Road Trip 2008 included a stop at the Corvette assembly plant in Bowling Green, Ky. Road Trip 2009 will feature visits to factories, as well as to Air Force Space Command, the Badlands, the Firefighters Challenge, and much more.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)Dear readers: I want you. And I want you to stay.
For each of the past three summers, I've spent some time on the road, driving around different regions of the United States, reporting on some of the most interesting destinations I could find, and road-testing some of the coolest gear around. The CNET Road Trip has taken me through 17 states (and one Canadian province) in the Pacific Northwest (2006), the Southwest (2007), and the Southeast (2008).
The trips have been hits, but I have struggled to organically build an audience throughout each journey. Rather, it seems most people have tended to come across a story they liked, read it, and then left.
For Road Trip 2009, which will take me through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota, I want not just to get you here, but to give you as many reasons as I can to stay. And that, I'm learning, means being much more proactive in keeping you engaged.
To be sure, the heart of what I'll be offering up will be a steady flow of feature stories and photo galleries from places like NORAD, Yellowstone National Park, a unique Mars research program, an innovative Wyoming wind farm, the highest paved road in North America, and much more. But I know there has to be more than that. And the tools at my disposal are powerful, yet complex.
With that in mind, I asked four power social-media users for tips on how to make Road Trip 2009 a regular destination for a sizable audience. And if one thing became clear afterward, it's that I need to step it up and do a lot more personal outreach than I've ever done before.
Very busy days
Not to make excuses for my past lackluster social-media usage, but let me give a little context for how these trips work: Each day, I wake up in a new motel and quickly rush off to an appointment. I spend the late morning and early afternoon reporting, and then usually drive several hours to the next town. I eat something and then I write and process photos for a few hours. Then I go to sleep. Repeat. For several weeks.
Sadly, this hasn't allowed much time for things like meet-ups. But to hear my expert panel tell it, I need to get beyond that, and just embrace meet-ups. Or tweet-ups, if they're organized on Twitter, as many are these days.
"I'm a huge fan of the tweet-up," said Laura Roeder, a social-media consultant. "I just moved to Los Angeles...from Chicago. I've met so many of my friends through Twitter and through tweet-ups."
And despite my limited amount of available time, Chris Heuer, co-founder of the Social Media Club, says tweet-ups don't have to take all that long.
"Say, 'I'm going to be here at this place, from 6 to 7," advised Heuer. "Or have readers come and meet you and (organize the tweet-up) for you."
I also told Heuer that another element of my Road Trips has traditionally involved road-testing a number of high-tech products, and that this year is no different. Among the products I'll have with me this time are an Apple MacBook Pro and iPhone 3G S, a LiveScribe Pulse recording pen, an Amazon Kindle 2, a Verizon MiFi and more. I'll also be driving a "clean diesel" Audi Q7 TDI.
Heuer said that given that, one good way to get people to come out to the meet-ups would be to bring the technology along with me so that people could check out all the gear for themselves.
Of course, not everyone is a big fan of the meet-up. I asked Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin what she thought of them, and she explained that she has tended to skip such gatherings on her many reporting journeys around the world. Largely, it seemed, she didn't feel that meeting up with readers added all that much to the overall experience, though she did say she organized a couple of them in Latin America recently.
Still, it's clear that doing meet-ups is a natural way to energize local audiences--and Heuer suggested that even if it's only local audiences at first, getting them interested in the trip, and the trip's themes, will have a snowball effect as they tweet and blog about coming together with me and other readers.
Among the many tools CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman plans to use to build an audience for his Road Trip 2009 project is Twellow, which allows anyone to search for Twitter users by city.
(Credit: Twellow)I wondered, though, about how to get people in the cities and towns I'll be visiting interested in meeting up in the first place. And Heuer suggested using sites like Twellow, which allow you to find Twitter users by geography. Then, by interacting with some of the most popular Twitterers in each area, it's possible to engage them in helping to promote a gathering.
To Facebook, or not to Facebook
I wondered if Facebook would be a good way to organize the get-togethers, but found that, despite the social network's incredible success, the experts I talked to were mixed about its utility for this specific purpose.
"I honestly find Facebook a lot less useful than Twitter," said Roeder. "Twitter is much easier for more fluid, instant communications....I tell my (business clients) not to even worry about Facebook. To me, the core difference is that Twitter is all about meeting new people, and a lot of people don't use Facebook that way."
Heuer, on the other hand, said he'd actually turn to Facebook first, since the site's reach can be huge, and it offers specific tools for events. Clearly, the answer is to post meet-ups on both Twitter and Facebook, and hope that the two combined can create an echo effect.
Of course, I'm already using Facebook to some extent. I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a rank amateur when it comes to the massively popular social network. But a couple months ago, I started a Road Trip 2009 fan page. The response has been moderate, but not that bad, given that I haven't posted any new content to the page since then. But that is about to change. This story, for example, will be the first new post there, and every new piece of Road Trip content will appear there, as well.
That is, if I can be disciplined. Heuer cautioned against dropping the ball when it comes to utilizing Facebook. "The most important thing there is staying on top of it," he said, "and not dropping it after you start."
I agree. And we'll see how it goes.
Finding themes
One of the first people I talked to about expanding the reach of Road Trip was the futurist Jerry Paffendorf. An organizer of the Metaverse Roadmap Project, a very early Electric Sheep employee and generally a visionary thinker, Paffendorf asked me how I thought all the various destinations on the trip were tied together.
To date, I'd been thinking of the trip as concentrating on three major themes--environmental and energy research, military and defense, and America's natural wonders.
But Paffendorf said I needed to find a way to tie everything together, and that perhaps turning to my readers to help with that would be a good way to build an audience. He suggested asking readers, via the Road Trip blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, to suggest questions to ask the people I interview at each destination. That, he said, might create a dynamic where readers begin to feel like they're coming "on the trip" with me. So it's, "We're going to go on the road," not I'm going on the road.
Paffendorf also told me about a really cool project Flickr had done not long ago, commissioning a company called Uncommon Projects to build them a series of bikes complete with cameras that automatically take, geotag, and upload pictures on the go. It seemed like that would be a great addition to the car I'd be driving, especially since I'll be driving through some of the most beautiful country in the United States.
Unfortunately, after talking with Uncommon Projects, I discovered that commissioning something like that would cost several thousand dollars--money I don't have.
What I do have, however, is a bag full of things to give away to readers, things like Flip video cameras, Showtime DVD sets, and a series of video games. I can imagine handing them out to people at meet-ups, or to people who suggest the best things to go visit in a certain town, or maybe who offer the best question to ask my host at a military installation or national park. Or maybe I can offer a chance to have your picture posted on my blog, live, with awe-inspiring natural beauty as a backdrop, far from any normally available Internet signal. I want to get readers excited, and I want to give back to them for their attention.
Boing Boing's Jardin, for her part, said that when that popular tech culture blog has given away things like iPhones or iPod Touches, people have indeed gotten excited about the contests.
"People get jazzed about cool stuff," Jardin said. "But it's not just the device that's going to get them excited. The device is part of it, but so is the experience....(Giveaways) will pique their interest, but you have to have other stuff going on."
And, dear readers, that is something I feel very confident about. I may have a lot to learn about utilizing social media to build an audience, but at the very least, Road Trip 2009 will offer you an intriguing picture of some of the best that America has to offer.
On June 21, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a story about a company called Edoc Laundry and its line of clothing that featured a built-in alternate-reality game.
On Friday, I read about a new line of T-shirts available at Target that feature images from experimental games and which come with free CDs on which are the games themselves.
Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow wrote about the new shirts Friday, and it reminded me of the Edoc Laundry experiment, which, while innovative, never quite took off.
A new line of T-shirts that features images from experimental games is reminiscent of Edoc Laundry's clothing line with a built-in alternate-reality game.
(Credit: Edoc Laundry)Apparently, the new T-shirt line comes comes from a company called EGPApparel, and each individual shirt has an image from one of the games developed under the Experimental Gameplay Project, in which participants have one week to create an all-new game all by themselves.
As a promotion, the shirts come with the games the images are based on.
What's striking to me about this is that people are still pursuing the idea of putting original game-related content on clothing. I love the idea, especially when the imagery isn't something everyday folks will recognize.
In the case of the Edoc Laundry line, I've been seeing clothes ever since I wrote about it that remind me of the company's products but which ended up being just something that looked similar. And in the case of the EGPApparel clothes, I suspect these, too, will begin to take shape in many, many outfits that I see, few of which will actually be legit.
And as posed on Boing Boing, the very idea of taking images from obscure games and using them to sell clothes is rather fun. I don't know that it will end up doing much for the designers of the games, but it's worth trying.
One of my favorite people in the world of tech culture has always been Make magazine senior editor Phil Torrone.
Over the years, I've done a number of stories about his various exploits, including Roomba Frogger at South by Southwest 2006, his laser-etching business, his jamming of TVs at a hotel in Austin, Texas, and his work in helping organize Maker Faires. Beyond that, I've always enjoyed talking with him, as he's a world traveler, a top-notch intellect, and a world-class culture jammer. He's just my kind of guy.
'Make' magazine editor Phil Torrone playing with a TV-B-Gone at a hotel in Austin, Texas in October, 2006.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)And there's certainly one thing about Torrone that is evidenced in the things he does for fun and for work: he is not shy about pushing social and cultural boundaries. In fact, based on my personal observations of him, he kind of revels in doing so.
So when I saw a Boing Boing post on Tuesday reporting that Torrone was seen at this week's ETech conference in San Diego with a carry-on bag that has a fully formed imprint of a handgun on it, I was both shocked and not at all surprised.
What I would have given, I thought, to have seen him take that bag through airport security; to see what I'm sure was his straight-faced gaze as Transportation Security Administration personnel encountered the bag.
At the ETech conference in San Diego, Torrone was spotted carrying this bag, a model from Dutch firm Vlieger & Vandam
(Credit: David Pescovitz/Boing Boing.net)As Boing Boing blogger David Pescovitz put it in his entry, "Fortunately, (Torrone) made it through security with enough time to catch his flight."
I bet he did.
To be fair, Torrone's bag is a production model from the Dutch firm Vlieger & Vandam, and I'm sure he's not the only person traveling around with one. In fact, the firm makes the bag in three colors and also has one with an embossed knife.
But holy cow! What chutzpah. Especially because we all know that airport security don't take things that make them think of weapons lightly. Witness what happened to MIT student Star Simpson when she wore a shirt with some home-made electronics built-in to the Boston airport last year.
And I'm not at all surprised. If you recall, during this year's Consumer Electronics Show, the gadget blog Gizmodo caused a huge uproar when it ran a prank turning off TVs at the show, including those being used for a major Motorola presentation.
Gizmodo took a massive amount of flak for the prank--though its profile was also raised immeasurably--but one thing was lost in the mix.
As Gizmodo itself reported in its initial story on the prank, "when Make offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves...Thanks to Phil Torrone for the gear."
When I read that, I had to smile, especially after the firestorm of controversy that erupted afterward, not one single bit of which was targeted at Torrone. But I knew that somewhere, he was laughing his behind off at what he had wrought.
The reality is, Torrone is one of those people worth watching, no matter where he goes because he's always up to something interesting.
I'm sure there are those who think his brand of humor and sense of boundaries is anti-social and even dangerous. Having been there for the Roomba Frogger episode and having read the many, many comments readers left after I wrote about it, I actually know that for a fact.
But at the same time, I think that society's conventions need a little tweaking from time to time, and it takes people with a little chutzpah to do so, people who aren't afraid of the kind of response their actions will engender. And I also know that Torrone would never actually put anyone in danger.
So all I can say is, if you happen to be heading to Austin later this week for this year's South by Southwest conference--where I know Torrone will be--keep an eye on him. You never know what might happen.
The mojito-mixing contraption in this picture is Robomoji. Its 32-year-old inventor, a German man named Robert Martin.
(Credit: Jacob Appelbaum/Roboexotica.org)Over at Boing Boing this morning, I see that uber-blogger/novelist/speaker/electronic freedom fighter Cory Doctorow is planning on speaking at the Roboexotica symposium that gets under way in Vienna, Austria, tomorrow.
I hadn't heard of Roboexotica myself until I was in Austin, Texas, last month covering the Maker Faire there. At dinner one night with some of the Maker Faire folks, I Make Things video blogger Bre Petis started telling me about the event. And as often happens when smart people tell me about amazing things, my inner geek got very excited.
If you're not familiar with Roboexotica, this is how it's explained on the official Web site: "Until recently, no attempts had been made to publicly discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics worldwide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out."
Starting tomorrow, a conference on cocktail-serving robots begins in Vienna, Austria.
(Credit: Roboexotica)Now, I don't know what "Lebenswelt" means but I get the gist of it. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that people I know to be serious about things like this were actually traveling to Vienna, I might have thought Roboexotica was a prank. After all, "cocktail robotics?"
But it is real, and I wish I were going.
It turns out that the topics being discussed at the symposium don't all have to do with programming robots to serve gin and tonics--though, since I don't speak German, I'm not entirely sure what much of the program is about.What I can see on the English version of the festival's site, however, looks pretty interesting. You've got Doctorow speaking about "why consciousness uploading, post-human existence and life after the Singularity are popular today, and why science fiction is always about the present," and Petis is doing his own talk on "the apocalyptic utopia."
Fun stuff.
Now all we need to do is figure out how to get the organizers to do a San Francisco edition of their event sometime in the future, and I can guarantee a rabid local response. Zombies, meet cocktail-serving robots.
LOS ANGELES--I was sitting in line waiting to get on my connecting flight to Austin, Texas, where I'm going to cover the behind-the-scenes activity at Maker Faire, when guess who walked up to join the queue?
It was none other than Maker Faire co-organizer and Boing Boing co-editor Mark Frauenfelder, also off to Austin for the event.
I love how small the world can be sometimes.
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