I really enjoy liking things. Nothing makes me happier than seeing good work except for seeing people get excited when their good work is appreciated. Sometimes I do this by paying for it, but the best thing about the information age is that you can feel like a mini patron of the arts just by talking about things you like and hoping that somebody else spends money on it for/in addition to you.
Things I Like
Ramona Emerson writing for HuffPo – What I said about liking good work is doubly true for writers. Even moreso for writers who are not yet famous. It means that while I may not have their natural talent, dedication to craft, or many of the other prerequisite traits necessary to thrive in that competitive marketplace, I do have taste. It’s the equivalent of what Aziz Ansari’s character in Parks & Rec does when he says, “Game recognizes game.” I should really start saying that more often. And you should read some of Ramona’s work.
Braids – Beautiful. Short listed for the Polaris Music Prize.
Ian Rogers’A Step-By-Step Guide to Building an Online Marketing Plan That Works – A great presenation on building relationships with fans and giving them a reason to buy from you. The specific tips are really good, but the general philosophy behind it is even more important to internalize. I’m rarely excited by marketing related presentations, but Topspin is consistently showing me the future of online marketing I’d like to see. I don’t mind living within their system at all.
I saw this tweet the other day and saved it for later, after retweeting it. It’s an idea I really like on the surface due to the fact that, as a twenty five year old, – I’m working that into every blog post I write this year – I like feeling like a responsible patron of the arts without having to work too hard. Yeah, I pay five whole bucks a month to Rdio, and I get to feel like that money is going to the bands I listen to. That makes me feel like a stand up guy. But I also know that the amount of money each band is getting from me isn’t a whole lot. They rely on a bunch of listens. So instead of making me feel good about listening to a band, displaying the exact numbers is probably going to frustrate or discourage me as I see how little impact my individual plays have in moving the bar forward. (For some reason I see a progress bar that can never be filled all the way when I picture this. Sometimes it shows royalties paid out from me next to the average listener.) I still love Rdio and think it’s probably a great deal for artists at any stage in their career. I just think this feature would end up being counter-productive because of how people perceive numbers and what it takes to feel like you’re making a difference.
Interestingly, I didn’t run into any sort of mental block when I was using Flattr. I didn’t have a steady stream of income when I signed up for it, so my handful of Euros a month felt relatively generous. I also was opting in to a system that was totally voluntary and where there is no social pressure to buy the work. Direct payments for blog posts you can read for free isn’t really a thing. The authors post them knowing that they will be consumed for free. And readers expect ads to take care of the bloggers. Just like music subscriptions though, that requires huge numbers to be effective. If I only Flattred one or two different authors in a month they could receive a couple of Euros each, which isn’t a ton, but it’s more than a few clicks on some ads generate. Flattr also had the positive effect of being an encouragement to small talent. I meant each click of that button to be a heartfelt pat on the back and a congratulation of work well done. And I could decide at any given month to Flattr a bunch of items and have many more, smaller, amounts go towards giving someone 15 cents worth of, “Thumbs up!” I ultimately left Flattr not because I didn’t want to pay for posts, but because it wasn’t adopted widely enough for me to pay most of the people I really wanted to pay.
I’m still a young employee, trying to figure out the working world as I’ve found it from my own experiences and observing what my friends’ jobs are like. I work things out by writing and getting feedback, much in the same way that I propose ideas to my wonderful co-workers so that they will expose my assumptions and make me step up to defend my positions. I’ll probably write a few more pieces on work related subjects. These posts shouldn’t be read with my current employer in mind, as they are heavily influenced by the outside world.
Like many young employees, I have an interesting relationship with expereience. On the one hand, I want to believe that I have a fresh perspective on things. The notion that youth is valuable because it has not been become used to standard practices is understandably alluring. On the other hand, I am constantly confronted with the benefits of experience as my coworkers avoid distractions or deftly solve problems that take me much longer to understand. But there has been an idea bouncing around in my head for the last few days that just won’t go away – Experience in years is not an indicator of correctness.
People seem to have a basic understanding that data is important. And data often takes the form of numbers. Therefore, they think using numbers will make them look better prepared, more respectable, and more right. But, while saying, “I’ve been doing this for x years!” doesn’t say nothing, it doesn’t really say anything either. The speaker is really trying to depend on a pretty heavy implication; that is, “I’ve been doing this right for x years.” If you aren’t familiar with the person or their work, this is a huge leap of faith for you to make, as you are operating without any data. What you can be pretty sure of is that they have managed to at least stumble through a career path without getting fired a ton of times to the point where they are deemed too big a risk to hire.
What would help everyone much more is if the employee/applicant said, “I did X, Y way, with Z results!” Now you have a real platform for discussion, and perhaps more importantly, for trust. You may still be uncertain if “Y way” is the correct way for the current task at hand depending on whether or not you think the projects are analogous, but you know some important things. You know how that employee attacked a different task in the past and you have a certain understanding of the level of success achieved.
So, one problem with invoking experience in years is that it doesn’t tell you anything about the task at hand. The other problem with that exclamation is that it tells you that they don’t want to learn. Because even if they aren’t wrong, and their idea is totally valid, this individual is discounting the idea that they could be more right. They believe themselves to be operating at 100% right levels. Maximum right. And I’m sorry, but that is never the case. The individuals who are going to be closest to that 100% right level are the ones who keep acknowledging that there may be a better way, and actually go looking for it.
In my last post about the craft of Twitter humor and storytelling I asked about the importance of the 140 limit. You know, because creativity loves restrictions. Well my old pal, and Xanga superstar, @Drakonskyr is making that text field look pretty roomy. For the last three days Daniel has been making the briefest of updates, only using one word each time and often limiting himself to a single syllable. This includes @ replies.
Intrigued.
A tweet’s relationship to time is an interesting thing. As I mentioned in my last post. @fireland‘s tweet “— end of side one — ” gains something in meaning for every second it is not followed by a new update. There is also a quality dependent on the notion that you are reading content as it is produced. Obviously, this is not a necessary part of the experience. A solid one liner is still a solid one liner. (As a matter of fact, I just starred a number of tweets produced months ago. Wuddup @JasonPermenter) Daniel’s stream, however, is completely dependent on time. At least relative to his other tweets. This is unlike any account I’ve come across before. There aren’t any jokes. There is no perspective being pushed though his observations. The updates simply are. I’ll give you an example. On June 1st his tweets read: “transportation”, “affinity”, “inspectors?”, “fail”, and “failsafe”. He ended last night with, “SUCCESS” and began this morning with, “gloating”. (British punctuation FTW.)
I couldn’t even get a monolexic comment about the origins of this shift or an estimate about how long it will run but I hope that when it reaches its conclusion there will be absolutely no attention given to it.
In other Twitter news, @Mike_FTW will be ruling Brooklyn Museum’s @1stfans account with an iron fist for the entirety of June. The number of readers who care will be exactly zero though, as the account requires you to be a BM 1stfans member. At $20 a year, it’s actually a pretty good deal for people who would take advantage of the “IRL” social networking that goes on but charging for access to Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts just seems ludicrous. Maybe you think that challenging the notions of monetary value for things is still an interesting question to raise in the art world. I don’t. I only mention it because I’ve always wondered what their guest artists do with the feed and Mike was kind enough to post a screen cap of his early updates.
Frankly, I would love to see the rise of throw away or one off accounts that were dedicated to a single narrative. I think the people behind the retelling of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over the course of a single afternoon via Twitter and Foursquare provided a good proof of concept there. It certainly helps that the story was already well known and loved but I don’t think it would take much to make an original story go viral.
When I first met Nick he was a fresh faced blogger who wore hooded sweatshirts. Now he’s a bearded blogger who plays (what looks to be) speed-bananagrams while wearing suits.
Early Friday morning, I rebloggedNickDouglas and contributed my thoughts on making mistakes as a writer in the wake of the throw down between Mike Monteiro, Mat Honan, and Caroline McCarthy. It got me thinking about my own mistakes. I’ve made a few. The most publicly embarrassing was probably being called out by the happiest man alive, Andrew W.K., for making an absurd amount of typos in an interview I did with him. In terms of personal shame, my interview with Nick during the promotion for his book, Twitter Wit, holds the top spot. I had just moved to Berkeley and was starting to land gigs. I was simply brimming with confidence and held the always dangerous belief that I knew exactly what I was doing. This piece was analogous to the time I crashed my car after saying that there really wasn’t all that much to learn about driving. I have no problem admitting that I fumbled the submission process terribly. More embarrassing is the fact that I put my own interests before the interests of someone who took a fairly large chunk of time out of their day for a complete unknown. As time drifted by and people grew more Twitter savvy I found myself at a loss for how to proceed. The piece was cannibalized and redone several times and simply got away from me. I doubt that the lack of progress even registered on Nick’s radar. Shortly after we spoke he appeared on Martha Stewart’s show so I’m pretty sure some people heard about his book. You can also find his writing all over the web and he is currently an editor and blogger at Urlesque. I’ve had different jobs and new deadlines in the interim but I can’t help but be distressed by the fact that he gave me a great interview and I botched it. At least once every two weeks I pull out my notes or the transcript and sigh. The web’s climate has changed a great deal since we spoke. Favrd is down, Twitter has multiple monetization strategies, Facebook proved that they are more than willing to compromise user experience for money. But Nick was saying all this in August ‘09. He noted the value of archiving tweets and now they’re in the Library of Congress. I’m not saying Nick went to James Billington, Librarian of Congress, slapped him in the face with Twitter Wit, and screamed, “Do you see!” until he included every bit of content the site produces. What he did do was give me a bunch of insightful comments about Twitter that he expected me to promulgate as widely as I could. I failed to do that.
This is not a straight “from the vault” type post but I have kept the first introduction I worked on in the hopes that it might provide a sense of how much things have changed in the last year alone in respect to Twitter being a completely accepted service. It took me two Thanksgivings to make my family and our friends understand what the damn thing was and now they love explaining it to me.
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While some focus on the transformative potential of Twitter from the news to education, its detractors have deemed it an expression of our nation’s self absorption and attention seeking behavior taken to their extremes. As parents complain that the youth is losing their ability to spell and compose a proper sentence, Nick Douglas sees a renaissance in the art of the one liner.
Twitter is unarguably a growing force in almost every aspect of our lives. A Twitter ticker on news stations is now almost as common as the stock ticker or additional story updates and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to read a paper or watch a sitcom without at least some mention of the service. Even the next iteration of Xbox Live will integrate Twitter functionality. Although there has been a great growth in interest and usership, many people still don’t understand exactly what they can be getting out of Twitter. Nick Douglas has put a lot of thought into that very subject. As a founding editor of the tech industry site Valleywag (of Gawker Media) it was practically part of his job to try every online service out there and examine their encouraged user behavior and effectiveness. Nick has been on Twitter since the beginning when “it was just something the geeks played on,” and while he can talk at length about things like Twitter’s lasting power and competitive edge against Facebook, his most recent project focuses on the unique way that Twitter lends itself to humor by collecting some of the funniest one liners across genre and subject. While Twitter Wit itself may be seen as a “joke book” it is clear that to Nick Douglas the existence of this book is a reflection of a significant transition taking place in how we communicate and our humor itself.
Although his career brought him into contact with countless services that originally promised great change and tiny, focused, revolutions in user behavior only to fizzle out, Douglas saw something evolving on Twitter. “I noticed more and more people specifically trying to entertain instead of just fulfilling the basic purpose of saying what they were doing. These were people who were thinking about the audience they were writing to instead of, ‘I’m writing something for myself,’ almost as a personal diary. Twitter Wit works in a way that Blogger Wit wouldn’t really or Facebook Wit doesn’t even work, even though they’ve got some very similar features. You just don’t get huge numbers of people on Facebook trying to be really funny.”
The beautiful thing about Twitter is its simplicity and the almost absolute lack of direction its creators give users. While feature happy third party apps abound for the service, the actual web UI looks like it might have been designed by an ascetic hermit. (If ascetics had internet.) Conventions like the hashtag and even the RT are all derived from user invention and implementation. The genesis of this book depended on the integrated “star” or “fav” feature and the user communities that arose as a result. “Favrd definitely changed the game for me,” says Douglas. The now defunct service tallied the number of stars users had been awarded for their individual tweets and displayed them in rank. “It changed how people were tweeting because suddenly there was a goal in mind: get the most stars, land on the top of this page, and be commemorated for that day as the funniest person of the day. Turning it into a little contest, like so many things online, really upped the ante of how people were going to behave.” In addition to encouraging content creation, it presented a more manageable way to find that content. Previously, Nick had simply been starring tweets he liked by reflex but he was still limited by the fact that he had to depend on his own follow list or hope that his friends retweeted material they’d enjoyed. Sites like Favrd and Favotter allowed users to increase their visibility.
This democratizing aspect of Twitter that allows everyone from housewives to college students access to their own audiences has been touted much in the same way people pointed to Youtube celebrities a few years ago. “I do see Twitter as an equalizing platform. Granted, the same network effects are still in play. A famous person is always going to get more followers by default, versus someone who can be funnier than that famous person that just doesn’t have an audience. People aren’t just reading to be entertained purely by what the tweets are, they also want that feeling of connection with whoever’s behind them. There’s nothing magical about Twitter that would override that. And yet, at the same time, like with Shit My Dad Says, you can see that a good idea does get a lot of attention in a way it deserves. [More than followers] What really is important to me, as far as a sign of attention on Twitter, is whether people are saving your tweets.”
Perhaps even more importantly, the favoriting system has turned Twitter into something greater than a broadcasting tool. “I’d like to see starring become more of a standard thing on Twitter that people know to do. You start being able to track what’s good and what your audience likes and actually hone your craft.” The conventional comments system on a blog will typically skew towards the negative but Douglas notes that it doesn’t necessarily present an honest picture of audience response. “More people are going to want to explain in words why they don’t like what you wrote than why they did. It’s always harder to say a coherent positive response when you really just want to go, ‘Yay! I agree.’ Having the “likes” and the stars which are integrated on Tumblr, Flickr, Youtube, Amazon etc. gives people a chance to show their appreciation without having to rack their brains for specific nice things to say. It’s also important to get followers who are interested in talking to you. I think that’s one of the really valuable things here; you’re not just doing standup in front of a crowd, you’re doing something that’s participatory.” Instead of chucking dead ends or throw-away jokes out into the Twittersphere, comedians should be viewing Twitter as a testing ground or joke incubator. It is increasingly common to see conversations start on Twitter only to be followed up by full length blog posts or articles. Similarly, there is potential to select excerpts from longer works as a sort of “proof of concept” for the premise of a joke or story.
And here we enter the realm of craft. The development of characters and a commitment to voice are probably the best argument anyone could offer for Twitter developing into something recognized for having literary characteristics or properties. It is an interesting time, as writers on Twitter are still shaking out various approaches for creating accounts that invite investment from followers. Writers must decide to create an account for a singular type of joke, to create an account using their own persona or a fictional one, to stick to perhaps a limited number of subjects or let fly as ideas come to them. Authors like Arjun Basu, who tells self contained short stories in 140 characters or less, are something of an anomaly but that is not to say that there isn’t an abundance of story driven tweets. Particularly interesting is the way that behavior is evolving. While Douglas said he observed that writers developed characteristic voices early on, as personal style is almost impossible to keep out of creative work on Twitter or any other service, it took quite a bit longer for the now popular character accounts to develop. “I’d say those cropped up almost a year after Twitter started. I’m sure there were some but they were primordial. The really good ones took a while. Darth Vader was an early one but that’s a much simpler account. It’s very much the standard jokes for someone impersonating Darth Vader because that’s been a trope for decades. It’s a very easy persona for someone to get into. Fake Michael Bay is the first [sophisticated] one I can remember, or Fake Sarah Palin might have come first. The really interesting part about those characters is that they’re always better when the person goes beyond the first, immediate, joke. It’s the sort of thing they did at MAD magazine a lot. They would push beyond the obvious thing you could say about a celebrity. What the Fake Sarah Palin account got was not just that she was ill equipped for her political career, or not just that she was a dumb bible thumper, but that she was so self-assured about how right she was. It wasn’t just that she didn’t realize how dumb she was, it’s that she thinks everyone else is dumb when they disagree with her, and that’s what was magical.”
When confronted with the conventional wisdom often taught in creative writing classes that an author should find their favorite line or scene and kill it,[1] Douglas doesn’t hesitate for a second, dismissing the advice as “simplistic.” Much of the comedy taking place online experiments with the short form, he says. Shorter formats like video sketches or tweets reward artists who can come up with one or two of those killer lines. Twitter is arguably the shortest of forms. Whether working in puns, like JayHathaway; mimicking conservative politicians, like AveryEdison; or simply being diabolical, like JoshuaAllen, each tweet produced is inextricably linked to the negative space around it. The form’s brevity requires cues from the authors that hint at a world outside the tweet. Douglas describes Allen’s skill in being able to “imagine an entire short story and taking the one killer line from it.” The whole story is still there, he’s just let it fall away. The seemingly instantaneous aspect of Twitter also makes readers wonder about the physical context of the tweet. While a writer my go through numerous drafts of a tweet before publishing, the fact remains that it is a one off, created at a specific moment to be enjoyed by an audience as soon as the author deems it ready. Since a tweet can be sent from anywhere, and generally carries a tone of observation, it is not unlikely that a reader might wonder exactly what went on behind it. Was Jay Hathaway really making a hot pocket at the exact moment you read his hot pocket joke? The fact that a tweet can be multifaceted and create so many different types of associations in the mind of readers makes the case for tweets as compelling art.
Consider @firleand’s tweet from May 10th “— end of side one — ” There is a visual component to the composition of the tweet that sets it apart from anything else in the reader’s feed and replicates the sense of separation from content that these messages used to carry. While the tweet receives a significant boost in meaning to those who follow Allen’s Tumblr as being something relating to his own life, the tweet still works as a message from a fictional character or the last line in an imagined novel. These four words are rife with dramatic tension and gain in poignancy for every moment that they are not followed by another tweet. If we were to view the entirety of this feed as an artistic endeavor, this tweet, and the space surrounding it, would be the best exercise in pacing I’ve ever seen on the service.
How important then is the 140 limit, the restriction that creates the form? 140 has become something of an arbitrary hot number these days. You may have seen the 140 Second Film Festival that limited films to 140 seconds of footage. While it is true that the limit was adopted to leave room for the user names of those who submitted by SMS, or text message, which brings a limit of 160 characters, this was not always the case. Initially, there was no character limit at all. Any overflow would be separated into a second message and submitted subsequently, just as a normal text message sent to another cell user would be. Similarly, there is nothing to stop someone from writing a story or joke in 10 consecutive 140 character long segments. I asked Douglas what he thought about users simply ignoring the limit.
“It could be less elegant, maybe,” He said. “In any format, people that can work within the structure of the format are often going to produce more immediately elegant things. But, if you can tell a story over several tweets by paying attention to when you’re breaking up the narrative then you can do something really interesting. You can put the punch lines in the second tweet. You’re forcing comedic timing in a medium that usually seems bereft of any timing. What’s more artless to me is when people abbreviate. I’d much rather someone go into a second tweet than type in rebus language. It distracts. That definitely kills the feeling of humor, and I had to edit a few of the tweets in the book because they were brilliant except they left out a couple of punctuation marks, or shortened a word too much, just to fit in the character limit. It’s always better if you can, instead, change your actual words. If you want to be Hemingway you can’t just make the words look shorter, you have to actually use fewer words and still manage to get the idea across.”
Even if they were to get past the invention of the internet, the old guard would doubtlessly still be shocked at the concept of such brief stories. Even Henry Youngman, king of the one liners, would have a hard time understanding how Twitter could usher in a new type of one liner joke. Twitter’s hash tag system allows users to track all the tweets associated with specific tags. For example, you could search #presidentialdebate and follow the entire community’s reaction to a debate. Douglas points out the value of such a feature not just for academic purposes but for humorists as well. The jokes based on memes and trending topics are “a unique form of humor that wasn’t technologically possible without this one tool. Someone just starts a joke with a simple and easy to replicate formula like, ‘mashed up movie titles,’ or, ‘things I’d never say,’ and you can follow the tags and read hundreds of variations of a certain type of joke.” Twitter seems to be making everything new again. It’s not too long ago that a book of crowd sourced one liners would have seemed an unlikely pitch at best. Now Douglas predicts that before long, we may very well see entire books based on a single day’s jokes from Twitter. I sure hope so, there’s an empty spot on my bookshelf next to F U Penguin.
[1] Attributed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the form of “Murder your darlings.” from On the Art of Writing
During my in depth BSNYC RTMS unboxing yesterday, I was taken by the beauty of it as a sculpture of the blog I know and love. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong when I stood back and looked at it on its pedestal. Yes, it was a beautiful expression of form. Its sharp corners, hard cover, compact size (Perfect for the penoutermate pocket of my backpack.) all had me taken aback. Like Indiana Jones before me, I could not simply stare at the treasure I had pursued. I had to open it. Consequences be damned! I felt the spine crack ever so slightly beneath my soft, scholar’s touch. I let out a breath. How long had I been holding it in? Where Dr. Jones would have taken a piece of charcoal and made a copy while breaking everything else around him, I decided to simply read at a leisurely pace. I mean, I have a scanner upstairs anyway in case of emergency.
As the Bike Snob gained notoriety (which is like gaining notariety in that it involves a lot of signatures but differs in that they’re yours) some people began to ask who he was. It’s a silly sort of question for silly people but eventually even people I know who don’t ride bikes were in on it. A friend of mine told me she’d heard he was actually some guy in the financial field. If you actually read the blog you know plenty about him. He favors practicality and a lack of pomp while still appreciating that some things are simply fun to do. Although he spends much of his time telling people what to do with their bikes he freely admits that no one should follow his “dictats” if they are enjoying themselves as they are. (Within reason. See bike salmon.) He pokes fun at everything, including himself. He rides his bike often and emphasizes the activity over the maintenance of both body and machine. What else is there to know? As a skateboarder I used to run into the same people regularly at “spots” but only interact with them peripherally. Of these recognizable strangers, there were some I liked and some I disliked based on their comportment. Knowing someone’s name wouldn’t make me think they were any less of a dick for snaking runs and it wouldn’t make me like anyone who was courteous any more. What I enjoyed about this book is that it lets us know RTMS better in the ways that count. Those ways being his relationship to cycling and the joy it brings him.
However, I should note that if you think a band sells out when they use a recording studio instead of etching their disc format of choice with a rock by themselves, you probably won’t like this book. This book is certainly not the affront or slap in the face that many hardcore fans claim when their favorite artists create projects for consumption by wider audiences. However, it is not a “paper back blog” and may be different than what you expect if you haven’t been following the Snob’s interview circuit. While I personally feel that the blog holds up over time, at least looking back two years, I understand his point perfectly that a book should be more timeless. They are composed (and consumed) over a much longer period of time and should have a greater cohesiveness than a collection of posts that are meant to stand alone and have been composed over what was probably sometimes a lunch break. A blog is topical in the way we mean topical humor, this book is topical in that it is about the topic of cycling. Period. Complaining about the lack of the Lobster God here would be like complaining that his Giro d’Italia blog doesn’t make fun of anyone on a fixed gear.
A legitimate complaint would be that there isn’t a whole lot of stuff you didn’t know before. While I found all the content based on the history of cycling, why the bicycle was a great invention, and pretty much all of Snob’s personal stories to be engaging, there was quite a bit of rehash. Which is to be fully expected. The man has covered quite a bit of ground in the last couple of years. In general, he does it in a clever and concise way and it’s still fun to see him collect the various themes and categories he has developed over the course of the blog and consolidate and refine them. I particularly liked the part about the myth of bike culture where he skewers the notion of any “thing” culture and distinguishes that idea from the subcultures within cycling.
Back to stuff you already know. There are huge portions of the book dedicated to introductory maintenance and advice for navigating the mean world of bicycle commuting and ownership. Snob maintains a welcoming tone throughout these portions that reminds me of college orientation. There is certainly humorous content that the experienced cyclist will enjoy but in this book the novice or interloper is king. It’s like Snob is on a long ride with an unsure friend he’s brought along and keeps looking back to make sure he’s still there, smiling encouragingly to tell them to think about it for a second and realize how much fun they’re having.
If you’re like me, you might question the logic of a man who loves riding bikes and has built an audience of people who also love riding bikes writing a book for people who don’t love riding bikes. The truth is that this book is for people who don’t know they love riding bikes yet. And in that way it is very much for people who love riding bikes. He has given sold you something that you can give or lend to those around you that are, metaphorically speaking, constantly hovering above a saddle or standing next to a bike. I agree with him that the best form of bike advocacy is riding your bike. If you want better bike lanes you have to show that people use them. Once more, if you want to be treated better by drivers you have to get out there so they can get used to the idea of treating you any way at all. Snob makes the point that every time you let someone see you on a bike you’re helping to show them that cycling is accessible and easy. Without being snarky, I’d like to suggest that the best form of reading this book is letting it be read by other people. Think of this book as the guest bike you keep for enticing non-cyclist buddies and the blog as your daily commuter.
Notes:
I borrowed the term “paper back blog” from Sean Bonner. You can download the e-book here.
Yeah, the book is pretty on the inside. Christopher Koelle has done a great job illustrating and you can buy some of work here. It’s actually almost surprising because of how much the Snob avoids flashiness on the site. He hasn’t even opted to register his own vanity domain like I have, opting instead to stay a dot blogspot. Readers often take pleasure in his low quality photography and photo editing “skillz.” No blog to book could be completely bereft of pictures though and Chronicle and Bike Snob oblige with a 16 page insert full of images from the blog. The handlebar condom makes it in there, as does the lone wolf and the lime green rim heard around the world.
When I was a young boy I used to order “signed” baseballs out of magazines. I use dismissive quotation marks here because they were really just stamped on facsimiles of signatures. The balls came in cheap plastic display cases and even at what I remember to be around 15 dollars were probably vastly over priced. Much to my parents’ credit though, they would, from time to time, allow me order such a novelty item. Perhaps it was because of how I waited. If you have ever ordered any novelty mail order good then you know that there is a lot of waiting involved. My econ professor in college admitted to getting drunk and ordering some sort of sandwich maker at two in the morning and receiving it six months later without any clue as to why. Similarly, these baseballs were promised somewhere between six weeks and just before I you lost interest in baseball. After about a week I would start sitting outside in the front yard from when I got home until five. Truth be told, I enjoyed being in my front yard. But there’s something about a kid hanging out waiting for the mail man that just gets to parents.
Things have come a long way since then and Amazon now tells you within about a day when you’ll be receiving your next novelty item. Didn’t you know? Dead tree books are like sculptures of blogs. It’s a kind of origami that uses stitching. As you may know, I am a huge fan of a certain blog that is written by the previously mysteriousBike Snob NYC. Ever since I began reading it I have said that I would like to compensate him for his work somehow beyond sending him links to things for his quizzes. So it was that I went to sleep last night comforted by the knowledge that I would most likely rush home from work today and find the most recent Snob x Paper collabo waiting for me. I slept the sleep of a child who has already peeked at his Christmas gifts but has parents that are clumsy enough to misplace them during the transition from their closet to the tree. Well, they made it. Here is what I saw when I got home.
The first thing I noticed after I ripped this book from it’s protective covering was that it is small. Perhaps that is because it was built for performance. I immediately decided to take some measurements.
Like succulent homarus americanus meat ripped right out of a claw
In keeping with convention I opted to use sunglasses and improvised as necessary.
As you can see, the book is about one pair of sun glasses wide.
And one and a half eyes wide. I couldn’t take a picture of the most important dimension, width, because I had to measure it in cell phones and I was capturing the images with mine. It was two HTC Ozones thick FYI. I tried to weigh it but since my scale is set to babies, it wouldn’t register.
This bodes well for a quick, snappy read. I expect it to accelerate great in the bathroom.
Hey that’s a funny looking Facebook “Like” button I added to the site isn’t it? I have been waiting to get accepted to Flattr for quite some time now. So long, in fact, that I forgot what the service was called. Their introductory video has stayed with me however.
There is something really compelling to me about this program. I like pretty much everything about it actually. Flattr is a service that seeks to let fans make (almost) direct payments to content creators. In this case both Paypal and Flattr get a percentage (Flattr’s is 10%) for their trouble and you don’t get to select the precise amount that you pay. In my mind, this is distinguishable from the truly direct payments I’ve seen at signings where people just walk up to guys like Wil Wheaton, hand them a fiver, and say, “Thanks for everything.”
There is something called “consumer surplus” that describes the amount of money over a purchase price a customer would have been willing to pay for a product. This number is especially relevant (in my mind) when it comes to media items that adhere to a standardized pricing structure. Comic books are one example of such a product. Comics generally all cost about the same per issue to buy but there are some I buy that strike me as just barely worth the cover price and some I buy that I would pay at least 50% more for. (I owe Kirkman a lot of consumer surplus money.) I have actually considered popping a couple of bucks in an envelope and sending it to ol’ Robert Kirkman, but then I think about how impractical that is. I think about how strange it would be to ask him to take half of that amount and give it to Charlie Adlard. Some sites support themselves with Paypal donations but I feel that there is an extra obstacle to overcome in getting people to decide that this time is the time to donate. There’s also the problem of the micro-payment form itself. Making a one time payment that is so small feels strange, not to mention meaningless,when you consider the processing fee. With Flattr, you upload a lump sum and set a monthly amount to be distributed amongst the “things” or content you flattr. For each time you click a button, the content’s creator gets one equal sized piece of your monthly allotment. If you like one thing during that whole month, its creator gets the whole piece of the pie. If, somehow, you are incapable of finding anything on the whole internet that is deserving of two bucks, you still end up paying your monthly allotment, but it goes to charity. It’s like subscribing to the internet except it’s subscribing to content instead of the network. The only problem at the moment is that Flattr doesn’t encompass all the content on the web. As it stands now, you still have to sign up for an invitation and much of the content appears to be in Swedish. (Flattr is a Swedish start up.) I hope that they consider prioritizing applications because I sincerely believe that membership will be driven by a desire to pay major content creators and not out of attempts to monetize tiny blogs. (However, the fact that I have received an activation code hints that there is no such strategy in place.) The reason I say this is because any creator attempting to get money out of the system must have an active account. Meaning, they must be paying at least €2 a month. Most people know that they are not going to recoup that amount via micro-payments.
The only other quick addition I can think of that would be nice is the ability to keep track of what you’ve Flattred by month. I’d like to see how I’m spreading my money around. Right now, the dashboard displays the number of things you’ve Flattred and does the math on how much each creator will get.
People I would like to Flattr:
Tiny Mix Tapes (Yeah, I write for them. I do it because I like them.)
Not to mention countless bands I would like to support or individual posts that I might find incredibly helpful. I really hope that this, or something like it, takes off. I was reading on the Border Stylo blog a little while ago that it would only take a subscription fee of $1/year from its users for Facebook to meet what it brings in from advertising and data crawling. With all the concern over Facebook owning us, you’d think that people would be willing to pay that much to sleep a little easier at night. Especially since, evidently, despite all these concerns the bulk of us are unwilling to give up our profiles. If that’s not proof that stuff on the web is valuable to people I don’t know what is.
I made a judgment call to miss a few panels this morning and focus on getting some work done. But when I heard that Wil Wheaton would be participating in a panel on new media and publishing I packed it in and headed out. It should be noted that I didn’t see him listed in the paper and my attendance is the direct result of my following him on Twitter. He announced his participation about two and a half hours beforehand and I was able to see that while out and about and restructure my plans for the day. It was that easy. It’s that type of powerful flexibility (not to mention immediacy) that publishers are trying to harness.
In all honesty, it’s easy for people to walk away from these discussions unhappy. No one is going to give you the answer of how an industry is going to heal itself right then and there. Most panelists will tell you that right out. As Dana Goodyear put it, if she had the answer she’d be on a private jet to New York instead of at the festival. The truth is that these issues are too large to be definitively put to rest by any one individual or even a room full of qualified people. It can be incredibly illuminating to hear about experiences that people who are involved in pulling industries into the future (or present) have though. And it’s not just heads of companies who have been trained to fear changes in their industry. Many of the questions the panel fielded showed how pervasive big business thinking is in our culture. One question Wil received, for instance, relied on what Wil referred to as an assumption of a binary relationship between new media and free. He gave a great explanation about how no matter what medium your creating content in there will always be thieves. There will simply always be someone who doesn’t want to pay for what you’ve made and will figure out a way to take it from you. No matter how much you punish the people who want to pay you. That is, after all, what companies effectively do by making it difficult to use their downloads on your devices with DRM. He went on to talk about Valve trying to match the quality of customer support that pirates give. Wil made the excellent point that everything should be considered an aspect of customer service; from the speed of delivery (pirates often beat products to the streets), to meeting demands for the quality of a product, to the ease of consumption, to the guaranteed lack of malware or data collecting software. Pablo Defendini and Wil both pointed to author Scott Sigler who has released free e-book and podcast versions of his books prior to any official print version and still achieves huge sales rankings. Wil cited his experience trying to watch BBC’s Jekyll, which featured edits that fans considered detrimental to the story’s effectiveness. He was forced to find what was, in this case, the premium content on the “seedy underbelly” of the web.
This talk really boiled down to two things. First, if companies spent as much time thinking about the people that wanted to give them money as they did thinking about the people who weren’t giving them money, we wouldn’t be in nearly as bad shape as we are now. That should hold true for all time. However technology changes distribution, however trust relationships between official media outlets and social networks shift, a focus on the consumers you have is always going to be most important. That’s not new at all. That’s marketing 101. It is always more expensive to convert new customers than it is to maintain a relationship with a current customer.
The second point was that you can’t just try to hop in, treat new media like a classical advertising technique, and sit back waiting for your money to poor in. If you look at anyone who has been successful in new media you’ll see that they have embraced it and used it to add value to the content they were already making, without trying to hedge their bets.
Pablo Defendini had an absolutely fantastic example of this during his time at TOR’s community site. The publisher apparently tried to employ pretty standard loss leading strategy by giving away the first installments of series in e-book form. It sounds pretty smart right? They have an active online community with a proven fondness for consuming content digitally. There are low production and distribution costs for these versions so the “loss” part of “loss leading” is minimized. However, they were hoping to convert these customers to paperback sales. (Defendini didn’t say it in regards to this example, but he noted later that publishers still make more money off print copies.) They tried to exploit the digital media and convert it to sales in a different (pricier) arena. But your core purchaser of that e-book downloaded it because it was in a form that was already palatable to them. They didn’t want to finish it in the print form. They wanted it in the e-book. Defendini was getting e-mails asking for the rest of the series. From people who wanted to buy it. With money. They were in effect slapping the money out of their customers’ hands and telling them to go somewhere else. Those fans had to scratch their itch via piracy.
That’s the customer service coming back again. You can’t just set something up on the web and have it be a quick ploy. You can’t spam links. You can’t chop video and make the user experience crap unless they pay for a full version. You’ll see this idea taken forward by people who make good “lite” apps. They don’t butcher user experience for people using their free version. They add features that are nice, and necessary for what some people want to do, but not integral for base functionality. Certain Twitter apps have done an amazing job of this by adding geotag support, or the ability to save tweets for later or set them on automatic timers. The note taking service Evernote is a favorite example of mine. It is totally conceivable to work in Evernote’s free version. But the bonuses of PDF search and expanded security and storage make their premium service a reasonable proposition. Instead of trying to hamstring the service by placing incredibly restrictive upload limits on users, they made their product so good, and uploading so easy, that users want to use it at an accelerated level which increases demand for storage.
It’s all about adding value. You may have seen a guy who looked a lot like Wil Wheaton but more evil on The Big Bang Theory recently. Apparently you could have seen a lot more of him. He lobbied for permission to take his Flip HD around the set during the filming for some behind the scenes web clips. Approval came four days later, at which point they were already done shooting his part of the episode. He and the online promotions guy had to fight for an embeddable promotional web clip to show before the episode aired. As he put it, that’s the whole point of promotion. You want to get the word out. Preferably before your product comes out. Especially when your working with something time sensitive like a television show. If I hadn’t heard about that show, you’re damn right I would have found it online instead of waiting God knows how long for the DVD to come out or betting on the off chance that I’d catch it on T.V. as a re-run. Continuing with this example, just take a look at Wil Wheaton’s Twitter. He live tweeted the entire episode. That’s the definition of adding value to your content. His stream was full of fun facts and jokes from the set that made his product more enjoyable. It also enhanced his reputation among fans as someone who is accessible and cares about them. That’s never a bad thing.
The general criticism of adding content is that the industry is being forced to increase production costs while still charging the same price they would have in the past. That’s just an excuse from people who don’t want to think. It doesn’t cost anything to live tweet. A Flip camera is a couple hundred bucks. The reason those little DVD documentaries that came on music CD’s a while back didn’t increase sales is because consumers know that the music execs and a lot of the bigger bands involved in those projects were half assing their efforts. It was a scam. A quick hop in. And the internet has a way of seeing right through those.
But how do you add value to a book Thomas? Well, if you look at Scott Sigler’s work, you’ll find that he changes his versions significantly and that he has repeat business as a result. I wasn’t aware of how drastic some of his revisions were but the panelists claimed that he changes who dies in some versions. Podcasts are a great way to keep an author’s voice in his audience’s head as well and drive home the idea that he’s full of ideas and constantly working. Authors in particular run into the problem of getting lost in the mix between projects due to their long incubation periods. Do you have any idea how much content gets cut out of a book? It doesn’t cost anything to post a funny exchange between your characters that didn’t quite fit with your final vision. If you were to make your next book an iPad app instead of a straight format e-book you could update your book with new content or notes from the author at any point through the app store. The question of whether we can add value to a book seems to be based on an assumption that there isn’t any value there in the first place. We need to stop thinking along the lines of “no one in their right mind is going to read or pay for a book” and start thinking about all the people who want to read and want to buy.
Additional interesting ideas
Pablo Defendini asserted that publishing is still largely a business to business industry. When a publisher talks about their customers they’re talking about the professional buyers at Amazon or Borders, not the people reading their books. These companies aren’t talking to their fans and assessing buzz so that they can take that data to the buyers and build a case for a project.
Dana Goodyear talked about the idea of a print book as a sort of sculpture or souvenir for an online experience you’ve had. Especially for collaborative or particularly underground works. I’d have to agree. Even if Bike Snob just picked a few of his favorite posts to publish I’d buy it in a second in order to have a piece of a blog I like so much.
Wil Wheaton really wants there to be one standard publishing format…. Amazon……
Today was a day like any other for a lot of people out “there.” It was, however, an unusual day for me. For one thing, instead of waking up at 7:55 and running outside to move my car in a state of undress, I arose at precisely 7:00 A.M. and avoided the long and water resistant arm of the law by a healthy margin. I actually avoided the citation twice because with so much time on my hands I decided to go put gas in my car so I could actually make it to my job interview and when I got back home I promptly parked it in the exact same spot I’d gotten up to vacate. Then I went about trying to convince these people I could look professional and not only that, but that I probably look professional all the time. As time wears on, the perceived gap between looking a lot like something and being that thing continues to shrink; I’m convinced that pretty soon instead of passing a fireman’s test you’ll just have to show up in your own gear.
To give you an idea of the last time I wore dress shoes, I didn’t recognize the box at first because it was full of shooting targets from when I went to summer camp. I assembled an outfit that I like to think projected, “I’m wearing this sweater because I value unrestricted limb motion” and not, “I don’t have a jacket and I wanted to cover up the fact that I don’t have a belt.” I have no idea what the cut on my forehead I inflicted upon myself while trying to shave said, but, thankfully, they didn’t seem to notice. I’d say there’s some room for improvement with my morning routine but all in all I can do this professional, be-seen-in-public thing.
I’m not going to say where this interview was because A. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to be publicly associated with someone who can’t shave properly and B. I don’t want to increase the odds of them coming to know that I can’t shave properly. The fact that I even had an interview was out of the ordinary for me at this point but the interview itself was actually relatively standard in that, while being interviewed by another man of similar age, Star Wars became a topic of discussion early on. One of the things we talked about was the superior quality of the original versions of episodes IV-VI. Nothing ground breaking there. (I’m pretty sure there are people who have no idea who Greedo is that can tell you Greedo shooting first was a mistake.) As the discussion progressed I had a new insight into why I probably liked them better besides the obvious reasons that they were what I knew first and they were aesthetically consistent throughout.
I recently found the bulk of my Star Wars toys cached away in my brother’s home office and these were probably the finest children’s toys ever produced. The fact that you could tell that they were using models in the films didn’t make it less realitic, it made it more realistic because I actually had all of those space ships in my room! When I think of an X-Wing, I actually think of the behind the scenes footage of the Death Star run where they’re moving the fighters with wire. I don’t want to say that the props used weren’t detailed, because they were, but that’s never been the point with Star Wars fans. For every obsessive that goes out and buys an official piece of merchandise their are dozens more that make their own. Polish has never been the point. This is a fantasy franchise that is, perhaps more than any other, rooted in its fans’ ability to bring about physical manifestations and see it in reality. The more I think about it the more confused I am as to why merchandisers and film makers ignore this aspect of it’s success. I am not a toy collector or fanatic. I don’t buy any real collectibles at all. Not even those vinyl figurines people who like urban art seem to enjoy so much. But I’m pretty sure a common complaint (from children) is that these toys are poor representations of the films’ subjects. It’s probably a relatively alienating process to play with a toy from a more recent movie franchise. Not because the toys are bad, imagination is always going to be inherent in playing with a toy. It’s actually the best part. That aspect let’s you have the fun of putting Han and Chewie in Sherwood Forest, only to be “bat-a-ranged” by Batman. If anything, I’m saying the movies are getting too good.
I haven’t seen Avatar yet but from what I understand this movie is all about polish. It’s supposed to be immersive on a level we haven’t seen yet and apparently Cameron has set his sights on Lucas’ franchise in terms of producing a back story and universe to rival the one present in Star Wars’ literature, games, encyclopedias, and what-nots. But it’ll never happen; because, while Avatar might be more fleshed out with it’s scientifically accurate planet descriptions and it’s professionally created and documented languages, the film was made with the intention of being realistic to an unrealistic degree. It’s hard to say a movie that has brought in over 1.3 1.9 billion dollars worldwide is a failure. Especially considering how close it is to eclipsing Episode IV’s revenues (adjusted for inflation.) A film as financially successful as Avatar will surely have an impact on the industry and will probably always have a certain type of pop culture cache as the first of it’s kind technologically. However, there is no way a fan can take a piece of a movie like Avatar home and, in my mind, that’s going to kill it.
The more I think about it, the more benefits I see to treating a film project like open source software, at least if you’re trying to foster a community surrounding the work. I think about a show like Pure Pwnage which has become wildly successful for a web series (and is making a switch television.) They have done an amazing job monetizing the form. Part of that is due to the fact that they have a relatively uniform audience with a shared, targetable, interest — gaming. Online advertising is really only part of the puzzle, merchandising has got to be at least three of the corner pieces here. In the beginning the characters wore distinctive (sometimes copyright infringing) shirts that were obviously home made. You can buy those shirts. You can wear your FPS Doug shirt and feel like you have a piece of the show. Even if Jeremy isn’t rubbing each shirt on his balls.
Pure Pwnage is also a show that has the spoof factor. It’s actually gotten pretty sophisticated now and has aspects that would be difficult to reproduce but when it started out they were literally walking around with keyboards and using a PSP with a chord hanging out of a pipe to “open” security gates. I’m not saying everything has to be that rudimentary, there are plenty of large scale productions out there that allow people to get the same sense. Indiana Jones had a huge budget and tons of action scenes but what do people love most about Raiders of the Lost Ark? They love a hat, a whip, a bag of sand, and a dude getting chased by a big rock.
And fans go out and make stuff like this.
The fact that this Lego boulder got busted on Mythbusters doesn’t matter, just like it doesn’t matter that I’ve never heard of a boulder booby trap in real life or that the motorcycle scene from The Last Crusade got busted. These films don’t have to be realistic, they just have to make you feel like a real part of something.
A quick search will yield some awesome non literal star wars interpretations…
