Macleod

Hugh D’Andrade Book Jacket Illustrations —

Hugh D’Andrade has been creating a wonderful series of book jacket illustrations.

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Related posts:

- 30 Horrible Electrical Accidents, Illustrations From A 1931 Book

- Hugh D’Andrade Talks About The Paradise Lost Poster

- EFF Bloggers’ Rights T-Shirt by Hugh D’Andrade

- Ignore Everybody, And 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod

- Where We Overlap: Hugh D’Andrade & Mati McDonough

Ruud Questions: Hugh Macleod aka Gapingvoid —

I don't remember why exactly but Gapingvoid, as I think of him, was among the batch of first people I started to follow on Twitter. He seemed to be in some kind of smart crowd; the kind of crowd I like to follow to learn from. When I learned Who He Is I liked the fact that he replied to regular people (like you and me) on Twitter. Probably he's one of those himself; regular people.

You do creative work. Creative works get freely shared via the web all the time, not making the artist any (direct or verifiable) money. Is the future of creative then to make one, sell one; go back to the days of the painters of yore?

Creative work hasn't changed with the internet, at least the two basic elements for being successful at it remain the same: Making and Selling work. Both have ALWAYS been time sucks, which is why creatives work such long hours. This will never change.

In regard to especially corporate environments where repeating the boss' opinion is rewarded, you wrote: "we have millions upon millions of human tapeworms thriving in the Western World, making love to their Powerpoint presentations, feasting on the creativity of others."

Is that what's going on with our information consumption as well? Do we have more people reading for 1 hour about drawing than we have people drawing for 1 hour? Are we tapeworming on Twitter?

Oh, we've always had that. Writers writing at their desks for hours on end, while the poseurs endlessly yakking on about the "Writing" at the local cafe. Plus ca change…

You emphasize that "it"  — creativity resulting in income, in making a living –  takes work; hard work, lots of work — a lot of hard work. Hard work beats talent, beats luck: it's your trump card. But you also argue that in the end nothing matters in the game but trust. You don't say that in a Kumbaya manner either; on a very practical, day-to-day, nose to the grindstone "gotta make a living" level, trust has become essential.

How do you mean that — and how does it apply to Jane driving a backhoe or John cutting hair?

The same as white collar jobs. For every good job that opens, there are six people (At least!) chasing it. Doesn't matter if we're talking construction work or marketing for Apple.

Which of the six do you hire in the end? The one you like the most. The one you trust the most.

Liking and Trust are intertwined.

You invite anyone to do what you do  — "doodle" on the back of business cards and make money with it –  because you know 999 out of 1000 people won't.

Why? What is this avoidance behavior we often label procrastination? How do we beat it — how do you beat it?

There's nothing stopping the other 999. I don't do it because nobody else will, I do it because I love doing it.

You beat procrastination by having your ass kicked by it, enough times. Education is expensive.

Keep your day job. Hard work which doesn't give you an income for a long time. Once or if it does, you'll still do a good amount of  work just for money, and some sexy cool stuff for yourself.

What's are examples of your work vs. your sexy cool stuff?

My sexy stuff is doing the actual drawings.

The hard work comes from making sure the clients who buy my work are kept happy.

There's a lot to do. Have you ever hand-signed a thousand prints at a time? I have, more than once. Not fun, always.

If you can read this, you're likely a privileged citizen of the world. That suggests it brings responsibilities with it — doubly so when you're a famous privileged citizen. Why then, do you think, is their a certain annoyance with artists like Sinead O'Conner or Bono?

Scene: Beavis and Butthead watching the "Live Aid" video on MTV:

"Hey Butthead, who are those guys on the TV?". "Dunno, Beavis… some rich people asking us for money."

I have a hard time believing the Internet, social or not, is going to change big corporate from dangerous nuisance to benign to mankind. How do you see "social", trust and openness work on corporate?

I'm not sure if corporations are inherently big, dangerous nuisances. They create a huge amount of value for both society and their shareholders- the good ones, anyway.

And besides, they're the ones willing to go down to Nigeria, get the crude oil out of the ground, ship it to Rotterdam get it refined, and get it to the petrol station in time for you to fill up, while still making a profit. I don't see any of their main detractors willing to take their place, but they do seem to be fond of the petrol.

Is the essence of "social" and money that it's about mindshare?

Yes. All money is social.

It's not about the tool, you say, so naturally I ask about them. What are 5 of your software tools you rather not do without?

Googlemail. Google Docs. Photoshop. Mozilla.  Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, which allows me to draw on my Tablet PC.

Coffee?

Oh, yes.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Ruud Questions: Hugh Macleod aka Gapingvoid

Enterprise Computing: HP Blades Tech Day 0 —

Some of you may be aware that I’m heading to Houston today for an HP sponsored field day looking at blade technology. I have to admit that blades are not my area of speciality, in fact I know precious little about them other than the obvious. Having said that, this is a time to start being more aware of the technology “stack” as we move towards converged architectures in the data centre.

By convergence, I’m referring to what we already see with VMware, Cisco and EMC (VCE); the Acadia triumvirate. HP have already started to talk about their convergence strategy and I’m sure other vendors have ideas in plan. I’m looking forward to understanding where HP’s strategy is headed, how their relationships with VMware and Microsoft will play out at the virtualisation level and after this week, how they intend to manage the (storage) networking component.

Fortunately I’ll be in the company of some experts to keep me honest. Travelling with me from the UK is Simon Seagrave, plus the other following attendees:

• Kevin Houston (http://www.bladesmadesimple.com) – @kevin_houston
• Greg Knieriemen (http://www.storagemonkeys.com) – @knieriemen
• Frank Owen (http://www.techvirtuoso.com) – @fowen
• John Obeto (http://www.absolutelywindows.com) – @johnobeto
• Rich Brambley (http://www.vmetc.com) – @rbrambley
• Simon Seagrave (http://www.techhead.co.uk) – @Kiwi_Si
• Martin MacLeod (http://www.bladewatch.com) – @martinmacleod
• Devang Panchigar (http://www.storagenerve.com) – @storagenerve
• Stephen Foskett (http://blog.fosketts.net) – @sfoskett

If you’re following on Twitter, the official hashtag is #hpbladesday and you can also follow @bladenews

Athough it’s only a three day visit, I’m hoping to see something of Houston; ten-gallon hats, steaks and firearms come to mind. More updates to come!

Disclosure: HP have funded my flight and accommodation for this trip. Everything else is self funded. I am under no obligation to write about what I see during the Tech Day and HP have no editorial rights over the content I produce.

Can you learn to be 'social' when using social media? —
When I started blogging in 2005, one of the first things I did was study how the so-called 'successful' bloggers blogged. One of the bloggers I began reading was Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void.

I noticed as soon as I started reading Gaping Void that Hugh wasn't blogging the 'right' way. Specifically, he was constantly linking out to other sites and bloggers. This was obviously 'wrong', because all he was doing was sending traffic AWAY from his blog. And if a blogger with several days experience could see this, I'm sure everyone else could as well. Obviously.

But as I kept reading Hugh (even though I knew how he blogged was 'wrong'), I began to notice that people were commenting saying that they appreciated the link to Seth's recent post, or Tara's post on Pinko Marketing. Then I saw someone comment that they loved reading his blog because of 'all the great links you share'.

Hmmmmm.....could it be that by sharing links to other sites that Hugh wasn't actually driving people AWAY from his blog, but instead giving people a reason to become regular readers?

Then soon after, another blogging epiphany happened for me. As I was doing a crash-course of reading blogs in an effort to uncover the secrets of being a great blogger, I began to find a post here and there that caught my attention enough to leave a comment. Then a day or two later I noticed that traffic to my own blog started suddenly going up. And for the first time, COMMENTS were coming in! Awesome! But the problem was, I still had no idea what had caused the floodgates to open. Why all the traffic and comments suddenly? Then my friend Jordan Behan left a comment and when he did, he THANKED me for commenting on his blog. I went back and checked, and sure enough, almost all of the comments I had suddenly gotten, were coming from bloggers whose blog I had commented on first.

What these two examples did for helping me understand how and WHY people use social media, is immeasurable. Share something of value with others (such as a link to a great blog post), and they will be thankful. Create something of value for them (such as a comment on their blog), and they will not only be thankful, but they will want to return the favor.

But when I started blogging, my thought was that you become a good blogger by creating great content, and giving people a reason to come to your blog, and stay there. I had to LEARN how to be social with social media. I had to figure out how the tools work, and why people are using them. Not to silo content and information, but to SHARE it.

I was thinking about this learning process as I read Robbin's post today. I agree, I think companies have to train their employees on how to use social media as well. And in reality, the only way to do that is by making mistakes. Even if a company hires me to help them learn how to use social media effectively, there's still a time when the training wheels have to come off and the company takes ownership of their own efforts. No one learns how to ride a bicycle without earning a few scraped knees first. Social media is no different.

BTW as an introvert, I really think this applies. When I first started using social media, I didn't want to interact with strangers, because I am hesitant to do so offline. I had to learn how to become more social online, and now I think I'm an online extrovert, and an offline introvert. Have any other introverts noticed the same thing?

Cartoonist Hugh Macleod Gets To CwF+RtB In His Own Way — Hugh Macleod has done a good job of building "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" into a nice business for himself. He explains the secrets of his success in his post, "the three keys to social marketing" in which he states:

1. Figure out what your gift is, and give it to them on a regular basis.
2. Make sure it's received as a real gift, not as an advertising message
3. Then figure out exactly what it is that your trail of breadcrumbs leads back to.

#1 and #2 are his version of "CwF" and the essence of "RtB" is captured by #3. Macleod considers his style of business a gift economy:

They put stuff out there, as gifts. Great content, great ideas, great insights, great personal connection. By giving so much of themselves, for free, every day, they build up huge surpluses of goodwill, so when you're finally in the market for something they're selling (and they're ALL selling something, trust me), they're first on your list.

However, what Macleod describes is not really a true gift economy, since, as an explicit part of his so-called gift economy, there is an expectation that some selling will occur. There is a key difference between a "gift" and giving something away for free. Since, in a true gift economy, there is no expectation that the gifter will ever be reciprocated for their gift. Instead, there is just the hope that "what goes around comes around" and someone else will eventually give them something that they need. "Give it away and pray" is not really a good business model.

That said, he's doing many things right. Macleod uses his blog and social media to connect with his fans and distribute them his brand of daily cartoons (although in my experience, his site could stand to make his cartoons a little more accessible -- he would be well served to make them more searchable, and easier to embed). Then, he gives them good reasons to buy by selling limited edition prints, books, custom commissions and even his own brand of wine, Stormhoek. Added all up, this allows Macleod to make a seemingly nice living, which is great. So, what Macleod is describing, in his own words, is really Mike's CwF+RtB concept, which brings up another great point. While we do a lot of discussion here on how CwF+RtB works well for musicians, it's important to note that it's not just for the music industry -- it works for anyone that is doing a good job connecting with fans.

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