As someone who works at an internet marketing company, I have to tell you all that yes, I do look at the internet much differently than you do. I used to not be on this side of the fence, but things have a changed. So I’ll let you take a gander at what the view is like from here.

Confessions of an Internet Marketeer

Chapter 1: MySpace

Okay, so there a lot of internet users out there who feel that this is a terrible detriment to society and a poor representation of how the internet should be, but I wholeheartedly disagree. This user-generated, web 2.0 ass-craziness is exactly what is going on with the internet, and though you may feel that it is the internet equivalent of, say, Orange County, CA, you wouldn’t be far off. But this is you judging the book by its cover, in the same way you are judging Orange County by its… uh, coverage.

Also, I am obliged to have a profile on any social network I can find because, well, the internet is my work area, and this includes MySpace.

No, I don’t spam you. My view on spam will be covered in Chapter 2.

What I really wanted to show you all are some things you might not realize about MySpace that we know here on the side of market metrics:

• You’ll notice that MySpace breaks often. This isn’t so much their “dirty code,” as the framework code is actually quite flexible; I mean, you’ve seen those custom MySpace pages, right? No, MySpace breaks often because this way they can ensures that you will then load the page over and over, and it puts things in places on different pages so that you stay within the MySpace site. Their coding could easily be ported to, say, AJAX or even Flash, but doing this means you only have to load one page, and they want the numbers. So, separate pages it is, ladies and gents.
• Numbers, you say? Here:
• Globally, MySpace is ranked #5 in Alexa.com. They are #3 in the United States. Alexa rankings measure who is really in the lead in terms of site traffic, and the stats are so specific that you should probably sort it by country first. The top ten of Alexa includes our favorites: YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, etc.
• Percent of people on the internet who use MySpace: 4.445% . Keep in mind that the internet is vast and mighty.
• Americans make up 52% of the users on MySpace.
• If you take a look at my own MySpace, you’ll notice that I don’t mind banners and advertisements. Why? Sometimes, these people are looking for placements, and I’m happy to provide them with a venue because I’ve asked for the same. Of course, I’ve offered incentive for the use of ad space, like free swag as thanks and appreciation, but that’s something else altogether. The reason I let certain types of people advertise is not only because I support their cause, but because I can help their numbers. Some of these people plaster their flyers/banners/what-have-you on the internet for a certain metric – Reach. “How many people can I reach by plastering this banner?” Well…
• [number of banners] x [visibility of placements] x [traffic ranking of site] = value and effectiveness of a banner campaign
• And yes, sometimes this equals money.
• “Oh, MySpace is #5 globally on the internet itself? And I can paste banner ads on there for free?”

There you go. I hope this lends some insight into your day on the world wide web.

This is Nico, your Internet Marketeer, signing off, but staying logged in.

…to tune out the world around me. One of the greatest gifts I can give myself after one of my extracurricular income sources has suddenly picked up.

Why, yes, of course I’m talking about prostitution. How clever of you to crack the one joke everyone else does when referring to “work on the side.”

No, I’m actually talking about freelancing crap-work web issues that nobody else wants to do so it gets outsourced. Cheaply fixed problems for clients, a couple hours out of my own day, and sometimes you can get $25 wired to you for sending someone literally 40 lines of HTML that fixes a problem simply be remedied with a little creative Googling and testing it to see if the code works.

As I’ve also got larger projects on the plate, it makes sense that someone who is too preoccupied can not spend time picking through lines of code to fix one inconsistency. I am, however, a pedant, so this is a perfect source of extra cash.

I’d offer this work to people I know, but I only know two or so people who can mentally visualize a page by looking at the code, and they’re busy working on projects that require more attention.

Anyway, back to these new earpieces, who are a successful fusion of earplugs and earbuds: I can actually the hear the kick drum in the center of my cranium on a Specials’ album! And you know that ska is all treble, rudie.

Additionally, I feel this may up my productivity since nobody bothers me when it seems like I’m ignoring them, and when in reality I have an object obfuscating the sound waves emanating from their respective pie holes.

What a great investment. I’ll bet I can use these as stage monitors, too.

Because I work at an internet company, we are encouraged to communicate via AIM so as to be able to multitask with whatever we’ve already got on the screen and to collaborate with other people who are attached to a project.

Sometimes, however, it will get out of hand:

Lauren: i also suspect that “Ding dong el timbre suena” is not proper spanish
Me: really? damn, i use that all the time
Me: i must sound like a buffoon
Lauren: i use it too! all over glassell park
Me: maybe this explains the ungodly amount of sex solicitations i get from puerto rican boys
Lauren: ay poppy!

Additionally, we are encouraged to stay up to date on the latest YouTube viral videos, internet phenomena, RSS feeds for stuff in which we are genuinely interested, and any kind of shortcut helper applications.

Yeah, you wish you had my job.

… and a-shakin’!

Pics of what the new place looks like will be up soon, I just gotta convince Stuart to use his digital camera.

Anybody have suggestions for simple decorations? Since cleaning the place up, it has started to look a bit sparse.

You’d think that third party booking companies would look out for music in general, wouldn’t you?

I just got an email from one of our third party contacts who I let have the remaining slots on a night that had two bands already on the bill.

That means there are 3 slots left.

So he’s bringing six.

And not only that, but he’s bumping the two originally booked acts to the bookends of the night, which are the crappiest slots of any given night, thereby screwing them over hardcore and cutting their sets short.

Yeah. WTF, right?

The thing is, this booking company has been good to us before so I don’t understand why they’re feeling entitled to screw acts that we’ve booked ourselves.

Moreover, you’d think that when a booking company focuses on helping to bring underground artists some attention, that they would have some respect in letting the other acts who are just as independent do the same thing; or at least leave them be and not tread on their toes to get their own acts some attention.

As it turns out, no, there is no etiquette in the music business wherever I look. There is saving face, pointing fingers, and there are numbers; but there is no ethic. The more I deal with the business of music, the more I want to take down the entire institution that is hell-bent on promulgating its respective artists who, ultimately, will matter very little. Maybe something to do on a weekend night at most.

I realize that this is a rather dismal view of how the underground scene works, but from what I’ve experienced of it–being in control of the calendar, being on stage, being at the soundboard, being on the phone with venues, being on the road–I see little hope, and especially when I am first-hand victim to these aggressive and relentless sharks that call themselves managers.

What a disaster. Damage control is the worst part about this job.

Expect me to be a real jerk in days to come.

If you have known me for long enough, you know that I’m fascinated by self-awareness. Thus, my interest in metafiction, metafilm, post-modernism in literature and music, etc. etc. etc. hoity-toity jaded erudition jargon snooty blardy blar.

But you’ll notice that prefix, “meta-”, which is rooted in Greek.

Wikipedia (article):

Meta (from Greek: μετά = “after”, “beyond”, “with”), is a prefix used in English in order to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. The Greek meta is equivalent to the Latin post.

In epistemology, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced it, when, what format the data are in and so on). Similarly, metamemory in psychology means an individual’s knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it. Any subject can be said to have a meta-theory, which is the theoretical consideration of its foundations and methods.

Still with me?

It is at this juncture that I point you towards Stuart’s most recent entry, which is a blog posting about blogs (which are generally my favorite kind). He makes an astute observation about the disparity between collegiate and post-collegiate blogging. Luckily, I haven’t found myself in the trappings of the difference between my college blog and my after-college blog because I didn’t start until I left, indicating that my college life was too busy getting stoned to blog.

And when you’re baked, paranoia sets in if you’re a self-aware kind of person; and this is not necessarily a side of one’s personality that is something you want to share with others willingly.

. . .

I actually do keep old writings around me, and damn; I’ve discovered that I was a better writer in college than I am now. I guess I don’t really take the time to revise much anymore since when I blog, I kind of shoot from the hip (from the mouse?) – but I did start a blog on Xanga a while back and focused on actually trying to produce posts that practiced artistic integrity. I abandoned it because it occurred to me that those kinds of posts could more appropriately be relegated to sites like DeviantArt; and I guess they’re not as important to put in (reverse) chronological sequence as much as they should be merely in a catalog.

Others might argue that a blog that doesn’t have a focus is just a journal, and is just self-indulgent–but bloody hell, man – when is a blog not self-indulgent? I mean, really. In order to blog, you first need, well, a self. And self-indulgent is not the same as self-aware — moreover, rarely do those two facets of self work hand-in-hand.

From a web-developer standpoint, I tend to group blogging as being in the crowd of regularly updating content: XML files, RSS feeds, calendars, events, newsletters, reports, that kind of thing. Blogs are unique from the others, however, by the fact that they are open-ended in their content intentions. On the other side of the fence, we’ve got content that is (for the most part) static. Not that this kind of content is unable to be updated, but this kind of content, for all intensive purposes, is used to be expository and remain how it is so that others can pass by it and draw from it what they might want or need.

Ok, back to my point in bringing up Stoodert’s blog:

The interesting thing about blogging is that the blog only extends as far as the bubble around its user’s world. When in college, user lives in a college bubble. Said bubble will be popped once user enters what we were always told was the ‘real world’ — working a day job or whatever — users start to think about their lives differently as they are no longer fixed to the undergrad world around classes, papers, social lives, or convincing each other that they are pundits hell-bent on changing the world for the better. Users in this ‘real world’ are paying bills, loans (if this is the case), trying to meet new people since new people aren’t all on campus at some point, reading what they want when they want, and not doing homework.

Homework. Hm…

I’m going to call this the ‘homework/blog paradigm drift’ — the tone, content, and frequency is contingent upon user’s relationship to homework. That is, the lack thereof, pending doom thereof, having, doing, neglecting, turning in, etc. This, then, also covers our friends who are currently in gradschool, which is a kind of limbo-hybrid between real and collegiate.

This theory is released under Creative Commons, so feel free to make modifications and contributions. ;)

Yeah, scratch feeling good about that. Wiki’s article of the day should have been Bureaucracy.

Went into the courtroom 10 minutes early.
Queued up with the rest of the numbers.
Didn’t reach the front of the line in time to get signed in.
They made us wait an hour.
And then told us to leave and come back tomorrow.

Dammit.

At least I got to go to work today.

Ordinarily, I would be pissed off that I had forgotten to fill out an absence slip for work because I have jury duty. However, it was on Friday that the court told me I did not have to come in, and on Sunday, I had discovered that in fact, I do have to serve.

Just as ordinarily, I would be angry that I can’t get back to sleep because I had taken a nap in front of my computer while freelancing earlier — and being anxious about having to wake up at 5:30 AM is not good when you can’t get to sleep. My summons is at 7:30, but I have to drop Mahea off at my workplace, and in a way, I’m even jealous that she’ll get to be at work and I won’t. I’m jealous that a lot of people get to work when I won’t because my employer doesn’t pay for time off during jury duty.

And my printer won’t print the directions to the courthouse because it’s out of color ink, even though I never print in color.

And because of falling asleep earlier, I totally dropped the ball on freelancing and I’m even further behind. I hope I’m not coming off as a flake to my clients.

Speaking of flaking on clients, I hope my day job employers and the clients for whom I have correspondence due don’t freak out on me because I didn’t sufficiently warn everyone about my [then prospective] jury duty. I’ll leave a message tomorrow…

Gah, I just looked at my finances. Bad idea.

. . .

And I was getting stirred up about all these recent reality-shits-on-Nico all connecting to this confounded jury duty, but then I saw the article of the day on Wikipedia:

Law.

That little bit of allegory actually made me feel a lot better. Sounds stupid and insignificant, but it abstracted and put into perspective this thing that came out of nowhere (which was, in the grand scheme of things, always there) and started disorienting my life even more than how disoriented it already currently is.

And besides, this is my civic duty blah blah blah price of freedom what-have-you proud to be an American yadda-yadda etc. so on and so forth–but at the very worst I’m going to wake up early and spend a day reading and listening to music while periodically getting asked to sit, stand, and converse in certain parts of a building, identical events to my last jury summons. How bad can that be? Even if I’m not getting compensated, it’s a little time to not think about money or work.

And although things could be better, I could be sitting on the other side of the juror’s box via subpoena, the thought of which completely dwarfs my concern for what is going on in my own life.

Wikipedia: “Law affects everyday life and society in a variety of ways.”

No kidding.