help create the definitive inspiration engine for the creative community

23 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • 5 comments

I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking around improving this site and what my readers (that’s you!) actually need from a site like this. The document above goes into depth about my ideas. I’ve taken inspiration from sites like PSFK and Buzzfeed, and from people like Noah Brier.

I’d love to hear reactions and suggestions. Moreover, I’m interested in finding people that want to bring this to life with me. Editors, writers, and developers that want to own part of this and dedicate their time. My time is very limited, especially now that I’m back writing on the book, so in order to move forward I have to find a group of passionate people that want to build this together from scratch.

Behind the ideas are some trends or concerns I have about the state of publishing:

• RSS is the new QR Code – With Google Reader killing the community aspect of their product, I worry that the super user group inside Reader is scrambling like I am to find a new way to source content, new ways that involve algorithms like Percolate that sort content and not RSS readers that merely present it. Also, my site has taken a traffic hit since Reader lost its community. I see RSS still being functionally very useful, but less and less of a consumer facing technology.
• We’re Building Tools of Distraction – Flow content, the rush of ephemera on sites like Buzzfeed, is more and more the norm across the web for brands and publishers. We’re reinforcing a shallow attention span and we’re not innovating on long-form pieces with the same creative effort.
• Archives are Graveyards – When I consulted for CNN, I was interested in making their archive of content more useful to readers and the content more valuable to the brand. Think about it, in the way most sites work (in reverse chronological order), content has a shelf life of a few minutes. The efforts of editors and writers are worth more than that and every publisher should be experimenting with making their archives more useful and valuable. I’m calling my idea the Inspiration Board, but it’s just one possible outcome for content.

In essence, I’m proposing a massively collaborative project, powered by a small community. Are you interested in joining our little cabal of editors, writers, designers, and developers? If so, hit me with a comment or shoot me an email.

would you fund a new site for creative inspiration?

06 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • 3 comments

I’ve been blogging here since July 2008 and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to amass a small group of dedicated, kind, and interested readers. I attribute my small measure of success to this blog’s format: a mix of daily inspiration and the occasional deep dive on a wide range of intellectual pursuits. Well, I attribute 30% (roughly) to the format, 60% to the people around me both physically and online, and 10% to the silly images.

I really enjoy blogging, for the mental exercise, for the immediate feedback, and for the value of amassing interesting content close at hand. At the core of everything I do here, I believe that creativity needs both a mix of highly divergent beauty and deeply applied thinking.

Lately I’ve been considering scaling the site to make it more valuable to the creative community at-large. If I do it, I want to build the definitive inspiration engine for the creative community. Doing this would require some investment into the site, in the form of design, development, and most importantly new editorial blood (that could generate and curate a wide range of topics).

I’ve already developed a pretty robust vision for the site and how it would work. Just like this site, I see a strong emphasis on daily doses of interesting (but far wider topics and much more content) and then longer-form, incredibly valuable and deep pieces of analytical or logical reasoning. No middle ground, whatsoever. But even more critically, I see a set of tools that would mine our content to create valuable tools to be used in the creative process. I don’t just want to create another content portal, or an aggregator, I want to take the site to a new, functional, level.

But.

I’m curious if you feel that something like this is actually missing. If I created a Kickstarter project for this, would you consider funding it?

Also.

If I’m actually going to pull this off, I need this to be a project owned and obsessed over by more people than myself. I’m less interested in owning ideas these days. I’m more interested in making them happen. Are you a blogger or editor interested in a new project that you could be a part-owner in? Are you a development team looking for part ownership in a platform that you can use as a test bed for your best ideas and a powerful marketing tool to reach new clients? If I do Kickstart the site, I aim to be able to actually pay folks, but I’m not sure it will be full wages. To even consider it, you’ll probably have to know me and trust me that we’ll make it awesome together.

Quite premature, but in terms of business models, I don’t want to build another Huffington Post. Revenue on the back of free labor. I want to build a worker’s cooperative, where those that create/aggregate content and develop the site are invested in the success of the business. Generating revenue off content is no easy feat, though. It’s actually pretty rare. But I think there are opportunities beyond display; opportunities in our tools and thought leadership (conferences, workshops, videos, etc.).

Right now I’m just interested in feedback. Let me know in the comments or shoot me an email.

alignment

03 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • No comments

Here’s a simple but powerful exercise:

• Put your company’s or your client’s key stakeholders in a room together. Have the person with the most senior title agree that it’s a safe place for the next hour or so. Like Switzerland.
• First ask everyone what their next year’s objectives are. Write them down.
• Next ask everyone what they’re measured by. What their compensation is tied to, what makes their boss happy, what empty cells in a spreadsheet await them at the end of every month. All of the above. Write it down even when their answer is, “I don’t know.”
• Then write the company’s current mission statement down in big type. Write their current advertising message down right under it.
• Spend the next 90 days (to infinity) dealing with the confusion and conflict you just made sorely visible.

A mission must be measurable. A message needs a reason. A job needs a purpose. An organization needs alignment (even if that alignment is to enable loose innovation).

do we need a user’s bill of rights?

01 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • 9 comments

Earlier this year I had to stop using one of my favorite file sharing services, Drop.io, when they were purchased by Facebook and all of their data was shut down. I’m still waiting for Facebook to make this technology available again.

I used to rely on Backtweets to track who was linking to my blog and to my client projects from Twitter. This service was purchased by Twitter and then shut down. I’m still waiting for Twitter to make this available again.

Yesterday, Google decided to neuter its Reader product by shutting down sharing and re-routing its social services to Google Plus. This blog runs on my Google Reader shared items which have now been deleted and the feature itself has been disabled. For now, shared items are shut down until I scramble to find a replacement service.

From a business perspective, I understand why Google made this decision. Google Plus is the basket in which they’ve put all of their social eggs. And trimming social from their existing products inherently means that they’ll have less resources spread out. I also am very conscious of the notion that, “if you’re using the product for free, then you’re the product being sold.” I think the resource argument is a short-term thinking trap, that any company needs more bets than one in market, but I can’t argue that Google doesn’t have the right to modify their own platform.

But I can argue that they shouldn’t. And that as users of their platform, as the products being sold, we may have some right to fight for the features and products we love. We have a reactive choice. It’s called protest. Try Googling “Occupy Google Reader” – I shit you not. The social features inside Reader supported their most advanced and ardent user base and it even protected pro-democracy forces in Iran. It was important and now people want to fight for it, even if they can’t. But nature abhors a vacuum. Even as we speak, some of Reader’s users are attempting to build their own version of the utility, with social features, to fill the gap. With all of this passion and labor, I’m struck thinking that Google surely could have found something to do with these people beyond disappoint them. But again, it’s Google’s choice to make an engineering decision over a cultural one. But that sort of reminds me of another tech giant. The one in Seattle.

I can argue that we, the normally silent user base helping to propel these tech start-ups to fame and fortune, should be rewarding the companies willing to extend some protections beyond harm to body or mind to their users. We are another sort of 99% – the tangible value behind these products – and we should demand that social products respect the communities that we form, the connections we make, and the content we create in the process.

Community is where I think the typical arguments about value exchange in systems like these fall flat. It’s no longer about the value I personally give and give up for the sake of utility. How do you value new friends and new family? What’s that worth in display inventory and lines of code? And how do you measure the loss of it? That’s why I find Reader’s recent changes much more detrimental and troubling than losing utilities like Drop.io or Backtweets. I’ve lost a community of people I regularly communicate with and I’ve lost the value that community brought to my life.

My friends Rob and Alex over at Fearless worked on a new Consumer Bill of Rights earlier this year. I think we need to amend and extend this to digital products and services to protect our communities. And I think we need to demand that the firms we labor for agree to these new standards.

apple’s vision of 2011 in 1985

25 Oct, 2011 • posts i've written • 2 comments

A few things really interested me when I watched this …

• It’s interesting how right they were about our needs and behaviors and how wrong they were about how those needs would be filled. I mean, a dude with a bowtie?
• I do think they correctly predicted the steam-punk movement, they just didn’t realize it wouldn’t be their product aesthetic.
• Manipulating any data visualization is their version of flying cars. It seemed like a possibility, but it’s so far from a reality. I got a strong whiff of Wolfram Alpha in this though.
• When predicting the future, it’s really difficult to know the problems you’ll have to solve. That has to be some already-named law, that the further away you are from actually tackling a challenge, the more ignorant you are to its inherent hurdles. Having your iPad remind you about meetings is easy, having it parse natural language is much harder, having it render a lifelike human is insane.
• This was their product vision more than 20 years ago. Does that mean Steve Jobs was working on products that won’t be realized for another 20 years? There’s been a lot of talk about an Apple TV, but was he thinking even further out? What does 20+ years then translate to our even more frenetic tech cycle now? 5 years?
• In hindsight, it’s difficult to know how much of this was really inventive vs projecting nascent technologies forward.

publish early, publish often

19 Oct, 2011 • posts i've written • No comments

Last week, friend and past-conspirator Jamie Wilkinson stopped by the office to talk about himself and what he’s learned trying to ignite culture on the web. It’s a long video but it’s definitely worth watching in full.

I mean, the dude won an Emmy. So. Yeah.

Tomorrow (that’s Thursday) we’ll also have Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, talking to us about what the world might look like in 2020. Tune in tomorrow at 4pm PST for that.

holy cow of the day

18 Oct, 2011 • posts i've written • 1 comment

I want one for Christmas.

More on Quantum Locking over at io9.

what complexity are you mirroring?

12 Oct, 2011 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Structurally, agencies and their clients look quite a bit alike. We also work quite a bit like each other. This is because we evolved together. As our client’s structure changed, we adapted to support them. We mirrored their complexity. Now we’re practically indiscernable from one another.

And that’s good and bad. We’re familiar to our clients, how we work doesn’t shock them, and our billing department works pretty well with theirs. But we’re just as slow as they are. Just as maladaptive. We can submit an invoice and they can process it. But can we lead them into the future? Can we improve their business models?

Agencies also evolved to support changing mediums. Our internal structure mimics the diversity of surfaces we slap our work on. Each one of those surfaces have nuances that we need to know, so we’ve locked ourselves into silos. Now, however, the game isn’t how well you can design a single ad, but how a myriad of executions (some ads, some experiences, some inventions) can work together to affect busy, diverse, complex-in-their-own-right human beings.

Now, many of our adaptations are working against us. What was once an asset is now a liability. Gills have little use on dry land.

It’s time to question our adaptations. It’s time to question what complexity we mirror and what complexity we ignore. Perhaps the more valuable adaptation isn’t that we look like our clients, but that we can solve their emerging problems.

r.i.p. steve

05 Oct, 2011 • posts i've written • No comments

My first computer was an Apple IIe. I fell in love at first sight.

The heroes you pick say more about you than them. A part of me doesn’t feel diminished right now, it feels awoken.

If you didn’t study the man before his death, you’re a fool not to now.

seeking invention strategists at heart

22 Sep, 2011 • posts i've written • 8 comments

I’m 4 weeks in now to my new job at Deutsch in Los Angeles as Invention Strategist, and while the role is fluid, I’m getting a better sense each day how it stacks up. More importantly, to you, is that we’re looking to hire people to experiment with this new role – working with me.

I come from a non-traditional background. I’ve worked in digital studios, content companies, a strategy shop, and a couple start-ups. I’ve been a programmer, a designer, a writer, a project manager, and strategist. What free time I have is spent deep diving into almost-random subject matter. I have a sick need to abuse myself of ignorance – and there’s so much I don’t know. When I was looking for a gig, it was hard to find a role that wasn’t too narrow, or too rigid.

So it makes sense that my role here is in a bit of a no-man’s land bridging strategy and creative. I think Winston did a great job explaining why Invention Strategy matters, I would just add that the purpose of the role is to bring ideas and prototypes to the client that don’t fit in the comfortable mold of ad deliverables that they’re used to.

We want to build a team that creates products. Modern products. Products that inspire people to share them, to talk about them, and to evangelize them. We want to find people that can invent those products, services, and platforms. We’re looking for people who think in systems, too, who see business models in systems, and propose advances that recognize and take advantage of systems and ecosystems. Together with the larger organization, we want a team that helps expand the definition of what an integrated agency can do – a team that can work with the talented storytellers, strategists, and developers already in-house to create remarkable pieces of communication and remarkable products to be communicated.

We’re looking to build a small nimble team that can extend itself across the organization, to sense what’s going on, and to bring valuable ideas and advisement where they’re needed most. I, personally, want to build a team of people smarter than myself, and I want to work closely with those people so we can make each other smarter. We want to find those individuals that shudder at the restrictive job descriptions in most agencies. The people who are routinely told, “You’re smart, but we don’t know what to do with you.” We want to build our own island of misfit toys, with the mission to pursue ideas that impact our client’s business. The kind of people that have a rabid sense of curiosity and a productive frustration that leads them to want to make things better. We also prefer to work with nice people. Egos need not apply.

If you’re interested, please send a cover letter and a resume to bud.caddell [at] deutschinc [dot] com.

Extra points: help me understand where you fit in these spectrums. No one maxes out all quadrants, we are all stronger in some areas and weaker in others, but give me concrete examples of when you’ve thought and when you’ve helped build in each area.