[bright lights and danger]

[...and back and forth for hours, but in the end I know that it really doesn't matter what I do. In any case I need the money for tomorrow, so if I don't make it to the party, I'll still need to drive out in the dark, get onto the freeway and get to the Caltex where there's an ATM. Bright lights and danger, I think. I could die so easily out there. But I know that it really doesn't matter what I do, if I do]

Storify this

Ever since I came across Storify I've been trying to think of something it could be good for.

Storify lets users curate social media updates on a given topic into a story. This one, on editors, was pretty blergh but even this one on Syria has that same air of "and then he said and so I said but she reckons" to it.

Still, in my unquenchable thirst to mashuperate the content as much as possible, I've thought long and hard about how this could be good. As far as I can tell, there are two options:

1. Stupid and hilarious riots of conversations about something serious: like the conversation I had with my friend the other night, ostensibly about the Leveson inquiry, but really about cute lawyers at the Leveson inquiry. I'm, clearly, not kidding. All you need to do is look at spoof Twitter accounts like that of Jesus Christ, or serious humour publications like The Onion to see this would work. Hilarity (along, I suppose, with porn) is the lifeblood of new media.
2. Actual conversations, augmented with other media, that precipitate a tangible result: for example, you and I hatch a plan, via a Twitter exchange, to paint Gina Rinehart's house with a photovoltaic coating under an ironic cover of darkness. The curated, temporally arranged replication of the exchange is supplemented with maps showing our GPS locations throughout the exchange, soundbytes from the salesman who sold us the paint along with his headshot, footage we took on-site at painting time with infra-red camera, news reports on the incident following our apprehension by police and subsequent arraingnment, simultaneous rallying of friends and supporters via social media and telephone, shots from their protest outside the court, etc. Think of the possibilities for reportage of things like the Arab Spring protests, Brisbane council evicting the Aboriginal tent embassy, and so on! Compare those possibilities with the Syria story I mentioned, and you'll see there's a big opportunity there to make shit, well, interesting and informative.

That, as far as I can see, is how social media storytelling, like Storify, could be good. Incidentally, I made a multi-character story on Twitter in February last year—this might be the other decent way to use a system like Storify: for fiction entertainment.

In any case, the multiple media factor is the clincher. Curated social media conversations alone won't really cut much mustard if you ask me.

Ending the charm offensive

Today I realised just how much effort I put into writing charming professional emails.

I start always with a sweet salutation, then elucidate some carefully expressed sentiment framed just the right way so as not to offend or leave room for confusion, and finish by telling the correspondent how much I'm looking forward to hearing from them.

For fifteen years I've been composing—really, composing is the most accurate verb here—these missives to people who:

• reply with "Thanx"
• don't bother to respond at all
• are incapable of using salutations of any type
• ignore my email then write to me a week later to ask what's going on
• read the email, ignore what I've communicated, and reply with three short sentences that tell me what they're going to do regardless, apparently, of the input of myself as their colleague
• reply with questions relating exclusively to something else entirely.

So why bother?

This is the question of the day. The only answer I can come up with is, "because I'm an idiot." Well, idiocy no more. From this day forth, I will give precisely on a par with what I get.

And so ends the charm offensive.

Evolve

Today's cuteness courtesy of FastCompany:

...grow a tail with a hook in it! Simple!!

Seriously, though, that nifty fellow looks to be doing better than we are, no?

Hobbled by cliches

Today I was speaking with my favourite human about doing physical stuff, country stuff: cutting wood, digging trenches, wrangling goats.

He said, "Yeah, you're doing this kind of work all the time, and it's still work, it's still physical labour, but it's just what you do."

And I said, "Well, yeah, it's like … physical work. But it just becomes … you know, that's life."

That's life.

I did not mean "that's life" in the sense that the cliche would communicate. I wasn't saying, "yeah but man, you just gotta suck that shit up." Or, "you have to take the bad with the good." Or even, "yes, but don't you see, this is all part of the rich tapestry of life." (Of course I didn't mean that—what am I? Some kind of Zen master of block splitting?)

What I meant was, that is life. That is where the life is: in morning air so cold it burns your nostrils. In rasping-throat breaths as you stack wood. In seeing next year's buds at pruning and knowing that Spring is hurtling toward you even now, with the first frost. In the crystalline nights, with the terrible stars screaming dead light into the precarious, overwhelming dark, each one barely a pinprick, but so much bigger than you.

That is life.

Fuck you, cliches.

Why wireframe your copy?

When we think of wireframing, we tend to think of reducing everything down to its most basic, functional parts.

But this article points out an important aspect of wireframing to do with copy: when you wireframe, you need to include real copy, not dummy text.

This is particularly important if the thing (site, app) you're building promotes a new-concept product or service. In those cases, user testing of wireframes can actually help you to identify conceptual language that does and doesn't work to communicate what you need it to.

That, in turn, can help to define the brand language itself.

Last year I saw this first-hand. The designer, a charming and intelligent individual, took the wireframes and added in my copy, which included references to the new-concept product that the site was selling.

The testing showed that some aspects of the language (like some aspects of the layout) were confusing in context, and needed refinement. It also showed us how far visuals would go to communicate the new concept, and where we needed the refined copy to step in.

To find this out at wireframe testing stage was a massive advantage. The refined copy (and I'm talking 4-word phrases here) proved far more successful at communicating the brand's fundamental purpose at the second round of wireframe testing.

Copy does so much to communicate the purpose and function of a site (or brand) at first glance.

I know a picture tells a thousand words, but often, visuals end up being pretty busy. On the other hand, single- or double-word prompts, or even short-phrase prompts, can be absorbed in an instant. Taken together, the dominant copy on your page contributes massively to that initial communication in the new user's "WTF is this?" moment.

The new-brand-defining moment, if you will.

Example? Example. Not an image on the page. Can you tell what this brand does better than any other? In an instant.

Bad example? This. The visual is busy (and boring), and there's zero actual information in view. The first big word I see is "Analytics", which only reminds me of this brand's largest competitor.

Why should I click on anything on this page? No reason is given in this first view. To put that another way, nothing unique is communicated in the user's first glance at the screen. This is just another analytics brand. Any clicking or scrolling I do will be an attempt to try to find a reason to stick around.

I don't know the facts, but I doubt this homepage's wireframe was tested with real copy. In case you're as slow as I am, the USP is real-time data. Real-time data! The benefit? Respond to this minute's site visitors, right now. That's some selling proposition. Don't use the past to try to predict the future: seize the moment, statisticians and site owners!

Is the immediate communication of a brand's unique function "usability"? Yes. Without a function, the brand has no use to the user. Without a unique function, the brand provides no motivation for its own use.

Yeah, I can work out how to sign up to the free trial and log in. I can scratch my way to hovering over that big arrow, clicking, and watching the video. But Jesus, in that first instant, I got nothin'.

Your video, your pretty pictures, and your logical, navigable, clickable interface don't mean beans—unless, together with your copy, the page says something unique in that first moment.

The random project

Every so often one of those projects comes along.

The random project.

"What the hell is this?" you beg the cosmos, staring bewilderedly at your email. "Did they say [insert ridiculous random project here]? Wait—" Your eyes rake back across the pixels to the Sender field. "—who sent me this?"

For [ridiculous random project], you (or, more properly, I) might insert:

• wacky music festival program/me
• fantastical creative-writing direct email
• greeting card messages
• outrageous-interview-then-carve-the-quotes-up-until-unrecognizable copy job
• comparatively-normal-interview-then-meld-all-talking-into-annual-report job
• my-management-team-just-changed-the-business-model-I-need-you-to-rewrite-all-the-content job
• write-an-entire-book-as-someone-else job
• boardgames.

Yeah, that's right, I said boardgames. And you thought I was just mucking around.

Show us yer briefs

Alarmingly few on the client side of the "information economy" know how to give a creative brief.

I know: yet another unfashionable opinion. There are, of course, some glowing exceptions within my own personal client list. However, I have found that few of my contemporaries in marketing roles within organisations know how to give a creative brief.

That's one end of the spectrum; the other is people who aren't my clients but run online businesses and approach me for work. Broadly speaking, they have less idea of giving a brief than they do about creating rocket-propelled grenades in a domestic kitchen.

I studied marketing, but I didn't learn to give a brief until I got a job and saw how others did it. I can't believe that in the last, oh, 15 years or so, no one has thought to teach undergraduates how to give—let alone take or interpret—a creative brief.

What's more concerning is that these greenhorns won't have anyone to learn from, since there are, apparently, few marketing departments where anyone more senior still knows how to give a brief.

The creative needs to know how to take a brief—sure. But it can be difficult (sometimes impossible) to communicate to a client who's never given one, and has grown up in the churn-and-burn, high-conversion, fuck-usability-fuck-users world of much online marketing, that a brief is even a thing, let alone a necessary thing.

I now find it easiest to just say no to such clients, and to revel—to crack champagne, make toasts, don gladrags—in the delights of those who do.

Because a brief helps the creative do a better job for the client. A brief makes it easier for us to make the client look good, which makes us look good, which means more work, and so the glorious cycle begins again...

Come what may

Sometimes, you can't write. Other times, you just can't read.

Usually it's best to accept this fact, put the books down, and go outside to stare at the trees, or turn the lights off and gaze vacantly at the moon.

The cycle adheres to a known trajectory, which usually ends in a long tail of disenchantment that takes some breaching.

Currently I'm trying to crack up that long tail with Monstress, which I bought at City Lights and which brought me to tears only last evening.

Give up, you say? Try something else? No, no. To abort is impossible. This is the only way. Come what may, we must press on.

Books on country

While I was a the Hill of Content bookshop (which I call the Hill of Content, for obvious reasons, rather than the Hill of Content; the former interpretation is also appropriate because I always leave in a state of inexpressible discontent) today, I saw a current, as in newly released, book described as a modern, British Walden, about a dude who lived on a remote farm in Wales for a bit. It had great reviews but as books are so wildly overpriced in Oz, and owing to my HoC discontent, I failed to purchase it.

However, it made me recall some of the great books on country I've read. In putting together these links I found out, happily, that the more obscure of them aren't just garbage, as my overly lettered family would have me believe, and a sad epithet to the death of taste and refinement in my reading habits, but are in fact internationally lauded tomes.

In any case, I wanted to give you a little reading list, if you're that way inclined:

• The Fat of the Land, Self-Sufficiency, and I'm a Stranger Here Myself, by John Seymour: great books, practical and homely. It was these that taught me to kill and clean a hen and a rabbit.
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, the highlight of this list if you have any errings toward modern sensibilities and like a dash of food industry scandal with your country tales.
• I Bought a Mountain, by Thomas Firbank, which Wikipedia recommends as an "international bestseller" in its time and my sister derided with a grimace the words "Alida, that sounds terrible." In it, a strapping young lad of 21 buys a 2400 acre farm comprising part of Welsh Snowdonia and runs sheep with his elfin bride Esme, to whom he proposes after spotting her in the high street of the local village, in the 1940s.
• Harvest of the Moor, and Spade Among the Rushes, by Margaret Leigh, who wowed the crowds in the 1940s by being a solo woman farmer and crofter. Again, these books are described as "popular classics" but my sister disdained them with naught but a withering look upon an attempted read, circa 2009.

Twitter vs. Facebook

If you put Twitter and Facebook in a ring and had them fight it out, Twitter would win.

On what basis? Why, the basis that Twitter is far, far more realistic than Facebook. It's sardonic, jaded, wry, scathing, vitriolic, and mordant In short, it's far more honest than Facebook.

This week I made a status update on Facebook that read:

Rage. Just sayin'.

For me, rage = humour. Clearly you already know this. And on Twitter, this status would have gone unremarked.

But on Facebook, smushed in as I expect it was between cute-yet-seemingly-endless pictures of people's children, lurid holiday snaps, shared recipes for sandwiches shaped like elephants, lolcats, animated gifs, Kony videos, and notifications that people have changed their profile photo augmented by 30+ comments from friends on how gorgeous, how simply stunning, they are, this status update apparently stood out.

People responded not just to the update but in my private messages, on my timeline, via email.

Heavens! the collective Facebookian userbase seemed to say. Here's someone who hasn't just experienced the best day of their existence and illustrated it in intimate, multicoloured, multimedia detail for all of Facebook to see! What in hell is going on?!

Nothing, that's what. My life is not crammed with Brady Bunch-esque jollity. Everything I do is not golden and glorious. My children, lolcats, videos, profile photos, and sandwiches* aren't mind-numbingly cheerful. They're boringly real, and dull and uninteresting for the most part.

And this is pretty much how I like things to be. Reality has its perks. And truths, after all, make friends.

*Euphemisms, people! I have none of these things! ...except a profile photo of course.