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Free Agents, Part 1: The Accidental Businessman

Gunnar — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 07:02:08 +0000

By Ryan Stuart / Photo by Kimi Hamada

Jeff Hamada has succeeded where so many web-savvy people have not. And he did it all by accident. Hamada took a blog, created a loyal, interactive online community and then monetized the whole deal. The result was Booooooom! – that’s seven Os – which gets 1.7 million visitors every month. A sign of how successful it is: GM advertises on the site.

Hamada trolls the net for work by virtually unknown artists and posts it under the sections Art! Design! Film! Music! Photo! Junk! and Projects! (exclamation marks are his). Unlimited talked with Hamada, a former Electronic Arts staffer who graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, about his unexpected international following.

How was Booooooom! born?
I took a year off school and worked at Electronic Arts. EA paid for my final year, but when I graduated, the company didn’t have a job open for me. I was sad about that. I started freelancing as a graphic designer about four years ago. I started Booooooom! about a 18 months ago as a personal blog to show all the art I made and the trips I took.

It’s changed a lot, though.
It changed early on. I didn’t think it was interesting for people to hear what I was doing, so I started posting art I liked, mostly work by lesser-known people on Flickr. I’d post something, email the artist to say I like his work and that I’d posted it on my site. The artist would get excited about it and mention it on his website. It became a conversation for art admirers. The site grew mostly by word of mouth. About six months in, everything went crazy, and now I get 1.9 million page hits a month. I wasn’t trying to make it grow. I just lost control.

Describe Booooooom!
It’s a daily inspiration site about photography and drawing. It’s different than a lot of other sites out there. I find artwork that I like by artists all over the world and I post it on the site, like an online art gallery. I really want to create a collaborative community.

I have another side to the site where we do group collaboration projects. I come up with an idea for a project and ask people to contribute. It’s an avenue for people to get inspired and make stuff that inspires others. I hope it becomes more of a focus of the site.

Could you describe a few group projects?
The last group project was a music video. Everyone downloaded the same music, filmed their own footage and submitted it. I stitched all the footage together. (See the footage here).

How much time does it take to maintain the site?
Now it’s a full-time job. I spend eight to 10 hours a day working on it. When I had freelance clients, I’d work on the site all night. I set it up to have three posts a day, so no matter where someone lives, when they go to the site there’s something new for them to see.

Jeff Hamada’s own art work. Hamada has worked for clients such as Converse.

How does the site generate revenue?
This is something I’m still learning about. There are three ways to make money: You get paid to write about a product. I’ve never done that and I’ve turned down a lot of opportunities. Or you can run advertisements from networks. I work with three or four networks that represent a bunch of companies. They pitch campaigns to me and I pick ones that work for the site. The third way is by having local companies in Vancouver sponsor the site. This is a one-to-one relationship.

The trickiest partnerships are with networks, because the products a network wants to advertise on your site are not always a good fit. They also want to sign long-term contracts, meaning that you lose control of what ads appears. But I can be pickier the more popular the site becomes.

Why do you think the site is so popular and continues to grow?
I am obsessed with analyzing the site and improving things that aren’t getting lots of hits. I paid a friend to make it more searchable and the topic I chose helped. No big sites are collecting the work that I’m collecting and there’s nothing going on for the community side of a lot of blogs. I put a lot of time into the site to make it feel alive.

There’s a stigma about art that only experts can talk about it. I try and make art inclusive. No matter what your expertise, you’re allowed to comment about the stuff you see. You don’t need credentials. I think the overall feeling is open and accepting.

Content-wise, I was uncovering a lot of unknown people, like people with only 30 followers. But when I mention one artist, he tells all his followers and then 30 people are checking out the site.

What would you like to see Booooooom! become?
I want to take it offline. I want to see some of the art on the site be shown in a [bricks-and-mortar] art gallery. I want the site to generate interest in the artists I feature. Beyond that I want to travel and meet the artists I cover and write about it. I want to publish a book of art. I don’t want to get rich. I’m not a business person that started this site thinking I could make money from it. The site is a lot bigger than the site I originally imagined. I’m definitely missing an opportunity to monetize completely, but I don’t want to be the mega-corporation of art sites.

Why?
My audience is a tricky demographic. It can get turned off by advertising if it isn’t done right. I could lose credibility really easily, especially if I include some covert ads. U

Free Agents, Part 1: The Accidental Businessman

Ryan Stuart — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:19:27 +0000

By Ryan Stuart / Photo by Kimi Hamada

Jeff Hamada’s own art work. Hamada has worked for clients such as Converse.

Content-wise, I was uncovering a lot of unknown people, like people with only 30 followers. But when I mention one artist, he tells all his followers and then 30 people are checking out the site.

Why?
My audience is a tricky demographic. It can get turned off by advertising if it isn’t done right. I could lose credibility really easily, especially if I include some covert ads. U

No Gossip Girl

Gunnar — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:30:38 +0000

By Anonymous

After a few weeks into my first job at a Big Federal Government Agency after I graduated from university, I was bewildered by many aspects of office-tower life. The most confounding problem, the one that seemed to exist for no reason other than to Make My Life Feel Like Crap, was the powerful rumour mill. I tried to get my work done, keep my head down, make a Good Impression, but was distracted by a slippery, hungry nest of vipers. Specifically, vipers drawing on the blood of gossip that flowed in, around and over the flimsy walls of our cubicles, sparing no one.

Psssst, June who works in accounting is pregnant again and the boss is pissed off about the timing. Brian? He only has that job because someone else got sick and there was no one else to appoint. Who’s the mystery creep-o, the person using the colour printer after hours to run off porn photos? The silent collective finger of the Mill pointed at a middle manager. Then there was the worst speculation: Who has slept with the boss? One woman, who was confrontational and largely disliked, became the target – which to the Mill neatly explained why she wasn’t fired.

One day I’d had enough with this venomous gossip. I went for drinks after work with two office friends whose “what the hell?” glances and shared eye-rolls during meetings told me they were also fed up. A martini-fuelled pact emerged that night: we wouldn’t talk trash about each other or anyone else at the office. We decided to see what would happen if we Just Said No. It went like this: Someone tells me something about you that bothers me, I promise to talk about it with you instead of behind your back. Someone baits me with trash, I blankly say “Huh?” – as if I don’t know what they’re talking about. This wasn’t about being dumb. It was about playing dumb. That ignorant “huh” means that I don’t care. Find someone else to talk to, snake-mouth.

It’s funny when someone comes to you with a particularly dirty piece of gossip and you listen politely, then innocently mumble, “Huh?” and turn back to your computer. First you become the object of the gossip: something is wrong with her. The first accusation lobbed at me was that I was sleeping with the boss. Right, that’s why I was given a raise and the office with a window. It had nothing to do with, you know, my work. The Mill threw the best they had at me and it bounced right off. The rumour reached my two friends, who listened to this juicy bit of trash, then each responded with a flat “Huh?”

We had disrupted the channel! Plugged the flow of information! That is the beauty of opting out of workplace gossip. It didn’t matter if these people think I had slept with the boss (I didn’t, for the record.) because our pact operated under the premise “Who cares?” And people, over time, appeared not to care. For my two friends and me, the rumours might as well have not existed. I was safe and I could work unfettered by this crap, at least with two other people.

The best part of opting out was unexpected. See, we had allies ready to take the pact. They saw what we were doing and began to say “Huh?” too. Soon the real culprits emerged. Over the next 18 months, the no-gossip movement at our office reached a critical mass, and the gossipers became increasingly marginalized. The three remaining gossips had no one to talk trash to except each other. And the rest of us were free to get on with our work. U

Social media like Facebook are changing our relationships – with ourselves

Editorial — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:00:00 +0000

By Heather Zwicker

After staring blankly at my computer screen for a few moments, I finally figured out that the Kelly who’d facebooked me was my sister’s ex-husband’s former boss’s ex-wife. I wrote back: “No, my sister’s not on Facebook. What a holdout, huh? It’s like she’s left the planet! But I’ll tell her you said hi.”

The Facebook Friend Wheel

And that was pretty much that, until Kelly wrote back and said thanks for the update on your sister. And, isn’t this great, I’ve added you as a friend, so now we can stay in touch! I think I met Kelly at a Christmas party once in the early ’90s. In what universe could we be considered “friends”?

The FB universe, that’s where.

I like how social media tools brings people from all parts of my life onto the perennial “now” of my desktop. Those pithy little status updates give me a glimpse into what’s going on with others and allow me to whine and brag, to inform and amuse my friends. Most of all, I like the crisp way people get designated “friends.” Or not. It’s a simple yes/no question. At the end of the day, would I consider sister’s ex-husband’s former boss’s ex-wife a friend? Sure, why not. We’ll figure out the details later.

We are always working out the details later, whether friendships unfold online or off. Friendship is generous and complex. Facebook oversimplifies the complexity of the relationships in our lives. Parents, coworkers and that person you hooked up with a couple months back can’t fit in the same category unless that category is really big. Which, happily, friend is. And it turns out we all know how to navigate its complexities. My students and I live by the maxim that what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook.

Working out the details can also get you in trouble. Take the “25 Things” meme. The more lists I read, the more dissatisfied I became… with myself. My friends’ lists were clever and original. They made me aware of how limited my imagination is: I can’t honestly start a sentence with “in order to be a clarinet player in the armed forces, I became a Canadian citizen” (Julie) and I’ve never been grabbed by an orangutan (Mari). It’s not just that Caitlin is a good knife thrower, it’s that I’m not.

Was I out of my league with these so-called friends? Was it too late to make friends in the real world? I clicked “Deactivate my account.” Facebook said, “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account? Your 201 friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you. Donna will miss you. Medgar will miss you. Roberta will miss you.”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave my friends. I realized that I didn’t have to delete my profile, I just had to modify it. Heather 2.0 is a vastly improved version of me. I sound thoughtful, playful, clever. My friends like me better, too. I’m sure of it.

Problems With Authority

Editorial — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:00:00 +0000

With files from Kent Bruyneel / Illustration by Rodrigo Lopez Orozco

Taking a page from author-illustrator Graham Roumieu's biting comics in
101 Ways to Kill Your Boss, we hunted down all the weird, wacky and just plain mystifying things bosses do and say.

And a few more…

“I used to have this boss who told other people what he thought of his employees right in front of the employee.”

“I used to have this boss who said, ‘It’s all about relationships.’ Until he took his advice and got canned because he was having way too many.”

“I used to have this boss who went to the bathroom and left the door open.”

“I used to have this boss who talked about himself in the third person.”

“I used to have this boss who was obsessed with filing things, even wanting the files filed under ‘F’ – for files…”

“I used to have this boss who, after every sip of a coffee, exclaimed ‘Ahhhhhhh’ loud enough for the entire office to hear.”

“I used to have a boss who said, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.’ That moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil.”

Tell us about delinquent bosses, supervisors without a clue and other tales about upper management. Finish this statement: “I used to have this boss who…”
Write to us

Toronto-based author-illustrator Graham Roumieu’s other books include Bigfoot: I Not Dead (the follow-up to his popular Me Write Book: A Bigfoot Memoir) and he has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Men’s Journal, the Globe and Mail and more. See his latest work and read his blog at roumieu.com.

Reach for the Top

Editorial — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:33:00 +0000

By Scott Messenger

In the decade that I worked at a commercial greenhouse, I advanced through the ranks at a respectable pace. After a few summers of selling potted plants, I moved to supervising sales. Two years later I began growing plants. By the next season I was overseeing that. It was good work, full of sunshine, exercise and, of course, fresh flowers. At least this is how I remember it on summer days when a deadline has me shackled to my desk. But that’s the trouble with nostalgia: it tends to leave out stuff that’s best not forgotten. So ponder what coulda-been at your peril.

I pondered anyway. A year after quitting, I returned to Hole’s Greenhouses in St. Albert for a long overdue performance evaluation from my old bosses, personnel manager Dave Grice and co-owner Jim Hole, the son of Alberta’s late lieutenant-governor, Lois Hole. Sure, I’d left to write, but I’d also concluded that the higher rungs of the company’s org-chart were too crowded for one more hourly wage earner hoping for the stability of a salary. Not so, it turned out. But, as my ex-bosses explained a little too enthusiastically, I wasn’t on the fast-track to agri-biz stardom, anyway. “You had your comfort zone,” said Hole, “and you didn’t want to step outside of that.”

Hole and Grice agreed that I worked smart and hard and got along with co-workers – stuff that would really only impress my mom and dad. (Or Hole’s mom, who acknowledged my efforts over the years with a couple of her famous hugs.) “You had to be a top-notch grower,” said Grice, “and you were definitely on your way to being that.” That is, I got the job done, but I never relieved my managers of the thing they tend to dislike most: managing.

Workers striving for upper management must act like they’re running a business within a business, said Hole. Cut costs, reduce inefficiencies, boost sales, improve product, repair equipment, upgrade your training – basically, take ownership of problems – and you’re on your way towards a potentially more engaging, and more lucrative, job. “A lot of times,” Hole went on, “you create a position. The very act of stepping up and asking for it would give us a clear idea of your abilities. Frankly, it would blow us away if anyone would do that. We’d be shocked! Stunned!” Maybe just showing initiative would have done it, but doing it right, he pointedly added, “takes some thought, some really deep thought.”

Let this be a lesson, then: if you’ve struck a comfortable balance between smarts and ambition, getting the occasional promotion can be a simple matter of keeping down the weeds in your project portfolio so the boss tip-toes through nothing but tulips. But if you want a quicker ascent, a rosy performance record won’t cut it. You need a strategy.

Every aspect of your character, your actions and your appearance counts – use them to your advantage or change them. And keep in mind that, if the plum job you’re eyeing doesn’t seem likely to free up, you can always try to pitch a position of your own. But before taking on any of this, understand that career advancement starts with good old-fashioned, troublesome soul-searching.

Know thyself and you’ll know not only what you actually want to be, you’ll also recognize the time, energy, cash and, yes, deep thought necessary to get there.

As a professor of applied psychology in the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Education, Bryan Hiebert works mostly at studying work. He’s also president of the Canadian Career Development Foundation and an editor of the Journal of Career Development. All erudition aside, careers are practical matters, and Hiebert likes to treat them that way, without the padding of academia. “Few people set up their lives to be slobs, right?” he says. “But sometimes it happens because they don’t have a vision of the person they want to become.

“Probably outside a person’s choice of mate,” he adds, “career-related decisions are the second most important ones a person will make in their lifetime.” Anyone taking such choices lightly has ultimately “left their life satisfaction up to chance.”

Or, much worse, up to an employer.

Tips To The Top

Editorial — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 14:20:00 +0000

by Scott Messenger

01. Learn to recognize opportunities like a senior manager’s mat leave or a problem the boss can’t shut up about

02. Don’t bring the boss any new problems before you’ve figured out solutions

03. Always have someone trained and ready to do your job so you’re available for a better one

04. Keep a “brag sheet” detailing your accomplishments for use in annual reviews and on your resume

05. Broadcast these by praising colleagues and staff involved in those (your) projects

06. Introduce yourself to company big-wigs whenever possible

07. Develop an elevator pitch selling who you are, your skills, your aims, and practise it for just such instances

08. Never blow such chances by getting wasted at company parties

09. Carry yourself – in action, attitude and appearance – the way your company leaders carry themselves

10. If you can’t quite pull this off, ride the coat-tails of someone who can

11. Take full responsibility for your own training

12. Interview internally now and then, even if your chances are slim, just to let the bosses know you’re ambitious

13. Have a salesperson’s attitude in everything you do – present positively regardless of circumstance

14. If your introversion makes #13 tough, learn to fake it

15. If the boss breaks a promise to you, suck it up and move on

Let Your Fingers Do The Climbing

Editorial — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 14:18:00 +0000

by Scott Messenger

* Government of Canada essential skills website srv108.services.gc.ca/english/general/home_e.shtml
If there’s a job you want, its description and all the skills you’ll need to get it are probably listed here, along with a few thousand others.

* Alberta Learning Information Service alis.gov.ab.ca/career/main.asp
Free stuff! Books, resumé review service, Alberta career profiles, even a hotline to abuse!

* University of Waterloo Career Development eManual cdm.uwaterloo.ca/index2.asp
Don’t have the cash for a coach but do have a decent enough attention span for some electronic introspection? Try this.

To The Test Of My Ability

Editorial — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 14:16:00 +0000

By Scott Messenger

I catch a bus to a strip club in an Edmonton industrial park. This is, after all, the landmark that Psychometrics president George Fitzsimmons told me to watch for. Well, it is easier spotted than his office behind the spruce trees across the street.

I’m here for an empirical framework to account for my successes and failures, an analysis I can use, perhaps, to steal my editor’s job. Fitzsimmons had sent me electronic versions of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to assess my personality and the Work Personality Index to gauge my workplace behaviours. This is why HR departments hire Psychometrics when seeking to, as Fitzsimmons puts it, “polish the individual so you can get more value out of them.”

Not everyone goes for these methods. University of Calgary prof Bryan Hiebert, despite helping start Psychometrics 30 years ago, worries that the tests discourage deeper self-analysis. At the very least, though, says Fitzsimmons, “one of the nice things is that they give you a language to market yourself.”

So what should I be advertising after discussing my results with Fitzsimmons? Well, I’m creative and energetic. Unfortunately, I’m also reclusive, yet loathe making decisions on my own – which might explain why I avoid leadership roles. And probably because I’m kinda emotionally detached, I’m only of average dependability.

“This is you in your current work world,” says Fitzsimmons. “It can change,” he reassures me, as if he can see the self-image entering my mind: slouched, still in pajamas at noon, unshaven and squinting at a computer screen, fingers stalled at the keyboard. Solutions are rooted in bringing problems into conscious awareness, says Fitzsimmons. I hope he’s right. U

The big free e-mail providers love our generation

Editorial — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 21:47:00 +0000

By Natasha Mekhail

Our Outlooks sit blank and unused, opening periodically, annoyingly, when we click on misleading “contact us” tabs. So the free guys compete for our short-attention spans by adding more space, more features, new interfaces, and by making themselves exclusive (only 50 invites!). And because it’s free, we get suckered in, following the wave of our friends so as not to lose valuable party invites to the spam box.

But when the socializing is over and it’s time to find a job, this free e-mail is the face we show the world. With 96% of employers accepting resumes electronically, is it still appropriate to be lazymuffin@hotmail.com?

You could argue that Hotmail and Yahoo shot themselves in the foot when they chose names that sound, in the first case, like an electronic peepshow, and, in the latter, like Coyotes during the Stampede. Only Google’s Gmail bears the stamp of semi-professionalism. And the fact that it’s newish means there’s still a chance to snag a username that sounds something like your own (if you don’t mind a speckling of underscores).

Before you sign in, however, stop and consider. Your prospective employer doesn’t need to know how old you are, chris22. She doesn’t need to know that you’re cool with being just a number, cs10968. And she sure doesn’t need to know what you get up to in your free time, roachclip71. Of course, what’s inside your e-mail is what counts, but don’t skimp on the packaging.