Category: Thoughts

Via the Inked Blog, a link to a new blog by a graphic designer and tattoo apprentice. He’s been doing freelance graphic design for awhile, and wanted to add tattooing to his body of knowledge to provide a steadier stream of income.

The post about practicing drawing things he doesn’t like was particularly interesting for me, because it reflects a lot of how I feel about the commercial arts. Whether you’re a professional writer, a fashion designer, or a visual artist, you’re going to end up with commissions you don’t really care for. How you react to those determines a lot of your success and it’s a fine line between taking a few not-very-interesting jobs and whoring yourself out, never doing anything you actually like, and ending up with a portfolio of crap you can’t be proud of.

I’ve written a lot of things that aren’t great art, but which I’ve still been proud of, because they’ve been useful. And I imagine a visual artist is the same way: you might not like your client’s idea, but you can steer them to something that will be better, if not perfect. And that way, even if it’s not perfect, you both end up happy.

Then, there are the things I’ve written that I’d just as soon disown: advertising writing aimed at search engines as much as humans, brochures that nobody was going to read, web copy that was just a string of slogans and buzzwords. And I’m guessing it’s the same for the other arts. You’ve got your good tattoos, your good paintings, your good buildings, in your portfolio. Then there’s the tasmanian devils, the portraits of jerks, the giant McMansions where the owner says “just make it bigger than the Jones house down the road.” And you swallow your pride and ink it, paint it, build it, and hope it never comes back to haunt you.

Not everybody can be the pure artist who only does the work they like. Not everyone has that luxury. And not everyone is enough of a jerk to deny a paying customer something they want. So, we try and advise or educate, and when we can’t, we let them make their own mistakes with their own money.

It kind of makes me want to be a better customer. I’m not commissioning houses or portraits of my family, but maybe I should go into my local tattoo shop and say “I want a tattoo you’ll be proud of.”

Maybe I found this funny because I’m going to a family reunion in a week, but I think it’s funny.

Also, I’ve been wondering what happened with Nat, but Cheridy sent me an email today telling me where he’s gone: ViceLand.

Via Billmon, news that people are accusing gay pride of causing the war.

The Boston Globe is not the world’s best paper. For example, today it noticed that it’s hard to tell when someone’s on a cell phone or crazy. It’s only been a standup joke since the last century. Hey guys, it wasn’t very funny then and it’s still not funny now that it’s BlueTooth headsets instead of plug-in headsets.

Earlier, they discussed the 1% rule— which is that about one percent of your online consumers will create some content (actually it’s less: 0.065% in the case of YouTube). It’s pretty much obvious that way more people consume than create, and also misleading. A 0.065% contributor-to-consumer ratio is much higher than with old media where there are perhaps a dozen creators and five billion consumers. The fact that as many as one percent of your users might say something to you is incredible. One percent is a great achievement, not a lamentable failure.

And the fact that the one percent might be anyone, that there are few barriers to a voice coming from the wilderness and creating the best YouTube video or blog post ever, catapulting itself to global stardom? That’s the best part. That can’t really happen in film or news or television.

Old-school internet curmudgeon JWZ has often been quoted as saying that all technologies boil down to helping the user get laid. Email, file-sharing, web-browsing, databases, whatever: it has to ultimately lead to getting some ass, because that’s the primary human drive.

The most direct software for that is, of course, dating sites. TechCrunch profiles 13 new ones. Do we need that many? Yes and no. Probably not all of them will survive. But on the other hand, if every website is the online equivalent of brightly colored plumage, then the world wants a hell of a lot more than 13 dating sites.

JWZ’s theory is flawed, of course: there are other human drives and not every technology is aimed at satisfying the reproductive urge. Stem cell research, for example, will probably never get anyone laid. And internet video of Josh Bolten’s defense of the stem cell veto has destroyed nearly all possibility that he will find sex, love, or work ever again.

According to Cranky Geeks, Digg got a huge surge in traffic because it managed to be the top Google News search result about Paris Hilton’s cell-phone troubles some time in February. But that’s not the right time-frame for the spikes in traffic that I see from the Alexa rankings: Nov-Dec ’05 and April ’06.

Any theories?

Monday I went to the Sox/Royals game with Bookdwarf, where it was incredibly hot.

Tuesday, I knew it was going to be hot so I went to the office where there was A/C. Someone emailed me a link and I clicked on it without thinking. It was a video of people having sex in time to music. I yelped and closed the window as fast as I could. Everyone turned around to see what I was trying to hide. Hilarity.

Today I’ve been updating the StyleFeeder FAQ, sending out new welcome messages, and trying to figure out how Flash 9 and MySpace interact.

Have a look at this chart of Alexa rankings of Digg and Del.icio.us. Both of them– and a lot of other collaborative-media sites like Technorati, Reddit, and MetaFilter— have small spikes in late 2005 and a giant spike right in the middle of April 2006. What happened? What were they doing, what was the world doing, that made those sites so popular so quickly?

Looking at one site you’d think that there were a couple of points where a critical mass built up, or maybe they scooped a couple good stories, or got some very positive coverage in a few major venues. Or perhaps they released a new version of their software and got a lot easier to use and therefore more popular.

But seeing all those sites with the same traffic patterns makes me think that it was something about the zeitgeist that made all those buzzwords like “collaborative news” and “citizen media” relevant to a lot more citizens.

Obviously, I want that kind of relevance, that kind of traffic and success, for StyleFeeder.

To get that, I have to find out not only what made it happen then, but what can make it happen now. Neither answer is clear.

SpaceCadetz links to the Worst of MySpace, but they haven’t really updated in awhile. So I’ve put together a few horrors I’ve come across in my promotional efforts on the StyleFeeder group:

• Group Name: Winnipeg Hotboxers
  Description: For all the cool kids in Winnipeg
  Members: 1

• Katie’s Layouts will crash most browsers.
• Someone asking for HTML help with a message made of sparkly graphics.
• Fashionistaz Galore has really annoying mouseover effects for all its links.
• Miles is the narrator of a chick-lit novel. He is a dog. He lists his income at 250k+, and wants to meet horny dogs. He liks crotches. The author’s homepage also features a clueless introduction and a bio consisting of an interview between the narrator and the author. The dog narrator and the author. Did I mention that the book is semi-autobiographical?

Someone’s abuelita cheers on the Argentinian national side.