On Ceilings

I briefly mentioned Nora Ephron in my last post, and was looking back in my Evernote clippings and noted that the article from The Guardian on her mentions 'ceilings'.  She was addressing her Alma Mater at the time:  "Don't let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you – there's still a glass ceiling. Don't let the number of women in the workforce trick you – there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents..."  I like that last bit because I came across an article on the Net yesterday suggesting the use of sheets of bubble-wrap as an insulator on windows.  In spite of the fact that we've actually insulated the house recently, under the floor and in the ceilings, the last few days have been particularly cold.  The heat pump has been working overtime, which doesn't bode well for the power bill, and it's still been less than comfortable in some living areas in the house.  I'm getting old, so the cold obviously affects me more than it used to, but...

Anyway, I don't know that we'll be putting bubble-wrap up on the windows at this point, though it may come to that in due course.  This morning I've left the curtains shut in two of the living areas to try and keep some heat in.  

When we were in Idaho at the beginning of the year, in what was their winter (it turned out to be more like our winter, which is often relatively mild), the house had a ceiling fan that spread the heat around the main (large) living area.  I guess that would help here too - it might stop the heat sitting up at ceiling level and keeping our feet cold.  Casablanca ceiling fans are one kind of model [see example to the right] but I'm sure there are others.

Amongst my clippings is a poem The Hinge Seasons, by Therese Lloyd.  It was highly commended in this year's Caselberg Awards.  Here's a 'ceiling' quote from the last few lines:

alive to the simple generosity
of that saucer of rainwater
sending up light to the ceiling.

Here's a line from the prospectus for the old cinema that became the London Opera Centre, where I did a year's course back in the sixties: Auditorium with rich Art Deco plaster work to walls, ceiling and proscenium; side walls include large panels of delicate ornamental grillwork and original lights. Large, enriched 3-tier ceiling fitting providing illumination and air conditioning outlets.

The cinema was built in the days when cinemas were next to palaces in design, though by the time I got there it had had additional rooms built in and walls shifted and all manner of odd redesigning done to it.  

Here's Seth Godin talking about the pricing of ebooks: Certainly less than $20 (a ‘moral’ ceiling related to the price of a paper copy) and probably more than $10 (which is the floor set by Amazon as the price of a bestseller on the Kindle).  He's not talking about 'ordinary' ebooks, but books with a 'provenance.'   Sometimes Godin strikes me as a bit of a snob, especially when it comes to the marketing of his own materials.  Anyway a 'moral ceiling' is a nice concept. 

Back in November 2011, there was an article in The Guardian (yes, I know I quote them a lot) about an overzealous cleaner unintentionally destroying an artwork called When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling.[See right]  She mistook it for an eyesore that was badly in need of a clean.   Enough said, I think. 

In the light of what directors can do to a play, check out this extract from an article on modern theatre productions: Before I went I’d been warned by my agent, by at least two other writers and by one literary manager that I would hate it. They’ll wrap all the actors in cling film and swing them from the ceiling on meat hooks, take out all your text and add in new text by Michel Houellebecq they suggested to me. They were wrong.

Sebastian’s production blew my mind.

Simon Stephens goes on to say what they did do with the play - and he approved of it - but I'm not sure that every playwright has had such an enlightening experience with their work.  

And finally, an extract from a blog post by Jason Goroncy, in which the ideas of ceiling are introduced in relation to theology: When we enter a cathedral and we look up at the majestically-high ceiling, we are reminded that God is big, that God is far away, and that we are small. But in our modern multi-purpose entertainment centres, the ceiling feels almost within reach, and God is not so big, and we are not so small. This reflects a change in theology – both in our thinking about God and about ourselves. God used to be bigger and we used to smaller. But now God is not so big, and we are not so small! Or so modernity’s narrative goes.

Self-publishing in its various forms

According to Seth Godin, the following authors were all self-published.   In the light of the current chaos swirling around the world of publishing, and with self-publishing in a variety of forms becoming all too common, it's interesting to see who's on the list.  

Ben Franklin

Ezra Pound

Emily Dickinson

Marcel Proust

Dave Eggers

Thomas Paine

Jane Austen

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Walt Whitman

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Stephen Crane

Nikki Giovanni

Virginia Woolf

Of course, self-publishing isn't just confined to the world of books...what we're doing with my musical, Grimhilda!, is a form of self-publishing.  Someone said to me the other day, 'You're lucky to be getting it on at all'.   But in fact, it's because we've done it ourselves, to a great extent, that it's going on.  It would never have got off the ground if I'd waited for an impresario.   Although an impresario might have come in handy, given some of the difficulties we've faced!

Think again about Steve Jobs' quotes

Alan Jacobs alerted me to two blogs that commented on the famous Steve Jobs' graduation address, quotes from which have been doing the rounds since Jobs' death.  

Robin Hanson, on a blog called Overcoming Bias, wrote that Jobs' advice about not settling until you're doing what you really love isn't actually that practical in real world terms.  If that was the case, no one would get on and do the humdrum stuff, and unfortunately that still needs to be done, come what may. 

It's a bit like a lot of Seth Godin's blog posts: the idea that you can up and leave what you hate doing and go and find what you love doing.  The reality is that most of us have to do something that is 'normal' and do what we love in our spare time.

Will Wilkinson wittily commented further, both on Jobs' statements, and on Hanson's.  Sometimes those who have succeeded in life forget that many others just have to get on with it; they don't have the choices that hugely talented people - or hugely successful people - have.   It's just the way life is. 

I'm keen to do the things I love, but regrettably I've never been in a position to go for broke and do only the things I love.  So be it.  Contentment with your lot isn't too bad a thing, in many ways.

Incidentally, Jacobs also quotes another writer on Jobs, and the less savoury aspects of Apple's influence on the computer world.

Improving professionalism

In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 4, verse 22, Jesus says For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open. (NIV translation).

It's interesting to read Seth Godin's most recent blog post (Why you might choose to be in favour of transparency) in the light of this, and how he views what happens from a marketing angle when things that are normally hidden (things that should be out in the light) are revealed to the public.

I haven't found some of Seth's recent stuff very interesting, for some reason - he's had a bit too much of a marketing angle on things and he's more interesting when he states his creative opinions - so it's pleasing to see him onto something with a bit more substance here this morning.

Basically he's pointing out that when companies, or practitioners (pig farmers and doctors, in this case) hide stuff and then someone reveals it, the professionalism improves, and even though we sometimes have to pay more for the 'product', we can be more sure that the product is actually up to standard.

There are some connections here with the Peter Jansen (a sensitive claims clinician with ACC) situation where he was going to sue a sexual abuse victim who'd written about him on her blog. Thankfully, he's backed down (perhaps under pressure from the ACC Minister), since even though this was a private legal action on his behalf, it surely had some ethical gray areas because the situation related to his position with the ACC, rather than to something outside his profession. But the outcome, hopefully, is that the ACC professionalism will improve as a result of this brouhaha (haven't been able to use that word for a while).

Getting fame in perspective

Unless you're running for something that requires a unanimous vote, it's a mistake to focus on the frowning guy in the back of the room or the dolt who doesn't get your subtle references or the miser who isn't going to buy from you regardless...

You're on the hunt for sneezers, for fans, for people willing to cross the street to work with you. Everyone else can pound sand, that's okay. Being remarkable also means being ignored or actively disliked.

From Seth Godin: Lady Gaga and me

Incidentally, I had no idea what a 'sneezer' was in the context, so it was helpful to find this definition: Sneezer: An online marketing slang term coined by Charles Nicholls, founder of SeeWhy, to describe any customer that spreads your offers and promotions through social networks. Social networking sites make it incredibly easy for your "sneezer" customer to share promotions and positive word-of-mouth marketing about your business in a single click with his or her network of friends.

How to organise a retreat, or an advance, or a whatever

I've never had to organise a retreat - apart from the ones I've done on my own without any other bodies involved - but if I did, I'd certainly be thinking about at least some of the ideas Seth Godin proposes in his latest blog post.

He doesn't actually want to call them retreats, but advances - something I concur with entirely, and which I've said also they should be called, for years.

Basically he reviews the 'advance' as a place to do some real forward thinking, innovative network building, and a heap more. He comes up with some twenty points, any one of which would be a good addition to most retreats as they're presently conducted.

You may already do some of these (all of these? nah!) but even if you do, his post is worth a read and some reflection.

Here are a couple of my favourites:

• Never (never) have people go around a circle and say their name and what they do and their favorite kind of vegetable or whatever. The problem? People spend the whole time trying to think of what to say, not listening to those in front of them (I once had to witness 600 people do this!!)
• Instead, a week ahead of time, give each person an assignment for a presentation at the event. It might be the answer to a question like, "what are you working on," or "what's bothering you," or "what can you teach us." Each person gets 300 seconds, that's it.

and one that requires a bit of paradoxical thinking:

• Use placecards at each meal, rotating where people sit. Crowd the tables really tightly (12 at a table for 10) and serve buffet style to avoid lots of staffers in the room. Make it easy for people to leave boring tables and organically sit together at empty ones.

Quit yer whining!

When you get good at whining, you start noticing evidence that makes your whining more true. So you amplify that and immerse yourself in it, thus creating more evidence, more stuff worth complaining about.

If you spent the same time prattling on about how optimistic you are, you'd have to work hard to make that true...

Seth Godin: two problems with whining.

There is no average person

Seth Godin rants in a recent post entitled 'Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so' about those people who choose to get their opinions from shallow TV shows rather than taking the effort to read the news, or informative (and formational) non-fiction books.

It's possible Seth was having one of his rare bad hair days (quite an achievement for him), particularly when he goes on to say: Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news. Ouch.

I'm guessing that he's quoting the following sentences from a piece Varian wrote back in March this year where he says: However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day.

It's a bit of a surprise to see Seth talking about the 'average person.' As he's pointed out on more than one occasion (and I'm working from memory here, so I can't link to a specific blog post), there is no average person. [My italics, incidentally.]

The people who read online news don't equally spend 70 seconds each day. It does seem to indicate that a large number of them spend a small amount of time reading the news online, but we don't know, since we have no indication of how large a number of people this is altogether, or where this statistic comes from. Nevertheless, in order to get that average figure we would have to have a number of people who read the news online for a good number of minutes, maybe more than those who 'on average' read the newspaper for 25 minutes a day, as well as having a good number of people who read the online news for less than 70 seconds a day.

But we just don't know: 'Mr or Ms Average 70 secs' is a non-existent person, and should never be invited to anyone's party, not Seth's, nor Hal Varian's - not even mine.

Slow down...

We've got this fascinating present we're living in, and we can't seem to be present in it. We're so worried about either not having lived the last moment well or not living the next moment well that we end up missing the current moment entirely.

Peter Bregman: Not Enough Time? Try Doing Nothing (Read the whole article Even if you don't agree with the idea of meditation - and Bregman's version of it is extremely low-key - what he has to say about breathing instead of reacting is worth picking up on.)

And another of my favourite writers, Seth Godin, on Demonstrating strength.

He provides nothing more than a list - 54 words in total. It sounds suspiciously like the Christian way to live, as much as the way a marketer should behave....!

Here are the first two lines:
Apologize
Defer to others...

Protecting, or not protecting, Intellectual Property

Julia Kirby has written an interesting article, published on the Harvard Business Review, called Why China Might Never Protect IP - that's Intellectual Property, to you and me.

China plainly has a different view of what belongs to whom. Or perhaps they have a different view of theft. But what Kirby points out is that even in the Western world now people are focusing increasingly on openness, a way in which when I create something that you can use or develop, I just let it go for free. Linux is an early example; Wikipedia is a later one, and one that has those people who think you have to make money out of everything still scratching their heads over.


Newspapers are learning the hard way that people aren't interested in being 'special people' who can read the 'special' news by paying a subscription for an online newspaper. Some will - that's fine. Most people who use the Internet have an innate sense that if newspaper A online isn't free newspaper B will be. Guess who gets read?

One of the comments on Kirby's article calls the article drivel. I just read through Seth Godin's alphabetical list of ;post-industrial' words. He introduces it by saying:

New times demand new words, because the old words don't help us see the world differently. Along the way, I've invented a few, and it occurs to me that sometimes I use them as if you know what I'm talking about.

Yes, he has invented a few, but not so many that we don't understand what he says. And his list isn't that unfamiliar. Anyway, one of his favourite words/phrases is the 'lizard brain'. My suspicion is that the person who called Kirby's article 'drivel' was being driven by his lizard brain when he wrote his comment. Kirby and Godin would mostly agree with each other's 'worldview' (another of the words on Godin's list, and definitely one he hasn't invented!)

We're in an extraordinary transition time in terms of property of all sorts; greed and endless profit is no longer the motivating factor for many people. It'll be interesting to see how it all pans out, and at the speed with which things are moving, I may still be around to see what happens!

A genius at your own level

The other day, Seth Godin wrote: If you're waiting for a boss or an editor or a college to tell you that you do good work, you're handing over too much power to someone who doesn't care nearly as much as you do.

We spend a lot of time organizing and then waiting for the system to pick us, approve of us and give us permission to do our work.

This somewhat ties in with something I've struggled with a good deal over the years: a kind of self-criticism that says what I do isn't good enough - because so and so does it so much better. The fact that so and so is some kind of genius has never impressed the self-critic in me. Because so and so is great/good/capable, I must therefore always be on a lower step on the rung.

It's nonsense of course, and what's worse it makes me criticise others, both those who really are better than me, and those who plainly aren't (though of course the critic doesn't let me say that without feeling guilty).

I realised the other day, after having discussed this at length with my supervisor on several occasions, that there really isn't some kind of magical 'bar' just out of reach that I'm always striving for....one that someone else has placed there. The only bar I need to worry about (if worry is the right word) is the bar I'm prepared to climb up to. If what I'm doing isn't good enough the bar is the one I set in place myself to make sure that what I do is good enough.

I need a bar, a kind of level to strive for. Otherwise, 'okay' is good enough - and of course it isn't; it's usually second-rate. But the other side of this is that when I do do well, or write something that's good, then that sets the standard for future work, and also satisfies the inner critic.

Furthermore, as Godin says, I don't need 'permission' from someone else, approval that says what I've done is good. Of course we all like to hear that other people appreciate what we create - equally we don't like to hear other people saying they don't like what we've done. However, reliance on that approval (or disapproval) is, in the end, counterproductive. It tells us nothing except that someone liked or disliked something.

The person who needs to like or dislike it is the creator of it. Ultimately I'm the judge of the work. If I think I've done my utmost with it, then that's the place to sit and be satisfied. If I realise that I can improve it (see the previous post) then I need to knuckle down and improve it. Until it's at that 'level,' that 'bar' I was talking about, it will make me feel dissatisfied.

But at least that dissatisfaction is within my own sphere, not 'created' by some false sense that someone else would/could do better, and that I'm a fraud to pretend I can do as well.

On an entirely different note, because different notes give variety, and monotonal music/writing is a bore, I have just discovered what pop displays are. I thought they must be something to do with pop-outs. Nope. The 'pop' stands for 'point of purchase' - that's not what we call them here in NZ where the term is more often 'point of sale display' - and it means all those little things you (or worse, your kids) can pick up at the last minute and throw into the bunch of stuff you've just spent an hour buying around the supermarket, or Bunnings, or The Warehouse, or wherever.

Bunnings opened its new store in Dunedin a few days ago - tonight they had about five minutes of full-scale fireworks blazing throughout the night sky, the second such display in a few weeks - the last was for the last match at Carisbrook, the famed sports ground that has been dumped in favour of the new Stadium Dunedin is building at enormous cost to the ratepayers - even though initially we were told it wouldn't cost us a thing! That ridiculously long sentence, with its muddled syntax and cluttered phrases is a prime example of something that should be fixed up (my inner critic is doing a poor imitation of weeping), but since the bar for this paragraph is just where I'm sitting already, I'm not going to do anything more about it!

[Picture of Mozart - a genius - for those who didn't recognise him.]

Every three seconds? A little bit of hyperbole?

The world is awash with e-books and their ilk. It's reported that Steve Jobs (not him personally, but him as a kind of entity) is selling an iPad every three seconds. I find that just a little incredible as a stat, but I've been surprised by stats before. Let's see what that actually means in real terms.

There are 86400 seconds in a day. Divided by three, that says that Steve is selling 28,800 iPads a day. Really? In a week, he'll be selling 201,600. In a thirty-day month, he'd be selling, 864,000 of the things, if my calculations are right. That's ten times the number of seconds in a day. An interesting bit of number play.

I suppose that's possible. And I suppose it's possible that Jobs and co can churn out that many from their production line, wherever that is, and that teenagers in need of acne treatment and saga generation people in need of new dentures can both discover the joys and wonders of the iPad idol. (Sorry, did I say 'idol'? Surely not.)

Seth Godin, from whom I got the stat about the three seconds, is obviously a fan of the Kindle, and has written a post suggesting ways in which it might forge ahead of its competitor. And of course the Kobo has just arrived on the NZ market, from Whitcoulls, of all people. (Perhaps the most innovative thing they've got involved with in along time.) Check out their site or check out Whitcoulls ebooks selection. I can't say the prices impress me much; I think I thought they'd be rather cheaper than they are. SuperFreakonomics, for instance, is showing at NZ$29.95. You might as well buy the book.

Marketers as artists?

Seth Godin stretching the idea of what it is to be artist:

Art, by my definition, has nothing to do with painting and everything to do with connecting with people in a generous way and causing a change to take place. A movie director is making art when she makes you cry. A product designer creates art when the UI is better than it needs to be and it creates efficiency or even joy. Marketers can find plenty of Dummies books and manuals and insider PDFs that demonstrate, step by step, how to follow the rules. That's easy and not particularly valuable. A marketer becomes an artist when she goes out on a limb, does the unexpected or the risky and makes a difference.

I'd argue that you two [Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba] do art when you stand up and give a talk about the 1%. Or Biz Stone was an artist when he figured out how to launch and scale Twitter's marketing. Or Scott Monty at Ford when he does a car show rollout that bypasses the cocktail parties at AutoWeek in favor of individual interviews with social media mavens. The second time someone does something, it's a copy. The first time, it's art.

Hmm...not sure I entirely agree. Maybe when you view everything from a marketing perspective you begin to take over language from other arenas.

Chasing the wrong prize

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.

Seth Godin

Facing the Fear

An extract from an interview with Seth Godin.
The interviewer was Gretchen Rubin on The Happiness Project - a blog with the subtitle: A chronicle of my attempts to test-drive every tip, principle and scientific study that promotes happiness. (Hmmm - happiness is scientific?)

Back to Seth:

"There are two secrets to creativity:

1. Understand that there's no gene for it. No cultural or family history required. Creativity isn't a gift from above, it's something that everyone is capable of.


2. The only thing that prevents your creativity from showing up is fear. Fear of being laughed at, fear of being wrong, fear of seeming uninformed. So many creative exercises and habits revolve around overcoming that fear.

For me, the single best thing you can do to become more creative is to be wrong more often. Creative people are wrong all the time (look at Apple's long string of failures). The goal is to create a safe place to be wrong, a way to be wrong without destroying yourself. The more wrong I am, the more often, the better I seem to get at being creative."

I can certainly agree with Seth about the fear aspect: it's very easy to think 'no one will like this - I'm going to make a fool of myself [especially when it comes to acting, or performing my own music] - this stuff isn't as good as so-and-so's' - and more. It's something you have to keep stepping up on top of and ignoring.

1,000 True Fans

I've just been reading an interesting (and long) blog post by Kevin Kelly (cartoon at right) called 1000 True Fans. I was alerted to it by Seth Godin a few days ago. The Kelly post is actually more than a year old, but suddenly seems to have taken on new life, possibly because Godin 'advertised' on his blog.

Anyway what Kelly has to say is that those artists who are probably never going to make it big-time -or perhaps don't even have the inclination to do so - may, however become well enough known by focusing their attention on 1,000 'true fans.' (Plainly 1,000 is a round number and doesn't have to be adhered to.) Not only will these fans support them financially, but they will keep the artist in a manner which allows him or her to work solely at their art, rather than trying to hold down a day job as well.

These true fans don't have to spend up large to keep the artist going; they may spend only a $100 a year. But that figure by 1,000 adds up to a reasonable sum - in fact most artists probably wouldn't need as much as that to survive comfortably (or to pay their low cost health insurance.)

As I said, the post is long, and there are two subsequent posts that offer further thought on the subject. It's not an original idea from Kelly - he tells us about others who've discussed the possibility before - but he pulls the thing together.

I found one other thing on Kelly's site which I thought was worth sharing. Just when you thought you knew everything about the World Wide Web (does anyone call it that anymore?) here's a different take on it...

What Matters Now

I've quite often quoted or mentioned Seth Godin in this blog. He's an entrepreneurial kind of guy with a whiz of a brain and plenty of ideas - so many in fact that you could be excused for thinking he has too many. He's a bit like someone who's always throwing seeds around - virtually anywhere will do - and expecting that a good number of them will come up in the harvest. Sure some of them fall on rocky ground, some in poor soil, but there are so many going that at the end of the day you'll have something. (He'd probably argue with my analogy - he gives the impression of aiming to make his ideas hit the target every time.)

Sometimes he can be annoying in his blog posts; sometimes I think he's just plain wrong about what he's said (not often, mind you); sometimes he's not talking to me, and that's fine.

Anyway, all this is by way of introducing his latest 'book' - ebook, that is. It's called What Matters Now and you can download it. The book isn't by Godin himself, although he's had a big hand in it: it's written by some 60 or 70 authors who each contribute a page (a screenful, in other words) and who each take some word (parsing is the one I happen to be looking at just now) and reflect briefly on it, in all sorts of creative ways. Some of the pages are 'normal,' many are colourful - some are handwritten. Some are focused on marketing (Godin's speciality) most are not.

Much of what is here will be quoted in the future all around the Net; in fact, this book is already written about on blogs all over the place. This is just one more post to add to the mix.

Incidentally, can that photo be real? It's ubiquitous on the Net, but it has a slightly doctored look about it. Perhaps it's just making the most of the uniqueness of this particular face...

Curious and Successful

Seth Godin writes in a post today:

I've noticed that people who read a lot of blogs and a lot of books also tend to be intellectually curious, thirsty for knowledge, quicker to adopt new ideas and more likely to do important work.

I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?

Well, that's the sum total of the post, so I hope Seth won't object to me copying it in full (quoting just ten percent might make the quote a bit incoherent!) I'm not sure quite what he means in his second sentence - it doesn't seem quite to follow from the previous one. Successful people aren't necessarily curious, I'd think. And curious people aren't necessarily successful. Actually when I read the first sentence again, I'm not even sure that intellectually curious people really do adopt new ideas more quickly. Maybe I'm just getting picky because the post was so short!

I'm looking around

Our local Operatic Society, which used to put on very good shows which didn't cost them the earth to produce or the customer the earth to watch, have, over the last decade or two put on extravaganzas that involve heaps of cash and aren't cheap to attend.

There are two parts to the problem: one is that the Operatic Societies around the country decide together each year or thereabouts to produce a big show, something like Les Miserables. They club together and pay for the sets and costumes to be trundled around the country so that each society can have a turn with the goods without having to build and make them from scratch.

The other is that these shows cost a huge amount to put on in terms of royalties. Seth Godin had something to say about this in his blog the other day. He pointed out that even in the States to put on a now-rather-tired-old-show like Grease still costs the average musical comedy society or high school a good deal of money. $US3000 in the case of this particular musical. And the reason for this is that a small band of licensers have a kind of 'monopoly' on how much should be charged.

Here's Seth's solution. He writes:

Here's the opportunity that the net provides (in this case and so many others): someone should organize the customers and negotiate on their behalf.

Imagine contacting 3,000 high schools and finding 500 willing to join together and agree to act as a buying cartel. Now, the organizer can poll the directors at these schools and find thirty plays they'd be willing to put on next year. Go to the rights holders of these plays and say, "We're going to pick six of these plays. Each of the six will get a huge number of customers as a result, perhaps twenty times as many as you usually get. But to be among the six, you need to lower your price by a factor of ten."

Now, if you're the rights holder, you have a dilemma (but not a huge one). You can agree to lower your price and thus double your annual revenue on this dusty old play, or you can stay where you are and make zero.

As Seth so often does, he makes good sense. It's just a matter of having someone to champion such a process and get it off the ground. I'm looking around....

That tribal stuff

I'm not entirely convinced by Seth Godin's theories on tribes, but obviously plenty of other (tribal) people are. However, I keep reading Seth's blog, because quite often he has something very good to say (and occasionally says something that makes you go, Duh?). Anyway, here's a short video on the tribes idea, which Seth pronounces to be very good in part because it uses motion graphics. He claims he won't read past the first page of a pdf any more; videos like this are the way of the future for him....




The video's by Paul Durbin, by the way. He obviously has some resources many of us who are still making pdfs don't have...!

However, it's interesting that the video leads to a pdf that's available here free. I wonder if it's a pdf that will make Mr Godin read past the first page - maybe, since the second page is written by him!