STICKPERSON

Finally, a book that (at first glance) seems to explain how I think!

The Back of the Napkin

This is why I have a 5′x 8′ whiteboard in my office. This is why I constantly carry a Moleskine notebook. It’s because when people ask me to explain something, unless they want to hear me babble on for 10 minutes, I instinctively draw something that explains what I’m thinking. Because, that’s how I SEE it.

I also find that the images stick with them, but my “babble” doesn’t. However, somehow the overall “concept” does. I have one image, affectionately described as the “Tubes” image, that has had a lifespan of nearly two years and is one of the few constants through two years of Web Strategy evolution. It is the image people refer to most and has been in nearly every presentation I’ve given at the University of Idaho in the past two years. I’m sure many people are sick of the image, but the reality is that now most of the key stakeholders could probably now draw it!

On April 7, Trever Paglen appeared on the Cobert Report to talk about his new book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me.

The interview with Steven Cobert just scratched the surface of Trever’s research into covert government operations and facilities. During the Vectors Fellowship Kim Christen and I attended at USC in 2005, Trever blew our minds with his presentation of images taken from the perimeter of secret government installations using limit telephotography. His photography and research ultimately became Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies a project that tracks the flight activity of the JANET fleet, a group of government owned airplanes who navigate:

a very peculiar kind of relational space indeed – a geography of secret projects, places, and people that military and defense-industry insiders refer to as the “black world.

What impressed me both when I met Trever and during his conversation with Cobert was that he refuses to take a stance that there is a vast conspiracy at work behind these symbols. Rather, he seems more interested in the details and bizarre behavior of the military culture that produces them.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive received some wonderful exposure a couple months back. A mention of the archive in a BBC New article by Bill Thompson led to: a BBC Radio interview, an article by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a Web feature on the Washington State University site, and even a heated discussion on Slashdot!

The unexpected media attention has raised awareness of the archive and Kim Christen has been invited to discuss the archive at both the University of Virginia and at The Future of Public Institutions symposium at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

After over a year of waiting, with Lost and Mythbusters being the only television shows worth watching, tomorrow my old favorite Battlestar Galactica returns for one final season.

SciFi Channel has but together a succinct and funny recap,

A ragtag fleet of ships following the Galactica through space…where cameras have a hard time keeping up.

Frakin’ hilarious!

Last year I was given the wonderful opportunity to contribute (about 2 seconds of rotoscoped animation) to the wildly creative and unique independent film Half-Life. No…not THAT Half Life. This is director Jennifer Phang’s feature film Half-Life,

…a supernormal tale about self-absorbed and disillusioned suburbanites who live in a futuristic time of natural disasters, suffocating air quality, and accelerating global cataclysms.

Single mom Saura Wu and her two kids, Pam and Timothy, struggle to rebuild their family in the presence of a sinister, but charming, interloper. Pam seeks refuge in her object of desire, a young hipster named Scott who, in turn, attempts to jar his fundamentalist parents out of their denial of his gay identity. Timothy, meanwhile, stumbles upon a way to develop and hone paranormal powers that he summons to alter everyone’s reality.

Modern and philosophical, Half-Life masterfully blends menacing rage with the tenderness and vulnerability of youth to create a tale that injects an empowering and persevering hopefulness into the family’s fatalistic fears of a disintegrating world. A visually ambitious accomplishment filled with gorgeous cinematography, handcrafted animation, and expertly concocted faux news reports, this auspicious directorial debut is without precedent and firmly establishes Jennifer Phang as an exciting talent to watch.

Half-Life made it into both Sundance and SXSW this year; very, very impressive for Jen’s first feature film!!

My brother Jon Cooney did the artwork for the opening titles of the film.

Besides providing a fascinating chronicle of Google’s ascension to master of the world’s information, John Batelle’s The Search provides an important distinction — the strength of Google isn’t solely their powerful search algorithm, but their keywords-based AdWords advertising model which effectively monetizes language.

Noah Elkin over at Searchenginewatch points out in his post The Shifting Power of Words,

With the ascendancy of search, the adman no longer occupies the foreground. Rather, success today hinges on working effectively behind the scenes to harness the intelligence of search – the insights into customers’ thought processes and the vernacular they use to seek out brands and products…

Noah goes on to point out that consumers typically use the same language across channels, so high-value keywords identified in an AdWords campaign could potentially inform messaging for print and broadcast. However, Noah drops the conversation short of where I thought it was headed.

Last year, Google’s acquisition of YouTube raised a lot of eyebrows not just because of the price tag, but also the fact that the company had no revenue model. However, over the past year AdWords users have been given the added option to place local print and radio ads via Google. So, how long until advertisers are able to purchase placement of YouTube videos based not only on keywords, but also geography and eventually demographics?

It seems Google is perfectly positioned to reinvent television, or better yet, create a new communications channel that combines the emotional impact of the moving image, the flexibility and mobility of the Internet, and the language-centric measurability of Google’s mighty search algorithms.

As strategic and operational knowledge implementing “interest-focused media” like AdWords becomes mainstream, interruption formats will continue their long decline or die off, to be replaced by micro-branded channels. No question Google seeded this rapid evolution nearly 10 years ago, and really, you have to wonder if this isn’t what they envisioned long before the rest of us started to connect the dots.

Steve Rubel gives a name to something I’ve been feeling in my gut for a few months now. In his post Attention Crash he ties the looming Web 2.0 financial downturn to a very human reaction to the information deluge the social networking has unleashed.

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing.

The post is nearly a year old, so I guess Steve is a bit more in tune with this than my own “gut”.

He goes on to quote Marc Andreessen as saying basically the bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble won’t be all that bad. But, maybe the recent news about the downturn in Google’s AdWords revenue and Marc’s own reference to the decline of newspaper advertising will prove otherwise.

Upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.5. Very impressive upgrade. Much cleaner administrative interface, even more up-to-date than the Wordpress.com free service I use for my Retail Distribution Management class. Wordpress is starting to blur the line between a blog/publishing platform and a full blown content management system.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a browser-based digital archive created by the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek, N.T. Australia in collaboration with researchers: Kimberly Christen, Craig Dietrich, Tim Dietrich, and Chris Cooney (me).

This project has been in process since 2005 and was installed at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Center this past summer.

• www.alessandroceglia.com

  Alex Ceglia’s “The Intruder”, an animated short completed at USC, is now being shown at film and animation festivals around the world. Alex designed the interface for “Digital Dynamics Across Cultures“, a project we collaborated on for the USC School of of Cinema and Television’s Vectors Journal.