I’ve got big news I wanted to share: I’ve taken on the responsibilities of opening an office here in New York as Contagious Communications’ North American Editor.

The official press release is up, and I’ve done a quickie intro on contagiousmagazine.com.

If you don’t know Contagious, I’ll give you the quick primer. It’s a London-based marketing intelligence company founded in late 2004 and led by the flagship product, a quarterly magazine. It also produces FEED, a bespoke subscription service for specialized pulses of information, an events division offering custom conference programming and Contagious Insider, a consultancy that has helped think on a bevy of interesting challenges from a wide variety of top-notch clients.

Contagious started around the idea of chronicling and considering how non-traditional efforts were impacting marketing; it has grown to a robust clearinghouse of innovative approaches, unique insights and all manner of interesting ideas from around the world of marketing and beyond. (Download 2009’s Most Contagious report for a taste.)

It’s extremely exciting to be able to bolster such a robust and focused team. Contagious has a diverse and deep pool of talented writers, researchers and collaborators as well as a can-do startup mentality.

A while ago I was reading a blog post BSS&P’s Ed Cotton had written about the need for a creative-thinking version of McKinsey, about how stimulating ideas and creative revitalization can be more beneficial to growth than cost-cutting. I think Contagious has the potential to serve as that energy- and idea-giving entity for any of today’s companies interested in what’s next.

So in the next few months I’ll be building our presence on this side of the pond at conferences and events, paying visits to lots of companies and, most importantly, watching closely and taking observations and insights to the print magazine and website.

If you’re not already, get in touch. Sign up for our e-mail newsletter, follow us on Twitter (@contagiousmag) and submit your best work.

Contagious is well known in Europe, and has been very successful around the globe so far, but we’ve still got a challenge in helping it find a bigger audience in the Americas. I hope you’ll be able to play a part and contribute to what’s fast become a vibrant community of forward-thinkers.

Pssssst…., originally uploaded by nparish.

Pssssst….

My buddy Dan posted this on Facebook the other day and it reminded me of one of the key points in Scott Berkun’s excellent “Confessions of a Public Speaker“. I read “Confessions…” late last year and have been talking about it to anyone who frequently presents or is involved in speaking in front of an audience; its a great resource.

Anyway, a point Scott makes is amply illustrated here: The audience wants you to succeed.

In Dan’s heartwarming case, he got a heads up on his fly being open, and probably went into that talk knowing he at least had one guy in the audience rooting for him.

Dan writes “Today I had to speak in front of about 70 people at this pharmaceutical company near Jersey when this fine older gentleman nonchalantly got my attention and passed me this note:”

You must hold the reigns tighter than you have ever held them before but let the chariot head over the cliff top. The abyss is calling.

Clutch at straws. Build castles on clay. Let the quick sand tell you lies. Take the scenic route. Be there on time. Use two drummers if need be. Fill out forms. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Days. Midweeks and predictions. Fall, spin, turn and dive. Sign cheques. Solicitor doing deals with “Hits” and “Now”. Sleep at night. Black to white. Highest new entry. Good to bad. Fast forward. Top of the Pops. Re-read this book, whatever it takes. No, don’t. You already know all there is to know. Faster. Faster. Faster. Give everything. Just give everything. This is the beautiful end.

I just finished The Manual and everything is clear.

Louis C.K. at the Comedy Cellar, originally uploaded by nparish.

I galloped down to the West Village with my buddy Sam last night to see Louis C.K. tape a few bits for his upcoming FX show (March). It was brutally hilarious. I suspect some of the material might be too horrifying for the FX audience but if he puts out a DVD of the show it might have some of the crazier stuff from last night. Oh yeah, we got to sit right in the front, too.

Louis (@cklouis) gathered the audience via a tweet the day before. This was by far the most exciting thing to happen via Twitter.

This is Sam’s favorite C.K. video bit; his YouTube channel is pretty golden.

I most recently saw Reilly on the front page of USA Today commenting about the Chevy Volt’s mileage claims after a week fishing in Montana secluded from all feeds and transmissions. I think I whooped.

The first time we met, however, was a little different. It was on a high school Spanish Club Spring Break trip to Mexico in maybe 1997. That was a fun trip. For some reason our historical survey swung through Cancun for four days. Our initial evening in that fine town a fellow (neither of us, for the record) experienced what could be termed ‘rampaging intoxication’ for the first time and proceeded to chop apart his hotel room dresser with a ceremonial hatchet he’d purchased earlier that day from a roadside tourist trap. Goooood times.

Spime. Spimey spimey spime.

Spime is a portmanteau of ’space’ and ‘time’ coined by Bruce Sterling, who envisions a world full of spimes. It’s fun to say, and important to think about. A scenario just crossed my mind that might help.

A spime, as he defines it, is a “location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities.”

We’re seeing stuff that’s spimier every day. Your smart phone is a pretty good example. While I was looking at Sophie Blackall’s fun illustrations of Craigslist Missed Connections it seemed like a pretty interesting way to think about spimes.

Thousands of people have potential Missed Connections every day in big cities. (Essentially, if you’re not clear on how the Craigslist section works, say the cute dude walking his dog makes eyes at you, and you reciprocate; if one of you gets up the guts and wants to make contact you post about the encounter on the board.)

But, the problem with Missed Connections is they require a great deal of persistence. One would imagine an earnest (yet shy) person would check the board regularly, thinking about the girl in the laundromat showing off her underwear in a flirty way or the neighbor whose groceries you helped pick up after her bag tore might have really felt there was something more, and posted. God! We really had something for that second.

Or you yourself would post after every small interaction that’s a piece of love in a often desultory metropolis (’Hey, coffee guy, I really appreciate your daily affirmations and good humor’). So, you follow every trail and leave bread crumbs of your own and you’re bound to find a soul mate eventually. But, you’re likely to end up with an earnest, shy, person who’s kind of like yourself. And opposites attract.

Spimes can make it better.

Say you’re out carousing, or riding the subway to work, and your phone is logging place and time information, and you’ve signed up to be part of the Craigslist Missed Connections database and are volunteering (fairly anonymously, if you want) your location and when you’re passing by various nodes. Say the commuter pal who you always see and occasionally share eyes with is too. And she/he looks at that day’s timeline, and remembers the encounter, and puts a little pushpin into it. Guess what? Since your route and when you passed through it is logged too, you get a notification. Someone who trod the same path shared an experience with a stranger. Was it with you? It’s a hell of a lot likelier than the currently haphazard method, and I bet you could find a psychologist who would argue it’d make a healthier match than two neurotic romantics refreshing the Missed Connections section every hour.

There are already things that use the iPhone’s GPS to do things like this; most notably Grindr, an app that helps gay men find cruising buddies based on location, allows chats and suggests places to tryst.

Aside from being a little more, well, romantic, adding the time element allows you utilize the core of the Missed Connection, that it’s already happened, and was a shared experience, and treat that first encounter like a notable moment where two lives cross.

So how do we do it? Who will try?

This week saw the auspicious launch of a new agency called Victors and Spoils, founded by former Crispin Porter + Bogusky folks, Evan Fry and John Winsor as well as Claudia Batten, a former VP at Microsoft-owned in-game advertising facilitator Massive.

Fry, in the Times piece, makes an impressive statement:

“Crowdsourcing is looked at as a trend du jour,” Mr. Fry said. “We want to be the first agency that gets it right.”

I want them to as well. But perhaps in a different way than they do.

Advertising execs have been in love with Clay Shirky’s ur-crowdsourcing text “Here Comes Everybody” since it made its debut last year, but they haven’t been able to get it right.

There’s a reason why; marketers have focused on using executions from the crowd (eg Doritos’ tone-deaf Super Bowl spots) to replace things they’d usually pay specialists lots of money for, like logos and commercial scripts, instead of the easy tasks everyone can complete, like drawing a sheep (as in Aaron Koblin’s Sheep Market) or retyping a blurry word (as in Luis von Ahn’s CAPTCHA).

So, to succeed, Victors and Spoils has to find the middle ground.

And, by the power of the crowd vested in this tiny node in a remote corner of the internet, I have it for them. Here’s your assignment, guys.

Build a community around the DARPA network challenge and one of the “household-name brands” you allude to pitching for in the Times, win the challenge by finding the eight balloons first, and donate the $40,000 in prize money to charity in the name of the brand.

I’d hire a mathmetician to figure out the best way to allocate your immense brain wattage and flex it to comb the country for the eight balloons. Issue incentives to players, keep them honest, allow the whole thing to develop near-realtime with streaming content and all sorts of extra goodies.

It’ll be tough, because you’ll be competing against ultra-efficient networks, the likes of 4chan, which is unfortunately the closest thing we have now to an effective megalith of distributed energy that has the get-up-and-go to mobilize quickly. But what they boast in adolescent drive they don’t necessarily hold in technical expertise.

In as much as advertising has become a highly-efficient substrate for many of our emotional responses, so too will you have to be the surface underlying the network, giving it nutrients and making it robust.

97.9 FM in Detroit has long been home to WJLB, one of the finer R&B/’urban contemporary’ radio stations in the country. While kicking around on the excellent Detroit Radio Flashbacks I found the website featured weekly charts, “hip pocket surveys,” for much of 1984-85. These were the final years legendary DJ The Electrifying Mojo was at the station, so I thought it might be fun to take a look at what was getting played just about 25 years ago. I mostly missed the Mojo era, but JLB was a hugely influential radio station for me; it played loads of local records and was one of my first exposures to live turntablism, with a party/booty show every Friday night. So, I hope you enjoy these tunes. There are some hometown favorites here, stuff that stayed pretty local, and things from the last throes of Motown. Not surprisingly, Rochester Hills’ own Madonna is the only white performer on the list. Also not surprisingly, Prince, a Mojo favorite, appears a few times, both in his own work and through Apollonia 6 and Vanity. Pardon the dodgy embeds, Most of the record companies don’t like it enabled on their YouTube offerings…

24. You Get The Best From Me – Alicia Myers

23. We Don’t Work For Free – Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five

No video…but here’s a taste of the song.

22. The Jacksons – Torture

21. Tonight – Ready For The World

20. The Last Time I Made Love – Joyce Kennedy & Jeffrey Osborne

19. Solid – Ashford & Simpson

18. Sex Shooter – Apollonia 6

17. Set It Out – Midway

	Midway – Set It Out
	Found at Set It Out on KOhit.net

16. Pretty Mess – Vanity

15. Lucky Star – Madonna

14. Look The Other Way – Isley Jasper & Isley

Isley Jasper Isley – Look The Other Way (Official Music Video) – Funny videos are here

13. Let It All Blow – Dazz Band

12. Jungle Love – The Time

11. I’ve Been Watching You (Jamie’s Girl) – Randy Hall

10. I Promise (I Do Love You) – Dreamboy

I Promise (I Do Love You) – Dreamboy

9. I Owe It To Myself – Prime Time

8. I Feel For You – Chaka Khan

7. Friends b/w Five Minutes of Funk – Whodini

6. Fast Life – Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

5. Erotic City b/w Let’s Go Crazy – Prince

Prince doesn’t like his songs living free on the web. I’m sure you know these by heart anyway, right?

4. Cool It Now – New Edition

3. Computer Age (Push the Button) – Newcleus

2. Centipede – Rebbie Jackson

1. AJ Scratch – Kurtis Blow

What do you think, there are six more charts to close out ‘84, should we count ‘em down? Let me know in the comments.

Here are a few photos I’ve got from a recent falconry talk at Orvis’ Manhattan store.

Well, we did it.

Last Saturday a group of coworkers and I gave a good wallop to the Hamptons Half Marathon, with all of us finishing strong and raising a ton of money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Based entirely on a supportive group of individuals, I was able to raise over $2,800 for the LLS, benefiting individuals and families afflicted with blood cancers.

The race couldn’t have gone better. It was a clear, crisp day, not too hot, not too cold. I got plenty of sleep the night before, despite a weird throat infection that had worried me all week.

The plan for the race was to stick as close to the 9-minute-mile mark. Earlier in the season I’d set a goal of a sub-2 hour finish, but with my IT band barkin’ it seemed like slower would be the norm. But everything felt good, and at the 6 mile mark it seemed like I was on track to finish in under 120 minutes.

So I stuck with it, and sucked it up when it started to get ugly around 12 miles, and finished in 1:53:33.

I’m not sure if I’ll do a full; maybe next summer. I’ve taken a week off but will soon be getting tuned up for the Nike Human Race 10k later this month, so I’ll stick with running a bit longer. I still don’t get the zen immediately. But maybe I will someday. I am, though, proud of what our group did, and thankful for the fabulous Team in Training coaching, as well as your support.