LINKS FROM November 2007
the uncanny valley of relationship marketing
"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."
Tags: marketing advertising blogs
"Sorapot is a simple modern teapot designed to brew heat-sensitive green and white teas."
Dept. of open questions: Why not infomercials?
Rob Walker: "I’ve been wondering why the networks don’t respond to the writer’s strike by simply running high-end infomercials. That is: Just let Nike or whoever buy an hour of prime time, and let them do what they want."
Tags: marketing advertising television
The Art of Indie Music in Commericals
New York comedian Aziz Ansari breaks down the advertising music licensing business.
Tags: funny music business advertising video comedy
I Like to Answer Questions Well
"In an earlier video, Levitt talked about how hard it is for economists to make good predictions about the macroeconomy. He continues that theme in this new piece, explaining why he’d rather tackle a much smaller question and try to answer it well."
The Social Graph In The Second Inning
"What I want is a single aggregated social graph that I control that has all of this data in it. That "meta social graph" can then be applied by ME to the interface I want on top off all my messaging systems."
Tags: socialnetworking ideas attention
The Ten Video Games That Should Be Movies (and the Directors Who Should Make Them)
Duck Hunt by Wes Anderson and Second Life by David Lynch may be my two favorites.
Tags: funny movies videogames lists
"You know Baby Got Back that anthemic early 90’s tribute to a woman’s behind? Well Sir Mix-A-Lot didnt have shit on this Biblically minded remake."
Tags: funny religion books video music
Baby versus daddy.
Tags: funny video advertising commercial
"In a world where many people get their music for free, we wanted to create a site where bands we loved could put their music out there for free AND get paid for it."
Tags: music advertising mp3 blogs
"creating favicons has never been easier"
Tags: favicon design icons tools
IBM Predicts the End of Advertising as We Know It
"Advertising agencies must experiment creatively, become brokers of consumer insights, and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices."
Tags: advertising research
"Privacy is lost not in one great flood but rather through steady erosion. Eventually, the Peeping Tom taps on your window and waves, and you don't recoil in horror and embarrassment. You wave back."
Tags: privacy facebook advertising
the best thing i learned today
Brilliant idea for a blog.
"So to make things easier for you, here I present my top 50 graphic design blogs. I’ve categorised these blogs by their Google PageRank (PR), which is Google’s way of determining the authority of a website / blog."
Behind Enemy Lines With a Suburban Counterterrorist
"Rossmiller succeeds by exploiting a fundamental flaw in al Qaeda's famously decentralized organization. The absence of a strict hierarchy makes it pretty easy for a cunning person to mix among the terrorists."
Tags: terrorism postmodernism security internet
"Every year, hundreds of nonprofit organizations rely on the Taproot Foundation's award winning Service Grant program to provide millions of dollars worth of pro bono marketing, HR and IT consulting services."
Tags: design business consulting nonprofit marketing
"Paying People to Lose Weight Helps Drop Pounds and Health-Care Costs"
Tags: economics behavioraleconomics gametheory health
McLuhan would blow hot and cool about today's internet
"The internet doesn't really fit into McLuhan's "hot" and "cool" dichotomy. It encourages participation but it also sucks up our attention and dominates our senses."
"What these experiments neatly demonstrate is that the taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of our inputs, and cannot be solved in a bottom-up fashion."
Tags: wine psychology culture criticism research brain bestarticlesof2007
Gold at the end of the rainbow
"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."
Tags: music business email marketing crm
""Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information." Permalink to this paragraph"
Tags: advertising
"perfect for business cards, junk mail, obnoxious documents and postmodern philosophers."
Tags: funny
"In the graph, the y axis is roughly the number or frequency of hacks, which doesn’t have a scale, because it’s based on theoretical model. The x axis is time and show how the number of hack change over time."
Tags: innovation networks hacks
Chris Rock On The Music Business
"If the musician is a good businessman, he’s a shitty musician . . . Which is why something resembling a record company is going to be necessary in the future. Musicians make the music, someone needs to sell it."
"Therefore the challenge, if you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times."
Tags: conferences culture
"experiments with hand lettering...a ongoing series based on spam subject lines in my mailbox"
Tags: funny spam art design typography
"To accelerate your learning, we've come up with a list of a few light-hearted recommendations around building good social applications."
Tags: design google socialsoftware community tips
"Even though points on Consumating were redeemable for absolutely nothing, not even a gold star, our members had an unquenchable desire for them."
Tags: community design games reputation socialnetworking culture psychology
Postmodernism's Most Important Gift
"Postmodernism's great gift to humankind is this challenging of assumptions, and this is an important matter for our new century. Why? Because in every walk of life, our failed institutions are rooted in assumptions that need challenging"
Tags: postmodernism media culture bestarticlesof2007
Steven Johnson New York Times blog on cities is released from behind the Times' paywall.
Tags: art city nytimes culture
"Naturally, when I get snitty it’s because something’s violating my impeccable taste, and when other people get snitty they’re humorless bastards who are taking things too seriously"
Tags: psychology culture
The jacket.
Smart thinking is the key to a stylish press
"Don't write off newspapers, says Tyler Brûlé, founder of 'Wallpaper' and 'Monocle'. Titles from Italy to Japan have embraced modern design to remain essential reading"
Tags: newspapers magazines media
Facebook Ad News: Not So Light Reading
"I'm still digesting all the Facebook news. Here's a roundup of coverage with excerpts (currently being updated; check back for more)."
Tags: facebook advertising marketing
Research Note: Lord of the Flies, Or The Shape of the Faceconomy
"The synthetic relevance Facebook is pushing is a drug for the strung-out advertisers of the world: they desperately need a hit of something to make them believe they matter again."
Tags: facebook advertising marketing socialnetworking
Awesome blog full of visualizations by the guy who did the McCarren Pool reviewed.
Tags: blogs culture data visualization
Trent Reznor and Saul Williams Discuss Their New Collaboration, Mourn OiNK
"But those days are gone. Because, mainly, that infrastructure is broken at the moment. How long before [record companies] are irrelevant? Who knows? They seem to be doing everything they can to make sure that happens as quickly as possible."
Tags: music business economics free
Radiohead Results: 38% Forked Over $6 Average
"Paying downloaders forked over an average of $6, with U.S. consumers paying almost twice as much ($8.05) as those from other countries ($4.64)."
Tags: music business internet mp3
NYTimes.Com Aggregates Third-Party Content, Marks Transformation of Media
"The New York Times joins what I expect will be a rapidly expanding list of media brands that aim to create value for their readers by aggregating the best third-party content from across the web."
Tags: aggregation media nytimes newspapers
Twin Musical Tesla Coils playing Mario Bros
"Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils playing Mario Bros theme song at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon sponsored by DC Cox (Resonance Research Corp) in Baraboo WI."
Tags: video music videogames strange
Free is more complicated than you think
"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."
Tags: books economics free service marketing
The 7 Bad E-Mail Habits that Make People Want to Kill You
"Here are seven particularly bad habits, and how you can fix them so people don’t want to kill you"
Tags: email tips informationoverload lifehacks
Great infographic from the New York Times breaking down this summer's McCarren Pool concerts.
Tags: visualization design nytimes nyc
"This site converts bitmap images to vector art - it's an online auto-tracer."
Tags: vector illustrator webtools design
"Beacon is the internal project name at Facebook around an effort to work with third parties and gain access to very specific user data. An example may be a purchase of a book or DVD from Amazon."
Tags: facebook business attention marketing
Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly
"So far, every time the Web has matched up against a proprietary alternative, the Web has prevailed."
Tags: google internet socialnetworking opensource
Google OpenSocial will (hopefully) make social apps more relevant
Charline Li from Forrester offers her take.
Tags: socialnetworking api google facebook
"Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps"
Tags: mozilla software development
Why Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) Strategy is a Winner
"It's intriguing to watch Amazon, the old favorite dot com era e-commerce site, transform itself into a technology company with their new and innovative HaaS unit."
Tags: amazon business internet technology
Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin
"San Francisco indie band The Society of Rockets, for example, plans to release its next album strictly on vinyl and as MP3 files."
Tags: music business vinyl mp3
"Ikea: One day you’ll be able to afford real furniture."
Tags: funny marketing copywriting