on culture
feed issues
I realized my feed was down tonight. A bunch of troubleshooting led me to disqus as the problem. So I killed it. In the process, though, I deleted my feedburner feed. It will redirect for 30 days, at which point I’ll redirect it again. None of this should matter to you (hopefully), because my readers are all seeing the blog fine now, but if you lose me from your reader at some point, come back and resubscribe.
peoplespace
As I was packing up to leave school in late May, I had a weird experience on campus. I had crossed the river from home to school to pick a few things up from my various lockers, closets, etc. It was about 10 days after school had let out for summer. Most people had already left campus for travel before starting summer internships.
Being on campus, a place where I had had a million intense memories accumulate during the year, I had a rather vacant feeling. The type of vacancy you’d encounter coming to a place you’d never been before.
In my mind I started to feel nostalgic – remembering all the great things that had happened that year.
It occurred to me then that the place would never be the same. Granted, I still have a whole year to go at HBS, and many many more memories yet to create. But the notion that what had happened during the year – the experience – was more closely tied to the people and the circumstance than the physical place, made me realize how much I will need to capture every opportunity in the coming year.
Because once the moment passes: the people, the place, the circumstance – everything that happened there becomes a nice (but unrepeatable) memory.
I wonder what psychologists would say about memories – and the strength of them – relative to people or place.
the content wedge
In corporate strategy, theorists like to talk about the “wedge,” or the gap between cost of goods and a customer’s willingness to pay. This means that the company with the most sustainable strategy has the lowest cost of goods and the customers with the highest willingness to pay. (That’s a simplification, but bear with me).
The same could be said of content, if it weren’t for a complicating factor called quality. Whereas other industries have found ways to reduce the cost of goods without reducing the quality, content quality is still tied very closely to cost. (If you give a film student a prosumer camera and a modest budget, the discerning audience will still be able to target the work as sub-par when screened alongside a professionally produced film involving 35mm film cameras, etc.)
Recently, though, things have started to change. Technological advances have enabled the creation of high-quality content that rivals that of Hollywood. The question then remains, how long before a new system, a new content producing apparatus, springs forward to break the old-standing business model?
You can see some of this type of work happening around the web already. My friend Nathan Heleine of Crush + Lovely has been involved with this project called Fifty People, One Question. The videos are pretty astounding both from an editorial perspective and from a physical quality perspective. The photography is done by Benjamin Reece of The Deltree and it is just astounding (more of his stuff on his site). Worth checking out any of the links if you have time.
Projects like this are the future of moving image content.
illustrated blogging
Felt compelled to share a link I stumbled across today. Maira Kalman “blogs” for the New York Times. The blog is called “And the Pursuit of Happiness.” She is an artist, illustrator and designer, and this is reflected in her work at the Times. Her thoughts and observations are presented in illustrated fashion. (It’s also interesting to note that the Times has an alternative style sheet for the presentation of this blog.) I found the most recent post, entitled “Can Do” particularly inspirational. Enjoy.
