Last week, Jamie Sandford began the day with what I’ll call a “metatweet.” I responded. It took off. Here’s how our conversation evolved throughout the course of the day:

@jsandford: <something about coffee>

@davidbthomas: <something about Mondays>

@jsandford: <inspirational way-too-much vim and vigor tackling-the-week tweet>

@davidbthomas: <excessive use of motivational hashtags>

@jsandford: <ending of day tweet>

@davidbthomas: <expressing an interest in a particular foodstuff and/or alcoholic beverage>

@jsandford: <general agreement and/or countering with alternative item which is more complex or uses rarer ingredients>

@davidbthomas: <enthusiastic agreement, onomatopoeia representing consumption of said foodstuff>

@jsandford: <comment related to upcoming TV show, hashtagged>

@davidbthomas: <parenting anecdote>

@jsandford: <emphatic sport event comment!>

@davidbthomas: <support for the opposing team expressed as ridicule of your character>

@jsandford: <denigration of your team based on menial historical statistic relating to prior triumph in the series>

@davidbthomas: <rejection of the importance of your quoted statistic, followed by equally trivial statistic from earlier contest>

@jsandford: <commentary on the difficult nature of putting small descendants to bed and/or humorous pre-slumber saying>

I’ve seen quite a few discussions lately about the Spotify online music service. A few people said they didn’t get it; they wanted to own their music, not rent it. I saw a similar comment about the Amazon Kindle e-reader. That person was concerned that Amazon could take the content back at any time; he wanted to own it.

Why?

I’m not talking about people who like the experience of holding an actual book. I get that. Or audiophiles who get all squishy at the smell of a freshly-unwrapped vinyl LP. I mean, why do you care about actually owning the content?

For one thing, you don’t in fact “own” the content; the artist or author does. You’re just buying the delivery medium.

I listen to all my music through iTunes, XM Radio or the web (just trying out Spotify). I have around 500 albums and I haven’t had a functioning turntable in at least a decade. My CDs are in the drawers of my son’s dresser. (We’ll have to move those as soon as he discovers them or I predict they will turn into a thousand shiny projectiles.)

I don’t want to own content. I don’t even really want to store content. I just want it available when I want to access it.

I love using Kindle on my iPad. It syncs to my iPhone which means I always have the book I’m reading with me. There are some books I’ve re-read several times (Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, for one), but looking at my Kindle library now, I’ll tell you there aren’t more than one or two titles on there that I have any desire to “archive.”

For TV and movies, even fewer. Remember that Qwest commercial from about ten years ago? A haggard looking man checks in to a dusty motel and asks the bored teenage clerk if they have any in-room entertainment. She says something like, “We have every movie ever made, available at any time, day or night.”

Yeah, that’s what I want.

When I found out that Spotify let you stream whole albums for free, I thought, “Yep, that’s it. I’m done.” My favorite albums of all time are London Calling by The Clash, I Just Can’t Stop It by The Beat and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis (yes, I went to college in the ’80s). I listen to them maybe twice a year, if I’m honest. Why do I need to buy them and hold them, if I can go online and listen to them whenever I want?

Yes, there’s lots of obscure music out there you won’t find online, and things do go out of print and disappear, but if you’re worried about that, I already covered you in my squishy LP-opener category.

I don’t want a closet full of storage devices. I don’t even want a hard drive full of files. It feels like clutter to me, and something that will endlessly have to be maintained, backed up and worried over. If I ever did make a full to-do list, there would be several items related to just the external hard drive with my MP3s on it (back up, eliminate duplicates, organize). I don’t need that.

Tommy Lee Jones, viewing a new piece of alien music technology in one of the Men In Black movies says, “I guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again.”

No you don’t! You just need to pay somebody who has the White Album online. And if a service like Spotify can supply both the archiving of old music and the discovery of new, that’s all I’ll ever need.

(Of course this all falls apart if the White Album isn’t available to stream. I should probably check that.)

If you like owning your music and books, I’d love to hear why.

image by me

I find I’m not using contractions as much anymore. I just wrote “he had been ready” when I’m sure I would ordinarily have written “he’d been.” (Of course, now that my mind is on it I’m using contractions in this post, so this is not a good test case.)

I blame the iPhone. It is much faster and easier when typing a text message or an email to write out the full words rather than go into the special characters menu for an apostrophe. (Just read that over and saw I’d written “it is” instead of “it’s.”) Also, the iPhone autocorrect feature has some quirks that sometimes mistake one contraction for another.

Now that I’m conscious of it I’m re-reading some things I’ve written recently. The lack of contractions seems to make my writing seem more formal, more stilted and, in a way, dumber.

Has mobile keyboarding changed the way you write?

photo by someToast

I have a love/hate relationship with bizspeak. I’m fascinated by the way phrases enter our lexicon, become popular, then die off. But I also get annoyed by hackneyed writing and lazy speech. Smart people usually fall back on cliches because they don’t have time to think of an original way to illustrate an idea, and that’s understandable.

Still, it sets my teeth on edge when I hear something like, “We’ll start at the 50,000 foot level, then do a core dump and a deep dive and brainstorm some value-add strategies to open the kimono.” David Meerman Scott does a great job skewering the phenomenon in his Gobbledygook Manifesto.

When I worked at Nortel, back in the late 20th century, there was a phrase in vogue that got used so confusingly that I’m convinced most people didn’t know what it meant. The phrase was sometimes rendered as “moving the goal posts” and sometimes as “moving the yard sticks.” Sometimes people said “moving the yard sticks” to indicate progress, as the ball moves forward on a football field. Others used “moving the goal posts” to mean the target had shifted after the project was underway.

Others used them interchangeably, or incorrectly, so that whenever anyone used either phrase, you had to stop and wonder if they meant it was a good thing or a bad thing.

The phrase I’m hearing a lot these days is “move the needle,” as in “do something to create a measurable impact.” Not too bad, all things considered. But let’s hop on it before we get sick of it. Can we come up with another phrase that will mean the same thing?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Stuff the turkey
2. Butter the muffin
3. Inflate the balloon
4. Squeeze the turnip
5. Grate the cheese
6. Raise the barn
7. Float the armada
8. Pickle the okra

Your ideas? We’ll decide on it, then start using it. We won’t tell anyone. We’ll see if other people start using it. It’ll be our secret.

photo by Amarillo Chuck

I was just perusing Facebook, as part of my getting-ready-to-write ritual. (It’s also part of my taking-a-break-from-writing ritual and my winding-down-from-writing ritual. Essentially, if it weren’t for Facebook, I could have finished this book in an afternoon.)

I came across a link to an article at PCMag.com entitled Suburu Slaps In-Car Wi-Fi into its 2011 Outback.

Interesting idea, but I was reading the article thinking, “I’m not sure it’s worth paying $29 a month for another Internet connection that you can only use in the car.” At least not for me. The only device I’m likely to connect when I’m in the car is my iPhone, and that’s already, you know, connected.

I am becoming increasingly averse to monthly fees. I will almost certainly cancel my XM Radio subscription, the next time I remember. Yes, there’s some good content, but there’s also lots of good content out there for free. (It should come as little shock that I spend the little time I have in the car alone listening to marketing podcasts like Six Pixels of Separation/Media Hacks, Marketing Over Coffee, For Immediate Release and Managing the Gray. Those are all free, as well as valuable. Those nine and ten and eleven bucks a month fees add up, after all. Then I came to this quote:

“We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: It doesn’t make sense to pay for most in-car Wi-Fi solutions from automakers,” writes editor David Thomas.

So I guess this idea isn’t playing very well with David Thomases.

Dad, what do you think?

photo by germanyengland

Last night The Mrs looked over my shoulder at Tweetdeck and said, “Everybody’s talking about Old Spice.” It’s the hottest topic in social media, marketing and advertising right now. Built on the success of the video embedded above, which now has more than 13 million views on YouTube, the integrated social media campaign features shirtless ab merchant Isaiah Mustafa, who recorded dozens of personalized YouTube responses to all kinds of people who mentioned Old Spice on Twitter and Facebook. And not just Ashton Kutcher and Alyssa Milano: in a quick scan I saw three videos addressed to people I know personally, not just through social media.

No doubt this campaign will win dozens of awards and be the subject of multiple case studies. I look forward to seeing some hard analytics showing how this campaign actually affects Old Spice sales. In the meantime, assuming one of the goals was to raise awareness of Old Spice, I think we can mark that goal achieved.

I just had a lunchtime conversation with my colleague John Mosier, who leads our content strategy initiatives. We talked about the reasons we think this campaign succeeded. In essence, they used the techniques of social media and raised them up to the brand level in a way that few companies have done.

In other words, they made it scale.

(It was no mean feat. This excellent article at ReadWriteWeb talks about the team that made it happen.)

Here’s what they did right:

1. They understood the communities they were addressing. They knew how people communicated in those channels and how they liked to be addressed. They spoke the right language. They even got positive responses to their video directed at the “anonymous” users of 4chan, which is perhaps not the easiest community to impress.
2. They understood the channels they were using, what the individual characteristics of those channels were and what benefit they could derive from each.
3. They had great content. Everybody wants their campaign to “go viral,” and the Old Spice campaign demonstrates once again what it takes to make that happen. The scripts for the videos are genuinely funny, edgy and innovative.
4. They had great talent. Despite my description above, Isaiah Mustafa is much more than a pretty torso. He’s a talented comic actor with great timing, and is apparently an ironman, considering he stood in a towel for a very long time, cranking out video after video. Isaiah was supported by a social media team and a group of writers who are obviously at the top of their game. I’ve watched a dozen of the videos and haven’t seen a single one that wasn’t genuinely funny.
5. They knew when to quit. Rather than milking it to the point where people were sick of it, they left on a high note, ending the personalized video responses today with a thank you video to everyone. The comments to that video on YouTube are mostly along the lines of “Oh, no! You can’t go!”

No doubt we will see a flood of imitators trying to duplicate Old Spice’s formula. Many of those efforts will ring hollow. Inevitably, some will be downright embarrassing. I’m sure a lot of corporate marketers are looking at this and thinking, “All you need to make a splash on the Web is a good gimmick.”

Good marketers already know that breakthrough campaigns are built by smart people with great ideas, amazing content and a solid understanding of their customers and the places they congregate, backed by intelligent execution.

This blog post is now diamonds.

This isn’t the kind of thing I normally write about, and this post is far from comprehensive, but I got into a conversation with two colleagues recently about how to connect a computer to a TV and stream your shows without needing a cable box. I wrote them a long email with my experiences, and, as is my wont, I decided I’d post that email here in case it’s helpful.

The Mrs and I shut off our cable TV service about seven months ago and have since been using a Mac Mini plugged into our Vizio HDTV for streaming video. It’s not necessarily an easy transition and takes some fiddling, but if you’re the kind of person who likes fiddling, it’s a good way to save about a hundred clams a month (for now, until the cable companies and content providers figure out better ways to charge for it).

Here’s the advice I gave my colleagues:

Here’s a good video that lays out all the steps. It gets a bit bogged down in all the cable options. My advice would be to Google specific questions about your TV and your computer, e.g., “connect Macbook Pro to Vizio HDTV.” Most likely someone has already done what you’re trying to do.

Basically, hooking up your computer to a modern TV is no different than hooking it up to a monitor. You just need to find the right cables.

For us it was easiest to connect our Mac Mini to our Vizio TV using a VGA cable plugged in to the TV, and a mini display port to VGA adapter to plug it into the Mac.

A lot of PCs have a VGA port already, so for a PC you can get a VGA cable and just plug it in to both devices. I did that when I was using an HP laptop with the TV.

The next challenge once you get it plugged in is setting the display and finding the right resolution. The video gives a good overview of how to do that. One thing that helps is finding the “native resolution” of your TV, which is probably shown in your TV manual, or you can probably find it online. If you set your computer’s display properties to the same resolution as your TV’s native resolution, you should be able to get full screen video with no letterboxing effect.

Of course, as with all things computer, sometimes it works easily and sometimes it doesn’t. I tried to use my Mac Mini with a mini display port to HDMI adapter, following specific instructions people had posted on the web, and could never get the color or resolution right. I gave up and went back to the VGA cable, which works fine.

The VGA cable doesn’t transmit sound, however, so I had to plug my computer into my stereo with a headphone-out-to-RCA-in cable to get audio output, but I was going to do that anyway. If you can get an HDMI cable to work, it will transmit sound as well, through your TV’s speakers.

We mostly watch network shows free on Hulu.com. We also have Netflix, so we can stream movies and TV shows from netflix.com. For the few shows we like that are not available in either of those places, we buy a series subscription through iTunes and download them.

There’s also a free web-based service called Boxee that aggregates a lot of feeds and attempts to make this all more streamlined, but I haven’t given it a good try.

None of this is simple and tidy. It requires a lot of fiddling at the start and a lot of web searching, unless you hit it lucky right away. Then, you have to hunt to find the shows you want. Depending on the strength of the network connection in your neighborhood, you may find that streaming video starts and stops. Most of the services like Netflix and Hulu will allow the show to “buffer,” so that it runs smoothly, but that means you might wait a minute or two for it to start.

You can run a free test at Speedtest that will tell you the download and upload speeds for your network and give you an estimate of the time required to download different types of files. Be sure to test it more than once, at the times you are most likely to be streaming TV shows. If you get a reading significantly below average, you might want to call your cable company and ask. One of our neighbors found ours to be very low, and the cable company investigated and made some changes to match the high load in our neighborhood.

All in all, for us it’s been worth the $100 a month savings, and we find we’re watching TV more selectively, which was one of our goals. Also, there are fewer commercials on Hulu.com shows than on the broadcast equivalent, but already we’re seeing signs that is changing.

In other words, the free lunch won’t last forever. But for now, it’s worth it.

photo by Paulpod

I’m working at home today, having returned to meet the HVAC guy and finding out we need a new air conditioner. I was upstairs (since the upstairs AC unit is still okay, touch wood) and kept hearing what sounded like helicopters overhead. I went outside to look but didn’t see any.

After a while I was sure I heard one, then it sounded like two or more. I asked a question on Facebook and Twitter: “Okay, at the risk of sounding like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, why have I been hearing a helicopter in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area for the last hour or more? It’s almost never a good sign.”

I assumed it would be bad news. The only time a hovering helicopter is welcome, in my experience, is when UNC wins the NCAA championship.

Several folks responded right away to let me know what I could have found with a news search, that a light plane had crashed at Horace Williams Airport, not too far from where we live. Sadly, the news is reporting that one person was killed and two injured. One of the passengers is the brother of the American killed in the recent bombing in Uganda that targeted viewers of the World Cup final. He was flying home to be with his family. Thankfully, from what I can tell, he’s okay.

I’m sitting here in my bedroom now, listening to what sounds like several news helicopters, flying back and forth, no doubt broadcasting the same image of a crumpled airplane.

In 1995, a UNC law student named Wendell Williamson shot and killed two people near downtown Chapel Hill, UNC sophomore and lacrosse player Kevin Reichardt and Chapel Hill resident Ralph W. Walker, Jr. He also shot and injured two other people, including a young Chapel Hill police officer who was shot through the open window of her car as she rushed to the scene. As this 1999 article in Time points out, everybody who was in Chapel Hill at the time has a memory of that event. I had two friends who were downtown at the time and hid from the shootings in a parking garage. Another said Williamson shot at him and missed.

I was in Durham during the shootings. I don’t remember why, but I know it was after I had started working for myself because I had my first cell phone. I was driving back into Chapel Hill when my mother called. “Don’t worry,” she said, “your father is fine.” Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about because I hadn’t heard the news. My dad worked at UNC-Chapel Hill at the time, having retired from Nortel and taken an associate dean position at the School of Education.

I called and talked to him, then I pulled the car over, turned on the radio news and was overwhelmed by a deep sadness. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill since 1989. We moved around a lot when I was young, and Chapel Hill quickly felt like home when I moved here and took a job at The Chapel Hill News. Inside a year I knew lots of people, from the mayor to the door guy at The Cat’s Cradle to bank presidents and bartenders and musicians and town council members and business owners.

It turns out I probably also knew Williamson, as he and I were both regulars at the Hardback Cafe. I don’t really remember him, possibly because I was usually there in the evenings and he was a daytime regular.

Everybody says the same thing in the aftermath of senseless violence, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen here. If you’ve ever been to Chapel Hill, it’s a fairly typical, picturesque college town. When it gets mentioned in books, it’s usually called “leafy” or “sleepy.” It’s grown a lot in the 21 years that I’ve lived here, but it’s still a pretty laid-back and friendly place. The kind of place where tragedy feels more personal.

My apartment was near downtown. I found out later that Williamson had parked his car in the lot of the adjacent apartments, and walked into town via the same route I used. Sitting on the couch watching the news, I could see the helicopters outside my window. They would hover there, motionless, for as long as they could, then zoom off abruptly to refuel. Then they would come back. That went on for a long time; in my memory they were there for hours.

I remember wanting to shout at them to go away. The longer they hovered there, the more ghoulish, inhuman and robotic they began to look, like mechanized vultures.

That’s what I’m thinking of now, as the helicopters hover outside my window again. I can’t quite see them through the trees, except when they climb to get a different view, or, I assume, leave to refuel. I suppose they’ll be there through the evening news broadcasts, and we’ll be eating dinner to the sound of rotor blades.

… that I was buying into the lifestyle of a busy executive on the go, the kind of executive who might, at a moment’s notice, jet off to Baltimore – first class!