What is SISE?

SISE (pronounced Sissy) stands for Scale In Small Enterprise. SISE is an unconference parallel to (to be held during) BIF-4, the Business Innovation Factory event in October.

Our unconference will be held October 15th at Local 121, 121 Washington St, Providence, RI. Specific times and costs are TBD. The latest information will always be available at the SISE Unconference wiki.

The concept behind SISE is to extend the “scale” in BIF’s “Innovation at Scale” along a continuum that includes so-called micro-enterprises. We seek to show that micro-enterprises, in aggregate, represent a significant economic force in Rhode Island. If you will, there is scale in ‘the long tail.’

As a primary goal, SISE will create a database of micro-enterprises that extends well beyond the 100 or so participants we anticipate at the unconference. Given the importance of the arts and design in our local educational nexus, we contend that Rhode Island may enjoy an higher-than-usual number of creative or arts oriented micro-enterprises. Add to this the phenomenon we call the corporate diaspora - a great number of laid-off executives that have become consultants.

Rhode Island might have a longer tail than average. If this proves to be true, it could represent a crucial sector to nurture.

SISE seeks to bring together these companies to share ideas, teach each other best practices and generate an esprit de corps. Our chosen format - an “unconference” - fits well with the capabilities of these companies as well as the culture of self-employment.

SISE seeks to complement BIF, not compete with it. In fact, virtually all micro-enterprises would find the cost of BIF quite out of range. This price dynamic played a key roll in the creation of BIL, an unconference parallel to the famous TED conference in California. As BIF shares many qualities with TED, SISE would be much like BIL - a grass-roots expression of the same values promoted by the more refined event.

Why is SISE necessary?

We believe that BIF’s parent organization, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, should recognize these businesses and included them in their overall economic development planning. As presently configured, RIEDC only recognizes businesses that have technically-defined “employees” that generate W2 withholding tax forms. However, the vast majority of micro-enterprises operate in what we’re calling the “1099 economy.” These companies are founded as limited liability corporations (LLCs) - if they’re legally incorporated at all - and generally remain “below the radar” of the RIEDC.

Still, these micro-enterprises pay taxes, pay rent, buy computers, go to trade shows and generate all the other kinds of economic activities of a larger enterprise. The difference is that they pay quarterly estimated taxes as opposed to monthly withholding taxes.

Importantly, micro-enterprises tend to share projects with each other. That is, one company will “job out” part of a project to another micro-enterprises in their network. These networks tend to be robust and highly active. So while they do not “employ” workers, they do extend economic benefits to a larger group.

Do BIF and SISE have a relationship?

No. Like BIL, SISE is a spontaneous event and not affiliated with BIF in any way.

About Unconferences

An unconference is like a traditional conference in that it brings together people interested in and/or knowledgeable about a particular topic. The primary differences are cost and organization. The costs are very low. While it’s not always possible to achieve, “free” is the preferred rate. And unconferences are self-organizing. There is no set agenda or roster of speakers. The participants themselves decide “on the spot” what topics should be presented and by whom. It is common for a participant to teach one session and then learn in another.

In February 2008, Johnson & Wales University hosted a successful unconference called NewB Camp, focusing on the basics of Internet design, development and business creation. SISE founder John Speck of Real Advertising in Pawtucket, was an early supporter of NewB Camp and gave two different sessions. In addition, he played an important role at Enterprise 2.Open and gave a very popular session called The Human Factor, a game that drew out the dynamics of implementing an open social network in a rigid, hierarchical enterprise.

Links

http://www.ted.com
http://bilconference.com
http://enterprise2conf.com
http://www.enterprise2conf.com/conference/e2open.php
http://web2open.pbwiki.com/
http://newbcamp.com
http://www.socialtext.net/enterprise…i?human_factor

First, my enduring thanks to Oliver Marks for sponsoring my participation in the e20 conference. He upgraded me from the one-day free pass to a full conference pass. And I’ve gotten the most out of it.

As an underground-type person and micro-business enthusiast, I haven’t spent a lot of time inside a large enterprises for about a decade. It seems that some things are, in fact, changing for the better. Or at least for the different. But much remains very the same.

At its core, the conference is a great big application demo. When the sessions were supposed to cover more general or intellectual topics, they would turn into a demo. And most sessions about a concept or phenomenon became a discussion of enterprise architecture, with notable exceptions on Thursday.

I was surprised that the organizations I that impressed me most were very large ones. I talked with very bright people from SAP, Intel, Deloitte, Lockheed-Martin, Pitney-Bowes, IBM. Of course there were, like, infinity awesome consultants.

But the undisputed stars of the show turned out to be knowledge management specialists from the CIA. Yes, that CIA. Readers on the Urban Planet boards know how much I loved the World Fact Book and how much I think it’s skewed in recent years. Well, there’s a reason. Like so many large enterprises, that important public document is edited by an elite group of highly-placed people. And it ain’t the guys I was talking to.

If you think of WFB as the Encyclopedia Britannica of US intel, then my “contacts within the agency” are building the Wikipedia version. It’s called Intellipedia, and it’s just what it sounds like. A straight-up wiki for intelligence. When I asked one of them if there were any thought of bringing unclassified content from Intellipedia into WFB, he didn’t say yes or no. He said, “Well, that should just be an open wiki.” Note that he said should, and not will.

Still, someone on the inside thinking that an editable World Fact Book is a good idea? Praise Jesus, and pass the mustard.

Open Sessions

Like so many commercial conferences, the real value came from the hallway conversations. This, of course, is the concept behind an unconference: do away with the boring sessions and sales pitches and just talk about subjects of interest.

Our unconference (open conference, they called it) was very successful, and more than one person said that my e20 role-playing game was the highlight of their experience. Believe it or not, I hardly talked. Hence the good reviews. Rather, I set up a situation, and the players did the talking. And we really learned a lot - read our results.

Ross Mayfield, CEO and co-founder of popular enterprise wiki SocialText, deserves mass praise for pulling this together. He personally guided the group - many of whom were experiencing their first unconference - through the spontaneous creation of the program. Who would do what where, who would combine with whom? But for a scheduling conflict, my session would have combined with a session from an IBM/Lotus guy who was all about using video games and game structure within the enterprise. Expect to see more on games and gaming theory in future.

Ghandi Leaders

Whether in the open sessions or in the hallway conversations, the unambiguous 800-lb gorilla emerged: adoption. We heard story after story about 1,000 dead wikis, empty rooms on enterprise social sites, blogs that never get updated and good ideas that got killed by a VP that just doesn’t get it.

Unlike the “consumer web,” e20 solutions MUST have strong leadership from the highest office. But it must be enlightened leadership - leadership that actively suppresses the ingrained hierarchical tendency to control and to horde. Our game clearly showed that allowing (requiring) workers to share ideas openly generates the best results. But there must be leadership that - like a good parent - nurtures and supports at first, but then gradually relaxes control and allows things to follow their natural, organic path.

What is the magic formula for creating the “aha moment” for the senior executive? We asked that question many times and completely failed to answer it. The best lead I found came from SK Telecom’s Rich Petersen: we all start as consumers.

You’re not going to change an executive’s outlook by showing him or her yet another piece of software. If you were, you would have done it already.

But perhaps you can change a mind by using The Grandchildren as the context, instead of The Enterprise.

Thanks to everybody I met for an energizing and enlightening four days.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this June includes a free section centered around an officially-sanctioned parallel unconference.

Depending on your perspective, your reaction could be:

1. Wow, that’s cool.
2. Huh?
3. Duh.

Introduction to Unconferences

If your answer was 2, an unconference is the open source version of a conference. You get together a group of people knowledgeable about a particular area. They talk about and/or listen to people talk about the subject at hand. So it’s like a conference.

Except it’s very much less expensive, with free being the preferred rate. And it’s much more flexible, mixing pre-scheduled session with impromptu sessions.

At present, unconferences are almost exclusively a geek phenomenon. They grew directly out of the software development community, and most unconference have focused on technology in some form or another. Over time, less purely-technical groups have used the technique, with PodCamp being the best known.

My introduction to unconferences came in the form of NewBCamp held at Johnson & Wales University in Providence. I gave a session on Marketing 101 and got a lot out of the networking. It was a great, energized group of about 75 people who met for 6 hours and then got drinks at AS220. I enjoyed myself immensely - far more than at any actual conference I’ve attended - and vowed to do more of them.

Before I could put my evil plan to action, BIL happened. BIL was an unconference run in parallel to TED. The famous TED is famously expensive, at several thousand per pop. They haven’t priced out TED2009, but it’s gonna be north of $5k. BIL charged the preferred rate - FREE - and had to cap attendance at 150.

This wasn’t the first parallel unconference, although it may be the first spontaneous unsanctioned example. (Will there be more? sfx: evil laugh) BlogHer had some open sessions last year and will have some open space for birds-of-a-feather sessions this year.

The Other Two Answers

If your answer was 1, you should go to the conference website and register for a free open pass. Then come and check out the awesomeness that is a free, open unconference. We’ll learn ya’ all about them blogs ‘n wikis ‘n all that stuff. Learn ya’ real good, too.

If your answer was 3, go to the Enterprise 2.Open wiki and sign yourself up to give a session. You’re clearly an expert. (Oh, what’s that I see? A business session on The Human Factor of Enterprise 2.0? Who is this Frymaster?)

Pretty much all commentators agree that one of the main social factors driving the growth of what I’m calling Producer Culture is the democratization of media, information and, ultimately, knowledge. For me, the paragon is not YouTube or Facebook or Twitter. It’s the Obama campaign.

Obama has raised more money than any candidate in history and has done so largely without the big-ticket fundraisers that breed the political elitism that has weighed down the Clinton campaign. He’s also (allegedly) kept the PAC money at bay. Instead, he’s gotten hundreds of thousands of small donations from regular people for whom the gift was likely their first political sponsorship. Think of it as the democratization of democracy.

But this is no political blog. My point is simply that while the Obama campaign is Internet-enabled, it’s not an Internet phenomenon. It’s a social phenomenon.

This is Producer Culture: taking control of the means of production. What produces a US President? Cash and votes. What produces the news? Observers who can write, photograph or shoot video. What produces media? Devices and software that capture and edit sound and images.

Compared to the days of rampant Consumer Culture, “everybody” has access to these means. If you have a will, the Internet has a way.

The resulting product, of course, is greatly uneven. Access is more or less equal, but insight, talent and ability vary. Yet, the most successful and popular Internet news and media phenomena aren’t necessarily the ones that most closely approach the content and production values of MSM. Instead, home video of kittens on a treadmill can draw over a million viewers.

You don’t have to be great. You just have to catch the social vibe in the right way. And that’s the charm of the Internet right now - the homemade, slightly amateurish output that is so utterly without pretense that you can’t help but rejoice. Bollocks NBC.

Now, a million viewers is not much when you think in terms of Nielsen ratings. But, hell, this is Web 2. Nobody’s trying to make a million dollars on these things.

Oh, wait. They are.

Over the past two or three years, a professional blogging community has emerged, and for good reason. Organizations large and small are circling around the Web 2 waters. Some are bold. Most are terrified. And all of them are looking for knowledgeable guides. As you would expect, big companies go to big consultancies, and Forrester are looking strong right about now with the success of Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li’s book Groundswell.

Several Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley blogs have jumped up into very strong positions, hoping to or actually getting bought by larger media companies. While the acquisition of Ars Technica by Wired/CondeNet got some attention, it was Wired’s coverage of TechCrunch recently inking a deal with the Washington Post that generated so much chatter.

I’ve got no beef with any of this. It’s part of the natural cycle of technology acceptance: when that which was underground enters the mainstream, it will take on some characteristics of the mainstream.

Only it doesn’t end there. These people have taken to referring to themselves as “the A-list.” I’m taking it as a rule of thumb that the more comfortable an A-lister is in using the phrase, that less “webby” that person really is. Put another way, people who happily refer to themselves and others as A-list would be happy if this whole messy social computing thing went away so that the great unwashed can more fully appreciate the genius that is the A-list. (To be sure, just about all of ‘em are uncomfortable with the term AND the concept.)

Mainstream media is about control. Barriers to entry are high as is the energy put into competitive self-promotion. Helping somebody else will hurt you. Does this zero-sum game sound like the social Internet we know and love?

Charlene Li is pretty much top of the stack these days. But she still acts like a human being. And by that, I mean she said something nice about me and linked to my other blog. She and Josh liked some of my irreverent comments on their blog, and didn’t care that I’m a Z-lister.

That’s a “webby” reaction: quality content wins regardless of source.

Contrast this with something said on Twitter that made me instantly “un-follow” a top A-lister who is quite the favorite of the other A-listers. His simple tweet that completely turned me off: I’m only following other A-listers.

This individual must be pretty smart. Smarter than the Wisdom of Crowds. Smarter than everybody. He’s essentially decided that the people he already knows are all the people he’ll ever need. “If I don’t know you, you’re not worth knowing.”

To repeat, as of May 2008, most of the A-listers are still more or less normal people who will deal with other more or less normal people. This one person is the only one I’ve come across to use the term so smugly.

But this individual is highly influential and I will be watching to see if his disease spreads.

There is something particularly human and appealing about Internet Superstar’s Live ROFLcon show, and I doubt The Networks will ever be able to match it.

ROFLcon is a conference held at MIT that features viral stars of the Internet. Homestar Runner creators The Brothers Chapman, xkcd cartoonist Randal Munroe, or JibJab founders Gregg and Evan Spiridellis meet with fans to talk about making and consuming all the silly, viral stuff that your boss is furious that you were watching on company time but is secretly glad he discovered through you.

Internet Superstar is basically a talk show, and this live episode is shot in a classroom. The hosts sit behind a small table. Guests sit on those chairs with the flip up desks. The name of the show is written on the chalk board. Middle schools produce TV shows with better sets.

And yet, that’s the appeal. Even though it’s called Internet Superstar, the show is completely unpretentious. These people are genuinely and authentically goofing around, making a TV show about all the wacky stuff on the Internet. Martin Sargent plays the host and does a good job getting his guests to tell their stories. Not that these people need much of a prompt. His sidekick Gator plays a southern hick who delivers a lot of laughs with references to Warrant tapes and such like.

To be sure, just because the set is decidedly downscale, don’t assume the production values are. The image quality is very good. And everybody’s wearing well-configured lavalier mics, so the audio - that could have sucked in a concrete block classroom - is crisp and strong.

The guest? Well, they’re what you’d expect from ROFLcon. There’s the Leslie Hall, who turned a love of gem sweaters into a Midwestern Internet media empire. Denny Blaze (link below w/ note), whose early ’80s white rap video became a viral phenomenon, propelling his career to new heights. And Jay Maynard, the Tron Guy. That is, the guy who dresses in a helmet and skin-tight unitard with faux circuits drawn on them. Y’know, like, Tron? He turned a Halloween costume into a painfully awkward skit opposite Mike Tyson on a Jimmy Kimmel show

I think I’ve said enough. Watch, and you shall ROFL. Except for a particular portion of the intro that should definitely have found the cutting room floor. Digitally speaking.

Note: If you click this link to www.dennyblaze.com you will be met with auto-playing audio media. To shut it off, scroll to the very bottom of this long-ass page. This is worst practice. So why don’t you just not click it at all.

Clay Shirky, in his Web 2.0 conference talk on the Cognitive Surplus, used the example of a professor in Brazil who created a street-level crime mapping website. Shirky used it to illustrate the fact that it’s so much faster, cheaper and simpler to leverage the knowledge of a large group of regular people than it is to gain access to and work with the data that already exist in government databases.

But this example also fits with a line of reasoning about how connectivity affects safety, conflict and stability. Simply put, connected is safe. Put another way, crime and socio-political conflict thrive in isolation. Eliminate isolation and, by and large, you eliminate the problem.

At the macro level, Thomas Barnett’s book The Pentagon’s New Map is carrying forward the argument that global terrorism would not be possible if not for nations that, for any number of reasons, become disconnected from their neighbors and the broader international community. Al Queda flourished in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and the Sudan - all deeply isolated countries. North Korea, using the secrecy that isolation fosters, created a nuclear weapons program affects the entire region.

Conversely, European nations have overcome centuries-long animosities through greater and greater interdependence to the point that former enemies are now partners in a multi-national government.

At the micro level, this dynamic is playing out in the arena of crime prevention, and this is where Sharky’s example is so apt. Much has been made of the fact that social disorder (vandalism, abandoned property, graffiti) are the main indicator of a cluster of problems including crime, high infant mortality and low education attainment. The so-called “broken windows” approach to policing, instituted most notably by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, vigorously enforced low-level “quality of life” crimes. Early predictions of success have not played out, and the approach is no longer as popular as it was in the 1990s.

Ongoing studies in Chicago indicate that specific kinds of connectivity are an indicator of counter-trend conditions. That is, properly connected neighborhoods can reverse anti-social trends despite other predictive conditions like high social disorder.

Dr. Robert Sampson at Harvard University, a leader in the Chicago studies, calls this capability Collective Efficacy. In his 2004 article in the journal New Economy (now called Public Policy Research), he predicted the Brazilian website and the use of technology to empower and connect citizens.

“If residents knew where incidents were occurring - in more-or-less real time - innovative and effective mobilization might occur in ways that go well beyond police power.”

He argues, though, that tightly networked neighborhoods can, in fact, enable crime. In urban neighborhoods, the criminal and non-criminal networks are deeply interwoven. This dynamic makes “broken window” policing counterproductive, increasingly isolating the police from the community they serve.

Or, consider the foul events that transpired on an isolated ranch in west Texas. The FLDS, a true cult, represents a rigidly controlled society that used both tight networks AND isolation to create a criminal community. Allegedly.

Adults in the community enjoyed an ultimately connected network to maintain complete control over all intellectual input the children received. Children were constantly watched, their actions explicitly scripted. Yet were this ranch not self-sufficient and highly isolated physically and in terms of communications technology, their crimes would have been exposed and stopped long ago.

So connectivity itself is no guarantee of security. Security requires the right mix of tight and loose networks as well as connectivity across levels - from citizen to city, from city to nation.

Sharky’s ultimate point - that American society is waking up from a collective cultural bender on the mind-numbing drug known as television and that this awakening will unleash a torrent of creativity and innovation - bodes well for society if it proves out. It would create the very conditions that Dr. Sampson believes will generate “innovative and effective mobilization” that will create the stable, prosperous urban environment necessary to support a knowledge-driven economy.

Thanks to Damiano Vukotic’s NitMesh for the video link.

Chris Brogan initiated a conversation about what clients should expect from a social media expert. I guarantee you that 100% of the people who read and/or responded to the post think of themselves as experts. I know I do.

Moksh Juneja left this comment that Web 2 is more than just blogs. And that’s my starting point.

In discussions about Facebook or Twitter or whatever, I keep finding myself saying “Don’t put too much stock in any of these specific applications. They’re all transitional.” Like your kids’ clothes, they’re great now, but will be outgrown too soon.

Face it, the Internet is a toddler, about a three-year-old. And Web 2 is its Head Start program. The Internet has a lot to learn about communicating with the society around it.

Of course, the Internet isn’t something out there in the product landscape. Users are the Internet. I am, you are, companies are, governments are, NGOs and non-profits, rock bands, tattoo shops, cafes. That’s the Internet, and it’s just getting to the point where it’s effectively combining communication skills and social skills. A three-year-old.

Consider, then, the effect on commerce and industry of the Internet’s first two phases:

1. infancy (web 0)
2. crawling (web 1)

Web 0

Internet is short for inter-networked computers. A network of networks, as in the network in your office right now. That network is connected to other networks and so forth in what you might call a world-wide web of inter-networking.

So before the Internet, there were just regular old computer networks, and they brought a revolutionary wave of efficiency through individual companies. Each company that deployed a computer network saved time and money that far outweighed the cost of deployment. That’s why virtually 100% of companies have computer networks.

The simple power of automated calculation and a virtual document storage (aggregation) regime that allowed multiple users to access the same document completely changed what was a profitable activity and what was not. This was the revolution of the Computer Age.

Web 1

The advent of the Internet brought a new wave of revolutionary efficiencies to commerce, but this time at the industry level. Publishing, travel, real estate, car buying, employment, entertainment. All of these industries were radically transformed by the Internet. And often to the detriment of existing players.

Some efficiencies came through the delivery of company-level software over the Internet. But most of the changes were classic market efficiencies. By aggregating interested parties regardless of geography, the Internet created whole new markets and, in fact, a new economy.

Web 2

So now the Internet is social. Already, it has had an enormous effect on the way people connect and interact. It is just WAY more easy to find and communicate with anybody anywhere. Someone I haven’t talked to in probably 30 years sent me an email the other day. It took him only a few minutes to find me. Ten years ago it would have taken hours. 20 years ago it would have been impossible.

But, at the company level and commercially in general, Web 2 has had virtually zero effect. For every Facebook or MySpace, there are 10,000 bloggers asking “How do I monetize this?”

That’s entirely the wrong question. The question is: What can this do for enterprise?

The short answer: everything.

The Long Answer

The short version of the long answer is that Web 2 gives enterprise the opportunity to put the wetware onto the hardware.

This is your brain. This is your brain on a server.

In the same way that Web 0 let companies aggregate documents in a shared environment, social computing lets organizations aggregate human knowledge in a shared and, better than that, collaborative environment. When the act of creating a ‘knowledge set’ is itself collaborative, it produces more fully vetted information AND it strengthens the critical offline connections that exist within, without and between organizations.

Blogging is huge right about now and will probably continue to grow its influence in the broader media/communications landscape. For many, even most companies, it will become a critical part of their communications mix. And 100% of online newspapers/news sites will (eventually) become blogs.

Social networks are an enterprise no-brainer. It should be no surprise that Xerox and IBM are leaders in that area. IBM seriously missed the boat on a little industry we like to call Software. (Sure, Bill, you can have the operating system, whatever THAT is.) If you’re too young to remember, Xerox invented the graphical user interface and that thing in your right hand. No. I mean the mouse. (Sure, Steve, you can have this whole point-and-click thing, but who’s gonna put a computer in their home?)

I’m pretty sure neither will be missing the next revolution.

Discussion forums have been the go-to app for customer support in the software industry for 20+ years because they are fast, cheap and effective. Every other industry in the world, where the hell are you?

But wikis, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, offer the most upside to the most organizations. In my little Web 2 class, I call wikis “ISO-9000 in a box.” If everybody in your company documented everything they did over the course of a day, how much of your operation would that cover? A lot.

Those data will never be forgotten, never get slightly convoluted or critical steps dropped. In fact, the veracity of the data would improve over time. Don’t think that editing only occurs when a knowledgeable user changes or adds text or images. Editing occurs whenever a knowledgeable user reads and tacitly approves the text and images. By NOT editing the text, they give their approval.

What project wouldn’t be easier to manage with a wiki than emailing Word documents? What process is so complex, it cannot be expressed with an infinitely scalable and endlessly flexible architecture? What instructions are so simple, there’s no point in writing them down?

On Chris Brogan’s blog, there was robust and constructive discussion of what constitutes expertise. Some commenters - and they seem to be from the ad agency side of the world - say things like “social media is a fad.” Social media, maybe.

But social computing? No way. I boldly predict that neither computers nor society will disappear this century.

They’re baaaack. Those culture-crazy cro-mags, the Geico Cavemen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5JV0Fs_GE8

It’s been a while since Geico last aired the Cavemen campaign. Why? That stupid ABC sitcom, of course. I’ve loved this campaign since the first guy drops the boom, says “Not cool,” and walks off the set. The shade of light, light pink in the jacket of the guy who orders the roast duck — too perfectly LA circa summer 2006.

They’ve continued to add elements to the Caveman’s Crib website, where I love to waste time.

The brand is always relevant because they’re the bad guy. It’s rare for a brand to have the guts — or the sense of humor — to be the butt of a joke. But, guess what, brands? It’s wildly popular. Duh.

So, then, LA (and these spots are set in LA, right?), so LA goes ahead and takes the unnecessary step of making really amusing, engaging thirty-second spots into a worthless sitcom. I said it on AgencySpy - a loser from the get-go.

All those spies were right, the ads disappeared. And then, big surprise, the show disappears.

So, big ups to Geico for giving the people what they want: arrogant semi-sophisticates that just need to find a decent barbershop.

LATE EDIT: So now I’ve seen the new, crappy ads with the TV cast. Boo.

It makes so much sense for the Real Advertising website to be a blog, I feel like a complete moron that I’m two years on and only just decided to do it. Like the old Steely Dan record says, “You gotta walk it like you talk it, or you’re gonna lose that beat.”

So here it is, my own little corner to rant and rave about all the great and greatly stupid things that brands and marketers and advertising weasels and bloggers and publishers do. I hear you already. “Who needs another freakin’ blog about advertising?” You do, that’s who.

There’s not a lot of people that bring the Frymaster’s unique experience both making and hating advertising, which I’ve been doing since I was in grade school. (No word of a lie, I wrote my first headline at about age 10. It was a Sunday, and my dad (a Mad Man at JWT back in the day) was on deadline writing an ad for Kings Supermarket, specifically the deli counter. He was working in the kitchen, and I was watching TV. A promo came on for the Wizard of Oz. I said, “It’s the Wizard of Ounces.” Get it? Dad did.)

And your not-humble-in-the-least Frymaster has been building brands online since the mid-90s. I actually stumbled over web 2 in 1999, and I didn’t realize it for about 5 years. The story is part of the Web 2 class I give at Providence think tank New Commons. I think I’m going to blog it over on the New Commons Blog. It’s called Going from Nowhere to Nowhere.

I’m starting to gain some traction with what’s called A-list bloggers. I find that term annoying. I’m not much of an A-lister, although if the pay is any good… Seriously, it says so much about the blogo-sphere that a little guy like me can make an impact on big-time industry-type people. That’s why I waste, er, invest so much time on the blogs.

Alright, enough of that. I’ve got a theme to install and customize. I have a portfolio page to figure out. And the client log in stuff.

Check back early and often.