I Blog, Therefore, I Am

I tend to think of this blog as an online magazine of stupid and sometimes interesting stuff. That's one of the reasons I never do a post without an image in it. (This ain't The New Yorker. It's more like Highlights for Children or Mad.) That's also the reason I will go back and edit a post if I later find misspellings or half-baked thoughts not fully fleshed out. Or if I find some twisted language that makes no sense, such as using "half-baked" and "fleshed out" in a sentence together. Baked flesh.

Traffic to this little corner of the World Wide Waste of Time has crept up slowly, but there is no way to "monetize" that light trickle and you will never see contextual ads in the sidebar. Maybe someday when I reach 100,000 hits a day I can start selling t-shirts and plastic awareness bracelets. Until then, it's just a place to create, because oftentimes my job doesn't allow me to do that.

Here are some of the things being said around the world about Where's My Jetpack?

"Brilliantly subversive."
Advance, a Danish agency

"I'm quite fond of Mr. Jetpacks."
Stan Lee, Melbourne, Australia

"It must be nice typing rants to yourself."
Some anonymous commenter

Not What We Had In Mind

The Corporate Blog Challenge

Click for bigger, printable, stealable version.



Having assisted companies in setting up and administering blogs, I know it’s challenging to convince them of the need to be transparent, less stodgy and a little “uncorporate” if they want to (get ready) “maximize their presence in the social media space.” Most of the blogs I helped get established are miserable failures now because the companies either a) gave up on frequent posting or b) only wanted to be rah-rah vehicles, self-promoting and basically devoid of personality. The authors also weren’t going out to other blogs, boards and forums and making relevant comments that directed readers back to them.

I recently visited the corporate blog of a worldwide company. It is well-designed, has many expert authors and frequent postings. (One author has over 800 posts.) They’ve employed all the appropriate tag mechanisms and social media link widgets. They incorporate plenty of text links, images and the navigation is intuitive. But nothing is happening interactively. I am hard pressed to find a single comment on the entire blog. There is no “two-way” happening. The posts read more like little articles and they appear to have been sterilized. I’m starting to wonder if the blog is merely search engine fodder, because clearly, there’s no “conversation” going on. Comments are also monitored heavily, which is generally expected of a corporate blog, but I submitted an (somewhat) innocuous comment last Friday and it has yet to appear, perhaps because it was (somewhat) humorous and not in keeping with this corporation’s communications guidelines.

Corporate guidelines should be relaxed to a degree if you’re going to get any interaction from your company's blog. For legal reasons, you can’t have your authors going off on rants like a private blogger is free to do, but at the same time you should allow your authors (and commenters) the ability to speak with some candor.

The corporate blog I visited has a 150 word paragraph of fine print above the comment box. It's full of legalese, with phrases like “collect, process, use,” “personally identifiable information,” “worldwide in perpetuity,” and “without notice to you and without compensation.”

I mean, c’mon. I just want to comment. But this is one example of why corporate America is having a hard time getting a handle on “Web 2.0.” (Kill me if I ever use that term again.) In the interest of sales and marketing (and in the interest of covering their asses legally) they’ve pretty much killed the conversation.

Arrested Development

As the inventor of the Middle School Humor Index (MSHI) I am not the least bit surprised by this blog's ranking. I display this badge with shameful pride, if such an oxymoronic thing is possible.

Thanks to Make the Logo Bigger for the find.

One Year, 365 Posts

One year ago today I started this blog. This post is #365. Where's My Jetpack? has almost become a part time job volunteer position. It was started out of frustration with not being able to write anything fun at my job. (Go ahead, write 40 pages about predictive and statistical analytics software and tell me you had fun doing it.) I suppose I'll keep it going, unless someone out there has an actual paying job that let's me write like this.















On this anniversary, I will add a new feature to the sidebar called "Open Mic Night" in which I will open myself up to ridicule, scorn and derision by posting homemade recordings every so often. At worst, I make you cringe, requiring an aural palate cleansing using your favorite music. At best, I quit my day job and go on tour with the White Stripes.

Fred is Dead

Not literally, but he laid his blog to rest yesterday. It was a sad day for ad blogging, as Fred often posted amusing insights about more than just ads and the ad world. The author will live on at Hands Across the Porch and No Joe Girls, among other places.

I found Freelance Fred through George Parker, which is basically how the incestuous blog world works. You hit a link on one blog's comments or sidebar and find another blogger who posts stuff you like to read. Fred went out in style, buying a 20 oz steak at an Atlanta area strip club and reviewing it for his readers.