Happy Friday

Eric Boyd and I have named him Herman.
He is totally bizarre looking and yet fascinating.

The future

This one is longish, but worth it I promise.

A few times a year I stumble across something that changes my perception of community and social networks, and a few other times I discover some art form or movement that compels me to talk about it incessantly. Yesterday I found something that is both.
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
This is the latest iteration of social amalgamation on the web. It was just unveiled out of beta at the TED conference last week. The idea behind sites like this, and others like www.moodviews.com, and offline works that are displayed online like http://postsecret.blogspot.com/, is that there has to be a way to show, on a mass scale, how people are feeling. With the explosion of blogs and the leaps of technology Spiders have made in the past few years, it is now totally possible to troll for specific keywords on a global scale.

Wefeelfine.org would be cool if that was all it did. The interface alone is fun, and if you play with the key on the lower left hand side of the window when you run the applet, you can find tons of info to spark your imagination, but it is the gallery that truly offers something amazing:

http://www.wefeelfine.org/gallery/index.php

I say amazing because what you are seeing is completely honest and unflinching. It is without a conscious author. The site simply crawls blog pages for sentences that have the words "i feel" and places them against the closest picture available. It doesn't take into account flow, or structure, it just cuts and overlays.
Some of the art that comes out of this is, well, go see for yourself.

There is a broader message here, a beginning of something that has to do with web identity, and humanity as art, and I think that this is going to convalesce in new and striking ways- that inspire everything from universal communication to design to the squashing of racism and xenophobia. Maybe I'm stretching a little here, but I don't see how this movement won't rise to fundamentally change the individual viewpoint.

Time to Celebrate

OK, since we are in advertising and since I KNOW you would want to be reminded...... today is my birthday! And as it is my birthday, I want to say to all of you that my life is unbelievably great a) because I got it together enough to have three great kids, b) I had the amazing experience of working with all of you ... plus about 85 more of you from other years and c) because I made the decision to design my life and move my ass to California. What a great idea that was! Anyway, blessings to all of you and I hope you all come here to see me tonight with a cake... cheap airfares right now don't cha know. Don't bother with candles - they don't make cakes big enough to put them all on....

GAH.

It's really fucking hard to concentrate when it's so gorgeous outside. Half of the office is doing work on our fire escape.

hey you crazy kids

take this survey.
it's about being a planner and your personal situation.
it tallies all of the answers and then sends them out to everybody.
in the end we will hopefully see the places that suck, the places that totally rule and the places that are only good for paying for your chipotle.

here's the link to the survey
and then here's the link to receive the results

i know y'all have 3 minutes of time, or else you wouldn't even be spending time here.

congrats to my true love!

I would like to be the first to congratulate sweet sweet Danielli about her brand new job.
She will be going to Carmichael Lynch and I'm so happy for her.
I love you homz.