People seem to believe that text is an emotionless medium, and I, frankly, disagree.

If you spend enough time speaking through textual mediums such as email, instant message, or text message, you start to pick up on other people’s typing habits.

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At the Tumblr event on Sunday, I met Bill Cammack while standing with a group of friends. In his recent post, he talks about how he didn’t recognize my Twitter name or my real name, and therefore was unable to place me in context. He also mentions that’s he when he tried several times to draw a connection between us, and found none.

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For me, a project always starts with a name.

A name of some sort, whether it be a title, headline, or a domain name, before I could start doing work. The name didn’t always have to be final, but I needed some name to start with.

I don’t know if this is a bad habit or a good habit, but these days, it seems like a useful habit, at very least. I never start a new project without a name and a corresponding domain name.

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In the Boston BarCamp session called Public Data, one of the opening statements stood out to me: “Data in the wild is dirty.”

There is an overwhelming amount of public data that could and should be processed and analyzed, however there is, as of yet, no real set of standards for organizing the data into a machine-readable, parsable format.

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The viral marketing session at Boston BarCamp was led by Matt Peters of Pandemic Labs.

His basic premise was that the field is too new, meaning there are no real “experts” yet. I wholeheartedly agree, but I believe that this sentiment isn’t limited to viral marketing. In fact, it seems to extends to most new and emerging forms of digital marketing. Which basically includes everything except straight-up online media buys for banner-ads, homepage take-overs, and the like.

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Wow, what a weekend. I woke up on Saturday morning at 4:30AM in order to get ready in time to shower, get ready, pack, and leave to make the 7AM Chinatown bus with @ChrisRicca.

It was actually the first time I met Chris in real life, but given that we’ve been Twitter buddies for awhile, we were able to immediately launch into an interesting, lively conversation. And then the early morning rise caught up with us, and we promptly passed out for the remainder of the bus ride.

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Earlier today, @ChrisRicca Twittered that he was going to Boston BarCamp3 tomorrow morning. I have been wanting to attend a BarCamp, and not having anything particularly pressing to do this weekend, I decided on a whim to go to Boston too.

After making this decision, I realized that I don’t have any business cards. I’m out of personal business cards, the business cards from my last job aren’t going to do me any good, and I’m not getting my W+K business cards until next week. And it’s 7PM, on a Friday night.

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For me, the hardest part about joining the working world after being a college student was adjusting to the fixed hours of 9-to-5.

Though it wasn’t the actual 9-to-5 part that bothered me. In fact, the idea of 9-to-5 is somewhat misleading if you’re in the advertising industry. Since most employees don’t roll in until 9:30 or 10AM, our day starts later than most other industries, which means it ends later too. Generally, we leave anywhere from 6:30 to 7:30PM. Sometimes we don’t leave until midnight. And occasionally, we don’t leave at all. In the advertising industry, it’s considered necessary to keep a change of clothes in your desk, because you never know when you’re going to spend the night there. Continue reading »

If you’re in marketing or advertising, and even if you’re not, you’ve got to see this.

BrandTags calls itself “a collective experiment in brand perception.” Basically, it’s an online application for word association. A logo loads up, you type the first thing that comes to mind, and hit next. You can also search it by specific brand name, or you can try and guess a brand name based on the words people associate with it.

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Last night, I read that Google has recently shut down their service called ‘Hello.’ While I personally never used it, I think it has a really great fundamental concept.

When I was living in China from 2005-2006, I posted a lot of photos on my Flickr. And then I would call my mom on Skype, and listen to her reaction and opinions as she looked through them. The problem is, my mother, being that she is my mother, she often gets really excited about stuff I do/create/write. The pictures I take are no exception.

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