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

business porn (cont.)

I was having a long conversation with a friend last night about "Business Porn":

Business Porn is just like Ordinary Porn or Real Estate Porn, except instead of it being about the women we wished we could sleep with, or the houses we wish we owned, it's about all those cool, lucrative, exciting jobs and businesses that we wish we had, instead of the normal, tedious, schleppy crap most of us end up doing to pay the bills.

Does your blog suffer from low traffic? It's probably because there's not enough porn on it. Sex Porn, Real Estate Porn, Wine Porn, Biz Porn, Emotional Porn, it doesn't matter.

Porn = Traffic.
Porn = Marketing.
Porn = Sales.

With Porn, all things are possible.

So now you know.

"News Flash: Most wines do not get better with age."

Jason over at Stormhoek writes a very long post about why "Freshness", the key attibute to the brand "is not a gimmick, nor is it simply a sales tool. It is a critical indicator of wine quality, particularly in whites."

It's a very long post, but it's key to adding substance to our schtick i.e. Quality has to matter in this equation. It's too easy to get carried away with all the Cluetrain/Hughtrain stuff and lose sight of the fact that yes, for the money, it's actually a very good product.

Yes, we're still giving away the £1,000. Meanwhile, I have to write some feedback to all those wonderful "label designs" and ideas that bloggers sent in. Should be cranking all this out this week.

gapingvoid in the guardian

I was mentioned in an article today in the Media Guardian [registration required]. And they had my photo in the paper version.

There is a huge schism between the world of blogging, which has evolved a language and community all of its own, and the rest of the world, which thinks that blogs are mostly trivial forms of communication, largely devoted to pictures of the writer's cat and read only by said writer's friends and family.

But the refuseniks are being won over. The number of blogs - loosely defined as cheap, easily-created websites containing information posted in chronological order - is rising exponentially. A recent survey by web-tracking firm Technorati found that the number of blogs in existence doubles every five months.

Blog evangelists such as Hugh MacLeod, cartoonist, former ad creative and blogger via Gapingvoid.com, say that blogging has traditional media running scared. And certainly this opinion is borne out by recently departed Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers, who at the beginning of November branded newspapers as the 21st century equivalent of the vinyl record shop and the internet in all its guises as the way forward.

If you're anywehere near a British newsagents, check it out.

[Bonus Link:] From B.L. Ochman: "Don't they have fact checkers at the New York Times anymore?"

While I'm delighted to see that mainstream media is covering blogging, they still have a "gee whiz" attitude about blogging as a source of income or a marketing tool. And, because they seem not to be knowledgeable about the role of blogs in corporate marketing or the role of advertising in blogs, they make factual mistakes in their articles.

san francisco

I'm in London today, going back home tomorrow (Thank God).

Interesting: The territory that English Cut is growing the fastest seems to be our San Francisco market. Traditionally, New York is the biggest US market for Savile Row, but we seem to have gotten this West Coast selling-virus started.

Yes, the internet changes everything. I suppose what thrills me the most about it is being able to create one's own business model so easily, and not have to slavishly follow what the competition is doing (and has been doing, for the last two hundred years).

English Cut operates on Savile Row, but we don't have our own shop there. Instead we rent space in other people's shops on a per-use basis (this is actually a very common practice among the tailors- a tailor who makes for the Sultan of Brunei doesn't have his own shop, either). We've never intended to have our own shop. A permanent address on Savile Row will set you back a couple of hundred thousand dollars per year. A permanent weblog address will set you back a couple of hundred dollars' worth of bandwidth per year.

Which one would you rather have?

recommended reading

I'm in Stockholm, teaching a crash course in blogging to some students.

Rather than just rattling off a laundry list of what to do, instead I'm going to give you a list of bloggers who I rate highly. Read them reguarly, and after a while you should discover why what they do works so well.

1. Jeff Jarvis. A former journalist, Jeff is best known for his commentaries on the changing face of the media business. Very little happens in this space that Jeff doesn't notice, sooner than most.

2. Robert Scoble. The chief blogger at Microsoft. He also co-authored an excellent book on corporate blogging with Shel Israel, called "Naked Conversations". What's most interesting about him is the affect his blog has on the internal Microsoft culture, versus the "external conversation". This has all to do with what I call "The Porous Membrane".

3. Doc Searls. A great visionary. Co-authored "The Cluetrain Manifesto", the seminal book on how the internet will affect markets, and humanity in general.

4. Seth Godin. Probably the most distinctive voice on marketing in the blogosphere.

5. Loic Le Meur. French entrepreneur and European head of Six Apart, the blog software company.

6. Fred Wilson. New York venture capitalist. Writes engagingly about this most mystified of businesses.

7. Jason Calacanis. He just sold his blogging company, WeblogsInc to AOL for a small fortune. Fast-talking an highly opinionated, the one thing you can't call him is "boring".

8. Tom Coates. Probably the most respected blogger in the U.K., and rightfully so.

9. English Cut. The blog of my business partner, Thomas Mahon. Thomas is arguably one of the top dozen tailors in the world, and works on Savile Row. Last January I convinced him to start a blog, which totally transformed his business within only a few months. He's my best case study for creating what I call the "Global Microbrand".

10. Manolo the Shoe Blogger. Manolo Loves the Shoes!

11. Technorati. This is a website that tracks "conversations" in the blogosphere. If you have a blog, I'd make sure you're signed up with them.

12. What software to use: This blog is powered by Movable Type. I like it. Other software that I rate highly is Typepad and Wordpress.

13. [Bonus Link:] Robert Scoble's blogroll. Yes, he reads a lot of them.

[AND IN OTHER NEWS:] Looks like one of my wee cartoons just made Page Two of the New York Times Business Section. Rock on, Budget Rent-A-Car and B.L. Ochman.

sweden

Off to Stockholm for the weekend. Back Sunday/Monday. Blogging light till then.

[NOTE TO SELF:] Busy times. Aaaargh.

post-hughtrain

Kathy Sierra recently asked me, "So what comes next, after Hughtrain?"

Good question. The Hughtrain was written last year when I was still in the traditional advertising/marketing world. I no longer am. It was written as something to sell to other people. In the end I ended up just using it myself.

I want to keep making drawings [which is not the same thing as posting them online, by the way]. I want to keep selling suits. I want to keep selling wine.

I want to keep going to the local pub with Thomas twice a week, and to our favorite Chinese restaurant once a week.

I want to spend less time sleeping in hotel beds, more time sleeping in the bed of this certain Cumbrian girl I know.

I have no idea where blogging fits into all of this. That might be a good thing.

the blogvertising cancer starts to spread...

The Assimilated Negro is using rap music and blogging to pimp mineral water. Rock on.

the sex & cash theory (cont.)

Well over a year since it was first published, I'm noticing a lot of people still linking to "The Sex & Cash Theory", which was a chapter in "How To Be Creative".

Funny how things take on a life of their own...

[Bonus Link:] Manolo the Shoe Blogger now has t-shirts. You must buy. And buy. And buy again. Buy and never stop.

[Also:] Congrats to Alistair Shrimpton (formerly head UK honcho at Six Apart) for his new job at Skype. Rock on.

the perpetual selling virus

English Cut just got a story for the second time on U.S. Public Radio's "Marketplace":

"Speaking of Bespoke"

Goodbye business casual. Hello business suit. Want to out-dapper the other guy? English hand-made suits are all the rage.

Big-Media attention is fine & dandy. Good for credibilty and cachet etc.

But if I had to choose one or the other, I'd much rather have high Google rankings. No question.

Big Media offers the short-lived spike in blog traffic. High Google rankings offer the perpetual selling virus.

metatara

Some interesting thoughts from Tara Hunt to do with metadata and tags. Clay Shirky mentioned. Pay attention, Sig.

[Great quote from Shirky:] "Calling these labels TAGS worked because the word TAG is right on the edge of descriptive and strange."

share the stormhoek love, blogosphere!

Inspired by the new Cheerios campaign, members of the Blogosphere are invited to go to the Stormhoek Wiki and share their "Stormhoek Stories" with everyone. [Thanks to MarketingMonger for the link.]

That's right, Bloggers- the groovy cats at Stormhoek Wine have generously and graciously diverted some resources from their busy, lucrative enterprise to allow you, The Consumer, an opportunity to tell the world how much you like everybody's favorite South African Lovemark. Rock on.

[Any user-generated content that doesn't directly serve Stormhoek's agenda will be instantly deleted, of course.]

do the math...

Remember the wee blog campaign I worked on for Budget Rent-A-Car a few weeks ago?

From Mediapost:

Scott Deaver, Budget's chief marketing officer, said the entire contest and promotion--including the $160,000 in prize money--cost less than a single 30-second spot on a highly rated TV show.

Do the math.

[Henry Copeland has some click-through metrics here.]

details magazine...?

Someone from New York left Thomas a very garbled message on his answering machine, so I'm doing a little follow-up investigating.

From what we could understand, it appears English Cut was mentioned in the November issue of Details Magazine [U.S. Edition].

Being in the UK, I have no way of confirming this. Are there any American Details readers out there who can help me find out? Thanks.

[Bonus Link:] Origins of the word "Pitch" (as in, "to pitch an idea" etc):

This originated during the Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada, one of its leaders would tell imprisoned playwrights that if they could interest him in an idea, he would let them live long enough to write it. If not, they were dropped into a large vat (or pitch) of boiling tar, hence the term 'pitch.'

intoxicated

The groovy cats at Craven's, a medium-sized ad agency in Newcastle just commissioned me to draw some cartoons for their website and in-house collateral.

Probably the coolest thing were the new business cards. The staff could individually pick any design they wanted from the twenty or so drawings I did for them. Private-label blogcards, as it were. The cartoon above is one of them.

Jamie Warde-Aldham, the Creative Director is a good friend of mine, who I occasionally freelanced for during my pre-blogging days. Craven's and I go back a long time. Rock on.

robert scoble's business card

Robert Scoble has a new business card. I must say it looks very familiar [Thanks to Trench Talk for the link].

[Bonus Link:] Interview with Shel Israel about the book he co-authored with Robert, "Naked Conversations". Interview Topic: the impact of blogs on advertising and marketing.

[btw:] I've read the book. It's great. Well-written and very, very smart.

Their publishers kindly sent me an advance copy. You can read pretty much all of it on the Naked Conversations blog. Or you can order it from Amazon.

million dollar homepage 2.0

Too funny. This would have to qualify for the "Bizarre Blog Post of The Month" Award.

An old college friend of mine, Talia Channon (who was introduced to me by Dave Mackenzie, funnily enough), has a film project in the works. Here's the PR blurb:

Following in the footsteps of a startlingly simple online marketing scheme launched this year, two UK screenwriters are raising funds online to develop their feature films.

Screenwriters Talia Channon and Lee Curle of Lucre Films have launched PixelYourShops.com, a site based on the successful Million Dollar Homepage, developed by 21-year-old UK student Alex Tew. Individuals and businesses pay $1 per pixel (sold in 100-pixel blocks) to advertise themselves on the website for five years, and Lucre Films keeps the funds.

The site has the potential to raise $1m.

Michel Shane and Anthony Romano, who previously served as executive producers on Catch Me if You Can and I, Robot, are attached to produce Lucre’s romantic comedy Too Good To Be True. The script is completed and is currently being sent to potential directors.

Too Good To Be True is about an Englishman working on a New York magazine who has to return to his homeland to report on the social season and unexpectedly finds love. No casting decisions have been made for the project yet. Channon told ScreenDaily that the film’s production budget was expected to be around $15 million and that there was already interest from a UK distributor.

Buyers of pixel blocks on the PixelYourShops site so far include a fashion photographer and a water technology business.

Heh. I knew it would be a matter of time before somebody copycat'd the Million Dollar Homepage. But I didn't expect it would be friends of mine.

That being said, maybe it'll work. If you look at the original Million Dollar Homepage, a lot of the ads are fairly [cough] low end. Casinos and whatnot. The kind of stuff you're more used to seeing in your spam filter.

However, you could argue PixelYourShops is more targeted. It's connected to the film business, so who knows, maybe film people will see it and like it, and give them their money.

Besides that, Channon & Curle have had some pretty major interest from a huge Hollywood producer (Yes, you've heard of them), so we'll see what happens.

"saving the net from the pipeholders"

Doc Searls says:

It's probably the longest post I've ever put up on the Web. It's certainly the most important. And not just to me.

If you care about the internet, I would strongly recommend you go read Doc's "Saving The Net From The Pipeholders". And if you have a blog, I would ask you to please help spread the word by linking to it. This stuff matters. Thanks.

an open letter to bill gates

Dear Bill,

One of your more groovy and well-known employees, Robert Scoble called the little South African wine company I work for, Stormhoek, "Microsoft's Real Competiton". [This was in response to an earlier blog post of mine.]

Of course I was delighted. Good PR for Stormhoek etc, plus I was getting tired of always hearing you guys just mentioned in the same breath as Google or Apple. I mean, give somebody else a turn, C'mon.

Of course, the "Stormhoek vs Redmond" idea left a few people going "Huh?"

Small wine company? Big software company? Competitors? What's up with that?

Frankly, methinks what seperates us are minor technicalities. Size isn't everything. After all, unlike Microsoft, we don't have an army of folk on the payroll. Not do we have an army of sharholders to keep happy. Both are a royal pain to keep on board. Small has its advantages. We like that. "Meaning Scales".

Secondly, at the end of the day, we're both competing for the same thing.

We're both competing for other people's money. We've both got bills to pay.

More importantly, we're both competing for what they call "Conversation Share". People have a choice; they can spend their limited time on earth talking about the X-Box, or talking about a small vineyard in South Africa. Their choice, not ours. All we can do is make their choice easier to make in our favor, using what limited resources we have. And that in turn sustains our markets. That in turn allows us to meet payroll.

And yes, both Microsoft and Stormhoek are ultimately selling the same thing. We're both selling stuff that allows people to interact with each other more easily. Both software and wine are forms of social lubrucant. At the end of the day, "Other People" is all we have.

You're a smart guy; none of this stuff will be alien to you. But it's alien to much of the wine business, and dare I say, business in general. A lot of people get into the wine business to escape the real world- leave the rat race and open a vinyard etc etc. We're trying to do the exact opposite. We want to kick some butt. We want to disrupt the market we're in. We want to prove a point. Software or booze, it isn't what you do, it's the way that you do it.

And yeah, if either Microsoft or Stormhoek ever forgets this stuff, we're dead. When Robert Scoble talks about Microsoft's Job Number One should not be "Making Products", but "Thrilling Customers", he's not just talking about software. He could be talking about wine just as easily. ANY person in business should have the same goal. It isn't rocket science. Again, "Meaning Scales".

Good luck in Redmond. Looking forward to seeing Vista when it comes out.

Godspeed,

Hugh MacLeod

http://www.gapingvoid.com

Cumbria, UK

thoughts on cartooning

[This cartoon has an interesting backstory.]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about losing my cartooning mojo.

Then suddenly, mere days after I made that post I started getting it back. Been drawing a lot lately. More than that, I've been drawing with a lot more intensity than I had been for ages.

"Creative Mojo" is a funny one. As soon as you think you've got it, you start losing it. And as soon as you think you're losing it, it starts coming back again.

Yes, I find it infuriating.

I'll be posting more new work soon, as soon as I buy a new scanner (current one is buggered.) Rock on.

stormhoek label update

[The back label of a Stormhoek bottle, with the wee semicircle "Feshness Indicator".]

A couple of days ago, in order to drive the thinking about the Stormhoek project forward, I started a little impromptu "New Label Design" contest.

Wow. It generated over fifty comments and about two dozen e-mail submissions.

Thanks a lot for everyone who contributed to it. Seriously.

One person, Michelle, left a pretty interesting comment:

So sorry Hugh, don't want to burst your bubble - but you probably should have given people some boundaries to work within. I work in the wine industry and the label is one of the most regulated areas in the industry. The last thing you want to do is spend time and money on a label only to find it won't be approved for sale in say the UK or US!! It's all well and good to think outside the square - but it's worth knowing your limitations too.

Well the good news is, we know all about wine label regulations and know how to work within them. But the purpose here wasn't to save money on lable design- the purpose here was more of an intellectual exercise between my readers and myself in order to shake things up a bit.

It's hard to know what other people are thinking unless you ask them first.

So where are we now? We're still sifting through all the great ideas we received. Lots to think about. But this is what we're currently thinking:

At the back of every bottle there's a wee semi-circle called "The Freshness Indicator" (It's that little green & yellow thing in the photo). Basically it tells you the dates when the wine is at its best to drink, i.e. when it's at its freshest. Instead of saying "Best before October, 2006", it tells you "Best drunk between Feburary and October, 2006". It's a nice little device that works, and works well.

A few weeks ago we were at a consumer wine show, pouring out free samples (Yay! Free Alcohol!), telling people all about the wine, and the Freshness Indicator is the part of the story everybody seemed to click on right away.

There are only three snags.

1. It's small. Almost invisible. And yet it's so central to what the whole "Freshness Matters" schtick is all about.
2. It's on the back of the bottle. You don't see it until you've got the bottle in your hand and are already reading the back label.
3. It's not exactly a [cough] classy design.

So we are thinking:

1. Make it big and easy to read.
2. Make it the central motif on the front wine label.
3. Make the design more pleasing to the eye. Classy and engaging etc. After all, even at the $10 price point, wine is aspirational.

At the wine show, we were telling the Stormhoek story the Feshness Indicator etc, and people liked it. But it was taking thirty seconds to verbally transmit.

We need to visually tell the same story, in the supermarket aisle, in three seconds or less.

Is it a risky strategy? Of course. Maybe people won't dig it, especially the wine snobs/geeks. But maybe there's more people out there who are looking for the "Smarter Conversation" thing, than are out there trying to do the wine-snob geek thing.

But a wee voice tells me if this works, it'll REALLY work. Far better than the standard cutesy-designer-aspirational wine label you normally see.

And if not, we're screwed. But hey, that's usually the way.

Regardless, the conversation moves forward. The Label Design project with the blogosphere moves to Phase Two. Any thoughts?

fannelli's

This cartoon is titled "Fannelli's". From my "About" page. That post gives some background on how I got into the whole "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" thing:

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.

Today I realised that it's been almost eight years since I started working with the business card format [I got going with it in December, 1997]. Wow. Time flies etc.

I often wonder if, had I known back then that it would take me this long to get them to this point, would I have bothered doing it in the first place?

Actually, that's a bit of a moot point. I honestly never expected anything much to happen with it. Just one more dumb hobby from one more despondent Madison Avenue barfly.

Funny how things turn out sometimes.

thoughts on "fine art"

One of the major projects I've got going on the side is selling the cartoon originals, as "art" and/or "collector's items" etc etc.

Frankly, I don't like selling them much. I especially don't like selling them to fellow bloggers. I much prefer just randomly giving them away for free, at blogging events, geek dinners and whatnot. Which probably explains why I rarely write about that side of the business on gapingvoid.

That being said, there is a small market for them. And it seems to be growing. Here are some initial thoughts:

1. Selling art is a long-term thing. Perceived value takes a while to gestate. Decades. Jackson Pollack never sold a painting for more than $900 when he was alive. They're worth millions now.

2. It doesn't matter what the art critics think. Look, they're "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards". I call them that for a reason. I don't call them "art" for a reason. They are what they are. People either get it or they don't. And if they don't, nobody cares.

3. Transparency? Ha. The upper end of the art market is very screwy. Anybody's who's in it has something to hide. "Awash with lunatic scumbags" is a phrase that most readily comes to mind.

That being said, I don't need the money, nor do I care if I sell them or not. So there's only so much power that scene can have over me.

4. I would recomendend reading Mark Kostabi. His column for Artnet, advice for artist trying to conquer the art world, is brutally honest, lucid and brilliant. Whether you like his work it not is irrelevant.

5. I like selling the originals for large amounts of money. Or like I said, giving them away for free. It's the in-between I find a complete waste of time.

6. Much of the art world is fuelled by the "Complicity of Desperation". I'll leave it to you to figure out what I mean by that.

7. "Romantic Artist Lifestyle Shit" can spur you on initially. But it becomes an impediment all-too-quickly.

8. The internet is a great place to sell art, but there other alternatives. Imagine a large network of high-end galleries, scattered around the globe like confetti, all doing my bidding. Yes, indeed.

9. Mixing art and commerce successfully is impossible. Unless commerce is an integral part of the art. Which is what made Warhol so wonderful.

10. Mixing art and real life successfully is impossible. People who think otherwise normally fail in both.

wee update...

It's Monday morning, and I'm in London, having been down here for the weekend. Catching the train home this afternoon.

Thanks Everybody, for all the wonderful feedback on the Stormhoek label. Very helpful, indeed. Will write more on that very soon.

Lots going on...

the stormhoek label design: "why shouldn't a small wine company see apple or google as its competition?"

So here's where we are with Stormhoek.

We've got a great litte wine from South Africa, which I've been blogging about.

Then we sent out some bottles to other bloggers, no strings attached, to see what they had to say about it. As they're fond of saying in the blogosphere, to start a conversation.

I did this not because I wanted to turn bloggers into wine pimps, but because, hey, I thought it would be fun. I thought it would be disuptive. I thought it would be my kind of thing.

So far it's working. The groovy cats at Stormhoek are happy. By interacting with the blogosphere [I call it "Taking the Cluetrain seriously"], it's changing the way the company see themselves, and the the way the wine trade sees them.

It's changing the brand. It's evolving the brand. Sales are up. Good things are happening, whether they want them to or not.

So what's next?

The bottle design.

99% of people who go into wine shops do not read blogs. They've never heard of Stormhoek. A very small percentage may have read about it in the mainstream press (a lot of British wine writers like it, happily for us), but who can remember all those wine names you see in the Sunday papers? Sure, all the Cluetrain/Hughtrain stuff I'm doing for them is great for "The Internal Conversation" and "The Porous Membrane" etc etc, but as I've said again and again, 95% of Stormhoek's marketing to the customer happens on the supermarket shelf, in three seconds or less.

We need a new bottle design. A new label. Something that JUST. ISN'T. ABOUT. THE. FRICKIN'. WINE.

[btw: This is what the current bottle designs look like.]

I told Nick Dymoke-Marr the Managing Director of Stormhoek: "You're not competing with Jacob's Creek or Blossom Hill. You're competing with Google and Microsoft and Apple and Skype.

Yes, the product category is always irrevelvant. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it etc etc.

So I'm now on the hunt for a label & bottle design that better reflects the whole post-Cluetrain/Hughtrain schtick that Stormhoek is slowly becoming internally, that telegraphs this instantly to the external market.

Why shouldn't a small wine company see Apple or Google as its competition? Think how more interesting the world would be if more small, non-techie companies thought the same.

I'm looking for a new "look" for the bottle that sits there on the supermarket shelf. The look may require a new label a new bottle, or both. Something that conveys everything I've been talking about above.

Something that conveys what the brand is becoming in this crazy, post-Cluetrain, wired age of ours.

So here's the deal. Instead of the usual going to a graphic designers and giving them a formal "Cluetrain-savvy" brief (which 95% of them wouldn't understand proeply, anyway) I thought I'd start the conversation by asking The Blogosphere if they have any ideas.

No, you don't have to be a graphic designer. An idea that works on the back of a cocktail napkin is just fine by me.

It's the idea, not the execution, that interests me at the moment.

Anybody who comes up with the winning idea, an idea we can actually run with, we'll pay them £1000.00 (roughly $2000 US). If you have an idea that might work, feel free to post it or a link to it on the wiki. Thanks.

If you know of any blogosheric designers and creatives out there, please pass this message along. Though yeah, this idea isn't just restricted to them.

Thanks again. Rock on.

[UPDATE:] Robert Scoble: "Microsoft's real competition is Stormhoek." Exactly. Tell Bill to watch his back etc.

[UPDATE:] Thanks for all the great feeback, Everybody.

Me and the groovy cats at Stormhoek spent the weekend going through your ideas, and have had some thoughts.

So I'm closing down this comment thread below, and moving the label design cvonversation on to Phase Two [which you can find here]. Feel free to join in. Thanks again.

golden micro-geese

Jeff Jarvis has a nice post here on the Apple iPod now being the latest form of advertising media.

Jeff has a phrase he likes to use called "Exploding Media". This means media whose audience is fragmenting very quickly.

And with media exploding, old-style media companies are imploding. As Jeff explains in his comment section:

I think certain old-media companies are indeed imploding. Newspaper companies are having a bad time... NBC ain�t happy.

Time Warner stock isn�t moving for a reason (he said unhappily since he still owns the shit-on-a-certificate): cable will shrink v. the internet; magazines are stagnant; AOL is hot again only compared to how deathly cold it was�

Some will be smart. Some will be stupid. Media as a whole will expand and explode and that doesn�t mean that the old players will or won�t be playing in the future.

Everything is up for grabs. And that�s why it�s so damned much fun to watch.

Jeff, it's more than just fun to watch. It can be extremely profitable to watch. With the internet, you can advertise your product on a global level without needing to feed the coffers of Time Warner or NBC. For pennies on the dollar. As Clay Shirky said last year:

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

Of course, Big-Mediaville not too happy about it. Their golden goose is turning rusty before their eyes.

But what's far more interesting to me is how small businesses, in their millions, can now move in and fill the gap, finding their own "Global Microbrand". Their own golden micro-geese.

naughty, bad, evil skype etc.

Oh, apparently Skype is evil as well. Or at least, they now have a dark side. [Link via Fergdawg.]

Seems like there are three stages in the blogosphere's perceived business cycle.

1. Cool, Fabby, the darling of the early adaptors etc.
2. Big and evil.
3. Big, evil and dying.

So Skype is now moving from Phase One to Phase Two. But as the founders are now sitting on their yachts, having sold the company to E-Bay for quazillions, who cares?

long-term value

A conversation I've been having with a lot of people recently:

The long-term value of English Cut comes not from the profit margins of each $3,000 suit, or how brisk sales were last month. The real value comes from happy customers, who continue to dig what we do over the long haul. It is not uncommon for an established Savile Row customer to spend twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand dollars on a wardrobe over time. A good Savile Row tailor will easily have a few hundred customers on his books, by the time he's established his reputation. Do the math.

Another thing I'm fond of saying:

Blogs, when they work, are cheap and easy.

But of course, society has taught us you can "only" make money by doing stuff that is expensive and difficult. To me, this explains the cultural resistance blogs first encountered. Too many people had little buzzword-infested, top-down fiefdoms to protect.

Sure, making a hand-made suit from scratch is a pretty complicated business. But does that mean the marketing & communication has to be?

[Speaking of long-term value:] According to the logs, Google drives roughly 5 times as much traffic to English Cut than Yahoo. Rock on, Google.

google etc.

Robert Scoble's best post in a while:

We don’t know how to thrill influentials. Google does. Maybe by accident. Maybe by plan. I don’t care anymore. They found a way to bring us a little better search with advertising that sucked a lot less. That’s really why they are on fire.

How did they do it? They didn’t do it by doing committee meetings. By doing focus groups. By studying millions of users. They did it by understanding the leading edge of users and serving them well. They did NOT serve my dad well in the early days. It took me two years to switch my dad from AltaVista to Google. They DID serve ME well, though. On every user study I’ve seen I’m way off the end of the bell curve. But Google groks people like me. They serve people like me. And they romance people like me in a way that no other company does.

[Speaking of Scoble:] Don't forget, Robert and I will be hosting a Geek dinner in London on December 10th. And there's an Irish Geek dinner with Scoble on November 30th.

a gem from kathy sierra

Great, great article from Kathy Sierra [one of my favorite bloggers] about "Old" and "New" advertising. Her chart [above] sums it up rather well.

powerlaw, schmowerlaw

One of the great blog visionaries and a terrific guy to boot, Joi Ito has dropped off the Technorati 100:

My Technorati ranking has become #104 and I've officially fallen off the Technorati top 100. Powerlaw, schmowerlaw. If you don't blog often or maintain a stream of interesting content your ranking will quickly drop.

I would agree with that. There are a lot of great bloggers out there. Joi was an very early adaptor of bogs, I assume he's moved on, early-adapting something else with equal vigor. It'll be interesting to see his next move.

2005 was a watershed year for bloggers.

2005 was the year blogs hit the mainstream.

2005 was the year when making money via blogs became a no-brainer.

2005 was the year when the blogosphere became too darn big.

Yesterday I was talking to Phil Torrone, the editor of O'Reilley's MAKE blog.

He is, like myself, a full-time professional blogger.

The subject of our conversation: How keeping up with the blogosphere now feels like a full-time job. How actually writing the blog in comparison is a piece of cake.

But yeah, I'm glad the whole thing has exploded. A lot of us bet our entire future careers on the fact that it would.

stormhoek francais

Stormhoek's French Blogger's Wine Freebie should be going out at the end of next week. Please watch your mailboxes.

[BACKGROUND READING: "Wine Blogging As Marketing Disruption".]

Like I've said before, Stormhoek doesn't really export to France. As far as I know France isn't a big destination for S.A. wine in general. Not surprising, they already have plenty vino of their own. Some of it is actually quite good.

French wine in general is going places. The industry has come a long way in the last decade or so. Seriously, a few years down the road and I could well see some French wines start giving the South Africans a serious run for their money.

Watch your back, South Africa, France is on your tail.

[Bonus Link:] "Oh yeah - Stormhoek Syrah doesn't suck. Can wine be long tail?"

the only thing