Worth an explore…it’s a bit of collaborative performance art. Dares for cash. Digitally documented contemplation. All of this with a bit of whimsy thrown in…
Kinda like this:
If you give me $250 I will buy you a PO Box in New York for a whole year. I will mail you the key. Throughout the year I will mail letters and things to the PO Box. I am hoping that you don’t live in New York, and that where ever you are in the world you will know that there is a small PO Box in New York amassing with little things for you. You will come to New York before the year is up and collect the little pile. Since PO Boxes are small, it will be a small collection, so I will only mail things when I feel there is something special to send.
Nigel Maister has a PO Box at Cooper Station in New York until 2/28/09
Jessica Shade has a PO Box at Grand Central Station in New York until 2/28/09
Bernice McDonnell has a PO Box at the Knickerbocker Station until (they didn’t give me an expiration date - I assume one year from 3-14-0
Marloes Lasker has a PO Box at the Knickerbocker Station until (they didn’t give me an expiration date - I assume one year from 3-14-0
Just teriffic! 10 Steps to Building Your Personal Brand via blogging, using nationally-recognized fashion blog Omiru: Style for All (www.omiru.com) as a case study. Omiru has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Lucky Magazine, and Real Simple Magazine.
Interesting people. A theatre of ideas. An evening of interestingness.
Six months after our first event, the Interesting South team have found more fascinating people and have asked them to speak about something they care about. We want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, music, jokes and whatever.
You’ll be happy to know we picked the Belvoir Theatre as we’re striving to keep the kind of atmosphere we had in November. Something intimate enough that you can see the whites of the speakers’ eyes so it feels more like a chat than a lecture, but with comfier seats.
This time we’ll feed and water you. All ticket proceeds are invested into the night.
We into reducing paper so we’re going to try send you a mobile bar code with will serve as your ticket. This will be sent 2-3 days after your purchase. If you don’t receive it, we’ll have your name on our door list.
Here’s how they describe it: The idea is simple: take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days.
Simple, but not at all easy. Like millions of others before you, you’ll be shocked at just how difficult - yet also how life-changing - a week spent unplugged can really be.
Mmm… sounds tough, but worth the experiment. Maybe next week…..
press people consider me an outlet to push their marketing messages. It upsets me that people in the world can look at me and only see ways that they can scavenge some limited advantage through which to push their agendas. They see my personal expression, my unadulterated opinion and they think they can use it as a host for their parasitic bullshit.
I couldn’t agree more with these heartfelt manifestos.
My experiences with kind of behavior have left behind a slightly different flavour. I’m not a died in the wool opponent to people making money out of their content and am a staunch believer in the capitalist imperative…
But it needs to be the decision of the content creator:
Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller author Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. We Tell Stories begins with Charles Cumming’s Google Maps adventure. ‘He was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time’. Now you can follow his adventures across the nation and across the world, step by step.
But somewhere on the internet is a seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl called Alice. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape Alice’s journey and help her on her way. These clues will appear online and in the real world and will drive readers to the other six stories where they will have the chance to win prizes, including The Penguin Complete Classics Library.
The gaming community has been awaiting the first project from SixtoStart and the next digital publishing initiative from Penguin whose last project, the wikinovel (http://amillionpenguins.com) generated 85,000 unique visitors in five weeks, arriving at a rate of 10 per second at one point.
New York must be a small town- I keep running into Mike Arauz, which reminded me that I needed to share this piece promoting a new book by Charles Leadbeater, ‘We Think’ which says it explores the potential of the latest developments of the internet.
For me one of the most interesting questions posed is: How do we earn a living when everyone is freely sharing their ideas? In the was you were what you owned. Now you are what you share.
One of my favourite quotes about our current gift economy is: ‘the more information your organization has outside of it’s firewall the stronger you become”
Information is particularly suited to gift economics, as information can be copied and transmitted at practically no cost. It can be treated as a nonrival good: when you share information, you do not deprive yourself of the information (although you may deprive yourself of certain revenues that could be gained in the market economy from the intellectual property rights).
Traditional scientific research is an information gift economy. Scientists produce research papers and give them away through journals and conferences. Other scientists freely refer to such papers. The more citations a scientist has, the more prestige and respect he or she has, which can attract funding and positions. All scientists therefore benefit from the increased pool of knowledge.
You see when everyone is giving away their ideas- how can your client tell tell when your idea is a good one? What can communicate that you might have the right idea, the right approach- that’s where authority and reputation comes in. It proves that you have been able to have ideas worth sharing and prompted valuable conversations. So it’s economically worthwhile to build this reputation.
The ideas you share can only be a contemporary reflection (often campaigns are planned more than six months in advance)- and so relatively useless in the rapidly changing environment in which we are trying to create brand experiences. And I’d like to think that the experiences that we make for brands, because they are designed to differentiate, are not replicable by anyone else anyway after the fact.
Our ideas will earn us a living when they are consultative, forward facing, built on strategic insights and anthropological rigour. We need to share our ideas so that the work we do can stand out from the crowd and so we can create fascinating and delightful experiences in the future.
Joshua Allen Harris’s “Air Zoo” installation made on the streets of New York by tying plastic bags to the subways vents. More sidewalk subway creatures here.
In a town where ( as the lovely and clever Kristen would say) Girl Guides get thrown in jail for selling cookies on the street without a license, the squirrels are thumbing their very cute noses at the law.
I say: nice one, furry tailed champions of subversion. That’s the spirit.
It’s a beautiful Spring afternoon in New York and Madison Square Park is full of people sitting at small green metal tables enjoying the sun. They’re chatting with friends, checking each other out and eating, cooling their heels after an hour wait in line to be served at the Shake Shack. Check out the current waiting time on their web camera .
Why? Why would you wait that long? Because they’re the best frickin’ hamburgers you’ve ever eaten and the shakes would impress Vincent from Pulp Fiction.
Ever reflected how you’d do things differently if you were in charge? How you’d put your money where your mouth is on things like climate change if you were the one dishing out the taxpayer’s dollars? Would you, like the previous Government did, subsidise the polluting fossil fuel industries at 28 times the amount of renewable energies?
Now you have a chance to tell the Treasurer just how you’d like to even the ledger - using Get Up’s ’Australia’s Biscuit Budget’ tool, before he sits down to review the $9 billion of fossil fuel subsidies he’s inherited: click here
I love this video of a mash up of Twitter and Flickr of reader created Six Word memoirs.
We’re planning on tasking all of the attendees at Interesting South, instead of wearing a name tag, to share a six word biography. Interesting? Challenging? Silly? We hope so.
Madison Avenue Journal has invited me to Ad:Tech San Francisco April 15th to 17th, 2008- and I’m looking forward to getting pretty inspired as the theme of the conference is : “brand strategy and the expanding world of digital marketing”
Jonah Bloom over at Ad Age invited the the Power 150 bloggers to ponder:
“I see a lot of chatter on the Power 150 about different digital technologies, websites and web applications, but which single technology, site or application do you think is most deserving of marketers’ attention in 2008 and why?”
and published the results in the article Crystal Ball 2.0. The responses are a trend map of the latest and greatest bits and pieces of technology.
And here is where I’ll stick my neck out: great digital marketing is not about a single piece of technology. It will never be delivered by one site. It cannot be experienced through one application:
Great brand strategy is delivered by utilizing the world of digital marketing opportunities.
Digital marketing opportunities naturally articulate from great brand strategy.
I’d have to say that both great band strategy and brilliant digital marketing are fed by insight and the online landscape is providing amazing opportunities to listen and learn and grow stronger relationships as a result.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
“The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”
“Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”
Of UFOs: “They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth.”
“Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy.”
So that’s what two years of blogging feels like…..Happy Birthday to Me!
Last year I said “The Hundred Acre Wood grows for me every day- it’s my thinking spot and helps me demystify Heffalumps and Woozles”.
This year has been one that has let me meet Snuffelupagai (thats what I think the plural should be of Mr Snuffelupagus) . Not imaginary friends, even though most people can’t see them, real friends and I’ve had real adventures. Some to share and to which you’re all invited to participate :
Now this is insight: Whether you call it Va-jayjay, Map of Tassie or even Hilary Muff, one thing’s for sure… we love naming them. In fact, 94% of Australian women use another name for their vagina, (although 91% are not so keen on men using nicknames).
More about ultimate care down there on the Kotex U site.
