Get Stuff Done

Feigned sobriety, unopposable thumbs, mornings done right, obsessive winking, sweet-talk for hire, how we’re always right, why red is better than apple, and whose rack we were ogling while almost getting arrested.

ART OF THE HOW

We’re inept. Or at least that’s what the recent surge in how-to sites and services is telling us. But it’s okay, because we are indeed inept. About some stuff, that is — you know, that whole the-more-you- know-the-more-you-don’t-know thing that comes with the curious mind — so it’s great to have resources on how anything is done.

Our favorite so far: Howcast, the brain child of ex-Googlers and YouTubers. It’s user- generated content curated by the editorial eye to bring you super useful how-to videos on anything from chilling a 6-pack in 3 minutes, to lying and getting away, to making your bathroom eco-friendly. Better yet, it’s all high-quality and free. And even better yet, the Howcast vision is all about giving emerging filmmakers a chance to get experience and exposure, then fusing it all with content distribution and smart advertising. We dig.

Then there’s Quamut (Latin for “how to”) — an enormous how-to library, complete with printable charts written by experts and reviewed by fact-checkers. A Geekipedia, if you will, that’s both super accurate and super useful. Quamut comes from Barnes & Noble, which means, of course, there’s a price sticker somewhere. But it’s not too bad — you can view everything online for free, you just need to suck up $2.95 if you want to download a PDF of something. And if you’re really compelled to go old-school with all the bells and whistles, you can scurry over to an actual Barnes & Noble store and cough up $5.95 for a laminated copy of select Quamuts. (This is where we point, laugh and remind you of Howcast.)

Finally, let’s not forget the power of collaboration and popular wisdom: wikiHow is a wiki-based resource where users can contribute to the how-to’s of various subjects. Think of it as collaborative how-to manual that’s much like a hands-on Wikipedia. It’s got a Creative Commons license, comes in 6 languages, and has a decidedly philanthropic feel with a vision of improving quality of life through practical knowledge.

So if you ever find yourself wallowing in ineptitude, do check out one of these great resources. Now we’re off to learning how to make a water gun alarm clock for those can’t-get-out-of-bed mornings. (Which are NOT due to not having seen the very amusing yet informative “How To Fake Being Sober” video.)

DEMOCRACY OF THUMB

And speaking of popular wisdom, Rules of Thumb offers all sorts of nifty, well, rules of thumb, each rated on a usefulness scale (1-10) by the populus. The whole thing is searchable and browsable by subject. And we dig their definition of “rule of thumb” — turning information you have into information you need.

More importantly, we dig the fact that what they’re doing seems to aim at taking the error of many out of the whole time-tested “trial and error” paradigm by learning from the error of a few.

That’s where we make our very lame indeed pun about giving it the thumbs-up. What, we held off for an entire paragraph.

WHAT YOU FEEL IS WHAT YOU GET

And of course, getting stuff done has to always start with getting in the right mindset. Which often involves starting the day off on the right foot — and what righter foot than a feel-good outlook?

That’s where the feel good initiative comes in. It’s a very simple, very smart concept: every day, there’s a new song uploaded along with some quick extra stuff (mostly artist’s website). That’s it. The idea is you start your morning there and listen to the daily song along with your coffee and newspaper. Some days, the song will be a response to a previous day’s. All days, it’ll be inspiring, refreshing and sure to put you in the right mood to face the day.

And if you’re not the surprise kind of person, if you have a specific craving for a song you already know, there’s Songerize — a supremely basic site where you just type in the name of an artist and/or song, and it just pulls it up and starts playing. Brilliant.

It’s the stripped-down version of the also brilliant SeeqPod music search engine, there to make your music wishes come true at the click of a mouse. Plus, it actually works — it found all but one of the tracks we tested, including stuff on the off-mainstream side (like our latest obsession, Kate Nash). So what are you craving to hear right now?

STALKER 2.0

It starts innocently enough. You need to look up a friend’s mailing address. But then before you know it, you’re digging up dirt on your ex, your “good girl” coworker, your nasty brother in law, and worse yet, you get all crazy-eyed and jittery with excitement about it. If you don’t like that image, proceed with caution. And if you’re screaming “GIMME!,” indulge. Now onto the goodies:

There’s the everyone-knows-this White Pages reverse phone number lookup — great for those could-be-mysterious-could-be- creepy missed calls. Then there’s Zaba Search, the free people search that digs up all sorts of public info on your searchee, including address and date when the address was recorded — so when you get multiple listings for someone, you can spot their current residence. Good idea, but didn’t work for many of the people we tried. (What, it was research…)

Which is how we get to our favorite: Wink. Wink searches over 330 million people across pretty much all existing social networks — on many of which people list their full name, address, school, workplace, interests and more.

And you can search by even more variables: full name, username (love this one), city, state, zip, country, province, career, tags, even keywords based on the person’s interests. We tried it and it’s no joke how much our friends reveal online — we were able to find every single person we searched, most complete with mugshots. And Wink doesn’t just search regular folks. It’s integrated with news services, so you can get the latest scoop on your favorite celeb.

So next time you get all hot and bothered over your MySpace conversation with cutehottie4u, you can track down the 43-year-old computer programmer typing away the hot stuff from his cube in Ohio. And if you get all Wink-obsessed, you can get their plugin and search straight from your browser anytime, or download the Wink widget, which lets you tell people where you are online all the time — particularly useful if you’re trying to promote yourself in the digital world. Better yet, you can create a Wink profile for yourself to really manage your online presence and how it’s presented to the world.

Smart, nifty, and oh-so-handy. We love.

REPUTATION REMEDY

But what happens if you just Winked yourself and found some, um, less than presentable stuff? Worse yet, what if there’s a public record of your careless youth somewhere on the web where you have no control? That’s when DefendMyName comes in — think of it as a reputation management program that specializes in removing negative listings about you and replacing them with good stuff. Using search optimization and a few other strategy, DMN promises to mitigate negative blog posts, customer reviews, news stories and other public info about you or your brand.

Hands down, we’re not crazy about the idea — whatever happened to transparency and the whole authenticity shebang? We get enough of politics as is. But we gotta give it to those guys for finding a clever, however ethically questionable, way to exploit the combination of people’s propensity to fuck up and the ever-growing power of the Internet.

UNTRIVIA

Some time ago, we made a big bold claim that consumer reviews were actually the real beginning of social networking. And now, thanks to the good folks at eMarketer, we have even more proof for just how much importance consumers place on each others’ opinions and recommendations when shopping. Turns out…

• …22% of consumers always read reviews, 43% do so most of the time, 33% read them occasionally, and only 2% never do.
• …the majority (68%) require 4 or more reviews before they make a decision to buy, and 22% won’t settle for less than 8
• …64% place peer reviews on their wish list for all websites, above anything else, including special offers and coupons
• …product reviews by peers are the most frequently visited (55%) product research tool, trumping comparison charts (22%), expert reviews (21%) and shared shopping lists (1%)

No wonder last year, for the first time in retail history, customer satisfaction with online retailers surpassed that with brick-and-mortar stores. By 12%, which is a lot. On a 100-point scale, online retail scored 83 points and offline got an underwhelming 71. And Amazon, the mother of all reviews, topped the chart with 88 points. Could the reviews have something to do with it? (You’re nodding vigorously now, right? Just making sure.)

PICTURE THIS

After last week’s huge upgrade to the image search process, we seem to be on a roll. This week’s hot pick: retrievr, an experimental color recognition system that lets you draw with colors on a digital canvas and delivers image results from Flickr that feature the space/color combination you sketched out. Or, if you’re not into drawing, you can upload an image and retrievr hunts down images with similar space/color schemes.

Although the algorithm doesn’t recognize shapes (say you sketch the rough outline of an apple), it does match colors and the colors’ spatial position within the image.

Sounds awkward and complicated explained, but it’s actually incredibly simple and brilliant — so see for yourself.

Hits, Punches and Other Impact

Three-minute verdicts, humanitarian aid for your vocabulary, Brazilian models, hyper-social networking, what Harry Potter and the Yankees have in common, and where you can get a side order of sweaty hunk with lunch. Welcome to the Hits, Punches and Other Impact issue.

IMAGE VS. LIKENESS

Amnesty International, always the shocker, is on a latest spree to remind us that toy recalls are the least of China’s reputation problems. In a new campaign busting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the human advocacy crew is out to expose the contrast between China’s marketing efforts and their internal practices, a discrepancy that reeks of blatant hypocrisy.

Turns out, when China promised to kick up human rights for the 2008 Olympics, they went ahead and made a bunch of minor touch-ups to the death penalty system (a.k.a. itsy-blitzy change) and vouched to give foreign reporters more freedoms.

But “freedom” is the last thing one such investigative reporter, Zhao Yan of the New York Times, got when he tried to appeal his three-year prison sentence for an alleged political vendetta. The appeal was dismissed in under 3 minutes. He was recently released after completing the sentence.

Which is an unsurprising event, given a long-standing law has been allowing police to shove crime suspects in jail for up to 4 years without trial. Since 1957. That’s half a century of legalized anti-freedom, granting suspects not even a shot with the whatever loose justice system does exist. Meanwhile, China’s busy opening the world’s largest, blingest luxury airport.

The irony, of course, is that the entire marketing campaign to boost China’s international image for the Olympics is funded by the tax yuan of these very same people facing human rightlessness on a daily basis.

Read up on what’s wrong with that picture and check out the full Amnesty International creative.

VERBAL STEAL & DEAL

The wonderful people of the Red Cross bring all kinds of aid to those in need. Including the linguistic kind. Overheard in a shared restroom, we bring you this uncovered vocab gem of the week, courtesy of the lovely women of the American Red Cross:

Squidget |’skwijit|

noun: Too short to be a midget.

[Definition spoken in a matter-of-factly, isn't-it-obvious tone by utterer upon inquiry.]

WON’T SEE THIS ON A BILLBOARD

We’re starting to understand why Brazil is on a mission to ban outdoor advertising: because they have so much higher standards for what constitutes compelling, culturally relevant visuals. (As opposed to, you know, babes-boobs-and-beer billboards.)

Case in point: 27-year-old artist Bruno 9li. Inspired by alchemy (even saying “alchemy” is pretty damn badass in and of itlsef), his ink-on-paper and mural art may just be Brazil’s hottest contribution to culture since Gisele Bundchen. (What, we do have to acknowledge the mainstream’s tastes. Chill out.)

In the sea of sameness (hello, pseudo-anime and anything with distorted doll heads), Bruno 9li’s work stands out as something we’ve never seen before. Do check out his full exhibit to feel a little more enriched, or at least a little closer to Gisele.

UNTRIVIA

The college set. A small (18 million) and often annoying (ah, the swollen sense of entitlement) demo. But one with enormous market influence: a combined power of their own disposable income and what they puppy-eye their parents into buying, a solid, opinionated word-of-mouth network, a tendency to be early adopters of, well, pretty much anything, and a lifetime of consumption ahead of them. Their relationship with the marketing world, to say the least, matters.

So here’s a snapshot of how this dynamic has changed over the past couple of years. Anderson Analytics, a youth-oriented market research getup, sets out every year to probe what brands the kids are digging via their annual GenX2Z College Brand Survey. A top-line:

2005: Nike, Coca-Cola, Polo, American Eagle, Sony

2006: Nike, American Eagle, Sony, The Gap, Old Navy

2007: Google, Apple, Target, Facebook

What else the kids care about:

On the web:

2005: CollegeHumor, Facebook, Google, MySpace, eBay

2006: MySpace, Facebook, CollegeHumor, YouTube, Google

2007: …here’s where it gets tricky. This year, more than ever, the differences across genders are really starting to show:

Women:

1. Facebook, 2. MySpace, 3. Google, 4. YouTube, 5. PerezHilton, 6. PostSecret, 7. Craigslist, 8. AddictingGames, 9. eBay, 10. SlickDeals

Men:

1. Facebook, 2. ESPN, 3. Google, 4. YouTube, 5. Digg, 6. CollegeHumor, 7. Yahoo, 8. MySpace, 9. Amazon, 10. Engadget / Fark (tie)

The gender breakdown gets even more interesting. Even though Facebook tops both charts, twice as many women rank it #1 than men, and MySpace is nowhere to be seen in men’s top 5. So the survey seems to assert that social networking skews much more female in the 18-24 set.

But here’s our thought: Take Digg. It allows people to see what content others in this whole big Internet universe are digging, exchanging information and opinions with the world at large rather than with a small social circle of actual friends and acquaintances, as is the case with traditional social networking sites. None of the Digg-type sites pop up on women’s web favorites list, but they do on men’s. (Fark and CollegeHumor are just other bystander ways of connecting to what tickles others.) Could such sites be a form of “hyper-social networking,” allowing users to connect with others beyond their immediate “society” in broader, less intimate ways?

So it may be, then, that social networking holds equal appeal to young men and young women. It just manifests itself in different ways as these two groups choose to relate to the world differently.

Something to think about.

CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT FICTION

Lately, we’ve been on an unintentional busting-the-print-is-dead-myth spree. On the whole death vs. evolution note, it’s not just the medium that’s evolving: its consumption also is. So what happens when you cross two dinosaur media — books and snail-mail — with a new-age phenomenon like peer-to-peer and social networking? You get Paperback Swap, a Netflix of sorts for books that’s completely free and a true testament to an old-fashioned code of honor.

Here’s how it works: you sign up (with a valid email and USPS address), sift through your old books to decide which ones you’re willing to swap, and post them on the website, adding to the over 1.6 million books already available. Just for doing that, you get 2 free book credits, so you can go ahead and request 2 books after browsing through the e-library. (Credits are the exchange unit on PBS — every time one of your books is received, you get a credit you can use to request someone else’s book.)

Then you just sit and watch your mailbox: the books, after they arrive, are yours to keep. Free.

The only thing you ever pay for is postage when other members request any of your books (about $2.13 a book using Media Mail). But, then again, they pay postage when you get theirs, so it’s all fair and simple. And, speaking of postage, PBS has neat shipping labels you can print out at home to make it all even easier. Or, you can go hardcore and join the Box-O-Books program where you can ship multiple books in one big box and swap with other boxers, saving on both postage costs and wait time.

And, for the musically inclined, there’s also sister-site SwapaCD, the self-explanatory similar program for CD’s.

Here’s the thing: if we remember our copyright classes from way back correctly, there’s something called the “first book doctrine,” a loophole in copyright law that allows you to transfer (for payment or not) a lawful copy of copyrighted work (like a book or CD) once you’ve obtained it. Basically, whenever you buy, find, receive as a gift or get your hands on a book in other ways, it’s yours to do whatever you like with. Including swapping.

Whoever thought the big break in peer-to-peer media exchange, always the hot-button issue in digital media, would come from the very media written off as dead?

FOOD & FIGHT

This week’s as-seen-in-Philly: spotted in the midst of Philly gem Reading Terminal Market (and in the midst of lunch rush hour) is a full-blown boxing match, complete with a loudspeaker-armed announcer, a DJ, various sponsors, and ABC Action News coverage.

We couldn’t quite figure out the purpose of the whole shebang, but it seemed like some sort of boxing match ticket sales stunt. More than anything, though, we couldn’t figure out why such a stunt would be pulled in the middle of the indiest of fooderies.

But, hey, perhaps there’s some truth after all to legendary Bulgarian wrestler Lyutvi Ahmedov’s even more legendary adage: “The grub makes the fight.”

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