We Are Team Rubber

Last night Team Rubber paid a visit to a Bristolian driving range, to check for golfing geniuses within the company. It emerged that everyone in Team Rubber was naturally talented at smacking plastic balls with rods of metal. My natural talent was shining so brightly last night that it brought tears to the eyes of onlookers. One fellow golfer said that during my performance a halo started appearing 12 inches over my head, and the world slowed down to a crawl accompanied by Dvorak’s New World Symphony. No, actually that’s a complete lie. I was appalling.

i) We love reading, especially books; the web’s altogether more organic foe.

ii) The reading list is getting longer.

Here is some visual proof for both of the above statements:

Books = stacky

‘Marketing guru’ Seth Godin (who, as Andy insightfully points out, is ‘annoying but accurate’) posted today about workaholics. He says:

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.

Now I might be about to, er, expose myself here (as an odd individual stepping out of the safety of the unspoken social understanding between us all), although I suspect not, but I think I’m one of those people and have one of those jobs. I’m sure my wife would say I am… and actually, you, my colleagues, ‘caught’ me the other day, logging into the School Councils site from home at 10:30pm :s

So what about the rest of yas? Who else will ‘fess up to being quite caught up with all the stuff we do? And will anyone admit to just being here to do a job, take a wage and go home? It’d be interesting to see what the prevailing accepted standard is here, as in most jobs it’s cooler to be the latter…

Click me

A very interesting article from the Guardian regarding Facebook, its founders and board members. The article speculates that the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel.

In Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.

Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax.

‘He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: “You can’t have a workers’ revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu,” he says. ‘

any way have a look see………

Ok, ok, so I’m blowing my own trumpet a bit, but it turns out one of my personal sites (social comic book) won “mashup of the week” on mashupawards.com.

I’d like to thank my mother, father, my childhood pets, …

We’re just launching our Viral Ad Network system, a premium, managed service to help publishers who are asking “How can I make money from my readers by publishing quality viral content?”

The Network will provide a new, more interesting, more clickable source of ad revenue for blogs and sites by sending site owners great viral content tailored specifically to their audience.

To accompany the site’s launch, we’ve put together a series of videos on topics such as ‘How to monetize my blog or portal’: the clip below, for example, tells you why and how to go about signing up to the Viral Ad Network. If I’m a site owner and I want to make money from my subscribers, I need to have a watch of the clip or just get straight over to the Viral Ad Network site and sign myself up!

How to join the network

Something slightly less rubbery is the GHOP competition I mentioned a few weeks back. I thought I’d update everyone and put up some screenshots of the themes that our GHOP participants have created to date. These are all plone 3 themes, and in the collective to play with right now.

Now thezep.net has wound down and come to a close, I thought I’d log/brainstorm/babble about some of my afterthoughts on my first ever blog handling/babbling/waffling experience…

Writing articles and blog posts for thezep.net proved difficult sometimes, partly due to the staggered nature of Zeppelin news throughout November, and partly due to regular smatterings of good old writers block. I wanted the content for my blog to remain vital and fresh, by not falling into the plunging pits of mundane and generic posting! Sometimes it would come in one draft; an idea would pop up, I’d write it and publish it and be happy with it forever more. Occasionally the news and story was there in my hands, but the words and the inspiration to articulate it would not. Inevitably, a desire to write and a rarely flourishing vocabulary would on the odd instance be lacking a relevant topic or a juicy enough news story.

The secret is to harvest your thoughts and to seize those opportunities when the blog writing gods would shine down and the topic stars aligned and the (almost) perfect post (well, not perfect, but nearly so) would emerge.

I guess, like those women that expose their sex lives online from behind an alias, it’s every budding blog writers dream to maybe make a bit of cash. I’d certainly like to make money from my blog. Of course there’s Adsense, which may not be a totally bad idea now the blog is winding down, but there must be a special feeling that emerges from getting paid to write your thoughts! Or at least to write your thoughts, have enough people read them so that Adsense would apply to your site.

By Ian