stuff that is relevant
...or at least relevant to me
2/1/12
Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Well: Elementary?
1/30/12
Delightful Lamps: Imaginative Lighting
You could make an imaginative children's bedroom revolving around this lighting. From likecool. Ditto.
1/25/12
“This constant fear: is it insanity or just ambition?”
“This constant fear: is it insanity or just ambition?”
- @alaindebotton
From obsessivecompulsive - makes sense
1/23/12
Shirtify: Existing Habits. Existing Habits.
Existing Habit + Existing Desire = Idea
Example: Shirtify.
Listen to music + Connect with favorite artists = Your favorite artists send you t-shirts
Minimal barrier to entry. Simple to understand. Beautiful.
Now just make sure it is tied to your brand. If it has to be.
One Receipt: Photo Budgets
1/12/12
Best Moment of the Day: Diaries of Millionaries
From obsessivecompulsive.
1/9/12
The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: Learning Sales
- The irony was too rich when Morgan started talking about how his creative freedom were being limited from working with a client. It is unfortunate he never made the connection between his own internal struggle with the creatives who work in the industry every day. It would have made for a poignant 10 minutes if he sat down with a creative to discuss how to handle these limitations.
- The film is truly successful at being objective, and what makes the film so interesting is whether Morgan is being objective because of his craft demands it or because of all the partnerships and their accompanying contracts.
- The partnership process Morgan takes on is realistic. He first needs to figure out what his "brand" stands for, and then needs to find brands what brands align with his brand. It is funny how we do this all the time and take it for granted that not everyone knows this process.
Because the entire movie is essentially Morgan learning how to market himself and his movie, it is a solid movie worth watching for anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the advertising world.
1/7/12
Best Blogs Posts of 2011: Neil Does Your Homework
1/1/12
The Myths of the Creative Worker: Evil 5 Second Breaks
Every time.
I'm as guilty as anyone of this. While working I simultaneously open 5 browsers to jump around from one thing to another. I've always regarded it as a creative quirk. One of those characteristics of why I'm in the business of ideas.
But it is bullshit, and I'm much more of a realist than a romantic. The idea of not leaving work burned out is the holy grail I'm going to starting marching towards.
The first step is scheduling breaks rather than taking them at will. Wish me luck.
12/29/11
1x Run: Limited Edition Art

12/25/11
Art & Copy: It sure does look easy
12/19/11
Skateboard Sculptures

Japanese artist Haroshi creates unique three-dimensional sculptures out of recycled skateboard decks.

Layers of stacked wooden decks are transformed into sharks, body parts, fire hydrants, toys, fictional characters, and shoes.



Incredible. I need that apple. More pictures on Toxel. Thanks G!
12/14/11
11/30/11
Canada Tweets its War Dead: Discrupting Feeds
Canada Tweets its war dead:
The Ottawa Citizen has taken an interesting approach to memorializing Canada’s war dead. Perhaps taking a cue from Israel’s tradition of annually naming all the people killed by Palestinian terror attacks, The Citizen has created a Twitter feed called ”We Are The Dead”
The Citizen’s Glen McGregor set up a bot that accesses the Canadian Government’s Virtual War Memorial, which houses 119,531 records of Canadians killed at war (mostly in the 20th century). Once an hour, it randomly accesses a name, rank, posting and date of death and uploads it to Twitter.
“A quick calculation showed us that it will take more than 13 years for the bot to work through the list of war dead. We decided it was worth doing anyway,” says McGregor in his blog.
“We are the dead” is a line from the WWI poem ”In Flanders Fields” by Canadian physician and Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae”
Here is the stanza:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Revenues and responsibility: Purpose Branding
Revenues and responsibility:
Corporations are trying to work out their role in the world beyond revenues and profits.
It’s a story that’s been repeating itself for the last few decades with corporations flirting with corporate social responsibility.
In a world focused on short-term revenues and driving shareholder value, many companies have put CSR on the back-burner, but that looks set to change.
It looks there’s a re-emerging new school of thought that is about delivering revenues and responsibility- we see it with Coca-Cola, Unilever and others.
Here Pepsi’s CEO, Indra Nooyi explains in a Fortune interview how the company has gone one step beyond CSR to the new world of Performance with Purpose.
This new perspective seems to be happening right now for two reasons.
1. Global corporations are looking to source even more business from the developing world and it therefore pays to be a good citizen
2. This is a response to the backlash to big business and CEO’s as companies make a concerted effort to take a more human approach (consumers are demanding more accountability)
It will be interesting to see if this trend trickles down to mid-size and domestic companies, or remains something that only the enlightened global corporation engages in.
11/29/11
A Complete Idiot's Guide to 2012: My Self-Improvement Reading
The quick, usual doubt came in: I'm just too lazy. Not actually lazy, but I'm busy with a good job and trying to launch a business (check us out at UnionSt.us). Amongst the suds, I realized I needed a simple, idiot's guide (see what I did there?) to these subjects if I was ever going to get around to them. The idea formulated: every month in the new year I would read a different Complete Idiot's Guide. I investigated the cost and decided I was too cheap. Working in digital (and hence social) I figured I would give the old ask-for-something-free-through-twitter approach.
And lucky for me,
They contacted me after my tweet and offered to give me any 12 titles I wanted as long as I blog about the title after each month. A fair exchange, and I'm very grateful for their generosity.
The titles I chose:
Complete Idiots Guide to....
The Psychology of Happiness
Starting a Business
Spices & Herbs
Motivational Leadership
I'm sure I'll touch on more of why I chose them as I begin reading, but for now my plan is to approach each book, and blog post, through a content and marketing lens. Content being the subject matter itself, and then how the subject matter can be applied to marketing. I'm excited to begin the process in January. Hope you follow, and thanks again to the good people over at Complete Idiot's Guide.
11/9/11
Mr Button by John Caswell Design - adds a little character to an...

Mr Button by John Caswell Design - adds a little character to an object that often goes unnoticed
11/6/11
'Two-Pizza' Teams: Interesting Look into Amazon
'Two-Pizza' Teams:
Werner Vogels: Amazon and the Lean Cloud from HackFwd on Vimeo.
“Amazon is a technology company. We just happen to do retail”
So much insight in this fascinating talk from Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, at the recent HackFwd event in Berlin. Werner essentially tells the story of how Amazon Web Services (their cloud infrastructure offering) came about but in doing so makes the point that many of the principles talked about around Lean Start-Up are ones that remain central to the way in which Amazon operates.
Scaling quickly had always been the key priority for Amazon, more of a priority than maintaining a coherent architecture, which led them to developing services based around APIs rather than direct database access. This in turn leant itself nicely to an organisational structure focused around small teams typically comprised of 8-10 people ('Two-Pizza' teams - the number of people who can be fed easily with two large pizzas). There are currently around 800 such teams in the business behind 800 different services which go to comprise the wider Amazon offering (calling the home page requires about 200-300 such services to construct the page for you). Teams of 8-10 people are able to stay in touch with what each of them are doing, whereas meetings would be required to do this for larger teams.
This decentralised structure has several major benefits. It is a structure that is built for speed. They can bring a new service or product to market in 10-15 days. But it also means that they inherently design for flexibility, for on-demand and, where appropriate, for automation. Processes are distilled into their simplest form because they have to be. It means that they can enable a culture of continuous innovation ("Amazon Web Services looks like a collection of 15 or 20 or 40 startups") and a relentless customer focus (benefits from additional scale are passed on to customers, innovation is focused on the things that don't change, those that will always be important to people). Amazon Web Services launches a continous stream of new products, each with minimal features sets. More features are launched only through close co-operation with cutomers.
At the recent Google Firestarters event, Mel Exon talked about how the new agency OS might be characterised by small, nimble, networked, task-based teams (as Nigel Bogle had put it "Big is a collection of smalls"). Despite building a huge business, Amazon have been able to retain the flexibility and adaptability of a start-up. In a world increasingly characterised by the need to respond to and design for on-demand, there's a lesson in that for all of us.
11/1/11
Google Reader's Moronic Move to Delete Shared Items
More so, I have been a Google guy for awhile: gmail, google docs, tried buzz, trying +, tried android and, heck, I even built a crappy site using Google sites. Looking back at that list, I'm starting to wonder why I'm such a big supporter of them.
Google Reader's move isn't just a dumb upgrade move, it is a dumb marketing move. The best way to grow a brand is to support your core advocates so they spread your brand through word of mouth. Unsexy as it is, word of mouth is king and will always be king for a brand.
Back to the current problem, Google allows you to export your shared items through a json file. What is a json file? I don't know. Should I? Maybe. Should an everyday user? Hell no. I'm left hoping for someone more tech savvy than me to come up with a solution, and that I'll find the solution by Googling.
There in lies the point. I will never stop using Google as a search engine because it is simply better, and Google has confused that with brand love. It is not. Usage does not equal advocacy. Bank of America can tell you that. Shell can tell you that. Company Google does not want.
In the meantime, I've found a link that allows you to access your shared items so I will manually go through to star each one of the thousands of shared items. Star'ng isn't a solution though because I don't know what would stop Google from removing that some day. It may be time to switch to Evernote.
If you are in the same boat, there is a petition going around. Here's the link, or you can Google it...














