Tapa Update #3 - The Tapakapa Branding Strategy

Alrighty. A small, little christmas break will soon be upon us (me), but first: It's update time!

Behind the Scenes
Why the Hell is This Taking so Long? - Research

I get the feeling it's often not very obvious to people what actually makes up by far the biggest chunk of what I'm doing. Any time someone asks why I don't make more videos, what's taking so long, and any time I consider trying a new thing, then scrapping it after a few minutes of careful consideration, the reason is the same: Research and writing is taking so darn long.

This might not have been an important point to make in the pre-internet days, where the difficulty of finding out anything about anything seemed quite obvious, but nowadays, I think, it always bears repeating: Finding good information takes a lot of time. You'd think it's easy. For a lot of stuff available for free on the internet, this is true. You read the Wikipedia page, paraphrase a bit, write a witty in- and outro - BAM! - there's your video script.

Problem with this approach: You're essentially just repackaging shit someone else made. This is the easy, most cost-efficient way, but it yields bad results. I don't just want the Wikipedia version of a topic, I want the good stuff, and the good stuff is way harder to find. In some random book from 1883 or in some historian's passion project of a website. For stuff like this, you need to dig.

Just to give you a bit of an idea of what it takes to research this stuff: For the upcoming video I've already read through a few books and scientific articles, searched through historic government memos in an archive I didn't know even existed, ran some of what I found through an OCR program to be able to translate the text to a language I could understand, analyzed laws, parts of a constitution and how they'd actually be weighed in court, and looked for instances of convictions under those laws.

And here's the thing: Most of that has only to do with my topic very tangentially. Still, that's what's required for me to understand the mattter I'm writing about. And if I don't understand something, I don't publish.

And that's just the finding information part. In the next update, I'll talk a little more about taking that information and actually building from that raw material an interesting story that's fun to listen to.

Qomments and Cuestions
"out of the last 10 videos, 8 have a flag in the thumbnail, and 8 have asterisks in title"

Correct! This is very much not a coincidence. I'm doing two things with that:

1: It should be pretty clear by now that I'm focussing on flags instead of randomly jumping from topic to topic. Over the years of researching flag-related things now and again, I've found that there's so much bad information floating around about them on the internet. It's basically impossible to search for flag info without facing an overwhelming amount of completely wrong or strongly misleading copy/paste garbage. I'm trying to change that. I'm digging a lot deeper than your typical, omnipresent "this color stands for serenity, this color stands for the blood of the patriots"-kind of flag video. But you can't really build expertise like that over a few weeks. You build it up over time. With every flag video I'm making, I gain more understanding of the field as a whole and that should then also come through in every new video I make. That's why all the flag stuff.

2: The asterisk is basically a channel branding / mission thing. Asterisks are interesting to me as a geometric form, but more importantly, as a symbol saying "there's more to this", which expresses very well my approach to videos; especially considering that they're about a topic like flags that's usually deemed pretty shallow but actually provides me with lots of interesting things to find out and share with you.
Also, if you take a look at the flag featured on my desk in the last few videos, you'll find an asterisk on it as well, so there's branding strategy for ya!

Interesting Stuff
Tradle - Why I'm Obsessed With the Export Economy Now

So, there's this little game called "Tradle". Like Wordle, only instead of guessing words, you're guessing which country's yearly exports you're looking at. And I'm completely obsessed with it.

Before starting to play, I knew very little about the economic makeup of countries, including my own, but ones improves so much over time that I can now usually get it in three guesses or less. You get a pretty good feeling for which countries export how much of what, how countries are different from each other, and what the appropriate USD export values are for small and big, industrialized and non-industrialized countries.

If you want to learn more about economics or are simply looking for a fun little game that's not taking up a lot of your time - There's only one country per day. - I can't recommend Tradle enough.

https://games.oec.world/en/tradle/

That's it from me. I'm off now to rewrite the script some more, then drown my sorrows with punch and cookies. 'Tis the season, after all! 🎄

Have a good one!
Tapa