GlitchNYC

Okay - so technically they’re not completely free since you have to trade some of your old games for them, but really, we’re you going to play Counter Strike anymore now that you’ve got an XBOX 360?

I’m not traditionally a console gamer, so I’ve gotten very little use out of the game-trading site Goozex so far. Since they were a “CD only” operation until now, I’ve sent out some games and built up points but that’s about it.

Recently, Goozex added handheld games to their repertoire, and I just got my first GBA game, Sword of Mana, in the mail. It’s like getting a free game! The first 3 “transaction fees” (usually a meager $1) are waived, so this one really was “on the house”.

Speaking of games, there’s some new developments here in the apartment, but more on that soon. In the meantime, check out Goozex. They’re cool people - I met some of them handing out fliers in Times Square while I was doing the same thing for The Alternative Music Show - and they’ve got a great little service.

Welcome to the participatory web. The end of consumer culture. The age of making, rather than buying, and giving instead of always getting. As we all turn from consumers to producers, there’s nearly endless satisfaction to be had in simply making something.

But lets face it… It’s a whole lot cooler if there’s also someone who’s enjoying that thing you’re making. Whether it’s a writing an evocative blog post, recording an awesome podcast, or even clipping a popular clip, seeing people appreciate your work is like seeing someone’s eyes light up as they open the perfect birthday gift.

In some ways, it’s even better than getting that perfect gift yourself.

Does that make all this participation selfish? Perhaps, but to me, it’s a good kind of selfish. I can deal with the “I did something good today” type of validation being something that we’re all gluttons for. Hell, the idea that maybe we can take this amazing “selfishness” offline a bit and make the world a little bit nicer to live in keeps me up at night, and gives me hope for the future.

But wasn’t this post about Godiva? Well, the secret that we’re all learning is that it’s not simply enough to make something great. You’ve also got to let people know that it’s worth their time to check it out.

There’s there’s a subtle science to conveying greatness before people ever get in the door, and the retail world has been perfecting the art of “making you want the stuff you want” (to steal a phrase from the marketing geniuses at podtini) for centuries.

So let’s look at this Godiva package for a moment.

In a sea of Bright! Colored! Bigger! New! candy available this Halloween, Godiva’s is small. It’s tastefully designed. You know it’s better before you ever open it, and that preconceived notion has the power to actually make it taste like the best chocolate you’ve ever eaten.

If you were to ask someone what made certain chocolate great, you’d probably have a long discussion about milk vs oil ratios, cocoa quality, and other quantifiable differences, yet the Godiva package is notably lacking in any claims about it’s contents. It relies entirely on almost intangible aesthetics to make it’s pitch.

It’s tempting to say that Godiva is marketed completely on it’s reputation, but to be honest, no one has ever recommended Godiva chocolate to me. My perception is based entirely on the idea that if they can afford to put this much effort into the experience around their product, then they must put even more into what they do best. It’s something that apple hits a home-run on nearly every time, so much so that there’s a growing culture around simply unboxing their products.

Today’s overall Lesson from retail? You’ve only got a few seconds to win people over. Even if you’re giving something awesome away for free, don’t be afraid to get the “packaging” right. Sometimes it’s just as important as what’s inside.

For an excellent example of how getting the packaging right can work online, take a peek at Photojojo - “one damn fine photo newsletter.”

(A replica of Hermione’s time-turner from the Harry Potter 3. )

Why is it that all the events I want to attend here in NYC happen on the same Wednesday evening?

Tonight, I’ll be heading to the Video 2.0 event, but that means I’ll not only be missing yet another NYC podcasters meetup, but I’m also going to miss a NYLUG (New York Linux Users Group) presentation with Ajai Khattri talking about Gentoo Linux.

If these events were Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I’d love to be at all three!

While I’m wishing for the magic ability to be everywhere at once, I’m bummed that I’m going to have to miss MarCamp - the ad-hoc, barcamp style marketing conference on Sept. 26th. If you’re out on the west coast and involved in podcasting, blogging, or any type of marketing, I’d really suggest making it to this event. I know a bunch of people are heading out that way a bit early for the Portable Media Expo, and it would make a great first stop!

Speaking of the PME, I’ll be skipping that as well, instead pouring all my energy into Podcamp in Boston on Sept 9th-10th and BarCampNYCII here in the city Sept 30-Oct 1st.

Phew! That’s a lot of events, and a lot of links! Wish me luck, it’s going to be a fun month!

Check out this promotional video for Rayman: Raving Rabbids. It features a whole family getting involved with the Nintendo Wii’s innovative and kinetic gameplay, but with actors that make the kids from Saved by the Bell cast look like master thespians.

It’s worth a watch both for a glimpse of how the Wii will work in action and to guffaw at embarrassingly bad commercial itself.

It’s a complete “Duh!” right? If you want the community to talk about your product, service, podcast, photos, or whatever, you should make it easy for them to link to.

I read Tantek’s piece today and almost dismissed it as a no brainer…

Until I realized how bad I was at it.

I haven’t given people any obvious and easy and obvious ways bookmark or blog about either The Alternative Music Show or Felt Up. He lists a bunch of smart ways to go about it, and I’ll certainly be going through the list this weekend when I have some time to dedicate to it.

Now, let’s see if I can come up with something more compelling than “I’m a listener” badges. Any ideas?

I never set out to be a marketer. Like many artists, I want to create stuff simply for the act of creating. If people like it and enjoy it, all the better.

Increasingly, though, I find myself learning and thinking more and more about the fact that even great things can go unnoticed without the proper marketing. I’ve spent the last few months working to increase the exposure for The Alternative Music Show (formerly The GlitchCast), Felt Up, and other ventures.

I read the Cluetrain about a year and a half ago and it finally opened my eyes a bit. I didn’t want or need flashy catchphrases and slick sites. I didn’t need carefully crafted, triple approved messaging. I needed interaction with the community. I needed to get it out there, and to help the work speak for itself.

Tara Hunt’s Pinko Marketing idea cuts right to the heart of that, and even goes a step further, asserting that it’s not even so much about connecting with an existing community (although that’s part of it), it’s about giving the community an idea and then getting out of the way.

Hugh Macleod of gapingvoid.com is doing a great job of this with Stormhoek wine. He’s seeding the blogging community with ideas and then letting them do their thing. They’re looking for a new bottle design, so he’s commissioned the community for ideas.

Not only did many of them submit interesting designs, he’s also gotten some incredible advice:

…Hell you could commission a winning artist to do a run of three. A wine bottle triptych. Oh I’d buy a full set every time, just to sit on the shelf and look pretty. Actual wine drinkers having a browse for a new drop would be pretty narrow not to buy into art/design wine thing at least once -and then the drop is so good they’re hooked right?

Hugh asks that if you like his art (he posts tons of witty drawings at gapingvoid.com every day) that you simply buy stormhoek wine. He gets paid based on the number of cases that ship, so he makes some money, and you get a great bottle of wine for your contribution. I’m already going to buy at least 1 bottle. Hell, if Stormhoek was suddenly the Threadless of wines, you can bet I’d be buying the 3 set triptych whenever a design caught my fancy.

Brilliant stuff.

Well, I don’t know if it was the fact that I was laid up for a good portion of the past week or just that my brain was rested and ready to churn out something creative, but last night I was struck by inspiration, and couldn’t stop coding for hours.

I’ll release the results here in the next day or two under the GPL (I’m working out some final bugs right now), but basically I’ve written an open source myspace friend adder in Perl. At first I was wary of all the steps involved but I’ve done some web automation before and the WWW::Mechanize library is amazing. It really makes jobs like this easy. I went from concept to working code in about 4 hours.

The script literally logs in as you, goes to the pages you specify in a simple comma separated CSV file, and then adds all of the friend IDs that are on those pages. It’s been working amazingly, as there are a lot of great bands that we’ve played on the GlitchCast. The theory is that if they like the music they’re “friends” with, they might also like our show and the other music we feature.

Part of me feels a little grey about the spammy nature of these invites, but I’m not just sending this to users at random, these are people I think genuinely might be interested in our show.

Myspace makes you enter a “captcha” after every few friends you add, so I’ve added a simple “pause” mechanism to the code, prompting you to go and add a friend by hand so it can continue on it’s merry way.

Adding friend 1468183…captcha detected. Go add a friend manually.
Here’s the current page:
http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=invite.addfriend_verify&friendID=1468183
Hit enter to continue.

If I had any doubts as to whether this was worth the effort, they’ve already been put to rest. Four bands have written me just this afternoon, asking to be included in the GlitchCast.

Outstanding.

At the moment, I’m getting hit with the captchas pretty frequently, so I’ll have to tweak the “sleep” time between adding friends a bit and see if that helps. I’ve also got 33 pages of pending friend requests, so that might have me in a higher “penalty bracket” or some such.

It’s been fun to play with myspace and hand-craft some of the tools I need. Being that I run on Linux here at home and didn’t really want to run this stuff on the work PCs, there were no commercial options available for me anyway.

Once I get this properly cleaned up and released, I’m going to start working on some ways to stay in contact with those on my friends list. It should be fairly easy to modify this script to log in and message those on our friends pages and do things like “thanks for the add” and “Check out the next show, it features Edie Carey” to all the Edie fans that have friended us.

Now, there’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you found this page through google looking for a free and open source myspace friend adder. The perl code will be available here soon (either tonight, 2005-01-03, or tomorrow). In the meantime, check out the podcast that got me excited enough to put in all this effort just to promote it: The GlitchCast - bringing great independent and under-appreciated music to the Podsafe Music Network

Whew.

I mean really… Whew. I was attempting to think about this post beforehand so I could write a short, funny sum-up of the last 10 days or so, but it’s just not possible, so I’m winging it.

We escaped NYC just after the transit strike lifted, and made our way out to CT to visit with Sara’s family. Her mom was violently ill, so it was pretty laid-back, and we had a nice, quick, Christmas morning exchange before we headed up to visit Sara’s extended family.

Now that Sara and I have been together almost 7 years, the cousins are really starting to feel like family, and I love hanging out with them. The only wrench in the works was that I was having a pretty hard time with my allergies and the 3 dogs + wood fire, so I ended up sidelined for a bit of the night.

The next day, we went to the mall.

Yes. The day after Christmas.

Even though there were about a million people all trying to return stuff, find various exchanges in the right size, and elbow their way around, it was actually quite enjoyable, mostly because I didn’t have to be anywhere myself. I spent a good deal of time just walking around and people-watching, and since I wasn’t in any hurry, I didn’t have the shoulder-ache of stress that most of the other people there seemed to carry.

I got myself some generic loratadine+pseudophedrine, which combined with my singular pretty much stops my allergies in their tracks, so the rest of the visit was quite enjoyable.

After saying goodbye to Sara’s family (and recording episode 13 of The GlitchCast with Sara’s sister Jenn), we rented a car and made our way to upstate NY.

Seeing my family is always great, as is hanging out with my best friend Rye and getting to see Kate and Doug, who drove out for New Years. Although it was great to see everyone, I ended up with just about the nastiest stomach bug I’ve had since I was in middle school. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say that I was really sick, and 3 or 4 days later, food is still a touchy subject.

Unfortunately, that meant that the New Year’s Eve revelry was pretty low key, but we had a good time playing lots of games like Super Scrabble, Texas Hold-em’, and Apples to Apples.

It went too quick as always, especially since I slept through a pretty good portion of the latter half of the week, but I certainly got a lot of downtime to brainstorm on what the next year will bring.

To all of my friends and family, I don’t know if I could ever express it enough, but I love all of you and thank you for making 2005 one of the best years ever.

I had a realization last night while saying goodnight to Sara and before embarking on the “first great coding binge of 2006 (more in the next post).” We just spent 10 days in stressful situations, surrounded by company, and packed in cars, malls, and overcrowded rooms, and yet in that time, we didn’t have anything close to a fight or even an exchange of words. What that’s not that abnormal for us, it just hit me that compared to most couples, that’s like running a marathon without breaking a sweat! If that’s not love, I don’t know what is! I love you Sara, here’s to a great 2006.

Okay, well, we started off at the BigContact event. It seemed to suck at first (which I kind of smelled before-hand) and I didn’t find a single podcaster there. Seeing as this was an event to bring musicians and podcasters together, among other things, that’s not really a good sign.

After Adam and I snuck off for a quick bite to eat and came back, things were much different. The place was hopping, there was a band playing, and Adam overheard people talking about podcasting and we joined the party.

After that, we had a nice hour of excellent conversation with Nat from Big Contact and Patricia from Indiefeed’s Folk-Americana and Alt-Rock channels (which have been on my playlist for the past 2 weeks, killing radio). Being a novice wine drinker, I’m also really interested in her other brilliant idea, the Wine Scout, where she tours the country in search of great wines. Time was short, so we said our goodbyes and headed over ot CB’s Gallery (right next to CGBG’s) to hear Adam’s friend Bobby Blue. Adam did his website (which I can’t seem to find right now), so if nothing else, I figured we’d hear his stuff, and maybe persuade him to be podsafe.

As a side note, Veronica Varlow was also going to be performing Burlesque tonight at CB’s. I’ve been a fan of Veronica’s for years, so I figured I’d say hello.

It turns out we arrived a bit too late, and Bobby had already played, but we got to see Veronica perform, and her partner in crime Burke Heffner was there too.

If you don’t know Veronica Varlow of DangerDame.com yet, go check out her site. Aside from having awesome designs and great photography (which is by Burke - he’s got more amazing photos at ThingsToLookAt.com), they’ve also written a screenplay and have pretty much the best damn indie trailer you’ve ever seen over at revolverthemovie.com.

I managed to wrangle them into giving us an interview, so you can tune in over at the GlitchCast next week to hear more.

At that point, I started to head home, but it turns out I wasn’t quite done. The trains were god-awful slow, so on the way home, I made conversation with a member of “The two man Gentlmen band“, a good subway performer (who’s name I didn’t catch, but he got a card), and a guitarist on the train (who also got a card) .

Not bad for a tuesday night out! Unfortunately, I missed the Invite Them Up CD release party to make it to all these events. Congratulations to Bobby, Eugene, and all the other great Comedians on their new Comedy Central CD/DVD set. For $19, this is the best 3-CD/1-DVD comedy combo you can give this Christmas.