Portland is, not surprisingly to any one who lives here, growing.

Detroit, not so much.

Creative Failure
A big part of working at Fight is trying things out. We try things all the time, most of them don’t work out exactly right the first time. The important thing for us to understand why they don’t work out, make changes and try again. With that in mind, I loved this interview with Adam Lisagor about the role of failure.

I was first made familiar with Adam Lisagor from his video work with Put This On, where he showed me how to tie my shoes. Yeah, I’m serious.

Good is Good
Last August I wrote a post defending the role of the web and social media as a functional component of peoples social interactions. I lead it off with this quote from the movie Heathers.

“People will look at the ashes of Westerburg and say, ‘Now there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society.’”

I was reminded of that when I read this charming little anecdote about a four year old playing Grand Theft Auto. Video games take a lot of heat for corrupting our society and our children, but reading this, it’s hard for me not to wonder if it’s the games doing the corrupting, or society.

“He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn’t want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.

Getting behind the driver’s seat of the fire truck awarded him with the most fun he had while playing Grand Theft Auto. With sirens blaring, he chased down the first red dot on the map. As he approached a car engulfed in flames he began showering it with the truck’s water cannon. Fire after fire, he extinguished them all.”

Misreading the Twitter Revolution
Khoi Vinh posted a link to this article on the Foreign Policy site looking at the reality behind last summers events in Iran. As someone who loved the idea of Twitters role in building a revolution in Iran, I found this article not disheartening, but rather deeply fascinating. Getting insight into the realities of what happened, and what didn’t, helped to reconcile the disconnect between the story we got here in the U.S. and the eventual outcome, or lack thereof, in Iran.

Home Star
There is a lot of conversation right now about the role average Americans, or more precisely our use of fossil fuels, played in the gulf oil spill. Regardless of where one falls on the blame scale, I think most reasonable people agree that this is another sign that we all need to take a more proactive approach to how we use energy.

Good magazine had a great post this week about the Home Star program. Having spent the last few months working on energy saving programs for a client, it’s amazing how effective some really small, and really cheap, changes can be. Especially compared to the cost of cleaning up after ourselves.

Locals and Tourists is a great little project by Eric Fischer doing just what it says: plotting the locations of photos taken by…locals and tourists in cities around the world.

It’s interesting to me to see the geography of the cities become so visible through the data. Even more so to see the notion of “what’s interesting” about each city described through the cameras of people who live there and those that don’t.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Digital Strategy
Last week I mentioned the upstart Texas Tribune as an example of journalism alive and well online. This week I found this article by Folio about The Christian Science Monitor and their efforts to understand how they exist and what they mean in a digital world.

While many other, far bigger, organization continue to try to shove a square peg into a round hole, the CSM took a holistic approach, looking at their entire ecosystem and not just looking at their digital footprint. By trying to understand not just what they wanted as a business, but what their customers wanted, they have been able to design a complete system of inter-related publications, both on and off line. This quote from the beginning of the article shows their efforts to understand what they mean in the larger news/internet world:

“Our approach is a composite of the learning economy—we’re serving people without a lot of time, who are trying to understand complex issues quickly, and contribute to a solution. As one guy here says, our mission is ‘Help me get smarter, faster.’”

Kites and Oil
I continue to love seeing the way people use ever increasing access to ever shrinking technology to solve real world problems. I wrote early on about CubeSats and Make, and a couple weeks ago about the Afrigadget Blog. Living a world of Tivo’s and iPhone’s it’s consistently refreshing to see technology stripped down to it’s basic elements and used to serve an individual’s needs.

This week brought this article in the Times about Grassroots Mapping, a project originally designed to help communities create maps, now focusing on documenting the gulf oil spill. With BP trying hard to exert control on information getting to people about the ongoing devastation in the gulf it’s great to see ingenuity and simple technology outsmarting them and allowing everyone to see what’s actually happening.

Finally, I really want to do this to Marco.
Awesome.

They’ve followed up with another one I like – Jet Lag Fighter

In both cases, I like that Virgin is looking at the totality of a customers experience with them. In the case of Flying Without Fear, they’re targeting people with a predisposition to not liking Virgins core product offering and trying to address it. The interface is dead simple and because the application is mostly audio, it means the user doesn’t have to spend their time interfacing with the app to get what they need out of it. Jet Lag Fighter is much the same. It takes a key negative experience of traveling and attempts to remedy it. Because Jet Lag Fighter is something you’d use specifically when you’re not interfacing with Virgin’s main product, makes it a great brand play too.

Overall, two great examples of a brand understanding their ecosystem, their customer, their brand, and their technology.

Media Diet
It takes me about 45 minutes after I turn my computer on in the morning to catch up with all the sites I read everyday, twitter, and a list of RSS feeds that I work diligently to keep trim. That said, I can’t help but wonder if I’m spending my time reading the best things I can.

What I Read is The Atlantic Wire’s regular series asking people of all stripes what they’re reading. While it’s not just online reading, it does slant heavily that way, so it’s pretty easy to sample the recommendations for your own use.

I love this site for two reasons: First, I like being able to see what smart people reading. From the most recent entry – Clay Shirky, to Terry Gross, to Ezra Klein it’s pretty fun to see where there is reassuring overlap and where I might be able to pick up some new stuff. (Side note: Shirly doesn’t read tech blogs, which makes me think I should’t read tech blogs, but if tech blogs are wrong…)

The site also fills a non-trivial need I have to know what famous/smart people do in their free time. Do with that what you will.

Put This On
I had a chance a few years ago to move to New York permanently. I had a great job offer with a great company in a city I’ve loved my whole life. In the end though, as much as I love NYC, I just couldn’t leave Portland. Portland is a easy city to live in, maybe that makes me soft, I don’t know, but I like it.

What I don’t like though is that it’s one of the few cities I know of where there is such a thing as “my nice running shoes.” These are the shoes people wear when they want to be “fancy.” Portland is also home of the “nice hoodie”, “nice parka”, and “nice hat with ears”. Mostly this is fine, but some times it’s nice to see people going out without looking like their camping.

Since I started Fight, I’ve to make a conscious effort to try and dress more like a grown-up, and this is why I like Put This On. Men’s style can go so wrong so easy, and more often than not these days it seems to trend between “childish” and “douche-y.” PTO is all about how to take things that used to be basics and bring them back. Pant’s that fit, a nice tie, nice shoes. Things your grandfather wore every day and looked awesome.

Meet the Facts
I love politics. I grew up in a fairly political family where debating issues remains a pretty standard way to pass time. What I don’t like anymore are political talk shows.

Meet The Press is a Sunday morning stalwart, broadcast continuously since the late 40′s. Like most political shows though, recently it’s become more a place for politicians and business leaders to get some free airtime than a place of even moderate debate.

Enter Meet the Facts. Another example of the asymmetrical nature of the web, MTF was launched after numerous pleas for the show to simply fact check its own guests. Started by a couple college students, the site has gained the attention of people like NYU professor Jay Rosen, an early critic of the state of political journalism on T.V., as well as NPR and the Huffington Post.

My favorite part of the whole program is that the creators have offered to give the entire site to Meet The Press if they will just start fact checking.

“If NBC News and the staff of Meet the Press agree to permanently institute a public fact-checking system for everything guests say on the air, we think they should absolutely name that feature “Meet the Facts” and we will gladly transfer over the domain name, Twitter username, and Facebook page username for their use, and at no cost.”

If It Was My Home
I feel weird putting this here as something I “liked”. Maybe “appreciate” is a better word? At any rate, among the many great and important projects people have done in response to the gulf oil spill, this one really drove home for me the massiveness of it geographically.

Sitting here in Northeast Portland and recognizing that there is oil coving an area that would reach well out west into the Pacific and and far enough east to pass Mt. Hood is staggering. Combining that with utterly heart wrenching photos (caution, these are disturbing) from The Big Picture of the devastated wildlife in the spill begins to make concrete to someone sitting 2,000 miles away the level of tragedy taking place. If you have the means, and you’d like – you can donate here.

BPGlobalPR
Sometimes people ask me about the name of this site. The answer is projects like BPGlobalPR. BPGlobalPR is a perfect example of the asymetrical nature of competition on the web.

In a time when corporations seem able to actively limit journalism, BPGlobalPR may be one of the few points of commentary on the matter generating any large scale response. I’ve read that it was the images of dead sea animals and destroyed landscapes that fueled a national boycott of Exxon after the Valdez. Absent that, this may be the best we can do. Without a press free to report on the actual situation, this stands as a small beacon of hope that multi-national corporations and their PR firms don’t control everything just yet.

Lost
Yeah, okay, so I just yesterday wrote a post about Lost as a cautionary tale for designers. I stand by that – as a product, Lost ended up being pretty terrible. But there was a reason I watched it for 6 years – aspects of the show were also pretty amazing. So much has been said, it seems silly to write more, but I can’t think of a program that has done more to layout a map for what narrative television could be in a post-internet world than Lost. Whether it was their consistent usage of DVR easter eggs, ARG’s; their direct response to conversations with fans written into the show, or their usage of other non-connected mediums to tell the meta-story (how many books were referenced in the show?); Lost stands a milestone in post-modern T.V. narrative.

The Texas Tribune
You could be forgiven for believing there are just two sides to the problem of journalism and the web – pay wall, and no pay wall.

The fundamental question these two sides actually seek to answer, though it’s rarely stated as such, is: “How do you maintain exactly the same business model you’ve always enjoyed in technologically and culturally changed landscape?”

The answer is becoming increasing clear to a lot of people: you don’t.

Enter the The Texas Tribune an online, non-prift news site started about 6 months ago to try a different path. This is from their About page:

“Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.”

The Texas Tribune I think makes clear a needed distinction in the conversation about the future of journalism: are we fighting to save journalism, or fighting to save profits? Looking the Tribune, I’d say journalism is alive and well.

The Tribunes 6 month report card

AfriGadget
This morning I’ve seen a bunch of tweets about a rumored update to Apple TV. Google just announced their version, Google TV. In a couple weeks we’ll all be seeing the next iPhone. For many of us, innovation can add new levels of convenience, new ways of creating, or new ways of communicating. Working in marketing, innovation can quickly become something viewed in terms of new “brand opportunities.”

The AfriGadget blog reminds me on an almost daily basis that for a lot of people, innovation is a matter of life and death. This isn’t capacitive touchscreens, or 1000fps cameras, its car batteries, broken mirrors, and old bikes, each of which is having profound impacts on peoples lives.

Okay – so that’s only 4 things, but it’s my first try. 5 next week for sure.

All the pictures I took this year with my iPhone.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a sitcom revolving 5 essentially mentally ill, anti-social people running a bar in Philadelphia. Always outstanding, the last episode which revolved around merchandising for the bar, raised the topic of advertising in a way that was both genuinely funny, and genuinely interesting.

While maybe not a revolutionary idea, it’s one I don’t feel like we see enough of, and this instance is executed especially well. By avoiding any mention of the either the show or the network, the site effectively serves as a sort of bridge between “show marketing site” and ARG.

What I found brilliant is that it was done completely as a continuation of the show. At one point in the show while seeing the “dicktowel” for the first time, one of the characters says to the other
“we should setup a website for it”
“already did it”
“you did?”
“dicktowel.com”

If you’re a fan of Lost this sort of thing is nothing new, but this was this first time I’ve seen it in a sitcom. Like the Lost sites, or any ARG, dicktowel.com allows fans to become part of the show in a small way. It allows the viewer to stay in the headspace of the show, and actually begin to partake in the storyline by participating in plot elements.

Like I said, the site itself is necessarily NOT revolutionary, but conceptually, the tie-in is elegant and seamless in a way I wish we saw a lot more.

From the sound of it, they’re adding new products to the site too. I can’t wait to get my “dicktowel.com” hat.