I could not agree more.

There’s another quote, somewhere in the lines of “It takes ten years of hard work to become an overnight success” (A perfect match with the “10,000 hours/10 years to become a master” rule lied by Malcolm Gladwell at Outliers).

But this is all rather straight forward (to most. Exclude the people in line for the lottery).

The problem is many things are a out of our control. We can try like crazy, for many long years, and still not make it. Just because we were unlucky. True, chances are better (probably) to getting somewhere if we do try (and try and try), but there is no certainty.

Our carrier, our financial situation, our love life, our health. All somewhat out of our hands.

So why am I ruining the party? Because it just hit me that here lies a good answer to why running a Marathon is a good idea. It’s one of the only fields you can be (almost) sure that if are persistent – you’ll get there. No need to count on others to like you, agree with you, follow you, buy from you. Very little luck is required and almost everybody can do it.

Scratch ‘Marathon’ and put whatever you like, but make sure it’s physical, you do it alone and it takes a long time to get there – and you have control.

Now go see a shrink and get a life.

I’m going to talk about English. Language evolution. Grammar. Cultural use and meaning. I cannot even talk right. Let alone spell. But me is stupid brave. So here goes.

Language is one of the things defining a group. When you talk the way others talk – you feel part of. But it goes the other way round as well. Groups create languages. Parting themselves from others, BRANDing themselves. It’s a chicken-egg kind of thing (“Which came first”) – Creation of the language by the group or the definition of the group by the existence of a language.

Enough bitting around the bush. Let’s dive into some modern web-world examples:

1. Chat/IM/SMS. Written language is very different from spoken one. It’s more difficult to convey what you really feel or think when you write, without using “so many words” (See: Louis-Ferdinand Céline/”Journey to the End of the Night“ , pages 1 through 700). So what do you do when you have a flowing conversation platform (I say something, you answer) using only text? You change the language. You make up short abbreviations of feeling-describing phrases, and Vuala! – you’ve got emotions.
   Oh, add flow of conversation (aka – typing speed) and space limitations and you get something my dad will surely use. Not. Examples?
   • lol – Laughing out loud (that one will star later on). BTW, note the use of non-capitalized fonts. Though we’re dealing with abbreviations. The reason is simple (and are two) – it takes more effort to capitalize (another key – Shift. Let alone mobile phone keys….), hence slower, and capitalization is saved for “shouting” what is said. Put more emotion into it.
   • rofl – Rolling On Floor Laughing.
   • lmao – Laughing My Ass Off.
   • omg – Oh my God!
   • wtf – What The Fuck?

   And so on. Not part of the group? You’re not welcome (and cannot take part) in these conversations:

   “OMG WTF! u nevaz did dat, like, dats like, fkin gay! if i did dat id be like, wowz!!!!” (Actual AOL chat quote)

   and:

   nerd#1: pudding
   nerd#2: lmfao!
   nerd#1: we know ur ass is fat dude… just say lmao… or nothing at all…
   nerd#2: Lmfao! oh wait nvm…

   Not to mention Emoticons

2. l33t. Pretty much the same actually. Only here another group – programmers not wanting to be tapped and gamers (more of the same, actually) – replaced vowels with numbers and other ASCII characters.
   
   Some “l33t” loser “OMGZ0rz WTF n00b u d0n7 5|*34k l33t!!1 u r n0t 4 h4><0rz!!!”

   See this Wiki for more.

3. LOL cats. Not exactly a group-language since as far as I know there’s no group using it as means of conversation, but it’s a cultural phenomena non the less. Called “Kitty Pidgin” or “lolspeak” the language is built on broken grammar, spelling mistakes and made-up words but has sentence building logic and, well, spelling and grammar. It’s most common place of use is as caption to cute images of cats (“kittehs”). You probably got one of those “funny” chain mails from your cousin (just before you added her to the junk sending list):
4. To put the phenomena into perspective, icanhasheezburger, the big player in the “industry” (a-la Compete) gets nearly 500,000 visitors/months (US only). All looking at cats, ye? Care to compare it to Twitter? You’ll find coverage and a great Wiki on the subject and for us closer to Ceiling Cat, you can also find the Bible. Translated.
5. Twitter Talk. This one is new. I would have said it’s an evolution of the above, IM/Text-like communication, but Twitter is not intended to be an online communication tool. It’s broadcasting (I think). And yet, you’ll find many pages looking like this:Sunshine clear to me.

What’s the bottom line? Two actually. Points for us internet “experts” to remember:

1. Hope to create a community around a product/site? Make them talk the talk. If we manage to create a language – they will stay. Feel part of. Belonging. Humans, I tell ya.
2. We have to remember that where we feel at home not necessarily means our users do. Few examples:
   • How many people really understood what the “beta” residing for years next to the Google logo meant? How many cared?
   • You think this (from here) feedback system is funny? Cute? Useful? For all?
   • Is inline smartypants blog editing understood by everyone? Do we care?

<3 you all. Peace.

I got a call from our branch in India at 09:15 AM . “We don’t have internet”, they said.

“Cannot be”, I replied. “Restart your computer”.

But the word started spreading around noon. Two under water cables were cut. The internet in the middle east and India severely damaged. It was official.

48 hours later, a third cable is gone. Speculations as for the reason started arising. Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography asserted:

“…A preliminary investigation links the cuts to a ship’s anchor that dragged and ripped into the two fiber optic undersea cables.”

But a quick investigation conducted by the Egypt’s Ministry of Communications concluded:

“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time“.

24 hours passed and a forth cable is gone. This got me curious so I started an investigation of my own.

I managed to put my hands on some under water cable maps and pinpointed the location of the break down (circled):

I used these coordinates, pulled some strings with friends in the army and managed to get this satellite image, taken at the exact time the cables were torn (I circled the location):

I noticed something funny. There was something there. A dot out of place. Thought it might have been a glitch in the picture, a satellite malfunction of sort, so I asked for a close up image. Again, location circled:

Still unable to understand what I was looking at, I reverted to Flickr, searching for images uploaded via mobile, from proximate locations. I found this one. Fishing vacation it appears:

Nothing out of place. Kept on looking and found another. Again – fishing at sea:

Again – nothing.

I’m still trying to contact the people taking the pictures. I know they have mobiles with them, since that’s where the images came from, but there’s no answer. Probably forget packing battery chargers.

So there. Nothing.

Suppose it was an anchor after all. Greek Maybe?

Update: It seems there’s no end to this story. A fifth cable is gone. I called the Operations Dept. in FLAG Telecom, the company who owns the cables. It seems they have cameras along the line. They sent me a photo (below) taken around 17:30 yesterday (Wednesday). Funny looking fish are swimming there, but I guess that’s how it is in the deep.

1. Invent a bunch of fiction characters. Boys, girls.
2. Set up a location. Could be more than one.
3. Create a story around them – one being friend of the other, dating a girl freshly parted from her boyfriend, being a friend of another and so on. AKA: a script.
4. (up until now – nothing special, right? but her goes:) Make the story unfold using the internet. Books, plays, TV and movies – Out. Internet story-telling – In.

How is that done:

1. Create fake Facebook profiles people can befriend and follow.
2. Create YouTube movies showing parts of the story from different points of view – one character’s friend (both on Facebook) filming another talking about his side of the story (translation: dating and having sex with a new girl).
3. Create Twitter accounts for the whole bunch.
4. Create blogs, each telling the story from the character’s mouth.
5. Create a blog giving a bird’s-view on the tale, excluding the details. Sort of a “Previously on LA Law”.
6. Let people from the outside interact with the story and characters. Make friends with the characters in Facebook, follow Twitter feeds, subscribe to RSS blog feeds and comment to the lot of them.

Sounds interesting? I agree. But it’s not my idea.

Meet Story2Oh!

If you hurry up, you can jump on the wagon, the story just began.

you can have a taste of the tale in the following link (18+ only , taken from one of the “actor’s” blogs, and the following video from YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The story is very underground. Little traffic is coming to the site, few link and discuss it (Google them and see how little results you get), not many friends are following on Facebook or Twitter. They seem to be just a bunch of people with an idea and with zero PR. It’s a shame if you ask me.Actually, they did get a bit of publicity. Mashable (the only main-stream internet blog that picked the story) wrote about them. Actually, they didn’t “write” about them. They slaughtered them:

Some days we get notified around here of really bad ideas. We give a soft chuckle, toss it on the pile, forget about it and move on. Then we get notices like the one for Story2Oh! that seem so bad, they aspire to be “lame”.

I beg the differ. Big time.

It’s a superb idea. Mashable’s main point against the initiative is the attention span required to follow it. “Mind-bandwidth” if you like. True. It’s time consuming. I personally won’t follow. But I don’t watch TV either. And I don’t read Tom Clancy. They’re all time wasters if you ask me. But people like stories about people, romance, sex. And they follow people sharing that info on the web. They starve for it. Otherwise, tools like twittertale would not have existed.

A smart marketer would take that to mind. Remember everyone talking about web 2.0 marketing? building brands around social networks? opening “fan pages” in Facebook? Now imagine Nike doing this:

1. Create a global spy story (Jason Bourn style) with Nike branded into it.
2. Let people find clues to make the story go (If they see a YouTube movie of someone hiding a clue under a bench in Sydney, they will find that long lost friend in Australia to go fetch it. Did anyone say “Viral”?).
3. As the story unfolds, using the surfers, Nike will give them gifts. Expensive ones (Treasure-hunt style).
4. Enjoy tons of PR. Globally. For novelty and the story.
5. Enjoy people’s envolvment with the brand and other fancy marketing words of the kind.

And how about reality shows? Movie trailers?

A new story-telling media is born. Jason Bourn.

go to: http://www.isitchristmas.com/

Merry Christmas everyone.

I got the joke.

I’m not a programmer.

I’m worried.

Living My Life Faster – 8 years of JK’s Daily Photo Project from c71123 on Vimeo.

Apparently, it all started when this guy’s girlfriend asked him sarcastically if he’s planning to use that camera he just bought everyday. Little had she known. Luckily, she didn’t ask that question regarding his new AK-47.

Update: Turns out this is not so original as I first thought. There are heaps of them, including one with 7 million views, and a Simpson’s parody.

If I did, this blog would not have existed. Better for it. It’s no love child I can tell you that. But apparently, in today’s web-world, if you don’t labor over your own blog, you’re nothing. Nada.

So here we go. Well, actually, there are some posts before this one, but they are old. I made them some months ago (more like 18 months, actually), as a first-dip-in-the-web’s-cold-water, so for romantic reasons, I left them here (and here, here, here, here, here and here).

Many words have been spilled over the how and why to write blogs. Regarding the “How”, the winner of them advices is “Make ‘how to/most’ lists. People love reading them” (or, in it’s original form: “How to make your post read by millions in just 10 easy steps”) .

Here’s my list of why it’s a bad idea to write a blog. Starting off with on the right foot, so to speak:

1. You don’t really have anything important/clever/new to say. That’s major. In my point of view there are six types of blogs: the silly (didn’t say not successful) sites using a blogging platform, the news blogs (which are more like online newspaper, only vertical), the commentary ones (where people who really have something to say like Seth and Mark, are writing), the expert in one field ones, the really know how to write and all the rest, talking about whatever and enjoying number 3 in the list hereafter.
2. It’s time consuming. I’ve been laboring on this post for the last hour and a half. not including the nearly-complete post from last night deleted by mistake (of the computer, naturally). What’s the up-side? Let’s say you put into it hundreds of hours a year. Think you could use that time to achieve other, productive, goals? or just sleep? or watch TV?
3. No one will read it. And when I say no one, I mean no one. Including your family and friends, which, after almost forcing them to read, sending them numerous emails and embedding the RSS feed of the blog in your Facebook profile, will conclude that they have no idea what you’re talking about, you’re a geek, and as they always suspected – you have no life.
4. You don’t like writing. It is NOT burning in your bones. In fact, your bones start burning when you think of the 3 days that have passed since you last wrote. Ok. Make it three weeks.
5. You’re a perfectionist. So every word has to be written correctly, the design has to match your desktop, you have to use the best off-line blog publishing tool for Mac (though you never are off-line, the back office of WordPress is much better and it DOES NOT ERASE POSTS, THE MF &#$#@!!!!).
6. You’re not native in English. But you have to write in English because somewhere deep down you hope No. 3 above will not apply to you. You’ll have a readership of millions, the Wall Street Journal will cite you twice a week and you’ll be on Opera’s speed dial. So you’ll laboring over it. And have your spelling mistakes show to the world. What’s next? A Chinese version?
7. It won’t serve its purpose. Self marketing? Broadening networks? Marketing your sites? Pff. Go to 3.
8. It’s time consuming. I know I said it before. Heck. It’s been 2 hours now.
9. No one will read it. Ok. Sorry. The joke of re-writing the same point (and omitting number 10) has been chewed to dust. But still. No one here to notice even that, right?

That said, hope you enjoy my blog.