writer, photographer, web person from Washington, DC.
If DC is where high school valedictorians go, then what is Baltimore? The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street have given this charming, scruffy city a bad rap. It’s home to some delightful neighborhoods, like Federal Hill (pictured above). It’s where Federal troops were stationed during the Civil War, to keep an eye on the occasionally riotous citizens of the city. Now it’s used for more peaceful purposes.
I’m the Chief Blogger for the DC Shorts Film Festival, responsible for developing an editorial strategy, training contributors, editing blog posts and writing posts of my own.
For the DC Shorts blog, I wrote a short article on local filmmakers in the festival. It’s a subject I’ve been interested in for a long time. The revolution in technology (cheaper cameras and internet distribution) allow anyone to make a movie these days. There’s no reason that filmmaking has to only occur in Hollywood anymore.
I’m a fan of Seth Godin, particularly his book, The Dip, which is about knowing when to quit and when to keep going. His thoughts on traditional publishing are also really compelling – it’s an industry that is broken. I read just about everything he writes.
Purple Cow is one of his older works, published in 2003 and updated last year. Purple Cow is a book that will push you to create something extraordinary. Godin’s basic point is that we don’t remember ordinary experiences, like the airline that got you to your destination on-time or the meal that was merely OK. Instead, we become passionate over excellent, “above and beyond” service and products. We rave about them to our friends and neighbors, which is the best marketing there is.
And about the only marketing that works.
Which is Godin’s point – in order to break through the clutter, we must create the truly extraordinary. Do work that scares you, that’s on the edge. Don’t be like other people – be unique.
A compelling idea, but one that probably doesn’t deserve a whole book (even a slim one). After a while, it’s the same story of iconoclasm again and again. Also, some of the examples are dated now, like JetBlue as a paragon of customer service and Godin’s comment about mobile phones being commodities at this point – obviously written before the iPhone.
But if you’re a fan of Seth Godin, or are currently working on a new product and need some inspiration, then it’s worth checking out.
Note: The 2010 edition includes an appendix containing stories of companies and organizations that have adopted the Purple Cow philosophy successfully.
Check out my new article for the Pink Line Project on what’s new at DC Shorts. This is an amazing film festival that I’ve been involved with for several years. 2011 features more films (145 from 23 countries) plus bigger parties and more free sessions on filmmaking. The DC Shorts Film Festival runs from September 8-18.
It was one of the hottest days of the year, at the end of a week of 100+ temperatures in Washington, DC. Cooped up by the oppressive heat, I had gotten a little stir crazy, so decided to venture out to check out Dance Day DC, where my friend and neighbor Cecile was volunteering
It was held at the Sylvan Theater, a little bowl next to the Washington Monument, with a steamy southern exposure. Things were pretty staid until the arrival of Mary Murphy, the judge from So You Think You Can Dance.
The audience knew as soon as she took the mic – I literally recoiled away from the speakers as her voice blasted out. She’s the loudest person I’ve ever met and probably didn’t even need a microphone.
Despite the crushing heat, she led the audience in a complex series of dances, part of a flashmob. This went on for a good half hour, dance after dance. I can’t imagine how hot it must’ve been on stage. I was off to the side, in the shade, doing nothing but taking pictures and I could barely stand it.
Murphy even taunted the sun. “I heard it was hot but, c’mon, is that the best you can do?!!”
It’s a good thing that she’s a celebrity. Otherwise, people might think she was insane.
My short story, “The Happiest Man in Washington” has been published in eFiction Magazine. You can read it below. If you roll over the pages, you’ll see backward and forward arrows. Click on the page and it will become a full-screen view.
This story was inspired by a homeless man I used to see daily at 17th and Rhode Island in DC. He was a neighborhood fixture, a happy face greeting commuters every morning. I wondered how he got there and if he ever thought about leaving the streets.
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Like this? Read more of my short fiction and my novel, Murder in Ocean Hall.
(For you WordPress geeks, eFiction is a magazine that was created using Issuu. You can embed and customize the viewer. I used the Issuu “customize and embed” tool to get the code to paste into my site. I made the embedded viewer one page across (instead of two) and to start on p.67, where my story is, rather than at the beginning of the magazine. The WP Issuu plugin was also necessary to make all this work. It’s not difficult.)
A hazy evening in Waynesville, NC, where I went to visit friends for a few days. It’s an iPhone pic that I ran through the “Lolo” filter in CameraBag.
In the age of the e-book, how will readers discover new authors? One possible way might be through journals like Digital Americana, the world’s first literary magazine for tablets. It’s like Esquire or The New Yorker but on an iPad.
And they just published my short story, “The City of the Dead.” My story is about a former Senator’s efforts to right a wrong in sunny Florida, as seen from the perspective of his imperious Egyptian wife.
Digital Americana is a gorgeous multimedia reading experience, featuring over 80 pages of fiction, poetry, interviews, book reviews, music videos and beautiful photos all in a format that you can scroll through on an iPad or iPhone. I’m biased, of course, but it’s one of the prettiest magazines I’ve ever seen.
To read “The City of the Dead”, buy the Digital Americana app for your iPad or iPhone. It costs all of 99 cents and includes the July Freedom issue. My story is on page 44.
Over the past few days, I’ve learned that three different short stories of mine will appear in three different online literary journals. Yea!
All of these stories are set in DC, at least in part, and feature the “beyond the monuments” knowledge of the city that I used in Murder in Ocean Hall. The three stories are all a little different:
The Really Real World – this is a dark and funny satire about the dangerous pursuit of fame. And, yes, the MTV series is involved.
The Happiest Man in Washington – I’m pretty much a realist, when it comes to fiction, but this is my attempt to write a parable like The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (an essential read for every artist).
City of the Dead – inspired by a friend’s trip to Egypt, this is a story about mortality and the limits of American power.
Look for all three of these short stories soon! Follow me on @joeflood and I’ll tweet when and where they’re published, as well as update this blog.
It was a small moment at the WordPress DC Meetup. One of the creators of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was in town. He had come to this monthly meeting at Fathom Creative to learn what the local community wanted in the next version of his web publishing software.
The media library in WordPress was discussed. Mullenweg admitted that it is confusing and gets difficult to manage once you have lots of images in the library. A man in the audience brought up a technical issue he had with the library. Mullenweg explained that you could actually do what the man wanted to in WordPress but stated:
The software is wrong, not the people.
This is a revolutionary statement. Mullenweg could have just told the man that “you’re doing it wrong” before telling him the “right” way to work with WordPress. Instead, the fact that users had problems with the media library told him that the software needed to be improved.
It’s a contrary notion. We all adapt to clunky and ever-changing software, relearning the basic tasks needed to accomplish our work – where’d they move the print button?
And we cope with this increasing complexity without complaint. Because no one wants to look stupid. You can’t figure out the ribbon in Microsoft Word? You must be the idiot, not the software.
This is especially true in the world of content management systems for web sites. I’ve worked on large-scale web sites for more than a dozen years as a web editor, producer and site manager. I remember when we did things in HTML. I have fond memories for Claris HomePage. Compared to the complexity of managing a large site in Dreamweaver, a CMS seemed like a brilliant idea.
Be careful what you wish for. Over time, I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to use nearly every major CMS out there.
The simple publishing tools that we used back in the 90s “evolved” into massively complex structures requiring expensive experts to install and administer. CMS like SharePoint, Vignette and Percussion are punishing experiences for the user, turning the joyous task of writing into a machine-led death march. You enter your content and then engage in a series of database programming tasks, with the hope that at the end of it, if everything goes well, your article will appear in the correct format on the web site at the next publishing cycle.
It’s no wonder that there’s so much bad writing online when the publishing tools are so lousy.
WordPress is different. Being open-source, and closely tied to the community (would Steve Ballmer listen to your feedback?), it has a different philosophy – “The software is wrong, not the people.”
Of course, it’s not perfect – the media library definitely needs some work – but it’s easy to use and adaptable. WordPress now powers more than 50 million web sites.
And, most importantly of all, it’s software that people want to use. No one feels passionate about SharePoint. But they do about WordPress. This enthusiasm will lead to its greater adoption. Over time, the users will prevail.