garry’s subposterous

The new Christmas Carol movie heavily falls under uncanny valley. Come on guys. Watching CG humans is creepy as hell.

Penenberg: Certainly, besides a nice chunk of change, Flickr has brought you a level of fame.

Fake: I design Web sites, its not like I'm Angelina Jolie. I think you need to tune that stuff out, otherwise you're never going to be able to build stuff, be an entrepreneur, take risks, fail. That's part of entrepreneurialism, being able to launch a stupid IM client. The hardest part about Flickr being successful is wanting to do it again. I think there's a benefit to being one of six people that no one knew. No VCs would return our calls and we were broke and bootstrapping it and operating under the radar so we could focus on the most important things: the product, the users, what we were building. There's all this noise, the tech-crunch, which you have to tune out if you want to build good product. None of that stuff is additive; it all takes away from building a product. You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

I would skip the networking events and spend your time building your reputation through hard (and brilliant) work. Work at an important Silicon Valley technology company doing interesting things, work on important open source projects, or create something new on your own time from scratch to build your reputation.

Really interesting take on networking in the Valley. This has proven mostly to be true. In the words of my cofounder Sachin Agarwal, there are too many talkers. This is especially true at networking events.

Be a do-er.

This is our customer service approach:
1. Answer ALL emails and tweets.
2. Build a support site that is SEO’d and contains all the questions people ask (support.gymu.com).
3. Find our evangelists and love them.
4. Find our haters and love them more than our own mothers.
5. Do whatever it takes to fix a customer’s problem, even if that means meeting them to give them pre-release code!

We try to do the same at Posterous. When you can't even get a response from other services, we'll try to get back to you within 12 hours or less.

There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got "practical" and did something else "first." The idea was that they'd be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the "practical" career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you're doing.

Rev. Fred Harrell at City Church of San Francisco

Just had this happen to me over Thanksgiving and it went something like this...

Grandma: What the heck is a TicketStumbler? Are you still just playing at the computer all day?

Me: Oh, have you been to our site Grandma?

Grandma: No.

Me: Well Grandma, have you ever heard of Expedia, Kayak or Orbitz?

Grandma: No.

Me: What about Bizrate or Pricegrabber?

Grandma: No.

Me: Hmm...well essentially what we do is take sports & concert tickets from all over the internet and put them on one website. So instead of going to multiple websites you can just go to one. You know how you put all your recipe cards in one place? Well we do that, but with tickets.

Grandma: Oh I see. Well, that's nice dear; would you like a beer while you work? Or how about some more candy?

Me: I love you Grandma.

I'd rather offend people than pander to them, and if you write about controversial topics you have to choose one or the other.

An Italian court is to decide whether four senior Google executives should face prison, over the broadcast of a video clip showing a boy with Down’s Syndrome being bullied by his classmates.

The long-running trial, which centres around a three-minute clip showing four schoolboys making fun of the teenager and hitting him over the head at their school in Turin, in 2006, is being seen as a test case for the control of content on the internet.

...

Google removed the clip within 24 hours of being alerted of the upload. Prosecution lawyers argue that the broadcast still amounted to a breach of privacy and was defamatory as the company failed to adequately control content on the site. They say the Google had a "legal obligation to prevent" the video from airing in the first place.

The Google executives standing trial are David Carl Drummond, head of Google Italy's managing board; George De Los Reyes, a board member; Peter Fleitcher, in charge of privacy protection in Europe; and Arvind Desikan, head of videos for Europe.

They each face up to three years in jail and a fine if convicted.

That executives of an Internet firm could be held liable for user-generated content THAT WAS TAKEN DOWN WITHIN 24 HOURS is absurd. That people totally unrelated to the specifics of a very sad and tragic case can be sent to jail for three years is just ridiculous.

Seriously, there should be no case here. To put people behind bars for providing a free online publishing service is like bringing medical malpractice to our industry. Society doesn't need this.

Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.

They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.