Seems lately that one of the very things that I’ve used to professionally put a stake in the ground is slowly eating away my soul. It’s something that I came to realize a month or two ago when I was preparing material for the “Creative Turtleheads” presentation.

As I looked through my archive of personal projects, not only did I notice that the majority of my projects were unfinished, I also noticed that beginning in 2004, the number of personal projects I attempted each year began to dwindle.

I thought this was interesting and I got to thinking about it. Why would that be? There were a few reasons that came to mind. 1999-2001 were prolific years because I was a single twentysomething that finally had his career in full swing. I had the ideas and the energy, but that seemed like it wasn’t enough. I still have ideas and energy but less output.

Then it hit me — I didn’t have Facebook to check all the fucking time! Of course I did more, because my time wasn’t so fragmented by online destinations. So, this made me take stock of what types of things I was doing online during that time. The list was pretty simple:

• Email
• Napster
• IRC on rare occasions
• Web surfing for product information

That was it!

Most of my free time was spent offline making things. I made short films. I made music. I made websites. I played video games and read books. I listened to music, and not listening while doing something else — I just sat there and listened, unencumbered by other tasks.

I say enough. My life is dwindling away and I’m taking what little free time I have back. I’m making a conscious effort to minimize social media usage in the evenings and I’m going to back to basics.

I just finished a book this week — the first book I’ve read in a year. It was I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max. I picked it up at DFW on an extended layover and figured, “What the Hell. I could stand to read a book.” I’m glad I got it. It reminded me a lot of some old college friends, and was just a good, mindless escape. It prompted me to order two more books to read: Born Standing Up by Steve Martin and 39 Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There by Tom Davis.

I’m playing more video games. After almost 3 years, I’m getting close to completing The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess and just picked up Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

In short, I’m letting my mind wander and experience new things. Hopefully by relaxing more, my mind will become more fertile again and the ideas will flow more easily.

“My Social Graph Is Getting Weird” attempts to answer why all these people you barely knew/didn’t know/didn’t like/etc. from your earlier years are coming out of the woodwork and sending you Facebook friend requests. This new age of connectedness brings an interesting question to light. “Are some relationships better off forgotten in the sands of time?”

Apologies in advance to some of my Facebook friends that were featured in this. Obviously I’m not referring directly to you in this presentation.

Spectacle!

What is Pecha Kucha (pronounced pe-chaw-kchaw)? One way of looking at it is that it’s performance art set to PowerPoint. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each — giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up.

I will be presenting a piece entitled “My Social Graph Is Getting Weird.” In this presentation I’ll talk about the strangeness of some of the Facebook friend requests I’ve received lately, the ramifications of being Facebook friends with an ex-wife, and ultimately whether or not some relationships from the past are just better off forgotten.

Pecha Kucha Night: Kansas City is being held tonight at Crosstown Station, 1522 McGee St. KCMO (across from the KC Star building). The show starts at 8:20pm and there’s no charge to get in the door.

I don’t think you’ll have ever seen anything like it. What else do you have to do on a Thursday night that’s more interesting than watching PowerPoint performance art?

Good point, but I’d still like to see you there.

I’m with you on the YouTube and getting totally unrelated “related” videos. I’ve been making an effort to find other video sites like Vimeo (I like viddler and dailymotion) but a lot of the stuff I look for is mostly on YouTube. I think higher quality video sites like Hulu and TV.com will take some users away from YouTube but they’ll still remain king for awhile. This scenario reminds me back in the day when Yahoo Auctions was trying to compete with eBay but in the end eBay’s user base was just too much and really I don’t think Yahoo really tried/cared anyway. Competition is good but it sure is harder to compete on the internets.

My thought about that is this:

YouTube really will never go away because it’s the Wal-Mart of user generated video. Where else can you get music videos, family vacations, and dudes lighting farts right next to each other?

The thing about Vimeo is that I don’t really see it as a YouTube competitor so much because it really does serve a different community. The Vimeo community seems to have more sophisticated taste and are making their content with more sophisticated skills and equipment.

And, Hulu is an even different animal from all the other examples you’ve mentioned. Hulu is kind of the epitome of video sites because it aggregates the highest quality video from the TV networks. To me it doesn’t even begin to compete with YouTube. Crappy copies of DVR-ripped shows don’t stand up to HD streams of the same content.

There’s always a place for YouTube. The problem is that it’s enormous content bloat makes the finding of content (either through recommendations or related links) a little cumbersome and in cases such as the zit popping fiasco completely ineffective.

And if you’re wondering, yes… I watched about 3 zit videos before turning away. It was like this awful train wreck. Each one was more disgusting than the last but I just couldn’t turn away. I spared you all great mental scarring by only showing you the tiniest bit of the video I showed in the last episode. Blech.

Some would call this a new years’ resolution post, but I’d rather not. I’d rather look at this post as a way of setting a couple of goals that go beyond a new year/new start type of thing and are more of a recommitment to what has already been a long-term process.

In 2009 I want to take a giant leap forward in building equity in my personal brand. As I mentioned above, this is not necessarily a new idea for me or even a new goal. I just want to tackle it in a new way.

In the past, the core of my personal branding goal revolved around positioning myself as being an expert in creative generalism, which is kind of a bullshit way of saying jack-of-all-trades except with just a little more focus and polish. And — oh yeah — might as well throw social media in there too since everyone needs another social media expert, don’t they?

For the most part this seems to have worked. I tend to be a trusted resource at work, people in the Kansas City advertising community seem to think I know what the hell I’m talking about, and the amount of speaking engagements I was offered rose dramatically in 2008.

However, I think there’s a limit to the extent I can build my personal brand on my own. The reason: I’m building my personal brand on my own.

“Jeremy,” you might ask, “isn’t building your personal brand on your own really what building something PERSONAL is all about?”

To you, I say “It used to be.”

I think that as the last days of 2008 play out, we are seeing the last vestiges of the age of the lone gunman, the sole expert, the know-it-all. In my world, I see more and more collaboration and idea sharing (online and offline) as the days and years go on, and I think that is where I need to be focusing on as I continue to build my personal brand.

It’s not all about me. Of course, it is about me to a great degree (otherwise why would my ideas and opinions have any value?), but it’s also about my ability to effectively tap into a great network of minds with whom I can collaborate to conceive and/or produce the best work available.

I can’t see how this angle can yield anything but success. Even if I collaborate just a tiny bit more than I already do, I feel I’ll have succeeded.

Oh yeah, and I plan on redesigning this site in 2009 too. Mark my words.

As the holiday season is upon us once again, we’ve put together a new site. One that the idea for it has been simmering in its own starchy juices since last year.

I give to you The Christmas Yam (if Christmas isn’t your holiday of choice, just click the bow in the upper left corner until it works for you).

I won’t lessen the wonder and whimsy of the thing by over explaining it. Instead I invite you to visit the site and just play around. It’s a beautiful interface featuring fantastic photography by RushWade2.

If you tweet, you’ll also want to make sure to follow @thechristmasyam on Twitter. It’s a lovely supplement to the idea that brings it all together. You can also send messages to the Yam by giving it an @reply.

I’ve said enough. Enjoy.

I dutifully wrote all those names down for no other reason that I had nothing better to do and thought they might be worth keeping. A year later I ran across that list in a sketchbook and thought it was time to do something with it. I separated the names into a couple of different database tables, did a little ASP programming, and the first version of the Rock Band Name Generator was born. The first version didn’t work very well… the algorithm I designed to determine the band name was terribly flawed and didn’t do a good job of tapping the wide variety of words that were in the database.

About 5 years ago I found the code for v1.0 and retooled it to run in PHP. I decided to put a Flash front end on it because, “hey, let’s throw Flash at everything” was my mantra at the time. The second version also didn’t work very well, mostly because the implementation of my Flash front end was really wonky.

Fast forward to last night. I thought to celebrate the release of Rock Band 2 I would dust off those RBNG database tables that hadn’t been accessed in 4 years or so and give them new life. I rewrote the logic from scratch (and got it right this time!), added a randomize feature, threw in a little AJAX and topped it off with some social media tools such as a send to a friend feature and the ability to embed your rock band name into your blog, Myspace profile, etc. via the RBNG widget (shown left).

Yeah, its another dumb web toy like the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator (I’m Beretta Hockey Palin BTW), but it’s been a pet project of mine for years and I figured it would be fun to finally release it in the manner that I always wanted to. You can visit it at myrockbandname.com. There are still a few features I’d like to add but it’s 95% complete as it stands.

Luckily, there was a voice of reason. Deep Focus, AMC’s interactive agency stepped in and helped show the error of the network’s ways. According to a post on Silicon Alley Insider, a Deep Focus spokesperson said that they advised that in this case it would be “better to embrace the community than negate their efforts.”

As I stated yesterday, these profiles represent a community of people passionate about the Mad Men brand, and as such were acting as powerful ambassadors of the brand through authentic communication. To take the profiles down was a mistake, and I’m glad that they were savvy enough (or at least scared enough of the growing negative online publicity) to reevaluate their decision.

I agree with Adrian Ho’s comment on yesterday’s post that AMC needs to hire these rogues to continue maintenance and development of these online personas. However, even though AMC could then control the quality of the content by offering creative guidelines, they need to be very mindful of the fact that the communications need to remain authentic and not commercially forced. If they were to control these profiles too tightly, they could ruin the integrity of what was created and find themselves back at the top of the online community’s shit list.

Finally, I have to tell you that my wife and I had a fantastic conversation about the takedown decision on the drive home last night. She brought the legal side of the decision into the conversation and made a great case for why the decision was made in the first place. I don’t really think we agreed with our opinions on the decision, but that was what made it great.

I really, REALLY wish we had been able to record it as a podcast because there was lots that she had to say that would be of great interest to everyone following this story. I’d be afraid to try to recreate the conversation too much because the spontaneity of the dialogue would be completely absent, but we may try to record something just because it was definitely worth sharing.

Stupid lawyers, why must you ruin everything?

What I’m referring to is today’s discovery that the Mad Men characters that have been happily coexisting on Twitter for the past few weeks have been unceremoniously taken down as a result of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint on behalf of AMC Legal.

These profiles were not being maintained by AMC, but by (semi) anonymous individuals with a passion for the characters and the show.

These profiles were brilliant. They interacted with each other and the Twitterverse as a whole. And they did it in character so convincingly that many marketers I know were pretty convinced that this whole thing was being beautifully orchestrated by AMC and perhaps the writers for the show.

Maybe that’s why AMC had the profiles pulled. Perhaps the rogues behind the idea were doing too good a job of pulling it off, and AMC had a “why didn’t we think of that?” moment. However, I’m thinking that’s not the case.

It’s very obvious by this action that AMC has no clue what today’s age of conversational interactivity is all about and that whether companies like it or not — the user is control of brands now. @soseman said it best in a comment on the original blog post:

Rogues don’t do things the way YOU want them to, they do them the way THEY want to do them. But clearly someone with such a passion for any brand just wants to help.

This was a terrible move on behalf of AMC. What initially started as what many of us saw as the best use of Twitter yet for a commercial property has become a black eye on corporate America’s perception of social media and its ability to stifle conversation surrounding its brands at any cost.

// UPDATE: Here’s another excellent point of view on this issue.

They’ve started a blog called Go Miniman Go that has lots of videos and articles about the history of the Lego Miniman and what lies ahead in his future.

One of the coolest features of the site is their call for people to create videos celebrating this anniversary. People have been making videos using Legos and the Minimen for a long time now, but they’re asking some of the video making community to pull out all the stops.

Lego created a video as inspiration for others to follow suit. It details some of the historic highlights of the last 30 years as seen in a Lego world. It’s certainly a cool video, but it was made using 3D animation, so of course it’s going to be slick.

However, the video below was created by Nathan Wells and he has chronicled the history of the world using Lego. You tell me which video is more impressive.