As you mayor may not know from having (or not having) followed us here for awhile, periodically we take a break. There’s been lots of discussion over the past few months on what it means to work at a startup. Should you work 4 days a week? Should you take time off? Should you work all night? Should you be a workaholic? We chimed in with our thoughts.

For us at Jackson Fish Market work is an important part of our lives. It’s not just a means to an end, it’s a critical component that we wouldn’t be happy without. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only component or the most important. We’re super passionate about our jobs because we’re super passionate about lots of different things. Some work-related, some not. We need time to pursue those outside work passions. Hence our twice yearly breaks.

Some folks, including us, doubted that we’d be able to pull it off. And while I won’t claim victory quite yet as we still have only three full-time employees (who are all founders) we are starting our third ‘break’ today. Spring break we’re calling it. We did a month in the summer of 2007, six weeks at the end of 2007 and now we’ve moved our break to the spring as we have our first ever intern class (Atelier JFM) coming in early June. We’re excited. (One of our interns is driving cross-country right now to get here in time.)

We’ve gotten lots done in the first 5 months of the year - with our main accomplishment being the shipment of Carbon Grove. Check it out if you get a chance. We have lots more cool stuff planned post-break.

We’ll be back in the office and back blogging bright and early on Monday, June 9, 2008. See ya then. Have a nice spring.

If you made it to our inaugural Secret Society Meeting at Jackson Fish Market World Headquarters last month, then you already know we’ve moved our working offices from the northwest corner of our building over to the northeast corner. The new space is not only much bigger, it also comes with wonderful floor-to-ceiling windows! We get lots of natural light, and a nice urban view of the Seattle Steam Factory across Western Ave. (Yes, they manufacture steam!)

With all this room to work with, we’ve carved out space for Hillel’s KJFM Studio, Walter’s I.T. Cave, and my Crafting Nook. Plus we’ve got two lofts (handy for when Hillel’s kids come to visit), a new larger than life-sized mural gracing our conference room wall, and a strange Star Trek-meets-Arabian-Knights doorway arch. (The arch was not of our making. We may do something to fix that later down the road, but some of our guests even like it!)

Walter and Mary-Alice even had a real street lamppost hanging around (!?!), so they brought it in and Walter installed it beautifully into the wood floor. Believe it or not, it fits right in, and looks like it could have come from our blog street scene.

Even though the space is big enough for us to spread out and each have our own room, Walter, Hillel, and I still prefer to all sit together because, well, that’s just how we roll Also, we have just enough space for when our summer interns arrive in a few weeks. Enjoy the pictures!

When it comes to brands doing digital marketing, I’m a big fan of trying to incorporate your online presence into the audience’s life on an ongoing basis instead of trying to get a bunch of their attention for a brief moment before they move on forever. MSN definitely took the latter approach when creating the “MSN Unleash the Enchantment of Brazil with Caress” promo site.

Not only did MSN and Caress take the opposite approach but they threw everything they could at it including making your own videos, a contest, and a free download of one of the Pussycat Dolls covering Duran Duran’s Rio. And while it’s not the style of site that we would have created, I have to give it credit for one thing - the free music download. Unlike the bulk of promo mini-sites I felt like the track was real value. I am sure there are plenty of people who would love the song. And given that I saw the site promoted during American Idol I am sure that MSN and Caress connected with exactly the right audience to download it.

The only thing I wonder about is why the site appears to try and limit how many times you can download the track. It’s the soundtrack to their ad campaign. Why put any restrictions on it at all?

We’ll continue to focus on building sites that try for usefulness and longevity. But giving away free stuff is good too.

When we first started out, one of the only examples out there of a genuinely useful website that was built with exclusive advertiser sponsorship as its driving force was Change Everything built by the folks at Social Signal. I wish I could say a lot has changed, but there aren’t exactly a plethora of sites that are worthy of this space.

Now Social Signal is up for a Webby. They’re competing against Facebook so they need all the help they can get. I encourage you to vote for them if you have a moment.

We’ve discussed the evolution from banner ads to branded widgets to full blown branded web applications. Many marketers are starting to understand the value of delivering useful “content” to their audiences as a means of engaging them. However, it’s worth spending a moment to examine the word “content” and how it’s used. It’s critical that we share a common understanding so we can take advantage of the new medium.

The following assertions are somewhat generalized but still useful to understand for our purposes. In the software industry content usually refers to stuff made by writers, (as well as photographers, musicians, videographers, directors, and producers). Content is the stuff that software presents, manipulates, finds, edits, etc. And it’s considered “easy”. In the content world, if software is even given any consideration, it’s considered… well… content. And more typically in the content world, software is not given any more thought than the film on which a movie is printed. Software is infrastructure.

Now imagine a world where software and content have to merge in a seamless fashion to create experiences that delight and engage audiences whose attention is at a premium given how many things are vying for it. In Hollywood, studios like Pixar are already creating breeds of hybrids who understand how to use the tech at its best but also know that all the tech in the world won’t help a bad story.

Marketing professionals and ad folks are just starting to grow these skillsets. They’re hiring the geeks. They’re learning the ropes. But there’s still a long way to go. For this next generation of ads it’s true that the tech (and the brand for that matter) should be subservient to delivering something that the user actually wants. But creative people still need to understand the subtleties and possibilities of the technology in order to create said experience. Interactivity is not just an extra feature like THX sound or even 3D. Interactivity completely changes the dynamic. People are not looking for interactive movies. Whether they know it or not, they’re looking for great software. And the best software mixes seamlessly with content to create things that users want to come back to again and again.

And this really is the test. Great software makes the user want to come back on their own again and again, essentially incorporating the experience into the routine of their lives. The distractions that many marketers are creating for the web today are nothing more than banner ads on steroids. And they’re definitely not anything that most people incorporate into the routine of their lives. If you do get a repeat visit it’s because they liked the distraction enough to inflict it on their friends and co-workers.

Consider that for a moment. For many of today’s interactive marketers, success is getting people to bug their friends.

Today however, the bulk of interactive content is does not meet the criteria above. These sites often have one or both of the following characteristics that come with their own drawbacks:

• They are dependent on produced content. Producing high quality content is expensive. And even if you can get away with cheaper content, it often gets stale quickly. The production costs, which can be high, become excessive when they turn into recurring costs.
• When they try to go beyond passive enjoyment of content and engage the user to extend their time with the site, the interactivity can often be relatively shallow taking the form of things like poorly executed flash games and the like.

There is nothing wrong with these techniques per se. But given some of the drawbacks listed above, there are alternatives that are worthy to explore (and to be clear, a handful of marketers are already heading down these new paths).

User-generated content is the key alternative to produced content. In addition to being much less costly to produce, not to mention potentially engaging, it can (when a result of a critical mass generating enough breadth) keep the experience fresh and new. Much has been written about user-generated content and clearly distribution and getting to critical mass are key components that enable a UGC ecosystem.

What’s truly new is a focus on what we’ll call “software” as opposed to mere interactivity. While an excellent complement to a UGC ecosystem, having real software or advanced interactivity is a potential source for serious engagement of an audience. We define software as going beyond what commodity sites provide. Don’t just enable users to upload their own videos, but create video editing tools that let users do interesting things they wouldn’t be able to do anywhere else. Don’t just let users post journals from their trips to exotic places, but let them plot their trips visually using photography and pins on a map of their journey.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get this software built. Most of today’s interactive agencies (or interactive units at advertising agencies) while producing excellent work, do not always have the technical talent in-house to deliver the kind of advanced software experiences that result in extended minutes of engagement. And often (though not always) traditional contract software development houses don’t have the design expertise and understanding to deliver experiences that make an appropriate emotional impact on an audience.

It didn’t take long after advent of the internet for marketers to look at it as a medium for advertising. And as most creators do when they see a new medium, they create for that new medium using the techniques and approaches that have served them well in more established mediums. In our specific example this means that marketers essentially converted billboards into banner ads and 30 second TV commercials into viral videos (or into 15 second TV commercials run uninterruptible before other people’s viral videos).

As happens with any new medium, after an initial phase of exuberance and random exploration, the creators start to learn the intricacies of the medium. And the internet, due to its fundamental identity as an enormous piece of distributed, networked, software has intricacies aplenty. They’re relatively well known but worth recounting:

• creation is cheap to free, and open to all
• distribution is cheap to free, and open to all
• interactivity is the default

These properties are being understood by marketers more and more every day. But our collective understanding is far from complete. In many cases marketers understand how sharing and social media can amplify their messages, but still end up delivering their messages in the form of billboards and television spots adapted for the internet. And to a certain extent the properties on the web are to blame.

Online businesses whose revenue comes from advertising look for standardization and scale in order to grow. Standardization and scale (as in most mediums) can’t help but lead to some degree of homogeneity and lack of authenticity. Filling rectangles on the web with banners touting your product has long been suspected as not the most effective means of communicating with an online audience. The logical next step is to add interactivity to those banners. However shooting ducks in a banner ad is not exactly earth-shaking innovation.

The next innovation was seemingly innocuous, but in fact much more powerful than most people realized. The innovation was the ability for the user to take this “interactive banner ad” and put it wherever they chose. In other words, not just anywhere on the page the advertiser chose, but rather on any page that the user controlled. In effect, this is what we now call widgets.

Why was user control over placement of the advertiser-created content so critical? Because at the moment that advertisers started relying on users to place the ads on their own web pages, they had to make those ad units actually useful. And this is the moment of conception for what we expect to be an eventual avalanche of advertiser-created/sponsored useful “content” on the web.

We believe that the evolution of brand advertising continues at breakneck speed. It’s true that the widget is an evolution of the banner ad (once you’ve added interactivity and the ability for users to place them in convenient locations). But what is the destination of this journey? Widgets are mini-applications that users embed in the web page of their choice. Their constrained screen real estate makes them ideal for embedding. That said, brand marketers who are deploying widgets successfully are already realizing that those same constraints that make widgets consumable also limit the amount of engagement they can generate with an audience. Why not create entire useful web applications that engage audiences exponentially relative to their widget siblings? In fact, these new web apps can have their own fleet of widgets that bring new users back to the “mother ship”.

Once marketers understand that this new generation of advertising is not just banner ads made large (and larger) but has a fundamentally different contract with the audience, both marketers and the general public will start to truly get the benefits of this new advertising medium.

Since January we’ve been working hard on our third Jackson Fish experience. Today, on Earth Day, we’re proud to release Carbon Grove™.

Carbon Grove lets you sign up for reminders for small things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. Every time you respond to your reminders you can watch your own virtual tree (choose from nine species in three forests) grow a little bit. If you keep at it, local wildlife may even visit your tree. Climate change is a problem that af­fects everyone on our planet. As is often the case with problems of this magnitude, it’s hard to feel like one person can make a difference. In reality however, every little bit helps.

A special word of thanks to Carbon Grove’s inaugural sponsor – the folks on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. They were eager to create a special experience for their IE users as well as show one small piece of their com­mitment to the environment. Not only is Internet Explorer the exclusive way to take advantage of Carbon Grove, but Microsoft’s Silverlight technology helped us make browsing the three forests a neat experience.

We’d love for you to check it out and plant your own tree. Your feedback and comments are welcome of course. Thanks for giving it a moment of your time if you get a chance.

In case you missed it, we’re having our first Secret Society meeting tomorrow night — Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 6:30pm. The details are here. You may want to consider an alternative to driving alone in your car for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s Earth Day.
2. The Mariners are playing. Parking will be scarce and pricey. (We recommend heading north on Western Avenue for cheaper and more plentiful parking.)

Look forward to seeing everyone. Remember, it’s worth wending your way through the baseball fans as we’ll have a cool speaker, free food and drinks, live music, and some new fun stuff from us.

(Click on the thumbnail on the bottom row, second from the left.)

…come see our presentation on next generation consumer software.

By no means do we claim to be experts, but hopefully from our first two apps (They’re Beautiful! and Invitastic) as well as our blog you can tell that we definitely have opinions on how to create a web experience. I get to share our philosophy tonight at the Seattle Tech Startups regular meetup.

My talk is titled: Next Generation Consumer Software. Here at Jackson Fish we feel that our industry is in the early stages of an evolution in what it means to make high quality consumer software/web experiences. We’re certainly not alone in that. This presentation gets into the details of what we think it means to deliver these types of experiences.

Would love to see you there. Here are the details:

• Wednesday, April 16th, 6:00 PM
• Seattle Public Library, Capitol Hill Branch
• 425 Harvard Avenue East, Seattle