Even though I love, love LOVE Vimeo, I ultimately decided that blip.tv was the place for the cocktail napkin* to live for one reason alone — iTunes podcast compatibility.

I wanted the cocktail napkin to be a podcast from day one, but it quickly became apparent that I was going to max out my server after about 10-12 episodes, so podcast compatibility was the first feature to get axed. No longer, my friends.

And, blip.tv gives me another option that not everyone is probably going to love — the ability to generate a little revenue through advertising. I opted out of pre-roll ads to keep things as unobtrusive as possible, but hey… Martini wants to get paid, son.

The main downside of blip.tv as opposed to Vimeo is that the Flash video doesn’t look quite as good by default, but I noticed that I can override their FLV conversions with my own. So, it’s extra work for me, but I can continue to deliver high quality video. HD versions of the episodes will still be available via the iTunes podcast. I also don’t see any way to apply custom design to the show’s page. That, however, is only a minor inconvenience.

I hope you’ll join the cocktail napkin* at its new home!

So, I asked this question last July, but I’ll ask it again. Are blogs dying?

Long before anyone had heard of the Internet, early home computer users could read their morning newspapers online … sort of. Steve Newman’s 1981 story was broadcast on KRON San Francisco.

This video is fantastic and is a great insight into how far we’ve come technologically in the past 27 years. Imagine (and for some of us it’s not that much of a stretch to do so) getting the entire text of a newspaper delivered to you in two hours. TWO HOURS! Most broadband connections today could grab the same amount of data in a couple of minutes (or less).

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.

This was a particularly exciting chance for me because not only did it give me a chance to potentially see some old friends and catch up, but it was a way for me to give back to the advertising community that gave me my start.

This was also a particularly touchy experience because that same community left me with a little bit of what one of my presentation slides calls “career freezer-burn” (thanks to Brian Brooker for that term).

Career freezer-burn is when you stay at an agency too long and it starts to turn the taste you have for your job a little sour. It’s different from burning out because you still love your career but just maybe not what you’re doing or where you are. The problem with career freezer-burn though is once you do finally decide to find a new job you still have that bad taste lingering and it taints the attitude you have and the work you do for a while.

My career freezer-burn came in the form of the type of advertising that I worked in during my tenure in Oklahoma City. Local car ads (no matter how creative they may be) only get you so far before you just can’t stand to do another. Given that fact, I wanted to be sensitive about not coming off as too bitter (I’m still ridding myself of the last vestiges of freezer burn almost 3 years later) yet I still wanted to honestly address the issue without being specific. I think I tackled the issue pretty well although there were a couple of people in the audience that knew exactly what I meant.

I digress. Didn’t mean to get into the freezer-burn thing that deeply. See what I mean… it sticks with you.

I spent quite a bit of time talking about future trends in advertising and advertising technology. Like any other “crystal ball” discussion, the slides in my deck are just my opinion and I’m sure an interesting conversation could get started revolving around others’ thoughts about what should have been in that section of the presentation.

I had a great time answering questions and talking with the college students in the audience. It always makes me feel good to give back to college students because since I was completely self-taught while I was completing my Philosophy degree I feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunities that I’m glad that these students are taking advantage of.

I’ve embedded the slideshare version of the presentation deck below. I also embedded the introductory video since I really want you to see that. It was quite the hit with the crowd and I’ve had a lot of comments from colleagues at work about it, so I’m thinking it’s pretty good.

IE6′s CSS support is well documented across the Internet for being notoriously bad. To get sites to look the same on it as on other browsers such as Firefox, Safari, or even Internet Explorer 7 requires messy code hacks and compromises.

I’ve been itching to ditch supporting Internet Explorer 6 for a long time. I can’t tell you how many times over the past couple of years integrating a site for hours, and when it comes time to browser test everything looks beautiful in every browser EXCEPT IE6. So, I began doing some research yesterday and it seems that many developers are finally planting a stake firmly in the ground and are ending their support of Internet Explorer 6 with their projects.

I’m staking my claim as well. From this point on, none of the sites I produce will be guaranteed to work with Internet Explorer 6 or lower. With the advent of Internet Explorer 8, there are two good choices for those people who wish to stick with a Microsoft browser.

Now that I’ve made this statement I have to decide how to handle IE6 users on my sites. Do I just let the site break naturally, letting them see whatever layout inconsistencies that may arise from the browser’s inability to render CSS correctly, or do I use some sort of IE conditional or Javascript function that yields a message to the IE6 user that his browser is no longer supported? If you’re a developer phasing out IE6 support, what is your plan?

This year they asked me to be on the Portfolio Development panel. I thought this was a welcome change — a change that I could bring a unique perspective to. You see, I know jack crap about portfolio development as it is formally taught (although my years in the business have let me catch up). This was explicitly reflected in our panel introductions. After the other two talked about the art schools they attended, I rounded the intros out with:

After going through five majors in college and finally landing on a philosophy major, I decided at the last minute that advertising looked like fun so I faked up a whole bunch of work and the rest is history.

The point is that being self-taught obviously caused me to craft a portfolio/demo reel that was not conventional but was ultimately successful. My introduction always gets a laugh when I speak to students and generally when I have the whole time to myself I qualify that statement with the fact that had I realized earlier that advertising was the industry for me I would have certainly taken the right classes for it instead of just teaching myself. However, at Career Day I only get ten minutes. In the interest of time I left that qualifier off and went into my content, which dealt specifically with demo reels and the importance of having an online portfolio to supplement (or in some cases replace) your physical book.

I think that my flippant introduction mixed with the fact that I de-emphasized the importance of a traditional portfolio made an enemy out of one my fellow panelists (an owner of a design boutique).

When Q&A time came around, the questions overwhelmingly involved interactive portfolios. Most specifically, “How do you create a good one if you’re not interactively inclined?” I mentioned Indexhibit and perhaps some books one might pick up that covers basic web design. However, about 5 questions into the interactive line, my “adversary” barged in at the end and said that “not enough people were asking questions about the physical portfolio book, and that’s what’s important, so let’s talk about that.”

A question came about rules of thumb using copyrighted music came up, which is a topic I’ve had a lot of experience debating over the years. Adversary quickly suggested to “just find a stock sound to use” and while I agree that stock music is a safe bet, I have suggested over the years that if you have the means for you or a talented friend to compose original music for the reel, all the better. I mentioned that I have composed the music for most all of my reels, and was met with “well, that’s fine for you but most people won’t do that.” Had I not been absolutely floored by how catty this woman was being toward me I would have mentioned that anyone with a Mac can throw together some loops in GarageBand and make something good.

I definitely hit a nerve there. For her and her design business, I won’t deny that the physical portfolio book is very important. But for agency types, I also truly believe that an online portfolio has possibly surpassed a traditional portfolio especially for purposes of securing an interview.

What do you think? Am I full of crap when it comes to demo reels and interactive portfolios? Let me know in the comments.

Ultimately, I had fun and I think I really helped a lot of students during the panel, but I don’t think it’s the place for me next year… or is it?

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.