At Vloggercon today, Andrew Baron talked about how he created Rocketboom as a vlog version of his favorite blog, Boing Boing. At the end of his session, he revealed that Rocketboom will help create a Boing Boing vlog. No preview or trailer yet, but he did break the news today.
The message at the kick off of the sold out vloggercon: support individual creators of media. The tools are here. We can all quickly create Web apps & media, so let’s get with it.
After reading a write-up of broadcaster Greg Wyatt pronounce satellite radio dead, I’m thinking we just need to chill on all the prognostication. Yes, I threw a rhetorical Molotov earlier, but I was exaggerating to make a point about the importance of business structures v. tactics and talents. Plus I will take my own medicine and look for more charm, intelligence & enchantment for readers of this space. Join me in spreading wonder, know how & delight.
We are taking down all the Big in Japan apps this weekend in order to pump, (clap), them up. Crazy demand is pushing us to bulk up the environment for PodServe, SocialMail, InstantFeed and all the other apps. We’ll have them up by Monday morning.
Companies make mistakes all of the time. For example, Big in Japan printed shirts for this month’s issue of Valleyschwag. They never got a chance to see the shirts before Thor shipped them and learned from a subscriber that they were see through. Ouch! This did not seem to mind the TechSlut, but Mierla was not to impressed. What if your users were so excited about your service that they took the time to fix your mistakes?
This afternoon I noticed a few new pictures tagged with biggu on flickr bubble up on the SocialMail footer and clicked through. Turns out Mierla, not deterred by the mashup goofup ‘remixed’ the shirts. She documented her effort on flickr:
Lots more to say about the new mothership we’re creating called Spur, but the first new thing you’ll notice is the focus of Alexander Muse’s blog, now dubbed the Texas Startup Blog. We like starting companies more than investing in them, so we’re focused on area startups, general discussions of innovation & entrepreneurship, and, of course, who’s investing in what.
Check it out. Lots more routine publishing of company profiles, interviews with entrepreneurs & VCs and much, much more. Big plans.
We are big Rob Walker fans here, and so it was a nice little surprise to hear that he’s resurrected the Journal of Murketing, sort of. The JoM was an irregular email newsletter full of offbeat brand observations. Walker now writes the ‘Consumed‘ column in the Times magazine (highly recommended) and also collected a series of essays on New Orleans in Letters from New Orleans, published in the months before the storm.
Check out his new writing on murketing (non-marketing marketing in the style of Red Bull, PBR, etc.). Subscribed, fo sho.
No time to fully wade into this just now, but I recommend the to & fro going on at BubbleGeneration in this post and this post. Umair & Nick Carr are hashing out an interesting dynamic: what is the relationship of amateurs to experts when it comes to peer production?
This is a really interesting entry point for me into discussions of community, marketing, etc. More later, but it’s a good starting point.
You send out free t shirts because 1) t shirts are fun & you are fun and 2) people will put them on, snap a photo and post them to flickr. And because you really want to be the skinnycorp boyz when you grow up.
