The Holy Trinity of Happiness
Posts tagged michaelnus
The Zero Moment of Truth
17 months ago
by Michael
in Social Media
Img: BuySellAds.com
People just love to speculate or wax dogmatic on how different the world of advertising is nowadays but no one has quite hit the nail on the head. I don’t profess to be the one who will finally strike it but I read this article about the future of advertising and I got to thinking about what it all meant. There’s a lot of vagueness and jargon abound today and I have doubts as to whether many of the pundits and pedagogues know what they are talking about when it comes to describing the state of the advertising industry today. I myself can only venture a guess based on what I’ve seen and experienced but in no way do I have the arrogance to suggest that I’ve figured it all out.
I’ve always been close to the ad game and a lot has indeed changed while some things remain the same. The difference to keep note of is that all the change in the ad game is due in large part to external factors while, internally, agencies stay more or less the same. What do I mean? Internally, it’s business as usual in terms of how an agency operates and services clients. Same old story, where agencies hire senior talent mixed with some scrappy juniors and people still change agencies like they change socks. Creative directors and partners still pitch clients as they compete against other agencies for accounts, etcetera, etcetera. If you watch MadMen you can get a general picture.
The big change, I think has been in how agencies approach the market and the people in it. Simply put, people don’t trust brands out of hand anymore and are researching the facts thoroughly before buying anything. Google calls this the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) and it’s one of the big reasons why Adwords and online campaigns in general are part of the frontier now. Furthermore the community itself is setting the trends faster than any agency can come up with and the paradigm has shifted from push strategies to mostly pull.
Before today, say in the heyday of the Madison Ave firms, agencies would help clients sell their product by pitching tailor-made campaigns with the goal of setting and popularizing a new trend or, in some cases, creating a new market altogether. They would push product at you. Using the Mad Men example, Don Draper-type Creative Directors used to think of the general social condition of the public and design a campaign that would at once be palatable to current tastes while also subtly introducing new ones. In effect ad agencies, due in part to their complete control of mediums such as TV and print, could almost tell you what you want, create trust in a brand or company by putting a face on it that lauds its benefits (“they’re grrrreat” or “it’s toasted!”) and, in a lot of cases, do more for a brand’s image than any PR firm could do at the time. People listened to the TV, the Radio and Print, and that was the arena in which brands contended. The prize that agencies fought for in the name of their clients was the hearts and minds of the public on those channels.
In the words of the fictional Don Draper, “What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.” Not an easy thought to accept but there may be some truth in that. Think about the range of emotions you experience on a daily basis and the limitations of how you express them and you may notice that how you behave is heavily influenced by the society/milieu you grew up in. If you happened to have grown up in a media-rich environment, the ad game has at some point help socialize you to fit into society as we know it. But where they lose control is word of mouth, writ large: social media.
The game has changed today because ad firms do not have complete control over the digital space and the truth is that many firms, especially the legacy agencies alluded to above, don’t seem have a full understanding of the space. Instead of pitching tailor-made campaigns, we see more pitches make heavy use of credential decks and past work examples with nods to web campaigns. The brainstorming, ideation, and campaign work starts after that, a lot of the time only once the agency nails AOR (Agency of Record) for the client. 
You can’t blame them, though, because while print and TV advertising does work the channels have diversified. What tends to happen nowadays is that firms are playing a game of catch up and are designing campaigns that are more reactive to trends that have appeared completely independent of their control or planning. Viral content, grass root movements, memes, public sentiment on social networks, and a generally more critical public have all but done away with the days where agencies could dictate the market. The Zero Moment of Truth says that your potential customers will now research the crap out of your product before ever setting foot in the store or whipping out their credit card to buy what you’re selling online. So in effect, they’re not listening to you right away, at least not unless your brand jumps headfirst into the social and digital space with effective social campaigns or banner ads (the modern billboard). What drives me nuts is that many agencies seem to think that running a contest on Facebook or Twitter is the new way to create a market for the product and get into the community, but does it really create brand loyalty the way it was done in the past with traditional pull and push strategies? I think not.
Why are the highly successful ads completely absurd and escapist – like Old Spice. Well, the new human condition seems to be escapism, tech-savviness, Google searches, the Boomerang Generation (A.K.A. Peter Pan syndrome) and pseudo-expertise.
Is this the human condition created by ad agencies who finally “get it” or have the agencies been forced to conform to sell more deodorant?
Comments welcome.
The Universal Blog Icon
17 months ago
by Michael
in Social Media
The Universal Blog Icon
It seems that there is a universally accepted icon for just about anything online these days. Checkins have that pin and map, links are typically a chain, delete is a trashcan or “x”, twitter is a bird, and so on.
Although some icons have double meanings, both are usually known across the web and are understandable within the context of the site or web app where they reside. With the popularity of blogs you would think a universal blog icon would have been in use for some time now but as far as I know there isn’t one. It’s probably difficult because conceptualizing what a “blog” (short for “weblog,” as you likely already know) is in itself difficult. A blogger gets inspired, types up a blog post, adds multimedia, shares it out to the web and social nets, and people read it. So how does one create an icon that pulls from all those actions? Also what about RSS feeds, a blogger’s lifeline in a lot of cases when s/he wants to keep people coming back with each new post?
Does an icon designer try to cram in the universally accepted thought bubble and keyboard icons for the ideation and typing part of the blogging process? The “add a picture” icon for multimedia, and the “sharethis” icon with the RSS feed radio waves? Surely not. Also, as blogs are often about the personality or subject matter behind them, how does one account for that? I think the reason why there isn’t a universally accepted icon is because blogs are hard to define in simple terms. Blog are all about content and that’s a very all-encompassing term that’s just too broad to put into an icon. Blogs can be repositories of all things internet and have a way of taking pieces of the larger pie that is the web and news sources and breaking it down to more digestible morsels by way of commentary, news feeds, satire, or reflection. Mashable understood this from day 1 and owes its success to being a central hub/mashup of the goings-on on the web.
Icons are generally very literal and therein lies the problem in this case, hence it’s not surprising that no one has really, come up with the “blog icon.” If Blogger/Blogspot didn’t trademark it’s logo, I think that would have been more or less suitable as a universal blog icon but WordPress is the king of blog platforms now and there’s no getting around the “W” as a brand logo rather than a universal one.
I was searching around and came upon a site owned by one “Brendan Mitchell” who, back in 2008, threw together the icon you see above. You can find the site at theblogicon.com. 
Sure, the icon proposed is somewhat derivative (it looks like the old “b” from Birdhouse Skateboards mixed with the RSS icon) but it’s so far the only real effort I’ve seen in trying to solve the blog icon problem. At the very least the radio waves taken from the RSS icon is apt as just about every blog has an RSS feed, so it makes some sense to me. Mitchell as also gone through the trouble of putting up all the Illustrator files in varying sizes and variations and allowing free usage of the icon with no restrictions. You can also just grab the gifs and pngs here individually. Apparently a Spanish site by the name of “Hipertextos“ came up with a very similar one but the differences are negligible. Both Mitchell and Hipertestos are aware of each other and are happy to share their icons equally as “icon brothers” – again the icons are almost identical anyway. I think if enough people start using any one icon, even this one, the icon will become truly universal or someone with way more artistic ability and inspiration than is fathomable will make something truly awesome and sort this out once and for all. In the mean time I’ll be using this icon in my endeavours. Feel free to follow suit if you also have found yourself in the same predicament when trying to represent the noble blog as an icon across your web presence or in print.
My Greatest Weakness
108 months ago
by Michael
in sustenance
Farmer’s markets are a great weakness to me. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to resist spending money at a farmer’s market save one time when I didn’t have my wallet on me. It’s damned near impossible for me to resist the urge to get fruits, vegetables and bread that are easily of a higher quality than any supermarket around.
Maybe it’s something about the fresh air or the fact that the vendors sitting in their tents peddling their goods are the very people who have grown, picked, concocted or invented whatever it is they are selling, but I am a complete sucker for them. When I lived in BC farmers markets were a dime a dozen and I would always show up at the house with heaps of fresh ingredients that I would turn into a feast for myself and any one of my starving roommates who would always appear “magically” right when I got done cooking.
Today I took my lunch at the Metro Hall Farmer’s Market and, boy howdy, did I drop a nice wad of coin. Before I knew it I had a delicious burger with peameal bacon on it, bought some beef jerky and pepperoni sticks, ate a bunch of fruit including yellow watermelons and a butter tart that Kelly, who met up with me there, insisted I try. I did and it was awesome. If I wasn’t on the way back to the office I would have bought a ton of stuff. The Metro Hall market is on till Oct 16th then they are gone like the dodo till next year but I will probably get there before that with a huge backpack and a healthy appetite. My wallet is already weeping but it’ll be worth it.
Sometimes I go to the Wychwood Barn farmers market at St. Clair and Christie or the Trinity Bellwoods one and it’s not too bad with some of the same vendors as the Metro Hall one but in my opinion, Metro Hall is awesome. I’m told that there’s one at Nathan Phillips Square so I’ll be checking it out. By no means am I any kind of expert on farmer’s markets but they seem to keep finding me. I’m definitely putting someone’s kid through college just like I am doing for that guy who walks around downtown with roses. He always finds me, puckers up with a pathetic face and thrusts some roses into my hands. If you’ve ever been to Loser karaoke at Tequila Sunrise you know who I’m talking about. He keeps getting my money because 50% of the time he comes round it’s someone’s birthday or I’m with a lady. Bastard.
Ken Seto, my colleague and CEO of Massive Damage Inc, creators of a great and super fun iPhone and iPad location-based zombie killin’ game called “Please Stay Calm” has recently picked up an obsession with “bulletproof” coffee (or was it called bullet coffee?). The main ingredient apparently is “grassfed” butter and I took a look for the stuff with no success today. I thought I saw a tub off it but the vendor wasn’t sure what that was and looked at me like I was mad before handing me a piece of cheese and telling me to bugger off. If any of you have any idea what that is and where to get it let me know. I’m making it my farmer’s market quest.
On Being a Grammar Nazi
78 months ago
by Michael
in Expression
No one is infallible. I’ve seen the best of us make huge mistakes no matter how convincing their air of perfection was. That being said, I find it disconcerting how we all try to correct each other as if the corrector is somehow superior to the corrected. The Oatmeal published a very irreverent and painfully accurate (if not opinionated) comic about what we SHOULD have been taught in senior year.
I’ve been a writer for years but from time to time I make mistakes, usually due to haste. When others read anything I’ve published they love to comb through it looking for minor mistakes and sometimes will find one. There are two ways in which I find and rectify a mistake. Either I proofread or someone tells me.
The first way is far more preferable, of course, and should be encouraged of any writer, but, again, everyone makes mistakes. That’s when the Grammar Nazis come knocking at my door with their Nazi accents. They tell me to cross a “t” or dot an “i” – sometimes adding “Herr Nus” at the end of sentences. The more learned ones will tell me (between mouthfuls of knackwurst) that, according to publishing standards, punctuation such as commas and periods should appear inside quotations, not out. The thing is they’re right and, if they tell it to me nicely and discreetly, I will always make the correction. But they won’t because they’re Nazis.
I do, however, appreciate the private DMs that good friends and fellow bloggers send me when they find an error and I am happy to reciprocate. Being a blogger, I don’t always have a second pair of eyes to re-edit my posts before they go out. Also being a blogger who has recently come into some extremely busy times, it’s been a struggle to get out as many posts as I used to. This week has been extraordinarily busy and I apologize for this one, lonely post.
Where, however, do we draw the line for politeness when correcting another person’s grammar, spelling or usage? I see it happen all the time where someone will be ridiculed for spelling “ridiculous” as “rediculas” or for messing up the spelling of “definitely” to the painful “definately.” I suspect that these glaring and annoying errors in the written English language come from a lack of training in the importance of root words and some gaps in vocabulary. However I think they can be easily fixed and don’t merit being called “stupid” for bad spelling.
I know a lot of very smart people who can’t spell to save their lives. No one is really born smart. That is even if someone was predisposed to be a genius, would he/she really be considered one they had not learned the fundamentals of human knowledge and prose before pushing the boundaries to eventually become the celebrated genius (or lamentable mad scientist, despot, tyrant etc.) that they were destined to be? If a “born genius” was born in a cave and never saw the light of day would that genius really become as resourceful, as creative or as bright as they are predisposed to be. Plato would argue that it would not be the case.
Therefore we must be shown the light of knowledge and help one another to learn rather than punish those of us who for, one reason or another, did not grasp a piece of knowledge the first time around. I would say that you will feel better if you helped someone learn how to spell a common word, rather than lambaste them online in great spectacle. Don’t be a Grammar Nazi.
What to do in a Tornado in Toronto
3
Source: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca
UPDATE: The Tornado watch has been lifted. This post is being left up for posterity.
Hey everyone. There’s a tornado watch in Toronto. The pictures on twitter allegedly show the twister in the city of Toronto and the lightning is fierce right now. I’m not sure of their authenticity at the moment but it never hurts to be prepared just in case. I am typing this up to give you some quick tips on what to do in a tornado and syndicating it to all my social feeds.
Getprepared.ca has some general tips but I thought I would flesh them out a bit for apartment/condo dwellers. It’s a scary time right now and I just want to help where I can with planned redundancy in information. If you get the info you need from this site, great. If from somewhere else, also great. Just stay safe!
Read the tips below but stay glued to 680news radio for updates. If you still have television keep your eye on the news. If your area goes from “Tornado watch” to “Tornado warning” SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.
If you are in a house
- Go to the basement or take shelter in a small interior ground floor room such as a bathroom, closet or hallway.
- If you have no basement, protect yourself by taking shelter under a heavy table or desk.
- In all cases, stay away from windows, outside walls and doors.
If you can manage it, bring an emergency kit or provisions with you. Charge your cell phone if you don’t have a flashlight and use it for light.
If you are in an office or apartment building
- Take shelter in an inner hallway or room, ideally in the basement or on the ground floor.
- Do not use the elevator.
- Stay away from windows.
If you are in the upper floors of a high rise building try to get to the garage and stay there for the duration of the storm. If there is no garage get to the lowest floor possible or in a neighbour’s apartment. If you can’t make it down get in your bathtub and cover yourself with pillows, blankets or even your mattress to protect yourself from falling debris. This is the safest place in your apartment.
Again, If you can manage it, bring an emergency kit or provisions with you. Charge your cell phone if you don’t have a flashlight and use it for light.
If you are driving
- If you spot a tornado in the distance go to the nearest solid shelter.
- If the tornado is close, get out of your car and take cover in a low-lying area, such as a ditch.
In all cases
- Get as close to the ground as possible, protect your head and watch for flying debris.
- Do not chase tornadoes – they are unpredictable and can change course abruptly.
- A tornado is deceptive. It may appear to be standing still but is, in fact, moving toward you.
Nobody is Nobody. Everybody is Somebody.
19 months ago
by Michael
in Stay Classy
Image: http://www.coolfer.com
We live in an age of entitlement now. I guess it sort of comes with the territory when a form of communication presents itself that is no longer one way, but two ways and many other ways in between. I am talking, of course, about twitter, facebook pages, the mobile web and so forth – social media.
People and brands alike have enjoyed (and sometimes lamented) the power of word of mouth for centuries but never before has new spread from person to person with the capacity and speed afforded by the social web. No longer must we wait till the news write up in the paper the next morning or wonder what’s on the 6 or 11 o’clock news to get the scoop on what’s happening around us. What’s more is that we can now provide instant feedback on any news we hear about moments after it ticks by on our twitter feeds.
Social lives have changed too. While we still protect our privacy to some degree we are more willing to share things online that we normally would not in a traditional social scenario (i.e. a cocktail party). We Live In Public‘s Josh Harris predicted that we would all give up our privacy online just for our 15 seconds of fame and recognition. While I still disagree with the extremity of his claim (i.e. I still don’t think we’re going to install webcams in all our living rooms and bathrooms as he did) people are using the social web to make a big deal about themselves whether it is for the purpose of getting invited to some exclusive party, get free swag, promote their web presence in whatever form, or just speak their mind without too much fear of immediate repercussions. So in a way, Harris was right but nowhere near to the extent he so arrogantly proposed.
While people on the social web “give up” their privacy as “social currency” (for example providing an email address, a follow, a Like) brands in turn give away the farm in many cases. You see it happen on group buying sites where businesses pretty much bend over backwards to give deep discounts and then have to deal with disgruntled customers who come in a few weeks later expecting the same deal, chomping at the bit to chirp them on Twitter when they don’t get what they want. You see the same phenomenon when a blogger or tweeter writes a complaint to his/her followers about some cell phone carrier that allegedly screwed them in some way. The list of scenarios goes on but the point is that business are spending and losing lots of money to appear accountable to the public on the social web and get rewarded a lot of the time with flak. I think that’s very commendable on the part of any business that would be brave enough to open their ports to the social web but it sort of grinds my gears when I see people take advantage of that and try to squeeze blood from the stone, so to speak.
Businesses on the social web now want you to feel special but it can go too far sometimes and it could hurt the ecosystem that balances the give and take between brand and customer. A phrase sort of popped into my head today as I was pondering this phenomenon of entitlement and the above issue. The phrase is this:
Nobody is nobody. Everybody is somebody. Just don’t let it go to your head.
Perhaps a mantra to describe the middle ground that I think could be created between the denizens of the social web and brands/businesses/causes that seek to engage their public without going overboard on what they give away. Yes, we give some of our privacy away when we get on Facebook, twitter, google+ etc so we should be recognized by brands for stepping out into the open and being identifiable and directly reachable. It’s a great metric for businesses to know exactly who they are dealing with now whereas before the social web there was a lot of guesswork on their part. The public still appreciates being made to feel special almost as a “thank you” for using a brand’s product (i.e. the Budweiser Winner’s Circle at the Honda Indy) but it should be recognized that Bud gave away a lot of product to market to you and throw such a swell party. Even though I was not paid to attend, I thanked Bud and Edelman with a blog post and some great pics.
In this sort of equal interchange I think the balance lies. Continuing with the Honda Indy example, although there were definitely some social media heavy hitters scattered throughout the Winner’s Circle 99% of people there were non-web folks just enjoying the event VIP style courtesy of Bud.
I guess in a long-winded fashion I am just hoping that in some form or another, social media folks make sure to say “thank you” and be a little more patient with the brands that have hooked them up along the way and continue to go to great lengths to satisfy our fickle needs.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome below.
I Won an Xbox at IHAVEANIDEA
29 months ago
by Michael
in Social Media
After a very busy day of meetings and wheeling and dealing I joined my good friends at IHAVEANIDEA for some drinks and schmoozing at Veritas. Every couple of months I get together with the usual suspects in the Ad game just to shoot the breeze and talk about what’s new and exciting in this thing of ours.
The last few meetups were sponsored by Microsoft Advertising and each time I showed up there was a draw for a new Xbox 360 with a Kinect! Of course Alfred of IHAVEANIDEA would not let the damned thing out of his site so stealing it was not an option and I was fresh out of chloroform-soaked rags so I had to play it fair and square. As I was telling the people around me how great it would be if one of won the XBOX with Kinect I heard someone say “The winner of the XBOX is Michael Nus!” and just laughed thinking someone was playing a joke. No joke, I got the XBOX and I must give my humble thank you to Microsoft Advertising and IHAVEANIDEA.
If you’re in the Ad game and just want to relax and network a bit, apply to become a member and see you at the next IHAVEANIDEA meetup. They also do a great event a few times a year called “Portfolio Night” where you can bring your creative portfolio – be you a copywriter, art director, designer etc – and have work on it with the very people who would see it at an interview for some of the most respected agencies around.
At its core, Portfolio Night is an event where aspiring young advertising copywriters, art directors and designers meet with several renowned advertising creative directors in a fast-paced evening of advice, networking and recruitment. While the evening has been jokingly called “speed-dating for creatives”, it’s really much more than that. In the nine years since its inception, Portfolio Night has grown to be a global event, reaching creative hubs in every continent in an evening where the best of the present meets the best of the years to come.
Creative Niche, a favourite creative recruiter of mine is heavily involved in Portfolio Night so you should keep your eyes open for the next one and sign up. Give Creative Niche a jangle and let them help you find your next great gig in the sky!
See you at Portfolio Night….that is as long as I can tear myself away from the Xbox 360.
The Emperor’s New Clothes and Google Plus
810 months ago
by Michael
in Social Media
Illustration: THORARINN LEIFSSON http://www.totil.com
Like many kids growing up I was told many stories by my parents and teachers. Hans Christian Andersen was a staple among the authors who would put me to bed at night or capture my imagination in class. One of the stories that stuck with me in particular was “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It was a simple cautionary tale that pretty much told of the evils of pretense.
Here is the summary of the plot according to Wikipedia: (click here for the full text of “The Emperor’s New Clothes“)
An Emperor who cares for nothing but his appearance and attire hires two tailors who promise him the finest suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or “just hopelessly stupid”. The Emperor cannot see the cloth himself, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his position; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they mime dressing him and the Emperor then marches in procession before his subjects, who play along with the pretense. Suddenly, a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretense, blurts out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor cringes, suspecting the assertion is true, but holds himself up proudly and continues the procession.
Living in a social media world I find that pretense always has the potential to run rampant among some of those who live in it. You may have observed said pretense in the scores of so-called experts that Twitter has spawned or the droves of “visionary” speakers who are making a killing on nothing but pretty words. It seems people are just salivating to become the experts on the next new big thing by becoming the early adopters (the “I was there!” pretense) of the newest technologies. So we’re on to the subject of Google+.
Ever since Facebook left the academic world and became mega popular people have been wondering what the “Facebook killer” will be. Enter Google Plus and many have been touting it to be that very killer but I’m not so sure just yet. Granted it’s still in its early stages and the Google+ dev team is reportedly adding new features, I still don’t see what all the fuss is about. I’ve been using it pretty much since the beginning myself but have not gotten that much out of it. From a social sharing perspective the idea is solid where people seem to be mostly sharing links to existing content and A LOT of “How Tos” for how to make sense of the Google Plus system but I’m still not seeing the real capital S Social part just yet.
The thing about social media is that the most effective applications of it have been where the activity mimics offline social life to a suitable degree. Facebook really is the granddaddy of social networks because you can invite people to events (compare: inviting friends over to your house for a little party), you can tell your friends happy birthday due to the reminders (tying a string around your finger), and you can see what other friends are planning if they make that information public (hearing something through the grapevine). The list goes on of course with Notes, Social Graph, Places, Chat, Groups, Albums etc. and they can all be compared to things you would do in a hypothetical world where the internet doesn’t exist.
Google Plus does some of social things adequately too, in particular the Video Hangout and the Circles functions. Just as in real life you would definitely hang out with people you know to shoot the breeze about this and that, and you would also maybe have different circles of friends from university or the office and so on who may not necessarily mix. So for Google+ that’s a big win for sure, especially with those on facebook worried about their privacy in terms of who sees what – it’s easier than Facebook to control that in G+. It’s also nice to be free of that damned Farmville app! But as I look at the main G+ feed stream I see that people are just spewing out shares of content pretty much the same way they would on any other social network. Aside from the +1s and comments there’s not much more “social” interaction happening there on that stream. This became particularly clear to me when I celebrated my birthday on the 19th. I was getting lots of birthday wishes from Facebook and Twitter and even on the phone and in person but not a single one came from Google+. Granted, many of those people on G+ were friends of mine who regularly talk to me on twitter and facebook and many of them wished me well on both platforms, so why not Google+ too? Well because so far it doesn’t tell you when someone’s birthday is on! At least not right on the front page of your feed. It also doesn’t have a sophisticated event function yet that’s different than their own Google Calendar.
And that’s when it hit me. I think that currently people just really want to like Google+ because they see that everyone else really wants to as well. It’s the new “in crowd.” Definitely a real social phenomenon but it has little to do with how good the platform itself actually is. It’s popularity and buzz could also very well be largely attributed to hype of the initial limited beta invite stage where people where asking each other (on Twitter, might I add) if they had gotten their invite yet and doing the virtual happydance to the envy of their followers who had not yet gotten into G+.
The real professionals aren't buying the snakeoil
Therefore I liken the current wild popularity of Google+ to the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes because it seems everyone wants to be the smart person who uses it and is admired by their peers, but so far it really doesn’t replace any platform we already use – there’s nothing there really. The current social media landscape is that Facebook is king of the castle but shares that crown with some great apps out there that focus on doing one particular function particularly well or even better than Facebook can. For example Twitter took the status updates and made that their specialty, while Foursquare and Flickr made check-ins and photo albums their own, respectively.
I’ve been giving Google+ the benefit of the doubt and I admittedly kinda dig the Android app for what it is in the microcosm of the mobile world, but the core web app still leaves something to be desired and really isn’t all that amazing. Perhaps I’m missing something and the best is yet to come, but I’ve been noticing a lot of people on Facebook, Twitter and even Google+ who are still scratching their heads as to what to do with this thing. I encourage you to weigh in with your comments below….Oh and share this on Google Plus, will ya?
Toronto Pride Parade 2011
5
No matter where I am, year after year when the Toronto Pride Parade takes over downtown I beam with pride myself. Although I myself am not gay and do not fit into the LGBT designations I have a great appreciation for the community. Growing up I was surrounded by the mixed feelings of others about homosexuality. I think any and all of us who have lived through the 80s and 90s have at one or more points run into careless comments of prejudice and misunderstanding about LGBT people and even some of us may have said something that can be construed as offensive to gay people. But when I see huge crowds at the Toronto Pride Parade celebrating sexual diversity I am always staggered by the times we now live in where prejudice, racism, hatred, and fear are no longer the norm but the outcast exception.
True, there are still pockets of the above hatreds (i.e. the ugly anti-Israeli “Apartheid” movement that wanted to crash the parade) but I’m happy that they are no longer accepted as normal public discourse they way they were, say, 30 or 50 years ago. The issue of sexual diversity, to me, was always a peculiar one as I grew up because although I went to schools that I suppose would not condone homosexuality, when I came home I still had two gay uncles and a close cousin who came out when I was 12. In my mind I figured that my uncles (one related and one not) were in love, lived together and were happy – so, awesome. There didn’t seem to be anything “wrong” with them, despite what the teachers said. They were two perfectly normal men with jobs, hobbies, cars and all that – they just happened to be in love with each other. As for their hobbies – they happened to enjoy decorating their apartment so it was way classy, preferred food and wine of top quality, and loved to travel. If anything I was in awe of their sense of good taste and none of it seemed weird at all. Even now I love going over and hanging out as it means I get to marvel at their baby grand piano, eat beautifully prepared food, peruse through their travel scrapbooks and secretly borrow selections from their classical music collection. They’re thrilled that I live with a roommate who’s gay and are noticeably more open about their experience together, which is great.
I wasn’t living in Toronto when same-sex marriage was ratified nationwide in 2005 but I was so proud to be a Canadian that day on July 20 (a day after my birthday) and I knew that my uncles were proud to be part of it. II made it a point to make it out to the Toronto Pride Parade this year and I got some really great pictures. As you look at them, think about what a great time it is to be alive and appreciate it. I certainly do.
Dead Nus week and One year!
0
I have been a very bad boy. I have not blogged in five days and the guilt is just weighing down on me!
I’ll tell you why though. Chris, Reb and I have been working on something awesome and it’s taken up all my time and energy because it was amazing enough to be voted into the finals of Microsoft’s Code Your Art Out competition this Friday! I have been trying to keep abreast of things but with the exception of NXNE happenings I’ve been head down with the guys making sure our presentation is ship shape for Friday’s invite-only event. I was even working while manning the tech for NXNEi!
I’ll spill the beans real soon about what this mystery awesome thing is but I owe it to you all to tell you what’s going on. I promise after Friday that I will get right back to work on telling you all about my experience at NXNEi with Epic Meal Time, Peter Chao, Corey Vidal and Matt Gibson, and I will also tell you all about Social Media Day, which I am helping organize! Actually you can go to the facebook page right now and RSVP as it’s stacking up to be a GREAT night with amazing speakers!
So just hang tight and I’ll be right back in the saddle with announcements about the above as well as the details on the NEW MichaelNus.com! That’s right, another thing that I’ve been working on in my secret lab is a redesign and relaunch of the site to commemorate it’s first year anniversary (officially on June 21st!) so I’ve been swamped making sure it’s right before I push it out the door. I can’t wait to do the big reveal but until after Friday I’m afraid you guys have to wait so life can get back on track!
Miss you all and stay classy!
- Nus
VaughanforMayor
I have to agree. I had funeral pictures for my Father on Monday, on Wednesday morning my BB 9900 went bust. I brought it into a Telus […]
1 day ago
TheDanLevy
At least you were able to realize before everything blew up! Now you can move forward and kick some serious anus!
3 days ago
Michael Nus
@ejbrooks:twitter You're the best, Emma.
2 weeks ago
Ryan Nus
Don't beat yourself up. Now that you've shed ego, you can realize self love. A much more powerful motivator.
2 weeks ago
Emma Brooks
Great post, Nus! The transformation that comes out of an accelerator sounds like it's not just the product, but the people, who grow and […]
2 weeks ago
