read it yet, are very much ready and willing to hear.

4. The idea has legs. I already have other book ideas that can follow this one. A "Cluetrain Manifesto meets Edward Gorey" franchise, as it were. As Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls called my work, "It's like Dilbert for people whose jobs don't suck."

food for thought:

From an interview between The Hollywood Reporter and American Express Global Brand Director, John Hayes:

THR: And, of course, to every project you say yes to, you have to say no to dozens of others.
Hayes: Absolutely. There's one other trend I think is worth noting -- a few weeks ago, I asked a group to tell me about their favorite Starbucks commercial.

THR: The point being, there are none.
Hayes: Somebody said, "Well, they're on every corner, they don't need one." But 10 years ago, they weren't on any corner. Brands are not being built on advertising. You're seeing this with more and more companies. If you fly Jet Blue, you talk about the experience. That's how you build brands today, through experiences.

Thanks to Modern Marketing for the link, and for also supplying this doozie:

However, old-school ad boys like Mark Wnek think that the ad industry will take all this in it's stride, because as he states in today's Independent, the web is really just a "canvas for commercial messaging".

Wnek believes that ad guys will just turn their skills effortlessly from one medium to the next. After all, he points out, "Who will fill these canvases in a way that excites consumers? The creative ladies and gentlemen who live in advertising agencies, that's who."

I'd make a comment if I weren't so distracted by all the Schadenfreude welling up inside me.

let me kiss

textbook hughtrain

Seth Godin writes about a painter who really made his day.

Two months later, I get an email saying the painting is ready and has been shipped. I send him a check, made out to his new name, on faith. A day later, a painting arrives by Federal Express. From Israel. With a handwritten invoice.

The painting is terrific--even better than the original. But more important to us is the story. Not sure what you can do with it, but thought you'd want to hear it.

I know exactly what to do with it, Seth. Cite it as textbook Hughtrain: "The market for something to believe in is infinite."

Exactly.

"extreme business modelling"

One of my favorite gapingvoid posts was something I wrote last July, to do with preferring my own business models, over other people's:

The thing I like about gapingvoid is it has allowed me to do my thing (for fun and yes, profit) without having to marry myself to somebody else's business model. Especially somebody else's LOUSY business model, which traditional publishing basically is.

The older I get, the less I like other people's business models. I prefer my own business models, thank you very much.

This is what the internet is really about- this is what causes the excitement. It's all about giving more people control over their own business models, not relying on third parties to supply them. This is true in publishing, retail, advertising, the law, you name it.

And I had similar thoughts in "How To Be Creative":

11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.

So it looks like Sig's been doing some similar thinking with what I think is a very compelling idea, "Extreme Business Modelling":

A few important aspects of extreme programming, eh, extreme business-modelling:

Write a user story. Explore the value for the customer!
[Extreme business-planning specific: Acid test your pricing and margins. If you could easily deliver at half the price of the competition, you may be good. If you're pretty sure you can deliver at 1/10th you'll have the leeway to play really loose :)]

The customer (even the potential one) is always available. Involve the customer, use him, make him a part of the process.

Pair programming and collective code ownership. Involve the customer again, let him have ownership to your product!

Make frequent small releases. Test one thing at a time, don't get stuck with a half-baked and untested complete plan.

Iterate and integrate often. Test and try, go back make better, test and try again, go back.

Leave optimisation till last. When it gels, shape the last parts, refine when the basics are right!

He is talking about his software company, of course, but the idea extends far beyond software.

Nothing wrong with extreme business modelling. Look at Wal Mart. Look at Dell. Look at the future that awaits most of us.

[Disclaimer: Sig and I are doing some work together.]

free savile row suit

Tom's giving away one of his old suits. We are being FLOODED with e-mails as a result.

Because the suits are designed to last 10-20 years, it's not uncommon to hand them down, usually to a son, grandson, or if you're a tailor, to your apprentice. As Tom has none of the above, he just randomly decided to offer it to one of his readers.

Tom reckons the suit has about another 10 years of normal wear left in it. Check it out if you're interested.

joi feels the strain

(A cartoon I drew last year, inspired by Joi's hectic life.)

Joi Ito is feeling the strain of maintaining a well known and highly-regarded blog:

Of course, this is just a rehash of an old discussion of collapsing contexts, but I find myself struggling with this bloggers block more and more these days. I find myself hanging out on the IRC channel chatting about things that in the past I would be blogging about. I definitely feel like my blog is going [from] edgy to broad and boring.

My two cents:

1. Every blogger who's been doing it for a while will have the same conversation eventually. Like I said recently, sometimes real life takes over etc. Joi's just being brave by bringing it up in public.

2. The good news is, "Blog Burnout" is relatively easy to fix, because it's usually not a symptom of blogging per se, but of blogging too often. So the cure is very simple: Blog less. Take your time, post less often, and put more thought in between postings. Your readers will adjust to the new pace eventually, and if they don't, who cares? Readers who are hostile to natural change are probably not the kind of readers you want to hold on to, anyway.

new blog from tom peters

From everybody's favorite bizpornographer, Tom Peters, comes a very promising new blog, TPWireservice. This comes only days after Tom announced he was cutting back on the blog-writing bit. I'm guessing the two events are not unrelated.

It's got some really cool stuff on it. Congrats to everyone involved with it.

our grandparents had laurel and hardy

Steve Rubel writes a thoughtful post about the recent "Blogging Backlash" going on.

What eMarketer totally neglected to talk about, however, is what the opportunity is for the companies that do decide to be brave and take the plunge. For example...

Significant competitive advantage -you could become the loudest voice in a channel where your competitors are absent

Press and consumers read blogs - either willingly (RSS/bookmarks) or unwillingly (Google); like it or not they influence purchases

Blogging ain't going away. The conversation is going to go on without you. Be there or be square.

Blogs are a cost-effective marketing tool that helps smaller and mid-sized companies generate more attention. Just look at Stonyfield Farms.

Blog bashing doesn't phase me too much- I actually find it rather entertaining. What can I say? It's rather fun watching people being wrong, again and again, for the same "I have a dumbass suit & tie job in a big company ergo I must be terribly important" reasons.

Our grandparents had Laurel and Hardy. We have blog bashers.

[BONUS LINK:] IBM makes its blogging policy public. It seems they are actively encouraging their 320,000 employees to start their own blogs. Rock on.

jeff jumps ship

Jeff Jarvis, one of my blogging heroes, just quit his job at Advance.net.

Am I surprised? Not really. He's always been a bit of a visionary. The Avance product never was. Of course, I'm sure he did his best to coax the company along as far as he could, but there's only so much you can do if somebody else is paying you a salary. This new gig of his (doing something for About.com) looks much more up his street.

Good luck, Jeffers!

british blogging

Left London yesterday. Got home late last night.

The London Geek Dinner that Robert Scoble and I have organised on June 7th has topped 125 people. Wow.

It was going to be a sit-down affair. But the numbers have gotten so large it looks like it'll have to be a buffet of some sort.

At the rate people are currently signing up, it looks like we may very well have 200 people turning up. Incidentally, 200 is also the number of people who attended Les Blogs in Paris last month, to give you an idea. And Paris seemed like a lot of people at the time. It's like this big blogging confab just self-created itself in a London restaurant.

Lots going on with me these days. I met up with Alistair Shrimpton (Six Apart UK) for coffee yesterday. We were talking about how much the UK (and Europe) was lagging behind America in blogging terms. For example, how many British CEO's are blogging? How many "A-Listers" are British? How many British ad agencies are using blogs to alter the marketing landscape? How many Brits are blogging to radically improve their business's fortunes?

The Brits have a lot of catching up to do. But therein lies the opportunity for Alistaire, myself, and anybody else crazy enough to catch the blogging disease.

in london

I'm in London at the moment, and it's all quite busy. Blogging light till the weekend etc.

The geek dinner in London with Robert Scoble on the 7th of June is nearly full. Please sign up ASAP if you're coming, thanks.