Kige Ramsey of “start-up” YouTube Sports has some of the worst production of any sports news videos made in what appears to be a wood-paneled basement. But that is exactly the appeal. The videos are, by all appearances, shot in one take with no editing. The sets are decorated with magazine cutouts and if Kige has rehearsed his readings beforehand, then he’s either a brilliant actor or something is wrong with him. Deadspin even nominated him into their Hall of Fame.
And guess what - this is the appeal of Kige Ramsey. There’s a certain trainwreck quality to his prognostications. It’s innocent and 100% awful.
If you’re going to do a terribly produced video, do it all the way.
If you’re going to do a professional video, do it all the way.
If you’re going to do ANYTHING, do it all the way.
Which brings me to my next point: Please back up a step.
I know your webcam is on top of your monitor and you need access to the keyboard but too many times, the camera is close enough that I can count your pores. Think about all the movies and television that you’ve ever watched. Do any of them look like webcam videos? There’s a reason they don’t.
My ask? Press the “record” button, take a step back so I can see your shoulders. When you’re done, walk back to the computer and press the “stop” button. Then, take the 5 minutes it takes to crop the front and back part of the video so I don’t have to watch you press the aforementioned buttons.
It’s easy. I’m looking at you iJustine. Take a cue from Jay Smooth at illDoctrine and get a swift piece of video editing software. It’s not a difficult task. It just takes a couple more minutes than you’re probably used to, but it’s in the details that people like/dislike something. Blackberries and iPhones pretty much do all of the same stuff - but there are some key details that make their users so passionate.
Collaboration is the reason we get together in meetings and talk about things.
It’s the reason we work in office parks and not in our own home offices. It’s the reason that the home offices still need phone and web-cams and thousands of other dollars of equipment in order to be viable.
I’m actually down on the whole home-office concept for companies of more than 3 people.
Home offices inhibit lunches with co-workers.
Home offices blur the work-home line (obviously) and make it harder to “turn off.”
Home offices inhibit casual communication vital in building relationships. The water cooler is more than just a water cooler.
Home offices make it harder to receive guests. You have many more “road games” than you would if you had a set space.
If you’re not in the presence of another person, you can’t have fun moments like this (some language nsfw):
(Side note: Why is it hip hop is one of the few pop music sub-genres that actually encourages collaboration? Sometimes it’s as much of a marketing tool as it is a purely artistic venture. You never see Disturbed and Linkin Park getting together to make a single.)
The cipher is an old-school approach to making rap music. Rappers get together with their best freestyles and rap over a beat. It’s organic, there’s a built in feedback mechanism, and you get an audience. There’s also a connection made in the collaboration that you can’t get by just going into a studio. Working at home is fine, but it makes it harder to build and maintain these connections, forged in common experiences.
For the comments, what’s the best part about being able to collaborrate with another person? Or, why am I completely wrong about the home office? Or, what did I miss that stinks about home offices?
I was watching Donny Deutsch last night and a caller had a question about how to overcome the obstacle of being the boss’s son and having the perception that he’s receiving preferential treatment.
Donny, having some experience with that same obstacle, advised the caller that he has an opportunity to be the hardest working person in the office, saying that outworking everyone can become his signature-style. The perceptions would take care of themselves from there.
While Donny has a penchant for giving some very general advice, I think this would be a good strategy for any entrepaneurial worker out there. Being the hardest working guy (or girl) in the room takes away a lot of problems associated with youth, inexperience, or reputation.
Why not pretend like you’re the boss’s son (or daughter) today and be an All-Star performer? Sometimes having a chip on your shoulder can be a real positive thing.
From Crossfit: Complete 32 intervals of 20 seconds of work followed by ten seconds of rest where the first 8 intervals are pull-ups, the second 8 are push-ups, the third 8 intervals are sit-ups, and finally, the last 8 intervals are squats. There is no rest between exercises.
If Rick does succeed at UCLA and become a great coach there, it will be because he made fundamental changes to the underpinnings of the ways he conducted himself at his job. It will not be because he changed the image of the things he’s always done. That’s what we’ll call: “changing the paint.”
In business, “changing the paint” can come in a lot of different forms, some of them more subtle than others:
Your field marketing campaign is given a new booth to drive interest;
Your affiliate marketing’s agreements are re-worked and so that you can re-coup some of the losses that your direct marketing is suffering;
Your e-newsletter isn’t getting any clicks and you purchase a list;
Your artwork doesn’t get the prices you think it deserves, so you start making less to create scarcity.
At its heart, “changing the paint” means that you’ve misidentified the problem and are trying to solve it through means that don’t solve the problem.
For the comments, what are some of your favorite instances where people have tried to change the paint?
Sorry I’ve been slow on the upkeep around here. I’ve been torn between my 9-to-5 and Vinny The Bull (WHICH by the way has a new post today AND a crappy bull I drew in Photoshop).
So today, excuse me for my brevity,but today I had to learn about the difference between hyphens and underscores in Google. I’ll never explain it better than Matt Cutts does in his blog, so I’ll let him explain…
Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.
Easy as pi, right? Do yourself a favor and read the full post.
"I'm an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it." (c) John Lennon 
