Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
Jeff Joins Hill, Holliday
I’m extremely excited to announce that I have accepted the position of Digital Technology Director at Hill, Holliday in Boston, where I’ll be working with their Interactive team to create new ways to reach customers with Internet technology.
I want to give a huge thanks to Baba Shetty, Hill’s Director of Media + Interactive, for seeking me out for this position based almost entirely on the contents of this blog. For several years now, I’ve been writing about marketing, branding, and innovative web technology – even though my job history has primarily been that of your basic, everyday web monkey. This experience should serve as a lesson that blogging about something you’re passionate about can truly change your life. It may not happen overnight, but with patience and persistence, eventually the right person will take notice.
So, what will I be doing at Hill, Holliday? Basically, I’ll be combining my technical skills and obsessive industry watching to help their Interactive Marketing team create compelling web experiences that truly expand the definition of “online marketing.”
One example of how Hill, Holliday has proven itself as a leader in this area is WhatsYourPolicy.com – an interactive site that has managed to build a passionate, loyal fanbase centered around an insurance company.
Hill, Holliday’s Interactive team is small, but unbelievably talented. It feels like I’m working at a startup, yet we’re steering the creative direction of some of the world’s biggest brands. Plus, we get all the free Dunkin’ Donuts coffee we can drink. My day-to-day role hasn’t entirely been fleshed out yet – I’m sure I’ll be doing a wide variety of things. But, hey, doing things is what I like to do.
OMFG – Firefox 2.0 Rules
This morning I installed Firefox 2.0. This evening I declare it unspeakable awesome.
Why? Well, I was working on a Very Special blog post (you’ll see it shortly) for at least half an hour, when my computer suddenly rebooted itself without any warning whatsoever – (note to self: I think the computer is overheating). Being that this is a WordPress blog, my post was simply being typed up in a basic, garden variety HTML “textarea” – so, clearly my post was doomed.
Not so. Upon getting back into Windows, Firefox realized Something Bad had happened, and asked me if I wanted to “restore my session”. I agreed to this, and Firefox not only reopened all the browser windows and tabs that I had open when the computer crashed – the entire contents of the textbox containing my unsaved post were also revived. I see now that this is a new feature called “Session Restore”
Kudos to the Mozilla crew for building such an unbelievably useful feature into Firefox. If you’re a blogger, this is reason enough alone to upgrade. If you’re not already using Firefox – what are you waiting for?
The “Buy Where You Shop” Debate
Jason Fried of 37signals started an interesting debate on the Signal vs. Noise blog. His post decried advice from Consumer Reports to research products in a store, then purchase online to get the best price. Jason feels that the brick and mortar store is providing a valuable service, and following Consumer Reports’ advice is exploitative and immoral. I think that’s a valid point, and I’m definitely guilty of this form of exploitation, but what I find more interesting is this question: How can stores change their business models to prevent this behavior?
Company-owned single-brand stores are one semi-solution – Apple doesn’t care where you buy your iPod after you play with one in an Apple Store. But this doesn’t do a customer any good if they want to compare multiple brands.
What if “big box” electronics stores behaved more like permanent trade shows – holding no inventory of their own, but renting space to various product vendors to show off their wares. Customers would see companies’ products in the best possible light (no giant banks of monitors locked at the Windows login screen at the wrong resolution), demonstrated by genuine experts. The exhibiting companies make money no matter where you make your purchase, the “store” is getting paid what it needs to keep the facilities running, and the customer gets help from truly knowledgeable people.
It’s not a 100% solution, but I could see something like this hitting the strip malls in the next decade or so.
John Walter Chausse
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing my brand new (first born) son, John Walter Chausse…
Born Friday, October 20th at 2:15 AM
7 pounds, 6 ounces
20.5 inches long
Everyone is now home and doing great. I hope you’ll find my brief absence from blogging understandable… though I have another very big (though not quite as big) announcement coming up very soon…
The Non-Story of Taxing Virtual Economies
Stories keep cropping up lately about whether or not the government will start somehow taxing “virtual economies” such as those found in Second Life or World of Warcraft.
I think the media is making up a story where there is none, presumably as an excuse to throw around words like “cyberspace” – to impress that segment of the population who still finds such concepts incredibly sexy. To me, this is a completely cut and dried issue, with an obvious answer.
First off, what happens in an imaginary world is just that – imaginary. You’re not taxed on fictional income made playing Monopoly, so being taxed for making imaginary money in World of Warcraft is simply ludicrous.
But what about when real money is exchanged for virtual money? What then? Surely this is an incredibly complicated transaction which bends all rules of economics and tax laws, if not those of space-time itself!
Nonsense.
The person selling virtual goods for real money is a contractor. They have performed a task, for which you are willing to pay money. The seller should get taxed on the income they received, just like any other independent contractor. Period. End of story.
But, you say, they’re paying for “virtual goods”, surely this is a brave new world of completely uncharted territory!
Again, this is utter nonsense. What is a website but a “virtual good”? If I’m paid to design a web site, in the end, my “labor” has merely rearranged electrons on a hard drive somewhere. This is exactly the same service performed by a “loot farmer”.
Now you say, “But a web site has real world value – you can use it to make money!”
Well, not necessarily, but nonetheless, people frequently pay for services which create no “value” in the economic sense. If I hire someone to paint a mural on my wall, have they created “value”? If I pay someone to cut my hair, have they created value? In both of these cases (and in countless others), a person is being paid for performing a service with no intrisic value. They’re simply performing a service that I find worthwhile, even though it generates no obvious real world financial benefit to me.
The only truly unique wrinkle I can find in the world of the “virtual economy” is the incredibly specific case of the virtual worlds’ software developers who can, conceivably, instantly generate in-game resources, and then sell them for real world cash. This would truly be a case of unfair real-world wealth generation. But the game developers don’t do that – to do so would be to devalue the in-game currency (just like in the real world) and make the game less challenging and interesting to players – resulting in fewer players and less bread-and-butter income.
This type of cheat would only be of value to a rogue programmer within a company, not acting for the benefit of the company as a whole, who would presumably face termination for this type of activity. This extremely specific situation hardly makes for a brave new world. Otherwise, if you’re loot farming, or otherwise getting paid to perform a task in a game (just as if you were paid to perform a task using Excel or Powerpoint), you are quite simply an independent contractor, and should be taxed as such. End of story.
Museum of Modern Betas
I think what’s so overwhelming about Web 2.0 is that, unlike in the Bubble days, companies are no longer developing sites that you can use for very specific tasks (say, buying pet food) – they’re developing tools that are supposed to be used every day to improve your life. It’s hard not to feel like you may be missing out on something life-changing if you don’t know about every possible option coming online. Of course, the irony is that if you need to use 100 different web tools to simplify your life, how much have you really simplified it? The Web 2.0 “movement” will need to see some serious consolidation if it is to live up to its intended goals.
In any case, the Museum of Modern Betas tracks all the new web apps coming out of the gate and can either help you keep track of things, or overwhelm you even more, depending on how you look at it.
Two things I just learned about XHTML
- It wreaks havoc on tables containing tiny images
- You can’t (legally) use input tags immediately inside form tags – Interestingly, most XHTML tutorials don’t even acknowledge this.
Steve Jobs Proposes a Weird Metaphor
Newsweek: Some people say that iPod might lose its cache because it’s too popular—how can it be cool when Dick Cheney and Queen Elizabeth have one?
Steve Jobs: That’s like saying you don’t want to kiss your lover’s lips because everyone has lips.
Don’t quite follow you there, Steve. My lover wasn’t [allegedly] mass produced in a Chinese sweatshop.
Google to Buy YouTube
Well, you probably didn’t hear it here first, but it’s official: Google is buying YouTube.
Which makes sense. Google is perhaps one of two companies that can make this move and not worry about being sued into oblivion by copyright holders who have been salivating, waiting for YouTube to actually have some money worth suing for.
I’m curious what The “Google is Evil” contingent will do again after the inevitable Great Purge of copyrighted material happens. On the one hand, it will look like Google is caving to The Big Corporations. On the other hand – what, should Google be above copyrights entirely? It was cute when YouTube, that scrappy little startup, got away with it. With Google it’s a whole other story.
Building Ray Ozzie
I don’t post much about Groove anymore, but Wired just ran this awesome illustration of Bill Gates & Ray Ozzie that I just had to share.
The related article, “Rebuilding Microsoft” is here.