I can’t remember when the last time was, that it took me more than 3-4 days to update an entry in le blog, but here’s an Idlan record: 13 days and counting. I live my days in chunks of activity, and blogging comes under that chunk reserved for creative pursuits. And the truth of the matter is that within the 24 hour constraint that I live in on a daily basis, a huge chunk of what used to be blogging time has been taken over by my new baby: The Stoodle Project.
How Stoodle literally began was summarised in a couple of paragraphs here, but even before that, I’d been thinking about a way to put forth Mims’s work in a way that would maximise publicity, but with an element of fun and minimal relative effort : after all, you can leave Bangi, but the laidback (read: pemalas) Bangi spirit never quite leaves you. And that was how, lathering body butter on my good self, drawing facebook statuses came floating into my consciousness.
To say that I’ve always been a fan of her work would make me sound a tad obsessive, not to mention that it is somewhat an untruth (wait, M, there is a compliment in this somewhere) because I have not been aware of her doodleness untill she started showing some off to me recently. Inspired by the (great?) Jon Burgerman, she asked me to get a copy of his book, and it was then that I became aware that Mims’s creations had a universal appeal. We’d toyed the idea of designing t-shirts on and off for a while, but the stumbling block was that unless people were aware of her creativity and her talent, it was hard to create a presence.
Enter stage left: Stoodle.
Facebook, since it’s creation some years ago, has exploded onto the Internet scene, overtaking Friendster, Bebo, Myspace and Orkut as the social networking platform of choice. Most people I know have at least one of the aforementioned four, but the networks converged on Facebook. I don’t quite understand the relative appeal or the underlying attractiveness, but in contrast to say, Friendster which is popular in South East Asia, or Orkut which is popular in Brazil and India, with Facebook, everyone’s (save for Norzu, apparently) is on it. It is also hard to define what the point of Facebook is – it is as much a way to keep in touch as it is a marketing and campaigning tool. Perhaps the attraction is in the interactivity – the ability to update one’s status (incessantly, in the case pf some) and the parallel upsurge of internet mobile phones and Blackberrys, giving Facebook a ubiquitous presence.
I have to admit I myself have been lured by Facebook’s interactivity. Since I began working on the Stoodle Project, the time that I often set aside to read and research on what ultimately becomes my blog entries have been redirected to learning about marketing and researching print and non-print products. To counter the lack of writing here, I’ve started two series in the Notes pages of Facebook: Notasi and Addendum. The former, a series of quips and short writings; the latter, a brief question or statements encouraging reader input. With that, it allows space for this blog to evolve into something more serious. I’d been planning to develop the blog into one that features more essay-type entries that discuss matters of more substance than what I made for lunch (which, by the way, was quite a substantial meal in itself) ever since my PhD thesis left my desk and deposited itself on a dusty shelf in the underground crypts of Lancaster University Library; but that has not yet come to fruition until now. Or perhaps not quite now – but now-ish anyway (read: 3 months maybe?).
But also with the good that Facebook brings, comes the evil: stories are abound about potential employers using Facebook as a tool to screen applicants, stalking incidents, addiction and generic privacy issues to name but a few. Stoodle aims to counter this by providing a balance – some clean, honest fun from the status updates. There is no mean-spiritedness abound – statuses are chosen because they are fun and eye-catching, often humourous or witty but not necessarily; but never malicious. To a certain extent, we’d like to inject a feelgood factor – to make the realisation that one has been ‘stoodled’ or ‘stoodlerized’ a nice surprise; so initial plans to first contact the owner of the status for prior approval was canned. Instead, those who’s statuses have been featured can request their stoodle to be removed should they find it offensive: to date, we have yet to receive such a request, but on the contrary, we have received requests from readers to ‘stoodle’ the status of their friends who might not be on our network.
And that is one limitation of Stoodle in its current format – we are limited to people in our network. Plans to ‘hijack’ the network of others and therefore add more ‘scourists’ have been thrown into the great Stoodle idea hat, but at the same time, we are also developing Stoodle-based products for general sale. At the moment, the latter takes precedence (read: we are broke and want to make money and drive Ferraris just like everyone else).
Because at the end of the day, the Stoodle Project is nothing without the soul of the project itself: Mims’s boundless creativity and talent. I use Stoodle in my lectures on accounting for intangible assets as an example of what drives companies in the knowledge economy (as opposed to the bricks and mortar economy of the previous century) – not merely physical assets, but also talent. Stoodle is a comic series that takes a comedic snapshot of a particular moment in our lives; but it also acts a front for the series of products we are aiming to bombard the world with. We hope you are all ready!
*The author of this piece would like to thank everyone who have been supporting the Stoodle project, either by participating in our promotions, comissioning products from the Stoodlerist or putting up the little banners in your sidebars / blogs. Stay tuned – as a way of saying thanks, there’ll be something in it for you!
