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I’ve been inspired by Michael Lee’s excellent behind the scenes post about SMASH! to explain how things looked from my side of the fence.

First, the background.

I was a founding member of the Sydney University Anime Society and one of the original organisers of Animania. I stopped working on Animania after 2003 and in 2006 I left Australia and went on the JET Programme. While I was in Japan, I heard about Katie Huang’s attempts to create a new anime convention and offered to help out as best I could. At the time, the working title for the event was ComiketWorld Sydney — a name that communicated the focus on art that was a motivating factor for the original organisers.

Although Comiket had strong ‘brand recognition’, I didn’t think it was right. I suggested SMASH! as an alternative. I’d come up with the name a few years earlier but, although I’d thought about organising an event of my own, I’d never had the time or the resources to put one on. I thought the name was pretty neat and it seemed a shame for it to go to waste when someone else could be using it. As I recall, I actually wanted it to be called The SMASH! (or for the domain name to at least be thesmash.com.au¹) but the others weren’t so keen. Looking back, I’m glad I was overruled.

While I was in Japan, there was a limited amount that I could do. I provided advice and suggestions but, when you’re on the other side of the world, it’s not as if you can actually help much on the day. That changed when I returned to Sydney in 2009. I helped assist with the Vendors Department, coordinating our contact with exhibitors, clubs and sponsors. That was the first year that SMASH! was a two-day convention and, while it went well, I’ll be honest: I had hoped for more people to attend. I was excited by the prospect that, with enough people, SMASH! could make the leap no other Sydney-based pop culture convention since OzCon² has made.

Second, this year.

So this year I was elected to a position on the Board of SMASH Inc. As an incorporated association, SMASH Inc is overseen by a bunch of elected representatives. In 2010 we tried a new system of appointing a management committee below us. Many of the members of the Board are on that management committee but not all. I’m one of the two who are not and this gives me a somewhat different perspective on the organisation. Whereas the managers had departments that they are responsible for, I roved, helping out where required. Primarily that was in promotion and marketing — an area that has never been my responsibility, either at the anime club, Animania or SMASH!, but one that I’ve always been interested in.

A lot of work goes into organising a convention. This sounds obvious when you say it but it’s easy to forget when you just rock up on the day. It’s tempting to think that it really shouldn’t be that hard. How difficult is it to hire a building, invite a bunch of exhibitors and put up some posters? Surprisingly difficult, is the answer. Either that or maybe we’re just not really good at it.

Organisation for SMASH! 2010 began in earnest in January. That meant deciding the location, picking staff for departments, setting up the website and basically beginning the long preparation process. Organising a convention possibly wouldn’t be that hard if it was just you. You’d make all the decision, bear or the risk and do all the work. There’d be a lot to do but you’d be the one doing it and there’s an efficiency to that. We’re a big group though, and you generally discuss ideas, come up with proposals and decide what to keep in and what to keep out. Although this can be frustrating at times, I think the event is better as a result. I probably would never have organised the maid café, for instance. That would have been mistake.

We got some early breaks. At the beginning of February, we found that Tiffany Grant, Matt Greenfield and Yūko Miyamura were able to come. This felt huge. SMASH! had brought the first Japanese seiyū to an Australian anime convention in 2008³ but now we had 2 coming at the same time. We also found out that Shaun Healey⁴, who had unfortunately had to cancel as a guest in 2009, was able to come along with his fiancée, Mikiko Ponczeck.

In mid-February we announced the guests and the venue. A lot of people suspected we were going to move (there’s only so long one can stay at the Roundhouse) but judging from the response online, most people weren’t expecting the guests. Their excitement built on our excitement and at that point you almost wished it was August so you could just put the whole thing on right there and then.

Of course, then you’d remember how much work was left to do and you’d be grateful for the months of time that was left. Time to plan our events, organise our AV equipment, plot out our promotion and marketing, design all our signs, badges and paraphernalia and send a lot of Twitter messages.

Third, almost there.

With about a month to go, the nights started to get very long. Things go wrong when you’re organising any event and, when it’s something like an anime convention, it’s a big event. For example, with a few weeks left to go we realised that a room was going to open without any of the equipment in it that was necessary for the events in that room to run. The venue fee was increased because our quote had been provided on the basis of a schedule of fees for the 2010 financial year. And YouTube kept rejecting entries for our AMV competition making it somewhat difficult for us to run our People’s Choice Award.

Still, conventions wait for no man and, no matter the problem, the days ground on and the event drew near. I had created a countdown clock and the numbers would just tick down with a cold sense of inevitability. I had not put any words on the clock so it was just this long string of digits. No ‘days’ or ‘months’ or anything like that. It made it easy to forget what it was before suddenly you’d be jolted out of your stupor upon the realisation that you were into the last 30 days.

I worked closely with fellow Board members, Tom, Nadia and Rob, putting out fires and trying to prevent anything from catching alight. We didn’t always succeed but there was always someone to help. SMASH! is fortunate to have so many people working on it that you’re almost always assured that if you can’t do something, someone else can.

Fourth, my black box.

SMASH! has a curse. No matter what happens, something always goes wrong with our Treasurer. Last year, one of our staff, Dollis Lee, sat in a bathroom both days counting and dispensing money. For that, we made her the Treasurer. Unfortunately, there’s a curse and, with bare days left before the event, Dollis had to pull out at the last second. Not having a replacement Treasurer handy we needed someone who didn’t have a job on the day. I didn’t have a job on the day.

I’m happy to say that in 2010 we didn’t decide to keep the treasury in a toilet. I was in a room, close to the back stage area. I sat in that room for pretty much the entire day. I saw a small amount of the pack up at the beginning and helped with the pack up at the end. The rest of the time was spent in my black box.

It was an odd experience. After having spent so long organising things, I sat out most of the problems that occurred on the day. We have about a dozen radios that are used by key personnel to communicate with each other. Everyone operates on one channel except for treasury. It sits on its own channel which, for most of the day, was silent. Occasionally, ticketing would request some money or notify me that a drop was about to take place. The rest of the time I made comments on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter or just sort of soaked up the atmosphere. Or at least as much of the atmosphere as one can soak up in a windowless room⁵.

I’m going back to Japan to live in October of this year and I don’t expect to return in Australia for a long time. I won’t work on SMASH! again and, on one level, that’s a real shame. This year the event had to stop selling tickets because we reached the capacity of the building. As a result, the event will move to the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre next year. It took four years. Did anyone ever expect that?

These just seem to get later every year, don’t they? Initially it was January, then February, now it’s March.

It’s probably good that I waited a couple of months, though, because there’s a few new ones that have snuck in just in time. Let’s see what I’m listening to this year and how many sentences I can end with a preposition.

The Brainy Gamer Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainygamerpodcast

Hands down, still the best video game podcast I’ve ever listened to. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the schedule other than Michael puts one out when he’s got someone to talk to and something to say. This is a formula that results in a few podcasts throughout the year but my God they’re good.

Downloadable Content

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/padlc/

There hasn’t been a podcast since June 2009 and, given that there were only 8 podcasts in 2009 alone, it’s tempting to write this one off to the dead pool. The only reason not to? It’s just so good and I have faith.

Dungeons & Dragons Podcast

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/rsspodcast.xml

I subscribe to this podcast solely to be able to listen to the Penny Arcade guys (and whoever they have with them at the time) play D&D. If you have even a remote interest in roleplaying or board games, you must listen to it. So funny.

Front Page

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/podcasts/frontpage.xml

The New York Times recently started making this into more of a ‘value added’ podcast by adding things like short interviews with reporters to the podcast. I’m not sure it really does add any extra value but for a quick wrap-up of what’s going on, I rate it highly.

The Japan Considered Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JapanConsideredPodcast

I’m still subscribed but there hasn’t been a new podcast since February 2009. I think it’s gone.

JapanesePod101.com

http://www.japanesepod101.com/wp-feed-audio.php

I’m still listening to Peter, Naomi and the rest of the crew over at Japanese Pod. I no longer bothering with the newbie and beginner lessons but the intermediate podcasts are still at a level I find challenging.

New Yorker: Comment

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rssfeeds/comment_podcast.xml

If you believe liberals are sanctimonious blow-hards, this podcast is not for you.

New Yorker: The Political Scene

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rss/feed/campaign_trail.xml

Dorothy Wickenden leads the best weekly discussion of US politics that brings together the depth and analysis for which the New Yorker is renowned. There are occasions where I wish they’d dwell on an issue for a little bit longer but it’s probably for the best that they don’t. Whereas I eventually tired of the Slate Political Podcast, this one is still going strong.

NHK English News

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/english.xml

This is one that I’m sure I’ve been listening to for ages. Why I didn’t have it on last year’s list, I’m not sure. It’s obviously an incredibly Japan-centric news show but if that’s what you’re looking for, I haven’t found better.

Slate’s Spoiler Specials

http://www.slate.com/podcast/id/2144834/

I am so far behind in the movies that I’ve seen that this has now blown out to 16 podcasts that I have yet to listen to. I can only imagine how much more awesome I’d find this if I didn’t listen to everything about 8 months after the world had move on.

The Pipeline

http://feeds.feedburner.com/thepipelineshow

This is one of the news ones that I just started listening to. Dan Benjamin of the Talk Show fame (see below) spends about 30 minutes interviewing a designer or web developer. If you’re interested in design and the web, this is a great podcast. Dan has had a crackerjack line-up of guests so far and my only concern is that he’s going to run out of awesome people to interview every week.

The Talk Show

http://thetalkshow.net/index.xml

Here’s another one that I think is gone (this is becoming something of a theme). I keep it in iTunes for the same reason as the others, though: when there’s a new episode I’m listening to it immediately.

アクセス

http://www.tbsradio.jp/ac/index.xml

I still don’t understand what ガガンボン means and I still don’t understand most of what’s being said but it’s my goal in life to one day be able to answer both those questions.

東京slow style

http://www.tokyoslowstyle.jp/podcast.xml

Here’s a new one that I started listening to this year. It’s a recording of a radio show in Japan. We don’t have so many of these in Australia — at least not aimed at younger people — but in Japan they seem a lot more popular. If you’re familiar with Triple J’s Hack, it’s kind of like that, only just about an interesting place or business in Tokyo.

37signals Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals_podcast

I think there’s a real danger this is just not going to have the legs to keep my interest for the next 12 months — you can only listen to the 37signals message so many times before it becomes repetitive — but it’s only been a month or two and I’m still listening!

So that’s who’s on there but who fell off the list?

• GWJ Conference Call I had the same problem with the GWJ guys that I seem to have with almost all gaming-related podcasts: after a while they just become too repetitive. I think it’s no coincidence the ones that remain on my iPod are the ones without a schedule that release a show only when there’s a show worth releasing.
• Slate Magazine Daily Podcast Sacrilege! Yes, I’ve stopped listening to John, David and Emily. After the election was over I’m afraid it felt like the same discussions were being had each week and it was just going around in circles. The other Slate podcasts, although fun to listen to, weren’t the reason I was sticking around.
• University of Sydney Podcasts As interesting as these often were, I just couldn’t justify the time. When I thought about the 2 hours that you could sink into one of these, that’s a lot of Japanese study I could be doing instead.

OK, Andrew. You didn’t answer my call last year. Don’t let me down now!

So in the past two or three weeks I’ve had about two or three discussions with people regarding Apple’s upcoming iPad. Usually the discussions go like this:

Me: I want an iPad.

Them: Are you insane?

Me: No, I’m serious. I keep thinking of situations in which I’d love to use something like that.

Them: Are you insane?

Am I insane? What are the ‘situations’ I claim to want to use the iPad? Well, I’ve stopped and thought about it and, you know, I think there really is only one situation¹. It’s the situation where I want to read the Internet.

It seems meaningful to me that when we talk about the Internet we rarely talk about reading. You ‘surf’ the net, ‘visit’ a website, ‘follow’ somebody’s Twitter account and ‘friend’ a friend on Facebook. But for a medium that is, for the most part, incredibly text heavy, why not any talk of ‘reading’ a site²?

The reason we don’t use the word ‘read’ very much is because, quite frankly, the Internet sucks to read. Reading a website is typically a terrible experience. Partly this is because of the content. Most websites have nothing to say. Rather, they’re about advertising. Even when a site does have something to say (eg. newspaper), the design of the website is very much built around the idea of making you leave as quickly as possible by clicking on an ad.

Of course, it’s not entirely the fault of the sites. Our Internet reading devices, or ‘computers’, frequently let us down, too. Consider how many people read newspapers or books at a desk. Yet that’s where we expect people to read something on the Internet. With a book or a magazine or a newspaper you sit in a chair, lie down in bed or recline on a couch. But with a computer, even when that computer is a netbook, this is all but impossible. A computer is too heavy to be comfortably snuggled up with and if you’ve ever tried to read something on the web when you’re in bed, you know not to.

Which is what has me excited about the iPad. I feel like with it, the web as a platform for reading is primed to take off. And with the appropriate device, I have high hopes that we’ll see websites designed to work on it. Of course, they’ll work on your regular computer, too, but increasingly I’ll think you wonder why you would want to bother.

The only impediment I can see to this grant strategy is that we’re talking about reading. And reading’s kind of dead. Which leaves me to wonder: can Apple make reading cool?

Disclaimer: I work on SMASH! and in the past I have worked on Animania.

The people who work on Australia’s anime conventions — Ai-con, Animania, AVCon, Manifest, Wai-Con and us at SMASH! — all work really hard.

Let’s just accept that as a given. If you didn’t want to do any work, you wouldn’t put your hand up to help on these kind of things. You’d just sit and recline on one of those inflatable couches people float around in hotel pools on.

On top of that, we’re volunteers. You certainly don’t get into the convention organising business to make money. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll make just enough money to be able to run your convention again the next year. And that’s assuming you can find enough idiots to volunteer to organise it all again.

So us convention organisers are hard workers and we’re volunteers. This is true. But this doesn’t mean that we’re infallible. And it doesn’t mean we’re not lazy. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes we don’t make mistakes. We are human beings and we screw up just like everyone else. The fact we’re volunteers doesn’t somehow magically stop this from happening.

So when I see people defending convention organisers by excusing any mistakes on the basis that ‘Well, we’re all volunteers’ or ‘Well, it’s really hard to organise a convention’ I get upset.

I get upset because it’s not an excuse. The person affected by the mistake is no less affected because you are a volunteer. They might understand that you didn’t pronounce their name properly — hello me as cosplay host in 2009 — because you’re a volunteer and you had a day job and that meant you didn’t have time to practice pronounciation as many times as you’d like but you still made a mistake.

Just say you’re sorry and you made a mistake. The world will not end if you do this. In fact, the world will not care. Because you’re running an anime convention and no one is going to die if you forget something.

I want to be really clear that this does not mean convention organisers should have to put up with unreasonable demands. Someone complaining that the convention should have cost $2 rather than $20 is a moron. What I’m talking about is a person who legitimately has been affected by the convention’s mistake. And they’re, usually, asking, Hey, what happened? That is a fair question and we should answer it. And by ‘we’ I mean the person who knows the answer. If someone doesn’t know why I was tired on stage on Saturday, they shouldn’t answer it. They should go and find me and tell me to answer it.

There would be no anime conventions were it not for the tireless work of the organisers that put them on. So let’s give them a hand. But not a pass. If we screw up, we should admit it and explain our reasons. We should do that because it’s polite and we should do it because it means we’re better able to avoid repeating the mistake next time.

And that’ll make us all winners.

So John Gruber named Henry Blodget his Jackass of the Week because of a piece Blodget wrote at Silicon Alley Insider suggesting that Google will do to Apple in the ’10s what Microsoft did to Apple in the ’80s. That is, completely marginalise the company and develop and control the de facto operating system.

Gruber’s argues that the situation is different this time around and that, because the analogy to the 1980s is flawed, the argument is wrong.

I agree that Blodget fails to properly explain what the danger is to Apple. But I also think Gruber writes the argument off a little too quickly. Blodget’s not wrong because there is no analogy between now and then. (He’s also not wrong because the iPhone is selling. Windows is still selling and I don’t think there’s many people who would say Microsoft doesn’t have problems.)

If Blodget is wrong, it’s because he fails to explain exactly what Microsoft did right in the ’80s and what Apple did wrong. From the Silicon Alley Insider piece:

What was that mistake?

The insistence on selling fully integrated hardware and software devices, instead of focusing on low-cost, widely distributed software.

…

With Microsoft spraying the same software platform across dozens of hardware manufacturers, the world had a chance to standardize on a single, cheaper development platform.

This doesn’t fully explain the situation and begs the question as to why being able to standardize a single, cheaper development platform led to Microsoft’s success.

The reason low-cost, widely-distributed software was important to dominating the PC market was because at the time the PC market was essentially the business market. And what the business market cared about–more than usability, innovation or anything else–was the bottom line. If they cared about anything else it was applications, but, really, at first, applications weren’t what sold DOS; it was the price.

Of course, applications became important. Indeed, once Microsoft obtained ubiquity, it then set about maintaining that ubiquity through applications. This is important because, to coin a phrase, someone else will always build a cheaper mouse trap. You can’t dominate solely on price. You can get scale, but at the end of the day you need to be able to solve a problem that someone else can’t. You need to be the only mouse trap running Outlook.

Is this what’s going to happen this time around? If Google can get to ubiquity, then, yes, it might be able to cement itself Windows-style in people’s pockets. But that is a big if and, as Gruber is correct to note, it’s an if Blodget never explains (other than to appeal to a vague historical analogy).

The problem with the analogy is that this time around the market is not business, it’s the consumer. And while the consumer cares about price, it’s not the determining factor in the way that it is for an IT department. Sure, consumers care about price but if that’s the only thing they cared about, we’d all be carrying around Nokias.

Is there something that is a determining factor (or at least close enough)? It’s hard to see anything that unifies consumers in the same way that cost unifies business customers. In fact it’s tempting to conclude that such a task is impossible since consumers are not a homogeneous group. Some people are going to buy a product for its quality, some for its price, some for whether it matches their clothes. And it’s at this point that maybe (maybe) we’ve found it. Consumers want variety.

Consumers want different things and they want to be different. No product can ever completely satisfy that need if it only comes in one flavour on a family of devices from one manufacturer. It’s for this reason that Apple might (and you really do have to stress might) have a problem.

Is there anything Apple can do about this? (Gruber criticises Blodget for not being able to suggest what Apple should do.) Not really. Apple is a hardware manufacturer and in what consumer space does one hardware manufacturer dominate like a software company can? The answer is none and the reason is because software can be almost infinitely customised when it comes to the variations that are possible from one hardware manufacturer¹.

This is Apple’s problem. If the mobile phone world decides the game is being played on Android, then Apple risks being left behind. But if we get there, it’s not going to be via the same route as we did with PCs. It’s going to be because consumers don’t want an iPhone. They want choice.