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

more facebooky goodness

Stormhoek has its own "Friends of Stormhoek" Facebook page. It already has 84 members. Wow.

Kudos to Dave Duarte for setting it up.

kinda says it all...

Saw the above post on Life Gives You Lemons. Rock on.

[BBC:] "A car bomb planted in central London would have caused "carnage" if it had exploded, police sources have said."

the new iphone

With the release of the Apple iPhone in the U.S. being THE STORY of the week, I guess I couldn't resist re-publishing this cartoon.

Of course, since this cartoon was first drawn I have acquired a new MacBook, an iPod and a Nano...

the blue monster goes yahoo

The Blue Monster gets a mention on this rather amusing, quirky ad for Yahoo Answers. The virus spreads etc.

[Link:] Yahoo Answers' "Share What You Love" homepage. It appears the ad campaign was created by this French ad agency. Rock on.

"friends of thingamy" facebook page

Since Facebook seems to be the big hottie this week, I am pleased to announce that Thingamy now has its own "Friends of Thingamy" Facebook page. Thanks to the "Friends of Blue Monster" page for the inspiration.

Feel free to sign up if you fancy. To get a better idea what Thingamy is about, probably the best thing to do is become a regular reader of its founder Sigurd Rinde's blog. Rock on.

[Disclosure: I have a small stake in Thingamy.]

blue monster in oz

The Blue Monster has made it to Australia. Microsoft's Steve Clayton explains.

[Also:] There's now a "Friends of The Blue Monster" Facebook page. 57 members so far. The virus spreads etc [UPDATE: Up to 110 members inside 24 hours!]

[UPDATE: ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, required reading for anyone who seriously follows Microsoft, is on the Friends list. Wow.].

blip.tv t-shirts

The last time I was in New York I had lunch with two buddies of mine, Charles Hope of Blip.tv and Rachel Clarke of JWT [details here]. While we were waiting for the food to arrive I drew Charles the cartoon above, on the back of one of my business cards.

Charles just e-mailed me to say he's turned the design into some t-shirts. Rock on. Thanks, Charles!

failure is an option

Back in my corporate advertising days, I was constantly hearing the phrase being bandied around the meeting table, "Failure is not an option". It always made me roll my eyeballs, though at the time I wasn't exactly sure why.

Now that I'm a wee bit older and wiser, I think I may now have the answer.

Because Failure is always an option, Stupid.

No great leader ever said "Failure is not an option". Because the simple fact was, they were great leaders in circumstances where Failure was always very much a possibility. As they say, a good General never underestimates the enemy.

Leonidas. Alexander. Hannibal. Churchill. Frederick The Great. Kutzukov. Rommel. All of them KNEW the situation they were facing. Without Failure being an option, they would have never come up with the goods. They would have just left it all to their junior officers to run with. But of course, they didn't. Which is why they're still remembered.

However, Hitler did say "Failure is not an option." On the Russian Front, he basically forbade his armies from retreating a single inch, even if it was strategically wise to do so. And Thank God for us that he did. This hubris basically cost the Nazis the Battle of Stalingrad. Rock on.

[Thanks to Shelley for getting me started thinking on this.]

twitter cartoon

Of course, when I first posted this cartoon back in April, I had no idea that it would soon be applying to me, as well.

"Twitter Anonymous", Anybody?

[Observation:] There are only five people on my Twitters friends list [i.e. less than 10%] that I haven't met in person. Seems "in person" is getting more and more important to me, in the whole social network/media thing.

[Prediction:] Ariel Waldman is going to be to Twitter what Amanda "Rocketboom" Congdon was to video podcasting. You heard it here first [Ariel's Twitter page is here].

yes. i am on twitter.

The plan is; I shall reserve gapingvoid for cartoons and the longer, "substantive" posts. The day-to-day minutiae [including travel details when I'm on the road] and random links etc I shall move over to Twitter. Either click on the link at the bottom of the blue Twitter badge on my sidebar, or follow this link to my Twitter page. Thanks.

[SLAVE TO FASHION:] Yes, I've joined Facebook as well.

but what if i fail

[One of the drawings I did for Seth Godin's latest book, "The Dip".]

Social Objects and Homeless People

So I've been thinking some more about Jyri's Five Principles of Social Objects, especially how they apply to gapingvoid:

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.

In gapingvoid's case, that would be the cartoons for the most part. The straight writing part I'm less concerned about.

2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It's clear what the site is for.

The verb that springs to mind is "share". Not only do people re-publish them on their blogs, they're also allowed to upload them onto other media for free: posters, t-shirts, stickers, whatever works for them. My licensing terms are pretty open.

3. How can people share the objects?

The key word here is "re-publish". Microsoft's Steve Clayton is probably the most well-known of my "re-publishers", as he's always using the Blue Monster cartoon for different things.

4. Turn invitations into gifts.

Again, the Blue Monster cartoon would serve as a good example. Microsoft employees hand out Blue Monster schwag as an invitation to start a conversation about Microsoft. The Blue Monster's main function is not about the message, the Blue Monster is about the social gesture.

5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.

D'accord. The people who put the cartoons on their business cards are doing the paying, not the people receiving them.

Somewhere along the line I figured out the easiest products to market are objects with "Sociability" baked-in. Products that allow people to have "conversations" with other folk. Seth Godin calls this quality "remarkablilty".

For example: A street beggar holding out an ordinary paper cup cup won't start a conversation. A street beggar holding out a Starbucks cup will. I know this to be true, because it happened to me and a friend the other day, as we were walking down the street and a guy asked us for some spare change. Afterwards, as we were commenting about the rather sad paradox of a homeless guy plying his trade with a "luxury" coffee cup, my friend said, "Starbucks should be paying that guy."

Actually, my friend is wrong. Starbuck's doesn't need to be paying the homeless guy. Because Starbucks created a social object out of a paper cup, the homeless guy does their marketing for free, whether he knows it or not.

Although I suspect he does. I suspect somewhere along the line the poor chap figured out that holding out a Starbucks cup gets him more attention [and spare change] than an ordinary cup. And suddenly we're seeing social reciprocity between a homeless person and a large corporation, without money ever changing hands. Whatever your views are on the plight of homeless people, this is "Indirect Marketing" at its finest.

And of course, the way I market my cartoons and my other various enterprises is not all that dissimilar...

[Bonus Link:] A wonderfully thought-provoking podcast interview of Seth Godin. Disclosure: He kindly gives me a brief mention about 23.15 minutes into it.

hallam foe and "kula"

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]

Thanks to Everyone who came along the Hallam Foe movie screening last night. It was a blast.

Thanks to Robert Bruce for the nice write-up of the evening. And thanks as well to David Brain for capturing some rough video footage of the Q&A session afterwards on his mobile phone. From Left to Right, that's me, Jamie [lead actor], David [director] and Sophia [lead actress].

[MEANWHILE:] The Guardian's Kevin Anderson [who also attended last night's screening] has a nice synopsis of Jaiku Founder, Jyri Engstrom's "Social Objects" idea.

Something about sites like Flickr that you will be using these sites for years to come.

The sites that work are built around social objects.

[...] MySpace. What is the real focal object? Music. Once they lose that focus, it is in trouble.

How does one build a useful service around social objects? Five key principles.

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.

2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It's clear what the site is for.

3. How can people share the objects?

4. Turn invitations into gifts.

5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don't pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.

Besides being a web 2.0 entrepreneur, Jyri is an anthropologist. So at the London Jaiku geek dinner last Tuesday, I asked him about the connection between Social Objects and its correlation with Malinowski's "Kula" [Malinowski was the father of modern Anthropology, by the way]. Jyri repsonded that this was very much the case. So much so, in fact, that one of his great friends and mentors, the aforementioned Joi Ito bought an island in Second Life and named it "Kula".

Kula. Social Ojects. Objects of Sociability. Call it what you will, I think so much of what we're trying to understand about the web, the future, and yes, MARKETING, stems from this very profound insight from Malinowski in the early 20th Century, that good folk like Jyri and Joi are now helping to shed new light on.

[Bonus Link:] Video of Jyri's talk on Social Objects at the geek dinner. One of the best talks I've heard for a while.

cnn this morning

[CNN offices in London.]

At 6.30am this morning I made a brief appearance on CNN Europe. They asked me in to give my opinion on Andrew Keen's new book, "The Cult of The Amateur- How's Today Internet Is Killing Our Culture".

I said I thought Andrew Keen's book was missing the point somewhat. I said the big story about the internet is not how much it kills what Andrew refers to as "culture", the big story about the internet is, as I'm forever quoting Clay Shirky,

"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."

I asked Andrew on his blog comments a few months ago, "if blogs are as dreadful as you say they are, surely that will increase demand for quality, non-amateur product from people like yourself?"

Then if so, why is that not happening? Why aren't people leaving the internet in droves and heading down to their local bookshop? Why aren't newspaper sales figures shooting skywards? What aren't Web 2.0 companies scrambling to get into traditional publishing, and not the other way around?

I never really got a proper answer from him. What the heck, though we may have disagreed on certain points, he was polite and gracious the whole time.

But a wee voice tells me that the world Andrew would prefer us living in no longer exists. Maybe it never did.

"human attention does not obey moore's law"

["Icarus": Another one of my old favorites. I often refer to this one as "my self-portrait". I find something compelling about a guy who's got a pair of wings, who can fly like an angel, yet he still remains ticked off at the world. A good allegory for the human condition.]

Two great posts from Steve Rubel this week:

1. Writing is Part of Almost Everyone's Job.

Writing not your forte? That was just fine 10 years ago, but not anymore. Writing is how business gets done. Communication inside corporations will shift somewhat away from email to wikis and blogs, but that doesn't really change the need for this skill.

2. The Attention Crash.

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.

"Human attention does not obey Moore's Law." Brilliantly put. Or as I'm fond of saying, "Human beings don't scale".

Tell me about it.

My life is pretty much divided cleanly into two parts. 1. The day job i.e. Stormhoek. 2. Everything else i.e. gapingvoid. Both are getting busier. And busier. Both have aspects to them which are not complimentary. Both often pull me in opposite directions. Yet at the same time, neither could exist without the other. So a lot of the time these days I am feeling, to paraphrase Tolkein's Bilbo Baggins, "like too little butter spread over too much toast."

As Tim Ferris points out in his great new book, "The 4-Hour Workweek", we web workers of the world have three main currencies to trade with: Time, Mobility and Money. The latter two I am fine with. Time, however, is starting to do my head in...

I had pretty much the same conversation with Mike Arrington, when he was in town a few months ago. As successful as his Techcrunch brand was becoming at the time [and still is], you could tell he was feeling the strain. Actually, he was pretty open about it. He was basically having the same rant as I am having now.

And now I'm starting to think, hey, pretty much everybody I know who's successful in this space is having the same problem, to greater or lesser degrees. Something has taken over our lives and it ain't all beer and skittles.

Of course, this web-enabled, stressed-out success model isn't anything new. Since the dawn of time, to get anything interesting done in this world pretty much requires one kissing normal life good-bye. This sudden mass overload of input we're constantly experiencing is just one more manifestation of doing exactly that. One of many. Same as it ever was.

[Rant over.]

everything i do

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here.]

mangy dog

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here.]

in a former life...

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here.]

untitled 22005

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here.]

hugh's new mac...

I love Fridays.

stormhoek pics

[Outside Tesco's this afternoon, Pinotage and Sauvingnon Blanc in hand etc.]

I'm not sure why exactly, but I always like it when I see new Stormhoek photos on Flickr. Something kinda affirming about it.

So what the heck, I was thinking, Stormhoek is now doing a wee promotion at Tesco's in UK, where a bottle is going for £3.99 [£1.00 off the usual £4.99], for the next week or two. So maybe there's an opportunity to have some fun here.

Therefore, the first 500 people, aged 18 or over, who send me a pic of themselves in Tesco's, holding a bottle of Stormhoek, will receive a £5.00 Tesco voucher from us, to cover the cost of the wine [N.B. These vouchers are not sponsored by Tesco's. We're covering the cost out of our own pocket].

And hey, you don't even have to buy the wine if you don't feel like it. You can spend the voucher on whatever you want. Nor do you have to blog it. Frankly, I'm more interested in the photos.

And to make it a bit more interesting, we'll post our favorite pics on the Stormhoek blog, and each week we'll send a complimentary case of wine to the person who took our favorite picture that week.

[AFTERTHOUGHT:] To get the ball rolling, I'll send a case of Stormhoek [6 bottles] to the first six people who send in a photo [on condition that you're over 18 years old, of course]. Again, you don't even have to buy the wine, nor do you have to blog it.

[CAVEAT:] Though this promotion is in most Tesco stores, it isn't in all of them. If your local Tesco doesn't carry Stormhoek, apologies in advance. Drop me an e-mail if this happens and I'll see what I can do. Thanks.

[P.S. For all you Wine Geeks:] The Stormhoek Pinotage that won the "Best Pinotage in The World" award last year is part of the promotion. Rock on.

This might turn out to be quite groovy, it might not. Whatever. Fail fast, fail often etc. But it's a cool enough idea to make it worth a try. Feel free to send your photos to gapingvoid@gmail.com. Thanks Again.

[UPDATE: Friday, 8th June:]

We have our first winner... Thanks, Wil!

[Wil's Flickr pic is here.]

"how i became a professional blogger"

Yehuda over in Israel has one of the best lists I've seen in a while: "How I Became A Professional Blogger". Great stuff.

jason in london

Talked to Jason Calacanis last night. He's in London next week, and it seems he's coming to the Hallam Foe screening, which I blogged about on the previous post.

If Dave and Jamie are cool with it, I might get him sitting in on the post-screening Q&A session as well. It certainly wouldn't be dull with him up there. Just an idea.

Looking forward to seeing you there, Jason. Rock on.

I still have a few places left for bloggers. If you fancy coming, again, please drop me an e-mail with the words, "Hallam Foe" in the subject header, Thanks.

hallam foe blogger's screening, london, june 14th

[See the trailer here.] [Read the blog here.]

It's official: My friend Dave Mackenzie's film, Hallam Foe, is being released in the UK on August 31st.

You may remember last October, when we had a bloggers' screening for the movie, back when it was still in rough cut. About 20 bloggers showed up, plus David and few of the folk on the production, David gave a nice speech, we all watched the movie, then we all went and had some dinner, all paid for by Buena Vista International.

Well, we're doing it again, to tie in with the final cut's official release. There will be another blogger's private screening on June 14th at 6.30 in Soho, London [Full details to be released closer to the date]. Not only will David be there like last time, he and the leading man, Jamie Bell, will be doing a Q&A session. And there'll be complimentary drinks and munchies afterwards.

I've got a few tickets to give away. If you fancy coming just drop me an e-mail with the words "Hallam Foe" in the subject header, and I'll see what I can do. Please bear in mind that the number of people wanting tickets will probably exceed the number of seats, but I'll do my very best.

All bloggers who come along, of course, will be under no obligation whatsoever to blog about it, good or bad.

Yes, I've seen the film, and of course I recommend it highly. David is a seriously good filmmaker. He also made another famous Scottish movie, "Young Adam" with Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and is now considered a small classic. All very exciting etc.

Feel free to blog this, or spread the word as you see fit etc, Thanks.

blue monster bizcards

My "Blue Monster" business cards arrived in the mail today. Very cool. It'll be interesting to see how people react to them.

[You can get your own set here.]

[Bonus Link:] Further proof of Microsoft's "increasing irrelevance". Rock on.

the pirate geek on psfk

The Pirate Geek has a nice write up on last Friday's PSFK London conference.

Lots of juicy links. We like juicy links. Exactly.

2012 olympic "brand launch"

[The paparazzi getting in their photo ops etc. Watching them was somehow more interesting than watching the sporting celebs on stage.]

My friends at Edelman kindly invited me this morning to the "Brand Launch" of the 2012 London Olympics [No, I wasn't paid. Just so you know]. Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

1. Anybody who's ever studied the Olympics knows what a huge political and economic undertaking it is. Frankly, I find multi-billion dollar exercises in good intentions a bit off-putting. I mean, look at The Millenium Dome. That being said, if they manage to pull iit off, it'll create thousands of sustainable jobs for Londoners, not to mention re-develop the whole east end of town.

2. The event was very slick and stage managed. Quite unlike the geeky conferences I go to. You could tell all participants rehearsed their script for weeks beforehand. But hey, the stakes are high, so what the heck...

3. Sebastian Coe, the 1980 Olympic Gold Medalist and front man of the London Olympic Committee, is actually very good at his job. You can tell he passionately believes his own schpiel. With this kind of thing, it's easy to be cynical. The hard part is being sincere, not to mention, effective.

4. From what I understand, they originally pitched it to the Olympics Committee as "The People's Olympics". Living in a basically liberal, tolerant large city of 10 million people, I can't say I'm surprised. What I did like about their reasoning was that their schpiel wasn't so much, "Let's use the Olympics to inspire young people to find their own greatness via Sport". Their schpiel was more, "Let's use the Olympics to inspire young people to find their own greatness... within themselves. Doing whatever it is they do, not necessarily Sport". I actually thought that was quite clever. In a good way.

5. I'm not used to these mega-huge, super-slick PR events. But it was interesting to see. I actually came away far less cynical than I had originally predicted. So good luck to them.

[UPDATE:] Seth Godin is not impressed:

If you are paying money to someone who talks like this, may I suggest you stop? And if you work for someone who talks like this, time to look for a new gig.

I know what he means. When large, highly-idealised, expensive political schemes start going on about "The Brand", "Inclusivity", "Excitement", "Passion" etc, it all gets a bit cheesy [Like I said, remember the Millenium Dome?]. But I disagee with Seth re. the 2012 Olympic logo. I quite liked it when I first saw it.

the cult of the brand r.i.p.

Janine Ramlochan makes an interesting point that she learned from working with a Japanese team. The emphasis is mine:

It became clear, the ‘western’ approach to brand-building did not apply in the same way ~ particularly, as western brand-building has normally been used to extend relevance in the absence of innovation. In markets where consumers were more “innovation-chasing”, brand-building needed to be balanced with innovation for a brand to survive. And if a brand carried too much baggage for a new innovation, it would sometimes make more sense to just launch a new brand instead.

This brings me back to my rather surreal days as an advertising copywriter: "You were excited about Nike. You were excited about Starbucks. You were excited about Apple. And now here's your chance to get excited about diet supermarket cheddar!!"

For twenty-odd years the Western marketing world totally got into this idea of "The Brand". Even the part of the Western marketing world that has lousy brands.

i.e. This Platonic ideal that was was somehow more than the sum of its parts via-a-vis your company, your product and your reputation. It was nostalgic, idealized, romanticized, backward-looking and, for all its warm n' fuzzy stuff, extremely cynical.

It was meant to bring comfort and continuity to both mainstream Western society and, I suspect more importantly, to Wall Street traders and aging, second-rate corporate hacks with big mortgages. Lucky them.

Far too many people, when asked why they get out of bed in the morning, only have one genuine answer: "Because I need the money." The Cult of The Brand evolved the way it did, primarily to keep the latter contented.

Which is too bad. Life is short.

great mark earls profile

Well done to Mark McGuinness for doing such a great job of profiling one of my marketing heroes, Mark Earls, including a podcast interview [The latter's book, "Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature", is one of the best books I've read all year].

[Mark Earl's blog is here.]

bill and steve

I suppose Everybody and Their Uncle will have seen the recent interview of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs by now, their first joint interview in 10 years.

It's an hour or so long. For the benefit of Generation-YouTube, Wired's "Cult of Mac" blog has it broken into seven easy-to-digest segments here.

The good news is, this is no simple PR photo op. This is two very smart, successful guys talking in great depth about what interests them most. Fascinating stuff.

Having been watching Microsoft close-up for the last month or two, the most interesting bit for me was, funnily enough, only about five seconds long.

It was about 6 minutes and 10 seconds into Segment Number Five, when Bill makes a rather small, vague remark, something or other to do with Microsoft soon re-entering the internet game with renewed vigor, upping their ante.

I thought that was VERY interesting. Bill understating something so important to the future of the software industry [i.e. the Internet] spoke volumes to me. Say what you want, the implications are potentially huge.

[UPDATE: Within a day of me writing the preceding three paragraphs, Techcrunch broke this story. You know you want me, Babe.]

[Bonus Link:] Usable Interfaces has a nice summary of the show.

The other big Microsoft moment for me this week was the announcement of this, especially in light of the many "Microsoft is increasingly irrelevant" comments directed my way [and ipso facto, towards the Microsoft Employees who read this blog] in the last month or two. Never a dull moment in the tech business etc.

I'm currently "between innings" with the whole Microsoft/Tech/Blue Monster thing. Taking a breather while events gather momentum all around me. Some things I can't talk about, some VERY interesting things I hope to make public very soon. Watch this space.

PSFK

Sitting here at the PSFK Conference in London. The best advertising conference I've ever been to, just about. Well done to Piers & Co. for pulling it off etc.

[UPDATE:] George Nimeh live blogged a lot of the conference, including my talk. [Bonus Link] Ian Tate: "Ten Reasons Why Digital Is Better Than Advertising."