Category: Uncategorized

I realized the other day that while I (and many others) rarely twitter my “status” or “what I’m doing,” other people are doing so constantly. That’s when I realized there are really just two different types of people: Twitter Voyeurs and Twitter Exhibitionists.

Examples of Twitter Exhibitionists:
Guy Kawasaki — Who’s constantly twittering about “truemors.” (For a while I was really confused about what Truemors did, until I just realized it’s a user-generated Fark.)

Hugh McLeod (gapingvoid) — Hugh is an interesting blogger, and an interesting Twitter-er. He’s updating Twitter FAR more often than his blog, lately.

Examples of Twitter Voyeurs:
Me– Every once in a while I update what I’m doing on Twitter, but just not that often. However, I do have Twitterific to read what people are doing.

Is there a middle ground? Somehow I don’t think so. The Twitter Exhibitionists seem to be the people that were consistently blogging, but now are Twittering instead. That makes me think they’ve simply “shifted their paradigm,” to use consultant-speak. Twitter Voyeurs like me either don’t have much to share, don’t want to share the insignificant details of our lives, or have a majority of our friends and colleagues not on Twitter. Perhaps there’s a middle ground, but I haven’t really seen it.

So are you a Voyeur or an Exhibitionist? Or do you think you are one of these middle-ground characters??

Comments are open…

I was recently reminded of the Terry Tate adverts when I was back in the States. They’re absolutely hilarious!

Terry’s World

This one is my favourite. When he starts the “Pain Train” with the “Woo-Woo” train whistle while his victim frantically digs in the rubbish, I nearly cried laughing.

https://www.youtube.com/v/H86S7IgBE0I

Draft Day

https://www.youtube.com/v/CtJOzE1GJWw

Office Athlete of the Century

https://www.youtube.com/v/Mz6ChdD6H6M

Vacation

https://www.youtube.com/v/6EHhwxRls2Y

Super Bowl 2003 commercial

https://www.youtube.com/v/Rl4-lfNyTe4

Streaker

https://www.youtube.com/v/oVw7jb7M3N8

Sensitivity Training

https://www.youtube.com/v/17jplpjCaec

Late Lunch

https://www.youtube.com/v/cLgdz5zJKQg

If you’re like me, you occasionally like using the 3-D and other transition effects in Apple’s Keynote software. However, if you try exporting these videos to YouTube, you’ll find that they just don’t work. Between Apple’s exporting and YouTube’s importing, enough data is lost and/or compressed that the final result looks like crap. (While the slides and audio are fine, the transitions are horrible.)

I found a workaround to this problem, and have used it to successfully upload Keynote presentations to YouTube with the 3-D and other transitions working beautifully. While there may certainly be better ways of doing this, the way I’ve found works and is detailed below:

First, within Keynote, export your completed presentation as a Quicktime movie, but with a custom format:

Next, for your custom format, choose a custom size:

Select 320 x 240 as your custom size; it’s the YouTube size. If it doesn’t show a frame rate of between 24 and 30, click the “Settings” button to change this:

Once you’ve finished these selections, export your presentation as a Quicktime movie.

Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t like videos that have been exported this way, so I use iMovie as a quick and painless work-around.

Open iMovie and drag the recently-exported Quicktime movie into the new movie project:

Next, export your iMovie project as a Quicktime file, but select “Expert Settings”:

When the Save box comes up, select “Options”, highlighted here:

This next screen finally lets you get your presentation into a format that YouTube likes. Make sure the file format is MPEG-4 (Improved), the Image Size is still 320×240 QVGA, and that the frame rate is 24 or higher.

Click OK to export, and you’ll have an MP4 file that will export nicely into YouTube with all of your audio and transitions fully intact.

I hope this is useful for you!

Recently I happened to read some of Diego Rodriguez’s old blog posts, where he talks about fractal brands. Specifically, the best brands are fractal. Here’s a quote from his post:

Definition of fractal, from Hyperdictionary:

A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar (bits look like the whole) and independent of scale (they look similar, no matter how close you zoom in)

Good brands are fractal. Every interaction you have reflects the interaction you’ll have with every other piece of the whole, as well as the whole itself. Since “brand” is shorthand for the total experience you get from buying, using, servicing, and disposing of a product, creating a great brand requires taking a fractal point of view to the process of designing total experiences where everything — large and small — is consistent and mutually self-reinforcing.

(Emphasis is mine)

To understand his background, Diego is a partner at IDEO and teaches at the d.school (Design School) at Stanford. He’s been on the forefront of innovation his entire career.

This is a very insightful view on good branding. He later follows it up with this post on Apple Stores, remarking that even three-year olds recognise them as a place to buy an iPod, because they have the same design sense as an iPod. And of course, there are also some bad governmental examples.

Everything you do in a company is part of the brand, but to a geek like me, describing it this way is so simple to understand. What do you think?