Seems that children’s television is a popular topic around these parts. Apparently, Nickelodeon has a new show called Yo Gabba Gabba! whose title is a Ramones reference and features a segment called Biz’s Beat of the Day, hosted by none other than Biz Markie (of Just a Friend fame). Newsweek describes the show as, “a cross between “Sesame Street,” the Muppets and “Soul Train,” mixed up with a little N.W.A.”
But the best part of the whole article may be Biz’s answer to “Does Biz have a future in children’s programming?” To which he replied “I really want to be the black Mr. Rogers, that’s my goal. I would do everything the same, but with a hip-hop feel to it.” That’s awesome. Why has no one taken him up on this yet?
I’ve actually had this conversation with a few people recently. I can’t remember who suggested it, but I decided to go with a tiered approach. I’ve got a “friends” folder, a “searches” folder (which always gets read first and includes all my ego feeds) and then “tier 1″, “tier 2″ and “tier 3.” To be perfectly honest, I never really get to tier three and hardly even get to two. So, I open up the floor to you (and test comments in the quickies column): How do you organize your RSS feeds?
If you use Apple’s Mail.app at work you’ve probably run across this problem: Someone’s default address changes to their home address without you noticing and you end up sending work correspondence to their personal email. After it happened to me today, I finally decided to take action and ask metafilter. Within minutes I had my answer: Select “Previous Recipients” under “Window” and search for the email you don’t want to send to anymore. Then just remove it from the list. Easy answer to an annoying problem.
Interesting article from this month’s Wired all about Doug Morris, chair and CEO of Universal Music Group. It’s a great look into how the music industry got into this mess. The two most interesting nuggest are about the industry’s (lack of) techno-savviness (“‘There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,’ Morris explains.”) and Apple (“We were just grateful that someone was selling online. The problem is, he became a gatekeeper. We make a lot of money from him, and suddenly you’re wearing golden handcuffs. We would hate to give up that income.”).
Google has added an experimental feature where you can vote up or reject search results. Looks like it only works for your results for now, but how long can it be before they start factoring this kind of information into the algorithm. As a sidenote, this made me think about Google Web History. I’ve been saying for a while it’s the feature that speaks best to a future plan for Google: Recording all your web behavior and making recommendations based on collaborative filtering (a la Amazon’s “people who like this like that”). If you haven’t tried it, it’s quite fascinating (the interesting items tend to be amazingly accurate).
Interesting move by Corbis. They’re going to let bloggers use their photos for free and embed an ad in it. According to the article, they’re also going to offer “bloggers the opportunity to earn ad revenue based on how many times Web users click on the images posted to their blogs, according to the Web site.” I think more and more companies are going to start looking into this revenue sharing route. Seems like such a no-brainer.
Looks like after tackling world’s information, Google is ready to take on energy. Yesterday they announced plans to find a renewable energy source less expensive than coal. “We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers,” said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. “We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal.”
I love this for two reasons. First, Google is not doing this for completely altruistic reasons: They believe this initiative will save them a lot of money in the long run and be good for business. With that kind of motivation I expect them to get more done. Second, I get excited when people who know very little about a problem approach it (see this great Wired article on the Verifier Method).
For those of you reading this at NoahBrier.com you’ll note things look fairly different around here. For those of you who get the RSS feed a) you’ll have noticed a whole bunch of new entries pop up and b) click over to the homepage and check it out.
Anyway, I wanted to give a little explanation for what’s going on:
I wanted a new look. The other one had been around for about a year and a half and I was getting bored. If you miss it, you can still see it on every page other than the homepage, where I haven’t gotten around to switching things over yet.
I have changed the “sidenotes” thing. Lately I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t been able to blog as much as I would like. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t had lots of ideas and done a bunch of reading. The old format, which was just a straight feed from my del.icio.us, wasn’t really doing the trick. So the idea for this new format is to do short posts, mostly around links and other assorted stuff, kind of like those links roundup I do every so often. The other big decision was to include them in the main RSS feed. I don’t plan to post them that often, so I hope it won’t get to overwhelming, but if it does I’ll go back to the old version.
I really wanted to better integrate the email subscription mechanism (now in the header).
I really wanted a print and email buttons (now attached to each post . . . don’t love the solution for email, but I’ll keep working on that).
So I think that’s it. Pop on over to the site and let me know what you think. If you have any thoughts on how to improve it, I’d love to hear them. I will try to roll out the rest of the site over the new week or two. Thanks for the patience.
Rob Walker offers up a nice counterargument for Saturday’s New York Times article by Joe Nocera about a la carte cable. Nocera argued that in the end it would be more expensive for consumers in the end: “Take, for instance, ESPN, which charges the highest amount of any cable network: $3 per subscriber per month. (I’m borrowing this example from a recent research note by Craig Moffett, the Sanford C. Bernstein cable analyst.) Suppose in an àla carte world, 25 percent of the nation’s cable subscribers take ESPN. If that were the case, the network would have to charge each subscriber not $3, but $12 a month to keep its revenue the same.” Anyway, read both, I think Rob Walker makes some very fair points, like “if it’s really true that lots of cable channels would die out if they weren’t buffered from the actual marketplace by cable-company bundling, well then, why shouldn’t we just let that happen?”
An excerpt from the upcoming book on basketball phenom Lebron James. A few of my favorite tidbits: “Reebok really grabbed the family’s attention when CEO Paul Fireman pulled out a $10 million cashier’s check made out to James. If he signed that night, he could take it with him. Reebok said it was a one-time offer, take it or leave it.” and “The company [Adidas] rented signs and plastered the sides of city buses with messages such as DO YOU WANT TO BE THE NEXT SUPERSTAR? specifically targeted to James. Yes, adidas was recruiting James on the streets of his home town by renting billboards to be seen by anyone driving around or taking a walk.”
Never thought about the difference between ad inventory on TV and online before . . . “On TV, if a show attracts more viewers than promised, advertisers essentially get “freeâ€? exposure on top of what they paid for, as deals cover specific episode dates and times. But online, a network can cease running an ad once it has delivered the number of viewers the advertiser has previously requested. Broadband programs that satisfy viewership commitments more quickly provide networks with more leverage to force advertisers to negotiate another round of sales.”
Turns out the release of the original Sesame Street on DVD includes a warning that the content may not be suitable for children. As Virginia Heffernan so nicely puts it: “The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.” Two facts I learned from the article: 1) Snuffleupagus is how you spell Snuffleupagus and 2) Cookie Monster was “Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay.” (If you want some more, check out this NPR interview with Heffernan.)
Umair quoting ad:tech panel description: “…Brand nation is about marketers to get loyal customers to be citizens of their brand nation regardless of global boundaries.” He goes on to explain, “From an economic point of view, it’s exactly the opposite: connected consumers (sometimes, in those rare instances that firms actually do something cool and create value) want firms to be citizens of their microcultures.” Nice and succinct . . .
Was reading Sporting News tonight (they roped me in with one of those free subscriptions and now I actually pay for it) and came upon yet another article talking about Barry Bonds. This one mentioned that Sporting News had named him their Player of the 1990s and that they had also named Pete Rose their Player of the 1970s. Can you imagine another sport where two of the best players in history will go down in such infamy?
About 10 times in this article I thought it was going to go off the deep end in one direction or another. In the end, though, it turns out to be a fairly good look at the speed at which culture moves today (especially music) and includes some good insights (like the erosion of the local band).
Gladwell on how FBI profiling is a lot like being a psychic: You offer a bunch of fuzzy predictions and assume people will only remember the ones that were right.
Grant McCracken on how simplicity and complexity work hand in hand. Good summary quote: “And there was awhile in the 1990s when people would roll out talk of mother boards, chip speeds and baud rates. But that’s over now, isn’t it? We now understand that every new advance in technology will be yet another measure of how little we understand and far we are falling behind. Now mastery is finding the escape key and the willingness to use it early and often.”
The other morning I had breakfast with chartreuse. After a few debates about sports, media and the state of the universe we got on the topic of blogs. I believe it began with us both saying we were generally unimpressed by what’s out there at the moment. Not sure what it is, but it seems like there’s less and less of interest being written (which of course leads to less interesting writing since everyone is really commenting on everyone else).
Anyway, the conversation eventually shifted and I got into my speech on why big media companies are having difficulty fighting in this new age. I think I’ve said it here before, but the argument goes something like this: Big media companies are used to fighting against other big media companies. CBS and ABC will fight over ad revenue or programming, but neither is willing to undercut the other at the expense of the television model. The incentive, then, is for a competitor to undercut the competition ever so slightly while at the same time raising the water line for all the players.
Today, however, CBS and ABC are competing against me. Obviously I don’t have the numbers, but on a micro level, every minute you spend here is a minute not spent with them. The danger for the big media companies is that I don’t care about their model: I haven’t made a dime directly off this blog and don’t plan to. That means they’re fighting the crazy guy, and, as everyone knows, you never want to fight the guy with nothing to lose.
After going through my whole explanation (which I’ve rehearsed many times before), chartreuse looked at me and said “what would you do if you were a big media company?” I gave it some thought, and replied with something dumb . . . clearly he had an answer in mind, but I couldn’t resist trying to come up with something. So after I gave my fairly dim-witted response, he gave me five words: “Give them something to lose.
And, as often is the case, he was exactly right. When I read Umair’s post “Blogonomics 2007, Or How The Blogosphere Lost It’s Mojo the other day, I knew I had to write about our conversation. Umair writes, “Most of the blogs that have gone pro have lost their mojo. They’re boring now – not fun to read, losing their appetite for risk, they almost never take a position on anything anymore, in lieu of the same old middle-of-the-road presentation you can get, well, in any lame old newspaper.”
In other words, they now have something to lose.
PS – I am updating the site a bit. Anyone who is over at the homepage will see that the Sidenotes have changed a bit (now include video) and there is a complete overhaul in the works. If anyone wouldn’t mind helping me out by taking a look at the new design, I’d love feedback. You can see an early version at http://www.noahbrier.com/nb4.
I’m just about to leave for my Thanksgiving vacation and I figured I should leave some links and such for those who have to work tomorrow. So, here’s a grab-bag of thoughts, links and randomness.
The next likemind is November 30th (also the last of 2007). Be there or be square.
Russell Davies makes a great point about the beautiful future of marketing (aka a world where marketing becomes so targeted that it ceases being marketing). He points to the already existing world of blog outreach, and just how bad it can be, despite the unbelievable amount of personal info to work off. Russell explains, “what’s both worse and more interesting is that the people who can be arsed to do a little bit of research send even more annoying and frustrating emails. They plunge into a kind of direct marketing uncanny valley where the more desperately they try to personalise their message the more I’m reminded that they’re not really my friend. The more ‘personal’ information they utilise the more it freaks me out. (But again, not always, and maybe it’s in the ‘not always’ where salvation lies, but I doubt it.)”
Can’t remember whether I mentioned it or not, but RCRD LBL launched and it’s pretty sweet. Go play around and download some good music.
I’ve been playing a lot with Tumblr and I have a whole post about niche blogging platforms in my head . . . just haven’t gotten it out of there yet. Any thoughts?
I really want to move this site over to WordPress (from Movable Type). Anyone have any experience with that? Tips for maintaining permalink structure? Or just know someone I could pay to do it for me?
If you have a BlackBerry, make sure to check out the Facebook application for it. It’s the best-designed mobile app I’ve used (much better than either Gmail or Google Maps mobile) and makes me start to believe in Facebook again.
Okay, I think that’s it for now. Will try to get back to somewhat regular posting at some point in the near future. Until then, have a great Thanksgiving.
For a while now I’ve been collecting SEO (search engine optimization) info. I’ve used some of those tips on this site andothers. A few months ago I put together a presentation with what I’d learned to share with some folks. After recently digging it up again, I cleaned it up a bit and decided to post it on SlideShare. However, as I was playing around with Keynote (my presentation tool of choice), I noticed a nifty feature: You can record yourself doing a presentation and export it to video.
So, I figured why not give it a shot. Now this video is a bit long at around 7 mins (and maybe a bit boring), but hopefully it’s pretty informative. If you guys are into it I’d love to go back and record one for my power law presentation as well.
Anyway, without any further ado . . .
And, if you prefer not to hear my voice . . . here’s just the slides.
I’ve been using Tumblr a bit and I really dig it (for the record, the address for my Tumblr is heyitsnoah.tumblr.com). In the course of using and thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that the service is really nothing more than an interface design innovation. That’s not meant as a knock on the service at all, it’s just to say that I don’t think any of the technology behind it is terribly interesting (it seems like a regular old CMS), however, what they’ve done is built a brilliant interface for a very specific use.
I expect we’ll see more and more of this in the near future. Blogs are great and all, but the software was built for a specific purpose and does that best. When you start to adapt it to a specific niche,
About an hour ago I received this IM: “Can you write a bitchy response to this?
i can’t understand how this is a failure when the band is taking $2.26/unit when signed bands typically earn about $0.02-$0.10 per record”
The article in question, Most Consumers Grabbed ‘In Rainbows’ for Free, not surprisingly refers to Radiohead’s In Rainbows which let people download the album for any price they chose. Numbers have started to emerge from the experiment and pundits everywhere are debating about its relative success.
My take: This very debate lies at the heart of the problem. Success, like just about everything else in the universe, is not a binary. Things are not either successes or failures, rather it’s a relative measure based on a number of factors. (It’s a very postmodern take, I know.)
Now when it comes to most articles, the focus is that 6 out of 10 people paid nothing to get the album, leaving the whole experiment with an average price-per-album of $2.26. The other half of the equation, however, is that of the 38% who chose to pay something, they “forked over an average of $6, with U.S. consumers paying almost twice as much ($8.05) as those from other countries ($4.64).” Now sure this is less than the cost of a physical album or download on iTunes, but maybe, just maybe, what people are telling us is that these things cost too much. Plus, has anyone asked what percentage of people actually pay for albums? Is it unreasonable to think that if Britney Spears sells 2 million records, another 3 million people steal it? (Sounds about right to me.)
Part of the reason I’ve been so focused on music lately is because I think it’s a nice case study for what’s going on in media generally. Here are a couple thoughts on how:
Music is stuck in a contradiction: While it’s more popular than ever before (how many people do you see with white headphones), it’s also less profitable in traditional terms (that is record labels are struggling).
Digital production has fundamentally altered the economics of creating music (garage band is a piece of software, not a bunch of guys with nowhere else to practice).
It’s increasingly unbundled (the shift to a world of singles rather than albums is all but complete — hink about all the people who listen to playlists or shuffle on their iPod).
Musicians are discovering it’s not the size of the audience, it’s what you do with them. (This is a lesson I’ve been explaining using NoahBrier.com as an example: I don’t make any money directly off this site, however, the platform has allowed me to start things like likemind, which certainly have monetary value.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, the best distribution platform anyone ever built for it is free. Napster was better than any record store that ever existed. I didn’t need to leave my house and I could get anything I wanted in seconds. Oink, which was a giant BitTorrent site that just got shut down, had everything on the planet in every format you could ever imagine. Even musicians liked it: As Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails explained, “I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great.” Or, as DJ Rupture put it: “In many cases, I believe that downloading an album from Oink would be both faster (more on this in a bit) and give you more information about the CD than sites like iTunes.”
As usual, I haven’t really answered anything here, just added a whole lot more questions. But, as Terry Heaton so nicely put it, “Postmodernism offers no answers, but asks questions that might lead to answers, if we’re willing to ask them.”
Update (11/11/07): Keith makes a great point: “What I failed to realize when the news hit was, regardless of how much coin the band makes from the actual sales, they’ve just built a most impressive consumer database. In order to download the album, you must give your address, e-mail address (obvs), and mobile phone number!” Think about the value of a database of over a million of your fans. Amazing.
So things haven’t really slowed down lately. Between work and some exciting likemind stuff, I’ve been fairly lazy about keeping this thing updated (which is an effect of lack of quality input in the form of reading). With that said, I haven’t been a complete waste lately, so at least here are some thoughts/links/randomness.
First off, more presentation action (and further fascination with SlideShare. This one is from a talk I gave on the bundling/unbundling of marketing agencies at ad:tech Chicago.
After reading this Technology Review article on the role of quants on Wall Street, I couldn’t help but think maybe the marketing industry is in dire need of a quant revolution similar to the one the financial industry saw in the 1980s. I wonder if someone couldn’t come along and blow up the industry with some really creative math. Mmmmmmm . . .
I’ve started playing with Tumblr. No idea if I’ll maintain it, but I’ve put up a site at heyitsnoah.tumblr.com. To be honest, it could end up being a lot like these random link posts . . .
Chris Anderson makes some good points in his blog post “Free is more complicated than you think”. My favorite of them is that he plans to give versions of his new book away in order to “Give speeches, customizing my analysis and research for specific companies and industries. The free book is simply marketing for that, which can be more lucrative than book royalties.” This is a perfect example of giving away the product and selling a service on top of it. I keep explaining the ROI of blogging this way: Sure I don’t make any money directly off the blog, but the audience I have has enabled me to do things and make money in ways I never would have been able to without it.
I’m still thinking lots about weak ties and social networks. If anyone has any particularly good insights or links about network theory I’d love to hear them. Two recent reads (though not recent articles): Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong and Network Theory’s New Math.
My friend Justin is very funny. His latest gem: “If taglines were honest”. A few of my favorites: “Ikea: One day you’ll be able to afford real furniture.” and “PopTarts: Until you realize how disgusting they are, we’ll keep making them.”
So I’m really digging SlideShare at the moment. It’s a great way to share presentations and the embed functionality is pretty killer. It’s pretty hard to believe Google hasn’t added embedability to it’s presentations yet (or has it and I just don’t know about it).
Worried that your shotgun is too far from your bed? The Back-Up solves that by giving you a handy holder that goes between your mattress and box spring.
Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong. This isn’t really new news, but it’s the best explanation I’ve read. If Metcalfe’s law was correct it would make no sense for networks (like Facebook or Myspace for instance) to be closed. (For more info on networks, check out the presentation at the top of this post.)
I feel like I’ve been going to a lot of conferences lately. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but after going to Influx Ideas last week, I actually spoke at Nielsen Buzzmetrics’CGM Summit 2007. My panel was called “Are Brands Prepared for 2010?” and was moderated by none other than Max Kalehoff. Here’s the description:
What are the leading brands doing to rewire their DNA for a world increasingly impacted by CGM? How are they changing the way their companies listen, the way they communicate, and the way they manage customer relationships? How have past CGM experiments and lessons informed marketing innovation and planning for the future? Where are we certain, where are our vulnerabilities?
Anyway, I had lots of thoughts about the future of CGM (consumer generated media), but didn’t necessarily get them all out during the panel. So, I figured I would throw up some of my notes here:
In three years, CGM will be:
Integrated into more and more major sites. This is already beginning to happen with Washington Post showing blogs that link to an article or to a lesser extent, Yahoo! including Flickr photos or the New York Times showing which articles are most blogged. Obviously this will lend it an air of credibility and further expose CGM.
Much more about testing. I’ve had this theory floating around my head for a while that the future of CGM (especially from an advertising/marketing perspective) is going to be about making a whole bunch of really small investments, seeing which stick and then iterating/investing more on the fly.
Accepted as a long-term relationship play rather than a short-term burst strategy. Clients are still focused on ‘viral’, however, CGM is best used as a longer term strategy for developing relationships with customers. (Also on the panel was Bruce Ertmann from Toyota who seems to get this.)
Also mentioned throughout my presentation: Brand as curator, big seed marketing and horizontal media. Although I didn’t get to talk about it, I meant to mention the idea that I am ready to move past just looking at influencers and instead at the gauge of the community you want to influence. I haven’t fully formed this idea, but after reading The Strength of Weak Ties (PDF via Bokardo), it’s something you can expect to read about in the near future.
Sorry if the presentation isn’t self explanatory, I am happy to add some voiceover if necessary. Just let me know. Okay, that’s it for now. Sorry for the slow posting lately.
[This is an email I sent to friends in sf. I decided to post it here and invite all you as well.]
Hi everyone I know who lives in or around SF,
I was thinking about getting a bunch of people together Monday night for some drinks before I leave town for the other coast. If you’re so inclined and available, here are the details:
Rye is a cocktail bar with delicious drinks. It’s a bit expensive, but you can always grab a beer instead of a cocktail (but really, the cocktails are quite delicious).
Obviously feel free to tell friends, post on blogs, scream from building-tops about it. The more the merrier.
Am out in San Francisco at the Influx Ideas Conference (that’s Influx like the blog). Ed was kind enough to hook me up with a free ticket and in exchange I’m going to some blogging from the event. I kind of hate the live blogging thing, though, so rather than just feed you a bunch of random points out of context I’m going to do my best to add a bit of extra info/thinking. It’s an experiment, so let’s see how it works out . . .
So here are some thoughts/quotes/ideas. Each header is the speaker who was onstage . . .
There’s an opportunity for local food as a reaction to national security threats. Knowing where your food came from makes it safer . . .
“Not every company brands green with integrity,” but consumers will expose them. (More or less a quote.) Okay, I’m not sure about this one. Who are these vigilante bloggers people are always talking about. Are consumers really calling brands out or are consumers who live in our bubble more aware of what brand integrity means and we’re projecting that awareness on the general population. Joe, a coworker from Naked, had an idea awhile back about building a Virtual Midwest to allow marketers like myself, who live in an NYC bubble to visit the midwest and see what the middle of the country looks like. Just to step back for one second, I don’t mean to be snarky here and Sarah may be absolutely right, but I don’t feel like I’m savvy enough to know whether a brand who calls itself green and uses some earth tones in its packaging is doing it with integrity. (As Joe pointed out, GM is a good example. Hopefully he’ll explain in the comments.)
Sarah talked a bit about backstory which I think is a huge area of possibilities. Reminds me of blogjects (here’s an old entry of mine that talks about them). Anyway, what happens when objects know (or at least contain information that documents) their own history. What if your clothes included a little chip that told you where it was from, who worked on it, how much fuel was consumed, etc.
They’ve done some awesome work. I’ve been to Reebok headquarters and it’s pretty amazing. He also mentioned Boeing and Telenor. I love architecture as a discipline. Seriously, it’s so cool and multi-disciplinary.
“When you see the Sydney Opera House you think ‘Sydney’, but when you think about Sydney, do you say ‘opera’?”
I’ve heard/read a few times recently about the idea of buildings as sales tools. Scott talked about how Boeing brings more clients to it’s office as a way to show off their philosophy. I can’t remember where it was, but I recently read about an agency (I think) that recently redid it’s office and they had a close rate of like 70% when they brought prospects in. (I’m sure those numbers are totally wrong and if anyone knows what I’m talking about, please let me know.) Anyway, it makes perfect sense: As always, everything is media.
Last from Scott is something else I’ve been thinking lots about. He was talking about buildings for corporations and how they approach it. Rather than working off functional specifications (number of desks needed, number of conference rooms needed, etc.), they work off the cultural specifications of the company: Who are they, what do they stand for, etc. This, to me, is a much better approach. I think far too often the corporate world approaches problems by forgetting that people are people. That’s why business software is so bad. Anyway, here are two articles about designing business spaces that I think you’ll find interesting: 1) Enabling Innovation Through Office Design and 2) Designs for Working.
I have to admit, as soon as the topic of Second Life comes up I kind of roll my eyes . . .
The one point I found especially interesting was the idea that Second Life could be a super cheap 3D app. Rather than paying thousands of dollars for Maya, people have a cheap way to design 3D objects. Of course it’s a lot more amateur, but so are lots of other things . . .
Okay, that’s it for now, will just keep amending this thing . . .
As with most months, I like to remind people that likemind is happening. We’re in 37 cities (if my counting is right) and we’re pretty excited to be opening our first dual city this month as likemind Brooklyn joins Manhattan (we felt like the time was right).
What’s extra exciting for this month, though, is the realization of an idea Piers and I have been bouncing around for a while. We’re going to see what happens when we throw a question out to the likemind network. It’s a bit scary, since the beauty of likemind is it’s free-formness, but we are quite committed to keeping things that way. No one is required to talk about it, but we thought it might be a nice way to meet new people you otherwise wouldn’t chat with (it’s much easier to start a conversation off a prompt you’ve been given).
Anyway, this month’s question is: “If you were to rebuild your city from scratch, how would you build it differently and what would you keep the same?”
Got any thoughts?
Update (10/17/07): I am headed out to SF tomorrow AM. Will be there Friday for Influx Ideas (and hopefully stop by likemind). If you’re around, drop me a line.
Clearly the music business has been on everyone’s mind lately. Between Radiohead going with pay-what-you-want and the slew of announcements that followed, it’s been a hot topic. So, in a move that should surprise no one at all, I’m going to throw my two cents in the ring (inspired in part by Chartreuse calling me out).
So in no specific (or sensical) order . . .
I’ve said it before (though maybe not here), digital technology and piracy is not to blame for the decline of the music business. Rather, poor planning and lack of strategic vision is the real issue. Rather than dealing with the hand they (and the rest of the media world) were dealt, they tried to hold back the dam with some chewing gum (even winning lawsuits for hundreds of thousands of dollars). If the industry had invested even a small portion of their legal fees in building something people wanted, they probably would have been the ones Rupert paid millions to instead of Intermix.
Suing your customers is a bad business practice. Period.
A while back I wrote that everything is relative. Well this, my friends, is a perfect example. Small artist invests small amounts to make record. Said small artists needs to recoup small amounts to break into the black (especially without all the accountants, lawyers, handlers and marketers to pay). It’s not brain science . . . Sure they may not make millions like the record company did, but then again, the only figure that really matters is the one you need to pay your rent (and whatever else you like buying I guess).
I listen to more music and go to more concerts than I ever could/would have before all this digital music stuff happened. I love it. Two weekends ago I shelled out $50 for an Arcade Fire show and this week another $20 for !!! (which I didn’t even make it to thanks to a delayed flight). I am seeing Go! Team Friday in San Francisco (btw, if anyone wants to meet up, I’ll be out there for a few days) and Sufjan Stevens in two weeks. That’s a lot of music and a fair amount of money. All of it is being spent on bands not on major labels who I wouldn’t know about without all this crazy music sharing that’s going around.
Despite what Chartreuse said, Radiohead is an anomaly and much of the success of this experiment is due to past work (not just marketing) and the hype Radiohead can create (seriously, how many other bands have fans who wait outside the night before the release?). That’s not to say that this isn’t a good model, but rather that few other bands will see the kind of success from it that Radiohead will. It’s not an indictment of the system or the other bands, but rather it’s praise for Radiohead.
Speaking of revenue models for music, I think it’s Prince, not Radiohead, who’s got it figured out. (I wrote a bit about this a few months ago.)
And speaking of music and marketing, I’m pretty excited to see how things work out for RCRD LBL, I’ve been chatting with those guys and I think it’s bound to be big.
I think that’s it for now. I’m sure more thoughts will pop in my head and I’ll add them as updates or just stick them in the comments. Until then, feel free to throw in your own.
Okay, so I haven’t had a ton to say lately, but I expect that may change as I have recently begun reading Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. I’m just digging in, but have been quite impressed so far. It’s basically a book that suggests the way we think about almost everything is backward: We focus on normal when its extreme events that really make change. My favorite example is a thought experiment that imagines a politician who managed to get a law passed prior to September 11th, 2001 that required all airplanes to have bulletproof locked doors to the cockpit. Taleb goes on to explain:
The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statuses in public squares, not so much as a quick mention of his contribution in his obituary. “Joe Smith, who helped avoid the disaster of 9/11, died of complications of liver disease.” Seeing how superfluous his measure was, and how it squandered resources, the public, with great help from airline pilots, might well boot him out of office . . .
No consider again the events of 9/11. In their aftermath, who got the recognition? Those you saw in the media, on television performing heroic acts, and those whom you saw trying to give you the impression that they were performing heroic acts.
David Card huzzahs Michael Arrington. In response to a quote by Arrington about how music should be free, Card responds: “By this remarkably oversimplified analysis, software, filmed entertainment, soda at McDonalds, and the classic example, high-end perfume, should all be free. What, pray tell, are the “real products” that will support those industries? Very few bands can make a living off of touring and T-shirts. Oh, that’s it, advertising. I bet Arrington listens to a lot of commercial radio…” As my mom so nicely put it in the comments to my last entry: Snap!
Speaking of economics, Robert Frank was interviewed on NPR the other morning about his book The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas. Basically he goes around trying to answer questions like why are milk cartons square as opposed to round like most other beverages (answer: because milk always needs to be refrigerated, so you want to fit as many as possible) and why does Magnolia Bakery not charge more for its cupcakes if the line is so long (answer: because the line is their best marketing channel).
My coworker Jared wrote a great post last week about how awful the idea of “owning” things in marketing is. Money line: “And despite one former client’s dreams, their snack could never own July 4th, no matter how much they spent (budget was roughly $2 million). Because only one thing owns July 4th, and that’s fireworks.” Go read the whole thing.
Switching gears, my friend Andrew wrote up a great entry highlighting the differences between marketing conferences in New York and web 2.0 articles in San Francisco. Money quote: “There’s a lot of women here, of all ages, all ethnicities, and all advertising job functions. ‘nuf said.”
A really good article from this month’s Wired (at least I think it’s this month) on how there’s a push in science to publish failed results. I feel like this probably falls into the Black Swan/behavioral economics category, but I’m not sure how. Think about it, though: How many experiments fail? Yet all we ever learn from are those that succeed. How much money and time is wasted recreating failed experiments because others didn’t admit to their failure?
Anyway, that’s it for now. Have a big weekend ahead of me: Taking a tour of the High Line, seeing Arcade Fire and going to a wedding (with the geekiest cake toppers I’ve ever seen). Have a good one.
Mostly I find nostalgia annoying. Complaining about how things used to be only moves one further away from the real issues. In other words: Change happens, deal with it.
Memory, it turns out, is a perfect topic for the nostalgic set. Ever since Plato mentioned it in Phaedrus 300 years before Jesus, people have been bitching about how the kids can’t remember anything anymore.
Two recent articles stoked the flames again for me. Though both went in decidedly different directions, in each one I thought I was going to hear a story about how digital technology is killing memory and how it’s a BAD thing. The first, an article on Britney Spears’ miserable VMA performance from the Times includes this paragraph: “Performance anxiety, heavy drinking and even hair extensions have been variously blamed for these lapses. But why blame the victims? They are just products of a culture that does not enforce the development of memory skills.” The second article comes from the always brilliant Clive Thompson and is a lot more insightful. When I started reading his Wired article, I thought I was having deja vu:
This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.
Now to be completely fair, I wouldn’t call either author nostalgic. In fact, Thompson brings some real nuance to the argument and it makes for quite a good read. But you know there are people who will read each and moan about the state of things: Remembering back to the old days when knowing things was more important than knowing where to find them.
But that’s not our world any longer. In the same way calculators made it hard to justify knowing how to do higher order math by hand, computer, and specifically sites like Google and Wikipedia, have made knowing vast amounts of facts seem like a waste of time.
I, happen to think all this change is a good thing. The best ideas come out of connections between disparate things. Our brains are especially well suited for making those connections, as it mirrors how we actually learn (as I understand it, neural pathways form when connections are made). What if we were actually made for a digital world?
Obviously, it’s not so cut and dry. But nothing ever is. Whenever someone tells me that IM or text messaging is ruining interpersonal communications I take offense. In fact, I take offense when someone tells me that face-to-face conversation is preferable to email. It’s not that I don’t enjoy chatting with people in person, but rather that you can’t compare media like that. We’re not dealing with apples and apples. Face-to-face is great in some contexts, but email can be much better when you don’t know someone so well, want evidence of the conversation or just need a quick answer.
When I saw Steven Johnson and Henry Jenkins speak a year ago, one of them (think it was Johnson, but can’t remember exactly) gave a nice anecdote on this topic. In response to the violence in video games like Grand Theft Auto, he suggested that there was another very popular tradition amongst teenage boys that encourages violence and often the objectification of women. What’s more, high school football is a school sponsored activity.
Things are still pretty crazy around here and my brain is still a bit scattered . . . Instead of a proper post, here’s a few links and some thoughts on blogging. Hope to return to your regularly scheduled programming this week.
Very interesting Financial Times article that suggests the online advertising market will grow as the economy crashes. Their reasoning (which makes sense) is that the worse the economy is, the more people require ROI in their investments. ROI, of course, is easiest to measure in digital. (Thanks to Virtual Economics for the link.)
Finally, got an email last week from Tina (aka swissmiss) with a few questions about blogging. In absence of other content around here, I asked her if she minded me posting my answers. If anyone else feels like answering them in the comments I’m sure she’d appreciate any additional insight.
What drives me to blog?
I do it for myself. It’s a place where I can think out loud. I never start with a conclusion, rather I use writing on my blog as a thinking exercise. It also gives me an excuse for constantly seeking out new things and reading with a critical eye. If I didn’t have a blog I don’t know that I would underline books and magazines, but having that outlet gives me a reason. I love that stuff.
Who is afraid of what the blogosphere has and will become?
Lots of folks are quite frightened. Big media is scared because they’ve never had competition from outside their walls. In this day and age I compete with Fox (albeit on a very small scale) for people’s attention. Fox, however, is used to a world where they compete with NBC and CBS. In that kind of competition the goal may be to take out another station, but never at the expense of television or the business model attached to it. However, I don’t care about their medium or business model. Us bloggers are kind of like the crazy guy in the room, we’re scary to fight because we (literally) have nothing to lose (actual dollars earned directly from my blog over three years: $0).
What is its role of blogs as a forum for ideas?
Not sure I understand the question completely . . . so I will just give some thoughts. I absolutely love that I can throw up a half-baked idea and get back responses from a group of absolutely brilliant people. On occasion it feels a bit like opinion outsourcing: I take an idea I haven’t fully developed and get feedback and viewpoints I never would have been able to amass before I had this forum. The quality of the comments never cease to amaze me.
Where’s the medium going NEXT?
I think blogs are going to move even further into the community realm. At the moment most blog software doesn’t have many community features beyond comments, however, I expect we will see that evolution coming soon (Movable Type 4 actually includes some of it). They’re the perfect micro-communities: Super-targeted and sharing common interests. On a small level I find myself connecting different blog readers together and wish more of this were built in.
So once again I’ve got a kind of crazy week and don’t know that I have anything especially exciting to say, so it’s going to be another link post. This week I’m off to speak at Promo Live in Chicago on a panel called “Social Media: Evolution to Execution”. Herb Sawyer put it together and on the panel with me are David Armano and Rohit Bhargava, both of whom I’ve met before and have a lot of respect for, so it should be exciting. Sometime later this week I will try to post my slides as I’ll be giving a little 10 minute intro to my state of mind . . .
Now onto some randomness . . .
The PSFK LA Conference is today. It looks great (just as New York was). If you happen to be in LA, reading this today and can make it over, it looks like there are still some tickets available.
Speaking of conferences, I’ll be heading out to San Francisco for the Influx Ideas Conference on October 19th. The Influx crew was kind enough to hook up a blogger ticket for me and it should be a great time. Beyond speakers from all over the place there’s going to be a section of the day devoted to five minute presentations from audience members. Plus Gareth and I will be there, so it must be fun, right? You can buy tickets here. (Also, I plan to stay a few extra days, so if you’re around San Fran I’d love to meet up.)
Okay, this cracked me up. The Onion reports that Pitchfork Gives Music a 6.8. Money line: “In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.” So good . . . (As a side note, here’s my favorite Pitchfork review ever.)
They’ve banned smoking in London, just as they’ve done in other major cities and Seamus McCauley has some insights into what it means from an economics perspective: “So it turns out that banning smoking in pubs has not so much encouraged smokers to quit but instead provided them with a decisive competitive reproductive advantage if they keep puffing away. Drinking outside South London Pacific on Saturday night I came across this amusing demonstration of the law of unintended consequences: smirting, which is of course the practice of flirting while popping outside for a cigarette.”
My friend Michael Surtees has the story of how he ended up in NYC told in Unlimited Magazine. Read the whole article, but here’s the shorthand: Michael mentioned on his blog he was coming to NYC and asked for recommendations of things to do. I suggested he buy City Secrets (the best NYC guidebook on the planet — even for those who live here). We started chatting, he mentioned he was coming down to interview, I said he should come in and check out Renegade and a few weeks later he was driving a Uhaul with all his stuff from Canada.
As a side note, I have been thinking about starting a site specifically to catalog those success stories. What do you all think?
Okay, that’s it. I’m off to Chicago this afternoon and then Jacksonville tomorrow evening. Will be back Friday in time for likemind, hopefully I’ll see some of you there (or at least in pictures from the other 40+ locations around the world).
Since Sunday night, there has been a seemingly endless string of discussions about how horrendous MTV’s VMA awards were. Most of them centered around Britney’s performance which has been officially declared a train-wreck by congress.
Anyway, I can’t pretend to have watched the whole thing, however, I did see enough that evening and then watch enough on the MTV site the next day to understand what all the buzz was about. After some interesting conversations with friends, I had been considering writing something about it, but I just didn’t know where to begin. But then my friend Andy was kind enough to get the ball rolling with an unsolicited email:
Did you watch the MTV VMA’s this week? I watched it with my girlfriend, we are both pretty in tune with pop culture, media, youth, etc…and we found it to be unwatchable. I didn’t know who 70% of the artists were, the performances and production were terrible, and the nominee announcement editing nearly gave me an epileptic seizure when they showed it before each award.
For the first time in a long time, I really felt disappointed in pop music and in MTV. The decline of MTV has obviously been a long time coming (since the Real World debuted some might say and started the slide from a music videos to content programming model), but it really felt to me, that this VMA’s was the tipping point. It’s over for MTV. They have just completely lost the audience that grew up with them.
So how do they save themselves? Do they? Can they? Should they? Would anyone care if they did? Do they even need saving, or is it just the evolution of the brand and the business and I am now officially out of the demographic?
At 29, I grew up with music based MTV and just can’t get down with new MTV…but the 15 year olds of today, they have grown up with Real World and reality based MTV and this super polished, pre-packaged “here is your pop music and here are your manufactured pop stars” on a plate…so maybe I am another near 30 year old shaking my fist at these kids and their crazy rap music. Who knows.
I sometimes forget that everyone doesnt consume media like you or I might, with Last.fm and the like…maybe most people don’t care that Comcast, and News Corp, and Viacom, etc all tell them what to listen to and what to like. Maybe the average person is fine with having their media wrapped up nicely and left on their doorstep. Maybe we’re the crazy ones.
I took the bait and added my two cents (I also added a few thoughts as I was writing this time):
I was having a conversation about just this the other day. The VMAs were a trainwreck, that seems indisputable. However, the question in my mind is why MTV didn’t do anything about it. Surely someone must have noticed the thing sucked and mentioned it. Actually, from the minute I turned it on I noticed how the camera work seemed odd. In a way I felt like I was watching a reality show (like Laguna Beach or the Hills), not an awards show with a million dollar budget. Eventually it led me to wonder whether MTV had actually done this on purpose as a way to get people (like us) talking about them. [Seth seems in on this conspiracy theory as well.]
As for MTV, clearly the model has changed (no new news there). Music videos (and music generally) lives in the digital realm. With that said, music videos, I would argue, are more popular than ever before. What’s more, three minute short-form content is no longer just an idea, it’s a reality. MTV, in many ways, was about 25 years too early. The question, then, is how did they lose their way? Why are they not able to tap into current musical attitudes?
What’s more, the thing that really struck me was the cruelty of the whole thing. Shelly Palmer nailed it with his entry about Britney’s performance: “Tonight, I was profoundly sad for a star that is about to implode while others profit from her misfortune.” It was so clearly a performance made to humiliate. Sarah Silverman had her monologue all ready to rip Britney down. It’s almost as if MTV has taken on the personalities it asks of its faux-ality show stars: Shallow, backstabbing and cruel.
It’s all quite odd. I think the big question is why MTV would let this happen? Sure “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” and I may watch next year to see if it’s even worse, however, my desire to turn on MTV at any other moment is non-existent. Sure I’m not the target and it’s entirely possible that I am just being an old fart, but MTV seems to be struggling generally (outside The Hills).
So I think that’s it. Sorry I couldn’t add more insight Andy, hopefully some commenters can fill in the holes. Anyone?
For some time I’ve been trying to find a good opportunity to write about online display advertising. It’s not that I haven’t had lots to say in the past, but I just haven’t had a particularly good context. That was until Adblock Plus came around and started getting some press. Adblock Plus, you see, is a Firefox extension that (not surprisingly) blocks advertising on the web. Instead of seeing an ad in the right column of a New York Times article, for instance, there is just an empty white space. (To be honest, I think it’s kind of cool looking.)
The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model. After an installation that takes but a minute or two, Adblock usually makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No Google ads based on the search terms you have entered.
From that perspective, the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter.
It’s that last sentence I find especially interesting. Click-through rates are abysmal and we’ve known for quite sometime that people are banner blind, yet the industry just keeps pushing along. To me it’s always been a lack of creativity: Publishers who came from a world of traditional media were completely uninterested in imagining a new model. Then, as new online-only publishers entered the arena, they didn’t have the marketing savvy to understand that there may be another way to survive.
I think I’ve said it before, but online CPM (cost-per-thousand) advertising is like crack. Publishers know it’s no good and won’t last, but they are addicted and can’t ween themselves off the stuff. The issues with it are numerous:
They still assume reach is the ultimate measure. Problem is, reach is a number born out of a medium (television) where there was a limited spectrum. As a result, people were forced to watch one of a small number of stations. The internet doesn’t live by the same rules, as the digital spectrum is infinite. As an advertiser you can extract much more value by offering a specific message to small group than a general message to a large one. Therefore, the real value on the internet becomes the ability to target, rather than the ability to reach massive numbers. (The issue with this, of course, is that the more targeted you are the less efficient you can be — unless you’re Google of course, in which case you can sell people’s intentions rather than their eyeballs.)
As I mentioned before, people are banner blind. Seriously, when’s the last time you noticed a banner ad?
As Umair mentions: “Ads are nothing but nuisance costs to most consumers.” That, of course, is a larger advertising issue, but it’s especially important in a medium where people are in far more control of what they read/watch/see.
All of this is to say I don’t feel the slightest bit sorry about Adblock Plus. If people don’t want to see ads they shouldn’t have to. Publishers shouldn’t complain about something like this, rather, they should take the hint and start finding new revenue streams. Take job boards, for instance, many bloggers are figuring out that this is a viable revenue stream that taps into the targeted nature of their small(ish) audience. I’ve been a strong proponent of this for a while, as I think it’s the most simple example of a new media revenue stream that actually provides value for advertisers, publishers and users. The problem is, there aren’t a ton of others out there (at least that I know of). As I wrote in July:
But what is a site with few visitors to do? Is it less valuable? The answer is no: It’s actually more valuable to advertisers, but less valuable to the publisher (from a purely monetary standpoint). Being able to efficiently target an audience is worth a lot of money, however, if a site or other niche property doesn’t have big numbers it may not be able to survive the CPM game. Instead of thinking about other ways to add value, however, most just end up folding. That’s sad. While I don’t have a definite answer for how to fix it (Google figured out one way, job boards are another interesting one), it’s clear that Scott Karp is right when he says page views and CPMs are suppressing online advertising.
So there you have it. Pageviews/CPMs are the easy way out and Adblock Plus, while it may not ever become huge, is certainly another signal that publishers need to get more creative and stop relying on a model created for print and television.
After a totally insane weekend at Electric Picnic, I am back and ready to write again. I’ve got three entries in my head at the moment, so hopefully that means there will be a bit more real substance around here and a bit less randomness. Just so people can hold me to it, the entries are: “the death of the middle” (how the middle was never efficient, but it’s a worse time than ever to try and compete in that space), another entry I can’t remember at this very moment (damnit!) and “the blurriness of music today” (which is what you’re going to read now).
I first start thinking about the idea of no more musical genres as I was sitting at Live Earth at the Meadowlands. The lineup included Keith Urban, AFI, Akon, Fallout Boy, John Mayer, Alicia Keys, Melissa Ethridge, Dave Matthews, Kanye West, Smashing Pumpkins, Bon Jovi, Roger Waters and the Police. There is very little all those bands have in common except for the fact they all sell a lot of records and they all played in New Jersey that day. I don’t know that this is necessarily a new idea, but it really struck me that musical genres really seem to be disintegrating before our very eyes. We all know hip-hop is mainstream, but how about Kanye West sampling French electronic band Daft Punk in his newest single?
This weekend the same thing struck me. The mix of music at Electric Picnic was eclectic to say the least as bands like Iggy Pop, Bjork, Primal Scream, Polyphonic Spree, LCD Soundsystem and Chemical Brothers shared billing on the main stage and Beastie Boys, !!!, Nouvelle Vague and The Go! Team pulled huge crowds at side stages. Once again, these bands have incredibly little in common other than the fact they showed up on the program together, yet everyone seemed to enjoy every one. Sure there were enough people at both Live Earth and Electric Picnic to support different groups seeing different genres, however, I don’t suspect that’s actually what happened. Rather, people’s musical tastes and music in general seems to be blurring to a point that finding the lines between genres is nearly impossible. It seems that everything is just “pop”.
So how did we get here? Well, as I’m sure you expect me to say, I believe it has much to do with digital access to music. People are listening to more music than ever before (as the never-ending sea of white headphones attests to) and I expect this includes artists as well. In addition, the speed at which a band can reach popularity at this point is astounding. One review on Pitchfork for Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah! turned them into indie darlings overnight. Then, thanks to access to their music on MP3 blogs and the like, the buzz built to a level that eventually led to a mention in Rolling Stone as a hot new band for 2005 (an amazing feat if you consider that Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah! is one of the oddest bands on the planet and fronted by a lead singer who puts the “ine” in “whine”).
Anyway, the point of all this is to say that the world is blurring and music is probably a great case study in how and why.
Update (9/5/07): Just remembered another entry I’ve been meaning to write: “What Google Gears is all about” (another “it’s only a matter of time before Google takes over the universe” post)
Update (9/5/07): In going through my feeds I ran across this entry from Rob Walker comparing Kanye/Justin to Prince/Michael (or disputing that comparison, rather). Two sentences that relate to this entry: “I don’t know whether it’s a permanent change or just a slump, but pop music is just not the center of pop culture to the degree it was in the Prince/Jackson era, and surely West must be aware of this.” and “Meanwhile, who is really the new Michael Jackson? The iPhone of course.” My first reaction to the first quote was to say that pop music is still at the center, it’s just that the definition has become much blurrier. However, while I do think pop’s definition has changed, Walker has a point about the iPhone. I’d even take it further to say that nothing competes with Michael/Prince in their heyday because there’s just more of everything competing for attention. Therefore, even the most popular things get a smaller percentage. (I know that’s not incredibly insightful, but hey.)
Okay, now on to some real stuff. I want to talk about Twitter. For those unfamiliar with the service it’s a sort of microblogging platform that allows you to send posts via text message, web or third-party app. Friends subscribe and can receive your posts through any of those portals. For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the point of Twitter was. It seemed like it was solving a problem I didn’t have.
But then we built House of Naked and included Twitter integration. All of a sudden everyone from work was Twittering back and forth as it was the easiest way to add content to the site. Once I had a real-life social network on the service it became a far more useful tool. Twitter has become a place for exchanging funny quotes and inside jokes within a network who exists within a certain proximity and mindset. The majority of people I’m subscribed to exist within this network and while occasionally I find it annoying that my phone is constantly buzzing with new text messages (or that I get a $300 phone bill because I hadn’t turned on unlimited texts), overall I love this connection point and feel like it’s brought much of the office closer.
Overall I think the service has been quite brilliant in the way it’s handled itself. Twitter never really tried to describe what it did and rather has allowed its users to determine the path of the service. For instance in July they streamlined the friending process. Rather than having to chose between “friend” and “follow” (which no one quite understood), they changed it to just “follow” and gave users the option to receive notifications via SMS. In doing so, they solved what I believe to be the most fundamental problem with social networks at the moment.
As anyone on Facebook can attest to, making friendship a binary decision makes things quite difficult on occasion. Sure you can give someone a “limited profile”, however, the user on the other end knows that you’ve done this. It kind of feels like calling someone an “acquaintance” to their face. Friendship is not a binary thing. We all have different levels of people we call “friends”, ranging from folks we talk to every day to those we’ve met once.
Twitter solved this problem incredibly elegantly. You can add anyone as a follower, however, you can be very selective about who you subscribe to on your mobile without letting the other party know. This kind of opaque management of social connections is almost completely unheard of anywhere else. There are lots of people trying to figure this problem out at the moment, but no one besides Twitter (which is also a fundamentally different kind of social software) seems to be doing a particularly well.
Not quite sure what to do with all this, just wanted to get it out there.
And I wanted to find a way to put “opaque management of social connections” into a sentence. Have a great long weekend.
Update (9/11/07): I signed up for an Orkut account and they have a feature that seems to do just this. It allows you to opaquely decide where someone falls on a friendship scale of 1-5.
Once again, I don’t have a coherent entry to put together, so instead I’ve got a bunch of links and stuff. Sorry for the recent slowdown.
First off, I’ve done a bit of a redesign of the likemind site. The big reason I finally got around to it is that Google finally made their maps embeddable. Now with MyMaps (which allows you to create custom maps with your own locations) you can embed them in any site. Check out the likemind map I put together
Now I’m not sure how I’ve missed this for so long, but I finally got around to watching the beginning installments of R Kelly’s trapped in a closet. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a bizarrely brilliant “hip-hopera” based on Trapped in the Closet. Chuck Klosterman put it well when he said: “Describing TITC [trapped in the closet] to anyone whose hasn’t seen it themselves is virtually impossible, simply because there’s no other art to compare it with (it falls somewhere between a parody of musical theatre, a soap opera from the late 1970s, and a BET version of The Red Shoe Diaries).” I’ve embedded the first two episodes below.
Not to keep harping on this one, but it’s seriously blown me away (to the point that I just bought both DVDs. Now beyond the amusement of the whole thing, it’s pretty amazing that this guy made something over an hour long that held my interest in the way it does. Sure it’s totally absurd, but who cares? I can’t watch 10 minutes of music videos without switching the channel . . . In addition, it’s a fairly shrewd business move. It’s not a high-quality production or anything, couldn’t have cost a ton, and the DVDs go for $16.99. As Klosterman wrote, “In practical terms, this all might be nothing more than a way to sell DVDs instead of CDs.” As I’ve made quite clear in the past I’m all for music finding new revenue streams.
Finally, one last video for your enjoyment. This one comes from Miss Teen USA 2007 . . .
Think that’s it for now. Hope your weekend’s went well, will try to write something with a bit more substance this week. It’s amazingly easy to tell where my head’s been by these link posts isn’t it?
For a whole bunch of reasons I’ve given a lot of thought to building software for businesses. First off, I work for a business, so it’s interesting to me. Second, I’m quite fascinated by the idea that you can build software to help things and people work more efficiently. And third, because 90% of software for businesses sucks. It’s just plain terrible. Time-sheet software is the perfect example: Ask anyone in the ad industry what part of their job they most despise and they’ll tell you it’s completing their time sheets. Sure it’s an onerous process, but it’s only made worse by how awful the majority of time management software is.
So it’s with those things in mind that I’ve developed my rules for making business software. It’s a pretty simple two-parter:
Make software people want to use.
Even better, make software people can get value from without even knowing their using it (without spying on them, of course).
With those rules in mind, I was quite excited to run across an essay by Jamie Zawinski titled Groupware Bad (the link came via Anil Dash who recently wrote about this very topic in relation to the iPhone). His two money lines are both things I’ve thought/said in the past (though I never read this 2005 essay until today): “If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy” and “Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?” (The latter I wrote about in a 2005 entry titled DLA Should Get You Laid which was inspired by this story of iTunes getting a college student laid.)
Anyway, this is a topic I’m quite passionate about and while I’ve only actually built one piece of “business software” (a term I use quite loosely for it), I tried to bring these ideas to life. The Naked Aggregator is a fairly simple idea: Rather than forcing people to constantly update the Naked blog with full entries, why not pull from the content they’re creating anyway? So it pulls in content from del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and other people’s blogs and inserts it right into houseofnaked.com. In my mind, it’s an example of passive activity, which I define as tapping into people’s existing behavior in order to deliver, rather than asking them for the information themselves. This can come in the form of metadata created from regular digital activities or by tapping into services that people are already using (with the help of XML/APIs).
One simple solution in this area are information visualizations (think Jonathan Harris), which exposes insights into news/language/culture by aggregating lots of data people are creating anyway and organizing it in a way that allows others to extract value. (Watching Harris explain his work makes this far more clear.) As Ed at InfluxInsights so nicely put it: “in a data-driven world — infographics are the new art.” In that sense, infographics act as a mirror to our universe.
Okay, so back to business software, I think there’s a lot to learn from people like Harris. If you really want to understand what people are up to, you need to watch them, not ask them. Researchers have known this for years (hence recall bias). Business software needs to take the same tact.
Hi, I'm Noah. I am the co-founder of Percolate. I like writing on, thinking about and making stuff for the internet. I'm responsible for a few internet experiments like Brand Tags, likemind and My First Tweet. On this site I write about media, marketing, culture, technology and randomness. I like it when people email me.
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The drip denotes a curated post from Percolate. The comment is mine, the content on the other end of the link is not.
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Hi, I'm 
