Radical Transparency

(in case the other blogs need a friend)

The Horse Flies Are An Iridescent Green

The Mountain Goats are in LA tonight. I expect it to be the first of many animals with suicidal pride concerts for me. Huge thanks to Wiley for the introduction.

(download)

Original Air Blue Gown is track 15 on Full Force Galesburg.

Creativity Is A Prairie Dogg

This one's for Wiley, a great admirer of fast-twitch suspicion:

Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.

Alain de Botton wrote that, referring to a week he spent writing at a desk in the middle of an airport.

Thank you PSFK.

(Note: I'm again and again impressed by the jolts of happiness that good metaphors give me.)

Ninjas, Spelling Mistakes, and Email Marketing

This just arrived, by email, from Wiley 'Lil Tuna' Kestner, one of China's most trusted food and technopolitics experts:
Get You're [Sic] Quiz On!

My dear family & friends (with iPhones and iTouches), 
 
If you guessed this was lame spam, shamelessly promoting some ridiculous product, then congratulations you've just scored your first ten points!  Welcome to Get Your Quiz On™ the brand new FREE :O trivia game show from Prairiedogg for your iPhones, iTouch, and yes, even the iPads!

I know, I know, you're just dying to find out how much you know about Ninjas, Snax, and Mullets, so instead of reading my skin-deep, narcissistic cry-for-help any further, do these things, and do them well: 
  1. Download the FREE game here: http://bit.ly/geeko
  2. After downloading it, give it a 5 star rating + rave written review on the iTunes store.
  3. Spam your facebooks and twitters mercilessly with this link (10 extra points for each person that unfriends you as a result!):

    http://bit.ly/geeko

At this point, Seth Godin would probably advise me to write a short personalized note that tried to make it seem like I cared about our friendship in the hope of establishing some kind of human rapport.  But I know that your [sic] a savvy internets expert, and wouldn't fall for cheap marketing ploys like that.  So instead of standing around singing kumbaya and talking about our feelings, lets go get busy with points one, two, and three.

Love,

Wiley

PS - This is where I would claim to take you off my mailing list at your request if I had any intention of doing so.

How many points do I get for a copied and pasted blog post?

The Old Beijing Roommates

Extraordinary talents, these two.

Cheers

One, last I heard, was racing planes in Reno.

The other just launched a totally awesome iPhone app. It features a panda in a bib. And makes it possible for anyone, regardless of language skills, to navigate Chinese menus and restaurant interactions like a pro.

Here's a song one of them recorded a few months ago. Anyone want to guess which one?

(download)

In Defense of Aging

Evolution, through the eyes of a metaphorically inclined computer programmer:

Old age is a feature, not a bug. With less turn-over it would be difficult to life as a whole to adapt to changing environment. It has drawbacks as knowledge lost by the dead individual. Advanced life forms overcome that with culture. Earlier simpler life forms probably lacked the aging feature, and were superseded by others who had it.

Thank you, Wiley, for passing that along. Your ability to stay current with the Slashdot comments is both a mystery and an inspiration.

The Shiv

From the GChats:

Wiley: Have I shared this with you?
  The Secret saved my life!
me: you have not
Wiley: I've heard it described as the best customer review on amazong, ever
me: wow
  ok
  i'll read

I did read.  And I laughed.  And Amazon(g) gets big props for leaving it on their site.  They could easily have taken it down.  Maybe should have.  But definitely shouldn't have.

THE Band

Wiley and Tuna and I sung harmonies on The Weight for months in Beijing.

My sister, my uncle Zach, and I just made plans to watch The Last Waltz sometime in the next week.

And I'll be surprised if I don't always remember this song as one that I only fully discovered after it made an accidental introduction from my left-behind iPod.

I don't know when or how The Band released this version of Get Up Jake, and, since the internets aren't giving me easy answers, I'll leave it at that.

(download)

The Inevitable Dissolution of POWER

After a day of DjangoCon and an evening of storytelling with a NASA sysadmin and a dangerously dressed Silicon Valley lawyer (who may or may not have been joking when she told us she likes heroin in moderation), Wiley and I started talking about politics, The Carrot Project, and the book he's reading.

He read me this excerpt about The Final Call (a newspaper published by the Nation of Islam), an attempt to change consumer behavior, and the realities of market economics:

The paper also carried a health section, complete with Minister Farrakhan's pork-free recipes; advertisements for minister Farrakhan's speeches on videocassette (VISA or MasterCard accepted); and promotions for a line of toiletries - toothpaste and the like - that the Nation had launched under the brand name POWER, part of a strategy to encourage blacks to keep their money within their own community.

After a time, the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in The Final Call; it seems that many who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan's speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest.  That the POWER campaign sputtered said something about the difficulty that faced any black business - the barriers to entry, the lack of finance, the leg up that your competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for over three hundred years.

But I suspected that it also reflected the inevitable tension that arose when Minister Farrakhan's message was reduced to the mundane realities of buying toothpaste.  I tried to imagine POWER's product manager looking over his sales projections.  He might  briefly wonder whether it made sense to distribute the brand in national supermarket chains where blacks preferred to shop.  If he rejected that idea, he might consider whether any black-owned supermarket trying to compete against the national chains could afford to give shelf space to a product that guaranteed to alienate potential white customers.  Would black consumers buy toothpaste through the mail?  And what of the likelihood that the cheapest supplier of whatever it was that went into making toothpaste was white?

Wiley has always been worried about this.  He thinks it's all about those mundane realities, all about fundamental economics.  Farrakhan's message didn't fail because of ideological flaws.  The old Buy American campaign didn't fail because of ideological flaws.  They failed because of the practical realities of the marketplace. 

The Carrot Project has to face that same marketplace.  And, in Wiley's opinion, it can't rely on ideology. 

And that's fair.  And scary.

But it's a challenge we might as well embrace.  It's something we think we're addressing, in a preliminary way at least, by featuring main stream brand to main stream brand comparisons, by helping people choose between Crest and Colgate or Pepsi and Coke.  Will that be enough?  Might it be a source of competitive advantage?  Maybe.  Maybe not. Either way, it's a challenge to keep in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind is the author of the book Wiley's reading, the man that wrote that passage above.  Barack Obama.  Not bad for a politician.