- Page 386 of 400 Christopher S. Penn - Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

8 things about me… or at the least, my iTunes

I was trying to come up with 8 things about me to fit the 8 things meme that [a] are interesting and [b] don’t venture into the boundaries I keep that separate my personal and professional lives. On a whim, iTunes was open, so I thought, hey, what are 8 things in my iTunes that would be interesting?

1. I have almost as much audio as video, disk space wise. I listen to lots of audio.

2. I have actually paid for some of Apple’s games, silly as they are. Nothing kills off 3 minutes in line at a store like Zuma or Bejeweled. I’m tempted to buy the billiards one next.

3. I listen to LOTS of motion picture scores and soundtracks. I have The Crow, Batman Begins, Superman, Star Wars, and anything else that sounds like John Williams.

4. I listen to LOTS of motivation/inspiration stuff too. I have Tom Hopkins sales training, Tony Robbins, Richard Bandler, and those sorts of folks.

5. I have an entire album of Tibetan music from Lama Tashi of the Drepung Loseling Monastery. It’s interesting.

6. I own tons of podsafe music, albums that I’ve either bought or been sent. Just about anything that Matthew Ebel has published (willingly or not – I have some rehearsal outtakes in there), Rayko KRB, Anji Bee, Rich Palmer, Rebecca Loebe, Michelle Cummings, Black Lab, iscintilla, Uncle Seth, Rob Costlow, and tons of concerts and things I’ve recorded over the years.

7. Almost all the video I have is stuff I’ve transcoded from iMovie, stuff I’ve made. I don’t watch many video podcasts because I don’t have time. I can listen on the commute, but not watch.

8. Every six months or so, I dump all my subscriptions to podcasts. Delete them. I then re-add any that I can remember. If I can’t remember it, chances are I wasn’t listening to it anyway.

On this twist of 8 things, tell me 8 things about your media collection, Steve Garfield, CC Chapman, Matthew Ebel, someone, Chris Brogan, Jeff Pulver, and Karen Cardoza.

August 5, 2007

Describe the pattern of usage

A few things came together in my mind on the way to work this morning. If you haven’t read Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building, I strongly encourage you to go pick up a copy. It’s a book that’s nominally on architecture, but provides concepts that go far beyond how to build stuff. One of the concepts is the idea of a pattern language, the idea that how we use something defines it.

This got me thinking about how we use language patterns long after the literal pattern is gone:

Dial a number. When was the last time you used a rotary phone? If you’re under the age of 30, do you even know what a rotary phone is?
Rewind/fast forward. Originally from the reel to reel player. You see these buttons on digital media players like flash applets and iPods, but the tape they originally applied to is long gone.
DVD. The DVD is still around, but more often than not, DVD refers to a certain length of video and a certain level of quality.
HD. Another term that’s used far beyond its original scope.
Taping a performance. When was the last time you used a magnetic tape cassette to record audio?

This of course brought me back to podcasting. Podcast is a portmanteau, a neologism that combines two words. To people who don’t know what a podcast is, you have to explain it, and that can, as any podcaster knows, be a convoluted process. What I do is describe podcasting as internet radio that you download. Yes, there’s RSS and all that stuff, but the super fast elevator pitch is internet radio that you download.

In there is the word radio. Radio doesn’t just describe a delivery mechanism or a device – radio describes a behavioral pattern, just like dial a number. Radio describes a way in which you enjoy audio delivered to you, and it describes the way you’d use that audio. TV describes a way of enjoying video content. You sit down in front of a video display device in your living room with a drink and a snack, and sit back and watch something on the device. Whether that device is a television set, a plasma display, or an iMac, TV is the general term for the behavioral pattern.

If you have a difficult concept to explain, what behavioral patterns can you leverage to make it easier for someone to instantly grasp at least the rough idea?

August 1, 2007

Since we're on the topic of voting in podcasting…

… please take a moment to vote for someone who is NOT a podcaster. My friend and musician Natalie Gelman is competing in the Famecast competition as a finalist. She’s podsafe, has been since just after PodCamp Boston 1, and has been a great supporter of podcasting and new media since her introduction to it.

What’s at stake? Among other things, $10,000 in cash, which for a young independent musician is a Very Big Deal ™. Podcasting’s abuzz with the various podcast award voting sessions running right now, and I applaud everyone who’s been nominated, but if you can spare a few minutes away from voting in the podosphere, please register at Famecast.com and then vote for Natalie Gelman.

Register here.
Vote here.

Voting concludes August 7th, so please vote before then.

August 1, 2007

Too many cameras…

I just realized after ordering a new Nikon D40 that I have too many cameras.

Kodak DX6490
Canon SD450
Nikon Coolpix L2
JVC PV-GS120
Sharp something or other
Sanyo VPC-CG65
Nokia N91

On the bright side, they all work. One of these days, I’ll open a used camera store or something.

How much fully functional but not often used stuff do you have laying around?

July 31, 2007

Taxes, taxes

Food for thought. When I mention that Sweden has a very high personal income tax rate, the nationalistic American response is, “Ha! In America, it’s the land of opportunity. Low taxes, capitalism, and opportunity for everyone!” (chances are, if you read this blog, you’re not the typical American, so I’m not counting your responses in this)

I just got my pay stub for this month. Out of every dollar earned, I pay 43 cents to Uncle Sam in the form of Federal and state taxes, Medicare, and Social Security. That gives me 57 cents on the dollar to spend. Then add in

property tax
sales tax
meal tax
utility tax for electricity
home energy tax for heating and cooking
water tax (they call it a fee for service, but face it, it’s a tax)
sewage tax
telephone tax
911 mobile tax
excise tax on the car I drive
gasoline tax for the gas I put in the car…

… and I figure that I get to *use* about 14 cents on the dollar on a good day. I’m grateful to my fantastic employer, the Student Loan Network, for providing 100% healthcare coverage, or I’d be dropping another $300 -$ 600 per month for healthcare.

How, exactly, is this low taxation?

As for opportunities, several people made the statement that America is still the best place for opportunities, to which I’d say in the 20th century, that may well have been true, but with Internet connectivity approaching near ubiquity in some countries (Europe’s 3G network puts the US to shame, and South Korea’s gigabit to the house is just frighteningly fast) opportunities are increasingly portable. In order to maintain its competitiveness in the 21st century, America has a lot of work to do to reduce government waste and invest in its citizens as other countries are doing.

Food for thought: $447 billion spent so far in Iraq. Regardless of your politics, that would pay for every college student in America to go to a four year public university for free for all four years. It’s not that we don’t have the resources in America – it’s just that we lack the will to do what is necessary to ensure our continued prosperity and to hold those we elect to office accountable for their choices.

July 30, 2007

The Mother of All Pingbacks

Working off an idea from John Wall and David Meerman Scott, here’s a massive list of everyone who has left me a comment on my blog (or in some cases, a pingback). This list was compiled from the MySQL database that powers my WordPress blog, with the query:

SELECT DISTINCT `comment_author` , `comment_author_url`
FROM csp891_comments
ORDER BY `comment_author` ASC

I stuffed the output into Excel, did a little cleanup, and here we are. Thanks to everyone who has participated in the past few months to make this blog what it is.

Updated: The DoFollow Plugin is also enabled. Google Juice for everyone!

July 29, 2007

Off the grid

Off the grid this weekend, in case anyone’s looking for me.

July 28, 2007

Test Post

I’m writing a test post using the PodCamp Boston 2 tag.

Manual tag: podcampboston2007

July 27, 2007

At the Last Minute: Relay for Life Online

I got the call this morning – “Second Life Relay For Life has almost no buzz or PR – and it’s tomorrow!”

So here’s the instant marketing plan to help this group get donations up and running.

Get the donations page set up.
Realize the donations page has an AWFUL URL to promote.
Use the word-of-mouth friendly name TodayIsave.com/alife
Get some artwork because there isn’t really all that much. Mashup SL and RFL logos.
Facebook group. Get it set up, point it to the donations page.
Look at the marketing collateral and realize it’s all depressing. People are dying, etc.
Look at the research and spin from it – donations led to the HPV vaccine, a major contributor to cervical cancer.
The long blurb: “Donations in the past led to the HPV vaccine which will lead to the prevention of cervical cancer. $20 today could save the life of your mother, child, or best friend tomorrow.”
The short blurb: “$20 today could save a life tomorrow.”
Promote the hell out of it on Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. and launch this baby like crazy.

July 26, 2007

A taste of things to come – stolen milk crates and peak oil

Let’s talk briefly about polyethylene – specifically, high density polyethylene. It’s a dense plastic that is extremely strong and resistant to a bunch of things. Things like Tupperware are made from it. It in turn is made from petroleum – oil – in a lossy process that consumes 1.75 units of petroleum to produce 1.0 units of polyethylene.

Why is this important? Well, it seems that milk crates – those super-high density crates that virtually every college student has at some point – are vanishing at a rate far beyond the usual theft rates. The dairy industry investigated and found that the price for recycled polyethylene jumped from about 7 cents per pound to 22 cents per pound over the last two years. Recyclers were accepted stolen milk crates in bulk, chopping them up, and shipping them to China to be used to make consumer goods.

Think about that for a second. China, already one of the world’s largest consumers of petroleum, has companies paying 22 cents per pound for used polyethylene instead of refining petroleum to create new polyethylene. That means that in their manufacturing processes, it’s cheaper to recycle (or use recycled materials) than it is to manufacture new – which is not usually the case.

What does this mean? To me, it hints that the cost of petroleum and relatively limited supply is causing one of the world’s largest consumer goods manufacturing economies to choose recycled materials over new, and that means that the supply of oil is probably tighter than we think.

Peak oil, anyone? A harbinger of things to come?

July 24, 2007

Author: Christopher S Penn