Tag Archives: linkedin

After The Quake: Haruki Murakami

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Going to be sacrilegious and just go ahead and say it. I don’t get nor, particularly enjoy Murakami. As in I know, he’s the Japanese Wonder boy and I’m super un hip if I don’t like him but like… whatever.  :POkay, maybe its just a half-truth. I don’t think any of the short stories in After The Quake connected with me even though it really did try to take my time and read each one slowly and take post-story analysis breaks to extract meaning.I really liked “The Little Green Monster” which is part of The Elephant Vanishes collection, but I heard it on select shorts podcast so I think hearing a actor say the story make all the difference.Final query: Why do Audiobooks generally have the most monotone-voiced person telling the story? I recently heard The Tell Tale Heart on Selected Shorts and man, I’ve read the story before but it was AMAZING having heard it. And also the reason why David Sedaris audio books are so fun to listen to over and over again.  Alright, that’s my rant of the day.

Breaking The Curfew

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Finally finished – Breaking The Curfew by Emma Duncan.Yes, so it’s an old book about Pakistan and reading a book about politics in history written in 1989 fully 20 years later in 2009 is a little weird. What is surprisingly un-weird is how much the class, political, tribal and ethnic breakup (and alliances, affinity, identity) that the writer describes (with clarity, sharpness and openess) is still so valid today.Most of the key players in the book in Politics, Tribal Power, Feudal Power, Business Power are the same people from 20 years ago, or at least from the same family. The army and its power play is the same. All you really have to do is replace soviet threat with Tabliban and whamo – you gotta book for 2010.

New ipod, New Life

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Slowly attempting to replace all electronics lost in disaster of 2009.On Saturday is purchased the ipod nano.

My New Ipod Nano

My New Ipod Nano

The good:- I was really happy that I got a purple ipod nano. Purple is my new favorite color, even though a couple of years ago I literally hated the color. It’s funny how that happens.- I actually like having the radio on the phone. Yes I know, this feature is LONG overdue as in a lot of non ipod music players had this 5+ years ago. Whatever, I’m glad I have it on my ipod.The bad:- I don’t like the click wheel on my new one as much as I did on the old one. It seems to be less responsive and of generally cheaper quality.- I generally dislike the long shape of the new one. I know its all about the big screen to see your album flow, videos and the like but the shape is pretty awkward.- Videos!! Okay so great; we can now take a video on the ipod. That’s nice. But umn.. I can’t take a picture (because apparently the video camera is so shitty that grainy videos are okay but if you took a still photo you would really know how bad it is.) Also, I can take both pictures and videos on my blackberry AND I can upload them to facebook, BB message them or email them instantly. So I’m not sure why I would ever choose to take a video on my ipod.- So I’m not planning to take any videos on my nano, BUT if i was going to the placement of the video camera is terrible. It’s at the bottom of the ipod where you would put your thumb naturally if you were recording vertically (as in you have to flip it around). It’s really weird and awkward.- The new ipod nano has voice memos; seems like fun and I’m thinking about using it one day to record my Karachi driving road rage which should be fun. In the MEANWHILE, it seems like the iTunes app, and ipod nano itself has limited ability to manage voice notes. Every time I plug in the nano it asks me if I want to download the note (which I don’t). Plus there doesn’t seem to be a way to delete, organize, name or manage my voice memos or tell it to not ask me about them every time I plug my ipod in.- The voice over feature for the ipod which tells you what song is playing when you press the center button SOUNDS like a good idea. But its kind of annoying because it keeps on turning on when I’m actually trying to add stars to a song I really like. Also, I can’t find a place in the options to turn this voice over thing off. ANNOYING. It also is a bit buggy, if you try to forward through a song sometimes is starts saying the name of songs that you are not even listening to.- In the ipod interface; why do podcasts have their own menu (makes sense) but audiobooks are under music (makes no sense).Overall, this ipod seriously feels like Apple treated it like the bastard child while it focus on its new love child the iphone.  My opins, my old nano was nicer.
My OLD ipod Nano

My OLD ipod Nano

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

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Or uhh– thankfully not so mutant, not so ninja turtles.

Turtles Power on the Beach

Went to Sandspit beach this weekend and was lucky enough to be there for turtle egg laying season. We saw TWO turtles coming up from the ocean (those cuties are NOT as slow as you would think for a turtle and are really big) and we say them dig their hole and start laying the eggs.The local peeps who protect the turtles told us to keep away from the turtles until they start laying their eggs (otherwise they get afraid and run away aborting the turtle babies for the year).  Once they started laying their eggs we got closer to take a look. It was amazing – right under their back legs is a surprisingly deep hole which had over two dozen eggs.Apparently each turtle will lay between 100 – 120 eggs. Once the turtles lay the eggs and go back to the sea the local peeps dig them up and move them to fenced off location where they are safe from predators like dogs and of course humans. We either saw the Green Sea Turtle or the Olive Ridley Turtle. My bet is that it was the Green Sea Turtle which as supposed to be big ’cause these guys sure were. (I also kept referring to said turtles as guys, even though they are clearly the opposite.)We also got to see some of the baby turtles that had already hatches (they were probably a couple of weeks old) and released them into the ocean. Pretty cool!

More Turtles on the Beach - Photo Credit Danish Ghazi

More Turtles on the Beach - Photo Credit Danish Ghazi

Turtles laying eggs - Photo Credit goes to Sami

Turtles laying eggs - Photo Credit goes to Sami

New Phone, New Life

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Finally cracked yesterday and decided I could no longer deal with a blackberry with the round ball thingy that does not move – rendering my blackberry a useless piece of plastic.I bought the Blackberry Gemini. It was exciting purchase in that it happened so fast – I asked for it at 11 (as I was just minutes from throwing the phone against the wall) and it arrived a couple of hours later totally unexpectedly.The good:

  • nice bright screen
  • good screen size and really light and thing
  • the new interface is slightly easier to use
  • the track pad

The bad:

  • although the shiny screen looks good, it dirty smudged really fast which is annoying
  • the layout of the keys is tighter than the old bb curve which takes getting used to
  • the keys are really hard and you have to press them making typing more work and slower (okay this gets really tiring…)

Overall I really like the phone although I really wish they would fix the keypad which is the most annoying feature.The bold goes for around 42,000 rps (almost double for a leather back, slightly bigger wider phone) so at 25,000 rps the gemini is a really good deal in my view.

Marketing 360 gobbly gook

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There is a very popular marketing forum in Pakistan called marketing 360.  Someone told me to get on the list when I moved here because this was apparently where all the marketing peeps connected. Here is a recent post:” The telecom company you are talking about believes in Ethic-ism rather than Intellectualism and ethics are beyond logic & reasons but based on pure experiential wisdom in other words one can call it mannerism of relationships. In ethic-ism its always a real natural benefit and embed in society and culture. Intellectualism is finding the reason n logic and creating a benefit which might be natural or forced when its natural in essence it works like great wisdom but when forced it’s meaningless hence increases the failure rate.Both ways are fine but ethic-ism is more stable, natural and beneficial to the adopter. My experience says ethics sells more!Kindest Regards,Ali Mirza “Now, I have been known to invent words myself – but umn? ” Ethic-ism “  what with the “ism” dude. Maybe you mean Ethicism?Never mind that, he goes on to say…  “ethics are beyond logic and reason” .. wha wha whaaaa?  In a 5 word sentence he’s  x-ed out a long history of moral philosophy that starts with Socrates – based on logic and reason.I can’t even understand what the rest of this mean means… “ethics are … based on pure experiential wisdom in other words one can call it mannerism of relationships”.What the hell is mannerism of relationships???Also, I hate to be nit-picky – but NOWHERE in the definition of “intellectualism” does it mean “finding the reason n logic and creating a benefit which might be natural or forced”.  WHAT?!I think the scary part of this goobly gook is the utter defeat your feel – you can’t really argue with someone if they have no logic in their argument.

If you haven’t heard: We are facing tough economic time(z)

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For most of my 5+ years of working career I’ve been on the media side, first on the classifieds end (BuySell.com) and then on the classifieds + content end (Autonet.ca ).On the media end your energy is divided between building interesting content (so that the people come), figuring out how to sell the advertising around that content (what do the advertisers want? how do we efficiently use all out inventory?).In between there is lots of planning, building and tracking metrics, internal politics and fighting for resources – much like anywhere else.Now I’m working on the agency side the experience has been very different and eye opening. I’m generally lucky to be working at a digital agency where we do both planning, buying, strategy, web applications, social media et al. so the work is interesting and varied for the most part.Things I wish I knew back that that I know now: (I dare you to say this 10x)The benefits developing a close relationship with the buying agency (And umn… no I don’t mean in the kick-back kind of way…)It always surprises me how little interaction the local media sites (for the most part) have with us despite the fact that we probably account for a large portion of the overall online buys.I guess it’s because generally the online industry is so small here, it’s not enough revenue to really matter. But if you are spending significant money to build an online platform – you should be spending at least a decent amount of time trying to figure out how to effectively monetize it!My non rocket science advice:1.    Please don’t place ad spots at the bottom of the page as studies has shown that fewer eye balls see them2.    Please try to make your ad placement in BigBox (or LREC as they call it here) because it offers the most design options.3.    I would also love to see some interesting creative size like the half page ad; I tried it on Autonet.ca where the ad spaces could support both a BigBox or a Double Big Box (for the same CPM rate!) but for whatever reason it did not become popular.  I guess you have to be a site like the NY times for an advertiser to want to make special creative for you. I know from out end; we would be happy to include it in the plan to see what the response was like.I do have some junior level rocket science advice (develop a network by partnering with other sites; find ways to track users and serve them ads! take over the world! no wait… scratch the last one) but that’s for another post.On the other hand I’m glad I’m NOT on the media side right now. As a digital agency we focus a MOST of our attention on strategies for developing engagement directly with the customer through both Facebook and web applications and connecting directly via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WAP sites, SMS contest, developing blogs or even content portals.Once media was such an important component; now it’s increasingly irrelevant.Tough economic times for my favorite sites like NYTimes and TorontoStar.Although I haven’t been to either site in at least two weeks; but I did spend most of my ‘downtime’ today getting to level 21 on Mafia Wars and streaming the new episodes from The Daily Show…

4 Indispensible Tools for any Marketer

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1. Google ReaderIf you don’t know what an RSS feed is, learn about it now and start using them! For the rest of us, we all know the number one challenge (in any industry) is keeping up to date with what is happening in your field.RSS feeds make life 1000% easier since you can easily track the blogs/websites/people that you find most interesting.Google Reader is in my opinion the best way to manage and keep track of your RSS feeds especially you’ve got a built-in network of colleagues who are also using it to share items of interest. 2) Screen Capture ToolsBelieve it or not, I have three (3!) screen capture tools installed in my browser.Although anyone in the online field (online media, marketing, web development, product management) would I have more uses for these tools; I find it hard to imagine a job where there is no need to ever capture an area of the screen.

  • Notable App: I recently discovered NotableApp and have started using it. The best things about NotableApp is that it allows you to quickly and easily highlight certain areas of your screen capture and add notes. You can also email the link to the screen capture with your notes; though I generally end up saving and sending a pdf. The personal version is free to use, allows for up to 3 users and 3GB of storage. Noteable has a firefox plugin which makes it very handy. The big drawback is that it doesn’t let you grab an image outsize of your browser screen – and sometimes you need to include info on browser setting (i.e. for reporting bugs) or the date and time the screenshot was captured.
  • Aviary is a mind-bogglingly cool company. This have a full suite of tools online applications for editing including an image editor (Phoenix) a vector editor (Raven) and a newly launched audio editor called Myna. Given our internet speed; full-fledged image editing online is a little too slow; but this company is definitely going to be a game changer for things like Photoshop and Illustrator in the future. (Are they watching and creating their own competitive products? Hello… anyone out there?) Anyways, I mostly use their screen capture tool called Talon. Again it has a Firefox extension so image capture is an easy one-click away. Talon let’s you capture an area of the screen or the full screen and you can edit the image using Falcon which is an image mark-up tool, if needed. Again there is no way to capture info outside of the browser scree

  • Screencast is by TechSmith makers of SnagIt. In my previous job as product manager SnagIt was probably the most used tool. But since there is not free version of the tool I’ve had to go greener (cheaper?) pastures. Screencast needs to be downloaded and installed onto your computer. You can capture a whole page, visible page only or a portion of the page but the best part of Screencast is that you can capture videos. This is really handy if you want to explain an interaction to a developer, or need to capture an interaction. You also get space to store your videos on Screencast which is great as you can easily add links to things in presentations without blowing up the size of your presentation.

3) Delicious Using delicious is probably nothing new for most marketers, I add this to the list because it’s probably one of the tools I use every day. I’ve become a religious bookmarker and I save anything I find remotely interesting – creating presentations becomes so much faster when you don’t have to hunt for the right references and examples. Searching for your bookmarked items in delicious is usually pretty good as you can search based on title, tags or comments. Probably one of the under-used items in delicious is where you can explore other people public tags of things; it’s a good way to hunt out relevant pages/sites/things/ideas. 4) Brand Monitoring ToolsThere are tons of tools that help you monitor your brand online; totally indispensible if you are a brand / marketing / product manager. Although there are many, Viral Heat, PeopleBrowsr and more, the only one I’ve used is Social Seek because again its free.It takes less than 5 mins to download, install and setup SocialSeek. You enter your brand name and it will monitor it on a range of websites including Blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Images on Flickr.This is just my list; what would you add to it?This post was also published on PakMediaBlog @ http://pakmediablog.net/otherstuff/4-indispensible-tools-for-any-marketer/