Changed my billing address with verizon today. This is the email I got. Amazing. Seriously. Wow.

From: verizonorders@email.click.verizon.net
Subject: CBAOrder Confirmation
Date: September 6, 2008 2:37:28 PM EDT
To: rick@xxxxxxx.com
Reply-To: olf@verizon.com

CUST_LAST_NAME><
CUST_FIRST_NAME>RICHARD WEBB<
EMAIL_ADDRESS>rick@xxxxxxxcom<
DUE_DATE>9/6/2008 12:00:00 AM<
TRACKING_NUM>XXXXXXXXXXX<
ORDER_LOCATION>BAE<
STATE>MA<
ORDER_TYPE>CBA<
RECAP_SECTION_1>

**
Services Ordered **

Change Billing Address
END_RECAP_1>rick@stodgy.com

Okay, a longish one again.

So, I was talking to this friend of mine. Yo is looking for interactive producers. And yo said something really intelligent, and at first I thought “oo this is an interesting insight” and it totally was, but, ultimately, I realized it was a bit misguided. But then I realized it touched on something really interesting, namely education and this wacky industry of interactive advertising, and in a couple different ways.

Lemme explain that.

SO, there is a lack of good interactive producers out there. Especially for agencies. This is totally true. They’re insanely hard to find. Like to the point where I could probably name, from memory, over half the good interactive producers in America. There are fewer Dressage champions in America than there are good interactive producers. I won’t dispute that point. Man, if you’re a kid trying to get into advertising and want to make a killing, become an interactive producer. Oh, right, except you can’t, because nowhere in America do we actually teach anyone HOW to be an interactive producer. VCU’s tryin’ to get it together, and they’ll have it in a few years, but, really, you can’t go to school for it right now. Oh and there are no books about it, either. I’ve been meaning to right one (though lord knows my producerly ways have been gettin’ shabby as they’re tainted with other aspects of the industry these days), but, like all half-decent interactive producers, I’ve been too busy to do it. As an aside, Amanda, or Mike or any of you want to write this book together, we could make a mint.

ANYWAY, my friend made an interesting comment while we were jointly bemoaning the lack of good interactive producers. Yo said “You know, we have all these great creatives, and they come to their producer with their good ideas and the producer just bogs them down with all of these questions. ‘how many pages?’ ‘Flash or HTML?’ etc etc. And it totally stifles their creativity. It’s not like this with Broadcast. Creatives can just think about the idea. The producers do the rest. We need producers who will help get the thing done.”

I think there’s a lot of intelligence in this comment, and I think it’s a solid hallmark of a great interactive producer – help ‘em get the shit done. Be a team partner, and figure out the hard stuff.

BUT, I think there’s another point in there. My friend’s agency has made a logical decision – to hire creatives who focus on the idea, and then get them the support they need to execute on the idea. This makes sense, but I believe it is a bit of a myopic view of the situation.

If we take a look back and survey the environment we’re in, we’ll realize that these traditional creatives aren’t coming to their broadcast jobs blind. Every kid in America knows what a camera is. They know what lights are, and mics, and green screens. Most every kid in America could tell the difference between a CGI effect and a real one, and could probably even tell you when to use which. Every kid in America can spot a big budget film from a low budget film. Everyone knows what a script is. Most people know what a storyboard is.

The tools and trades of making broadcast advertising is ingrained in our national conscience. We all know the basics. A broadcast creative can thank hollywood for giving them a basic grasp of their field for free.

In interactive, however, this is not the case. Yet.

Would the above analogy work if a traditional agency hired creatives who didn’t have a clear idea of what a movie camera was, and when they went to their producer with an idea and the producer said “sounds good hey get me a script or a storyboard.’” they said “what’s that?”

Would a traditional agency creative be able to keep his job if he kept proposing ideas that were manifestly obviously 200 million dollars to create?

I can see it now: “okay, we’ll get every living soul in India as an extra, right? They can’t be that expensive, then we’ll launch a rocket with a giant – what are they called? cameras? yeah. one of those – with a giant camera on it and we’ll film all those extras from space while everyone in India waves at the camera. It’s never been done before. And like people-powered stuff is big right now. What? catering? What? There aren’t any cameras for rent in space?* Oh, well, I mean, I dunno. Why you asking me all this. It’s your job to figure it out. I’m just about the idea.“

This is an absurdist extension, but barely. This is the kind of shit people hear from traditional, or media agnostic creatives all the time.

In 1930-whatever, when JWT decided to make the first broadcast commercial, and it went over well, do you think they said “hey that went over well, let’s make everyone do them now without re-training them?” Well, hell, maybe they did, but I’m sure that in the great migration of American advertising from print to broadcast, a lot of people had to scramble and learn some new stuff, or they stayed relegated to print, which at time, they probably thought was still going to be the big thing, and these wacky kids, whatever.

Before schools started pumping out more film students than you can shake a stick at, before the talkies became ingrained in our nation’s conscience, and before Coppola, Lucas, Tarantino and Sony brought filmmaking to the masses, people were either trained for it, or they scrambled, caught up, and learned the technical skills needed. Or they stayed in print.

So sure, have creatives be creatives across all media, but bear in mind there is a basic level of knowledge that is needed to be an effective creative in any medium. Much of that we already have in print, and in broadcast, but not necessarily in interactive. Yet. The kids are totally different, by the way. The kids have arguments now about Flash vs. AJAX and all sorts of stuff. Send your creatives to some classes. Start classes in-house. Give your creatives the same basic level of understanding of the medium that hollywood gave them about film. Hell, do it for print, too. Teach ‘em about dot gain, while you’re at it, please.**

Or, you know, you could ignore it. But just know that to someone who knows this stuff, being exasperated at questions like “how many pages do you think the site might be” is the equivalent of being exasperated by a producer who asks you how long your spot might run. Both parties gotta come to the table here.

I’m sorry but it’s true. Don’t feel bad. I started in print too. It’s not that hard.

So, I kind of snubbed nbc.com for the olympics for other available, non-silverlight sources, but I had read a (shockingly) good review of demconvention.com and its HD feed of the Democratic Convention on Gawker. Then I got to my New York apt and tried to find an over-the-air signal for my television and there was none, so I was getting panicky and really wanted to watch the DNC, so I said “okay, I’ll listen to gawker and try demconvention.com.”

Turns out the thing was Silverlight. I hate downloading plug-ins, makes me feel all 1998 n stuff. But i persevered and downloaded two plugins – one for Silverlight and one for Move Networks – and went for it.

OMG, it was amazing. I watched all manner of Democratic congressperson and soldier in amazing HD, streaming, in real time. And not only that, I was in awe of it’s auto-correction and bandwitdh optimization management. The stream would effortlessly switch from HD to standard resolution to low res, depending on bandwidth, and sometimes you could see both streams in the same frame. Really solid stuff. Color me impressed.

Day three, however, made me realize that it had some problems. I’m not sure whether the problems were with the fact that I was watching more pre-canned video than live (and maybe they are on slower servers), or if my neighborhood (my roomie and I share straight up standard Time Warner Cable Internet), or my machine, but the whole thing was unwatchable, and this is where the problems started cropping up:

1) There’s no option to say “okay, silverlight, just play the low res version already I don’t really care if there’s a HD version available I’d just like it to stream k thnx bye.” I am assuming this would go in the prefs panel.

2) speaking of the prefs panel, it shows up with a right click (control-click on a Mac) when you’re at standard size, but in large size, it does not. Weirdly, and additionally, the only way to get out of full-screen is by typing control-click, which is not documented anywhere. They need a little instructional blurb, like flash, letting me know how to get out of full screen mode.

3) Silverlight is an absolutely insane resource hog. I didn’t bother looking the first day, but the thing sucks up like 80% of both of my cores on my MacBook Air. The rest is taken up by kernal_task, which is a finder-level process, but i can’t help but think Silverlight is directing the task, because when you quit Safari, it all goes back down to zero.

4) God help you if you have Growl installed, because it slows Silverlight down to an unusable extent.

5) It’s play/pause controls are woefully unresponsive, and it doesn’t seem to let you hit pause and let the buffer get much bigger than you need, so you can actually watch things without htem stuttering

6) Also, it does weird things like not close when you close the window, and the video kept playing like a full ten seconds after I closed the browser window and quit it. Weird.

Still, though, this thing’s a beta, and the Mac version is obvs. not Microsoft’s top priority, and with those things in mind, I was impressed.

The Democrats really need to hire some user interface designers, though, because whoever designed the player and video clip nav was, well, not hack, but not as UX-conscious as they could have been.

So, Adium – a multi-protocol IM client for the mac – released v 1.3 this week that now includes integrated Facebook chat, along with several other protocols:

They’ve released new versions before which have integrated the IM protocol of specific social networking sites, most recently MySpace, as well as, previously, Livejournal. Both of those were mildly exciting, but never really caught on. The facebook one seems different, though, and got me thinking about how well Facebook integrated chat into the actual web app before they launched their IM protocol out to the public. So last night, when I ran my Adium upgrade and added my Facebook account details, I instantly saw something like 50 new friends in my buddy list, many of whom I didn’t have an IM screen name for before. It’s been fun chatting with random other people. Nice breath of fresh air.

The other thing I realized is that this sort of completes a trend I’ve been noticing for a while. Adium, you see, shows a little icon for each buddy in your buddy list, specifying which IM service they were on. For years, the list was basically non-stop AIM icons. Over the years, though, new icons have popped up in there, as people have adopted other services. Jabber and GTalk were the big ones, those really mixed up my list nicely. But today, with Facebook chat, it looks like the Aim icon has finally fallen below 50%:

And this doesn’t even show my Bonjour) buddies from within the office.

However, this is just volume of usernames, not actual chat time. And it’s slightly skewed by our internal Jabber network.

Still, though, I think it’s an interesting milestone. AIM is not the only go-to anymore. Gtalk contributed a lot to this, but I have a hunch, in time, Facebook will as well. This was a well-executed play for them.

Okay, so I buy a LOT of tickets. Like, um… well, I see about 500 bands a year. And I blog about it a lot. It’s kind of ridiculous how many tickets I have laying around the house. Like I ought to be able to buy bonds or something against them. It’s like a form of currency. Um. Or something. Here’s a picture:

But that is not the point I am making today. Today, I am thinking a different thought. So, like, as you probably guess, and can see from the picture, I buy a lot of tickets from Ticketmaster.

For the last year or two, Ticketmaster and Apple have been running an iTunes promotion. When you buy a ticket from ticketmaster, you get a free song.

So I buy two tickets at a time, so I get two free iTunes songs. About once a month, I go through all the calendars of all the clubs I like in Boston and New York and buy tickets for any upcoming show I may want to see. There’s a complicated math algorithm here about my travel schedule and buying tickets for shows I don’t end up going to, and resorting to scalpers, but basically it’s cheaper to buy them even if I’m not definitely going to make it, plus I get the added bonus of making my friends happy when I drop free tickets on them.

But that is not the point I am making today either.

This iTunes thing has, basically, made it so I’ve bought almost no new music in the last few years. This isn’t 100% true of course, I still buy things like new Suicide box sets and out of print Epic Soundtracks records, but basically, whenever I hear some song I like, and I want to own it – be it some catchy new single by the Ting Tings or a Goldfrapp choral version, I have more than enough free songs from Ticketmaster to cover me. Like I never run out. I am, basically, purchasing free music.

(And that’s not having bought any tickets in a month or so. I’ll be back to like 20 by Monday)

Everyone’s getting paid here. There is no piracy. This is interesting to me for two reasons: first, it is totally 100% a Branded Utility, as Ben and Johnny coined so many years back. Secondly, it kind of shows me that the music industry maybe isn’t dying at all, just changing.

It’s time we found out. Is the Internet Awesome

(Thanks Noah!)

Anyone find any features/fixes in the iPhone 2.0.2 update yet?

Ah, I remember it like it was yesterday. The iMac is ten. It was my first MacWorld Expo. My first time seeing Steve Jobs in person. I think I may have cried. It was like going to see a rock concert. Actually you know what it was like? It was like when Primal Scream put XTRMNTR! out and this thing you loved, but had strayed a bit, this thing you always loved, came back and did it all once again, and you know everything that everything was going to be okay.

I remember that grid. I remember how excited I was watching that last square be filled in.

I remember trying to hook up my new iMac to my Agfa Accuset Imagesetter with hardware RIP. Oh, um. Never mind.

Happy birthday, iMac.