chroma

Messed-Up, Dressed-Up, Fucked-Up

Reading Paul Hartnett's interview brougt a smile to my face this Friday afternoon. His thoughts on photographing subcultural movements brought to mind many vivid (and some more blurry) memories of the mayhem and messiness experienced from behind the DJ booth, exploring the underground, late-nite side of life.

What I love about fashion and music is when people are totally fired up, and a bit ‘bonkers’ with it. Really exploding internally and doing something individual externally, going beyond a commercial formula, a safe established pattern.

Here's what he has to say about the internet, and how it's brought an underground, DIY sensibility to everyone:

The Internet has come along and fucked so many people sideways. The music industry is in a tizz, everybody

seems to be online so much of the time. Punk’s DIY ethos is everywhere. People pimp their profiles to a narcissistic extent on myspazz and facebore. There are street-style photographers such as Facecunter (I think that’s his name) who snap at fashion events, but in a really bad way. So cheesy and hap-hap-happy. All very Grazia or Closer, Heatish.

I think it’s great that so many people are taking photographs, even if it with with dinky telephone toys. I love that crap quality, that low-res fuzz.

And to go off on a tangential note here (come on, it's Friday), I love this article comparing MySpace and Facebook (and MySpace to scrapbooking!). And lo and behold, here's Rob Walker at Murketing puzzled by the MySpace aesthetic (and ending up echoing Paul Hartnett):

When I first looked at MySpace, my reaction was: “What a mess. It’s just (visual) noise.” In fact I think I reacted to it much like parents reacted to some of the music I listened to when I was a kid: That it wasn’t music at all, just noise.

Now what’s interesting about that to me is that, from my point of view, it most certainly was music. It was not “noise” in the way they meant, at all. They just didn’t get it. We differed.

And since I first looked at MySpace, I’ve wondered if something analogous isn’t going on. It looks like visual noise to me, but maybe I just don’t get it. The people who made MySpace a hit originally were largely members of a generation that I’m not in. Maybe MySpace spoke to them in a graphic/visual language that not only made sense to them, but pleases them — the same way the Ramones or the Clash pleased me, but agitated my parents.

More thoughts on Ugly.

Baffled by Beacon

A lot of people have articulated the problems with Facebook Beacon far better than I could ever hope to. But I guess there a few things that jump out at me regarding this fiasco:

1. How the (seemingly) simple usability issue of opt-in vs. opt-out lies at the heart of this mess. Most people seem to agree that if Facebook had simply made Beacon an opt-in thing, there wouldn't have been as much, or any, outcry about the program.

2. The fact that it looks like the braintrust at Facebook was probably confident that most people would not care/know enough about the whole thing to do much about it. This is pretty cynical, but I think perfectly valid. And what does this say about Facebook, and the way they value, respect and care about the users?

3. Finally, the realization that unlike, say, Google, who has built a very strong brand around the "Do No Evil" mantra, there really IS no Facebook brand. There is a huge community of Facebook users, spending a lot of time at the site daily, but there is no brand at the centre.

(update: I forgot one other small thing after I posted this)

4. Brands aren't the same as people, and they're definitely not the same thing as "friends". Again, others have written about this, so I won't repeat those arguments here, but the sheer stupidity of these kinds of statements from Facebook truly do baffle me:

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages.

 

As long as Facebook continues to arrogantly mistake and equate their platform and membership numbers with a brand, they'll continue to trudge down the wrong path. Do you really think that members won't dump Facebook if they keep doing stuff like this? Why is Facebook different than other community sites that have fallen out of favour?

They might find a way to eventually monetize what they do, but this will continue to be different than building a brand, or, indeed, systematically ruining it before they even begin to reinforce it's foundation (which wil be built on trust, transparency and respect for users).

(image by the ever-wonderful)

Mister Splashy

I love this. Greenpeace has been running a Whale Naming poll. In their words, 

More than 11,000 possible whale names were submitted but we are now down to the last 30 possible whale names...which ones will be given to the wonderful humpback whales currently travelling on the Great Whale Trail?

Here's a list of some of the wonderful names, along with a brief description of their rich heritage and lofty meaning.

Of course, they had to sneak one fun one in there, "Mister Splashy Pants". Excellent!
I don't know about you, but I would find it hard to vote against "Mister Splashy Pants", in any poll. Apparently, a lot of people agree. Here are the results thus far. To me they pretty much sum up the internet.

Back to Blogging

Thanks to everyone that chipped in and abstained from blogging yesterday in honour of Blog Nothing Day.

Jason has just been interviewed by Gavin over at Marketing Profs about the event, and he goes into a little bit more detail about what this whole thing was about. (Don't have the link to the full interview yet, will post it when I get it, or Gavin can leave it in the comments?).

It may seem like an unlikely or even undeserving cause for unpaid bloggers to rally behind
but there was one key issue that I believe struck a chord with our
community: compensation for works distributed digitally either by DVD
or Internet downloads.

Now, back to blogging about, well, pretty much nothing!

Iro

You know, I was just thinking about the fact that it was hard to keep up with where we stood with respect to irony in our culture, when this nugget from OIA popped up.
Thanks guys!

How We Met

How cute!

Blog Nothing Day

The Verve has cooked up a great idea. In support of the WGA Writer's Strike, he has declared November the 26th "Blog Nothing Day".

I'm joining the struggle, hope more people chip in with support.

Russell's Uncanny Valley

If there was somewhere to nominate "Post of the Year" or something, I'd surely offer up Russell's latest Campaign article. It's a perfectly refreshing reminder that we have to be a lot more rigorous and thoughtful in our overzealous pursuit of the Holy Grail of advertising: perfectly targeted, relevant online advertising.

I was trying to say something along the lines in my "Social Ads are going to Suck" post, but Russell does a much better job of getting why they will suck!

Read the whole thing, but I'll take the liberty of quoting this here:

advertising will enter its own Uncanny Valley in the next few years and I'd like us to be prepared. The online advertising industry took a step closer to its Holy Grail last week with the introduction of various advertising initiatives on Facebook, MySpace and across other social networks. These promised much better targeting than has ever been possible before, massively increased relevance; advertising that's so in tune with its audience that it ceases to be advertising and becomes simple, useful information. Hmm. Sort of. There's certainly better targeting, or at least different ways of targeting, but, as yet, no-one's going to feel like they're reading something specially designed for them. It seems like we're about to enter a period where our digital lives will be full of the online equivalents of those messages you find on your television when you check into a hotel; always welcoming someone who's got a name a bit like yours. Never actually your name. And you wish they just hadn't bothered, you wish they'd just issued a general, warm welcome and not tried to connect at a level they just didn't really feel (because if they'd have really felt it they'd have made sure they'd have gotten your name right.)

More here.

Image is found at ffffound, and it's from a lovely collection of stylized Spam subject lines.

Change in all things is good

Yesterday was my last day at Mediaedge. (The picture above depicts how I imagined my exit would be, but in truth it was far less dramatic).

I was there for a year and a few months, and decided it was time to move on to a new challenge and change of scenery. On Monday I'm starting a new planning gig at TBWA. Hooray!

I'm really excited about the new job, even though it was a bit sad to leave yesterday, and of course that comes down to leaving people you enjoy working with. So a quick shout out:

I'll very much miss The Verve, who was my first hire at Mediaedge. I heard someone say once that if you want to be successful you should always hire people smarter than you. So I hired Jason. I don't know if made me more successful, but I sure enjoyed working and hanging out with him, and I'll miss him a lot. I'm hoping that he keeps sending a few ideas up the flagpole and see who salutes.

And everyone should be so lucky to have a boss like Bruce Neve. I learned a lot working with him, and it was great to keep trying to make change happen, even if it puts others out of their comfort zone. I'm sure our paths will cross in the future.

But there'll be little time to reminisce, Monday it's a fresh start, so here we go, here we go, here we go.

(image found on ffffound)

Happy 20th, SP1200

My all-time favourite piece of studio equipment is, by far, the EMU SP-1200, It's a low-res 12-bit, nasty sampling drum machine. Because of limited sample time (only 10 seconds), it forces producers to be as economical and creative as possible. Launched in 1987, it quickly became the definitive sound of hip-hop during the late 80's and much of the 90's. Of course, it's pretty much obsolete by now as far as memory and technology goes, but still- the sound of the SP1200 cannot be beat.

Here's a video of the beast at the heart of Ski Beatz's studio, with appropriately melodramatic intro music:

 All of my favourite hip-hop producers used this and a lot of New York house DJs and producers (like Kenny Dope and Todd Terry) relied on the SP-1200 for dirty, crunchy beats. As budding producers, my brother Terry and I just had to have one. We got ours about 12 years ago, and to this day it's impossible to make drums sound as good as they do on the 1200. Gritty sounds and perfect swing, I could hit those pads for hours :)

I actually just found out this year is the 20th year anniversary of the SP1200, which kind of amazes me. I can't believe it's been so long.

Happy Anniversary beloved SP.