1. Use specifics. Are you selling a sweater? Or are you selling that cozy, cuddling-by-the-fire feeling? (You might just be selling a sweater. That’s OK too. Try reversing it: “It’s a sweater. If you want a fluffy cuddly feeling, adopt a kitten. This just keeps you warm.”)

2. Try grammar. It’s really not so bad every once in awhile.

3. Don’t be afraid to tell grammar to suck itself.

4. Delete until it stops making sense. Then add in some specifics.

5. Reward people. Encourage those rare individuals who actually bother to read. Don’t punished them with boring crap.

6. When in doubt, delete something.

7. When you think it’s finished, delete something.

8. There was a number 8, but I deleted it. See above.

9. Spell check. Seriously. It’s like right there.

10. Pay attention. To everything. Because real life is always, always better inspiration than some other writer’s interpretation of it. Plus, books are for pussies.

This rabbit is named after Captain Picard. He needs love, content management.

Or, maybe you have a little non-profit animal rescue organization, with news updates, adoptable animal profiles, pet care advice, and adoption stories, all updated by different volunteers.

Maybe you have something in-between. Either way, you have a buttload of information and it’s only getting harder and harder for the people who need it most to find.

Here’s a quick and dirty solution:

Slap a blog on your homepage and get tagging.

Someone comes looking for an eco-friendly business solution? Hey look, there’s a “hippy crap for your business” category! Someone wants a cute orange fuzzy kitten? Lucky for them, you have 25 posts tagged “fuzzy”. Woo!

The important thing about doing this is that all the information is accessible from the same place. This not only makes it easier for anyone visiting your site to find what they need, it also makes it easier for your volunteers/marketing people/middle managers to add advice/product launches/videos/whatever the hell else could possibly be relevant or interesting – and it makes it easier to track, edit, update and delete.

Some great examples:

Evolution Bereau

Big Spaceship

Gary‘s new portfolio website

There are all kinds of awesome content management systems out there – blogs are one kind that tend to be particularly easy to use for people who would otherwise have no idea what they were doing. WordPress isn’t so bad. (That’s what we use.)

If you’ve used any other super-easy-free content management systems, or have seen another great example of an organization that’s done this, please post it in the comments section.

(P.S. Picard is a real rabbit up for adoption at SaveABunny. Also, adorable.)

Thea’s friend: “Something Economist something writing an article for some client something.”

Thea: “Wait, so, The Economist is writing content for the client’s website?”

Thea’s friend: “No. It’s an advertorial that runs in the print edition.”

Thea: “Oh. How awesome would it be though if you could get The Economist to provide content for your brand’s website? Like if your target market was into that stuff?”

Thea’s friend: “You know what, I’ve got, um, a… plane. To catch. I’ll facebook you or something.”

Three days later the idea still seemed sort of valid, so stick with me here. Brands need content that’s going to be valuable to their customers. Magazines need someone to actually pay money for their content. So, brands commission trusted publications to create content that’s relevant to their customers. Journalists keep their jobs, brands get some trustworthiness and interestingness rubbed off on them, and consumers get to enjoy not having to flip through crappy advertorials or skim over boring corporate blogs. Everyone wins! (Except me. I’m a content writer. So I would lose. It’s ok, I’ll always have the novel…)

Anyone heard of this being done already? Would there be some kind of code of journalism that this would break? (Ha! “Code of journalism.” As if.) How would you price something like that? Is the shift from branded content to contented brand really practical? What do you think?

1. The whole unboxing genre still seems odd to me, BUT yay for spontaneous user-generated advertising.

2. Ninjas rule.

3. Thank you flytip and RGA.

So how do you make a game (or anything else) not just addictive, but sustainably addictive? There are games people are still playing after years – decades even; World of Warcraft, Diablo, Dungeons and Dragons. They all have something in common: user-generated content. Yep, that custom +12 flame sword or whatever you spent 26 hours on is actually a hot marketing buzzword. In the game industry, it’s sometimes called “player-generated content,” because they’re fancy like that. LittleBigPlanet, one of the most highly-acclaimed games probably ever, is based almost entirely on this concept. Mad Libs, arguably the original mass-market UGC-based game, has been around since 1953. The pillars of our modern Internet – Wikipedia, YouTube, and social media – depend on it entirely. No one’s getting bored of those.

The fourth pillar, obviously, is Lolcats.

When you invest time or money into something, it gains value. When you invest your idea into something, it becomes priceless. Everyone has time and money, but only you can create this content in exactly this way. This investment creates a sense of ownership toward the greater whole that you’re contributing to, because you literally created a part of it. The more the framework depends on your contribution, the more ownership you feel. Mad Libs might be at one end of this spectrum, Wikipedia at the opposite end, and your average democratic republic somewhere in the middle.

There’s two points I’m leading up to here. One is that frameworks and tools are more sustainable than static content or product, and creating the right environment for life may be a far better investment than trying to create that life from scratch, when it comes to content for games, websites, or probably any other medium.

The other point is that FarmVille should have a laboratory feature where I can create my own genetically modified super crops and sell the seeds to my friends. Get on it, Zynga.

1. Porn. Now that that’s out of the way…

2. Shopping. Yeah, that sweater looked great on the website – it even looked good on me. But it itched like an std from a mosquito when I finally got it in the mail and I couldn’t return it because it’s freezing outside and now I don’t have a sweater. Jerks. If only there had been some way to know it would be itchy beforehand…

This is what Obamacare feels like.

3. Texturtizing. Now your brand has a texture! Who’ll try to copyright “warm and fluffy” first? …Probably T-mobile. That was a stupid question.

4. Puns. “Our new product rocks!” Ad feels like a rock. (Please never do this.)

5. Menus. Frak scrolling and pop-ups. I can just dig around in my virtual bag of holding for that +5 fire augment or whatever. Warm and hexagonal ftw.

6. Blind Internet. Refreshable braille displays can only go so far.

7. Texture tones. Like ring tones, only… textures.

"Ah crap, it's my chemically-imbalanced middle-manager from the post office."

8. Tagging. Imagine a Flickr-style tag on a photo that instead of saying some inane crap about the use of lighting, it feels like dewy flower petals.

9. Texturepedia. Ever wondered what the inside of your veins feel like?

10. The other kind of menus. On the nano-scale taste is really just texture – why not sample your meal before hand with a lick? Oh. Right. That.

11. Music. Music videos are so 20th century. I shouldn’t have to be on drugs to feel techno. Drugs are expensive.

Btw I learned about haptics on Singularity Hub. You guys rock. (rollover: igneous rock texture.)

Here’s what I predict for the next ten years:

1. Augmented reality will become as commonplace and useful as the internet became in the 90s, as consumers buy more smartphones and early experimenters find out what works and what doesn’t. Remember when the first few URLs started showing up in ads? We’re there now with augmented reality.

"I could really use a cold one! Anyone else down for the fresh taste of the Rockies?"

2. Brands will embrace the new emphasis on social interactions, sometimes to extremes – think robots you can hang out with in bars who casually suggest Miller at every opportunity.

3. 90s fashions will dominate. No, not those 90s. The other 90s.

4. We’ll finally get a space elevator. It’ll be made out of carbon nanotubes. It’ll be 100% privately funded.

5. Near the end of the decade, the whole “authenticity” thing will be played and we’ll want fake stuff again.

6. Nanotech will be used for evil. Also, good. Also, marketing.

7. We’ll discover conclusive evidence of life on a another planet. It will be related to us.

8. There will be fewer, and less deadly wars, thanks in large part to communication between citizens via the internet.

9. Social games and gestural user interfaces will totally pwn traditional consoles and controllers, annoying some but finally making the industry “culturally relevant” via deep, meaningful interactions. Later in the decade, the cool kids will finally get into console games for the retro factor. Irony will win the day.

10. Social media, geotagging, augmented reality, security concerns and chronic over-sharing will join forces to completely destroy what little privacy we had left. Surprisingly few people will complain.

And to the last ten years: good riddance, I hope you burn in hell.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I like it better.

Joseph Pine on what consumers want | Video on TED.com.

Is that dude grilling some emu steak on the freaking moon? Metal!

Despite being unfortunately described as “the America’s Army of STEM education”, I have high hopes for NASA’s upcoming moon base MMOG.

Why? One, I like space stuff. Two, this quote:

“We are working from the premise that game developers know more about how to make a good, fun game than government agencies,”

So, if it sucks, blame Virtual Heroes. Not NASA. Because everything else involving NASA always goes famously right.

News via Edge.