Moving and Life updated

So I have been an infrequent blogger for the past few years – for many reasons, some work some personal, none really bad just been more active in other forums and haven’t had blogging inspiration. But I realized as I am in the midst of packing up our every belongings with my wife in preparation for our pending move next week that I havent’ been keeping my blog readers in the loop. 

So a few big personal bits of news, if you read me for technical tips, political views, food reviews or other matters feel free to skip this post and come back here for future posts. 

Okay for those who have stayed the highlights only updates from the past few years.

A year and a half ago I got married over Thanksgiving weekend here in San Francisco.

Married life has been wonderful and in July my wife and I will be adding to our family with the addition of our first child (we don’t know the baby’s sex and won’t until she or he arrives). 

Later this week we are leaving the “big city” behind and moving to East Palo Alto from San Francisco. While we are both urban dwellers at heart – I lived in Chicago for 16 years then San Francisco for nearly 7 years (with a brief 6 months stint in Berkeley, the one month in Oakland was actually a month in a bigger city than SF so doesn’t count for leaving the city behind) and my wife has lived in San Francisco for nearly 17 years herself so this is a pretty huge change for us both. But it is one that we are both very excited about – not lead because of the chance to be nearer to her family – and for the little things that are harder to have in a bigger city – like more than one bathroom – but which are quite helpful with a growing family.

After the move I hope to resume more active blogging – and will be spending some time gathering together my disparate online sites into a more cohesive whole. 

Initial thoughts on Facebook Graph search

I’ve been playing around with the new Graph search which i just got this afternoon.

First impressions – BEST “tour” I’ve ever seen in a product – instead of canned searches & results the TOUR uses logical elements from your Facebook profile and actual live results (in my case “University of Chicago” then “my friends who attended the University of Chicago”)

Second impressions – very cool but the auto completion vs actual search is frustrating – and will be MUCH more so when (if) they allow searching in blobs of texts (i.e. updates, shares, posts etc) – much that I would want to actually search for won’t be possible.

For example something like “friends who are hiring” which would be awesome to get reasonable results for isn’t currently feasible.

And more playing with the searches also shows a lot about who is/isn’t keeping their profiles active and up-to-date. Definitely increases the value/importance of keeping elements of your FB profile accurate (companies you work/worked at for example). They also don’t quite get that distinction – i.e. Dave McClure showed up in a simple search I did for “friends who work at Paypal” (note that my search was in the present tense – of course I know Dave used to work there… )

This will also be useful but will suffer from the “when/how” do I use this? Will Graph search be available to me via the FB apps? Or just the website? Will it be a standalone mobile app (ala Messenger) What more complex use cases will this have beyond the obvious friend stalking/local restaurant suggestions types of things.

Seth Blank’s YourTrove.com is still FAR more useful for me – that lets me search stuff that has been shared with me (full text search of posts) – i.e. insanely useful in tracking down stuff I know someone shared with me at some point in the past but which I can’t recall the precise details (for example the private, friend’s only post where a friend shared the names of his newborn children)

Overall definitely going to be an interesting shift in how Facebook is used.

Your Browser Alphabet

So a few days ago I came up with a fun yet revealing game – and asked folks on Twitter about it.

What is your browser alphabet?

That is, when you type a single letter what does your browser auto-complete to (if at all)? This may vary across the browsers you have installed and is, of course, based on your browsing and searching history in each of your browsers.

For me not every letter maps to a site and some more obscure letters map to sites I rarely use (but which are the only sites I use with any frequency that start with that letter). In my own case a few links, of sites I use the most, map to highly specific pages of a much much larger site. In most cases however the browser defaults to a fairly top level domain.

Safari (my secondary browser)

A is for accounts.google.com (yup, over Apple.com)

B is for bbc.co.uk

F is for Facebook.com

etc.

Browsers vary and a lot of this depends on what you have been visiting recently – but I think the full exercise can buy  revelation about what sites you actually spend the most time and may help you think about what you have been prioritizing. Sharing the full list almost certain reveals more of your self than most people would be comfortable sharing but I think it could easily be a very fun site/game to capture this info and compare it to others.

What are your get the New Year started rituals, habits or practices?

Do you do anything every first business day back from the new year break?

Do you try to get down to inbox zero for the new year?

Do you try to clear out RSS feeds, evaluate podcast subscriptions?

Try something new to start the year?

For me here are my goals and new habits for the new year.

1. Clear my inbox, currently hovering just under 2000 emails – going to try to get that down to <100 by the end of the week
2. Zero out my RSS feeds for the new year and likely unsubscribe from dozens (hundreds?) of feeds I rarely read last year – giving myself space for new subscriptions
3. Try to write a blog post (or more than one) and schedule others to get myself into the habit of at least one blog post a week for 2013 (so check back with me in 2014 to see if I make that – goal is at least 52 blog posts to http://slowbrand.com/ orhttp://shannonclark.wordpress.com/
4. Visit at least one new cafe or restaurant a week for 2013. Today I’m at The Wooly Pig on Hugo St in SF – a new cafe and a whole new street to me (haven’t been here before) Great food, good coffee, free wifi (in a tiny space) = a definite winner to start the new year. 
5. Reconnect with old friends and make new ones. Every year I meet 100′s of people, some years 1000′s, and while I always form new friendships each year I’m not always great about staying in touch with old friends. Not just via once a year birthday greetings here on Facebook but by actively engaging with my friends – catching up on the phone, meeting up in person. In 2013 I’m going to try to reconnect with at least one old friend each week – and meet at least one new person each week (whether they become friends isn’t the primary goal)

Idea – Small Business everyday – not just once a year on Saturday

This Saturday is the return of the American Express sponsored alternative to Black Friday, Small Business Saturday which is indeed a great event where American Express is using their marketing clout to promote shopping at local, small businesses. if you are an American Express cardholder you definitely should register before Nov 24th via the above link and qualify to get $25 credit if you spend more than $25 (on a single transaction) at a registered small business – either per the website above or a Square merchant.

No complaints about that emphasis from me but it did spark an idea and a question.

Why restrict this movement to one Saturday a year? Why not create a way to promote shopping from innovative businesses every day? 

Clearly there are a lot of complicated reasons to focus on a single day – for one it is a great way for American Express to leverage marketing dollars to make a single push and to emphasize the value of accepting American Express to small business merchants (i.e. since it costs more for the merchants anything like this day that adds value to that transaction via stretching marketing dollars is a win for small businesses) but I think there is a lot of great opportunities for networks of smart businesses to work together to create value for all participating merchants.

First however a few definitions and restrictions I would put on any such project were I to pursue it.

1. The value for consumers in shopping at a small, local business should be the service they get and what they can get there that can’t easily be found elsewhere. In many cases this means businesses that offer unique items, often locally made and/or that support and service older items no longer available elsewhere. Used bookstores versus an only new bookstore for example.
2. If I were running things I would emphasize the value of curation and editing over comprehensiveness. Small businesses win against the Amazon.coms and Walmarts not by competing on price or selection but by offering better service – which includes editing what is available to only sell great products. This in turn also allows for value to buyers even if the absolute price of a given good is the same (or even higher) than that good might be at a big box store or massive online site. Busy shoppers value service – and help in identifying the great versus the not-so-great is, for many, worth spending slightly more (avoiding the costs and time of returning items or replacing things that wear out quickly)
3. Small businesses don’t necessarily mean tiny one-woman shops. Relative to the $100B+ massive big box chains like Walmart nearly every other retailer is “small” – small in this context primarily means in ethos and focus – though I think I would start with businesses primarily in the <$100M/year range (mostly in the <$10M range with many in the <$1M). These could be mid-sized businesses like San Francisco’s Rickshaw Bagworks or even smaller businesses like my wife’s design business.
4. Here in SF we have an example of the type of thing I’m thinking about – SF Made is a network of 100′s of local to San Francisco makers – companies that aren’t just based in SF but in most cases manufacture what they sell here in San Francisco. SF Made is close to what I’m envisioning though I think it should be a national movement not just a local citywide one.

I don’t mind in thinking about this idea if it excludes many types of small businesses. The idea isn’t to promote shopping locally or at small businesses just because they are small or local – ignoring whether they offer great products at fair prices – rather the idea is to find a network of likeminded, related businesses that through pooling together can better market and promote the unique products and service they offer. Any such organization has to be about the value to buyers as much (perhaps even more so) than it is about the value to the local businesses. If it is this could be a highly sustainable movement – if the value isn’t there however or if it is too skewed towards one party over the other then this isn’t a sustainable, long term movement.

Groupon’s approach isn’t, I think, the right on – it emphasizes price over quality and service. What I’m thinking about would be a service that is not open to any business to join – but which rather is possibly a co-op where very business has to be approved in some manner (perhaps not by each other – this should be open even to “rivals” as long as they all meet the core criteria and philosophy). Once a member and once pooling marketing and promotional budgets the idea would be that this organization could do things that no single small business could reasonable take on – sustained online marketing campaigns, long running offline advertising and promotional campaigns etc. Possibly this organization would also serve as a negotiator on behalf of these smaller businesses for a wide variety of products and services (health insurance for example but also negotiating with payment processing firms like Square, American Express etc.

Services in iOS – wild speculation about how to evolve mobile OSes

photo of NeXT Cube by Joachim S. Müller used under a CC license

More than 20 years ago my primary computer was a NeXT cube – still among the best computers I have ever owned and many of the features of that computer are still revolutionary. Among those features is one that showed up in the Mac OS many versions ago but which has never been widely used – the concept of Services which are pieces of functionality that one application offers and makes available to all other applications on the computer.

Potentially incredibly powerful both for day to day use and for use inside of scripts to automate routine tasks these services have, however, never been widely used or understood.

So here is my crazy speculation – in response to this recent Google+ post on the future of Context and iOS by Robert Scoble - Apple should make it possible for every iOS application to expose services to other applications on the platform

This has lots of challenges – not least of which is data security and integrity – exposing services means passing data amongst applications on the platform and opens up the device to any number of privacy and security concerns – but the advantages that this could offer are also nearly endless.

Imagine an entire new class of applications – applications that aren’t designed to be run directly but instead which enhance every other application on the platform. A few immediate examples:

A public transit application that makes public transit directions available in EVERY application on the device that uses a map

A translation application that offers on the fly translation/language lookup of any bit of text inside any application on the device

A “share to …” service that adds a new service to the core sharing services baked into the OS (i.e. currently Twitter and Facebook but this would be a way to install one core element and get sharing features potentially everywhere on the platform

Today many applications actually bake into their codebases code for various third-party services – web analytics, social network login/sharing features. game score/matching features etc. It may be possible that in the future, should services be widely adopted, that many applications could have a smaller, more nimble codebase by leveraging a single, well updated and maintained codebase for common services (such as ad serving, analytics, etc) much as today they consume core iOS services such as Maps etc)

I should note that while I pay attention to mobile development and iOS development it has been sometime since I was actively and personally involved in the development of an iOS application so I may be misremembering certain details of how to build such applications under the current iOS. And yes there are always problems when 0ne application depends upon a 3rd party application for core services (i.e. an update to that 3rd party service may impact the performance of your application in potentially unforeseen ways)

But equally such a movement away from siloed applications to emphasizing services that one application can offer to other application could open up the iOS platform to countless new opportunities while also enabling smaller and faster applications.

These new Services applications could do all kinds of potentially crazy and innovative things – actions that would then be potentially available inside of every application on the device. From allowing for enhanced auto-completion (i.e. text snippets etc) to on-the-fly translation, to enhanced geographic contextual information to new forms of analytics the possibilities are nearly endless.

So that’s my “simple” suggestion – bring back Services in a big way.

Review – The Impact Equation by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Reading The Impact Equation at Blue Bottle Mint Plaza in San Francisco

Do you know how to make an impact? How to get heard? How to have your ideas shared with the world and have an impact?

My friend Chris Brogan along with his co-author Julien Smith have a new book, The Impact Equation: Are You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise?, which will be published on Oct 25th, 2012. They sent me a preview copy and over the past couple of weeks I have been reading it at cafes and on the muni here in San Francisco. My copy is already dog eared and flagged with post-its for easy reference back to key points in the book.

TLDR review – pre-order this book and read it

First a few disclosures and admissions. One, Chris Brogan is a friend – not an old “grew up” with friend, but not just someone whom I follow on social media channels, he’s someone whom I have met in person many times and whom I knew years ago before he had books published and a speaking schedule that takes him around the world. Two, I haven’t (yet) read Trust Agents which is Chris and Julien’s earlier book. My stack of books to be read – for fun and for business including far too many by folks I know has been large and growing over the past few years and somehow I haven’t gotten to Trust Agents yet. Three, many of the people they write about in this new book (and I suspect in their previous book) are people I know friends from here in San Francisco and from the larger tech/social media/blog/podcasting world. Four, I don’t have the 1000′s of readers/followers/listeners of folks like Chris and Julien but I am as they say “a degree away” from many people who do – folks with millions of followers and a high impact on the world.

With all of that disclosed up front I have been inspired not just to write this review but to rethink a bunch of my personal projects (including this blog) and over the next few weeks and months I anticipate making many personal and professional changes inspired in no small part by the ideas of The Impact Equation. I can’t summarize their book in a few short paragraphs but I will summarize a few of their early and key points and discuss how I plan on addressing them.

To start with the equation itself (quoting from the pre-release copy but I assume this key part won’t change in the final print edition):

Impact = C x (R + E + A + T + E)

Yes, that is, not surprisingly, the simple yet key fact that to have impact now (and in the past) you have to create – frequently, often and well. The full equation defines each part and the book illustrates each aspect of the equation. Contrast - a new idea has to familiar yet different enough to be noticed. Reach - the number of people you can get connected to your ideas. Exposure – how often do you connect with the people you can reach. Articulation – being understood and clear in communicating your idea. Trust – the subject of their previous book but still not entirely figured out – but why will people listen to you? And finally Echo – the feeling of connection that great ideas and impactful people create.

Fairly simple, fairly memorable yet also complex enough to warrant a full book (and I’m sure many more talks and presentations in the future for Chris and Julien).

On a person level my biggest takeaways from the book is a reminder to get myself back into the ongoing, frequent content creation business – that if I want to grow my own personal impact I need to create more content, more often, and more thoughtfully. Furthermore I need to think about this whether I’m going to continue being an independent consultant or if I join a larger organization. That while I may have some impact in my tweets, comments, email list participation and even events that I create if I were more thoughtful about my online (and offline) activities I could have a much greater impact on the world. With more thoughtful (and literally more frequent) effort I can have a far larger impact on the world than i do today. That I can take the conversations I have one-on-one today and still have that impact but also bring it to a far wider audience.

For some of this I will have to get out of my comfort zone – write more content, experiment with new formats for myself (video? audio?) and generate this content far more frequently than I have been for the past few years.

In each of the chapters of The Impact Equation Chris and Julien cover a mix of specific tactics (and the occasional exercise to get you thinking) as well as stories that illustrate their key ideas. Some of these stories are from business people they have met others are illustrated with celebrities they admire. But in every chapter they also focus on asking you to think about how this applies to yourself – how would you evaluate yourself on this dimension of their equation. I think most of these chapters and the book over all are compelling but not every chapter is equally strong.

The initial chapters on Ideas – on Contrast and Articulation are very good and have a lot of useful exercises for everyone. In particular they have a lot of great exercises around how to evaluate your own ideas and how to communicate them clearly.

The middle chapters on Platforms – on Reach and Exposure – however are a bit weaker. In particular I think the chapter on Exposure is the weakest chapter in the book. In part this is because Exposure is in no small part outside of your direct control. They talk in this chapter about the exposure that someone like Jimmy Fallon has from his tv show but they also talk about the impact of frequency on your exposure but the links and what will work best for most people is not entirely clear from this chapter (and it is perhaps not an easy thing to answer). They have a lot of great questions and a few answers but this chapter left me a bit unsatisfied. Yes, participating in the communities you want to reach is great advice (it is what I tell my clients in fact) but it takes more than just that to get great exposure of your ideas.

The final chapters on Network – on Trust and Echo, Echo – are perhaps surprisingly among the shortest in the book. The chapter on Trust is a revisit (per what they wrote, I haven’t yet read Trust Agents) of the topic of their earlier collaboration. The chapter on Echo (Echo, Echo) is nearly the end of the book and very important but also fairly short. It is about how your ideas resonant and connect. Very important but I think if they could have gone a bit deeper here the whole book would have “echoed” for me even more strongly. But that said they make some really important points in this last chapter leading to the conclusion of the book.

Overall as I said above my recommendation is that you go out and buy this book – in fact that you go preorder it now to be among the first to read it. I hope for my friend’s sake that it is a huge hit and given the quality of the content I’m sure it will be a successful book. More importantly on a personal front it has many parts that I will be using myself to make changes in the coming weeks to my own professional habits and practices and online (and offline) content.

Things every geek household should contain…

My wife Usha and I playing games at Snakes and Lattes in Toronto on a recent trip.

Clearly this is a list that is long and might differ by your particular interests but I was thinking this evening about the things that every geek household should contain (and realizing that my own household may be missing quite a few things…).

What additions would you have to my list below?

1. A bag full of dice – the full array of d20′s, d12′s, d10′s, d8′s, lots of d6′s and some d4′s plus assorted classic or unusual dice
2. Settlers of Catan
3. A number of full bookcases with an array of great books – likely a wide mix of graphic novels, science fiction & fantasy novels, philosophy, history, technology and more. Geeks read and almost all geeks read widely and diversely (or at least did in college and kept their textbooks)
4. A chess board and chess clock
5. A go board (selling my cheap one, may need to find a better replacement)
6. A shelf full of old and new boardgames – likely a lot of modern Euro games but also some classic “Ameritrash” games as well as childhood favorites (Stratego, some version of Risk, etc). Note that Monopoly, Sorry, Candyland etc aren’t required but probably Scrabble is. What other games would you say every home should own?
7. Lots of decks of playing cards, well used and a full set of heavy duty poker chips (at least one)
8. Wide selection of pens, markets, sharpies, crayons and more – basically most geeks could in some manner do double duty as a 2nd grade teacher – but they use their craft tools to draw out game boards or outline craft projects.
9. A sewing machine (yes even male geeks should likely be able to craft stuff – i.e. cosplay, larp costumes…)
10. More computers than humans residing in the home
11. A game console (or two or three)
12. A home network (or two)
13. A set of tools to take apart computers and other gadgets (i.e. more than just a single basic screwdriver). Many geeks will also have a wide array of tools – power or mechanical likely including a soldering iron, a box full of electronics parts, lots of power strips, batteries and power supplies etc.
14. A few current and few older gadgets – stuff like a FitBit but probably also an older X/O computer
15. At least one digital camera other than on your smartphones (which perhaps goes without saying nearly every member of the household – at least all the adults and older children each already own). Mostly for being able to shoot video and higher quality images than you can with your phone but many geeks will also own a DSLR camera for more “serious” photography/videos. Perhaps many “real” geeks will also have microphones.

What else would you expect to find in a geek household? I’m open to suggestions from many different definitions/types of geeks. My wife and I are both geeks, though in different ways and between us we have lots of other highly geeky things – a kitchen full of tools and equipment (which we actually use regularly), shelves full of serious cookbooks, her room (and many boxes in our garage) full of her sewing and craft supplies and equipment including many machines, specialized tools and parts and pieces. Geeks tend to, in my observation, go overboard about their specific areas of deepest interest and passion – whether cooking, crafting, gaming (paper, board or digital), comics, books etc.

But so to I think there may be a superset of things that most (or at least many) geeks will own that perhaps helps define us. Curious if my list above resonates and what glaringly obvious things I’ve missed….

Today I registered for the TechCrunch Disrupt

originally posted to my Google+ account – reposting here for posterity 

Today I registered for the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon here in SF in September and I’ve started thinking about what I want to build. One thought is an application that builds upon what I started my first company, JigZaw (with a Z not the sell other people business cards company) to build – namely a really smart calendar.

But with a twist.

Instead of being a calendar – or even an online schedule/list of upcoming events (of which there are both lots and frankly nothing very great) this would be focused on a related problem – but with a very different UI and solution.

The core idea (which I’m posting here as I usually post ideas – I would be interested in building this and am planning on possibly pursing this, if someone else wants to build it do so though I ask for at a minimum some acknowledgement and would be interested in being involved, but I’m not claiming any kinda of IP on ideas) is:

Countdowns and Deadlines.

Countdowns are descending reminders about when something will start (such as 100 hours to the 2012 Olympics – though the units can be days, weeks or even years instead of hours or minutes). Mostly countdowns for an event would actually be a SET of related countdowns – for example “countdown to when SXSW panel submissions are open” along with “countdown to hotel registration opening”, “countdown to registration opening” and “countdown to conference starting….”

Countdowns are for events that haven’t yet happened/started

in contrast:

Deadlines are for an event/happening that has started and will end/stop at a specific time

Often a countdown will end and a related deadline will start (i.e. “Deadline for SXSW panel submissions”)

The idea for this application is that individuals could select countdowns and related deadlines to pay attention to / be reminded about in the app from countdowns and deadlines setup by other users (and/or by the company or corporate partners). These could be in LOTS of categories – release dates for movies or books, ticket sales for touring bands, festivals, sporting events, school related dates, sales at favorite stores (online or offline) and much much more.

Most countdowns and deadlines would be default PUBLIC though the option would be there for you to also track personal, private deadlines (work deadlines for example)

Alongside your view of pending deadlines and active countdowns you might also overlap reoccurring activities/goals/to-do’s (walk 10,000 steps each day etc) but this last feature is one that I think is optional and we might leave out in the first version.

Individuals would be able to add and share new countdowns.

Each countdown or deadline would be associated with both a description and a link to an related resource – ideally one that would reflect any future CHANGES to that event (i.e. extension of a deadline or postponement/cancelation of an event being counted down to)

Once you have selected a number of things to track and pay attention to this service would then be able to offer at least two compelling additional services:

1) Show you related countdowns/deadlines which you might want to also track – i.e. next year’s conference if you are tracking this year’s or the same conference/show offered in a different region. Over time this might get refined to learn which categories you care so much about that you want to know every instance of that event (PAX & PAX East for example) vs. more common events you might not care about every instance of (every hockey game played in the NFL for example vs the home games of your favorite team)

2) Show you PEOPLE you might want to meet/connect with due to shared interests. This might start with leveraging the Facebook social graph to show you shared interests across your existing friends (assuming you and your friends are both using this service) but eventually this might also help you discover others with many common interests nearby.

This service would likely list a LOT of events from sites such as Meetup which would be a really rich data source.

In terms of the business model(s) for this service I see many different options. One simplistic one is that non-humans wanting to have accounts (to create events) would pay for that right. (i.e. event organizers, companies running sales, film studios etc). This professional fee would scale in some dimension and would offer them a rich suite of tools and functionality. It would be available to “human” users as well at a reduced price assuming these features are of value to some individuals as well (i.e. folks who run a number of personal events for example – a musician for instance)

Other options: some affiliate fees on sales driven by this service – either links to online (or offline) sales or links that are to ticket/event sales directly. (in many cases however these would have to individually negotiated and aren’t all that high in many cases)

Direct sales of the mobile apps (debatable – a free app may drive more user growth and still result in greater revenues particularly if the professional/corporate layer was an optional in-app subscription purchase)

This type of application and web service won’t change the world – nor will it be a billion+ business but I can see how this could be a very nice profitable standalone business OR a rich addition to an existing web business. I also see how to build this affordably and in a way that should scale to quite large numbers.

(and I have many many years worth of past research and development that should allow me to build some really powerful and rich tools to power this service – to check links for relevancy, to automate the updates when data changes and eventually to also discover and search out related or new countdowns/deadlines)

So who is interested in helping me build this – either as developers or investors?

Comics, Geeks and the evolution of media

If you didn’t already know this about me – I’m a geek and proud of it. I’m also an analyst and observer of business trends and for many years now one area I have been studying very carefully is the ongoing evolution of media an evolution which is occurring all around us on a global scale in ways that may change billion dollar industries (and already have). For the past few years I have been focusing on studying a variety of specialized niches both because they are areas that interest me personally and also because I believe that each niche offers insights into the future of the larger market. Individual creators and content focused businesses should study these niches for what is working as well as what is not and for the direction of things to come.

While there are many great examples here are a few specific cases across a variety of niches which I think are worth careful study. Hopefully these are also entertaining and enjoyable.

Comics

As the big two comics publishers Marvel and DC experiment with line-wide relaunches and explorations of digital content (see DC Comics on Amazon for example – note my Affiliate link is in there – that’s a link to DC Comics available on the Kindle where for a while at least they were exclusive) independent comics publishers have been doing some really interesting experiments. The web comic world for example has launched a lot of highly successful Kickstarter projects to fund the physical print versions of web comics (which are mostly available online for free) and the model of free-online frequent web comic supported in part by infrequent collections in physical form (or as paid digital collections) is starting to see some successes.

The comics site that I will be watching carefully over the rest of 2012 (and into 2013 and beyond) however illustrates some other relevant trends around the comics industry – namely that comics are a fertile source of new IP that leads into other media and increasingly creators are crossing between many different genres and media types to tell and explore their story ideas. This site is ThrillBent which is a collaboration of Mark Waid and Jon Rodgers. Mark Waid is a highly acclaimed comics writer and Jon Rodgers is the producer and writer of the fantastic TV series Leverage (and other projects in the past and future). Jon Rodgers is also a gamer (see below where I embed a video that includes him talking about his game playing).

Video entertainment

Increasingly there are entertainment options that are available on-demand from a wide array of options (physical media – DVDs/BluRay being the least useful option) and as this evolution continues to expand the 500+ channel cable/satellite TV model is increasingly under attack and likely will evolve considerably in the next few years. Just this year YouTube has taken a major step in generating eve more new ongoing content on YouTube via their program of channels many of which they are helping fund. My personal favorite is the Geek And Sundry channel which has become my regular video viewing on a weekly (and often daily) basis.

See this video from Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop series feature Jon Rodgers among other guests.

Shows like this may not garner the millions of viewers of the latest reality tv show but they are compelling and engaging and, in this case, highly geeky…