A couple of months ago I left my position at Ponoko, handing over to the highly capable Josh (aka Mr Judkins). It was quite emotional leaving Ponoko, *sniff*. We were in Argentina at the time and Sarah suggested it would be a good idea to take a couple of months off once we got to London.

“And do what exactly?” I said.

“Whatever you want!” came the rather apt reply…

I got to chew on that chestnut while we continued traveling around Argie. The two big reaffirmations for were: 1) I love the web, still… and 2) I love to create. Then I had an idea I knew I wanted to work on followed by another and another.

So here’s the first, AcornHq:

AcornHq is, in a sentence, a carbon offset site for iPod and iPhone users.

At the very core the idea was to promote more environmentally responsible gadget ownership. To start with this means we provide an easy way for people to offset the carbon associated with their iPod or iPhone.

We all love our iPods and iPhones but they do have a very real cost to the environment. Carbon is emitted when your iPod is manufactured, when your iPod is transported from the factory to you, and when you use power to recharge your iPod. How that power is generated to recharge your iPod also has a huge impact. Think hydro vs. coal…

So you come to AcornHq and join a tree by purchasing a leaf, for US$3.50. Once all the leaves on that tree have been taken, we plant a tree in the South Island to offset those iPods. Trees being most excellent at extracting and absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

You can then place your tree on your website and watch it fill up with leaves as more people join it. Also, when the trees we plant reach the end of their life, the plan is for any timber produced by the trees to go into community housing projects.

This is just the start and I’m quite excited about everything else to follow but do have a look and let me know what you think!

–

A big public thank you to my lovely wifey for helping me wrap my brain around this idea and asking the hard but essential questions. Thanks to Olmec Sinclair too for his hard work which has ultimately allowed me to realise this idea.

This is the first of (what I hope will be) three or four wee projects you’ll see from me in the next couple of months.

P.S. Argentina has to be one of the most insanely great countries in the world, you really should go visit. It’s a total Lovemark for me - hope to go back to live one day.

About two years ago, Intergen, gave me an opportunity to create a Web 2.0 focused presentation:

I presented it in Auckland, Wellington, & Christchurch as part of Intergen’s Twilight seminars as well as a Brightstar conference in Auckland. It was a lot of fun and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I uploaded the slides to Slideshare to create an easy way to share them around. I noticed after a few weeks it was getting a consistent amount of views - something that has continued for 2 years now having just now recorded it’s 100,000th view!

I think it’s probably the most popular piece of media I’ve personally produced. Next goal: 1,000,000!

A few months ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Simon Young for his iJumpTV podcast. A few weeks ago Simon put the interview up:

This was my first interview and it was a lot of fun to do. Watching it was quite a bit tougher - I think some media training wouldn’t go amiss…

If you haven’t checked out the iJump podcast you really should. It going to be a great record of online Kiwi’s years down the track. And if you need help making sense of social media talk to Simon and Marie!

Update: this is the quote/slide from Heather Champ I referred to. (Hattip Sue)

As a community manager one thing you never have a shortage of is email. It forms a huge part of my average day.

So by extension I get to see a lot of away/out-of-office messages. This one I received just this week and it’s my absolute favorite:

Subject: He’s gone, real gone

Body: Hi! I’m on a humanitarian mission to rid the vacation resorts in and around Tulum, Mexico of cell phones and Tequila.

I should be returning to the world of the working somewhere around September 19th.

If you need to get in touch with me, I suggest carrier pigeons or a hand-written note in a bottle, dropped in the gulf of Mexico. I will likely not be responsive to anyone who is not offering me some sort of appropriate beverage in person until I return.

Cheers, and safe travels to all.

Totally going to plaigarise that the next time I need an away message…

Snapped this at the airport a while ago. Found right next to the AirNZ check-in counters, it’s a good example of thoughtful placement.

Smaller text reads: “Most of our clients are based in Wellington, so that’s where you’ll spend most of your time.”

Nice work Equinox (shame about your website though…).

Sign up forms really do need to die. And yet its such an ingrained part of our thinking and practice with websites, both as users and as webbies. This certainly isn’t a new topic but it’s a great one to think about because it can have such a huge impact on our users’ experience.

One of the better articles you can read on this subject is an excerpt posted on A List Apart from LukeW’s semi-recent book: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. I have to quote the opening paragraph:

I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. [You’ve] stumbled upon or been recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

The simple question is why does your service need to know information like your birthday or last name to allow you to post a video or start a blog or to play a game or whatever? Why not allow your users to get stuck in, see the value of using your service, and only ask for the info when it is needed to advance the task or experience?

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this recently was Posterous. Consider their homepage:

I love the: “Skip it! No setup or signup”. Posterous is seriously cool - it can even tie in with your blog to make it super simple to email anything to your blog. Give it a go now, just email: post@posterous.com

As soon as you start thinking about how gradual engagement could work for your service you’ll start to feel like you’ve been freed from some kind of web-oppressor. We’re working on something really neat at Ponoko (launch is very close) following these rules. I can’t wait.

A big thanks to Jeffrey for helping make me passionate about the use and abuse of forms.

I was surprised and chuffed to see my groovy Stiletto Laptop Stand get a quick review on CNet by Michelle Thatcher:

It’s bad enough that my vacation’s over, but the sudden withdrawal of natural materials is really bringing me down. Which is why the wooden Stiletto laptop stand spoke to me…

The basic design idea, or brief, came from my father who wanted some laptop stands for his mobile computer suite. We spent the better part of a weekend designing and cutting out prototypes (5 in total) before we arrived at the finished and perfected result.

It’s another great example of what’s possible with Ponoko. Not only can we help you create a truly original and personal piece but we can help expose it to the rest of the world. Brilliant.

I can’t work without mine now and I’m slowly converting the others in the office. If anyone would like one of these stands, let me know, I’ll give you a special Umamiblog discount.

Update:  And another quick review on PopGadget - “The Stiletto is a laptop stand with style”

Imagine it’s lunch-time. You’re sitting at your desk stuffing your face with some kind of nutrition-less processed snack and you think to yourself: “Ooh, I better check my bank balance”.

Trawling through your credit card transactions, buried between Hell Pizza and numerous iTunes charges, you see:

80000 TANITIM ILETISIM ISTANBUL (27.06 Turkish Lira)

Simultaneous thoughts of “Oh crap” & “WTF!?” rush through your brain. Followed immediately by: “How’d they get my credit card? I better ring the bank, reverse the charge, and get a new card…”

Then suddenly you remember. Could TANITIM ILETISIM ISTANBUL be Itself, that cute t-shirt site you bought a t-shirt from last week? A quick email to their support team answered my question in the positive. Phew.

The review:

The good
Itself is a well designed site that is clean and visually appealing. The checkout process is easy to complete and they’ve definitely thought about most of the interactions users are going to have with them and worked to make them simple. Given how much Threadless has led the charge in this area it’s not surprising to see others follow.

I do like the t-shirts they offer and the fact they’ve limited it to only a handful of designs. Itself’s shipping costs to NZ were quite reasonable and they definitely out perform Threadless when it comes to packaging - beautiful in comparison. Their comms and support are also very good - for instance they don’t charge you until your t-shirt has been shipped.

The bad
The whole credit card charging scenario I went through above is a major let down for Itself. I felt they weren’t upfront about being a Turkish company or what I could expect to see on my credit card bill. I just don’t understand why companies don’t charge with their brand name!?

It’s not an issue about Itself being Turkish, the problem is purely that my expectations are that when I order a t-shirt in US Dollars from a .com English language website, then I’m going to expect to see a US-based charge. Not an Istanbul charge in Turkish Lira with a name I don’t recognise! Seriously Itself has no idea how close they came to having the transaction reversed/canceled.

The t-shirts themselves are ok - but they’re the kind of t-shirts that only look good on people who go to the gym. A lot. (If you’re one of those people then this won’t be a bad thing…) This is purely a style call.

Here’s the actual t-shirt I bought. Love the simplicity quote so had to have the tee:

Wee note: Part of the reason I’m posting this is in case anyone else has the same freak-out when seeing their credit card and Google’s the charge name. If that’s you, do leave a comment…

When I still worked at Intergen, Trey put me onto Mozy. It’s an insanely-great online backup tool. It works on a PC or a Mac, it works in the background with minimal fuss, keeps the different versions of your files, is very lightweight, and has a very generous free account.

I love it. It has saved my bacon while I’ve been working on Ponoko more than a couple of times.

Today, as a Mozy user, I received their May newsletter (don’t think we’ve seen one at all before…). A big part of my role at Ponoko is email marketing so I pay a lot of attention to what others are doing. Below is the “lead” story in their newsletter:

First thought: WTF was he thinking!? I’m almost speechless beyond that…

It has nothing to do with their product (which is awesome) and manages to insult Americans, Canadians, Quebecois, hockey supporters, and probably his staff as well.

Then again, had he not insulted all those people I could probably guarantee I wouldn’t be blogging about his newsletter or his company or his product.

What do you think? Insanely stupid or insanely smart?

At least in this analogy it is.

JD has posted some good commentary on Facebook’s $15billion “valuation”. And as usual he couldn’t be more wrong for the most part I agree.

However, I can’t help but think we would have said the same of TradeMe’s eventual valuation of $700-and-something million. To me it means we should really look at the other side of the equation and just consider: “what if?”

At $15billion, Facebook’s 240million users would be worth $62.50 each. Now if you have an average profit per user of $6.25 per year then maybe the $15billion “valuation” is more or less valid (at least for the purposes of this article).

The obvious observation is, of course, there ain’t no way Facebook is earning a profit of $6.25 per user right now or anytime soon. JD rightly points out that even “Google’s latest conference call included hints that they were having trouble monetizing social traffic” and I think it’s not hard to agree with that point for the whole social media/networking/traffic kit and caboodle.

Which leads to my title and analogy:

Social media is like a money making machine. Only we’re all too stupid to figure out how it works. We can recognise that a lot of smarts, effort, and thought went into building these networks. We know the output is money. We just don’t know how to do that tiny little bit in the middle.

I eagerly await what happens next.

The smartest thing a brothel could probably do is campaign against itself.

Yesterday I found out I live in the same suburb as Simple and Loveable ’s Nat. As she reported, Mt Vic residents received a letter from the banana-republic-styled “Mt Victoria Resident’s Association about Brothels in Mt Victoria”. It was a simple petition/submission letter asking you, as a resident, to let the council know you don’t want brothels in our suburb.

I really don’t know if I could care less. Moral panic is boring and generally turns me off. If a brothel respects the regulations those business have to follow… then the law says it’s a completely legal enterprise.

It’s an interesting contrast with Mt Vic’s recreational drug users, from the social dope smokers to the drum’n'bass munters. While some of these are probably next in line for legalisation (once Jim ‘need to protect you from yourself’ Anderton departs) and tolerated like they already are legalised… the law does quite plainly state… they are illegal.

These concerned residents and other moral outrage activists never seem to learn from each other that the very thing they crusade against is what they end up helping the most.

I remember when the “Society for Promotion of Community Standards” protested against Baise-Moi being screened in NZ. Essentially all it did was bring attention and coverage to the film. If they wanted to stop people from watching then they suffered an excellent failure. Their rampant attention grabbing probably increased the film’s patronage in NZ by a factor of 100.

Which makes me think: if I was a brothel, the cheapest most effective way to promote myself would be… to campaign against myself. It would be brilliantly effective at grabbing attention compared to the newspaper ad examples included in the petition, has amazing stickiness, word-of-mouth appeal, efficient (read: cheap).

These guys have just advertised “convenient” brothel services to Mt Vic’s 5000+ residents for the price of a ream of A4 paper. Well done.

It has all the makings of a brilliant guerrilla marketing campaign. Remember, you read it here first.

Woo!
In a few hours our first 10-Day Design Challenge open round draws to a close. We’re experiencing quite a fantastic response. We focused on jewelry or wearable art for our first challenge and looking through the pages of entries I’m blown away with the effort people have put in.

From here 25 are chosen to be made for the invitational round. Then it gets down to the business end with 10 runners up selected, each winning USD$300 and a grand prize awarded to the best overall design for USD$1,000.

It’s still technically possible to enter into the challenge. Start here, then watch the clock… 2.5 hours to go.

Moo!
Moo asked Ponoko to participate in their Moo Egg Hunt, we agreed. They’re running a really cool promotion which involves finding these eggs. Some in the real world, some in the unreal virtual world. Yours truly hid some around Wellytown - I think the photos are too easy and give it away, see for yourself.

Boo!
I’m popping up to Auckland on Thursday for the Auckland Web Meetup to talk about Ponoko. I hope to see some familiar faces. Anyone going along? Anything in particular about Ponoko you’d like to hear about?

Phew!
Then this weekend it’s WOMAD. Anyone else trekking up to the Naki for this?