Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

This is Part 8 (Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7,) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

Seth Godin wrote a great post this morning. He writes:

...this was a decade filled with opportunity. The internet transformed our lives forever. Opportunities were created (and many were taken advantage of). And, like every decade, just about everyone missed it. Just about everyone hunkered down and did their job or did what they were told or did what they thought they were supposed to, and just about everyone got very little as a result.

I'm happy to say that 2007 was the year that I made the most of the opportunities presented to me.

2007 was also the year that the internet got really social. In March of 2007, a weird little service called 2007 blew up at SXSW. Facebook completely opened up, and the mass migration from MySpace over to Facebook began.

Up until 2007, I had pretty much stumbled along in my professional pursuits and fallen into every job I had. But in 2007, I figured out what I actually wanted to do.

It took me a lot longer than I had anticipated or hoped for to find a new job. And one bit of encouragement that I have for anyone out there who's currently seeking or thinking about looking for a new gig: have patience, and don't lose heart.

I chased a bunch of jobs in 2007 that seemed great at the time (trendhunter, project manager for a Second Life design/development agency), yet in retrospect were clearly bad fits for me. And I feel lucky now that they didn't work out.

Instead, I was lucky enough to discover what the heck a "planner" was, and lucky enough to meet some great people who helped me see that there was an emerging need for people who could do digital strategy.

One of the things that I love about digital strategy is that it's one of the most meritocratic careers you can choose. We are encouraged to make our best work public. Jobs are won and reputations are earned primarily on the strength of our ideas.

If I have any advice worth sharing for people who are trying to get into this biz, it's to start a blog. Start a blog, publish your best ideas, welcome feedback and criticism, and keep sharpening your thinking in public.

I wish I could take all the credit for that sage wisdom, but I think it was actually the advice that Noah Brier gave to me when we first met for lunch in July of 2007. After that lunch, I wrote my first real blog post: What Is A Blog?

At lunch this afternoon, Noah Brier said that blogs can be like The Simpsons in their evolution: poorly animated and lacking a charismatic lead in the early years, and requiring some time and exploration in order to eventually achieve their full potential. Also, like The Simpsons, the plot-lines may vary while the quirky characters stay consistent. With this in mind, I invite you to join my community of subscribers by adding my RSS Feed to your feed reader of choice. Have a little patience, and hopefully I'll prove to be a sufficiently quirky character for you to follow.

I certainly haven't achieved my "full potential" as a blogger, yet (I hope : ), but it has been an incredible journey.

And I can't thank everyone who reads this blog enough for your support. This blog has been the backbone of my professional career, and I wouldn't have ended up getting paid to do something I love without your links, comments, thoughts, criticism, and curiosity.

This is Part 7 (Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6,) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

In 2006, I joined Flickr, started publishing my Delicious bookmarks, and I started blogging.

I relaunched this site with a major redesign in Spring 2006, with a few important similarities to it's current incarnation. It had one larger main column on the left, and a smaller side column on the right. Back then, however, the site was really more of a tumblog, modeled after a few of my all time favorite blogs kottke.org and coudal.com. The kind of stuff that I now post to my Tumblr blog was the primary content on mikearauz.com: interesting links, pretty pics, and funny videos.

Flickr wooed me in, and I discovered the social side of photography. I shared a small studio space on the lower east side, and was working on portraiture. What was fascinating about getting into Flickr was having what felt like an objective judgement of your work by the number of views, comments, and likes that each photo earned. It was both relieving and kinda corrupting.

The sad part is that - even though I'm still a happy user of Flickr - the site has ultimately discouraged me from being a photographer. It feels more impossible than ever to make pictures that truly feel original. When I try to take photos of my own, I can't escape the thought that someone else has already taken a picture just like this one, and I can find it in an instant on Flickr.

As the de facto web designer and digital strategist at Pompei A.D. where I was still working, I got the opportunity to oversee the redesign of the company website. ...A blessing and a curse. You know how people say that you're always your own worst client, well imagine if you're also an entire company full of talented designers - who have never built a website themselves - who have a lot of ideas about how it should be designed.

With the tireless work and creativity of Ian Coyle, and his team at FL 2, we actually managed to do a decent job of creating a website that was both a beautiful and immersive experience, with a completely dynamic and easily updated blog-like back end - the current version of Pompei A.D. My only regret now is that I wish I had been more honest about the firm's willingness to actually maintain a blog-like site.

I (re)discovered The Cluetrain Manifesto. I couldn't believe how dead on it was. It put everything I was thinking about how the internet was changing the marketing and communications landscape into words. Then I discovered that it had been written in 1999. Well, it still holds up 10 years later.

I also read another internet nerd classic: The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan. As the hundreds of little sticky post-its, bracketed passages, and notes in the margins will attest, this book changed my life. And that's not an exaggeration. As he's done for many other students over the years, McLuhan's ideas about technology opened my mind up to an entirely new way of thinking about our digital world. The book raised my level of curiosity, and critical thinking about the role that the internet was playing in our lives.

By 2007, this curiosity became a career aspiration.

This is Part 6 (Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

In 2005 I became a power blog reader and I started watching the YouTubes.

Thinking back, it's hard to believe that YouTube has only been around since 2005. Now it's one of the most heavily trafficed sites on the entire web, and continues to undermine, threaten, and revolutionize, the entire TV media industry as we know it. It's become a critical distribution tool for anyone with video content to share, both brands and consumers alike. And back in 2005, the site introduced "viral video" to a whole new audience.

Boom Goes The Dynamite



Leeroy Jenkins



And one of the first, and arguably best, mash-up videos, Shining, which went on to spawn a never-ending fountain of hilarious movie trailer remixes.




One of the major beneficiaries of this new video distribution site ended up being Improv Everywhere. Charlie Todd, the founder, and his friends from the NYC comedy scene had been doing public stunts and performances since 2001, and had been smart enough to capture most of them on video. When YouTube came along they already had a bank of great content to share. After taking my first No Pants Subway Ride with them in January of that year (SAVE THE DATE - NO PANTS 2010 ON SUNDAY JAN 10), I joined them as a covert photographer on their next mission in March, Look Up More.



Back at my day job, we were working on a retail concept for Radioshack and Motorola. The idea was to be a technology store of the future, introducing the best of both companies, from home entertainment to mobile, to consumers all over the country. Needless to say, things didn't go so well for these two titans of yesteryear technology, and the retail concept never came to fruition. But, while I was working on it, I devoted myself to the tech blogosphere.

I started reading every major tech-related blog I could find, learned to use a blog reader, and would read almost everything they posted. Oddly enough, only a few of those blogs are still in my reader. I've found that I keep moving on to blog sources that are going to introduce me to something new, and away from the blogs that tend to regurgitate what everyone is talking about.

Reading so many blogs made me re-think my own web presence, and at the end of the year I started to work on a major redesign of this site.

This is Part 5 (Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

As much as I enjoyed school, and would argue for the importance of a good education, sometimes we learn best by just doing. 2004 was when I got tossed into the deep end of design and web development without my floaties on and was forced to find my own way back to shore.

I started working at a small-ish architecture, design, and brand strategy firm called Pompei A.D. (more on that website when we get to 2006). I was helping them to create some flash animations to be used as projections at a FORTUNE Magazine Gala Event. What's interesting about this situation was that I was neither a designer nor a flash developer, I merely knew how to use Photoshop and had done some basic programming in HTML, JavaScript, and a little PHP. Suddenly, I was learning ActionScript and the basics of graphic design the hard way, by just doing it.

Then one Friday, Pompei A.D.'s real graphic designer quit. On the following Monday, I became the in-house graphic designer.

Meanwhile, Greene Street Salon was going strong. We launched a new website, and I created my first blog for the three of us who ran Greene Street Salon to write about the NYC arts scene. I started to actually think about what I was writing, and attempted to get better at it. I learned both the challenges and the pleasures of trying to create a successful blog. The burden of regular posts. The importance of connecting with other bloggers within your community. The way that blogging can open up new ways of thinking about the world around you.

This site continued to change, making use of my newly acquired flash skills with a very tasteful animated banner (see below), and figuring out how to use PHP to syndicate events from upcoming.org onto my home page.



MySpace put Friendster out to pasture. Everyone I knew migrated over. And little ol' Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates at Harvard started introducing Facebook to their Ivy League friends.

This is Part 4 (Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

2003 was when the new New York, the New York we know now, really showed up. The digital industry was starting to bounce back from the bubble burst. Web 2.0 was dawning. The blogosphere had new power. Social Network Sites were on the rise. The Bush administration was accomplishing their mission in Iraq, while New Yorkers were protesting in the streets. And hipsters were beginning to recognize themselves.

It was also the year that I became an artist, a web designer, and a marketer.

In March 2003, I launched this site: mikearauz.com. The first version was nothing more than a digital resume for my acting. It had one page with a few head shots and my acting resume. Within a few months I had shaved my head and pretty much given up on my acting ambitions. This site changed along with it. Eventually turning into a place for me to share my photography, my conceptual art, and a calendar of various arts, music, and performance events happening around the city.



Some time around May 2003, I received an email from a mysterious stranger inviting me to participate in a sudden and seemingly spontaneous happening. That event, turned out to be the first of a series of what were later labeled Flash Mobs, and the mysterious man behind the email turned out to be an old college friend named Bill Wasik, now the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. As Bill wrote about in his 2006 essay for Harper's Magazine "My Crowd, or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob", flash mobs were originally intended to be a performative commentary on the mob mentality that was loudly, but superficially, rejected by hipster culture while simultaneously defining hipster culture (a lot like Steve Martin's classic Nonconformists' Oath: Now let's repeat the non-conformists' oath: I promise to be different! (audience repeats) I promise to be unique! (audience repeats) I promise not to repeat things other people say! (audience laughs, repeats) Good!).

At the end of an eventful summer that included performing with an experimental long-form improv group, and experiencing The Black Out in the midst of acting in a play at the NY Fringe Festival, I finally took the plunge and quit my day job for good. Ultimately one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I became a freelance web designer/developer. I can't say enough for the benefits of understanding first hand what makes a web experience tick. The websites I designed back then were pretty rudimentary, but I learned a lot about what not to do and the difference between looking cool and actually being usable.

By the end of the year Friendster was already waning, and MySpace was on the horizon. Because I had so many musician friends who were early adopters of MySpace, I quickly followed them over.

And Greene Street Salon, the little arts organization that my friends and I had started continued to kick along. In my new found free time, I started to work on a new website for them.

This is Part 3 (Read Part 1 and Part 2) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

2002 was the year I joined Friendster; it was also the most depressing year of my life. I'm not sure if that's ironic or completely expected.



I hardly remember Friendster at the time, other than that it was immediately used as a free alternative to online dating sites, and was quickly adopted by the growing army of young funny people who were flocking to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre at the time. Which gets to one of the central, and often missed, truths of social network sites: most people use social network sites to connect with people that they know in real life. If Friendster hadn't been adopted by the people I was getting to know offline, there wouldn't have been much reason for me to join.

In March of 2002, I was hating my day job, and feeling frustrated about my limited opportunities as an actor. I decided to take a long vacation - my first since I moved to NYC in July 2000 - to visit some friends in Seattle. I had just invested in new head shots (click here for a laugh), and was determined to up my game when I returned to the city.

When I attempted to quit my job, they talked me into sticking around part-time. After all, I needed the money. And, as it turned out, they needed someone to redesign, and program, the company website.

Although I took a few classes, met some good new people, and landed a couple roles, I spent most of the summer in Central Park lying in Sheep's Meadow reading. I was slowly beginning to realize that while I loved acting, I wasn't so excited about spending most of my time putting stamps on envelopes and mailing out my headshot.

At the same time, however, I was beginning to settle into the arts scene in New York, between theater, the quickly growing comedy community at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and some close friends who were part of the lower east side singer/songwriter scene (when Norah Jones was still stopping by to play gigs at The Living Room), and the classical music scene. We began hosting casual salons at our apartments, where we'd bring our creative friends together to share their talents with each other.

In Fall 2002, we created Greene Street Salon. We hosted our first official event in a gorgeous loft on Greene St, in Soho. And brought together an incredibly diverse group of artists from all sorts of different disciplines to share their work, and then party with around 100 other young New York based creative people.

Over the next few years Greene Street Salon introduced me to hundreds of the most talented artists I've ever known. It also was my first and best lesson in using the internet to build a fan base and market a brand. More on that in the next chapter.

This is Part 2 (Read Part 1) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed our lives in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

2001 turned out to be a momentous year for both obvious and much more subtle reasons than I realized at the time.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I left the apartment I was living in in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn on my way to work shortly before 9am. Outside, two men were standing on the corner staring towards lower Manhattan, having only minutes ago watched the first plane crash into The World Trade Center's North Tower. I went back inside, turned on the TV, and moments later heard the news that the second plane had hit. I went to the roof and bits of charred paper and ash were beginning to float across the water from the towers and land in South Brooklyn.

At the time, I still didn't have my own computer, and was in the habit of waiting until I got into work to check my email. I did, however, have a cell phone and called my friend who had moved from New York to Seattle back in April because I knew he'd want to know what was going on as soon as possible.

Then I went into work. Probably to get on to my computer, as much as anything else. At work we listened to the radio, and I watched live streaming video of network news on my computer.

Considering how far streaming online video has come in the past 10 years, and how it's still lacking in many ways, it's hard to believe that it was fairly reliable that morning back in 2001.

Sometime that morning, as more and more people attempted to get in touch with friends and family, cell phones stopped working. I think they went down in New York first, shortly after the towers fell. And pretty soon people all over the country had trouble making calls.

One of the striking differences about that morning, compared to today, is how many fewer people were relying on digital technology to communicate with each other. Imagine how an event of that magnitude would strain the system today. Not only would cell phone service go down, but so would Twitter, Facebook, all major news websites, and we'd probably even notice a global slowdown across the entire web as people started flooding the web with information.

Over the next couple weeks I felt unmoored, to say the least. The sketch comedy group I was in was about to open our first show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre that week (great timing, right?). I was settling into NYC, and making new friends. But, I was also stuck at a dead-end job, and was spending increasing amounts of time surfing the web. I wasn't quite sure what the hell I was doing with my life.

It took me a couple years before I realized it, but I think the seed was planted that morning in 2001. Eventually I realized that being fulfilled in life has a lot less to do with achieving any predetermined or easily labeled goal you may have set for yourself, and a lot more to do with being creatively and intellectually challenged and inspired by what you do.

It was that realization that eventually lead me to where I am now, doing what I do now; and it will continue to lead me to wherever I'll be and whatever I'll be doing 10 years from now.

Problems Comparison Chart: Tiger Woods Vs. Jay Z



This image, posted to Buzzfeed, now has over 26,434 views making it the 7th "Most Viral" post of the week, the 4th "Most Shared" post of the week, and making me one of the Top 20 most viewed contributors of the week.

So, why did this particular JPG spread so much further and faster than the average image posted to the web?

UPDATE: Here are some key stats direct from the official Buzzfeed Editor's Dashboard



On Thursday Dec. 3rd, at the height of Tiger Woods nonsense, my co-worker Clay Parker Jones came up with the brilliant idea that it would be funny to compare Jay-Z's 99 problems - none of which have anything to do with women - to Tiger Woods' problems - all of which have everything to do with women.

We both made funny info-graphics illustrating the joke and put them up on the interwebs.

At first we posted them to our Tumblr accounts, and within minutes they were receiving several likes and reblogs (one of the best things about Tumblr is how quickly you can find out if something is going to spread). We posted the link to Twitter, and watched the link get LOLs and RTs.

After seeing that we were on to something, I posted my chart to Buzzfeed, where I'm an occasional contributor and have had a few posts on the front page before. I used Twitter to give the new post a shot of attention, and was lucky enough to get moved to the home page within about an hour after submitting up the post.

Once the image made the homepage of Buzzfeed it quickly gained views, badges, and new blog pick ups on a few other popular blogs including FastCompany, GorrillaMask, and FlowingData.

Aside from luck, and a great platform for lift-off (Buzzfeed), there are a few key ingredients that contributed to making this image catch on. A few things that any brand hoping to do the same with their message should keep in mind.

Humor
Things that are funny, generally spread more easily because they are a fantastic way for us to define our collective identity. We tell our friends a joke, and if we both laugh, then we're both IN, if only one of us laughs, then one of us is IN and the other is OUT.

Timing
This was extremely timely, created and posted on the same day that interest in Tiger Woods and his troubles reached its peak. And then with the added bonus of Friday Dec 4th being Jay Z's birthday.

A Dry Forest
As Duncan Watts has shown in his tipping-point-busting research, the distance that an idea will spread doesn't depend on the originating source, but rather on the structure of the network and how receptive the network is to the idea. In my case, the idea of making jokes out of charts was an already well established and appreciated internet behavior (especially with hip-hop related content). There was a ready hunger for this kind of content.

Social Currency
Lastly, content spreads best when it is taken from one interest group and shared with a new one. Think of these interest groups as barely overlapping social networks; if your idea makes the jump from one tightly connected network over to a new one, you've just expanded your audience and reach exponentially. This Jay Z / Tiger Woods chart satisfied many overlapping interest communities on the web, as illustrated in the interest map below.

This is Part 1 of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed our lives in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.



In June 2000, I graduated from college and moved down to New York with my closest friends to pursue a career as an actor in the theater.

Boy, a lot has changed since then, huh?

As the decade comes to an end, I've decided to take this opportunity to look back on how the internet has evolved along with my relationship with it.

When I moved to the city, I was lucky enough to have a friend who was willing to share not only his small apartment with me, but also his computer and internet connection. In those days, I wasn't using the web for much beyond email and watching stupid videos (ironically these two activities still account for the bulk of my daily time on the web). Although our internet was relatively fast, we still had to wait several minutes for movie trailers to load. Every once in a while we'd get a couple of friends with laptops together and play Command & Conquer over the local network.

My only email address when I graduated was my college address, and I soon set up an alternative address at a domain that my older brother had recently acquired.

I remember buying my first cell-phone, a Nokia 650, since I was looking for work and was attempting to maintain a long-distance relationship. It didn't do anything except make phone calls. It was big. It was heavy. But, it did enable me to talk to anyone in the country, at any time, from anywhere I went. And that was a revolution.

In September 2000, I got a day job at a quirky little company in Chelsea that sold tennis equipment wholesale. There were only two other employees, and I was the only person who really knew how to use a computer. Thinking back, this job turned out to play a crucial role as a playground and laboratory for me to learn about the web over the next three years.