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This postcard from PostSecret really made me feel a little better.
It reads:
You need not find a cure for everything that makes you weak…
For years, I tried to find a cure for my low self-esteem until I realized that I didn’t need to feel good about myself in order to be a success. Sure, I’m weaker because I don’t have a good self-esteem, but I’m able to survive without it. And that’s what’s important.
Update 02-08-10: According to Shannon in the comments, this line is from the song, Against the Grain by City and Colour.
PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.
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Mike’s aunt, Gini, gave us a matching t-shirt for Mini and Zadi. They love them!
Gini and Mike’s cousin, Emily, run Molly McB & Company. They sell doggie t-shirts and a bunch of other stuff.
It was hard to get them to sit still for the photos, but they looked so adorable in matching t-shirts!
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I love this photo of Stacey and I.
That day, Stacey and I had put on a parade on our street. We dressed up Stacey in her swimming suit, put the Fun Fountain hat on her head, a veil over the clown hat, and clown makeup on her face. Then I pushed her up and down the street in the wheel barrow. I took a photo of her in the wheelbarrow, but I don’t have a copy of that picture. It must be in Stacey’s book.
That was such a fun day in my memory. It was one of those days when the weather was nice, there was no school or parents at home and we could basically do whatever we wanted.
Plus, Stacey looks super cute in this photo…
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I posted this on CodeAway, but I thought I’d post it here as well. A special thank you goes out to Roland Smith for snapping photos of the Blogger/Geek Dinner last month.
Our Geek Dinner next month is planned right after PodCampSLC. so we can all go to Fazoli’s after an awesome day of podcasting greatness!!
Thanks for taking pics, Roland!
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Dean McCall, Founder, IdeaGin. Podcastready
Stephen Newman, CES, Mouth Watering Media
Todd Morrey, Mosso: The Rackspace Cloud
Wes Wilson, Presidentof IncSpring
Moderator: Chris Tolles, CEO & Co-founder, Topix
Chris Tolles:
Two problems with audience: how do you get them and what do you do with them when they suck.
Monetization: Different models and who is doing it right?
Todd Morrey: Mosso helps managing content.
Chris Tolles: How are we going to get paid? Who are doing the best job of monetization?
Wes Wilson: YouTube, Facebook
Todd Morrey: Twitter is NOT doing a good job. The places that create an auction that allows the best content to bubble up to the top.
Stephen Newman: I think eBay is a great example of an organization that has been profitable. I think of user generated content with a broad definition. Look at reality television, now making television is more economical because of user generated content. We need to think of it in broader terms.
Dean McCall: LinkedIn and Threadless They made a place for designers to upload their art and a way for people to buy the designs.
Chris Tolles: Do you pull the content in, or do you create it? What is the fairness of earning money off the backs of your users?
Wes Wilson: When you’re not paying for the service, it is understood that you will make money off them.
Todd Morrey: You provide a way to upload their stuff.
Stephen Newman: There is more value than just money. If you give people a way to become part of the community, then they get something from your site.
Chris Tolles: What if you decide to take your site offline?
Todd Morrey: We don’t want to get into the business of policing. Make sure you document your policies, because that gives you a legal backbone.
Chris Tolles: Users suck. Skittles website problem.
Dean McCall: I think all my users are great. You can tell a Threadless shirt because there is a mob mentality. Digg has the same problem.
Chris Tolles: How do I keep the riff raff from destroying my site?
Wes Wilson: With any UG site, there will be people who try to hurt it. You have to trust your users to police it for you. I’m against mob rule.
Wes Wilson: The tone that you set is the way your people will react. With content that people care about, you need to set it up with ground rules.
Todd Morrey: It’s important to try to get the better content in front of more eyes instead of being the first poster.
Chris Tolles: SlashDot and their Karma system can help. There is a heirarchal system. Transparency can help with that. The MORE transparent you are, the harder it is to game the system. No one out there is flaw-free. No one has been able to keep everything off there at all times. Craigslist is the best for having a small number of people who flag things.
Wes Wilson: Your community will be vocal about telling you what needs to be removed.
Todd Morrey: There are MANY ways to reward people. The have to get something of value out of the experience to get them to participate. The ratio of those that participate to those that just come to read is small.
Jemina at The Guardian: User Generated Content is an ugly word, but we all know what it means, so we’re stuck with it.
Todd Morrey: User Generated Content takes some of the humanity out of what we do.
Dean McCall: How to get people to your site? Good old fashioned PR work like with Twitter, Digg.
Chris Tolles: It’s three or four years for you to start yearning money. No one is making a whole lot of money in User Generated Content right now.
Dean McCall: I still think we are early in the industry of the User Generated Content market.
Stephen Newman: I sat in this room a year ago and Twitter was around, but not as cool as it was last year. There is still growth. We’re still in the just beginning.
Todd Morrey: I find that the content gets better the more focused the community is. I want the micro-communities to develop so we can see what is coming.
Wes Wilson: Eventually we’ll have all our niche sites to go to.
Dean McCall: Blog Catalog and Bloggers Unite! Allows bloggers to unite about a cause. Rally around a cause is an effective way to get people to care.
Chris Tolles: The most effective example was the Obama campaign. If you can get elected with this stuff, it must be good.
Steve Johnson, outside.in
The news is called Old Growth Media. Based on The Invention of Air. Culture is an ecosystem.
I did something that I NEVER do, but I wrote a speech. I’ll probably post it on: steven berlin johnson.com
I used to go to the bookstore religiously during my college years. I was orbiting the bookstore looking for the latest issue of MacWorld. New issues arrived at the third week of every month. College Hill Bookstore got them first. This was obsessive behaviour.
We need to be reminded of what life was like before the web.
If you wanted to find out news about the Mac, you needed to get a MacWorld magazine. Even then, you were getting the news a month late.
In the early Nineties, MacWeek would upload its articles once a week on Compuserve.
1993, Wired Magazine launched.
Then the Web arrived and he was reading a site called Macintosh. There were tech critics on Salon. Even then, Apple announced their own website.
There is FAR more information available and the lag is only seconds. There is so much complexity that we are in an ecosystem.
In 1987, the Mac news ecosystem was a desert. Now, it’s a thriving rain forest.
We need to look at the future of NEWS itself.
Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and go to Iraq?
Technology news on the web is the old growth forest of the web.
Most of what we care about in our lives is the long tail. We never expected the newspapers to cover a local deli closing. They can’t because of the economics of it. Blogs CAN.
We will go through the same revolution as the tech and politic bloggers do for local news.
The Old Growth Ecosystem: There is going to be MORE news not less. Do what you do best and link to the rest.
It is FAR more complicated to navigate this world. There is more noise now. Can we expect the general public to navigate this new ecosystem?
Maybe the newspapers will become the new aggregators of QUALITY news. Their online audiences have grown. They are MORE relevant now. Their motto should be “All the news that’s fit to link.”
DIY City: Public information apps and aggregation.
Slide of how the ecosystem of the news will look it in the future.
Will this new system be perfect? No. Will it introduce more noise? Probably, but it will be better on whole than the paradigm that we’ve depended on the last century.
The emerging ecosystem is already around us. Many of us are already living in the old growth forest. It’s up to us to remind them that.
There are different writing styles for the web versus the print. Will that mean the death of high brow writing? The culture isn’t getting shorter or longer, it’s both. This is an ECOSYSTEM! Both species work together. You will see a lot of short form writing, but there is also lots of room for longer form writing as well.
Look up The School of Everything.
There is a lot of growing pains to be making these changes, but there is a lot of promise in it as well.
The ad model will move from a centralized model to a more network.
There are people who think that filters will get so good that you’ll only see the news that you want and you’ll never see anything random anymore. What I see, I get from the web. For me, a good one is Boing Boing. Randomness is what the web has always been about. If you WANT to be surprised, then the web will be the best for you. It may be that the people don’t WANT to be surprised. Newspapers used to force people to be surprised. I think people DO want to be surprised.
Moderator: danah boyd Researcher, Microsoft Research
Judith Donath MIT Media Laboratory
Alice Marwick PhD Candidate, New York University
Siva Vaidhyanathan Assoc Professor, University of Virginia
danah boyd:
It’s great to do a panel on privacy as you’re getting flashed with cameras.
We have different concepts of what we believe is privacy. We need to have a conversation between what academics are doing and what businesses are doing. Privacy is not a static concept. There are broader terms with private and
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
Writing a book called The Googlization of Everything. There are many transactions that happen between us and Google. Privacy is something that gets discussed quite a bit. Two annoying assumptions.
Privacy is NOT the opposite of publicity. Just because we put aspects of our lives on our sites, it doesn’t mean that we are not concerned with what we DON’T share. Just because you share, doesn’t mean you lose your right to privacy.
Privacy is NOT a substance that can be measured or bartered away. It assumes that people can break off a little bit of privacy and give it away. Privacy is NOT a substance. It means MANY more things in various contexts. It’s a bad word for what we mean because we don’t have a better word for what we mean.
Alice Marwick:
Dissertation of the effect of social media on social status. There is a positive value to publicness. There is a value to participating in conversations. Twitter is a series of conversations that add value when you participate. All that information can be aggregated that couldn’t before and it creates profiles that could be very valuable.
Judith Donath:
Teach at MIT Media Lab. How can we make visualization of ourselves based on our online persona. Online, history is the equivalent of the body. By creating this body, that brings the notion of control. The idea of private is always in opposition to public. This opens up a HUGE number of questions regarding privacy. Biggest issues: It’s always hard to know how others see you. When you’re in a restaurant, you can overhear conversations, but the social norms say that you ignore them and pretend that you can’t hear them. You don’t butt into their conversation. We need to develop the technologies to give ourselves a digital “mirror” of ourselves. We can see what kind of trails that we’ve left behind.
danah boyd:
What does it mean that we have to do with scale? We’re seeing a scale of publicity that we’ve never seen before. It seems like the scale of privacy is going in the opposite direction.
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
The biggest change is not purely economical. It has more a shift in political views. There are SO many rewards for people who can gather our preferences. They also want to target us in the aggregate. There is also a steady erosion or comfort level in privacy. Between 1973 to 1976, people were very worried about their right of privacy. They wanted to protect our privacy against the state. Most of those protections were undermined by the Patriot Act. Since the 70’s we’ve taken this privacy for granted. We need to be worried about businesses that vacuum up our information can sell it to other businesses or even the government.
Judith Donath:
It should be easier for people to see what sort of information people are leaving behind. The privacy that people are trading is very abstract to them. You should be able to see that in person.Just like you take care of how you dress, you should be able to see your online “body.” We need data self-awareness.
It’s very hard to have a real historical perspective of what is normal. Historically, people who lived in smaller villages had almost NO privacy at all. If you leave technology aside, then we have MUCH more privacy than we had before, but we were isolated society. This big privacy is a RECENT occurrence. Now, everything has a RECORD of what has happened.
danah boyd:
Most of her students felt like their homes were NOT a private place. They actually felt like the Internet felt MORE private because they had more control.
Alice Marwick:
Context is the KEY of what we need to be talking about in regards to privacy. If you tell your doctor, you assume there is privacy. The norms that govern each space are what we expect. Technologies are embedded into these larger systems, but technology can make things seep into different contexts.
We should have access to our Choice Point profiles. Is the burden on the individual or on the companies. The default should be that people shouldn’t share information.
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
These days, personal information is a form of currency. Shouldn’t I have some stake in the currency that I’m creating? I do expect to at least be aware of the extent of which my information has been used and abused. The tech elite are adept at managing our online personas. We have to worry about those who are incapable or unaware of how to manage their online personas. We need to publicly design a series of norms, laws and tech to give NORMAL people some measure of control.
Judith Donath:
The things that you put online can be taken out of context not only now, but twenty years from now. We are living in a world in which EVERYTHING is moving out of context. There is so much data about so many people in so many ways that it is FORCING tolerance. As much as we are worried about privacy, we should also celebrate. We are getting a large public space where the norms are very broad.
It’s useful to separate Large Scale Institutional Control from the sphere of privacy. The other scale is the privacy around personal presentation of self. There are a lot of ways that we control our social face. You wouldn’t brag about your vacation to a financially struggling friend.
danah boyd:
Privacy is currency is a social sense as well. How do we negotiate the idea that sometimes this currency is to our advantage. How do we deal with these contexts?
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
Teach a class called Privacy and Surveillance. He assigns them to read Jane Jacobs. People walking their dog and looking after each other’s children can make people be better to each other. There is a certain level of surveillance that we would want to invite into our lives. You share certain things with your neighbor because there is a benefit to it. When I trade with Amazon, the only reciprocity is that I can choose another vendor. There is NO reciprocity with the State. These interactions can be very healthy, but it’s really hard to distill into a bumper sticker. Reciprocity NOW is just not going to sell.
Alice Marwick:
The social face that you have on LinkedIn is DIFFERENT than the face you have on Facebook.
danah boyd:
There are social situations where reciprocity is not true is celebrity. We can know a lot about celebrities without them knowing about us. We have a similar situation with people who we follow who don’t follow us.
Alice Marwick:
The relationships that you FEEL that you have with celebrities is something that she studies. Your audience is ALWAYS your audience. There is always an unequal relationship there. This idea has trickled down to all levels, even if you have a blog with only six readers. This culture of publicity has come to many more people.
Judith Donath:
How do you have a large society that decides what the norms are. You have a society of millions of people who can’t decide on their norms with millions of people. Fame is the flip-side of privacy. What is the value of the attention that is paid to us? What are the economics of the privacy that you are giving up? How much do you value the attention that people pay attention to you?:
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
There is no zero sum between privacy. We should not assume that we give up the right to protect our own diginity when we become famous. It’s like fame make people less of a person to us. Any one of us can ridicule and harm any other of us with a small device in our pocket.
danah boyd:
Young people negotiate privacy differently with different people. They will trick the system because they want their own privacy. They will lie about the year of their birth, but they will always give the accurate birth date because they want their friends to wish them a happy birthday.
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
The contract of privacy with the companies online is a one-way and you can’t change it. The Terms of Service are so vague and opaque. They have tried to make them clear, but it’s not perfect.
Judith Donath:
What does it look like if you aggregate ALL the data about you online? It’s a beautiful portrait of you, but it’s not something that you’ve been able to see or look at.
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
These big firms can change their Terms of Service overnight. They don’t give you a chance to opt out.
Alex Hillman co-founder, Indy Hall
Coworking: A place to work and share ideas. It’s nice to have an office so there is separation between work and home. Community power and shared office space. It’s slightly different to everyone else.
Brad Newberg was working out of his home, so he got some people together to work together. Started a Google Group for Coworking. He open sourced the idea.
Jelly communities and coworking. Jelly was started in NY. I have flexibility where I work, but I like working with other people. Jelly beans, multi-colored group all together. Ad hoc get togethers. The natural pre-cursor to a formal coworking space.
One of the reasons that coworking works is the notion of a clubhouse. If you move it around, then people become people of habit.
The Google Group is the best resource for this community.
When I’m coworking, I do kind of lose productivity. You have to let the land sit fallow for a while, coworking is like that.
There are distractions. Productivity can drop. It’s a product of how often you deal with it. At home you deal with distractions as well (wash dishes, walk the dog, etc.). A good coworking space may distract you, but they are a sub-channel of productivity. It has more value to your work day than taking the dog out to walk the dog.
The traditional model is the 9-5 with micro-managed time. A lot of people realized that there are a lot of downsides to working at home. Cowork provides a venue that is somewhere between home and the office. You need to create an office environment that feels like a home.
ROWE: Results Oriented Work Environment
Accelerating Serendipity is the other benefit of coworking.
Coworking is about building authentic relationships. Whether you do that at the desk, at the dartboard or at the Wii is a method of building those relationships.
Collaborate or DIE.
We are creating a sustainable professional community.
This is a movement that is our only choice in the business community. Otherwise, we’ll end up like GM, or the banks.
Books: The Starfish and the Spider (decentralized organizations), Cluetrain Manifesto
Money: Two paths
Develop the space and work with communities and bring in people.
Gangplank in Phoenix, AZ runs on the Sugardaddy Model: Having access to really smart people never hurts. We’ve been able to hire people from this. We are able to get jobs from it.
Are there any templates for getting a coworking place started? All of the templates are on the Wiki… somewhere… wiki.coworking.info
How do you talk about this without freaking people out? People feel like we’re a bunch of commies.
Not everyone who is doing this, not everyone is succeeding. Alot of them are struggling.
Meeting other smart people helps you grow professionally.
Great incubator idea that distributes software online and distributes the money to each person who worked on the project at a pre-determined ratio.
Look for things that are going to happen anyway and try to make them happen easier and faster.
Once a coworking company “graduates” they stay in the community to be alumnis to be mentors to the younger generation.
Real estate companies have a ton of unused space. Contact the city revitalization people. Corporations with unused space have unused space. Security and culture are the two biggest challenges with these situations.
How do you structure your business? LLC is an agility issue. NonProfits are SLOW. We want to effect change quickly. Benevolent dictatorship. It provides us with the ability to make decisions.
Eventually, the idea of big companies having big spaces will be lost.
Where is coworking going? The connectivity makes us a more self-aware universe. I can travel to any city in the world and know someone who is there.
SXSWi 2009: Opening Remarks: Tony Hsieh
The slides were amazing for this speech. You can see them all here:
He was running a pizza joint. There was a guy called Alfred who ate a large pizza every day. A few hours later, he would buy another large pizza. He was taking them upstairs and selling them by the slice.
1994-1995 Worked at pizza business
1995- Microsoft Link Exchange He didn’t pay attention to corporate culture.
He joined Zappos full time. They sell clothing, cosmetics and even housewares. They want it to be about the best customer service.
They look to Virgin for inspiration. Zappos is about being the best customer service.
It means a lot to him to be recognized as a great place to work.
They spend their marketing dollars on customer service. The bulk of their business is from repeat customers.
The telephone is the best branding item that you can use. As low tech as it is.
Free shipping both ways. Order both and send back the one that doesn’t fit.
It’s not just about the policies. We decided that we were only going to show items on their website that they physically have in the warehouse.
We want to be about customer service, NOT shoes. Gave up 25% of their revenue to be true to customer service.
Repeat loyal customers get surprise upgrade to overnight shipping. Creates a WOW experience. Isn’t that expensive? Yes! It’s part of our marketing dollars. Everything that improves the customer experience is a marketing expense.We aren’t trying to maximize EVERY transaction, we’re trying to build relationships with their customers that last a lifetime.
Customer Service: No call times, no scripts. Spend as much time as you think is necessary to WOW the customer.
The NUMBER ONE priority is company culture. Great customer service will happen on its own when you get the company culture right.
They will also fire someone just because they don’t fit in the company culture.
Training is also REALLY important to them. Exact same training as the call reps go through. Go on the phone for two weeks. Then you do warehouse for a week, even if you’re hired to be a lawyer.
They pay people $2000 to quit while they are in training. Only 1% of the people have taking the offer. The biggest benefit is from the people who DID NOT take the offer. They are MORE committed to the company when they don’t take the offer.
Culture Book. They put it out once a year. Ask all the employees to write a couple of paragraphs about what it means to work at Zappos. Twitter has helped the company culture. They rolled it out to the entire company. They have a Twitter class as part of the training.
Twitter.Zappos.com You can see all the tweets from the employees.
Culture really drives your brand. The brand may lag the culture, but sooner or later, it will catch up. Companies are becoming more transparent whether they like it or not. Culture and brand are the same thing.
A woman order a wallet and sent it back with the free return shipping. She left $150 in the wallet. She received a letter from the warehouse worker returning the $150 in the wallet. Thanks for shopping at Zappos. Our warehouse workers don’t make a lot of money. They could have kept the money and no one would have known. This situation took care of itself because their entire brand is about customer service.
They want to own the 3 C’s Clothing, Customer Service, Culture
Zappos is happiness in a box.
Our core values are commitable. We hire and fire based on these.
Be humble is the one that trip people up the most.
Create fun and a little weirdness. How weird are you? People decorate their cubicles. It’s up to them.
How lucky are you? Luck is more about being able to see situations as more than they are.
It doesn’t matter what your core values are as long as you are committed to them.
Figure out your core values as soon as possible. Even if you’re just one or two people.
We believe so strongly in our culture, we’re not scared of what our employees will say.
Be committed to transparency.
Whatever you’re thinking, think bigger. Chase the vision, not the money. The money will follow.
There’s a big difference between motivation and inspiration.
Be interested rather than trying to be interesting.
The payoff is two or three years down the line when you concentrate on company culture.
No matter what you’re experiencing now, it’s really all just part of the path where you’re supposed to be.
Peak by Chip Conely Read it
Research Happiness
Pizza story: Sketchers party At night we went out drinking at a bar. Then we went to the second bar. We went to the third bar… We ended up at someone’s hotel room. They wanted a pepperoni pizza. I used to make pizza when I was in college. They called Zappos and put it on speaker phone. I’m in Santa Monica and I want a pepperoni pizza. The rep said we sell shoes, not pizza, yet… The rep put her on hold and gave her a list of five closest places in Santa Monica that are still serving pizza. If you get the culture right, then your brand happen naturally.
Pam Mandel Writer, Nerd’s Eye View
Sheila Scarborough Blogger, BootsnAll Travel Network
Pam Mandel:
Super nervous, so if I run out to throw up, please excuse me.
Wrote some travel guides. Has been blogging about travel for almost ten years.
Sheila Scarborough:
She also likes to write about drag racing. Her mom made sure that they went to all the local sites.
Pam Mandel:
At Blogher, I look at hundreds of travel blogs. I’ve been doing this for three years now. What makes a blog that’s worth your time to read. This is actually true of any type of blog.
I have to be able to read the text. Don’t use tiny fonts or use strange colors on black background. I have to be able to read it. You might be brilliant and I might never see it. I hate the sidebar chiclets. I don’t want flashy things. Don’t clutter your blog with buttons, links or awards. Everything on the sidebar should be valuable to your reader.
I don’t want to read your itinerary. I want the details of what you saw there. What did the waiter smell like? Draw a picture of the place. Describe the experience. I don’t want a list.
I want to know what you look like. Sometimes I’m surprised by what the people look like. It helps to give a more complete picture of the person.
I want to see a few pictures. They are fun to look at.
I never look at LiveJournal or MySpace. If you’re on one of those networks, then they are invisible to Google. They are stand alone blogs that are more findable on the search engines.
Negativity. When you have a bad travel experience, write about it very carefully. I want to hear about the specific story of how a local ripped you off, but I don’t want to hear generalizations. I want detailed stories. I don’t want any imperialism. No talking about weird food without examples.
Introspection drives me crazy. I don’t care about the internal experience. Tell me about WHERE you are. Focus.
Details Details Details There are stick in my head when I travel. I love to read about the little things.
Take me with you. I want to go! I love the idea of feeling like you’re on the adventure with them. That is the ultimate with really good blogging.
Sheila Scarborough:
I’m so glad that Pam talked about details. That is the difference between mediocre and great writing. You need to notice those details. Sometimes you end up getting shoved into the 10 secret places to shop in Paris. Write what won’t get into a print deadline. You have the ability to take that small obscure thing and shed light on it. You’ll get the long tail effect.
You never notice where your audience is going to come from.
You need to think like a blogger. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do any business on Twitter.
Some are your best posts happen with what you are doing right then. Shoot a video really quickly. Two blog posts from a sandwich and a bookstore. Take pictures wherever you are. EVERYTHING can be a travel blog post.
Pull out your cell phone and make an audio post to take notes quickly. Focus on the small details. The smallest things make good blog posts. Bring life to it through photos, videos and audios.
Pam Mandel:
How to tell which bloggers are worth reaching out too. People are interested in pagerank and high stats. These are hard ones because ROI is a hard thing to measure. They are looking for influential bloggers. Those things are very difficult to measure.
Sheila Scarborough:
Look at how many comments that they have. Hey, PR people. Google the name of the blog author. Does that person also show up in discussions, do they have a Flickr page? See where else they show up. Don’t look at how many followers they have, but that is such a crude measure.
Pam Mandel:
My inbox fills up with PR people. Talk to the blogger and read their blog.
Sheila Scarborough:
I write from a budget point of view, so don’t PR send me luxury stuff.
I had no idea who was reading my blog in the beginning. When you illicit those comments, you’ll find out who is reading your stuff. Your inbox is a good place to find out who is reading your blog. If someone is willing to send an email, then you’ll get a better idea of who they are.
Pam Mandel:
I don’t do much with video. I’m a still photographer at heart. I attended a talk about consulting. If you’re going to do video, you have to do it well or people will not pay attention to it.
Sheila Scarborough:
I don’t do very much video. I didn’t want to shoot video because I couldn’t get it perfect. I got a Flip Camera and I discovered that I could narrate what I was watching and use Microsoft Moviemaker. I wanted to learn to think visually. You may not be a video person, but your readers might be.
Hallmark Bow Making machine. This video was so visual that it worked so much better with a video than trying to describe it. People LOVED that video. Shoot some video to learn how to think visually. Those who do prefer visual will look at that.
Tell people how long your video is going to be. Make it short 45 seconds. Stick to one style.
Pam Mandel:
I would much rather a credible human than mob rule. Yelp might be snarky, but I believe a real person more.
Sheila Scarborough:
I will look at Trip Advisor, but a blogger who is talking about it is much more important to me.
Community is huge. There is so much conversation on Twitter about travel. You can get to know folks through comments on other people’s blogs.
Make your avatar consistent so people will recognize you.
Pam Mandel:
Sponsorship How do you get it?
Lonely Planet Guy: He gets 100 requests for sponsorship every day. I will give you stuff that we make. Guide books, help, and authors in the area. People are willing to give stuff. Have you been published? Who’s following you on Twitter?
Pam Mandel:
I said no to some advertising because I didn’t want to associate myself with their brand. Do I want this company to own my brand? I want to be known independently.
Pam Mandel:
The Hawaii tourism board is AWESOME. They communicate with me. They are on Twitter. They are actual people. They are paying attention. They are people who are there.
The Seattle tourism people are not even on line.
Sheila Scarborough:
It’s widely divergent between the tourism boards. They are so unwilling to do a little bit of less brochures and put a college intern on Twitter. There are people who are living in their cell phone. You need to be findable to those people.
Most tourism boards have been a great resource, but they stop at the keyboard. They are all redoing their websites.
Pam Mandel:
Geo blogging makes me a little nervous because of the stalking aspect.
Sheila Scarborough:
I’m wary of broadcasting that I’m away from my home.
Pam Mandel:
If photos are well done, then I’m all over it.
Pam Mandel and Sheila Scarborough:
Disclose Disclose Disclose If you’re writing for a tourism board, disclose it. Make sure that you’re are completely honest.
Moderator: Ricky Van Veen Co-Founder/Editor-in-Chief, CollegeHumor.com
Meredith Scardino Writer, The Colbert Report
B.J. Novak The Office
Avner Ronen CEO, BOXEE
Keith Richman CEO, Break Media
Ricky Van Veen:
When you look at the past, it was porn that was driving innovation, but now, it’s comedy.
I do College Humor.com a TV show on MTV now. Something cool that I like: Lonely Island Album.
Meredith Scardino:
I work at the Colbert Report and work in NY. I used to work at Letterman and Best Week Ever. She used to work with Atom Films.
What I like right now. Internet videos. Onion News Network
B.J. Novak:
BJ Novak Writer and producer of The Office. Internet watchers tend to be picky and tend to watch it alone. It’s a true test of comedy when you can make just one person laugh. We watch videos at lunch every day. There is a DJ that plays internet videos. Favs: Flea Market Montgomery, Charlie Bit Me
Avner Ronen:
Works at Boxee. Favs: Google.com I think they’ve done a great job.
Keith Richman:
Run Break Media. Break.com and Chickipedia. Favs: John La Joy and Honest R & B Song. Funny song genre is making a comeback.
Ricky Van Veen:
Why has comedy has lead the way?
Avner Ronen:
It has a quick punch too it. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a long story. There is a quick payoff.
Meredith Scardino:
My favorite show was America’s Funniest Home Videos. It was the kind of clips that you could show your friends. I used to have a collection of VHS tapes that I would show my friends. Now we can do that easily. That’s why people love it.
B.J. Novak:
Comedy is like music a little bit. A joke is structured like a song. There is a logic to it and it’s over quick. There is a payoff.
Ricky Van Veen:
What are the differences between Colbert and Letterman online?
Meredith Scardino:
Letterman, the site was supplemental. Colbert Nation is like an army of people that are motivated to follow him. User submitted content is used on the show, like “Make John McCain Interesting.” Amazing remixes of Stephen Colbert’s words.
B.J. Novak:
Directing The Office Webisodes. We don’t know what to do with them. We just know that they’re funny and popular and that we keep putting them on. Right now, it’s just a temporary experiment. We have kept the webisodes separate, but they ARE considered canon in our minds. Webisodes cost about the same as a day of shooting.
Keith Richman:
Monetizing comedy online is much worse than monetizing on television. We find sponsors directly. 93% of their advertising money is for television. We can point to the millions of people on our sites, but we aren’t getting the same amount of respect from advertisers as television gets.
Most web content is not good, but there are WAY more people creating it than television. It’s a numbers game and we have more people on our side.
Ricky Van Veen:
Are we living in a bubble? People watch 151 hours a month. TV is at an all time high, but we are canceling our cable. Are we the trend setters? Are more people going to be canceling their cable or are we an anomaly?
Avner Ronen:
Cable isn’t going away anytime soon. Soon no one will care whether it was made for the TV or made for web.
Ricky Van Veen:
Will the consumer know the difference?
Avner Ronen:
No. There is always a place for good content. People don’t care if it came from NBC or some guy who just makes good content. I don’t like to say anything about NBC. In general, sometimes they are challenged.
Keith Richman:
Cable has done a good job of branding. People know to come to College Humor for certain content. Our ability to finance shows is getting better. It will be interesting in five years to see where the money comes from.
Ricky Van Veen:
What is the relationship between TV and online. We’ve all seen the “Everything Is Great and Nobody Is Happy” bit online. What if he hadn’t been on Conan. If he had just been in front of a webcam?
Meredith Scardino:
Conan may have given it a stamp of legitimacy, but people give it a stamp as well. If you sent it to me, I would watch it.
Avner Ronen:
It’s the quality, not who filmed it.
Keith Richman:
In a world where there is so much content, how do you get discovered? That’s what Conan does. He’s an editor.
Ricky Van Veen:
Does TV give content more legitimacy than the web?
Meredith Scardino:
Our parents are just a little behind. When I worked on Letterman, all their friends were all excited. When I worked at Colbert, there wasn’t as much bragging rights for parents.
B.J. Novak:
If the Chocolate Rain guy have moved you to tears with his voice, would he have been as popular? Comedy hits harder than emotional stuff.
Ricky Van Veen:
People want to be funny. People want their friends to think that they are funny.
Meredith Scardino:
There is an amazement factor to some videos (like the mentos guys or the lion reunion). Those tend to be the things that move as well.
Avner Ronen:
We get hundreds of pitches for series and they all start out with “This is so funny.”
Ricky Van Veen:
People see online as a stepping stone. Will the web end up as an end game, or will it always be a stepping stone?
Meredith Scardino:
You can throw up a website on your own. It’s harder to get on TV than to get on the web.
B.J. Novak:
If Lonely Allan started a web show now, they would be a huge success.
Avner Ronen:
Money is recognition. When people can make money on the web, then people will be happy to stay there.
In the future, TV and the web are going to be one and the same.
Keith Richman:
The guys who are successful in Hollywood want creative freedom so they want to do the Internet.
B.J. Novak:
Are celebrities scared of the Internet? Yeah. That’s because it’s new and the infrastructure isn’t there. People don’t want to look foolish. It’s the wild West.
Keith Richman:
A lot of people are scared because the Internet is democratic. They are scared of falling flat. I’d be scared of switching medium as well.
Meredith Scardino:
Michael Scara has done a bunch of funny things on the Internet. Comedians are doing well online.
Ricky Van Veen:
Can Twitter save live television viewing?
Avner Ronen:
I think Twitter is great for news. It’s more challenging with the Office because no one watches the show live. Around live events, then maybe it has a way.
B.J. Novak:
The best answer is what you want it to be is probably what it will be. Everyone wants basically the same stuff, and eventually someone will figure it out and we’ll get what we want. Picture what you want and it will probably show up.
Ricky Van Veen:
What about interactivity?
Avner Ronen:
I think people will have different tastes for different kinds of shows. It depends what you’re doing. Everybody is scared and no one should be scared. The only people who should be scared are people who think that they can make crappy shows.
B.J. Novak:
No one is watching a crappy show on the Internet. Just okay shows are in trouble with Internet.
Ricky Van Veen:
What about the change of tech for your business?
Keith Richman:
I get excited because there will be a blending of models. The economics are getting better. You’ll have to make smarter bets. There is going to be better stuff. Someday, something will start on the Internet and it will be a multi-platform success. The Internet will be the discovery zone. Maybe people will go to the Internet first.
Meredith Scardino:
I’m excited about the future. I don’t think the platform matters. Good content will survive. It’s just how you watch it will change.
Keith Richman:
People who can do a little bit of everything will be able to be more successful.
Diggnation is doing it right. They are building a library and an audience.
B.J. Novak:
My only fear is not being good enough. You WILL have your chance, but you might not be good enough.
Ricky Van Veen:
We implemented Facebook share and our unique users just went skyrocketing. Social Networking sites have been a great boom for us.
Keith Richman:
Content has nine lives on the Internet.
Character development is harder. Jake and Amir are character driven, but that world won’t exist on the YouTube environment.
Ricky Van Veen:
The reason we started making Jake and Amir, it was cheap. Once we did it enough, then people liked the characters enough.
Ricky Van Veen:
What is considered a hit? Are you the number one video on Digg? It’s the crowning achievement for us.
Keith Richman:
We don’t know what a hit is? A girl eating a bug. It’s hard to know. A good title and a good thumbnail will carry you a long way.
B.J. Novak:
The Human Giant video about viral videos.
Ricky Van Veen:
We had a joke section for a while. It was popular for a while, but the second video came, it took over.
B.J. Novak:
I have a hunch that poetry is going to make a comeback. Based entirely on Twitter. The short form will come back.
Scene that took off in a surprising way? There are a lot of remixes of our characters. The Fire (Ryan started the fire). We watched it mesmerized. It’s like a blog saying they want to see more of Jim and Pam.
Meredith Scardino:
People pay attention. They are looking to see if people liked their jokes.
Ricky Van Veen:
It’s hard to go from the Internet to TV. On the Internet I can tell totally how long they watched and where they are. On TV, I only get ONE number. I can’t believe it’s still around.
Meredith Scardino:
The NEWS is always funny to me. Every day there is someone doing something funny.Thank GOD for the news every day. I idolize Conan O’Brien or Stephen Colbert. I used to watch SNL. I used to think that I could write for SNL. It looked fun. Whenever you see someone doing great things, you get inspired by it.
Ricky Van Veen:
The industries are lagging behind technology. Family Guy was canceled and it came back.
B.J. Novak:
If you are beloved, you benefit from the Internet. If you are an event you benefit from the Internet.
Avner Ronen:
The networks are paying very close attention. They would rather for you to watch shows on TV because they make more money from the television than online. The monetization is different.
B.J. Novak:
I think the rule is the same as it always was. Do something because you think it’s funny. Keep doing it if other people think it’s funny.
Ricky Van Veen:
How should video should be released online? Websites live and die on monthly unique visitors.
Avner Ronen:
Watching has changed. People are watching a full season in a weekend. On the Internet, you can decide how you want to watch the show.
Keith Richman:
If it’s good, release all six. Most of the time, it’s hard to be good on a consistent basis.
I love to think that power is shifting, but it is about knowing people. If something gets popular, then that’s what featured. Get to know the editors for various blogs.
B.J. Novak:
When people write a pilot, they spend so much time introduce characters. Most people don’t see the pilot. I’m sure it will adapt.
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My mom loved this photo of me and Stacey.
The only problem with it was that my underwear was showing. Through the power of Photoshop, I am now able to share this photo with the world. No more white undies showing here. I surgically added a few inches of length to my skirt and it’s no longer inappropriate.
It’s just a nice afternoon with just me and Stacey watchin’ Sesame Street.
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(c) 2003-2007 Laura Moncur
