Exclamation blog: Stories, Ideas and loud noises
Exclamation Conversation: Geekbrief.TV’s Cali Lewis And Her Nerdy Past
I love it when you’re reading a magazine like Guitar World or Rolling Stone and the editors unearth some interview with Duane Allman from 1970 that they never ran (translation: somebody got really stoned and lost the story behind the radiator). I ran into Cali Lewis at Gnomedex about a month ago in Seattle, and we sat down to have a chat, but, much to my chagrin, the audio fidelty (avoid recording podcasts on a cheapo Olympus Digital Voice Recorder) was too lousy to post on-line. So, before I let this one get locked into the vaults, I’m gonna ping out a lean-and-mean written version of my chat with one of the leaders in tech video podcasting today. As of today, Geekbrief.tv is up to Episode 227. One week’s worth of episodes, watched back-to-back, makes for the funniest and most bracing 15-minute tech news show I think I’ve ever seen. Don’t get me wrong; This Week In Tech is great for the post-game show and punditry, but when I’m running to catch a bus, I’d much rather be getting the download from Geekbrief.
I’m really sorry; I was eating breakfast when you gave your talk this morning; what did I miss?
Well, we started with no production experience at all;i had never been in front of the camera and Neal had never been behind the camera. We had a web company before the bubble burst, and after that happened, we took some time off. Nothing in technology really piqued our interest until we heard about podcasting, and when we found out, we were like, “Wow - we have to do this.” So, what we talked about was our story, but we didn’t want it to be about us: the fact that you can do anything you want to.
Tell me a little bit about getting into podcasting full-time.
When we decided to do podcasting full-time, we were in a bubble. We were in this frame of mind that nothing else mattered, that failure wasn’t an option and we were just going so hard and so focused on what we wanted to do, and getting it done. Yesterday, Guy Kawasaki spoke, and he talked about something: “Don’t worry, be crappy.” That’s exactly how we got started. We knew what we wanted to do, and we knew how we wanted to be, but Brief #1 was crappy. [The earliest easily searchable Geekbrief episode is Episode #7]. It’s still not where we want it to be. We found a video of Ira Glass on Current.tv - it’s an awesome inspirational video. He talked about how you have this vision and you have this talent, but it’s not “there” - you go through so many years…it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to get to this point, but you just have to start, and you have to get it done, and you have to do stuff to get to the point where your talent meets your expectations.
The Simpsons Movie came out about [seven] weeks ago, and I feel like Lisa Simpson’s sign in rising, and there’s been a lot of bloggage about women in tech, and especially younger women in tech. What do you think has been the trickle-down effect from your show? Have you heard any stories from girls that are like, “Yeah, I’m a geek and proud.”
I don’t think that it’s just my show, but I can talk about the audience of my show. Definitely, we’re seeing a change where girls are saying, “Yup, I’m a geek, and I’m proud to be a geek, and I don’t care what you say about me.” And, at the same time, they have that defensiveness, maybe, but I don’t think that people on the other side are looking at geeks and saying, “That’s a bad thing” anymore. It was, when I was growing up. We were cast aside, and the least popular…
Did you have glasses when you were growing up?
This is not something I want to share, but I’m going to anyway [nervous laughter]. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, and I had these huge glasses that covered my whole face, and that wasn’t fun. But I got contacts as soon as I could. And I enjoy my glasses now that I can fit glasses.
Now I know that Michael Butler [host of the Rock and Roll Geek Show], his daughter Martina has been podcasting for almost two years. Are you having teens come to you and say, “I wanna be like you in five years: what do I do?”
Absolutely. I get emails from teenagers all the time, and I’ve seen a bunch of teenagers that are incredible at video production. There’s this talent out there that just wouldn’t have been seen before. There’s a person [at Gnomedex] who I talked to his daughter in Second Life one time. I said, “Hi, Amanda.” He was telling me today that she went off Second Life and called all her friends and said, “I met Cali Lewis! I met Cali Lewis!” He and his wife were thinking, “That’s not really meeting Cali Lewis.” I’m really, really excited about how girls are coming into tech, and being willing to call themselves a geek. And I don’t really care about the term “geek” - it’s the idea. It’s the idea that they are into technology, and I can’t wait to see that grow.
Micro-Blogging Vs. Micro-Napping
As I spent most of this week at Supernova 2007, I had the opportunity to sit in on some brilliant sessions and discussions, especially during the Unconference part of the conference on Tuesday. One panel that I worked on, “The (Non)Ethics of Corporate Ghost-Blogging”, was a great debate on acceptable levels of transparency (and readers’ assumptions about transparency) in social media.
Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls workshop/discussion on VRM, vendor relationship management, “the reciprocal” of customer relationship management, was a well-attended, much-discussed session at the Unconference as well.
For many, Supernova was a speedy introduction to Jaiku, a micro-blogging service akin to Twitter, albeit with a different (and slightly cuter) set of features. A few sessions, like those at any conference, were a bit of a snooze (the ironically entitled “Provocations“, for one), and it made me want to pull out my iPod and try out my latest discovery, Placebo’s Sleep Tracks.
The site is perfect for the on-the-go blogger or traveler: creator Placebo offers nap music at 5, 8, 12, 18, 20 and 23-minute increments, taking the napper through a succession of white, blue and brown noise followed by a gentle “cock-a-doodle-doo” wakeup. But it gets progressively less gentle after that, ending in a cacaphony of bagpipes, computer tones, and eventually, a series of computer noises, and someone saying, “Get up.” You don’t even want to hear the nails-on-a-chalkboard effect. I prefer the rooster, personally. After trying this yesterday in a crowded pizza place, I realized that this truly is what noise-cancelling headphones were invented for.
So, the next time you’re thinking about making 5 Twitters or 5 Jaikus, just remember, you could make the next hour of your life 5 times more productive by unplugging with a 5-minute micro-nap.
Science Fiction’s Influence on Web 2.0 (podcast)
In this podcast, LaunchSquad’s Adam Metz and Stanford doctoral candidate Noam Cohen, author of the forthcoming thesis, “Speculative Nostalgias: Metafiction, Science Fiction and the Putative Death of the Novel,” discuss the influence of science-fiction on business, and especially, Web 2.0.
The podcast also features an in-depth discussion of the ramifications of Neal Stephenson’s 1993 novel Snow Crash, and its influence on virtual worlds like Second Life and There.
How A Small Press Author Stormed Amazon’s Charts (and beat Black Lab)
Scott Sigler works in downtown San Francisco, and hasn’t taken a day off from his day job in the last month to promote his new science fiction book Ancestor. So, how he got to #7 on Amazon was a wake-up call to many in the publishing industry. Turns out that podcasting your novels - and giving them away for free as PDFs - builds a large and loyal following.
Ancestor, is Sigler’s second novel, both of which have been podcast. I’ve been running into Sigler at San Francisco podcast Meetup events for the last year, and although I wasn’t amazed by his efforts at podcasting his sci-fi/mashup genre novels (so-so audio), I was impressed by the rabid and rapidly growing following that he was cultivating, as well as the fact that he was mounting an effort to coordinate his follow-up to “Kill Amazon” - yes, that’s seriously what it was called: Ancestor Kills Amazon.
In March, alt rock band Black Lab tried to do the same thing, and managed to sell 14,000 copies of their 2006 song “Mine Again” on iTunes, sending the song to #11 on the iTunes U.S. rock charts, according to Mike Musgrove at the Washington Post. While Sigler may not have sold as many copies as Black Lab, his gross is far higher; by the end of the first week, Sigler had sold 3,800 copies at Amazon’s price of $13.53. Which means his gross (about $51,000) is about four times higher than that of Black Lab’s (about $13,000).
And that’s what rocketed Ancestor to the #7 spot on Amazon for a day (and the #1 spot in Amazon’s Horror category and #4 in Amazon’s sci-fi category), and got Sigler’s other novel Infection (now retitled Infested) signed to Random House’s Crown imprint, where it will be reissued in hardcover next summer. Sigler’s next book, The Rookie, comes out in November.
