Paris

What’s going on

April 25, 2008 by Michael Boyle

I just realized I haven’t talked much about what I’m up to lately. When we moved back to Montreal, I had what I thought was going to be a great job developing a new, should-have-been revolutionary web product… but that didn’t really work out very well (they didn’t share my vision of what the site could have and should have been and I didn’t think it was worth the investment to think small). Since then, I’ve been working really hard to get a new company off the ground. My great friend Claude moved back from Paris a few months before I came back to Montreal and he has been working like a maniac to establish Exvisu in Montreal. Almost immediately we talked about merging our forces, and after one aborted attempt last spring, in the fall I started devoting some time to it and based on my good experiences in the early going, this past winter I dove in head first.

At the moment, Exvisu is all about doing a very unique and advanced kind of research to help leaders with marketing, communications, and political opportunities (or problems). We have the ability to go out into existing but unstructured data sets and learn a great deal more about an issue than traditional approaches can provide. From there, we work very closely with our clients to develop appropriate web-based strategies to address the opportunity or problem. And, to round out the offering, if our clients lack the capacity to execute on the strategy themselves, we’ll work with them to do the job.

It’s a pretty broad offering, but we’re exceeding the goals we set for ourselves in January. We have several clients and partners we’re working with such as AGY Consulting, K3 Media, Gartner Lee Limited and several others I can’t really mention. As well, we’re working hard on a couple of different technology projects that will be the key to moving from a pure consultancy to a much more ambitious play down the road.

A thinker whose work I struggled with

March 6, 2007 by Michael Boyle

A thinker whose work I struggled with

for some time, Jean Baudrillard, has died in Paris following a long illness. One of the best places to read him and about him in English is CTheory, which is where I was first immersed in his writings.

Cool launch in Paris:

December 11, 2006 by Michael Boyle

Cool launch in Paris:

Socialtext Unplugged. Edit Socialtext wiki pages offline.

I’m in deep juggler mode

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

at the moment, which is a really fun spot to be in. In theory I’m looking for work as a product/project manager for a web concern or something like that. In fact, I haven’t been looking much – I’ve been waiting by the phone for an offer that I will take. And in the interim – I’m learning, playing, and developing projects at a fever pitch.

I’m doing a lot of playing around with CSS box-properties layouts, which has been good, if a little frustrating. As well, Aaron and Luke pretty much convinced me to roll my own tools to manage content for montrealstories.org (although an interim solution will be deployed sooner) – so I’m playing with XML, PHP and some other stuff to get that going. I have a bit of a background in scripting, though with a different kind of tool, so I’m feeling pretty confident.

As well, though, I’ve just now figured out the next project, which could be pretty neat. I’m not going to say more so I don’t jinx it, but it would be a different sort of thing, and terribly interesting to develop.

Bottom line: what I really need isn’t a job but a patron, sort of like a renaissance-era painter, or maybe a poet in Paris in the 20s. All that said, I am still excited about the job on the horizon too. It’ll just cut into my personal research time

There’s a lot

December 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

of hand-wringing about advertising on the net and how to make it work. But the articles I’ve read lately, such as one entitled Web Ads Should Be Seen and Heard in Wired News today, miss the point.

The web is not a broadcasting medium. Period. You can try all you like to import methods from broadcasting and make them work on the web, but as soon as the technique quits being a novelty, it’s dead in my opinion.

The web is narrowcasting. The whole internet is narrowcasting. Look at WAP and other celphone tech – its usage pales in comparison to SMS – a one-to-one technology. It’s practically axiomatic that if a person can increase the granularity of their experience, she or he will do so.

What does this mean for web advertising? To me it means a couple things. First, that if you’re going to advertise, you have to engage in “deep targeting” – putting ads in front of lawyers (for instance) isn’t enough – you have to specify by location, specialty, maybe age/experience level, etc. Don’t advertise to doctors in general – advertise to particular specialties or sub-specialties. Second, and it springs from the first, you have to give that group a payoff. Give them something they want or need – say, educational material they couldn’t otherwise gain access to. You can’t do that without knowing the audience.

It strikes me that very very few companies are remotely equipped to do that – and further that an advertiser really has to buy into the vision, the whole concept. Which can be difficult, given the current climate. But I would turn away a potential advertiser if they weren’t willing to work with me to develop a program that provided a genuine payoff to the users that I have painstakingly attracted – were I at the helm of a content site.