Author Archive

It was a photographic version of the colorful phrase, drinking from the firehose.  Thursday night I attended a lecture by Magnum photographer Paul Fusco and then Friday, an opening of a show by National Geographic photographer Cary Wolinsky, both events presented by the Photographic Resource Center.

Paul Fusco spoke softly but passionately to a packed BU auditorium where he discarded the podium and sat on the stage, insisting on near-total darkness so the images (projected from an authentic slide carousel) could be seen best.

First, Fusco showed images from his RFK Funeral Train project.  In 1968 (a time, he noted, that was full of both hope and uncertainty, not unlike the present) he was assigned to photograph Bobby Kennedy’s funeral and boarded the train carrying RFK’s casket from New York to Washington.  It turned out that nearly the entire route was lined with mourners, and Fusco photographed them from the train window.    It’s an incredible slice of history and a collective portrait of the people of America at the time.  Buy the book or at least look at the website.

Next, he showed work that has not yet found a publisher, a series he calls Chernobyl Legacy.  The beauty of Fusco’s composition and use of light does little to make these pictures any easier to look at, but at the same time you can’t turn away. In Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, Fusco photographed the hospitalized and institutionalized childen and adults terribly damaged by the fallout from the 1986 nuclear accident. Fusco’s passion for looking this event unflinchingly in the face and sharing it with the world was evident and contagious.

Among others, I ran into Jason Liu, one of the artists in Hudson Street Gallery’s current show, and David Strasburger, one of whose prints I bought at the PRC’s auction last month.

The next day, I attended the opening of the second exhibition of the MIT-PRC joint gallery space at MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics.  That’s 6-304 for your Institute types, just go to the end of the Infinite Corridor and go up to the third floor, you can’t miss it.  Nor should you.  A new space has been constructed by enclosing the courtyard of building six, and the design of the space, even without the excellent artwork, is both inspiring and livable.  I wrote about the first exhibition in this space last year.

Cary Wolinsky showed work from two series: Sand House and Varanasi.  In Sand House, he documents a colonial-era house in Namibia that has been invaded by the adjacent desert and filled halfway up with sand.  You have to see this to fully understand the surreal beauty of it.  (And you should also check in with Max Becher and Andrea Robbins on how surreal the German presence in Namibia can be)  Varanasi is an Indian city on the Ganges and home to the fabric-dying industry documented in Wolinsky’s photos.  It’s part of his wider ongoing interest in textiles and fabrics and a body of work called “Fabric of Life.”

Besides the PRC show of Wolinsky’s photos, the MIT CTP space also has art and photographs by Sol LeWitt, Ansel Adams, director emeritus Robert Jaffe, and others.  Also don’t miss the LeWitt floor installation that you can see from the bridge to building 6C.

There’s ace photographologist Leslie K. Brown at left, setting the story straight on B&W films.  Also present were PRC director Jim Fitts and Jason Landry, currently the PRC’s interim education manager.  I was also lucky enough to see photographers John Chervinsky and Peter Vanderwarker, and one third of conceptual/political art trio Triiibe.  The official opening of this show is next week, so check it out.

Some time last year, I first learned about Pecha Kucha from the estimable Presentation Zen blog, but it wasn’t until last night that I experienced it.  Pecha Kucha, in a nutshell, is when people get together and share 20-slide presentations in which the slides advance automatically every 20 seconds, for a crisp 6:40 each.  The content of the presentations isn’t specified, only how they are delivered.

It’s generally done as a forum to practice the skill of making and delivering presentations, of focusing ideas and images into a predetermined format.  It’s become a world-wide movement, and the Boston chapter’s sixth Pecha Kucha night was last night at Mantra on Temple Place.  I dragged former colleague and fellow design geek J to the festivities.

The evening was co-sponsored by AIGA, “the professional association for design,” and many AIGA members were in attendance and some presented.

I love the idea of Pecha Kucha.  Creative people getting together and playing a sort of party game.  People getting serious about the craft of presentation.  Using arbitrary constraints to flex your brain and create something, like writing haiku or sonnets.  I didn’t fully know what to expect, and I was surprised on a few counts.

First, 20 seconds can be a long time, and so can 6:40.  At work, I used to budget about a minute per slide.  I now budget less because I’ve gotten better about reducing the amount of information on each slide, but now I have more slides.  At Pecha Kucha, I often found myself impatient for the slide to advance.  Similarly, at work, I’d be thrilled if any presentation lasted only six or seven minutes, but again, some Pecha Kucha presos seemed to drag on.

Second, having every slide up for the same amount of time is strange.  Imagine a film in which every cut or scene was the same length, or a book with every chapter exactly the same size.  I hadn’t given much conscious thought to the rhythm of a presentation, but it’s a powerful thing.

Third, these design types don’t just use fewer words per slide, they use none.  I’m a big fan of words and also of typography, so this threw me for a loop.  Sure, eveybody spoke to their slides, some at great length, but in most cases I felt a little lost when there was no verbal matter on screen.

It was too dark to take notes or decent photos, but some of the presentations that stood out where those by Chris Pullman of WGBH, Denise Korn of Korn Design, and Lisa Williams of Placeblogger.

Pullman was the lead off presenter and his talk was a capsule history of WGBH’s new building and the giant video screen thereon. His timing on the 20-second transitions was impressive, and as you migth expect of somebody working in TV or radio, he told a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Denise Korn presented another story, this one about a summer intership program she launched called Youth Design Boston.  Showing images almost entirely of the teens in the program and their work, Korn played perfectly to the audience of design professionals, most of whom were probably told as youths, as J put it, “you’ll never make any money drawing!”

She mentioned that one YDB project is a redesign of the MBTA’s Charlie Card being pitched to the mayor’s office.  I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds that Charlie character a bit creepy and maybe not the only who who feels some nostalgia for the colorful and ever-changing oldstyle magnetic strip MBTA fare cards.

Finally, I have to mention Lisa Williams’ presentation, a pitch of sorts for her company placeblogger.  Honestly, I was expecting more like this - a mix of text and image in the service of pitching a company.  But around the third slide, Williams declared that the slides had been rearranged out of order and the rest of the presentation was a bit of live improv or a game of battledecks.

Some of the other presentations were more like narrated slideshows of the presenter’s work or work he liked, and a couple were downright bad, with bad timing, monotone script-reading and overfull slides. On the other hand, the better presenters told engaging or even inspiring stories despite the restrictions of the format.

I’m very glad I went.  I think I learned a couple of things that might be useful in my own presenting, and oddly, I find myself itching to try for a slot in a future Pecha Kucha night.  Presentation topic ideas, anybody?

I’m a big believer in the primacy of content, but sometimes I have to share some technical details on what kind of typewriters the infinite monkeys in here are using, and I know there are a few techies out there who dig this stuff.

Feeling the need for more mobility in my computing and blogging, I recently bought an Acer Aspire One, a very small notebook computer, what’s often called a “netbook” these days.  It weighs 2.2 pounds and it’s (mostly) brown.  It also runs Linux and has a solid state memory thingy instead of a hard drive, so it boots up and shuts down very very quickly.  Here it is with a Thinkpad T61.  You can compare the Thnkpad’s 14″ not so wide screen (1400×1050) with the Aspire’s 8.9″ wide screen (1024×600) and refer to my earlier rant on wideness.

You can also get a sense of the keyboard and key size compared the Thinkpad’s, which is often considered the gold standard of laptop keyboards.  It takes some getting used to, but I managed to compose and edit today’s post on Social Media Breakfast on it.  It would have been liveblogging if a wireless connection were available at Ryles.  I had to use another computer to wrangle the photos, but only because I haven’t yet installed image editing software on it.

I’m really impressed with the completeness of this product.  The solid state module is only 8GB and the OS and preloaded applications take up more than half of that, but that already includes the OpenOffice suite, Firefox, and a bunch of other apps.  There’s a webcam and mic, three USB ports, external monitor port plus mic and headphones, and a hardware switch for turning off the wifi for in-flight use.  Once I figure out how to add Skype and GIMP, I’ll be able to do almost all my usual computing tasks on the go.

It’s not a MacBook Air in so many ways (the MacBook weighs 3 pounds, for one) but the Aspire One comes in five colors, and you can buy one of each for less than the price of an Air.  For a second or third computer, I was much more willing to take a chance on it.

You can read up on all the technical details elsewhere, but I want to leave you with my favorite part of the user manual, advice on how not to hold the unit in such a way as to crush your own fingers.  Thanks for the warning, guys.

Today’s Social Media Breakfast at Ryles in Inman Square was packed.  Packed with social media types looking for work and some free pastry, but also packed with meatier than usual discussion of ROI.  You can follow much of the live twitter chatter on the hashtag #smb10 even though hashtags are sort of obsolete.

After the schmoozing, Shift’s Robert Collins called the session to order, acknowledged the generosity of sponsor Hubspot, and introduced the topic, social media ROI.  Angst about the return on marketing investment is nothing new, and social media marketing has turned out not to be immune to the question, especially in strummy und drangy economic times.  Maybe it’s a meme I’m not hip to, but the possibly rhetorical question, “what’s the ROI of putting on your pants?” came up more than once.

The first speaker was Hubspot’s Brian Halligan who opened with the point that people are getting better and better at blocking out traditional (and non-traditional) interruptive marketing.  I guess that’s part of why Hubspot sponsors SMB, eh?  In any case, Brian showed how Hubspot uses content creation to bring in web traffic and then organizes that traffic by source into funnels leading down to leads and business.  A refreshingly pragmatic approach, I think.  On the other hand, there is an element of “give away interesting content and they will come” airy optimism here, but he advised us all to ask if we were generating “wonder bread or wheat bread” with traffic from social media sites.  I’m a little skeptical of the “intangible ROI” on one of his slides - if its intangible, is it really Return?

Next up, Matt Cutler of Visible Measures (also a Hubspot customer, hmm) talked about his company’s business of measuring online media, sort of like an Arbitron for the YouTube set.  My favorite factoid from his presentation was that the #1 predictor of the viewership of a given video is if the artist has just come out with another new video.  Apparently, the coattails of a new video, any new video, can carry along older videos by that artist, or - I speculate - other related videos by any artist.  He also pointed out that the “how did they do that?” factor contributes to more views as people watch it again and again to figure it out.

Matt also showed some word cloud analyses that I must blog about separately.  I love the look of word clouds but have some issues about how people are starting to use them more like tag clouds and thereby overestimate the amount of actual information in them.  This vintage limepost tells part of the story.

I also learned from Matt that primetime TV advertising carries a cost in the range of $25 CPM.  Interesting to compare that figure to my guesstimated price of $15 CPM for advertising in my twitter stream.  Hmm, indeed.

The third speaker was Andy McAfee, an HBS Fellow (with an HBS blog) who was the only one presenting without slides.   He began by pondering why you never see ROI figures of less than 100% on those slick documents you get from vendors.   Hmm.  It turns out, to my surprise, that Andy advocates a more realistic and relaxed view of technology (not just marketing, not just social media) ROI.  The says that the chain of cause and effect is so tenuous and attenuated, that it’s an “intellectually bankrupt exercise.”  What you can do, Andy says, is you can measure what you can measure on the Investment side - generally how much money and time you spend -  and for the Return side, you have to use a different method.  You have to tell stories and create scenarios.

McAfee went on to say that conventional “sharp pencil ROI” (the sort Sloanies like me enjoy) is a bit of a lie, and a lie that actually insults people’s intelligence since everybody knows there’s no way those numbers are that accurate.  He suggests that we should come to terms with the possibility that costs and benefits could be comprehended in dissimilar terms.

I like it.  But will the boss buy it? I hope the social media tweeps in the crowd down’t misread Andy’s talk as permission to throw ROI out the window or to stop measuring things.  It’s a call to add some flexibility (agility?) and judgement back into the mix, and I welcome it.

In the Q&A, Sanjay from LuckyCal asked about the relative yield of different media funnels.  Hubspot answered that they see less efficiency in the social media funnels, but much higher volume.  And Hubspot believes that the volume levels in social media might be made even greater with less effort.  Not all web visits are created equal, I guess.

Another Q&A item asked about the valuation of a social media asset, such as a number of facebook friends.  The suggestion was that you could value them by estimating what it would cost you to acquire permission to message those people by some other means.  But remember folks, your facebook friends are not really assets, you don’t own them, you just have the temporary privilege of communcating with them, revocable at any time.

See you next month at Social Media Breakfast 11, which will be about social media in the nonprofit world…

Sometimes I get excited about small things.  Some would say that’s the point of this blog.  Others would say, “that’s what she said.”  Today’s little fixation is the Random Redirect Wordpress Plugin by Matt Mullenweg. I have implemented it near the top of the sidebar with a version of Det. Harry Callahan’s famous inquiry.  So give it a spin.  You gots to know, don’t you?

That’s a pretty thin post, even for me, so here are a couple of other random items.

World Run Day

Today is World Run Day, a global virtual event in which people so inclined run as far and as fast as they fell like, and some even raise money for charity doing it.  Some Boston-area folks are taking a 3.8-mile loop around the Charles River Basin today. I’m more likely to walk it, but I was pretty excited to learn about MapMyRun, an ad-ridden but still cool map mashup that lets you plot your route and share it with friends while compiling statistics on the route and your progress along it.  The elevation feature is exceptionally cool and (so I hear) useful for those in marathon training. Kudos also to the Librarian on the Run for having a cool blog and for starting her fundraising for Mass Eye & Ear for the 2009 Boston Marathon.

Things to Worry About

I discovered Jeff Cutler’s blog of things he claims we worry about via a random twitter encounter.  I have to suspect these might actually be Jeff’s own fears, but I can’t say they don’t often resonate.  It’s a bit like those Worst Case Scenarios books, but without any actual solutions or preventions for the disastrous scenarios.  For example:

Slotter Slaughter
That when you go play the slot machines in either Vegas, CT or RI, the new slot where you feed in money will grab your tie or handkerchief and strangle you unceremoniously. Which also leads me to wonder why anyone would have a ceremony for a strangling or any such event.

My general diagnosis is that Jeff should switch to wearing bowties.

Park and Pray

I noticed Park and Pray’s inaugural post, The Five City Parkers you Meet in Hell, via Universal Hub.  To my pleasant surprise, they have kept it up with a nice mix of parking news.  too bad they weren’t around when I did unsuccessful battle with lousy parking maps and poor signage at the Cambridge-Somerville neutral zone.  They describe Park and Pray thusly:

Chronicling the adventures of urban street parking, Park and Pray started in the unparkable jungle of cow path built spaghetti-grids that make up the Boston neighborhoods. A voicebox for the adventurous spot-hunter, we’ll report on just about anything with a cursory relationship to car ownership in the city.

They welcome tips - the informational kind - so check them out and share your parking stories.

Bead Babe Roz

As I’ve mentioned, I have a theoretical affection for Etsy, but haven’t yet been a customer.  Recently, I helped L photograph some jewelery for her mom’s Etsy site, which is now up and running.  So if you’re interested in some beady goodness for yourself or for a gift, head on over to Bead Babe Roz before she’s sold out for the holidays.