I’ll be talking about Photojojo and the topic is how to get people to pay attention to what you’re doing.

As usual, if you’re in town and want to meet up, drop me a line!

March 1st: At PMA this year, I’ll be doing a solo session on day 1 of DIMA (the series looking at emerginc tech trends in photography). I’ll be talking about some of the “wacky” things we’re doing with Photojojo and how brick-and-mortar retailers can get involved.

March 13th: And I’ll be going to SXSW for the first time, where I’ll be sitting on a panel my friend Brian Oberkirch is organizing called “Try Making Yourself More Interesting” talking about how we built Photojojo’s brand and community to be more human and fun.

If you’ll be at any of these events, come by, or drop me a line. I’d love to meet you!

I wrote about them back in March and am thrilled to see ‘em getting more and more attention. Just in the past few days, they got a plug in the Wall Street Journal and a post in TechCrunch!

Their marketing strategy for the site, by the way, is spot-on. Instead of trying to attack the entire world at once (and spreading themselves too thin, with cities upon cities with no listings) or concentrating on one city at a time (slow), they’re latching onto popular events and conferences.

By creating campaigns around design and political conferences and major events, they make it temporal, and relevant. In one stroke, the site is worth talking about and blogging about for anyone who’s talking or blogging about that event. Smart.

I’m fearful that it will start ridiculously early. (But glad that Piers took my suggestion and booked the Swedish American Hall, which is only a block away from my apt!)

Link: A mini-interview with me on PSFK
Link: Conference details + tickets
(I have one free ticket… haven’t decided how to give it out yet..)

Thanks to Jinal Shah for getting me involved!

Link: I messed up

Link: Behance: Amit Gupta

He was recently profiled in TIME Magazine. Way to go, Jamie!

I didn’t know this before, but apparently the final grades are dependent on each students internet fame at the end of the semester. (Or, I assume, change/improvement in their frame.) Beautiful.

Here’s a choice quote:

Durtsche [a student] says the class has helped him to look differently at the Internet, at how quickly famo comes and goes… “You have to be creative, especially in this class to get an A. Why do you think I’m talking to you? This story is going online with my name, isn’t it? That’s more famo, right there.”

Link: Googling for your Grade (TIME), more about the class

Christine and Justin are a couple in NYC. They’ve made paintings of things they want, and they’re selling each painting for the amount of money it’d cost to buy that item. Simple genius. This is a story built to spread.

Link: Wants for Sale [via ReadWriteWeb]

See also: Kate’s work at Obsessive Consumption, Meg Scheminske’s Piecemeal Painting Sale

Last week we launched CommandShift3, and we’ve had an amazing response.

Silicon Alley Reporter was first on the scene, 37Signals linked to it, Wired blogged it, calling it a “refreshingly quirky twist on a popular online face-off model.” (And they liked our About page), SEOMoz mentions CS3 in their weekly roundup, saying “It’s a great way to prove to bosses obsessed with look and feel that those things matter…”, Women Tech blog geeksugar declared it their Website of the Day, LVHRD wrote it up, and so did Metafilter (thanks Matt!).

Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits), Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog), Cal Henderson (Flickr), Airbag Industries, Cameron Moll, Ben Brown, Josh Spear, and Elliot Jay Stocks (Carsonified) also gave us some link love.

We were also #1 on Delicious Popular, on the front page of Reddit, and got lots of friends twittering.

Today, we hit Read/WriteWeb (Thanks, Marshall!)

Thanks times 60 million to everyone who’s spread the word and checked out he site. We love you, and we’re working on a lot of awesome new stuff for CS3 for you. Stay tuned.

Quite possibly the largest Jelly yet takes place in Atlanta, GA this Friday.

Also on Friday, the ever-popular Austin Jelly, and the one that started it all, Jelly in NYC returns to House 2.0 this week.

Coming up next: Chicago Jelly (organized by my pal Sean Johnson!), Boston Jelly, Jelly in the O.C., and Manilla Jelly.

Recently: Houston Jelly and Singapore Jelly.

Gathering steam: Milwaukee Jelly, Tuscon Jelly, and San Francisco Jelly. (I know, I know, I’ve been busy!)

… and some recent press: we were on the Clark Howard radio show, and the hugely popular video blog, The JetSet Show.

Here’s the JetSet clip:

From Apple. Go figure! :)

[via MacRumors]

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads. Like Fred Wilson, I found I was getting very few pageviews and no clicks at all until I created this ad that started last night, and bumped my CPC bid from $0.10 to $0.15. Within a few minutes, it had 1000s of views and started seeing clicks.

In a couple hours, I’d reached reached 138 clicks ($10 worth). Then Facebook banished my ad, and I have no idea why.

Today the ad page updated to tell me my ad was in violation of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, sections 4, 5, and 6. It’s strange… you can see my ad in this screenshot, and I can’t really see how it’s in violation.

Here are sections 4, 5, and 6 of Facebook’s Ad Guidelines:

4. Grammar, spelling, and capitalization

Ad text must be in logical sentence form and contain grammatically correct spacing.

Ads must use correct spelling.

Ads may not include unnecessary capitalization (such as ‘FREE’). Acronyms may be capitalized.

Ads may not include excessive repetition.

5. Punctuation and symbols

The use of all symbols, numbers, or letters must adhere to the true meaning of the symbol.

Repeated and unnecessary punctuation or symbols is not permitted.

Symbols may not be used to substitute for letters (e.g., “$ave” instead of “save”).

6. Language and image content

Provocative images will not be accepted.

Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote adult content, including nudity, sexual terms and/or images of people in positions or activities that are excessively suggestive or sexual.

Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote offensive, profane, vulgar, obscene, or inappropriate language.

Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote defamatory, libelous, slanderous and/or unlawful content.

Any ideas?

With all the attention on 2.0 tech and RSS and the like, people tend to forget that for most people, even the leading-edge, email is still the killer app for the Internet.

I wanted to share this example of well-thought email usage on Meetup.com

Meetup already makes heavy use of email once you join a group (sometimes too heavy) but I love what they’re doing to encourage you to join and create groups that don’t even exist yet. This is such a smart way to increase engagement among the users they already have.

You indicate topical interest, and when a meetup starts within X miles of your location, they tell you about it. Even better, their “Pledges” increases your commitment to the group and the likelihood that you’ll attend the meetings and help promote and grow the group. Beautiful.

And it’s on autopilot right now–we’re doing nothing to make it grow. Wow.

A few things worth noting: (1) Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays seem to be “slow” days on Facebook. (See top chart.) (2) # of app installs per hour still correlates well to daytime hours in North America. (3) To increase the total userbase by 15% everyday, the raw number of people who add the application each day has to be dramatically greater than the day before. From the top chart here, you can see that’s exactly what’s happening (minus the slow weekend.)

FWIW, among apps with between 10k and 100k users, Amazin’ Giftbox is the 5th most viral app on facebook right now, according to Appsaholic. (It’s tied at 20% daily growth with the 4th place “Harry Potter Magic Spells”)

102,000, to be more exact.

New subscriber growth at Photojojo continues to accelerate. It’s taken us 1 year and 3 months to get to this point, and we’ve spent $0 on advertising and marketing. It’s all thanks to really enthusiastic readers who blog about us, tell their friends about us, and help spread the word. Thank you!

As an aside, when Daily Candy was acquired by Bob Pittman, they were about 3 years in and had 100,000 subscribers to their daily email list (we’re twice a week.)

Another aside: Two friends have started their own email newsletters in the past couple months, and I’m a fan of both: Nicole Davis’ startup Brooklyn Based for all your Brooklyn-dwelling friends, and Scott Hurff’s excellent Fuego for the classy men in your life.

When was the last time you got an email that was this simple and sweet from a company?

I don’t think I ever have. I have no idea who these guys are or when I signed up for their list. I kind of suspect I never did. But their email made me visit the site right away anyway.

Kudos, Josh.

• AT&T “You Will” Future Ads — I loved these optimistic ads about the future when they first came out, and they’re still fun. The cool thing is that most of amazingly awesome these things (video conferencing, on-demand video, online libraries, GPS, tablet computers) have actually come true!! Unfortunately, in pretty much all cases, “the company that [brought] it to you” was not AT&T. [via Adam Varga]
• Those mesmerizing UPS whiteboard ads — The feel of these internet spots is friendly and informal. They’re hard not to watch. Directed by Errol Morris, music by The Postal Service, and the actor is actual the creative director for the campaign itself! [via Kottke]

We ran a Photojojo tutorial today, How to make your own Photo Pop-Outs, that proved quite popular. We sent out a newsletter about it, it got picked up by a bunch of blogs, by Lifehacker, and later hit the Digg and Del.icio.us homepages.

Looking at the traffic patterns for the page over the course of the day, you can see what kind of impact each of those sources had. This is by no means a scientific survey, and there are surely a lot of complicating factors that swayed the numbers in one direction or another, but it’s interesting just the same.

Stats by Shaun Inman’s Mint.

Either way, I don’t know who you are.

I signed up for a new telephony service today called Grand Central. An hour later, I got an email from the CEO. He’d checked out my blog, knew who I was, and asked for feedback. I was flattered, and offered him what I could.

I used to look at every new Photojojo subscriber as they came in. If they had a custom domain name for their email address, I’d it out. Then we started getting more and more signups. Some days, we now get hundreds. It isn’t possible for me to check ‘em all out anymore.

I hate this.

I want a centralized database filled with people I should be paying attention to. Journalists, technologists, people who work at companies I care about, VIPs, sneezers, whoever I specify. And I want to be automatically notified whenever any of these people signs up for my newsletter or buys something from my store.

Why doesn’t something like this exist? Why doesn’t someone build something like this using LinkedIn or FaceBook as the database?

It would improve my ability to run my business, and I’d pay for it.

More on Sherb’s Blog (via del.icio.us)