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March 1, 2007
The folks who install cookies on your site that enable them to track your browsing history so they can target you with ads, all without your knokwledge or permission, have a site that tells you which of the cookies you’ve already accumulated and that lets you opt out. How very considerate of them.
It turns out that I have active cookies from seven of the nine trackers. [Tags: ads marketing spyware cookies ]
February 28, 2007
Just when you thought the Anna Nicole Smith affair had brought out the worst in our media institutions, along comes this hard-hitting press release:
What do former playmateAnna Nicole Smith and Godfather of Soul James Brown have in common? No, Brown didn’t father Smith’s child (at least as far as we know.) But even if they didn’t get together in life they share the same problem in death — their embalmed bodies are trapped in legal limbos. And both could have been resting in peace by now if they’d had Online Safety Deposit Boxes from KeepYouSafe.com.
Yes, the death of a minor porn star who left behind a tiny infant is just the right marketing opportunity for a classy joint like KeepYouSafe. Well branded, suh! [Tags: publicrelations pr anna_nicole_smith marketing]
February 24, 2007
Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason magazine, is moderating a panel on the relation of participatory and commercial cultures. He begins by saying that the inersection is older than the Web 2.0, “or, as I like to call it, The Web.”
Panelists: Kenny Miller, creative vp for MTV media; Elizabeth Osder, sr. dir. of product dev at Yahoo media; and Arin Crumley, one of the creators film Four-Eyed Monsters .
Kenny talks about “navigational dominance. [What a phrase!] “We navigate our world by means of brands,” he says. Each of the MTV properties has its own demographics (ComedyCentral, Nickelodeon, etc.). Each is a brand with navigational dominance. But now there are lots of ways to getting to info. “How do you enter that world in a respectful way?” It’s no longer a one-way conversation, he says. There’s more chunking. It’s a fundamental shift. MTV is getting more of the audience’s voice back on the air. “American Idol is awesome and we think about that.” It’s a binary world and we’re divided into teams; people might like another option, but people don’t know what it is. Attention is a zero-sum game.
Elizabeth (who was the first girl to play Little League softball officially) says that Yahoo makes connections among people. She points to the single sign-in identity system with 400M registered users. Yahoo bought Flickr, Delicious.com and MyBlogLog, she points out. “Every day citizen journalism and photo journalism is happening” there. Now at Yahoo she’s trying to figure out how to disrupt Yahoo news. Seven years ago Yahoo started a Digg-like facility for news.
Arin talks about the reception of his movie. They did festivals for 9 months and 3,000 people saw it. The same number saw the first portion of it in the first 36 hours they put it on line.
Jesse asks questions.
Q: Arin, how is the process affecting your film-making?
A: The MySpace page surfaces ideas and questions that would never show up in the Q&A at a conference showing. Real conversation. We can see what the audience got from the movie and can adjust. Also, we can share the backstory, etc.
Q: Elizabeth and Kenny, how have users used your tools in ways you didn’t expect?
A: Kenny: We put up a message board. We made a game. They took moderation off a board.
A: Elizabeth: Flickr taught us that users want to take your stuff and stick it on their site.
Q: What do you have to offer that we can’t get elsewhere?
A: Kenny: You can’t compete with everyone. The world is open and flat. We only ask if the audience is liking what we’re doing and is it growing. [Shouldn’t use the “audience” word in this crowd.]
A: Eliz.: We’re part of an ecosystem. The job on our news sites is to point people to the best info on and off the site.A: (arin) A lot of what’s been done seems contrived. The Web is becoming a means of expression. “We’re just peers.” We’re sharing what we do with other peers. And we have tutorials about how to create videos and post them.
Q: (audience) How do commercial sites connect the needs of advertisers with needs of participatory participants?
A: Eliz.: We understand our audience. And we share revenues with bloggers.
A: Kenny: That’s the big question.
[Tags: beyondbroadcast07 media yahoo mtv]
February 22, 2007
Last night I was just going to watch a few minutes of the documentary about the boycotting of the Dixie Chicks, Shut Up and Sing , but I ended up watching the whole thing, going to bed too late. It’s an imperfect documentary about imperfect people, which is why I loved it.
I didn’t used to be in the DC’s demographic. I’m a totally stereotypical northeastern liberal Jew, predictable down to my preference for iceberg lettuce and whining about sunburn. And that means I don’t much like country music (although I was brought up on folk music). I only started paying attention to the DC’s once their fans turned against them because Natalie Maines, the lead singer, uttered a single line critical of our president. Now, some celebrities have been brought down by using a single word, but generally those words have indicated an intolerance that we (thankfully) no longer tolerate. But Maines only said she’s ashamed of our president. That’s well within the range of political discourse. Economically punishing people you disagree with makes democracy worse, not better, imo — although I know many of you disagree. (As for Maines criticizing the president while outside of the US, the notion that we need to put on a fake, unified face for our allies strikes me as being ashamed of what’s best about democracy.)
The documentary makes it clear that Maines is a big mouth. Nothing wrong with that. Heck, some of my best friends and bloggers are big mouths. She said that one sentence from the heart, in the heat of the moment — London had just seen its largest-ever anti-war demonstration — and, as she acknowledges, to get a rise from the audience. Life is complex, and the documentary’s willingness to acknowledge this is a real plus.
Seeing the DC’s embrace the consequences of Maines’ single sentence, growing as people, citizens and musicians, is moving precisely because the growth is contingent and painful. This isn’t a matter of riding some bromide. They feel their way. They’re pushed and they react, sometimes with anger, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with their instruments. They may be insanely talented millionaire musicians, but it’s easy to connect with them as bullies shove them off their accustomed path.
The DC’s are great musicians and singers. I would never have found them if their politics hadn’t snagged me. I am, I believe, part of their new demographic.
(Disclosure: I got sent a free copy of the DVD as part of a blogging marketing campaign. I was planning on renting it anyway.)
[Tags: dixie_chicks movies free_speech music country_music politics ]
February 16, 2007
Rageboy in an email passes along the following message from his in inbox:
We thought you might be interested in www.pptexchange.com . — We are now in the process of getting the word out about the site…
The site is focused on allowing its users to publish, trade and sell content in PowerPoint presentation format. A marketplace for presentations !
If you have any presentations (self-promotions are welcomed ) that are sitting on your hard disk getting dusty please bring them online… Publish hem… Decide on a price ($ or email), put them out for free, or make available for viewing online only – please sign up and upload it! — It is free…
Any help spreading the word would be most appreciated!
Regards,
pptExchangeTeam
Not a lot there at the moment that isn’t a sample or posted by the PPTexchange team. But doesn’t this have to be either: 1. A performance art piece or 2. The future home of Powerpoint parodies?
Not that either would be a bad thing… [Tags: powerpoint markets exchanges ]
February 14, 2007
After United Airline‘s online systems assured me as of 7pm that my 8:40 flight from Boston to DC was only 45 minutes late, I arrived at the airport to be told by the unhelpful person behind the counter that they’d actually cancelled the flight that afternoon. (I’d also checked with a living person over the telephone.)
But that’s just your usual traffic snarl. Kafka didn’t step in until I said that the subsitute flight they wanted to put me on at 2:30 tomorrow afternoon wouldn’t work, but I still wanted to fly back with my ticket on Monday. Fine, said the unhelpful telephone support person, but that will have to be repriced up as a one way fare.
Ah, yes, that’s how to develop customer loyalty! [Tags: marketing united_sucks airlines travel kafka whines]
I was supposed to join a bunch of folks I really like, talking with NPR about social media. But it looks like I may not be able to get there until late afternoon tomorrow, at which point I assume it’s not worth my going. (Disclosure: It’s pro bono consulting.) Too bad. I was looking forward to it.
This is the “catchy” question I’m posing at a Web of Ideas session tonight at the Berkman, weather permitting. (It’s at 6pm. Details here.)
Here’s what I’m thinking of saying to kick things off.
The Internet is just technology, so, no, of course it can’t save democracy. But technology has certain possibilities, so given how the Internet works and also how we’ve been taking it up, can it help rescue democracy?
Rescue democracy from what? Does democracy need rescuing?
Yes, it does. There are, of coures, many definitions of democracy: A government that gets its authority from the will of the people, a government that lets citizens vote, a government that grants citizens certain equal rights, etc. But I want to take one particular sense of democracy: A government that is ours, where the “we” is all citizens. Our government doesn’t much feel like its ours. Frequently — usually, even — it works for us and our interests. But I venture to say that compared to the Founding generation, our democracy does not feel much like ours any more.
Why might this be?
1. In part it’s the sheer scale of the government. Yikes, it’s a big puppy! And there are so many of us.
2. Corporate lobbies that operate for their own self interest are so influential. Economics is the great unleveler.
3. Governing has become continuous campaigning, and campaigning is marketing. The language and body language of politics is demeaning. It doesn’t feel like us.
So, three questions:
1. Is the Internet well-suited to address any of these problems? How is it addressing them? How might it?
2. Since the Internet is just technology, it can be used for Good or Eeeevil. Will it become just another corrupt and alienating medium?
3. What does a leader look like in a Netty campaign and government? What does a follower look like?
[Tags: politics government berkman]
February 9, 2007
The Chinese blogger Isaac Mao has a three-part proposal for Google to help it get right in China. In an open letter to Google’s founders he suggests: 1) Google set up a $1B venture fund to invest in leading edge companies in China. 2) “Develop anti-censorship tools and service for global Internet users.” 3) “Increase the incentive to Chinese Google Adsense users.”
When Google first announced that it would agree to censor certain search terms in China, I thought that it was a reasonable choice among only bad alternatives, given other steps Google took, such as hosting the Chinese service out of China so that the Chinese totalitarian government wouldn’t have access to its records. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not more sure now, that Google made the right choice. Adopting Isaac’s proposals would help explain why Google being in China is overall a good thing. (Thanks to Rebecca MacKinnon for the link.) [Tags: china google search isaac_mao]
February 2, 2007
Actually, not every happy community is the same. And the unhappy ones are at least as diverse. So, it’s good to read HorsePigCow’s reminder that communities aren’t always just a bunch of fluffy bunnies snuggling together. Sometimes what we’re calling communities are in fact arguments, or conversations, or people who happen to like the same brand of orange juice.
It’d be good if we could have preserved the term “community” for actual communities, i.e., people who care about one another more than they have to. But it looks like that linguistic battle is over and done. Oh well. [Tags: communities horsepigcow tara_hunt everything_is_miscellaneous]
Let’s see. Terrorism is a tactic used to fight an overwhelmingly superior military force by terrifying the population. So, if you were a terrorist, how would you react to news that a great American city responded to electronic signs depicting a cartoon character by calling in its security forces, guns drawn, and shutting down the city? Do you think Al Qaeda uses the acronym “ROTFLMAO”?
This is what it means to be prepared? No, this is what it means to be stupid…specifically, the stupidity that’s an emergent property of bureaucracy.
If on Wednesday we saw how agencies terrified of being caught with their pants down respond, even though it means they end up pantsing themselves, on Thursday, we saw how an alert American citizenry responds to the sight of our security infrastructure running around in its knickers:
ROTFLMAO.
(I don’t know who first came up with that graphic, but: Thank you!] [Tags: mooninite terrorism security institutionalized_stupidity rotflmao media]
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