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Wednesday, 20 March 2002 |
His February 28 address to the International Trademark Association’s Battle of the Brand Symposium in New York. One of the things I like about Kevin Roberts is that he really gets Apple Computer and Steve Jobs. Rare in a corporate CEO. He is also from outside the advertising business and yet is one of the most interesting advertising thinkers of the present time.
I recommend reading Kevin Roberts’ other speeches, and his book Peak Performance.
11:48:21 PM 
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Steve, the act of living in London is like taking a belt sander to your body’s softer parts. The work was terrific though, and the trips out were even better.
11:37:00 PM
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It will raise the bar in online journalism. It’s for people who like poetry, books, movies, art, education, food, fashion, health, travel and technology. Never in a million years will anyone figure it out.
Dave Winer has been dropping hints trying to tell us without actually telling us what this new thing he is about to release US Pacific Coast Time today, but I am damned if I can work out what it is. Guess I’ll have to wait until sun up like the rest of us.
Writing, storytelling and sharing—online communities have been growing steadily now and when a new software product like UserLand Radio 8 appears it adds even more community members. And UserLand’s free Radio Community Server (RCS) is going to boost those numbers yet again.
Users are starting to claim back the web, when for so long it was being colonised by corporate brochureware and rapidly failing retail sites. Some of the more established community sites are now turning to a user pays model of a sort in order to support their running costs. UserLand is doing it another way, with a mix of freeware and low cost software.
Community sites work where there is a natural constituency around a given product or interest. It is amazing that Black+White has never done anything to harness its huge constituency beyond producing yet more magazines and special event spin-offs.
Then again, the publisher had a hard time comprehending what we were doing in the first place with the magazine. Asking him to understand what role the web has to play in relation to traditional media may be asking too much altogether.
Andreas and Masoud at Tank magazine didn’t get it either. Just take a look at the magazine’s website. Might be time to write a short piece on how to do magazine companion websites and communities.
10:26:20 PM
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This from Wired News. In a government-funded gambit to jump on the broadband bandwagon, Ireland will encircle 123 towns and cities with high-speed, fiber-optic access rings.
If I want to move to a European city and it must be one where something resembling English is spoken, then I’ll choose Dublin. Small enough for friendliness, big enough to be interesting, close enough to France, Germany and Italy to satisfy my multicultural needs.
I have eaten better and cheaper food in Ireland than I have in England and that was in some pretty out of the way parts of the country. The booze is OK too.
And now it seems they are going to be getting a pretty good broadband system at last. Much sooner than we will in Oz.
4:39:14 PM
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As a result of a couple of events today I am now officially claiming the title Writer.
When I got back from my appointment an email from the editor of Black+White was waiting in the in-tray. They are asking for more new ideas for the magazine and for me to write more stories.
And of course there was the incident back before Christmas when the headhunter from Kendall-Tarrant asked me to please consider being an advertising copywriter. The guy from Singapore who took the job had been repeatedly turning it down before suddenly deciding to phone up and accept way beyond the eleventh hour.
But even so, the fact that I was asked and in the running certainly means something. That vacancy was at a multinational with quite a history, especially back in Chicago, city of the broad shoulders, hog butcher to the western world. Chicago, the windy city and home to Carl Sandburg and Harry Callahan. No, not that Harry Callahan, the Clint Eastwood character. I’m referring to the original Harry, the artist.
3:54:52 PM
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An essential reference book for anyone uniting words with images for a living is Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. And no, it is not just about comics, it is to with how words and images unite in a third form of communication, whether it’s applied via the venerable comic book, the cartoon, the TV commercial, multimedia or the web.
Scott is a terrific thinker and communicator on the subject, a lecturer in digital media at MIT and the Smithsonian, has been called “the McLuhan of Comics” and his previous book Understanding Comics is also a must-read.
3:41:06 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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