Friday, November 27, 2009

Love: The Travis Diaries III

Carnival,  aex, travel, world, love, Dizzy, Money, Same Same, The Travis Diaries
"Love: It's like one of those carnival rides you pay money for and they spin you around real fast - and when it's over you're dizzy, but everything else is still pretty much the same." - Travis



For more in the Travis Diaries, check here:

Sex: The Travis Diaries I

I'm a man, DAMMIT: The Travis Diaries II
Love: The Travis Diaries III
Tiger: The Travis Diaries IV
Ambivelence: The Travis Diaries V
Advertising People & Blogs: The Travis Diaries VI
What's Left?: The Travis Diaries VII
Year of the Tiger: The Travis Diaries VIII
She said: The Travis Diaries IX
Dreams: The Travis Diaries X

A Bad Day: The Travis Diaries XI
Svengali? The Travis Diaries XII
My Way: The Travis Diaries XIII


Thursday, November 26, 2009

Happy Turkey Day! Throw that blog a bone?

Ahh, it's Thankgiving Day in America and you're catching up on your blog reading. Good for you. And football? Nice. I'm hungry. And so maybe are thousands or maybe millions of bloggers around the world. And why not? This is the medium that's putting thousands of proper journalists out of work. 'Why the hell should anybody pay for this when millions of you wankers just throw it out there for free?', you say.

And an excellent question that would be. But it's not my question. It's a question that's been coming up a lot lately, all over the blogosphere.
Jay Deragon and his blog, The Relationship Economy (highlighted below) gets the ball rolling this way:

"The Internet and social technology has turned the publishing industry upside down and inside out. We’ve seen 24 of the top 25 newspapers go out of business. Magazine subscription rates are down and the leaders within the industry are struggling to find a strategy to stay alive.

The Wall Street Journal is forging a war against the Internet. Rupert Murdoch wants to block its content from Google and has taken a stand with its readers by charging a subscription for the paper. No more free in the Murdoch world."


And so what's in all of that for me? Well, nothing basically. Murdoch was pretty adept when he bought MySpace, way before anybody really understood what social media was, but I think he may have bitten off a little bit more than even he can chew here.
Even Seth Godin says he's gotten this move backwards. When I think of my own work here at WWED and ways in which I might make a buck off it someday, I like this quote from Clay Shirkey:

Wow. Does that nail it. Can anything I do be 'necessary', 'irreplaceable' and 'unsharable'. Well, yes, except the unsharable part, because I want people to share things they find here, and give me credit, hopefully. The harder part is the first two constraints of 'necessary' and 'irreplaceable' . Can I create that, offer that, and then somehow, get paid for it? And my answer to that is yes. Just like the model for National Public Radio in America. People voluntarily subscribe. They don't have to. The content is already on the radio, and subsidized by the government for free - but listeners pay anyway, because they value the programming and know it doesn't have conventional advertising support behind it.

"Content is only as valuable as the audience who consumes it.", continues Shirky,
"Some audiences, and they are getting smaller, will pay for what they consider as 'premium information from talented writers'. Then there is a larger audience that finds valuable content for free and the authors pull audiences to their content based on style and substance, whether professional journalist or not."

So can WWED be considered as 'premium information from a talented writer'? According to one reviewer of late - "You might be very talented but what you are doing with the blog does not make you unique. Neither content nor expression." - uhh, no. But according to the overall number of positive comments, nearly 200 regular subscribers as well as subscribers who actually sent a little cabbage my way, the answer is a pretty resounding Yes. And although you're probably tired of me going on about our Technorati ranking, as of today, Turkey Day, we're at an Authority of 125 and a global ranking of 36,355, up from around 55,000 just six weeks ago. Heck, we're ranked at number 60 in the 'Business' category. Note to aspiring business journalists: "Just write whatever falls out of your butt three times a week and YOU too can be number 60!"
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Hell, I can't wait till I'm sitting on the new Oprah show, hawking the book I made from a blog and that reviewer from above leans over on a sofa somewhere and says to her friend, "I knew that guy when he was just a bum trying to eek out a living in Munich. He sucks". And then I'll jump up and down on the couch. Won't that be sweet?
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But until then, I won't be embarrased at all about encouraging support from readers. I'm a damn fast writer, and a damn prolithic one, but this still takes a great deal of time and a few bucks thrown in the hat from time to time just plain makes me feel better. It also helps pay some rent. You'll notice that we've added a 'subscribe' button to the page from PayPal. The way this works is that some nice person clicks it, and I get $5 bucks a month until they get tired of paying. You can 'unsubscribe' at any time. Seven people have done this so far - really.
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So get another helping of that stuffing, some cranberry sauce and another beer. I'll take that wing if you're not going to eat it. And if you've just got too much time to kill, make sure to fill out our 2009 readers survey.
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Post Script: In a post following this post, RCNevada at 'My View of the World' gives a more thorough overview of Rupert Murdoch's quest for cash off the Internet, in particular his much hinted at deal with Microsoft and Bing. If he swings it, he will give Bing exclusive rights to News Corp. info and Google will be cut out of the deal - so of course you'll have to search Bing for his info - and of course he'll get some fraction of a penny from every click on that info through Bing and make bazillions.
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Many bloggers sell books, art or other products and use their blogs soley to promote whatever it is they're selling. For those of us without another product to sell, the idea that our content could someday be integrated into another site with larger traffic, and that we could get a tick for every click we generate is a good one. But until then, I'll stick with the voluntary subscription model, and keep my day job.



For more on blogs, blogging and bloggers, check here:

Advertising People & Blogs - The Travis Diaries VI
How to Write the Best Damn Blog in the World
Throw That Blog a Bone!
If Blogs Are Free Are They Worthless?
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If You Like the Blog, Read the Book>/a>
2008 Annual Report - The Wild Wild East Dailies
Blog Redesign WWED
BarCamp Saigon 2008
Attraction vs. Conversion - How to Power Your Blog
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market?










Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Does Your Country Market Itself Well? These do...

France, Germany, UK, Kosovo, Poland, Turkey, Georgia, Macedonia, Advertising, Brand Marketing, FDI, Romania, Equitorial New Guinea, According to the finance ministers of both France and Germany, the recession is over with two quarters of growth reported for both countries. The United Kingdom is another story but that's not my story today. My story today is about Kosovo, and Poland, and Turkey, and Georgia, and Macedonia, and Romania, and Equitorial Guinea - because those are the countries buying up all the media time on CNN and BBC here in Germany to tout their foreign investment programs to corporations all over Europe. Those are the people who want your money.




Make sure to pause the music in the podcast before playing the video.
Wait, who? Let's do that again: Kosovo, Poland, Turkey, Georgia, Macedonia, Romania and Equitorial Guinea. Yep those are the big media spenders around here. Not China, Japan or America because they don't care at all about foreign direct investment. But these people above do and are making a real play for investment dollars with high levels of university graduates, tax incentives and workforces that are more than willing to work for just a fraction of what most conventional Europeans would consider reasonable.

Kosovo is particularly interesting. Take a look at the spot above. Rather than trot out it's economic statistics as does Turkey in their campaign, Kosovo goes for the heartstrings of it's own citizens by showing it's youth building their idea of the future, and attractively so I might say. For the record, Kosovo is one of the youngest countries in the world and has an average age of just 25.9 years old. This spot was produced by Saatchi & Saatchi and is really quite nice. Good song too.

While in Paris earlier this year I had a conversation with someone who was telling me that the French were protesting one Dijon Mustard company for moving it's manufacturing out of France and over to Poland for cheaper labour, but apparently mustard companies aren't bound by the same rules as winemakers in France. You couldn't move Champagne production out of Champagne, France and still call it Champagne, but you can move Dijon mustard making out of Dijon, France and still call it Dijon.

And so the world is changing. Again. Or still. I'm curious to know if any of the above named countries are running the same commercials in America? If you're in the States and have seen any advertising for these countries, please leave a comment here. With the US still technically in a recession I suspect that this is a European focused effort only.


Monday, November 23, 2009

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Take what you can get? Or get what you can take? I'll take the latter.

Seth Godin, David Everitt-Carlson, CarlsonCreative, Armstrong Floors, KOBACO, bat, British American Tobacco, Fortune 500, business, Survival, Management Consulting, Korea, I'm going to do something I rarely do, and reprint nearly an entire post from Seth Godin, because this one really hit me where I was living at the time I read it. Now with Seth issuing a post to his blog every single day, the need for an editor comes seriously into question because 60% of what even the most talented writer can do is rubbish, but if you're willing to wade through that rubbish, many of his posts have real longstanding value. This is one of them.

Read Seth's post in the coloured print first, and then go back and see my own notations in the regular font. I think you'll see why it resonated with me.

Take what you can get (?)


When I started my agency in Korea, CarlsonCreative, things were fairly bleak for the first six months. My staff told me that we were not getting pitches because we would not do them for free. I had also set a bar that clients needed to be of a blue-chip and pressworthy variety, ie: I wanted big logos so that when we finally won something, no matter how small, we could publicize it and get the street-cred of being an upstart David (no pun really) who had won against the Goliaths.

We scored our first pitch with the Armstrong flooring company from the US and followed that up with the Korean Broadcasting Corporation (KOBACO) and eventually, British American Tobacco - all paid presentations with the latter two turning into well paying clients and significant press generation vehicles. Within 18 months, we had become a 'hot' shop and the big agencies were truly scared of us.


We took this to heart and I am still a believer in this today.


This has been redefined for me in the last few months with the pressure to get my feet planted in a new market representing the most basic of needs like eating and paying the rent. These things are of course primary, but certainly not the ultimate goal in the longer term. Why the hell, in a million years, would I want to teach business English in an already overcrowded market of teachers and schools who are busy undercutting each other on an almost daily basis, when I've got a quiver full of marketing and advertising arrows that have flown true for my entire career?

Because it's what I 'could' get initially, but it's not what I 'want' to get, eventually. What I'm after eventually is what I have been able to do my entire life - to balance business and creativity in a way which benefits my clients and provides me and my family a superior level of income and professional satisfaction.


So I'm surviving. But that's not my definition of success. And I'm doing the work and not dying on the vine waiting for perfect in an imperfect world - but I'm spending more and more time defining what makes me unique in the market and striving to build a practice off that. This last week I renegotiated a contract which now pays me 30% more and broadens my responsibilities to consult on marketing with a client who had previously only needed language instruction.

Later in the week, I'm having coffee with a blue-chip sort of guy who works soley in the marketing business and in the evenings I busy myself with promoting this blog and writing copy for various businesses from software to arts and achitecture. All of this is still a far cry from having my own company in Korea, but at least I can remember what that was like, before we landed the big-fish client, and retrench my current life experience to more closely chase the dream of 'getting' what I can take, instead of just 'taking' what I can get.
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Many thanks to Seth Godin for helping me articulate this more clearly.






Saturday, November 21, 2009

Sex: The Travis Diaries I

06.25.09

"I never saw sex make anybody any smarter." -Travis

For more in the Travis Diaries, check here:

Sex: The Travis Diaries I

I'm a man, DAMMIT: The Travis Diaries II
Love: The Travis Diaries III
Tiger: The Travis Diaries IV
Ambivelence: The Travis Diaries V
Advertising People & Blogs: The Travis Diaries VI
What's Left?: The Travis Diaries VII
Year of the Tiger: The Travis Diaries VIII
She said: The Travis Diaries IX
Dreams: The Travis Diaries X

A Bad Day: The Travis Diaries XI
Svengali? The Travis Diaries XII
My Way: The Travis Diaries XIII


Friday, November 20, 2009

Who are the Friends of the Wild Wild East Dailies? Our first reader survey...

wild wild east dailies, reader survey, Marketing, internet, Blog, Demographics, Recently the Wild Wild East Dailies has had an increase of interest in sorts, both in terms of Technorati ranking, as well as reader contributions. And with that increase in influence come questions - big questions. Questions like, just who the heck are you? Oh sure, I'm fond of thinking that anybody who reads this drivel is pretty darn hip but it's always nice to know a little bit more about our readers and so a proper survey is in order. A painlessly short, five question survey that will take you all of a minute to complete. I'm going to let this survey run for the next month or so and then report the results back to everyone around the first of the year. This, combined with my regular Google Analytics tracking and Statcounter will then be compiled in February for the 2009 annual report. Please be assured that all responses are confidential and nobody will even know who you are. There will be no responses regarding weights, measures or body-part sizes and no sophisticated brain scans. This is just nuts and bolts stuff, with a little lightheartedness thrown in for effect. Please do take a minute, and thank you.



Should you have any trouble using the form on this page, just click here and go directly to the survey site. And if you are truly a Friend of the Wild Wild East Dailies, consider joining FOWWED on FaceBook by clicking the link.






Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Mystery Google: The Random Search Effect IV

Mystery Google, internet, Random search effect, I hope you think this is as much fun as I did.

So I'm looking at my Statcounter statistics because those give me a detailed list, hit by hit, of every tick this blog gets - and I see a hit from MysteryGoogle.com. Hmm, Mystery Google? Wonder what that might be, so I give it a click and up comes the screen you see here. That's interesting. It looks just like the standard Google search page, buttons and all but with a curious 'mouse-over' descriptor on the tab that says, 'Mystery Google. You get what the person before you searched for'. And so I punch a search term into it, the name of this blog, 'The Wild Wild East Dailies', and what comes up? Not that, but the results for the words 'fine fine' which turns up a music program on KX Radio for a show by the name of 'Fine Fine Music'. Interesting. So no matter what I punch in, I'm going to get the results for whatever the person before me searched for. That's the engine the Random Search Effect series has been looking for! Just random stuff. I thought it was pretty cool and played around with it for awhile, just looking at what other people have been looking for. Give it a try. You may be surprised

For more in the Random Search Effect series see:

To be continued: The Random Search Effect I
Children & Unselfishness: The Random Search Effect II

Your Inner Fire: The Random Search Effect III
Mystery Google: The Random Search Effect IV
Warren Buffet: The Random Search Effect V

Monday, November 16, 2009

Wir verfehlen Sie Michael Jackson! Oh, Michael, we hardly knew ye... Nothing Much Happened (XV) In München Today

And who would have thunk, that MJ would have been a fixture here in Germany, and in Munich of all places. I posed earlier this year on his death while I was in Dalat on a rebirth of my own but I never would have considered that his passing would have made a blip on the radar here. Wrong. Here a photo at the base of a statue of Orlande de Lassus who was evidently a very famous composer who died in 1594 (thanks to RCNevada for the info here) , redecorated to be a shrine to Jackson, and a woman mourning on a quiet afternoon here in Deutschland. Even when MJ dies, MJ lives. I found it touching. Many of you will have noticed lately that a friend of mine has had a dimming of life as of late, and so I ask you to all please say a prayer for her. I do every night. She has taken up the guantlet of her issues and tackled them head on. She dissed MJ at his death for being weak and unable to control his life or finances. May we all gain strength from him and move forward. This is it. The first day of the rest of our lives. Click on the photo to see it larger. It really is touching.




Sunday, November 15, 2009

You could lead the horse to water, but you could not make it drink...

Denial, Germany, Hell, Hieronymous Bosch,  Salvador Dali, SurrealismImagine a world of Dali-esque proportions. Where all the clocks dripped in the sluggish taking of time. Now imagine a world where love goes by that clock, continually making times and commitments but totally missing them, always. That's a world I know, and I know it well over thDenial, Germany, Hell, Hieronymous Bosch,  Salvador Dali, Surrealisme last eight months. A world where someone will throw any amounts of time and money into an endeavor, yet not themselves, truly. Almost as if failure is engineered in the planning by just not showing up. A world in which all is given but then taken back three-fold the next day in waves of guilt and misdiagnosis of past committments. Is that hell? Surrealistic hell? Yes, it is. But the other person plunders on in some manufactured reality that doesn't happen to include all the other people in their life, just their own fantasy. But you still love them, because you know they'll figure it out sooner or later - but just not sooner. Maybe years of psychobDenial, Germany, Hell, Hieronymous Bosch,  Salvador Dali, Surrealismabble will sort this out. Do I have time? Hell I'm old. Guess time is one of the things I really do have. I like much better the ideas of Hieronymous Bosch, a happy German and his Garden of Earthly Delights, but explaining this work to a person who has maybe never visited a museum wouldn't be the best idea. So let's get simple. Can you lead a horse to water but not make them drink? Yup. But in my case, I didn't really lead the horse to water. The horse was looking for something to drink, and I just showed it the concept of water. And that horse said, "What's that?" And I said, "Well, it's water, It's what you want" and it said, "Well I don't know that and I won't have that becuase I've never seen that before in my life". Yeah okay, Hmm, Question: how do you convince a person that water is what they need. Answer: You don't. And so I don't. Don't I need to pay the rent this month? Back to work...


"It's Baaaaaaaaack!" The BIG SHOW Vietnam!

The Big Show,Young Lions, Creative Circle, Vietnam Advertising Association, Vietnam Advertising Festival, After a seriously confusing year last year with The Golden Bells, The BIG SHOW and The Vietnam Advertising Festival all staging shows in a market that's really only large enough for one good show, The BIG SHOW is back and promising to incorporate the Vietnam Advertising Festival, including The Young Lions, possibly the highlight of all these efforts. So does that mean that The Creative Circle and The Vietnamese Advertising Association have put their gloves down and realized that combining efforts will strengthen the industry for all? Let's hope so. But messages to Creative Circle have failed to confirm this and the BIG SHOW website only sports a cryptic message about the date of the new exhibition, December 11. And will the Golden Bells still try to put on a less than exciting TV show out of the deal? Let's hope not. Unfortunately it doesn't look as if I will be able to make the show this year as I am in Germany, but here's wishing the organizers, participants and festival goers the best of BIG SHOWS! It seems my suggestions of the previous year may have finally found their place. Vive la BIGGEST SHOW ever! A recent article in Vietnam Business News indicates that the ad industry in Vietnam has successfully shrugged off the recession - let's hope the creative work has helped. No awards for Dr. Thanh, please!

Follow-up info from the Creative Circle indicates that The BIG SHOW and The Vietnamese Advertising Festival (Sunflower Media) are not associated with the Vietnamese Advertising Association and the Golden Bell awards, so the cooperation I had hoped for before does not seem to have materialized. So does that mean that another dreadful TV show is planned for the Golden Bells? Check your TV Guide.



Wednesday, November 11, 2009

What If Gutenberg Had A Blog? - Technorati Rankings Updated: Nothing Much Happened (XIV) in Munich Today



Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Blog, Blogosphere, Gapingvoid, Gutenberg, Huffington Post, internet, Munich, SEO, Technorati rankMany of you will have noticed that I've referenced Technorati and their blog ranking system in the last few posts. For those non-geeks, Technorati (Technorati is a portmanteau of the words technology and literati, which invokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism.) is the arguable leader in blog search engines and provides a service that rates and ranks individual blogs based on influence in the blogosphere. "OMG! What does that mean?", the non-geeks wail! What that means is that Technorati tracks, not how many hits your blog gets, but rather how many other independent blogs have linked to your posts - and then they give you a ranking for that influence in the medium. Now over the years, Technorati has been widely criticized for how they calculated the rankings and it was, of course, people with crappy rankings who did most of the complaining. In 2006, someone pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which then claimed to track 27.7 million blogs, did not take into account MySpace blogs, of which there were said to be 56 million. As a result, it was claimed said that the utility of Technorati as a gauge of blog popularity was questionable. However by March of that same year Technorati had started tracking MySpace blogs. Last year Technorati claimed to be tracking over 120 million blogs worldwide.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Blog, Blogosphere, Gapingvoid, Gutenberg, Huffington Post, internet, Munich, SEO, Technorati rankAnd then it all hit a wall. With the popularity of blogs rising and magazines and newspapers shuttering by the thousands it became imperative that a clearer tracking and monitoring of the blogoshere was needed. So Technorati pulled the plug on their old rating system and started from scratch. They also redesigned their site and killed a few features that made bloggers less happy, but all-in-all the new ranking system seems to be a success by both tech professional and average user standards. Andy Beard of Internet Business Systems authors the previous two click-throughs. But enough of all this tecno-babble. I wanna know about me!

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Blog, Blogosphere, Gapingvoid, Gutenberg, Huffington Post, internet, Munich, SEO, Technorati rank
And so we go. Just to give you an idea of where WWED stood in February of this year take a look at my 2009 Annual Report post, which is really a recap of 2008. At that point Technorati had us placed at 520,00 in a universe of 120 million or so blogs but with the new system, initiated in the fall, we debuted at 53,000 and have now climbed to 45,120 - but keep in mind they have cleaned out their definition of the blog universe pretty well and eliminated the scam/advertising blogs that weren't updated or written by real people - so we're not sure how many blogs are in their total universe now. All we know is that they only track the real ones. Technorati now rates blogs on a tally of monthly metrics that are confusing as hell to us mere mortals but based on post frequency, other blogs linking in and some other closely guarded hocus pocus - but what the hell, we're moving up. And that's got to be a good thing.

To give you an idea of where that puts us in the total universe, lets look at a few benchmarks: Ranked as number one for as long as anyone could say the word blog is the Huffington Post with an Authority of 964 out of a total 1000. Coming in a lot lower but still with over a million hits a month is Hugh MacLeod's Gapingvoid at an Authority of 579 to place at 1925 - and he just published a best-selling book. So with WWED clocking in at an Authority of 118 and ranking 45,120 I feel about as good as I should, considering that I haven't published a farking thing, except the blog. So something is happening, but I'm not sure exactly what. All I know is that when I show my dad a report card with a better grade than last time, he gives me money!

The photos here are all from the public library here in Munich, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and an exhibit they had on Gutenberg and his application of the printing press. As we now stand on the precipice of an entirely new information distribution system, the Internet, I can't help but wonder what Gutenberg would have thought of it and what his handle on Twitter might have been or blog might have looked like...



For more on blogs, blogging and bloggers, check here:

Advertising People & Blogs - The Travis Diaries VI
How to Write the Best Damn Blog in the World
Throw That Blog a Bone!
If Blogs Are Free Are They Worthless?
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If You Like the Blog, Read the Book>/a>
2008 Annual Report - The Wild Wild East Dailies
Blog Redesign WWED
BarCamp Saigon 2008
Attraction vs. Conversion - How to Power Your Blog
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market?





For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago


Sunday, November 8, 2009

If Blogs Are Free, Does That Make Them Worthless? Another Contribution. Thank you.


Blog, Bloggers, Monopoly, Bank Error in Your Favor, Contributions, Entertainment, ProductSo it seems that the decision of whether or not one contributes to blog writers is based on value. Is it valuable to you? Whilst providing a service or selling a product on the web has become all too commonplace, would it be so far fetched to suggest that a blog, as an entertainment vehicle, is a product in itself? I think not so far fetched at all - but as opposed to newspapers and magazines, most blogs (at least the good ones) are not supported by advertising, and I personally have been very selective in the ads I take. I'd much rather not take any and keep it a reader supported endeavor. My regular posting diet is good for three stories a week and I try to keep it varied with everything from travelogue, to comedy to personal reflection and sometimes politics, so if these things are interesting to you if you're a regular subscriber or you come back frequently to check the goings on at WWED, please do consider a contribution. It really does help.

All that said, we recieved another contribution today in the amount of $100 and we thank that reader warmly - and as the snow begins to fall here in Bavaria, that means a lot!


For more on blogs, blogging and bloggers, check here:

Advertising People & Blogs - The Travis Diaries VI
How to Write the Best Damn Blog in the World
Throw That Blog a Bone!
If Blogs Are Free Are They Worthless?
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If You Like the Blog, Read the Book>/a>
2008 Annual Report - The Wild Wild East Dailies
Blog Redesign WWED
BarCamp Saigon 2008
Attraction vs. Conversion - How to Power Your Blog
The Top 1%, Alvar Aalto and The Dalai Lama







For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago


Saturday, November 7, 2009

Review of WWED: Can You Spot Rejection? II

I had put this up earlier but pulled it down figuring the writer might be upset, but then I thought, well, I didn't write it...not really my issue...

There is a big difference beween you and Hugh Mcleod:

Ooh, that hurts. Hugh is a best selling WSJ writer and the reviewer knows I know him.

His book bases on cartoons: His cartoons, which are unique and entertained and not imitable. NEver. Form that point, his blog just delivers a platform to communicate that unique thing and can sell it and his cartoons.

And I am not a cartoonist.

You jump into the mass writer market, and your book bases on like or dislike, very controversal, and it makes you frustration.

I wish I had had this advice earlier. It could have saved me a successful career in the advertising business and a lot of frustration.

YOu blog is nice nice, basing on personal experience, a bit creative, nice nice, but not so unique like Hugh. Please wake up, you might be very talented but what you are doing with the blog does not make you unique. Neither content nor expression.

So the content and the expression suck. Is there anything else? Go shoot myself?

So, do you want to live with and depend on bad comments or good comments of any reader for ther est of your life and be frustrated everyday? When I see you, I dont see a confident man but a frustrated one?

Find me a person in the creative arts who doesn't experience frustration and I'll show you someone who's probably not very talented. Making any art is always driven by the feedback one gets from the consumers of that art. That's how it works. That's why it works.

Dont kill yourself that way. As a friend, I would like to tell you: Dear David, wake up. I learned on internet about jsut one guy who succeeeded with his blog so that it is integrated into a newspaper. You alone do not come fromthe journalism business, but a creative writer at adversiting companies.

These days I think having a background in journalism could be a liability. I'll take my chances.

So your book is exiting, has a mix of many things, complicated but for me not so deep in content if it shoud be the way of literature.

NO clear positioning, describing the nice story of a creative person going to the east...A travel book perhaps...But Many other personal stories are comparable: Success bases on like or dislike, but no big success.

There may be a million better stories, but they're not mine - even the reviewer has a more interesting story than mine. All I try to do is write down, as best I can, the images and feelings I have. What happens after that is out of my hands. But what I can say so far, is that my good reviews far outnumber this one.

Hugh's book is unique: simple, full of cartoons, claer messege, easy to read. It is unique, clear unique, not comparable....

Yes, we already know I'm not Hugh. This is bordering on just plain cruel.

Dont kill your self, David. Success can be a grateful day, after David finishes his job to survive and writes in confidence, and bigger things will happen, step by step, in a apeaceful way.


Comments please. And please refer to my previous post, 'Can You Spot Rejecton?'

Interesting how some critics have never done much themselves, which might make it easier for them to tell us what we're doing wrong. One thing I won't be doing for sure is killing myself over this. This week the Technorati Authority for WWED jumped to 115 from 103 earlier in the week placing us at number 52,929 - and that's out of maybe 120 million blogs worldwide - so do I feel bad for my 21 months work? I could feel worse. When I first saw the review above I felt immediately the anger from the reviewer and of couse it bothered me. It hurt me deeply, not because someone trashed my art, but because they trashed two projects I care deeply about and pour a lot of emotion into. It was an attack on my hope. And if the people closest to you don't believe in what you are doing, why bother doing it? I'll survive. Maybe that person wasn't really so close to me as I had thought.

On the funnier side was this email comment from a reader: "I love hate mail", it read, "When you get it, you know you've done something right!"

Touche!


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