August 10, 2005

Oxford Dictionary—Opinionated about twenty something bloggers?

oxford_blog.png The Oxford Dictionary is implemented in the current release of the Mac OS codenamed Tiger. It is using an odd line for an application example of the word blog in american english. Sure, it's just to show how it is used in a sentence. But how many will mistake this as an explanation? I don't know what they were thinking when they were adding this line. There are obviously better examples to choose from, hopefully considered for an updated dictionary.

The Oxford Dictionary: blog |bläg| noun a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2005

Creative Director: Misconceptions of a job

How would you define a Creative Director? Is it a senior designer? A senior copywriter? Or is it a manager? Apparently the views about how the role of a Creative Director is described vary. In my opinion, there's a number of great misconceptions out there. On job searching sites like Craigslist you will find job listings for Creative Director, but it will never be the same. Companies are struggling in their attempt to define a role in clear words that apparently appears blurry to them.

It's not new to me that people have different conceptions about job descriptions in this industry. After all you'll also find Art Directors listed in movie titles and business cards of hair dressers. The communications industry is undergoing a transformation process. Along with changing media- and content demands, what used to be divided in advertising, design and web, whereas advertising and design were closely bound to the prepress industry, is now changing into one big chunk of companies offering their set of often overlapping services. It is not uncommon that a former advertising company now has a web department, a direct media or customer relationship department, a pr agency and even does their own media bookings.

A Creative Director, however, usually defines a management position. A person that's usually directing people and commonly occupies a leading position. In some cases Creative Directors are also Managing Directors of a company, or at least member of the management board. Being Creative Director, in my personal experience, involves by far more management and leadership skills than any other senior job in the communications industry. Unlike a Managing Director, a Creative Director is in touch with all three connection points on a social level of a communications agency:


The Creative Director interacts within these three directions, trying to establish a fluent work flow, managing production cycles, getting calls from people who want to be hired, from recruiters, photographers and freelancers, and at the same time he/she is talking with other managers and presenting works to the clients. But the most important skill of a Creative Director is conceptual thinking. He should be able to write and hold his own presentations, with consequential thoughts and a single minded creative strategy. A Creative Director often finds himself in a role of a show master during client meetings: When the numbers have been discussed, the Creative Director takes over and presents the creative work, hopefully in a highly entertaining way. Which pretty much sums up the main reason why this job was always so much fun to me. It's a fast life and exhausting, but challenging you every day.

To promote the creative services of my own company, core, I started looking at portfolio hosting services like Creative Hotlist. It's one of many I'm going to use to post information about core services. Creative Hotlist knows the job Art, Creative Director. So there is no Creative Director without background in Art, which is a common misconception. In my career I've met a number of Creative Directors who had never had a drawing pencil in their hands. As a matter of fact, most highly qualified Creative Directors I met were former senior copywriters in advertising.

It goes further. When you're filling out your profile at Creative Hotlist, you can select Project Management and Writing, but not Concepts or Presentations. The whole experience matches with the one of job offering sites such as Monster. It's clear to me that those who create the database can't add all kinds of jobs offered in the big big world. Creative Director, however, is not such an exotic job that it would lack a clear definition.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:02 AM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2005

What ONE really does, and doesn't do

one.gifWhile I'm endorsing and encouraging any effort to actually do something about AIDS and to fight poverty, I also have mixed feelings about this campaign. Is it truly about humanitarian motives, or is it another attempt to blend us, to raise lots of money that won't change a thing for good? Additionally I see there's a lot of fashion going with it. Granted, star celebrities making a statement in the ONE commercial are eye catching. If Al Pacino is saying it's cool and every girl's dream Brad Pitt shows up twice, hey, it's got to be cool. The wrist band at the top of the ONE website is really stylish too. Don't you want one?

More things about ONE are questionable. Is it just money that's needed, or is it a change of policies towards Third World countries? What would be required are true efforts by corporations, thinking over their Globalization efforts. It strucks me odd, the topic Globalization is not even mentioned on the site, while it actually is the main cause for current poverty in the Third World. It also annoys me that there is no word about what will be done with the money, if it is invested in permanent changes, such as long term planned education systems, schools and university programs for the poor and true help to support and maintain a locally bound economy, that is not driven by trade treaties with international company networks such as Nestle, Nike, Coca-Cola. Sorry, but stating this is "...in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves..." has a bad aftertaste. It's simply hypocritical to mention "best American tradition" and failing to make any comment about current U.S. policies.

I found World Vision among the names of the founders of the campaign. World Vision is on the black list for humanitarian organizations with a bad history in letting large amounts of money disappear.

For years, World Vision has used tv commercials in which they show closeups in slow motion, big eyes of african kids surrounded by flies. The only information they gave in these commercials was the bank account number of World Vision. Make people feel sorry so they send their money. Is that all there is to it?

You can talk to one.org and ask them to explain why they don't do anything beyond raising money: one@data.org

Globalization is one major reason for poverty. It is caused by the true powers ruling the world, leaders of the western economy, at the top Oil companies and the largest corporate networks.

Addiontal resources:
The ONE campaign
globalissues.org: Causes for poverty
A guide to giving: "World Vision is the largest of the right-wing evangelical organizations."

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 31, 2005

iPhone or SkypePod?

Engadget picked it up from The Wireless Weblog. Apparently Skype had enough of dealing with reluctant phone companies and hesitant network vendors:

Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom announced the company plans to put out a VoWLAN phone, which will allow customers to connect to the Skype voice network via WiFi. Not too many specifics were given, other than that it’ll be out later this year. Let’s hope they inject it with a little more style than Vonage’s retro-cell aesthetic employed on the UTStarcom F1000, their first offering in the WiFi phone department.

phone.jpgTo pull this off, what Skype needs to do right is simple and twofolded. One, they need to make an excellent phone with seamless software/hardware integration. Just like the iPod . Two, they need to be able to create an enormous hype within three to four years, just like the iPod did. Hold on a second.—"Mr. Jobs? There is a phone call for you from Mr. Niklas Zennstrom?.."

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2004

Find your iPod to find your keys

Speaking of innovations, here is another one. You're gonna love this. It's something that makes your iPod even more useful. Griffin Technology came out with a plugin flashlight for your iPod. Yes, you can find your keys with it now. Isn't that amazing? Now you never have to look for your keys again. You just have to look for your iPod, and then look for that little white thingy that plugs into it, and voila, you have a flashlight and now you can look up your keys. That's a really useful $400 flashlight.

Am I the only one who finds that amusing, or do we all want to go out in clustered groups now, joining the hordes who came late to the iPod shopping party and arm ourselves with a brand new Griffin iPod flashlight? We can test it then and find out if it actually is as useful as promised.

But you know, I shouldn't be that harsh. Cause it's really hard. I mean, what do you do if you're third party developer for an uber-fetish. How can you top functionality of something that does, well, play music everywhere you go? Because Apple doesn't want to come up with a real PDA, you can already put text and your calendar dates on your iPod. So you can look up which date you missed cause you couldn't find your keys.

At least it sounds a lot cooler to say "I didn't hear your call cause I was listening to my iPod", even though that won't bring her back to you.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)

Skip or Skype

Every now and then, in between inventions like wars for presidency and frappucino light, somebody comes up with an idea that actually will change things. Just most people wouldn't think it would. In most cases it's not even a real invention. Often it's just recognizing something, seeing the time has come and we are ready for it.

Talking over the internet is such a thing. The idea is by far not new. Up to date, there must have been a good dozen voice over internet programs out there, all following their own protocols, all more or less flaky, crashing, disconnecting, worse than cells, but yet attempting to convince people to actually buy and use them. Sound is almost always choppy, most basic functions simply don't work. So how come one might be successful over another, if they're all of the same bad quality? Like with all brilliant solutions, the answer is simple. Even better, it is simplicity itself.

It's Skype, and it's for free. Plus, it works.

Skype sells itself with the line "Internet telephony that just works". That's not really an original line, except for the fact, it's actually true. I have been trying Skype for several times now, calling people online and -- here is the thing that makes the biggest difference -- also calling people in real life. Yes, that is land lines, cell phones, you know, the real world. Forget AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, iChat, Jabber and what else. You may have been fooled for some time, but come on, that was never really chatting! That was typing, dammit. And for every little 'oh!' and 'ah!', for every moan and smile, every blink of our eyes and the grumble in our bellies we had to come up with new incarnations of these ubiquitous smileys. They were never meant to go beyond the tee, you know. All of a sudden, you could find them in email, for christs sake, and an asterisk after an 's' meant something more than just a snake that spits, or something.

Yeah, I'm pushing it a little. I must admit I have been chatting too, or attempted it at least, but it didn't really work for me. Except if I really wanted to talk to someone and I just couldn't do it over the phone. Then it worked, as a beta version of real talking. It worked, but oh how clumsy.

So thank god, someone found out what people have been missing. Someone smart counted one and one together and came up with that little program called Skype. It rhymes with 'hype' -- almost scary how good they are in marketing, isn't it, and then the app even actually works! What an achievement. Hey, Microsofts and Apples across the planet, if you're listening, they did it, and they didn't ask you guys first. They just did what they thought was right, and it turns out more and more people don't think about who did it, if it just works.

Skype is available for all major platforms, it's a free download, and it's connecting to the real world. That's the summary formula of its success. Can you read that, Apple and big Micro, or do I have to repeat myself?

So how good is Skype, you're asking? Well, it works. It's like the first phone. It worked. It didn't look elegantly; it didn't work smoothly, sound was low, far and thin. It was not really amazing as an experience. But hey, the simple fact it worked at all, wasn't that something? That was at least the breakthrough of the century of that time. With Skype, well, I wouldn't go that far. But as long as it works, who cares if it's the breakthrough of the century. What matters is, people will start using it. And the last time that happened, we ended up with something we couldn't live anymore without these days. If you haven't guessed it, it's what you're looking at.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 02:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 18, 2004

Freedom of expression

issuelrg_131.gifk10 is a website hub for designers around the world. It's well known in the scene, but I personally found I rarely get 'real information' out of it. However, right atop there is an announcement about copyright issues.
It is an interactive presentation made with Flash, with copyright issues as a subject. Wether this is just a personal display of frustration, or creative expression about the limiting elements in current copyright law—I just found it funny and interesting.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 03:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 08, 2004

Blog on

The blog story continues. Different domain, same guy. It's on. My first blog based on Movabletype. People who have been reading me should know I was using Greymatter with spill, my old blog. It can't be really called an old blog, because its short time of existence doesn't call for such a definition.

Installing Movabletype on corebasis.com was a nightmare. It's not Movabletpye's fault, not Six Aparts fault, it's got to do with our server configurations, and above all, mostly with the fact that I don't know shit about Unix. In the end it worked out though, and it's always a rush of endorphines in your system when you get something running. It feels like having fixed an old cars engine, or something like that. It was not supposed to run, after frustrating hours and hours you spent on it, and finally it just did run.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:12 AM