Urban Vancouver

Somebody just texted me with “California supreme court just overturned the ban on same sex marriage. Is it time for Flowers for Al and Don 2?”

My first reaction: “crap, like I’ve got time for that”.

But this is great news. It’s a fantastic victory in this long-fought battle. From The Chicago Tribune:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has twice vetoed legislation that would’ve granted marriage rights to same-sex couples, said in a news release that he respected the court’s decision and “will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling.”

Conservative organizations, of course, will be ramping up their campaigns. If this becomes a central campaign issue for the national election, who does it help? I’m guessing McCain, but I’m not sure.

Yesterday I was in my local bakery, buying a muffin. The owner was training a new employee, and they were fiddling with something at the touch-screen PC which served as the cash register.

The owner was trying to scan the employee’s fingerprint, using a little USB fingerprint scanner that sat on the counter. They were having some difficulty making the thing work.

They wandered off, enabling me to pay another staff member for my muffin. I asked her what the fingerprint scanner was for.

It’s a biometric time clock (this company makes them). Employees ‘clock in’ at the the start of their shift by scanning their fingerprint at the front counter.

Does anybody else think that’s a bit creepy? Talk about not trusting your employees. The message is “I think you’re going to lie to me, so I’ve devised a foolproof system to foil you.”

It’s been about fifteen years since I worked in customer service, but I never actually had to clock in at any of my jobs. If I was late, the manager just hassled me. I could never be particularly late for those early shifts where a manager wasn’t around (probably common in a bakery), because I had a bunch of stuff to do before a certain time (also, I’d imagine, like a bakery).

In any case, I wouldn’t leave the USB scanner in view of the public. I imagine there are lots of patrons who have the same response that I did.

Travis wrote a nostalgic post about hot dogs and their role in the lunches of our youth. This bit took me right back:

I used to even get them in my lunch—my mom would get them as hot as possible and put them and the boiling water into a pre-warmed thermos in hopes that they’d be at least luke warm by lunch—which to be fair, usually worked unless it was REALLY cold on my bus ride. So I’d have warmish hot dogs for lunch, then forget to bring the thermos home and the hot dog water would get really fetid and make the thermos useless for anything except more hot dogs, and the cycle would perpetuate itself.

I don’t recall having any problems with fetid water, but maybe I was a more disciplined kid.

These days I only eat turkey and chicken hot dogs, and try to avoid the bargain basement variety. I think I’ve said it before, but the turkey smokie from the vendor outside of London Drugs at Granville and Georgia in Vancouver is terrific.

About a month ago, I wrote about how I was conflicted about yet professionally obligated to spend more time on Twitter. It’s a month later, so I thought I’d check in on my adoption progress.

Something that Todd said in a comment on that post resonated:

I found myself thinking that broadcast was the wrong word for twitter, as it tends to start working more like IM over time, only not as isolated.

Looking back at my Twitter stream, most of my tweets (I’m still displeased by that word) are replies to other people, or links to something. I’m not sure why, but I’m disinclined to post tweets that answer the default Twitter question, “what are you doing?”

21st Century IRC

I used to hang out in a Skype channel that included 30 or 40 Vancouverites from the tech community. I’d let in run in the background, and remark on some tech news or bemoan the Canucks as the mood struck me. Twitter has replaced that as a kind of 21st century IRC.

I have a link blog in the sidebar of this site. It’s a kind of clearing house for stuff that interests me, but doesn’t merit a full post on my site. A couple hundred people subscribe to it, and I really don’t know how useful people find it (I’ve never asked).

Now every time I spot a link I’d like to pass on (such as this blog of things that look like a duck), I have to decide whether it goes in Twitter, in the link blog, or both. Both takes too long, and I have yet to develop criteria for what goes where.

I asked, on Twitter, about just streaming my link blog into my Twitter stream, but I got a couple of negative responses. Understandably, people (presumably they were link blog subscribers) didn’t want to get repeated content. When I first signed up for Twitter many moons ago, I did that with my blog’s RSS feed, and somebody told me it wasn’t kosher.

They’re probably right–I find little value in tweets that read “New Blog Post: http://www.verysmallurl.com/fdfdla”. If I want to read your blog, I probably already subscribe to it. Obviously the etiquette on all this stuff is still emerging.

The number of people I follow is up from 33 to 58. The increase is mostly due professional interest (I’m following some top tech bloggers). I tend to give people a trial run, and if I find what they’re writing about interesting, I stick with them.

No Debate Team at This High School

The major frustration that I’ve found on Twitter is that it inhibits debate. I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to have a cogent argument that doesn’t devolve into sound bites on the platform. I love debate–it’s one of the reasons I spend leisure time online. Twitter seems to act a bit like high school in this regard–either people hurl insults or just talk nice (I know high schools have debate teams, but that’s where my analogy breaks down).

So, the experiment continues. Any suggestions on how I should handle the link blog vs. Twitter issue?

I’m only writing this post because my born and bred Coquitlam friend recently told me about their recent Spring Clean-Up day, and used the hilarious phrase ‘garbage amnesty’. From the City of Coquitlam’s website:

Spring Clean Up allows for a reasonable amount of additional garbage for pick up, and it must only go out to the curb on the assigned collection day to avoid clutter in neighbourhoods.

What is a reasonable amount?

The maximum amount that would fit in the back of a regular sized pickup truck. Items should be placed at curb and kept in a neat and tidy fashion for pick up to occur.

I gather a lot of suburbs do the same thing, though sadly few call them garbage amnesties. Here’s an effusive blog post about Everything-Goes-Garbage-Week in Delta:

The best part is the few days before the big day. Treasure Days. You see, it’s totally kosher to walk around checking to see if there’s anything on a lawn that you may want. Walking my dog this evening, I saw tons of people casually walking around the neighbourhood, people driving around picking up extra lawn chairs, leftover plywood. It’s the best recycling program ever.

I assume this helps prevent illegal dumping, and keeps everybody’s yard cleaner.

I’m just trying out this Scoutle silliness. Not sure about that name, by the way.

Scoutle.com

In order to activate the service, I’m obligated to post this widget to my site. That’s obviously a proven viral marketing strategy, but the requirement irks me.

I do like that their logo is two bare feet. That pleases me.

Via TechCrunch, TripKick is thin-slicing hotel reviewing on the web. Instead of just reviewing hotels (far too vague!), TripKick offers user-generated reviews of individual hotel rooms. It’s kind of the hotel room equivalent of SeatGuru:

Tripkick.com is designed to make your hotel experience an effortless one. We prepare you with the little known facts about each hotel room so you can make an educated decision when choosing your perfect room.

Each hotel page on our site offers a variety of helpful information. You can use us before you’ve chosen your hotel, or once you’ve already booked your reservation.

Here’s a sample page, for the the San Francisco Fairmont. The site has a nice aesthetic, though I have serious objections to the way they abbreviate headings. If you check out the ‘Compare Rooms’ tab, they have a table which includes column headings like “GREAT BATHRM” or “OVERSZ”. I may just be an old grammarian, but I miss those vowels.

Here’s my useless idea of the day. What if we could watch live or recorded screencasts of a writer’s screen as they write? The writer–from Stephen King to your favourite local blogger–installs some software on their computer, and it broadcasts the activity in their word processor (or authoring tool of choice) in real time to the web.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of Victor Hugo:

It kind of combines Webex and RobotReplay with the popular notion of radical transparency. It sounds banal, but so does Twitter, and people seem to like that.

The technology for this obviously already exists. There’d be a little work in building plugins for MS Word, NotePad,browser forms and whatever else people write in. But other than that it would be simple.

If you’re Stephen King, maybe you offer some kind of premium subscription that enables people to spy on your writing. Hardcore fans, knowing that King usually writes in the morning, would log in to watch him putter away on his latest novel.

Of course, no writer that I know would permit this. As the saying goes, “there are two things you never want to see made, sausage and legislation”. I’d add most forms of writing to that list.

As I mentioned, I recently saw “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”. It followed a plot trend that I’ve observed over the past decade in movies: average guy gets dumped for a long-haired, flouncy-shirt-wearing musician (or music lover).

Consider these three examples. They’re slightly variations, but they amount to the same thing. I’ll use the actor’s names for the sake of brevity:

• In “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, Kirsten Bell dumps Jason Segal for Russell Brand (who steals every scene he’s in). Brand plays a foppish, tattoed, new-agey singer styled after Bono. He frequently wears tight leather trousers and see-through shirts. In an argument, Ms. Bell criticizes the cultural diversity of his tattoos.
• In “High Fidelity”, Iben Hjejle leaves John Cusack for Tim Robbins, the pony-tailed world music lover who lives upstairs. At one point Cusack imagines telling Robbins to “get your patchouli stink out of my store”.
• In “Serendipity”, John Cusack fails to score Kate Beckinsale. Subsequently, she becomes engaged to John Corbett (his character has the very musical name of “Lars Hammond”). Corbet is a famous shenai (a kind of Indian oboe) player, and prances about in his psychedelic music videos to sitar riffs and Bollywood beats.

So what does this tell us about men, women and the movies? First, that a consistent fault of average guys is that they’re insensitive. And that the tonic for this insensitivity is to find a feminine dude with long hair and a love of foreign music. The movie love interest coos over her new man “he’s so sensitive, he loves ethnic food and all these weird kinds of music”.

Also, this character type seems to satisfy a particular plot requirement: the other man needs to be somebody that females might like, but that most men would disdain. Apparently the flaky hippie dude satisfies that need.

As some readers may know, there was another foofaraw last week in the world of online PR. Gina Trapani, editor of the super-popular LifeHacker, posted a black list of PR spammers. Like Chris Anderson before her, she was tired of being inundated with press releases and spammy PR email. Unlike Mr. Anderson, she’s blocking entire domains instead of individual email addresses. Blogger Matt Haughey added his two cents along similar lines.

And, as you’d expect, there was much fretting and gnashing of teeth from the PR blogosphere. I commented on a couple of sites. I was a bit bemused by the sense of entitlement from some of my peers.

In particular, they were very critical of the black list as a tactic for dealing with PR spam. I’m not. It’s imperfect, but I’m sure it’s turned down the tap on Ms. Trapani’s and Mr. Haughey’s deluge of marketing email. From the only perspective that matters–theirs–it’s a workable strategy.

An Uneasy Collaboration

There’s always been an uneasy collaboration between journalists and PR people. The rise of the web has stirred up that alliance, and the power has shifted away from the marketers. Here’s the truth: bloggers don’t need marketers. If you start with that humble assumption, you’re better off.

We’re busy revising a book on this topic, so I’ll spare you the (frankly, quite obvious) song and dance about joining the conversation, listening first and all the usual bollocks.

Instead, I’ll tell you what works when I get pitched. I’m in the somewhat unusual position of being both a–all gay jokes aside–pitcher and catcher in this relationship. I’d been blogging for years before I sent or received my first pitch. Fortunately, I don’t suffer a flood of inquiries. On the average day, I might get five. But it’s enough that I’ve stopped replying to them all. And, as you might imagine, I’m pretty sympathetic to marketers.

How to Pitch Me

I’m going to skip all the obvious advice, and focus on when strangers have successfully convinced me to write about their product or service:

1. Demonstrate that you’ve read my blog. And by ‘read’ I don’t mean that it showed up in search results and you emailed me. If you’re monitoring mentions of competitors’ brands and found my site, that’s cool. Just recognize that I’ve written about your competitors, and explain why you’re different.
2. Figure out what I write about. It’s not rocket science. Last year somebody pitched me a biography of a 17th century Portuguese nun. That’s not something I’m in the habit of writing about.

3. Geography matters. If your project is Vancouver or BC-based, I’m likelier to write about it.
4. If your project is a good cause, or has a social change angle, I’m likelier to write about it.
5. If you include references to photos or video that I can embed and link to (shamefully, this almost never happens), I’m likelier to write about your project.
6. Make me feel special. If I recall correctly, Bill from Workspace (where I currently sit, writing this post) invited me for a preview tour of his coworking office.
7. In terms of ‘breaking a story’, I almost never care about exclusivity. I think I’m an exception in this regard.
8. If it’s something you created (as opposed to being a PR flack), I’m likelier to write about it. Last month Ellen Bernfeld, the singing voice of “Pizzazz” from the 80’s cartoon “Jem and the Holograms”, pitched me on her YouTube video. I didn’t write about it–I’m not backing Senator Clinton–but it was cool to, you know, get pitched by a cartoon villainess (and the video’s creator).

Seth points us at Brand Tags, a site with a simple premise. It shows you a brand, and you enter one word or phrase which pops into your head that’s associated with that brand. It’s a kind of brand association, and makes for a amusing snapshot of a brand’s health and welfare.

Consider, for example, the prominence of ‘crap’ and ‘lame’ on MySpace’s results page. Or the happy coincidence of ‘awesome’ and ‘boring’ on NPR’s page. Playboy produces the kind of terms you’d expect.

Are the results actually useful to marketers? Probably not, though I could see somebody wielding them as evidence in an internal discussion about brand perceptions. Maybe, for example, your boss at Volkswagen believes that everybody’s over the associations with Hitler. Not so much.

If, like me, you just want to browse some brands, I lifted this list of links to the results pages for each brand:

ABC // Absolut // Adidas // Adobe // AIM // Allstate // Amazon // American Airlines // American Express // American Idol // AOL // Apple // AT&T // Audi // Bacardi // Banana Republic // Band-Aid // Bank of America // BBC // Beijing 2008 // Best Buy // Bic // BlackBerry // Blockbuster // Bloomingdales // BMW // BP // Bravo // British Airways // Bud Light // Budweiser // Burger King // Burt’s Bees // Burton // Cadillac // Capital One // Casio // Chase // Chevron // Citibank // Clorox // CNN // Coca-Cola // Comcast // Continental Airlines // Converse // Corona // Crest // Dell // Delta // Diesel // Digg // Discovery Channel // Disney // Dodge // Doritos // Dyson // eBay // ESPN // Evian // Exxon // Facebook // FedEx // Ferrari // Firefox // Flickr // Ford // Gap // Gatorade // GE // Geek Squad // Geico // Google // Guinness // H & M // Harley-Davidson // Heineken // Hilton // Holiday Inn // Home Depot // HP // Hyundai // IBM // Ikea // Intel // Internet Explorer // Jaguar // JetBlue // Johnnie Walker // Johnson & Johnson // Jordan // Kmart // Kodak // Lacoste // Levis // LG // London 2012 // Louis Vuitton // Marriott // Mastercard // McDonalds // Mercedes // Microsoft // Miller Lite // Motorola // MSN // MTV // MySpace // NASA // Nautica // NBC // Netflix // Neutrogena // New Balance // Nike // Nintendo // Nissan // North Face // NPR // Pabst // Patagonia // PBS // Pepsi // Pfizer // Pizza Hut // Playboy // Playstation // Poland Spring // Porsche // Progressive // Puma // Red Bull // Red Lobster // Rolex // Saab // Safeway // Samsung // Sears // Second Life // Sephora // Sharper Image // Shell // Skype // Sony // Southwest Airlines // Splenda // Sprite // Staples // Starbucks // Subway // T-Mobile // Taco Bell // Target // Tommy Hilfiger // Toyota // Twitter // Umbro // United States Postal Service // UPS // USA Today // Verizon // VH1 // Virgin // Visa // Volkswagen // Wachovia // Wal Mart // Whole Foods // Wikipedia // Wordpress // Xbox // Yahoo! // YouTube //

I just got back from the charming, witty Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I was about to write a little post in praise of Montreal’s Rachelle Lefevre, who I thought had a small role in this film. I thought Ms. Lefevre was playing opposite Jack McBrayer, who was pretty much reprising his excellent work as an uptight Christian conservative lad on 30 Rock.

I’d first seen Ms. Lefevre in Hatley High, a wacky little Canadian comedy set in an alternative universe high school where chess matters more than basketball or hockey. In that movie, I was struck by her charisma, and a kind of red-headed diaphanous quality that reminded me of Bryce Dallas Howard.

As it turns out, it wasn’t Rachelle Lefevre in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It was an actress named Maria Thayer. She’s a little older, and from Oregon, but otherwise they’ve had pretty similar careers–lots of guest spots on TV and the occasional film role.

I think I can be forgiven for making the mistake. While not twins, there’s certainly a resemblance. That’s Ms. Thayer on the left:

Forgetting Sarah Marshall isn’t a comic masterpiece. But it does have that Apatowesque truthfulness and subtlety that make it superior to traditional romantic comedies. It’s certainly better than the last breakup comedy I saw.

Over the past few days I’ve been getting a new species of comment spam. They’re meaningless strings of numbers and letters, often without links. I’ve been calling it GUID (globally unique identifiers) spam because that’s what they most resemble. Here’s a sample:

Website: 811b4a322b04 (IP: 67.159.44.134 , TE01.techentrance.com)
URL : http://811b4a322b04.us
Excerpt:
811b4a322b04…

811b4a322b040f05b8d5…

If you visit that URL, there’s apparently nothing there. Seeing as there are no links or keywords, what are they trying to accomplish?

I complained about this on Twitter, and Mark noted that it was like I was being ‘tagged’–a sort of GUID mark of the beast.

A lot of is coming via Tech Entrance, a hosting company of no apparentl fixed address.

Last September, CBC Radio launched two new technology shows: Search Engine and Spark. I forget how I first heard about them, but I subscribed to both podcasts from their first episode.

Search Engine is a show about the cultural and politics of the web (they need a copyable blurb on their home page and in iTunes). The most recent episode featured stories on the hacker convention Defcon, gaming the CIA’s website and a rapping Hungarian YouTube star.

Here’s the spiel on Spark:

Spark is a weekly audio blog of smart and unexpected trendwatching. It’s not just technology for gearheads, it’s about the way technology affects our lives, and the world around us.

What’s a Spark story? Wikis in the workplace, Guitar Hero in your living room, or why the new trend in design is the trailer park.

So they cover similar territory, but Spark is less concerned with the Web than Search Engine. Spark has a stickier tag line, because I can remember it: “Tech trends and fresh ideas”.

It’s been educational to watch both shows’ evolution over the past year or so. My impressions:

• They’ve taken somewhat different approaches in story development and presentation. Spark seems much more crowd-sourced, while Search Engine has a more traditional structure. I don’t know how successful it’s been (I’d be curious to hear about their objectives and measures of success) Spark has a wiki for developing show ideas. Additionally, host Nora Young regularly cites comments from the show’s blog. They’re usually insightful enough to merit inclusion (I tend to loathe traditional man-on-the-street commentary).
• Both hosts seem very well-informed, and (while I’m layman in this) are excellent presenters. Search Engine host Jesse Brown has a more informal style–he seems to be palling around with a lot of his guests. This mostly works, and reflects the DIY culture he documents. I do get a bit tired of the geeky indignation Brown seems to have for a lot of his tech stories. I get that every day in the blogosphere (including this site) and at tech conferences, so I don’t want to hear it from the CBC. Because of this, Search Engine sometimes feels more like commentary than reportage.
• I like both shows, but given the choice, I listen to Spark first. Why? Because the topics are fresher (see the tagline) to me. 80% of Spark stories are new to me. I’ve already heard about 80% of Search Engine’s stories. That’s not a criticism of Search Engine–it’s a reflection of the kind of information I consume.

Clearly the CBC made emerging technology and the web a priority last year, and I applaud the results. Keep up the good work.

This is barely related, but I note that these CBC sites have a wacky URL structure. For example, the about page for Spark is http://www.cbc.ca/spark/index.html?copy-about. Maybe it’s a symptom of an older CMS?

Rick Segal is a venture capitalist (we almost never write that out) in Toronto. He recently received a business plan in Microsoft Word format (a no-no in the first place, I’d imagine). The genius authors of the plan failed to ‘Accept All Changes’ in Word, thus enabling Rick to view a bunch of their comments in the document. A few gems:

• Scratched out “Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat”, replaced with “Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios”
• “Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
• “When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”

Make Chanukah jokes? That’s easier said than done. “Hey, uh, if we get our funding near the end of the year, maybe we could get it in eight parts?”

Here’s a simple rule to avoid this phenomenon in the future: PDF that mofo.

Yesterday I gave three talks. In the morning, I gave a relatively standard “Social Media 101″ keynote at DocTrain West (thanks for having me, Scott). Anne posted her notes from that talk.

As I’ve said before, I like to keep my accompanying slides bullet point-free. On each slide, you either get an image, a diagram or a few words per slide. Here are my slides from yesterday’s talk, which are pretty much inscrutable without, well, me.

Why do I take that approach?

• It ensures that I’ve written a speech or at least an outline outside of the slides. I’ve said this before too, but just because you’ve made slides doesn’t mean you’ve written a speech.
• Images become metaphors, and metaphors are excellent teaching tools. I’m currently reading the excellent Made to Stick, and the authors are constantly reinforcing this idea.
• My slides look different from nearly everybody else’s. That makes me (and hopefully my ideas) more memorable. Lots of my fellow speaker had terrific ideas, but their slides were, for the most part, banal and full of bullet points. See for yourself. Remember, your slides are your costumes, lighting and set. So do them up nice.
• I try to pick beautiful photos. They’re a pleasure to look at. Even if audience members couldn’t care less about my talk, at least there’s something visually interesting going on.

After my talk somebody thanked me for being a bullet point-free zone.

Casual, Friendly and Open

In the afternoon, I was running a workshop on social media tools, channels and technology. It was towards the end of the last day of the conference, and I figured everybody would be a bit bored of PowerPoint presentations.

Instead, I prepared an informal, conversational session around this tag cloud:

As I explain in the talk, I’m actually cheating here. The size of the terms have no application. It’s just a fun, topical way to make a list. The subtextual message is casual, friendly and open.

Sometimes I print these tag clouds out, as in the above photo. Props are usually a good thing, and it’s always fun to have something to wave around.

I put this list up on the screen, and invite people to ask about any of the terms, or to tell stories about their experiences. I prepare by devising little riffs and case study on each term.

It’s certainly not a particularly original or innovative approach, but I find people respond to it in a workshop or other less formal session. The tag cloud provides just enough structure to keep the conversation on track, and enables me to refocus or refresh the topic as necessary.

Plus, it’s more fun for me. I get to learn more from the audience, and the randomness of it keeps me on my toes. In a way, it’s a kind of rip-off of 30 Plays in 60 Minutes.

UPDATE: I wrote this post partially because James sent me these guidelines for abstract pointillism in PowerPoint.

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Working on a wicked project right now, watching the pieces come together. More will be revealed on Monday, but for now this song expresses my excitement level pretty well.

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Hockey-Reference.com does what it says on the box. I don’t think I’d visited the site until James Mirtle wrote about it the other day (I usually go to The Internet Hockey Database if I need to look up a stat).

Hockey-Reference.com just launched this clever sponsorship model, apparently taking after Baseball-Reference.com. You pay a small amount of money to put a text ad on any player, team or coach page on the site. The price varies based on how much traffic the page gets, apparently based on roughly $2.50 for every 1000 page views. I checked out Trevor Linden and Mattias Ohlund–they were both going for $40 a year. Gordie Howe is worth a $100 a year.

I eventually settled on Bret Hedican (great wheels, no hands) for a mere $10 for the year. I chose him because I was going to link to Julie’s figure skating blog, and he’s married to Kristi Yamaguchi.

It’s a clever gimmick, and a great way to raise a little cash for the site publishers.

My friend Gwendolyn recently started a food blog entitled Patent and the Pantry. She’s combining recipes with great photos of her concoctions. She brought a bunch of rosemary cashews when she came to visit us, and they were very tasty:

Rosemary Cashews have rapidly become my go-to hostess gift since I began making them a few years ago. They have been to book club and video nights, served as work snacks and traveled all the way to Malta as a small, homemade gift for friends hosting me there. (They were such a hit, we made a bastardized version for Canadian Thanksgiving, in which my friends invited 10 for turkey dinner by the pool.)

I love the play of salty and sweet and the hit of heat, combined with the herby woodiness of the rosemary. Plus they’re ridiculously easy to make.

My only tip for Gwen is that she ought to host (and tag and add to groups) her photos on Flickr, and include links back to the appropriate blog posts in the description field. That will likely drive some traffic, given how attractive they are.

I really enjoyed “The Bourne Identity” when I first saw it in the theatre (here’s an early, rambling blog post on the film). I also really wanted Matt Damon’s sweater. He wears this kick-ass black, military-style sweater in the film. Of course, he looks way better than I would in it, but that’s also true of togas, house coats and djellabas.

At the time, I imagined a website which tracked what actors wore in movies, and sold real-world equivalents which you could buy. This was back in 2002, and I remember searching for a website that filled that role. I couldn’t find much. I did a few quick searches today, and still didn’t find anything super promising. SeenOn.com looks like the right fit, but it lists all of three movies thus far.

CoolSpotters has the potential to become such a resource, though it seems more targeted at off-screen It Girl bollocks. I read about it today on TechCrunch:

It’s an eye-candy celebrity-focused site that shows users the products celebrities are wearing in various photos. Users can then talk about and, of course, purchase those items.

Users can track celebrities, products, brands, shows (TV, Movies, etc.), places, events, and more. The idea is to show connections between people and stuff. These connections are called “spots” (as in, “I spotted that”), and show details on the item. If something is incorrect, users can change or remove it, and add new people and things.

They kind of combine the crowd-sourcing of Wikipedia and Facebook tags (or Flickr notes, if you like) with the smarmy photos of gossip blogs. It’s a smart approach.

I did a search for “The Bourne Identity”, but the only product identified is an ostentatious TAG Heuer Quartz Chronograph. Which Mr. Damon was apparently wearing on both wrists.