Twit gift rig lift

Feast yer peepers on this little beauty! Weep with jealousy at the news that I just won it! Then gasp in disbelief as I reveal that I'm not talking about the keyboard, but the smoking hot Cordinated Cable perched provocatively on top.

GASP!

I am living in exciting times. Seriously, I fucking love this whole thing. I only started following Cordinated on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, and was wondering how to break it to Debs that I was thinking of buying yet more bloody cables when they ran a "retweet this to win" competition... and the rest is history.

I love cables at the best of times, but this one's a real cracker. Hand made in Chicago by Juli and Dan - he solders 'em, she wraps 'em in yarn - and up for sale on the ever-excellent Etsy. Love the schtick, the look, the whole "supporting independent business" thing, and of course (ad-man wank alert!) love the effortless demonstration of the marketing power of social media.

I can already tell that this is going to be a spectacular addition to my Fender setup (American Sunburst Telecaster and tweed-covered Blues Deville 212 amp). In case you're interested, Effects Bay did a comparative review, and if you want to hear one in action, check out The Nick next time we play.

A little bit of LOLitics

Do your own at the online David Cameron poster generator.

Waveform is analogue

This is rather neat - an analogue representation of digital waveform editing, in the form of "how to make that Prodigy song":

Helps if you have the sound on :-)

I love all this "writing on things in your house" stuff. Reminds me of this.

Copyright and ownership

All right, here’s question for all the millions of copyright lawyers who regularly read this: Let’s say I’ve downloaded a full TV series from a filesharing site or via a torrent service.

Illegal, right?

But what if that series has already been shown on a TV channel that I pay for? I could have recorded all the shows, then converted them into digital files before putting them on my hard drive… ended up in the same place I am now - and been completely within my rights.

So what’s the difference? Isn't downloading simply a more convenient way of getting hold of media I have already paid for?

The same thing applies to albums I own on vinyl. I could spend a couple of hours recording, chopping and converting my LP into MP3s, or just download them in a fraction of the time.

But since I already own the songs, what’s the difference?

For me, there is none - morally. If there is a legal difference, it surely only exists to protect the interests of media and music companies, who want us to pay several times over to get the same thing in different formats.

Bullshit, right?

I await the comments of my learned friends with scarcely concealed excitement.

Diary of a Grinder

I know, I know, nothing for 3 weeks, then 2 blogs come along at once.

If you're really bothered about getting regular, small doses of blenchtext, get onto my twitstream.

Which is what I'm writing about here: that is, I'm recommending Diary of a Grinder to you.
It's a twitter novella, apparently written by a recently bereaved man on the verge of marital collapse who, in his time of need, discovers the joys of grinding everyday articles into powder.

Sample tweet:

"Feel so satisfied. Drunk whole bottle of port. Ground empty bottle. 22 secs. V good."

So far he's lost his job, and his wife only shows up to shake her head disapprovingly, cry and leave again.

More time for grinding!

Check him out on the all new face of internet excitement that is Twitter.

Bastard's got more followers than me and I've been doing this for about 2 and a half years. What a rotten swizz.

I'm assuming the grinder in question is something like the one pictured above, and not one of these designer "spiceboy" devices. I still have a sore thumb from using this to grind 2 tablespoons of cumin a full 2 weeks ago.

No chance of doing a bottle of port in this. No way.

Under Armour 11

<Alan Partridge>And another!</Alan Partridge>

This tasty site promoting Under Armour's new soccer boots has just gone live today. This is the most fun project I've been involved with so far in my glittering career.

I spent a couple of weeks working with the Perfect Fools in Amsterdam, hanging around at the Amsterdamsche Football Club, meeting and interviewing the players, eating cheese toasties and fending off rude comments from the French dudes about my (tatty) ski-jacket...

And then I sat in front of my keyboard and wrote a load of stuff about football boots, the players themselves, and translated some French (and some Scottish) for video subtitles... et voilà!

The centrepiece of the experience for me is the tidy, full-screen videos. Here's one now (obviously not at full-screen res though innit):

As usual with a Perfect Fools production, there are some lovely details. The Keepy-up game during the preloader is sweet, the Flash mini-games they use to illustrate the boots' features are cute, and they get the simple syndication thing right too - embedding the above video was 3-clicks easy.

<Alan Partridge>Eat my goal!</Alan Partridge>

Adidas 12th Man

Another, "I did that" post.

It's the Adidas 12th Man campaign. As produced by 180 and seen all over the place. Hopefully. 

If you haven't already seen the "virals" (hate that term), no worries, what do you think I'm here for?

I didn't write these web-spots, I can't take any credit for them. Here's the Chelsea FC one anyway.

What did I write? This Liverpool quiz! And this Chelsea quiz! And - hopefully coming soon - more quizzes for some other clubs which haven't gone live yet as far as I can work out, so I'm not about to fuck up any potential elements of surprise / chances of being rehired by mentioning them here.

Screenshot!

Desperate to know what the answer to question 7 is? Don't come running to me, fatso. Work it out for yourself.

(And the questions are randomized every time, anyway, so...)

Cyber-cock bonanza

Rejoice! A fun project that I worked on has gone live. 

The Pacifico Alarm Clock is a joint production by Perfect Fools Stockholm and Creature Seattle for Pacifico beer. They were responsible for the concept, design and build of the website, iPhone app and Adobe Air desktop app.

Me... I wrote the words. Yes indeed, El Gallo de Pacifico is all my own work. Well, mostly. As tends to happen with interactive projects, especially ones that are produced by various groups worldwide, there's a certain amount of "teamwork" involved. But hey, I got the main bits sorted and set the tone of voice, so I'm happy.

Below is the blog widget that you can snaffle from the site. Enter your date of birth and enjoy live rooster streaming action!

And here's how the iPhone app looks - check out that little night vision dude :-)  

Finally, there's this clever little bit of behind the scenes backstory / seeding action via the Claudio and I blog - written by the Swedish guy in Mexico who's taking care of Claudio, running the webcam and comissioning Mexican sign painters to do rooster murals. 

Clock-a-doodle-do!

Action / Reboot

Trying to think of something to speak about at Reboot 11. This year's theme is "Action".

Plenty of chaff; not so much wheat.

Yet.

Leaning towards doing something frivolous... Intrigued by Flemming Funch's proposal of The art of not-doing - I was thinking along the same lines...

"I have a deliciously full bosom"

One of my favourite websites ever is Miranda July's promo for her book "No one belongs here more than you".

Strong concept, GSOH, etc.  Effortlessly beats plenty of high-budget Flash jiggery-pokery things. Falls down slightly because of a lack of syndication tools, though.

I had forgotten all about it until this link to a list of "hand-drawn websites" jogged my memory. Not that the list mentions this site, but you know...

So I went back and found brand new funnies. An update! A year ago! Nice to appreciate the value of slowness and solidity in these atomised, accelerated times. 

All of which reminds me of the "back and forth, forever" bit in "Me and you and everyone we know". Not entirely suitable for viewing at work, but you can probably get away with it if you use headphones and stifle your incredulous giggles.

Excellence.

Fixing my guitar

Horror and dismay! My lovely, lovely guitar went all weird at the end of last weekend's practice session with the soon-to be-most-incredible band in Amsterdam. I was all set to hand it over to a guitar tech to fix when the internets came to my rescue.

300 guitars told me how to clean a guitar or amplifier jack, and then showed me too in this neat little video:

And then a ferret showed me how to clean my pots using a special spray. It worked like magic on my guitar, so I took the back off my amp and did the same thing on all the pots in there too, and bingo! That annoying fluttering noise I used to get every time I twiddled its knobs has vanished. 

Total outlay: €11, plus I learned stuff. 

I am currently winning the game.

My imaginary alternate career

Fun musical thing at the consistently excellent AV Club - Wikipedia names your band.

Here's mine:

Takashi Honda turns out to be a musician already - a "composer of video game music" in fact.

Nice photo innit? It's by maydos {vovvv!}, who I suspect might be Turkish...

And the quote's from Anne Morrow Lindbergh: "Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me."

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, LOLcat

Welcome, comrades, to my new favourite site, uniting 3 of the things I like the most: LOLcats, all things Russian, and wilfully incorrect translations. I give you - Rolcats!

Anybody got any sites that poke fun at the Chinese?

Intelligent Idiocy

Rather nicely done integrated campaign for Compare the Market, one of the 13000000 car insurance comparison sites currently vying for the attention of UK drivers. Difference is, this one has a bit of fun with it all.

The telly spot does a loopy Compare the Meerkat riff featuring "Russian" meerkat Alexsandr Orlov. (Do they even have meerkats in Russia? Who cares? Me, obviously - I checked - they don't).

And lo! There it is on the internet, complete with a functioning meerkat comparison system, all wrapped in LOLkat-style speaks. Nices.

Most impressively they've got a Twitter account with almost 2000 followers, and - almost unbelievably - someone is actually tweeting regularly, and responding to followers' tweets. In my long experience, this is the thing that clients can never be bothered to do for themselves, and are too tight to pay agencies to do for them. Well done, you lot.

Even more amazing: the Twitter stream isn't full of corporate promotional bollocks - in fact, our little furry friend refuses to discuss his paymasters because "it cause him great pain". Instead he prefers to post crudely photoshopped pictures of him stuck in a lift with Stephen Fry and bicker amicably with the general public. This sort of behaviour usually makes Marketing Managers twitch uncomfortably and mutter about USPs, monetization and driving sales. Bravo!

They've got Facebook too, but I can't be bothered with that nonsense.

My friends used to tell me I looked a bit like a meerkat. I don't talk to them any more.

I'm not joking.

[Peripherally interesting aside: The real Alexander Orlov turns out to have been an NKVD man who managed to survive Stalin's bloody purges and defect to the West. Coincidence? I think not...]

[Pedantry: No self-respecting Russian would call his site "comparethe..." anything, cos Russian doesn't have articles - "a" and "the". Isn't that fascinating?]

Samizdat - watizdat?

Here are a couple of things I've come across recently, one via Russell Davies and one via my pal Shy Bobby.

Shy's band Sora Shima has made a CD at CDBaby. Meanwhile, a mate of Russell's has done himself a great little work-in-progress book over at Lulu.

Both services promise professional quality at a reasonable price, and include various marketing options for you lucky capitalist artists. I can't yet personally vouch for either CDBaby or LuLu, but I like the cut of both their jibs.

When I first got into the internet, I got very excited about its samizdat potential. 16 years on, I'm still convinced that the way the web gives everyone the power to self-publish is rrrrrrrrrevolutionary! 

And now these two lovely companies have come up with these ace services which bring the idea full circle and open up real-life publishing to mere mortals too. No need for publishing houses, agents, A&R men, shitty contracts etc. 

This is fabulous stuff. I will do things! 

Amazingly, I've already started a cute little collaboration with Ms Isl*ndgirl. How about that?

P.S. Is anyone doing anything similar for vinyl? 7"s and LPs and the like?

Amuse-a-thon

Thank you Dawn for pointing me towards Business Guys on Business Trips.

Dawn is a Project Manager :-)

Self-promotion the internet way

I'm a freelancer. I don't have to get up and go to work 5 days a week, or at least, not that often. But I do have to get myself hired pretty regularly. So I have this blog, and various other channels here and there all of which you can get to via my professional website. And I was wondering if it was worth doing anything a bit more official.

Then - as if by magic - I got a free €50 voucher for Google Adwords, so I thought I'd give it a go. Signup's easy, and using the provided tips and tricks I picked my keywords, wrote my ad, and had it live within about half an hour. Here it is:

After about a month, I get a bit of a wrist slap from Google:

"Your ads are showing too rarely to spend your full budget. You may need to add keywords or raise your click price limit." 

Bugger that. 40% of my (free) money has been spent on something like 23 clicks through to my site. The reporting's excellent though. I can see which of my keywords gets the most hits - "Amsterdam", and how all the rest get bog all attention in the first place, which convert into zero clicks. Most of these non-clicky terms are variations on "interactive copywriter", by the way.

I enjoy the disapproving, pull-your-socks-up tone, but I shall respond by thumbing my nose, farting, and cancelling my Adwords Campaign. Nice system, but pretty useless for me.

By far my most powerful self-marketing tools at the moment are my personal network and word of mouth, and - believe it or not - LinkedIn. 

Therefore, my tips for successful self-promotion in these connected times are as follows: Be present online. Keep your sites up to date. Talk to your friends and contacts. 

Also, give people cakes. Everyone loves a good cake.

What a drag

Just a thought - isn't drag, as in "drag and drop" an awful choice of word?

As in "what a drag", "pull behind you with effort", "the aerodynamic force that opposes an aircraft's motion through the air", etc.

Get better words please, interfaces. 

Mind you, I spose it's not all bad:

That's all for now.

21st century birthday boy

Check out my stack of birthday presents - it's an Amazon-fest!


More power to Amazon for the Wish List feature - a totally brilliant bit of marketing. Didn't spoil the unwrappy surprise either cos I built up my list a couple of months ago then totally forgot what I had put on it. 

Just opened them all - merci beaucoup to all my benefactors... what a haul! Particularly looking forward to watching "The Wire", and reading "Life's a Pitch". Currently listening to Bilge Pump... rocking!

Thank you very much.

Jack Bauer gets around a bit

New 24 episode - w00t!

Just as w00ty as the show itself is the way the trailer page gives you so many ways to do their marketing for them: check this out.

Another example of "make it easy for fans to spread the love" marketing. Difficult to imagine why more brands aren't doing this sort of thing on every piece of marketing they put out online.

Nicely done, DAMMIT!