Author Archive

Earlier today, my friend Richard Yum posted a Tweet saying that Starcraft 2 sold 3 million copies last month and that he “bet like 90% of those were sold in Korea.”

Its a smart bet for Richard if history is anything to go by. According to the infographic below, 50% of copies of the first Starcraft were sold to South Koreans, but that was ten-years ago. Since then, interest in the franchise has exploded:

I’ve never played Starcraft – how good is it?

-Parker

It used to be that you could get away with just a website. Then you needed way to collect email addresses so that people could subscribe to it. Then those forward-looking social media pros started saying that RSS was the future of communications, then Twitter. Whatever the medium, its always been about making it easy for your audience to get updates from your website.

With that in mind, I set up a Facebook Page for BlogCampaigning. All it will really do is pull in posts from here, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t become a Fan.

-Parker

If you spent the latter half of your summer following Heather, Jens, Adam Gorley and myself on Twitter in hopes of a quick-fix for your BlogCampaigning cravings we’ve got news for you: We’re back to blogging here.

Jens was busy writing love letters to his girlfriend Jenna, but he also got a job at a video game design studio in Berlin. We’ll have a post up shortly about his experience writing a game design document.

Adam Gorley did some serious renovations on his house. I hear he even dug out his own basement. Has your editor ever dug out a basement? I didn’t think so.

Heather spent some time traveling, and got to see the west coast of Canada for the first time.

In May, I started a new job at Radar DDB. That’s been keeping me pretty busy, but not so busy that I didn’t also go to Las Vegas, New Orleans and Vancouver on separate mini-vacations.

I have no idea what Espen has been up to.

Thanks for reading BlogCampaigning, and stay tuned!

-Parker

I’ve met a Jon Gauthier a few times and while I  knew he was an entrepreneurial fellow, I didn’t know he was starting up his own courier company.

The company, Good Foot Delivery, “provides a personalized point-to-point delivery service on foot or via public transit as well as employment opportunities to people with developmental disabilities.”

I think this is a great idea, and while I don’t want to downplay the hard work that Jon probably put in to get Good Foot off the ground I also think its a great example of how easy it can be to get a project like this off the ground with the help of social media. Its great to see that Jon was able to use his skills to do something he was really passionate about while also giving back to the community.

Read more about Jon’s company, Good Foot, in the Toronto Star and then vote for them on the Pepsi Refresh Project website.

Keep up the good work, Jon!

-Parker

It happens to me every summer.

The sun comes out, and all of a sudden I’d rather be playing soccer, riding my bike or sitting on a patio instead of working on BlogCampaigning.

Don’t worry, though. I’ll be back soon enough with some stuff here. Expect updates about my new job, thoughts about the advertising industry, why I think Toronto is Canada’s #1 Second Class City and lots more. I’m also big on the idea of those infograpahic-type things that you see everywhere these days, so maybe I’ll even try and put one together.

Until then, follow BlogCampaigning on Twitter to stay in the loop. Or just get outside and spend some time enjoying the good weather.

-Parker

A few weeks ago, a young producer and musician by the name of Jeremiah Vancans sent me a song he thought I’d like, called “PR Girls”, that he produced for his group The Deli Boys.

From his description of the song:

“It talks about the large boot, small dog, fancy bag culture that has taken over the city streets across our nation. We recognized a type of girl that was repeatedly emerging from the deep jungles of urban culture. Owning the street with their over-priced bags, they developed their own language of terms by using weird melodic lisps and slurs. These women, no matter if they were in the Public Relations field or not, were dubbed ‘PR Girls’. This term catapulted the idea of writing and producing this song. We hopes you like.”

(If you’re reading this post via RSS, you might have to click through to listen to the track below.)

The Deli Boys – PR Girls

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

What do you think? Is this what you think of when you think “PR Girl”?

And on a related note: whatever happened to Kim Kardashian’s reality show about PR Girls?

-Parker

On Saturday, June 12, I uploaded a series of vintage NASA photos to Flickr.

I wrote a blog post about how I found the photos, Stumbled the Flickr set, and also emailed a link to the set to one of my favorite blogs, io9.

When I woke up on Sunday morning, the set had over 10,000 views. As the day went on, and I kept checking the stats, it continued to gain more views.

What happened?

io9 wrote about the photos, referring to them as “the motherlode of space porn” and linking to the set on Flickr.

That post received approximately 52 different tweets, while a link to the set itself has received almost 90 tweets.

Jens told me he was going to submit it to Boingboing and Reddit, but he was too lazy to do either.

According to a little search I did, it was also shared on Facebook 82 times, got 45 “Likes” and 35 comments.

Since then, 52 different people have added me as a contact on Flickr (you can too: I’m ParkerNow there as well). My photos have had over 50 comments and tons of them have been made favorites by other people. Even better is that some of the Flickr people commenting are incredibly knowledgeable about the photos and are adding information, like when the photo was taken and who is in it (as below):

Admittedly, the photos weren’t really “mine” to begin with (as various comments have pointed out, better quality versions of some of the pictures are available on the NASA website and are in the public domain), but I wanted to put them in a public space and the whole thing has turned out to be a pretty rewarding experience.

On a related note, this graphic of “Your Flickr Stats Explained” is pretty good.

-Parker

Did you watch the Brazil/North Korea game today? I caught part of it while I was eating a late lunch and thought that Maicon’s goal was amazing.

Nike agreed and (not a brand to miss a beat) did an excellent job of capitalizing on it by posting an image of Maicon with the caption “Know Your Angles. Write The Future.” on the Nike Football Facebook page.

No kind of planning or content calendar can take that into account. An update like that with a response of over 1500 “Likes” on Facebook and more than 300 comments means that Nike is in tune with its audience and able to deliver what will create conversation amongst them.

In short, Nike knows its angles.

Between this and the previous post I wrote about the Pitch Perfect series of mixes, you’re probably thinking I’ve gone a bit nuts for Nike.

The truth is that I’ve worn Nike shoes for years (they fit my feet well), and currently have about four active pairs (cleats, indoor soccer, running, casual). If they’re going to keep me entertained as well, what’s not to love?

-Parker

A few years ago, Jens gave me a CD with some files on it that I needed for a school project. Also on the CD was a folder titled “NASA – 1172 Pictures (Black Magic Alchemy Illuminati Nwo).”

Knowing what I did about Jens at the time, I wasn’t super surprised. I also thought that the contents of the folder were awesome and, for the most part, exactly as advertised: over 1000 old-school space and rocketry pictures. There are photos of astronauts, galaxies, and the earth from space. There are diagrams of rocket trajectories, and landscapes of the moon and mars.

Some of them seem to be pictures from magazine articles, while others seem to be scans of official slides. They’re all amazing.

When I asked Jens where he got them, he said he didn’t even know about the folder, and that he’d originally gotten the CD from another friend of his.

Wherever they came from, they were too awesome to keep bottled up on a hard drive and I decided to upload them to Flickr.

Enjoy them.

-Parker

Note: this post has some spoilers about Ender’s Game, so if you haven’t read it yet, don’t read this post. Just go out and buy it and read it, because it’s amazing. But don’t take my word for it;  I mean, the 1986 Hugo Award and 1984 Nebula Award are hard to argue with. It’s not even that long of a book. You can probably finish it in a lazy summer afternoon at the cottage, if you put down your iPhone for long enough. You can buy it on Amazon right now for, like, seven bucks.

This weekend, I finished re-reading Ender’s Game for the first time since I originally read it ten years ago and was blown away by how well the author, Orson Scott Card, predicted the future from the early 80s.

I say the early 80s, but it could have been earlier. Card’s first version was published as a story in a science fiction magazine in 1977. He later fleshed this out to a full-fledged novel in 1985 (according to the copyright information in my copy of the book), and made some more minor changes in 1991.

And when I’m talking about how Card predicted the future, I’m not talking about Ender’s Desk (which is described exactly like an iPad) or even the Ansible, a device capable of near-instantaneous communication over vast distances (not that far off, really). I’m talking about how he predicted the rise of blogging and the influence social media can have over culture and politics.

While most of the plot of the book follows young Ender Wiggin, youngest of three children, as he goes to Battle School at the age of six to learn how to be the commander of a fleet to fight invading aliens, a sub-plot involves how his sociopathic, but brilliant, brother Peter, and more empathetic, but equally brilliant, sister Valentine, are left home on earth.

Under the leadership of Peter, the two of them start contributing to “forums” on the “nets” using pseudonyms, or characters:

“They began composing debates for their characters. Valentine would prepare an opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her. His answer would be intelligent, and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and good political rhetoric. Valentine had a knack for alliteration that made her phrases memorable. Then they would enter the debate into the network, separated by a reasonable amount of time, as if they were actually making them up on the spot. Sometimes a few other netters would interpose comments, but Peter and Val would usually ignore them or change their own comments only slightly to accommodate what had been said.”

The next paragraph describes how Peter tracked how their work was being read and shared, and reads almost like a description of media monitoring in 2010.

As the two keep writing, their influence grows, their articles get syndicated, and they begin to get involved in serious policy discussions. Since its all online, no one knows that it is actually just two genius children.

Implausible? Yes. Impossible? No.

While I doubt that our global politics are being played like a game of chess by a couple of kids, I think Orson Scott Card’s prediction of the way an ordinary citizen can get involved via the internet and become a serious, real-world influence is a great bit of future-casting.

Reasons like that are why I love reading science-fiction, be it old-school Heinlein and Asimov, 80s cyberpunk, or the post-human stuff that’s all the rage these days. Science fiction is a framework for thinking about what could happen; it’s a way of looking forward to finding out who is going to be right.

Have you read Ender’s Game? Were Peter and Valentine the original bloggers?