I may start posting some poetry here in the future. Maybe not. I haven’t decided yet. I don’t want anyone reading anything into it and beyond that I haven’t figured out how to get the music that goes along with it captured from my head to accompany the writing.

Let me stew on this, as I’m not sure if there is any good that come from this or not.

I’m also pushing out a backlog of draft posts from the last year in case the question comes up.

Over the years I seem to consistently get two e-mail questions…

The first is where to get a copy of Picture Publisher from. This makes sense I suppose since I maintain the only known repository for all of the Micrografx product updates. Even about.com links to my collection.

So, in answer to the question. Check E-bay. Corel appears to have been pretty thorough in recalling all unsold product from the retail channel so the chance of finding a stray copy of Graphic Suite on some store shelf is pretty much not going to happen. Even finding the demo downloads for Picture Publisher 10 have been getting pretty sparse. The only thing I would warn you about buying from E-bay is be mindful of what you think you’re buying. The primary listings I regularly see (as of mid 2010) for PP10 Pro are either a pirated/bootleg copy or a cracked version of the time-limited demo. Off and on there are legit copies of PP10 DCE version but that is just a feature crippled version of PP10. The next best bet is PP9 or PP8. Personally I felt 8 was a bit buggy and 9 wasn’t too bad. 10 Pro is the way to go if you can find it though.

The second question I get is why is the Game Zero site so ugly and bland looking. Well, that’s pretty easy to answer as well. The site was built from 1994-1996. The last significant visual design changes were made around 1995. What you are seeing on this archived site is a state of the art web design for 1995 that was created for optimal delivery and presentation for common modem based web users running at speeds of 14.4Kilobits or 28.8Kilobits with common screen resolutions of 640×480 and 800×600 (maybe even 1024×768 at best). Compare that to today’s speeds measured in MegaBytes and HD screens.

The next question that follows that is sometimes why don’t we update the site? Well, because it’s an archived site. The reason the site is even still up is because it is one of the only (if not the only) site with period reference for video game activity for the time span. Nearly every other site from that era is long gone and archive.org didn’t start indexing the web until late 1996. In fact archive.org didn’t even get around to start indexing both Game Zero sites until 1998 (that would be the U.S. site and the Italian mirror). Maybe some day if I have the spare time I might tweak some of the multi-page article navigation at some point to make the content more accessible but frankly it’s a low priority.

If you’re up to exploring though you can browse the Archive.org indexes for www.gamezero.com and our Vol.it hosted European mirror.

Thanks for stopping by.

Some of you may have last year about Cat Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam after his conversion to Islam) throwing out to the press the idea that he might consider suing Coldplay over a suggested infringement of his song Foreigner Suite via their chart topping song Viva La Vida. His song is a 30 year old track that likely nobody under 20 has ever heard of.

I’ve listened to both songs. Ah… yeah. Whatever. Keep dreaming the dream.

Anyways what got me was the transparently lame marketing ploy that this was. Yusuf is a washed up 70’s rock star looking for a fresh 15 minutes of fame in the U.S. while he tours his new album. He did one of those brilliant Prince like moves several years ago when he converted to Islam and changed his name to something nobody can remember or would even associate with his music. Hey I’m all for religious freedom. He seems happy with his life and I could really care less about his personal beliefs. From a marketing stand point this wasn’t the best move unless he was going to ditch his legacy work and start with a clean slate.

But that’s not what he did, so his P.R team has had a nightmare of trying to expose his non-core fans to the brand change with his name so they get as many baby boomers out to his tour dates as possible. They also need to hopefully scratch out a few new fans for his new work in the process (of course he’s been trying to get new fans for years and hasn’t gotten much traction, hence the need to dig up boomers for ticket sales). Yusuf is alot like Jimmy Buffet in this regard. Yawn.

Anyways, his P.R. team has went so far as too play the 9/11 sympathy card in going on about how his name was mistakenly on the DHS terrorist watch list preventing him from flying into the U.S. for several years. That alone got him a day or two of front page news when he flew in to start his tour.

This then got me thinking about how a lot of people sue other people simply for the press coverage. Front page brand exposure is expensive! But front page exposure where the news is talking about your frivolous lawsuit is free. Personally I think the whole practice is unethical and a waste of public resources but there are clearly people out there without ethics or an appreciation for the fact that our court system has real work to do. This activity is the basis of why so many companies quickly pay out on settlements fast before the story can make it into the news cycle.

People! Isn’t there a better way to handle all of this?

In the world of advertising and marketing you can identify communications as either push or pull. Push is where you push content out to viewers and Pull is where viewers come to you to get content.

Mediums such as TV, newsletters and banner ads are identified as push based communications in that they are designed to push information about new products and services to you. The idea is to inform you about a solution to a perceived need you never knew you had.

Internet content in general (and by extension most social media) is considered pull based communications because the viewer has to actively go out and request the information in order to receive it. There is currently no way for you to force someone to read your blog or watch your YouTube video (not that people aren’t trying to figure out a way to do it though). Granted you can design a website that forces a pop-up ad to show before you can read the page you want to visit. In this case the add is push, but the content that that provided you to the chance to see the ad is pull.

In many ways, modern TV has evolved to this state. Historically when all we had generally were three channels run by national networks to choose from in any given U.S. city an advertiser could simply run their ad on all three networks at peek viewing hours for their target demographic and be confident that just about everyone would see the ad. Now with literally thousands of TV channels between broadcast, cable, satellite, internet, etc… combined with time shifting technology (ie, DVR devices such as Tivo) advertisers are moving to running ads specifically related to a particular program. In very much the same dynamic as a web site (eg, you want to run an advertisement that I.T. workers will see? Run it on TV during a show like MythBusters, and then put your online ads on a site like Slashdot.

Really, the bottom line is consumer choice vs. advertiser choice. The less choice a consumer has the more push communications can be applied unilaterally. The unfortunate thing here is that as people have more choice, marketers must get more intrusive in order to push their messaging out. I’m left thinking of a scene in Minority Report where the Tom Cruise character is walking along and all of the wall ads are narrow focusing audio at him with personalized sales pitches.

In the decade since blogs first formally appeared as a platform, people have been trying to figure out a way to make them more Push based instead of Pull. Why? Because as a Pull based technology your readership is limited to who you can draw into your site and this is where link aggregation services such as Digg, etc… come into play. Effectively people have been trying to find a way to make a things like blogs work in the way TV communications used to work.

A site like Digg or Technorati are Pull services, but they have such high volume and high visibility that they can effectively becomes a Push agent for everyone else down stream because they have critical mass audience based on being an aggregate.

I suppose in the rare cases, there have been blogs that have attained that same space but in all of the cases I am aware of the blogs are working as an aggregate site. Examples would be Slashdot mentioned above as well as sites like BoingBoing or in the most extreme FARK.

So, I guess the lesson learned here is if you want to get the word about about your product, you either need to advertise everywhere you can (print, TV, web, etc…), go door-to-door like the old days (or site to site posting comments — don’t spam!) or get your site/product referenced on one of these aggrigator sites (you better have something unique going on to get their attention). Hmm… that’s all that comes to mind at the moment. Does anyone else have ideas on this subject?